Daemon of the Dark Wood Page 5

  Yawning, she rose from her desk to stretch her kinked-up back and then decided to lie down on the bed for a catnap. She was a little road-weary from the trip from Atlanta and felt the need to recharge her biological batteries. She fluffed the pillow, stretched out on the bed and closed her eyes. The sound of running water from across the hall in Angela’s bathroom was as soothing as the sound of a gentle rain on a tin roof, and Julie swiftly drifted into the seductive netherworld of sleep.

  * * * *

  She wakes with a start. The computer’s screen gives off an eerie green glow in the darkened room. She eases herself off the bed and sits at the desk. She reads the green letters on the black screen.

  HE COMES

  She hears the droning patter of Angela’s shower and the hum of water moving through pipes. She gives her head a shake, trying to clear her sleep-fogged mind. “I didn’t write this,” she says. “Who did?”

  Another line of green typeface appears on the screen.

  MICHAEL

  “You gotta be shitting me,” she says in disbelief. Then she shouts: “Angela! How the hell are you doing this?”

  She stares at the screen. “Michael? My Michael?”

  YES

  “This is not real. I’m dreaming is what this is.”

  DREAM REAL

  “Whoa, what the fu—” All the letters of the next two lines appear simultaneously.

  HE CALLS

  DONT ANSWER

  “I don’t understand,” she says, her heart drumming against her rib cage. “What’re you saying?”

  More letters appear onscreen.

  ZXXIALIERNVOSLDMKRPZXUY

  “Michael? I can’t read that. That’s gibberish. Michael?”

  When no new line appears, Julie begins to tremble with dread. Her teeth chatter, though she is not cold. “Michael? Don’t leave me. Please!”

  EOKJF;OUASDGVVPEROTU

  With tears streaming down her cheeks, Julie places her hands on the screen and whimpers: “Why did you leave me?”

  LSBADLKD PLACELAMLZXUFDARKNVNUONEMDCOMEST

  The extraneous letters fade away and Julie reads the remaining words.

  BAD PLACE DARK ONE COMES

  Before she can speak again, the screen goes dark.

  An oozing, suffocating darkness envelops her and she is drawn irresistibly into a black chasm …

  * * * *

  Wrapping a bath towel around her dripping body, Angela lifted her mug from the bathroom counter and drank the last of her hot toddy, then sloshed some bourbon into the mug and drank it straight. She moved languidly to the bedroom window and gazed out at the forested mountainside and at the houses dotting the ridge above her. Hillbilly houses, she thought, inhabited by backwoods in-breeders straight out of Deliverance. Cow fuckers who tell you to squeal like a pig while they sodomize you. She snickered at her own childish cynicism, then amended the thought: Most of them are probably decent God-fearing people, the same as me—except for the God-fearing part. Though she had been raised in the Methodist church, she had decided early on that if there was a God, He would not be the wrathful figure of vengeance the pulpit-pounders liked to portray. No, He would more likely be an It, a cosmic intelligence underpinning everything from the infinitesimal to the infinite. Heaven and Hell were no more than constructs of the frail human mind, and Good and Evil didn’t exist outside of human perceptions. Angela had learned that in Philosophy 101. Funny though, that Julie had taken the same course and come away with a totally different outlook. But then, no amount of philosophy could make Jools give up her guardian angel. Old Mikey was her angelic crutch, her soothing delusion. Angela didn’t begrudge her that. Whatever gets you through the night, like that old John Lennon song said.

  As was often the case, the bourbon put Angela in a philosophical state of mind, so she went across the hall to find an audience for her pregnant pontifications. But her would-be audience was curled up on her bed, catching a few afternoon Z’s. “Sweet dreams, Jools,” she whispered, and decided a nap wasn’t such a bad idea. She went back to her room, tossed off the bath towel and lay down naked on her own bed. Just a short nap, then I’ll explore our new digs.

