Daemon of the Dark Wood Page 13

  “That’s right. Pan. The god. Part man, part beast. A very powerful figure in mythology. Not at all like the modern-day emasculated representations you’ve probably seen of him.”

  “I shouldn’t be discussing this with you,” said Knott, straightening in the chair as if he were about to get up. “I’m sorry. I apologize for my unprofessional lapse. If you want to change doctors—”

  “Cut the shit, Doc. Something really fucking weird is going on here and you know it. Don’t hide behind your damned shield of professionalism. That won’t do me or your wife one bit of good.”

  Knott leaned forward and lowered his voice. “You expect me to believe a character from Greek mythology really exists? That he’s come to Georgia to—”

  “No, of course not, but I think we have to at least look at the possibility that the myth might’ve been based on a real-life … thing, whatever the hell it is. Some myths are based on real events and actual people. Pagan religious practices …” Sharyn caught herself shifting into a higher mental gear and took a deep breath to tamp down the urgency she felt, lest the good doctor think she was manic. Then she went on, slower. “My friend and colleague Alfred Thorn is looking into Widow’s Ridge folklore that seems to have parallels with Dionysian myth. Dionysus is closely identified with Pan. Some scholars believe the two are virtually interchangeable. The point is, Professor Thorn has found evidence that something happened in Widow’s Ridge in the late eighteen-hundreds that suggests a correlation to Dionysian myth.”

  “The Helling,” said Knott. “I spoke with him yesterday and he mentioned his … research.”

  “Right, right. He told me about the old lady’s wall drawing. Another pesky coincidence? Or synchronicity again?”

  Knott’s eyes seemed to dim, as if a curtain had come down behind them. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t accept this … speculation as a serious explanation for what’s happened to my wife. Or to you.”

  “Sure you can. You just don’t want to because this isn’t something your pharmaceuticals can make go away. You heard it! You know something’s out there.”

  He stood, avoiding Sharyn’s eyes. “Excuse me. I have to check on my wife.”

  “You’d better get real, Dr. Knott. If Al Thorn is right, this thing that can’t exist killed half the people in Widow’s Ridge a century and a half ago. And now it’s come screaming back.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  * * *

  Asa had a woman in each hand, his fingers exerting just enough pressure on the backs of their necks to guide them where he wanted them to go. It wasn’t easy because the zombified ladies wouldn’t move under their own steam; he had to gently push them forward to get them to shuffle along on their bare feet. If he pushed too hard or fast, they would slip on the wet ground and stumble and fall, but if he was too slow in leading them away from the magnetic pull of the cave, the Beast would surely catch them.

  Judy Lynn Bowen was faring a little better with her charge, as she could use both her hands to marshal the chunky gray-haired woman over the wet ground and around brushy obstacles.

  The rain had stopped and the trees were scarcely visible in the night’s gathering mists. Lines of William Blake’s poetry ran through Asa’s mind as he shepherded the naked women blindly through the dark.

  … they buried her in a silent cave. Urizen dropped a tear; the Eternal Man Darken’d with sorrow.

  He wasn’t exactly sure what the words meant; he wasn’t even sure who or what Urizen was, but from his repeated readings of Blake he was pretty sure that Urizen was a misguided demonic god or a demigod responsible for the fall of the material world and giving form to the likes of the Beast. Asa often got the Bible and Blake’s illuminated epics mixed up, but their passages usually served to soothe him, so he rarely bothered to sort them out in his head. Even the appalling passages about vomiting out scaly monsters of the restless deep somehow gave him succor; the act of naming the terrors made them a little less terrifying.

  But now his terror mounted, filling his breast with contradictory urges. Though the monster’s smell wasn’t getting stronger, he didn’t doubt Judy Lynn’s insistence that it was drawing near, returning to the cave in which it had stashed the women for its nefarious purposes—whatever those might be.

  “Hurry!” she said over her shoulder. “He’s almost here!”

