Daemon of the Dark Wood Read online

  Two miles up the mountain past Jackson’s General Store he found the apparent site of the accident, marked by shards of broken headlamp glass and a shining glaze of blood smeared on the blacktop. He parked on the shoulder of the road, turned on the cruiser’s rack of flashing blue lights and radioed his location to Ida, which she acknowledged in the nasal monotone she affected for her radio broadcasts.

  He explored the area with his flashlight and pieced together what had likely happened. After the collision between animal and machine, the deer had been dragged to the side of the road, leaving a smeared trail of blood. There the trail ended, suggesting that the deer had been removed—probably thrown into the back of a pickup truck. It was, of course, remotely possible that the blood on the road was human blood and that Judy Lynn’s bleeding body had been loaded into a pickup, but Rourke had no reason to seriously consider that grim scenario.

  After inspecting the area around the disturbed earth where the vehicle had obviously plowed into the ditch, Rourke returned to his cruiser, switched off the flashing blues and drove back to Dogwood.

  It was quarter past ten when he arrived at Grubb’s Service Station. He found Jerry Grubb finishing up a paint job on an old Mustang in the body shop behind his gas station.

  “Thanks for waiting for me, Jerry,” he said.

  “Hell, I’d as soon be here working as falling asleep in front of the TV. You find her?” Grubb pulled a handkerchief from the back pocket of his bib overalls and wiped sweat from his receding hairline.

  “Not yet. I want to take a look at her car.”

  Grubb jerked his thumb toward the front building. “It’s in bay number two. I’ll have to unlock it for you.”

  Rourke followed Grubb to the bay housing Judy Lynn Bowen’s damaged Honda Civic. Grubb unlocked a large padlock and rolled up the door with a metallic clatter, then he turned on the overhead light. “There she is. The pocketbook’s on the front seat. I didn’t touch it.”

  Grubb went back to work on the Mustang, and Rourke began his examination of the vehicle. He put on a pair of latex gloves and opened the driver’s door. The car’s interior smelled of recent cigarette smoke and perfume, but it was another smell that troubled him—the unmistakable odor of urine. He bent down and sniffed the seat, then touched his bare wrist to the seat’s cloth upholstery and felt dampness there. Had the accident scared the piss out of her? Could a woman as young as Judy Lynn have a bladder-control problem?

  He picked up the leather purse, set it on the hood and took a cursory inventory of its contents. Her wallet contained several credit cards and sixty-eight dollars in cash, ruling out any possibility of robbery. There was a small assortment of women’s makeup; a half-empty pack of cigarettes (Virginia Slims) and disposable lighter; a little stack of clipped coupons, bound with a paperclip; a ballpoint pen from Dogwood Savings & Trust; an opened roll of breath mints, wintergreen flavored; an oval packet of birth-control pills.

  After replacing the contents in the purse, he checked the glove box and found nothing unexpected. The cell phone was on the passenger-side floorboard. He didn’t touch it. He looked in the trunk and noted that the tire iron was out of its vinyl sheath. He left it where it was and softly shut the trunk.

  Grubb entered the bay, a cigarette dangling from his lips. “Find anything, Rob?”

  “Nothing to indicate anything more than a typical vehicle-deer collision,” Rourke replied, lapsing into the language he would use when he wrote up his report.

  Except the urine on the seat and the persistent scent of fear.

  * * * *

  It was almost midnight when Dr. Trey Knott pulled up in front of Ridgewood Psychiatric Institute. Flashes of lightning in the western sky and the subsequent rumbling of thunder prompted Knott to put up the top on his convertible Jaguar before going inside to deal with the emergency admission. Thirty minutes earlier he had been slipping quietly into bed so as not to wake Susan, settling in for what he hoped would be a restful night of sleep when the bedroom phone cut loose with its irritating electronic warble. He picked up before the second trill, but he felt his wife stir beside him and knew she was waking from a shallow sleep. Her hand moved beneath the sheet and found his bare hip as the faraway voice of the charge nurse whispered in his ear. Carrie Sanders, the night-shift RN who was better at assessing patients than most of the physicians on staff, briefed him on the new female admission and suggested that he see her immediately rather than wait until morning for his initial visit. “I’ll be right there,” he said, just above a whisper. He kissed Susan good-night, dressed, and drove to the hospital in Goat Head Hollow, three miles south of Dogwood.

