Daemon of the Dark Wood Read online

  He cries out to the earth: “Mother! Help me now!”

  But the Great Mother is oblivious to his cries, and his grip on the tree begins to slip. The yawning void relentlessly wrenches him, intent on stealing him from the precarious cradle of the earth.

  The tree slips from his grasp and he tumbles end-over-end toward the abominable void, mercilessly unmanned, an astronaut astray, falling sideways into a black hole.

  * * * *

  Julie sat in the flickering light of two berry-scented candles and stared into the soft glow of her laptop’s screen. A forgotten cup of cold tea rested on the desktop to her right. She tapped her cigarette against the ashtray to knock off a long ash, and then took another draw of smoke from the filter. Night nuzzled against the bedroom window with the spooky stealth of a prowling cat.

  She stared at the blank screen, her mind similarly blank. She had never experienced that dreaded malady known as “writer’s block” before, but here she sat, most certainly blocked. Her creative juices simply refused to flow. She’d been sitting here for … what? An hour? Hands poised over the keyboard, fingers ready to stroke the sensual entity of creativity that lived within her and to inveigle smooth-flowing verbiage from the mysterious word-spring. To no bloody avail.

  She angrily stubbed out the smoking butt, sat back in a huff and sighed: “Michael …”

  She suddenly hit the CapsLock key and typed: “DAMN DAMN DAMN.”

  The Ravenwood Horror was stuck in neutral. She’d written the first three chapters in an inspired rush of words and gripping images before leaving Atlanta, and now she couldn’t resume her place in the make-believe world of Ravenwood Manor. It was as if she had been branded an intruder, turned away and locked out by the sentient manor house. Barred from her own creation.

  Michael was AWOL and she couldn’t write a word without him at her shoulder, guiding her through the manor’s hidden passages and into forbidden rooms and deeper into the dark heart of the rambling old house. Her story was stalled. She was dammed up.

  She heard the softest whisper of movement behind her. She stiffened in the chair. Her heart pounded.

  Fingers touched her hair, pulling it off her neck. Warm lips touched the sensitive skin behind her ear.

  Without turning, she reached back and stroked Angela’s cheek. “Mmm, what are you doing still up?”

  Angela withdrew her lips. “Trying to entice you into my bed.”

  “Don’t tempt me.” Julie swiveled the chair around and looked up at Angela, who stood with one knee cocked and a hand on her hip. She wore a baggy Vidal Sassoon T-shirt that tented over her plump breasts and erect nipples.

  “Why not?” Angela nodded at the screen. “You don’t seem to be getting anywhere with your book.”

  “That’s exactly why not. I’ve got to work through this block. If I let it get the best of me, I may never break out of it.”

  Angela frowned and crossed her arms over her breasts. “You know what you are? A control freak.”

  “Don’t be ugly.”

  “I’m not. You are a control freak. All novelists are. I guess you have to be when you’re pulling all those strings, getting inside your characters heads, and unfolding the plot just the way you want it, but what irks me is when you try to do it in the real world, always with your hand on the control buttons, trying to make things happen the way you want them to. Well, here’s a clue, Jools. The real world isn’t like that. There ain’t no control buttons.”

  Julie narrowed her eyes, then slipped her hand between Angela’s thighs. As she suspected, Angela wore no underwear. She tenderly ran her fingers up the spongy lips until she found the hard little knob nestled in tiny folds of flesh. “What were you saying about control buttons?” Julie asked with a small laugh.

  “Not a damn thing.” She shifted her feet to widen her stance. Her breath came faster. “I was beginning to think you’d gone back to the dark side.”

  “The hetero side? No, it’s not that. It’s just that I’m stuck. Can’t get no traction, can’t get no satisfaction.”

  “What about your dream? As bad as it scared you, I would’ve thought you’d find a way to use it in your book.”

  “No,” she said, withdrawing her hand. “Unfortunately, I dream in clichés. The otherworldly message coming through cyberspace has been done to death. And it wouldn’t fit my story anyway. But it did spook me. It was almost as if Michael were trying to reach me through my dream. Trying to warn me.”