  Then Asa knew it was too late to escape. He knew he wasn’t meant to escape. After all these years, he was finally coming face to face with his weird. It was his destiny to meet the Beast and do battle with the savage fiend. Running away was no option. His weird was here. He could not run from his destiny. He knew not to try.

  “You go,” he said. “Leave the lady and get away from here as fast as you can.” It was better to save one than to lose them all.

  “I can’t just leave her,” she said, her voice thick with confused emotions.

  “Yes you can. Go now! Run! Don’t look back.”

  She dropped her hands away from the older woman and then dashed into the mists.

  Asa unsheathed his bone-handle hunting knife and stepped boldly forward, putting himself between the women and the thing coming at him out of the mist.

  * * * *

  She ran through the dark as if guided by a divine hand, or perhaps by an inner light, preternaturally benign, that prevented her from slamming into a tree or tripping over limb or rock. She didn’t know where she was going, other than down.

  Down was good. Down would take her off the mountain and away from the screaming beast.

  And it was screaming now, shrieking in the distance behind her, but she didn’t slow down, didn’t respond to its shrill call. Not this time. She would not give in to its evil summons. Never again would she give up her humanity to the stinking bestial creature. Never! Not after the horrible things it did to her.

  Despite her fierce determination to resist the otherworldly cry, Judy Lynn could feel her resolve weakening in the sound-wave assault of the echoes chasing her down the mountainside and through the fog. She clamped her hands over her ears as she ran, and though having her arms thus elevated threw off her balance, she managed to stay on her feet by slowing her pace.

  Until a thin tree branch slapped her across the face at the exact same instant her left foot came down in a slippery patch of mud.

  She twisted and tumbled headlong to the ground, throwing her hands in front of her just in time to save her face from a bone-crushing impact. The fall knocked the air out of her lungs, and for a long moment she felt as if she were suffocating. Her ears rang, but that was to the good; the ringing muffled the distant (but nonetheless insistent) cry of that hellish devil. She lay still and waited for her lungs to replenish their ration of air.

  Never again would she make fun of Josh’s father for his hellfire-and-brimstone sermons.

  The Devil was real.

  From the horns on his head to his cloven hooves, he was as real as real could be. And he had come up from Hell to torment her, to corrupt her soul and make her perform unspeakably evil acts. And even if nobody believed her, she knew she had to tell people what she’d seen and what had happened to her … and to the others—those poor women stranded back there with nothing to protect them but that crazy old one-eyed geezer, Old Edgar. Asa.

  But he saved my life. If the creepy old man hadn’t found the cave and shined the light in her face, she might’ve remained there at the mercy of the Devil. And everybody knew Old Scratch was merciless. Asa’s little light had somehow brought her back to herself, and now the poor old man was back there wrestling with Satan, sacrificing himself so that she could live.

  With the notion that Asa’s penlight had been imbued with holy power and had fired a blessed beam of angelic light into her eyes, Judy Lynn took a painful breath, pushed up and resumed her descent.

  The fog thinned as she went lower. She no longer heard the Devil’s howl. The moon was visible now through breaking clouds and she could better see where she was going.

  The road was do
wn there somewhere. If she kept going, she would eventually find it and then she would hike back to the safety of houses and electric lights and place herself under the protection of God-fearing Christians. If she could keep the blessing of divine grace round about her.

  And then she would warn them that Satan had come to these mountains.

  * * * *

  “Urizen!” he shouted. He brandished his knife before the Beast. Then the words came, unbidden, from his memory: “I will cast thee out if thou repentest not, and leave thee as a rotten branch to be burned with Mystery the Harlot and with Satan for ever and ever.” Words of Blake, though somewhat paraphrased, nevertheless shouted with all the baritone authority Asa could muster.

  The Beast stepped forward through sinuous strands of ghostly fog, its hooves scarcely touching the ground. Asa blinked his eye to clear his mist-blurred vision. The thing standing tall in front of him didn’t appear to be completely in this world, its shadowy form merely outlined by the mist. While the creature wasn’t transparent, neither was it solidly there. It came to Asa that the Beast had one foot in this world and one foot in some other, which probably explained why he’d had such a hard time catching wind of its musk. Even now, its scent wasn’t strong. But the thing’s undeniable presence and harsh aura of menace sent Asa’s pulse into overdrive.