  To an unschooled eye, Ridgewood’s “Big House” is usually mistaken for an old antebellum plantation house, renovated to accommodate mental patients; in truth, it was built in 1919 from the blueprint of a renowned mental hospital in Vienna. Dr. Browner had visited the Viennese facility in 1910 and had been so impressed with it and its director—the illustrious Herr Doktor Bruno Kesselring—that he vowed to erect a replica of the hospital back home in Georgia. By the early ’20s Ridgewood Psychiatric Institute was known as one of the finest private mental hospitals in the Southeast. Dr. Browner died the same year the stock market crashed, but the Browner family managed to hold on to it despite great financial difficulty, and the facility never shut its doors through the ten decades of its existence. In 1965 the Browner family built another hospital in Vinewood, Georgia, but the Graves County facility had always had trouble attracting good psychiatrists and administrators and never achieved the prestige of Ridgewood.

  Knott went up the brick walkway, mounted the concrete steps, passed between the central white columns of the portico and used his key to unlock the front door. Haloed by fine mist, the ornate light fixture above the glass doors created a pool of murky, yellow light, and the nine cane rocking chairs arrayed in linear formation across the wide porch seemed to be floating in the nebulous pool. A rising wind set some of the rockers in ghostly motion as Knott entered the building. The receptionist’s alcove was darkened and deserted at this late hour, as was the well-appointed sitting room on the opposite side of the vestibule. He paused at the foot of the wide stairway and glanced down the shadowy corridors to his left and right—the north and south wings whose rooms had been converted to offices for social workers, physicians, and administrative personnel. While not completely dark, the corridors were just gloomy enough to send an unexpected chill up his back as the vivid memory of his childhood fear of darkness came fleetingly to the fore.

  He climbed the carpeted steps, wondering why, after all these years, his old fear of the dark had reached out from the past to yank his memory chain.

  Midway to the second floor, the wide stairway gave onto a landing beneath a high stained-glass window and branched left and right at 180-degree angles, the two narrower stairs leading to the second-floor landing and to twin doors which opened in front of the nursing station. The doors were locked electronically from the inside but could be opened freely from the stairway side; the patients could not get out unless one of the nursing staff disengaged the lock with a push of a button or a turn of a key. With a hand on the banister, Knott swung to his right and climbed the narrow stairs to the second-floor landing. He glanced through the small Plexiglas window in the door and saw Carrie Sanders writing in a chart. He opened the door and went inside.

  “Oh, hi, Dr. Knott,” Carrie said in her whispery night-shift voice as she looked up from her charting. “Sorry to call you out so late, but I felt you would want to see Miss Rampling tonight.”

  He waved off her apology. “I’m the doc on-call. Comes with the territory. I trust your judgment.”

  “Right.” She smiled, her perfect teeth flashing brightly from the smooth ebony of her face.

  Knott half-sat on the long desktop built into the nursing-station wall and leaned his back against the shelf of numbered slots filled with the medical charts of the current admissions. He folded his arms across his chest in a
gesture at definite odds with those proponents of body-language correctness who maintained that such a posture denoted defensiveness and even hostility. Knott thought it was all psycho-hokum; for him it was a comfortable habit and nothing more. “What can you tell me about her?”

  “Sharyn Rampling, a forty-two-year-old unmarried Caucasian, professor of English literature at the community college. She’s been an outpatient of Dr. Crandle’s for five years.” Carrie paused to consult her admission notes. “Diagnosed as bipolar and hospitalized once in 2004 when she stopped taking her lithium and went into a full-blown manic phase. She responded well to treatment. Dr. Crandle got her stabilized on her medication and she was discharged after two weeks. She says she’s been taking her lithium religiously since then.

