Daemon of the Dark Wood Read online

“Cool it, Jools. Didn’t you see the way he reacted when we told him what we saw? He already knew. Whatever that thing was, Deputy Dog knows something about it. I could see it in his bloodhound eyes.”

  Julie’s eyes brimmed with tears. “I don’t know what I saw,” she said, shoulders slumping as she collapsed on the couch. “Or what it did to me. I’ve never felt anything so … so …”

  Angela sat beside her and snugged an arm around her sagging shoulders. “It’s okay,” she said. “You’re safe now.”

  “I don’t feel safe. What if it comes back? What then? That sound did something to me. I was … I lost control. It called me and I couldn’t stop myself from going out to meet it. Didn’t you feel it?”

  “Not like you did. I felt scared. Then angry. Tell you the truth, I felt sort of stoned and paranoid, like I’d smoked some kick-ass weed. But mostly I was pissed off.”

  Julie exhaled a shuddering sigh. Angela stroked her hair and added, “I’ll tell you what I really felt. I felt like a mean-ass bull dyke ready to take down a lounge lizard for trying to put the moves on my woman. How fucked up is that?”

  Julie snorted, then hiccupped. “You’re not a dyke. You don’t have a bullish bone in your bod.”

  “But I felt like I was shooting testosterone bullets, babe.” Angela comically deepened her voice and said, “C’mere, little honey, and suck on my peashooter.”

  Julie chuckled. Then sniffled. “Let’s go to bed. I want you just to hold me.”

  “Sure, baby. Go on up. I’m gonna make sure the back door and the windows are locked.”

  Julie stood unsteadily, chewed her lower lip, and then padded toward the stairs. Over her shoulder she said, “Bring your gun when you come up.”

  * * * *

  Rourke drove at a crawl through Mountview Villas’ maze of narrow little streets, looking for any sign of a prowler lurking in the wet darkness. It was simply a matter of routine; he didn’t expect to find a prowler too insubstantial to go bump in the night. Of course, it was possible that the young ladies had been stoned on illegal drugs and only imagined they saw something—or jointly hallucinated the thing in the rain, if that was possible. But what about the screeching they had described? Hallucinations didn’t scream, did they?

  Besides, Rourke had seen it himself in his own backyard. Or something very like it. He couldn’t write that off as freaky coincidence. His rain apparition and the thing the girls had seen and heard were—or at least could be—one and the same. He’d lived all of his thirty-nine years in Dogwood, and he was familiar with all of the indigenous wildlife, but he had never seen the likes of that rain-thing anywhere, outside of illustrated books of mythology. Wildlife, indeed. How wild could it get?

  He braked and rolled to a stop atop a small hill overlooking the hedge-walled courtyard in the center of the compound. The Explorer’s headlights illuminated the eerie statuary standing in the slanting rain within the rectangle of dark green hedges, majestic stone angels and cherubic gnomes arrayed in mystic formation amid the Oriental rock garden. It was a creepy spectacle; it brought Rourke’s thoughts back to mythological beings and creatures of fantasy.

  He shut his eyes and tried to recall the image of the thing he’d seen (and smelled) behind his house. He visualized the shape the specter had made in the rain, but it was only that—a shape without distinct features. Like a shadow caught in a rain-streaked mirror, the shape refused to resolve itself into any distinct image. But its shape and the way it moved suggested … what? What kind of mythical creature?

  The answer came to him in the image of a man with the hindquarters and legs of an animal. Half man, half beast. Very similar to bookish renderings of the mythological satyr. Or was it that other thing … the Minotaur? No, the Minotaur had the monstrous head of a bull, didn’t it? This thing had been more akin to the satyr. Yeah, that was definitely the image his backyard phantom had left in his head. Satyr.

  Sure, and Bigfoot’s living in the basement with Elvis, both waiting for me to come home and fry them a couple of peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches.

  He opened his eyes. Took one last look at the spooky rain-beaten statues, then backed up and drove off into blowing torrents of rain.