  * * * *

  The stone angels wear the pale blush of moonlight and Angela marvels at the way their blank eyes seem to follow her every move as she wanders through the garden of smooth stones. The walls of hedges enclosing the quadrangle are dark and sinister, yet each leaf is a sharply distinct spade-shaped spearhead, stirring imperceptibly in the night air. She doesn’t know what possessed her to come out here—alone in the dark and wearing nothing but a towel—to walk among the spooky statuary of mythical beings, but she knows she has made a mistake in doing so. A terrible mistake. Because she now knows she is not alone. Something is moving with her, stalking her, just out of range of her peripheral vision. She feels its presence, its hunger …

  She pauses in front of a winged fairy seated beside a fountain spouting water and she reaches out to touch the nymph’s white-marble flesh. “If I had your wings I’d fly the hell outta here,” she says in a voice not quite her own. She suddenly spins around on the axis of her bare heels, hoping to catch sight of whatever is stalking her. There! Something moving in the moon shadows. Something there but not there. A ghost?

  Angela hastens along the stone footpath, looking for—but not finding—the way out of this haunted garden. The sound of weeping brings her up short. On its knees and bent over an altar of rosy marble, an angel with half-folded wings is weeping into the crook of its stone arm. “My God, you’re alive!” cries Angela. Then it dawns on her: “You’re all alive.”

  Wings flutter stiffly, rustling the air. The night sighs with the collective breath of stony sentinels guarding the luminous rocks of mystical geometry. The weeping angel lifts its head. Tears of blood streak the perfect contours of its face. Rivulets of blood flow from the corners of its mouth, and Angela sees the half-eaten corpse of a human infant lying on the altar.

  “That’s my baby,” Angela says, for she knows in her heart that the dead infant somehow evolved from the fetus that a doctor sucked from her womb within the grim walls of an Atlanta abortion clinic three years ago.

  “No,” says the carnivorous angel, “you gave it to me. She’s mine now.”

  Turning to run from the guilty spectacle of gore, Angela encounters a new horror. From its gothic pedestal, an angel with mammoth musculature steps upon the earth and flutters great wings no longer made of stone. The alpha male of angels towers over Angela and looks down at her with a ferocious aspect. She wants to run but her legs feel like they’ve turned to statuary stone. Leering at her, the angel speaks in a voice hewn from granite: “Stone to flesh, flesh to stone.”

  Angela screams when she sees the enormous richly-veined phallus rising from his powerful loins. Cold hands throw her to the ground. The fierce angel falls upon her, wrenches her thighs wide and rips her apart with his ungodly phallus.

  All she can do is scream. Then she turns to blood-streaked stone.

  * * * *

  “Jools!”

  “Angela!”

  They each awoke screaming for the other. They met in the hallway and fell into each other’s arms, seeking refuge from their bad dreams, but their desperate embrace offered little solace. They both sensed that some psychic boundary had been breached, that a dark river of nightmares had reached flood-stage and its clammy terrors were about to overflow the banks of the waking world.

  They huddled head-to-head in the dim hallway, simultaneously laughing and crying, their tears a warm drizzle on Angela’s bare breasts.

  Chapter Four

  * * *

  He was known by many names.

  In Goat Head Hollow he was called One-Eyed Jack, owing to the fact that he always wore a patch over his empty eye socket.

  In the town of Dogwood he was known as The Rambler, or sometimes the Scrambled Rambler, because rambling was what he did and his brains were said to be scrambled (how else to explain his aimless wan
derings over hill and dale?).

  The inhabitants of the little hamlet of Widow’s Ridge referred to him variously as The Wandering Hermit, The Monk (because of his solitary and ascetic lifestyle), Old Scout, or simply Old Edgar. Because the log cabin he called home was closest to Widow’s Ridge, some of the more kindly-disposed ridge dwellers thought of him as one of their own, and a few even claimed him as their vagabond mascot.