  Save for the sound of rainwater dripping from the trees, the woods were unnaturally quiet. The moon broke through the clouds and lent a pearly sheen to the short-furred flesh of the Beast’s hindquarters. Two hornlike protuberances growing out of its wide forehead made Asa wonder if this thing before him now was Beelzebub himself, ascendant from Hell. But no, that couldn’t be; his mother had specifically told him that the Beast he was to be on the lookout for was not the Devil—not a fallen angel. It was an ancient god, one from among the panoply of deities that populated Old World mythology. He knew this creature. He’d seen its likeness in library books, though none of the illustrations had captured this thing’s terrifying aspect, nor its ferocious presence.

  Asa widened his stance and braced himself for battle. He tightened his grip on his hunting knife’s haft. As much to confound the Beast as to calm his vaulting anxiety, Asa bellowed more of Blake’s words: “‘For he stove in battles dire, in unseen conflictions with shapes bred from his forsaken wilderness of beast, bird, fish, serpent & element, combustion, blast, vapor and cloud.’” The words strengthened him.

  The Beast pierced him with a gaze of cold fury, as if Asa’s belligerent tone had enraged it. It came forward on those curiously bent legs, moving with unnerving animalistic grace.

  Asa extended his arm and jabbed the air with his knife. “Come on, you stinking pig! You’ll not touch these ladies! I am the sentinel to these hills. I’ll gut you like a—”

  His words broke off midstream when two new women appeared, wraithlike, in the fog, one on either side of the Beast. The fiend had abducted two more to add to his captive harem. One young, the other middle-aged. Both sturdy specimens. Both shockingly naked.

  The Beast opened its wide mouth, and at first Asa thought the thing was actually going to grin at him, but then the lower jaw elongated, the dark maw widened, and the Beast issued a strident cry that put the hairs up on the back of Asa’s neck and unleashed a dribble of urine in his britches.

  The powerful ululation saturated the night air, sonic waves solidifying into shimmering images called forth from the realm of ancient gods. Asa saw them hanging in the air like pictures on a gallery wall, frozen glimpses of a bizarre and timeless place ruled by ruthless gods like this one now standing before him. The cry rose in volume and pitch until blood trickled from Asa’s ears, then it quavered, sharply decreased in pitch, and finally faded to a puling glissando that left Asa frozen in clammy fear.

  The two women standing abreast of the Beast went into rhythmically convulsive contortions, as if dancing to maddening music only they could hear. Their faces twitched and contorted as well, their comely features transforming into hideous masks of rage. Then they came prowling forward in the slinky manner of stalking cats. Possessed and prowling.

  Asa heard a shuffle of movement behind him and realized that the three ladies he was trying to protect were also making ready to attack him.

  The Beast was using the women as chess pieces, frenzied pawns driven to violence by the cunning god’s commanding cry. Asa was doomed from the start; he could not raise a hand against females. It was a cardinal rule ingrained by his strict upbringing. He would let them tear him apart rather than fight back. His only chance was to take down the Beast and hope that would break the malevolent spell woven over these females.

  But it was already too late. The women attacked, launching themselves upon him, clawing and biting as they took him to the ground. With unnatural strength, the five females savaged him. He struggled to throw them off without hurting them, but they fought with the relentless ferocity of a pack of starving wolves. In the disorienting mêlée, Asa lost the knife, and one of the women snatched it up and planted the blade in his throat.

  His dying scream gurgled in his throat, and he finally saw that it was his weird to sacrifice himself to this band of madwomen.

  Chapter Fourteen

  * * *

  Knott drove through the fog, holding the Jag’s speed to an impatient crawl for fear of running off the road. Though he knew the road to his home in Goat Head Hollow quite well, he didn’t trust his memory or his instincts to keep him from losing the blacktop in the fog and plunging down the mountainside.