  Chapter Eleven

  * * *

  Sharyn sat hunched over the tabletop-edge of a wobbly card table which had been pushed against the corridor wall, her hands clasped together as if to maintain a firm hold on her roiling emotions and keep a handle on her fear. She knew she was right on the edge of losing control. If she lost it, she would likely give in to the urge to run screaming down the hallway and would surely end up strapped to her bed, or stuck in the padded Quiet Room, shot full of heavy-duty tranquilizers and nodding off into Nightmare Land.

  She couldn’t let that happen. Strapped to a bed was the last place she wanted to be with that thing out there, surreptitiously stalking her in the corridors of night, creeping closer through the rain.

  The night nurse was coming toward her now, gliding silently down the hallway on her white Nikes, white teeth glowing in a half-smile on her dark face.

  Sharyn tried to return the smile, but the corners of her mouth wouldn’t cooperate, stubbornly bent on preserving the toothy frown frozen on her face.

  “Feeling a little better?” asked the nurse.

  Sharyn nodded. Nodding was the easiest way to lie. If she tried to speak, her terror might come out in a manic rush of psychotic-sounding words. And she most assuredly was not psychotic.

  “Don’t you want to go back to bed and try to get some sleep?”

  She shook her head. “Not yet,” she allowed through clenched teeth.

  Nurse Sanders looked at her wristwatch. “Let’s give it ten more minutes. I’m bending the rules letting you sit up out here after curfew. Unless you’re talking about what’s going on with you. Nightshift counseling sessions are allowed under special circumstances.”

  Sharyn lifted her hands, spread her ten fingers and nodded. Ten minutes.

  Ten minutes, then back to the cramped room where the nightmare waited in shadow, waited for Sharyn to shut her eyes and drift back into the lulling waves of sleep, and then the unrelenting undertow would pull her back down into the nightmare and that hideous beast with the enormous erection would have its way with her.

  “Get a grip,” she whispered to herself.

  “Pardon?” said the nurse.

  “Nothing.” Just the loony talking to herself.

  The nurse smiled reassuringly, then walked back to the nurse’s station on her shoes’ silent treads.

  Sharyn tried not to think about those photocopied journal entries Al Thorn had let her read, but that was like trying not to picture a pink elephant when someone says, “Don’t think about a pink elephant.” In her case, the pink elephant had shape-shifted into a rutting god with a killer hard-on. And to make matters worse, Reverend Waller’s handwritten words were floating in front of her eyes, snaky sentences undulating like underwater tentacles. She brushed them away as if swatting a fly. The cursive words broke apart in the air and the alphabet shower evaporated before falling into Sharyn’s lap.

  She stared blankly down the long corridor in front of her and listened to the steady beat of rainfall. She tried to slow her respirations, thinking that if she could control her breathing then she just might be able to get a foothold on the windswept plains of her psyche where her fears had gone to run as wild as untamed horses. She knew she was past the point of driving them off, but if she could assert enough control then she could at least ride herd on them before they dragged her off into a full-blown stampede of panic toward the inevitable box canyon of mental paralysis.

  A ringing phone broke the relative silence, and a stab of fear as sharp as an ice-pick penetrated her chest. Phone calls in the middle of the night terrified her. When she was ten years old, a midnight phone call had delivered the bad news that her father had been gravely injured in an automobile accident. He’d died of massive head injuries before the next sunrise. Sharyn ha
d feared late-night phone calls ever since, their shrill nerve-jangling rings always piercing her viscera, twisting in her belly like the cold steel blade of a carving knife.

  The nurse’s voice carried down the hallway, not overly loud but nevertheless as clear as the singing ping of a crystal goblet, and Sharyn listened to the one-sided exchange. As a rule, she didn’t indulge in eavesdropping, but she made the exception this time because she thought it might take her mind off her own free-floating anxiety and semi-rational fear.

  The upshot of the nurse’s conversation was that an emergency admission was en route via ambulance to the hospital. Nurse Sanders efficiently repeated the information as it was given to her, no doubt writing it down as she did so. “Fifty-six-year-old female … extreme agitation … no history of mental problems or violence … attacked husband without provocation … oriented times four … required physical restraint …”

  Welcome to the club, Sharyn thought. The Dogwood Society of Wacked-out Women, President Sharyn Rampling presiding. Get out of line and I’ll gavel your skull.