  “So then … my dream was those stone angels telling me they really wanna fuck me? I don’t think so, Jools. A cigar is just a cigar, and bad dreams are just bad dreams.”

  “You know what Gail says.” Gail was the lesbian art teacher who’d helped them discover the true nature of their sexuality. She was an authentic bohemian, heavily into the occult, and brilliant.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. Just because she’s a card-carrying member of Mensa and her IQ is higher than yours and mine together, doesn’t make her right about dreams and all that occult junk. The only time that New Age crap makes sense to me is when I’m stoned out of my mind. I think that says it all, don’t you?”

  Ignoring Angela’s antagonistic answer, Julie said, “‘Dreams are doorways to other dimensions, and they’re every bit as real as the waking world.’ That’s what Gail says. And I happen to believe it. So did Carl Jung, Indian medicine men and lots of other cosmic pioneers.”

  “I don’t want to argue with you, Jools. I want you to come to bed with me. You can believe what you want.” Angela smiled lasciviously. “If you want to believe you’re making love to an angelic being of divine light, that’s cool with me if that’s what it takes to get you off.”

  Julie turned laconic. “Sorry. Not tonight.”

  Angela stroked her cheek again. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to piss you off.”

  “Didn’t.” Julie swung back to face the laptop. She back-spaced her triple-DAMNS into oblivion. “Sweet dreams, Ange.”

  “Slim chance of that.”

  Angela’s bare feet whispered over the carpet as she retreated from the room.

  Julie rubbed her palms together as if conjuring magic into her fingers, then held them over the keyboard, charged and ready to strike at the writer’s block and beat it down to rubble.

  The screeching seemed to come from a long way off and grew rapidly louder, as if the screecher were approaching at an impossible speed, covering vast distances of darkness in a matter of seconds.

  Julie’s fingers froze over the keyboard. Her eyes fell out of focus. Saliva suddenly swamped her tongue and drooled from the corner of her slack mouth. Caught in a Pavlovian paradox, she wanted to go to the screecher, and at the same time wanted to run and hide, wanted the shrill cry to cease before her head exploded.

  The unceasing screech grew louder and louder. Julie’s ears popped as if in response to a sudden altitudinal pressure change. She shivered feverishly. Her teeth clenched, then began to chatter.

  The spiky sound wrought strange changes in spatial dimensions. The bedroom and everything in it shrank to postage-stamp size, then just as suddenly expanded to include the outside world of endless darkness—the realm of the terrifying screecher.

  Julie lost control of her bladder and urinated in her shorts. The liquid warmth triggered deep spasms of arousal.

  She rolled her chair backward and bolted out of it, bumping her thighs on the desk and spilling the cold cup of tea. She turned and stumbled toward the bedroom door, certain now that the way to the screecher was down the stairs and out the front door of the townhouse, certain that the screecher was waiting for her out there in the night and the rain. The surrounding walls wavered in and out of her sight as if they were unable to maintain solidity against the incessant shriek of the one calling her out. The carpeted stair steps were spongy, scarcely solid enough to support her bare feet as she descended them and made for the door.

  As she reached for the doorknob, she half-expected her guardian angel to grab her by the scruff an
d stop her headlong plunge into the grasp of the thing waiting on the other side of the door.

  She wanted Michael to stop her.

  She didn’t want him to stop her.

  She turned the knob and threw the door wide. A rainy gust of wind hit her face, as did the overpowering odor of the unseen screecher.

  Like wash on a clothesline, sheets of rain fluttered before her in the yellow glow of the porchlight, threatening to open like jeweled curtains upon a world beyond this one, to once and for all reveal the maker of the unrelenting sound that held her in its thrall. A painful fullness in her breasts yearned to be expressed, to be violently suckled.

  A hazy shape appeared in the rain. Raindrops splashed off its wide shoulders as it came forward, growing taller with each jerky step.