  “She presented tonight in an agitated state. A state of near-panic, I’d have to say. She said she had to be admitted because this was the only place she had ever felt completely safe and protected. Patient stated, ‘I desperately need to be safe right now.’ When I asked her what she needed to be protected from, she said she would only discuss that with Dr. Crandle. I explained that Dr. Crandle is on vacation and that you’re covering for him. I don’t know if she will share her big dark secret with you or not.”

  Knott nodded. “Does she seem manic to you?”

  “No. She seems like something scared the bejesus out of her. If she’s delusional, she’s keeping her delusions to herself.”

  “Go ahead and do the routine blood work and a lithium level. You have her old chart?”

  “Just brought it up from Medical Records.” She handed him a manila folder containing the records of Rampling’s previous hospitalization.

  “Thanks. I’ll look this over while you draw her blood.”

  Ten minutes later, Knott rapped on the door of room 207 to announce his entrance. “Miss Rampling, I’m Dr. Knott. Dr. Crandle asked me to see his patients while he’s on vacation.”

  She rose from a seated position on the edge of the bed. Sharyn Rampling was a tall, attractive woman who looked a little younger than her stated age. The stark whiteness of her oval face was framed by the dark bangs and tresses of her shoulder-length hair. Her dark eyes shone wetly, as if she had been recently crying. She clasped her trembling hands in front of her, interlacing her fingers, and rested them beneath her abundant breasts. Each finger bore a gemstone ring. “I’ve seen you on campus,” she said. “You taught Abnormal Psych.”

  “Yes, I did, last year. As a guest lecturer.” He sat in the wing chair in the corner of the private room, crossed his legs and rested the unopened chart on his knee.

  She turned her profile to him and appeared to be studying the uninteresting painting on the beige wall. “I don’t know if I should confide in you, Doctor. I’m sure you know your job, but I don’t know that I can just start in cold and trust you with my … my problem.”

  “Nurse Sanders told me you said you came here to be protected.”

  She turned to face him directly. “Yes, I did say that. But now that I’m here, I don’t feel any safer.”

  “What is it that’s threatening your safety?”

  “I … I can’t say. I mean, I don’t know what it is. I just know it … something … wants something.”

  “Wants something from you?” he asked as gently as he could.

  She unclasped her hands and slid her bejeweled fingers into the front pockets of her tight jeans, the sparkling rings resting just above the seamed slits and creating the illusion that the pockets were embroidered with gemstones. “I know it sounds at least a little delusional,” she said in a husky voice, “but that’s what I believe. Whatever it is, it wants something from me. I can feel it pulling at me.”

  “Wants you in what sense?” Knott deliberately shifted the focus onto the patient as the desired object. He hoped he wasn’t being too abruptly obvious with his tactic.

  Her eyes narrowed and she puffed herself up in the manner of a cat trying to make itself look more formidable when threatened. “You’re asking me if it wants me sexually? Just come right out and say what you mean, Doc. We’re adults, are we not? Does this … this thing want to fuck me? To defile me in every way imaginable and then in ways you could never even imagine? To sully my soul?! Make me do things that would damn me forever?!” Her shoulders slumped with the release of some of her pent-up emotion. Her voice softened. “I don’t know. I don’t know what it wants. I don’t …”

  A volley of thunder shook the building and blowing rain pelted the windowpanes. A tear rolled down Sharyn Rampling’s cheek. She moved to the window and parted the curtains. “All I do know is that it’s out there, waiting. Probably watching.”

  “And you know this, how?” Knott scribbled a note in the chart: Pt. histrionic with a flair for melodrama. But she was a teacher of literature, so it was possible that her melodramatics might be, in part, a function of her educational vocation. He penned a question mark after the notation.

  She turned away from the window, letting the curtain fall over the dark glass. “I know it because it touched me.”

  A hollow laugh escaped her lips. “That’s funny, isn’t it, Doc? I say it touched me, and you’re thinking, ‘Yeah, she’s touched all right. Touched in the head.”