  To the students of Dogwood Community College he was known as Bigfoot, and to many of the younger children of this North Georgia hill country he was called The Bogeyman because he projected a rather frightening, piratical appearance, and because some parents used the specter of the eccentric rambler to scare their youngsters out of venturing into the woods and getting lost. “Stay out of the woods or the Bogeyman”—The Rambler; Old Edgar; Old Scout; The Mad Monk—“will get you,” a parent might warn.

  This man of many names had been christened Asa Edgar by his parents as they dipped their newborn boy into cold river currents. To this day Asa retained a vivid memory of that baptism, even though his mother had told him years ago that it wasn’t possible for newborn babies to remember anything. His mother had been mistaken. He did remember. But he hadn’t argued the point; his father was a strict disciplinarian and not one to spare the rod, the belt, the switch, or whatever was handy at the time of the boy’s offense, and arguing with a parent was most certainly a violation of the “Honor Thy Mother and Father” Commandment.

  As an only child, Asa learned to keep a lot of things to himself. He saw things others in his rural orbit apparently didn’t see, and he learned to keep those things to himself as well, because he didn’t like to be called “Crazy Asa” by the other children in the one-room schoolhouse. Rather than become a social outcast, he became a loner by his own choice, a follower of his own inner lights. While the other kids played their silly games, Asa took to the woods and found contentment in solitude. The creatures of the woodlands were his companions, and the expansive canopy of trees became the boundless cathedral wherein he worshiped Great Earth Mother. With his mind afire with ecstatic visions, he grew into manhood. When his parents died he sold their house in Widow’s Ridge and built himself a log cabin in the deep woods near the top of his ancestral mountain. The Great Mother sustained him. Hunting, trapping and fishing put food on his humble table, and when he needed money for supplies, he did odd jobs for people in Widow’s Ridge or in Dogwood. Once, back in ’89, he worked as tracker for Sheriff Gladstone and helped the law track down an escaped convict who had taken to these hills.

  Now he was sixty years old, and he could feel his life winding down. While he maintained enough physical strength to meet the rugged demands of his chosen way of life, some of his inner fire had gone out of him. Worse than that, Earth Mother no longer shared new secrets with him. His visions no longer blazed so gloriously. It was almost as if the earth itself were losing its magic. More likely, the loss of magic was his.

  Asa sat on a hollow log beside a small stream of clear water. He turned up the patch, uncovering his empty eye socket, then dipped his hands into the stream and washed his face and bushy beard. The water was cold but it did not refresh him. “Is this my weird?” he asked the mountain stream. “To be hollowed out like a soulless ghoul?”

  He could hear no answer in the gurgling flow.

  “Mother? Why am I deaf to your songs, though my ears still work?” He wanted to cry, to mingle his tears with the streaming tears of the mountain, but there was no crying in him. He felt nothing but a crushing emptiness within his barrel-chested trunk.

  Then it came to him. A long-forgotten conversation with his birth-mother rose from the shallows of his timeworn memory, triggered by his utterance of the word “weird.” Closing his eye, he saw the fire blazing in the hearth and heard his mother’s reedy voice.

  “Asa, it come to me tonight what your weird is,” she said.

  “What’s a weird, Mama?” He knew from experience that whenever his mother got that faraway look in her eyes, she had been consulting her oracle. It was said that his mother was a witchy woman, but Asa knew his father wouldn’t abide witchy doings, so he therefore knew his mother could not be a witch. She just knew how to read some things that others couldn’t. She could read the stars, the clouds, tea leaves and even the bumps on your head, if she took a mind to.

  “Your weird is your destiny,” she explained. “It’s what a body’s put on this earth to do.”

  “Then what’s my weird?” young Asa asked.

  His mother gazed into the fire as though she might be reading something in the leaping flames. Finally she scrunched up her wrinkled mouth and answered. “Your weird is to be the sentry to these hills.”

  “Like a lookout?”

  “That’s right. A guardian, though you surely ain’t no angel.” Her thin lips formed a skinny smile.

  “What do I look out for?” Blue-coated Yankees marched through his imagination. Of all the tales his mother told by the fire, he liked stories of the Civil War the best. Her shivery ghost stories gave him nightmares and he preferred not to hear them.