  “My God,” she said, or thought she said, looking up at the looming shape.

  Then Angela came through the doorway, pushed her aside, raised a pistol and fired. The screeching cry abruptly ceased with the firearm’s sharp report. The shape in the rain began to dissolve, bleeding into the darkness and disappearing in a matter of seconds.

  The rain-curtains closed.

  “What the hell was that?” Angela pointed the handgun at the rainy darkness.

  Julie didn’t answer. She shuddered violently.

  “You all right?” Angela put a protective arm around her.

  “N-n-no. I’m-m not.”

  Chapter Ten

  * * *

  Rourke drove through the stone archway of Mountview Villas, the Ford Explorer’s headlights carving thin rain-streaked swaths out of the night. Only a few of the streetlights were on, and all of the buildings were dark except one at the back of the compound. He turned right on a narrow lane and drove toward the townhouse with the lighted windows and porch.

  Not long after he’d seen—or imagined he’d seen—the rain-thing in his backyard, Rourke remembered the phone call from the Atlanta builder whose daughter and her roommate were already here at Mountview Villas, just the two of them in an otherwise vacant apartment complex. He had told the man he would check on the girls, but he’d forgotten them until he was crawling into bed. He’d made a mental note to pay them a visit in the morning.

  But the backyard visitation had left him on edge, too restless to sleep, and the thought of some mysterious beast roving the night made it imperative that he drive to Mountview Villas to make sure … to make sure what? That there was no rain-thing lurking about? Well, yes. And just to be able to say he’d been true to his word and checked on them. The girls would no doubt be in bed for the night at this late hour so he wouldn’t actually lay eyes on them, but he would do a drive-by, identify their vehicle and then feel better about things—maybe even good enough to be able to get some sleep when he returned home.

  Because it was raining, he had the SUV’s windows up and the air-conditioner running to defog the windscreen. The wipers flogged the glass noisily and the rain drummed on the Explorer’s roof. Rourke nevertheless heard the unmistakable crack of a single gunshot as he drove toward the building with the Dodge van parked out front.

  He accelerated, simultaneously powering the driver’s-side window down so he could get a better fix on the next shot, if it came.

  Then he saw the two girls huddled on the lighted portico of the townhouse. In T-shirts and little else, they both looked ready to bolt as he drove up to the curb in front of them. The dark-haired young woman stared blankly while the blonde shielded her eyes against the glare of the headlights and held a pistol in her other hand, keeping it down by her bare leg.

  Out of uniform and behind the wheel of a civilian vehicle, Rourke knew he had to proceed with caution to avoid getting shot as a late-night miscreant. He opened the door and stepped slowly out of the Explorer with his hands raised, palms forward. Wearing a pullover shirt, blue jeans, and cowboy boots, he felt naked and vulnerable as he softly shut the driver’s door with his foot and said, “Easy now. Don’t shoot me. I’m Deputy Sheriff Rob Rourke. Mr. Archer asked me to check on you girls.”

  The dark-haired girl whined: “Daddy …?”

  The blonde with the gun said nothing.

  Rourke said, “What’re you shooting at?”

  Then the blonde spoke: “If you’re a deputy, where’s your uniform?”

  “Hanging in the closet. I’m off-duty. Tell you the truth, I didn’t remember I promised to check on you until I got home.” He hoped his confession would break a little ice and make him less threatening to the girls—especially to the one with the gun. “What’s going on?”

  The blonde said, “We saw something …” Her words trailed off as she looked off into the rain.

  “It was screaming,” said the dark-haired young woman. “Screeching. It was terrible. It …”

  Rourke advanced slowly. “Let’s get in out of the rain and you can tell me about it. Okay?”

  “You got some identification?” asked the blonde. She seemed more with it than her shaken companion.

  He pulled his wallet from his hip pocket and held it out in front of him like a warrior’s miniature shield as he went close enough for her to see his official ID. “Okay? Can we step inside now? I’m getting waterlogged out here.”