  “That’s not at all what I’m thinking,” he said.

  “Shrinks are all alike. You never really say anything. You just run through your list of premeditated responses and use the ones most likely to hit the patient’s hot buttons. I know how the game is played. I’m not a novice.”

  “This isn’t a game. Games are played for amusement, for fun, or for profit. You’re clearly not having fun. Something has pushed you right up to the edge of panic and I’m trying to find out what that something is. Now, tell me how it touched you.”

  Her face seemed to relax a little. The patient had challenged the therapist and the therapist had risen to the challenge without getting angry or sidetracked. “There was this sound. A terrible shrieking sound, sort of like the cry of a wildcat, but I’ve heard wildcats and that’s not what it was. More like a fox, maybe. No, it was like nothing I’d ever heard before—a wildcat’s cry notwithstanding. I was sitting at home in my study, reading Yeats, and this screeching comes out of nowhere. It was outside the house, but it got louder and louder, almost as if it were somehow inside and outside at the same time. One long, continuous cry that seemed to … penetrate me. It was as if I were being violated by the sound. I was terrified, so frightened I couldn’t move. Then everything fell out of focus and …” She shook her head. “My memory is fuzzy on this part, but when the shrieking finally stopped, I was shaking all over in terror and I discovered I had actually wet my pants.”

  She gave him a pointed look, waiting for a reaction. When she didn’t get one, she added, “I mean, my God, I’m only forty-two. I’m hardly old enough to start wearing Depends.”

  “Have you been taking your lithium as prescribed?”

  “Oh yes. My lab results will prove it. I’m not going manic, Dr. Knott. I’m not delusional, I’m scared.”

  He nodded. “We may need to adjust your dosage. Although they are rare, incontinence, ringing in the ears and blackouts are possible side effects of lithium. Since you’ve been taking it for several years, I don’t think that is what’s going on here. It’s more likely that you are in the early stages of lithium toxicity.” He opened her chart to the Physician’s Orders section and began writing as he continued to talk. “You’ve been taking three-hundred milligrams three times a day. I’m going to withhold your lithium until I see the lab results tomorrow, then we’ll know how to proceed. How have you been sleeping?”

  She shrugged. “Okay, I guess. I’ve always been a light sleeper. I doubt I’ll sleep tonight, though. Not with that—whatever the hell it is—out there.”

  “You’re perfectly safe here, Miss Rampling. If there is something ‘out there,’ I’m sure it’s no threat to you. What you probably heard was a couple of cats going at it. Or something just as innocent. I�
�m prescribing a mild sleep medication. In the morning the internist will give you a physical exam, and I’ll see you again tomorrow afternoon.”

  Knott closed the chart and stood to leave.

  “I want you to be right about all this,” she said, crossing her arms beneath her breasts. “I hope it’s just a simple matter of adjusting my medication. But you want to know what I really believe? I believe something’s happening here that’s beyond the realm of medical science. If that sounds delusional, I’m sorry. That’s what I believe. You’re familiar with the concept of synchronicity? That seemingly random events occurring within a given timeframe form a pattern that isn’t at all random?”

  “Yes, I am. I considered myself a Jungian when I first started my practice.”

  “Well, I always thought the point of synchronicity is that there’s some underlying Godlike intelligence that pulls cosmic strings to create those patterns. Like Fate.”

  “Or the collective unconscious.”

  “And that those patterns might provide hints of things to come. Well, when I heard that God-awful shrieking, I was reading Yeats’ famous lines: ‘And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?’ How’s that for synchronicity?”

  Knott smiled. “One of the curses of a strong intellect is an overabundance of imagination.”

  “Did Jung say that?” She cocked the brow over her left eye.

  “No, I did.” He allowed a small smile.

  “Oh.” She rubbed her arm as though she were cold. “Those lines of verse keep running through my head like a song you can’t stop humming. But in my twisted version, the beast is slouching toward Dogwood to be born.”