  “Anything bad that might come your way. Anything that would harm you, your home or your people.” Then his mother put a hand on his shoulder and said, “And most especially look out for the Beast that comes out of the earth.”

  “You mean like a bear? A mountain lion?”

  “No, son. I’m talking about an evil thing that crawls out of the darkest pit to prey on the innocent.”

  “You’re talking about the Devil!” Asa couldn’t contain his sudden agitation. The fireplace suddenly became a window open to the fiery depths of Hell. If his mother’s hands hadn’t been on his shoulders, he would have jumped up and run out of the house.

  “No. Satan is a fallen angel. This Beast is a pagan god. Older than the hills.”

  Asa instinctively grasped the concept of a beastly god, and he asked what he was supposed to do if he should see such a being.

  “I reckon you’ll know iffen the time ever comes. I pray to God in Heaven you will.”

  Then with an admonition never to speak of his weird to anyone else—not even to his father—his mother tossed another log onto the fire and that was the end of the conversation.

  As Asa grew older, he more or less dismissed the idea of a beastly god, but the idea of being the sentry of the hills appealed to him and fitted well with his rambling way of life.

  Now, Asa the old man looked upon the surface of the mountain stream and saw the ghostly reflection of the hearth fire his mother had laid that cold night so many years ago, and he shivered. “Is it my weird that’s come upon me like the cold fingers of death? But I’m old and brittle. My wick is burnt short.”

  A mist formed above the fiery water, and within the mist he saw the nebulous face of his dead mother, saw her gaunt lips moving, heard the watery echo of her raspy words: “Your weird.”

  As the misty vision evaporated, Asa stood on creaking bones and sniffed the air for the scent of the Beast. His twitching nostrils picked up an odd earthy odor he couldn’t identify, and he knew at once that the scent had been there for days, hovering just below his awareness. Age had dulled his sharp sense of smell. He squatted down by the stream, plucked two pebbles from the bottom and stuck a pebble into each nostril. Then he chose a larger pebble and stuck it in his mouth and sucked on it. Breathing through his mouth, the hard taste and smell of the earth filled his senses. After a few minutes he spat the pebble out and removed the smaller ones from his nostrils. He inhaled deeply, then sniffed the air again, his senses cleansed and suddenly keener. Beneath the earthy smell was the pungent, musky odor of a rutting beast, definitely not a deer or any animal with which he was familiar.

  Downwind and a long way off from the origin of the smell, he picked up his hickory walking stick, put his eye patch down over his vacant socket, and ambled off to meet his weird.

  “So, this is what a pagan god smells like,” he said to the late-afternoon sky. A moment later the sk
y responded by dropping a dead sparrow at his feet.

  Chapter Five

  * * *

  Rourke opened an envelope of headache powder and deposited the bitter grains on his tongue, then washed them down with a shot of filmy black coffee that had gone cold on his desk. The headache had come on during his visit to the hospital to see Sheriff Gladstone, and it had grown progressively worse as the day wore on. He tucked his chin to his shoulder and sniffed the armpit of his shirt, confirming that the stink was his own.

  “Alice, I’m going home to take a shower and put on a clean shirt.”

  Alice Marsh looked up from the dispatcher’s desk, her brow wrinkled with puzzlement. “A shower?”

  “Yeah. And don’t look at me like that. I’m not losing it, I just need a shower. When you paged me this morning I was out for my morning run and I didn’t take the time for a shower. Now I’m beginning to offend myself.”

  “Why don’t you wash up in the lavatory? I could help you with those hard to reach places.” She winked and flashed him a provocative smile.

  Ordinarily, Rourke would have delighted in her flirtation, but now he was not in the mood; the events of the day were weighing too heavily on him, and the burden of his responsibilities as Acting Sheriff only added to the onerous weight. He needed some time alone to think things through and sort them out. He grabbed his hat and headed for the door. “I’ll be back in less than an hour,” he said.

  Alice plumped her lips. “You’re no fun.”