  “Come on in,” said the one with the pistol, which appeared to be a .25-caliber automatic with a pearl handle. She stepped aside and let him enter first. She showed good instincts, not letting him get behind her.

  “What exactly did you see?” he asked when they were inside and the door was shut against the rainy night.

  The girls looked at each other as if they were both unsure of what they’d seen. Rourke knew the feeling. He didn’t know exactly what he’d seen in his own backyard.

  “I don’t know what the hell it was,” said Blondie. “It was raining so hard and it was like … it wasn’t all the way there. If that makes sense.”

  Remembering his rain-thing, he thought it made perfect sense. “Can you describe it?”

  “It was just a big shape in the rain,” said the dark-haired woman. “But that screeching sound scared the pee out of me. Literally.” She blushed.

  Rourke nodded uneasily. “Which one of you is Miss Archer?”

  “I’m Julie Archer,” said the blusher. “And this is my roommate Angela Raynor.”

  Rourke said, “Miss Raynor, would you mind putting your pistol down.”

  She stared into his eyes a long moment, then set the gun on the coffee table. “I have a permit.”

  He nodded.

  “I didn’t know you brought your gun,” said Julie Archer, seeming a little more oriented and confident now that she was inside and in the company of an officer of the law—even if he was out of uniform and unarmed.

  “Don’t give me any shit about it either. What do you think would’ve happened if I didn’t have it?”

  “I don’t know what would’ve happened. I’m not even sure what did happen. I’ve never felt so strange in all my life. Didn’t you feel it?”

  “Not like you did, apparently. Girl, you were zoned out. Why the hell did you go outside after hearing that god-awful shrieking?”

  Julie shook her head. “I don’t know. I was … like in a trance or something. Like it was calling me and I had to …” She shrugged.

  A puzzle piece snapped silently into place in Rourke’s mind. He pictured Judy Lynn Bowen leaving her car on Widow’s Ridge Road and walking into the woods to answer the spellbinding call of something altogether wild. Something that defied rational description. Like the thing he’d half-seen in the rain. “And you shot at it,” he said to Miss Raynor. “Do you think you hit it?”

  “I don’t know. I’m a pretty good shot, and I aimed center-mass, you know? But the damned thing just … disappeared. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was like some supernatural beastie out of Julie’s books. She writes horror stories.”

  “What if it was?” Julie Archer widened her dark eyes.

  “Don’t even go there,” said her roommate. “Not if you want me to s
tay here.”

  “But you just said—”

  “I said if I didn’t know better. I do. Know better. It was some kind of animal. Or maybe a shared hallucination.”

  “You don’t know what it was and I don’t either. So don’t tell me what it wasn’t, Angela.”

  Angela rolled her eyes and said to Rourke: “You’ll have to excuse her. She also believes she has a guardian angel, who happens to be curiously absent tonight. She sometimes gets her spooky stories mixed up with reality.”

  “I do not.” Julie crossed her arms over her chest.

  Rourke said, “Keep your doors locked at all times and don’t go out after dark. Is your phone turned on?”

  Julie nodded. “And we have our cells.”

  “Any problems, call nine-one-one.” He looked at Angela. “And don’t you go taking pot-shots at anything. I’m gonna take a look around outside. Starting tonight, I’ll have a deputy make nightly checks here. Okay?”

  They both nodded.

  “Good night, then, ladies. Welcome to Dogwood.”

  He went outside and checked the tiny front yard and the parking lot for blood, but he found nothing to indicate that the phantom prowler had been wounded. He hadn’t really expected to. A rain-thing wouldn’t bleed.

  Would it?

  * * * *

  Julie fired a furious look at Angela, who had just locked, bolted and chained the front door. “Why’d you shoot off your mouth about me to that man? Don’t you ever put my business in the street again.”

  Angela met her fury with a cold stare. “I didn’t put anything in the street. The man’s a cop, for Christ’s sake. He was looking out for us. Which is more than you can say for your alleged guardian angel.”

  “You didn’t have to tell him about Michael.”