  She smiled to herself, feeling a smidgen better than she’d felt only moments before. I despaired of my lack of shoes until I met a man with no feet. The grass wasn’t greener on blighted ground.

  Sharyn had never been married, but it wasn’t difficult to imagine the impulse to do violence to any man who happened to be handy when the megrims in your head went from melancholic to vitriolic and you just had to fire-all-your-guns-at-once and explode-into-space because you were fucking-A born-to-be-wi-i-ild.

  Uh-oh, bad sign.

  Free-associating old rock songs to the flight-of-idea bugaboos bouncing off the interior walls of your skull, like that red-rubber-ball bubblegum bullshit you couldn’t get out of your head for days after you heard it on the oldies station, Randy & Spiff doing their hokey DJ comedy all-along-the-watchtower but you can’t-get-no no-no-no- no-satisfaction because nothing is even a-little-bit-funny while your conscience-explodes and harmonicas-play-skeleton-keys-in-the-rain …

  Double uh-oh.

  Whenever Bob Dylan wailed in her echo-chamber cranium she knew she was revving up to barrel off the tracks because only a crazy person or a magic-mushroom eater could truly understand old Bob’s lyrics, and now they were making perfect sense to her—as if he’d written them all those hard-driving road-weary years ago with Sharyn Rampling in mind, for this very moment, at this desperate stopover along the bloody rails to hell.

  Until this moment she hadn’t believed that her recent panic attack could be a precursor to a manic episode. None of the other signs signaling the onset of mania had been present. She had been taking her meds just as prescribed. Of that, she was certain.

  But now those old familiar feelings were creeping in around her mind’s edges, jabbing her like little cartoon demons with pitchforks, taunting her with the promise of wild and crazy times ahead if she would just give in and go with the scattershot momentum of her gloriously soaring disease. Soon she would be making lists of things to do, drawing up detailed plans for world peace or diagramming ingenious inventions guaranteed to prevent AIDS, cancer, and PMS. Then there would be absolutely no fucking doubt that, yes indeed, she was cycling, roaring like a crack-cranked Hell’s Angel on a monster Harley, toward the manic pole of her disorder. But until those things actually transpired, she would refuse to believe that what was happening to her was due to her psycho-biological disorder.

  Unless and until she did something outrageously characteristic of her condition, Sharyn was not going to accept that what was happening to her now was simply psychogenic.

  There was something out there in the night. She’d heard its terrifying cry. She’d dreamed flesh onto its ancient bones. And now she could feel it drawing closer. Stalking her.

  She knew in her racing heart that these hospital walls were not strong enough to keep it out.

  Nothing was.

  * * * *

  Trey Knott was taking a middle-of-the-night leak when he heard the thing scream. The eerie cry was so startling that it stopped his urine midstream, and he just stood there with his pee-shooter in his hand, his ball sack tightening, drawing up as if trying to squirrel away precious nuts.

  Knott shivered, astonished by his visceral reaction to the sound. He stared into the commode and just for the briefest moment he actually feared that whatever was making that horrendous noise might come screaming up through the sewer pipes, fly out of the toilet and latch onto his penis or throat.

  Feeling suddenly dizzy, he leaned his left palm against the wall to steady himself as the hair-raising scream (the hairs on his forearms stood on end as if pulled erect by static electricity) went on without end.

  Finally, the screechy scream faded out beneath the rattling hum of rainfall on the roof. Knott blew a sigh of relief and continued to relieve himself, urine nosily splattering and babbling in the porcelain bowl’s water. He shivered again—this time as a biological response to the body heat lost with the urine.

  Sharyn Rampling’s attractive face flashed into his mind, and he remembered her dubious account of the unseen screaming beast that had sent her into a panic. But now her story didn’t seem suspect, not in the least. Hadn’t he just heard the same unearthly cry himself? And a god-awful cry it was, as unnerving as a wildcat’s yowl and as grating as giant fingernails raking across the world’s noisiest chalkboard.

  Knott had been awakened ten minutes earlier by a phone call from Ted Devine, his erstwhile golf buddy and ordinarily a level-headed guy, but tonight Ted had been beside himself with worry about Mrs. Ted’s bizarre, uncontrollable behavior. Ted had already called 911 for an ambulance, and he wanted Knott to admit his wife Dani to Ridgewood and be her attending physician. “You’re the only headshrinker I trust,” Ted had said with a nervous laugh.