  The fog inside his skull was the real problem; it made everything seem unreal, it rendered his perceptions unreliable. As a man whose vocation required a firm and decisive grip on reality, Knott was unaccustomed to feeling so at sea, so lost in mental fog as to be unable to navigate or circumvent the dangers he knew were there though he couldn’t yet see them—like the shrieking thing in the fog.

  From the moment he’d left Susan strapped to the bed in her assigned hospital room, he felt like an imposter. A fraud. He wasn’t a real doctor, he was a psychiatric quack. His wife had lost her mind and he had no clue as to how to help her find herself. He was going home, abandoning Susan to insanity—or whatever the hell it was. He’d told himself it would do no good to stay the rest of the night with her; the IM medication he’d ordered for her would zonk her out for hours, so she probably wouldn’t know he wasn’t there. Susan was in the capable hands of a competent nursing staff. For now, she was safe.

  But that wasn’t the issue. What disturbed him so deeply was the fact that he could find no rational explanation for what had come over her with such a frighteningly rapid onset, and he certainly wasn’t ready to buy into Sharyn Rampling’s wild theory.

  But I heard it myself. There was something out there making that god-awful noise that made her crazy. I felt it too. Not to the extent Susan did, but I definitely felt something … unnatural. Supernatural?

  And what if it was still there, waiting for him? What if he succumbed to the thing’s crazy-making cry next time? What if—

  The dark shape darted into the road ahead of him, floating in the fog and flapping shiny bat-like wings. He stomped the brake pedal and cut the steering wheel hard to the right, narrowly evading a skid into the roadside ditch by cutting back to the left. The Jag lurched to a stop. He shifted into reverse and backed up, trying to catch sight of the figure in the rearview mirror.

  A woman in a dark slicker, not a bat-creature. She had been flagging him down, not flapping wings.

  She slapped her palm against the driver’s-side window. Knott powered down the window.

  “Help me,” she said, panting hard.

  “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?” He saw that she was on the edge of untamed hysteria, that her hair was a mass of wet tangles festooned with leaves and twigs, as if she’d been rolling on the forest floor. Her face was streaked with mud. There was wildness in her eyes.

  “We have to help them,” she said, rushing the words. “He’s come back. Please …”


  “Get in,” he said. “I’m a doctor.” Realizing how inane that sounded, he added, “I can help you.”

  He caught a glimpse of her bare legs below the folds of the poncho as she ran in front of the headlights and circled around to the passenger’s door, and he got the impression that she was naked beneath the muddy slicker, which was much too big for her.

  She threw open the door and climbed onto the seat. She slammed the door and locked it.

  “I’m Dr. Knott. What’s your name?”

  “Judy Lynn Bowen,” Her lower lip poked out in the manner of a pouting infant bewildered by a personal injury it can’t understand.

  “What happened, Judy?” He pulled onto the narrow shoulder of the road and shifted into Park. He turned on the hazard flashers.

  “Judy Lynn. Nobody calls me just Judy.”

  Knott smiled reassuringly. “All right, Judy Lynn. What happened? Who is it we have to help?”

  “Those women … he took ’em and did terrible things to us. He’s …”

  “He took you too?”

  She nodded.

  “Who did?” Knott noted the bloody lacerations on her bare legs, the sort of scratches you might get by running through the woods, but she didn’t appear to have any serious physical injuries—none that showed. Her serious wounds were apparently psychological.

  “I don’t know what he is. Some kind of monster. With horns like the devil. But the devil’s not real, is he? But this thing is. Real. But he’s not … he’s here but not here, you know?”

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t. I’m not following you. Start at the beginning.”

  “You don’t understand. We have to get help. The cops. He’s right up there.” She pointed at the wooded mountainside rising steeply on the right side of the road.

  Knott glanced out at the lush darkness and his old fear of the dark once again reached out of the past to twist his nerves into an insidious knot. He shook it off.