  “Where is Dani now?” Knott had asked.

  “I had to lock her in the closet.”

  So Knott had phoned the hospital to give admission orders, and then went to the bathroom to empty his full bladder. Which he was still doing now, peeing like a stud horse because he’d had that extra glass of iced tea with his late supper.

  Then the screaming resumed, screeching nails grating on Knott’s nerves—nerves that were beginning to unravel. He wanted to put up his piss-pistol, run to the gun cabinet to grab his shotgun in case the screamer tried to enter the house, but this time he couldn’t stop pissing. Couldn’t stop shivering. Moreover, he was unable to move; the scream had frozen him to the floor, robbing him of voluntary movement.

  He heard Susan’s wrenching moan from the adjoining bedroom, and he had to run to her to see what was wrong, but he couldn’t because he couldn’t hold his water, couldn’t stop shooting the golden stream into the bowl—no more than he could’ve stopped ejaculating in the middle of a bone-rattling orgasm.

  Then he regained a semblance of voluntary muscular control and he called out: “Susan? What is it?”

  She said something but he couldn’t make out her words over the gurgling splash of his urine, the roaring drumbeat of rain and the incessant screaming of something somewhere out there in the night.

  And still he couldn’t stop peeing. C’mon, c’mon, hurry up, goddammit.

  He heard a rustle of movement and the urgent staccato thumps of bare feet on the floor of the darkened bedroom.

  “Susan! Wait!”

  Finally he squirted his bladder’s last measure into the toilet, slipped himself back into the folds of his pajama bottoms and dashed out of the bathroom without taking time to flush. He saw his wife’s naked backside disappear from the bedroom doorway as she darted into the hallway.

  Where the hell was she going in such a hurry and in the middle of the night?

  He went after her, calling her name again. He slapped at the wall-switch as he ran by it, and the living-room light came on. He caught up to her as she was going out the front door, going toward the source of that raw call of the wild. He grabbed her right shoulder to stop her. She swung around and smacked
his jaw with her left fist and jerked her shoulder out of his grasp. Momentarily stunned, he stood and watched as she ran out into the rain. He wasn’t stunned by the force of Susan’s blow but by the fact that she’d delivered it without hesitation. She wasn’t a violent person. She didn’t even like to watch PG-violence in movies. Her sudden violence was proof that she wasn’t herself. Proof that the shrill screaming was driving her mad. With ten years of practicing psychiatry behind him, Knott knew all about madness, but this was beyond his experience. He knew nothing of madness brought on instantaneously by sound. He’d seen nothing in the literature that even hinted at such an improbable theory. But he knew in his gut that he was witnessing that very phenomenon firsthand.

  Just as he knew that the thing that had sent Sharyn Rampling running to seek refuge in the hospital was out here, right now, calling to his wife. Only Susan wasn’t running away from it—she was running toward it.

  “Susan, no!” he shouted as he started out the door after her.

  The house was atop a shady hill in Goat Head Hollow, and their nearest neighbors, Sam and Mary Ann Stribling, lived a mile down the blacktopped road in a refurbished farmhouse, so Knott didn’t have to worry what the neighbors would think if they saw him chasing his naked wife through the rain. Nobody was around to see the rowdy spectacle.

  What worried him, of course, was what would happen when Susan reached the screaming thing. Whatever the hell it was, it was calling her out for a reason. A reason he couldn’t begin to fathom because he knew of no creature in nature that could exert a hypnotic influence on human beings. According to folklore, some snakes were said to be able to hypnotize their prey, usually birds, but science said otherwise.

  At the far edge of the slanting yellow rectangle of light spilling from the front door and across the front lawn, Susan lost her footing on the wet grass and went down on her hands and knees.

  Knott ran toward her, eyes scanning the surrounding darkness for the maker of that eerie sound. Though it most certainly originated out here in the night, he couldn’t get a fix on it. It was almost as if it were coming from high-end surround-sound speakers hanging in the sky, highest-fidelity speakers powered by a monster mega-watt amp.