Daemon of the Dark Wood Page 6

  On the drive home he reviewed the conversation he’d had with Sheriff Gladstone this morning. With his head bandaged and his eyes blackened, Gladstone looked like a fat raccoon in a turban. The nurse warned Rourke that her patient was “off on a little trip to the Twilight Zone,” and that he probably wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense.

  When Gladstone saw Rourke with his hat in his hand, he studied him with a lopsided expression, then said, “Ta hell ya doin’ here, Robber, ya sick? Ya don’t look so good.”

  “How you doing, Sheriff?” asked Rourke, standing at the foot of the bed.

  “Me? Hell, I can’t get myself up. You got your pocketknife with ya? Cut these damn ropes off me, will ya? I’m spoze to be fishin’ the lake.”

  Rourke saw the leather restraints binding Gladstone’s wrists to the hospital bed. Not a good sign. He moved to the side of the bed. “Sorry, boss, I don’t have my knife with me.”

  “Shit, son, you outta uniform without ya got a knife.” The lid of his left eye was droopy. His lips were cracked and caked with a chalky mixture of dead skin and dried saliva. A few pieces of white lint clung to the gray stubble sprouting from his chubby cheeks.

  “Sheriff, I need to ask you a few questions. About what happened between you and your wife.”

  “Gladys? Woman’s a goddamn saint, sho nuff.”

  “She is a fine woman,” Rourke agreed. “But why would such a fine woman hit her husband over the head with a skillet?”

  Gladstone’s droopy eyelid twitched as a look of confusion twisted up his face. “Damnedest thing, I tell ya what’s the truth! That yowling! On and on. It run her crazy. Right outside the house. Scariest thing I ever heard.”

  “What yowling?”

  “Gladys … is she all right? I gotta see her. You find your pocketknife?” Gladstone was becoming more and more agitated, yanking his arms against the wrist restraints. His face reddened and a wildness came into his eyes.

  “Easy now, Sheriff,” Rourke said, putting a hand on Gladstone’s shoulder. “We’ll find her for you. Everything’s going to be all right. You just take it easy. Get some rest.”

  Gladstone sank back into his pillow, his eyelids fluttering, then closing. Thinking he had fallen asleep, Rourke tiptoed toward the door.

  “Robber? Ya bring me them worms?” The croak in his voice brought to mind a huge bullfrog.

  “Yeah, I got ’em,” he said by way of humoring the man. “Get some rest now, and I’ll meet you at the lake.”

  “Good boy,” Gladstone said, closing his eyes again. “Teach ya how to bait a hook the right way.”

  That was the way Rourke left him. Gone fishing in the Twilight Zone.

  And from there, Rourke’s day hadn’t gone any better. When he got back to the office, he learned that Sarah Melton was missing. The young schoolteacher hadn’t shown up for her summer-school classes at Dogwood High, and subsequently the door to her duplex was found standing open, her car in the driveway, but she was nowhere to be found.

  Then truck driver Clark Ellroy reported that after a week on the road, he had come home in the middle of the day to an empty house in Widow’s Ridge; his wife Sybil was missing, and he suspected foul play “because she’s a real homebody and she woulda left me a note if she was going somewhere.”

  First, Judy Lynn Bowen; then Gladys Gladstone; and now Sarah Melton and Sybil Ellroy. What the hell was going on? Three women missing from Widow’s Ridge, and one, Gladys Gladstone, missing from Dogwood. Did they, Rourke wondered, have anything in common? Were they members of a secret cult? Victims of a mass kidnapping?

  Rourke was at a loss; he could come up with no reasonable explanation for the disappearances, and he found nothing to link them except the coincidence of timing. If it was coincidence.

  He drove up in front of his secluded house as the sun was edging toward the western horizon. Lucy Fur got up from her favorite spot on the front porch and trotted down to meet him.

  “Hey there, girl,” he said, dropping to one knee and hugging the wolfhound. “How’s my Lucy?”

  Lucy licked his face and made guttural whining sounds, expressive of her simple joy.

  “How’s my best girl? Huh?” He grappled playfully with her, then headed toward the house. He paused at the front door, looked back at the cloud-streaked sunset, and for some inexplicable reason, he felt gooseflesh crawling up his back. He shook it off and went inside for a quick shower.

  As much as he wanted this long day to end, he dreaded nightfall.

  * * * *

  “Dr. Knott?”

  The voice pulled him back from the monochromatic chaos, but the bizarre slashes of imagery stayed with him, even as he looked away from the wall-drawing above the empty bed and turned toward the person calling his name a second time.

  “Alfred Thorn,” said the tall man with the close-cropped hair, short white beard and amiable affect. “From the college?”

  “Oh, yes. Of course,” said Knott, stepping forward to shake the robust man’s proffered hand. He remembered the man’s face—it was hard to forget a guy who was the spitting image of Papa Hemingway—but he couldn’t recall ever having spoken to him, nor could he recall the man’s position at the college. “Good to see you.”

  “Some of my students still talk about you,” said Thorn. “You made quite a dent on their impressionable minds. Your lectures on abnormal psych are becoming the stuff of legend.”

  “Well, that’s certainly flattering. I think.” The man’s grip was powerful and Knott was glad when he released his hand.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” Thorn continued to smile. His Hale-Fellow-Well-Met countenance made it clear that he was not the sort to take offense at being overlooked or forgotten.

  “I remember your face,” Knott admitted, “but I don’t recall your department.”

  “Anthropology. In fact, I am the Anthropology Department. Diminutive but not insignificant.” Thorn chuckled.

  “So, Professor, what are you doing in our neck of the woods?”

  “I’m here to visit one of your patients, a dear friend of mine. Sharyn Rampling. How’s she doing?”

  “I’m sure she’ll be happy to see you.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Thorn, bringing his hand to his mouth. “I shouldn’t have asked you that. Patient confidentiality. I withdraw the question. Though she’s like family to me.”

  “Well, don’t let me keep you from your visit,” Knott said in a polite attempt to send the professor on his way.

  But Thorn didn’t seem to hear him. He had shifted his gaze to the wall-drawing and was obviously lost in contemplation of the red jumble of lines and shadings. “Fascinating,” he said. “Am I to assume a patient produced that, or is one of your staff experimenting with hallucinogens?”

  Knott couldn’t hold back his laughter. He was beginning to like Thorn. The man’s good-natured humor was infectious. “The former, I assure you. As a matter of fact, a catatonic patient. She came out of it long enough to create this modest masterpiece. Even gave it a title, as you can see.”

  “Tell me, Doctor, what do you see in it?” Thorn continued to gaze into the drawing, fingering the bristles of his beard as if to stimulate new insights.

  “I honestly can’t tell you. It’s just random slashes and swirls of crayon, yet … if you look at it long enough … there’s a suggestion of … I don’t know what. But there’s something there that draws you into it.”

  “Quite so,” Thorn agreed. “You could cut that off the wall, frame it and hang in The Metropolitan Museum of Art and those twitch-nosed critics would go ga-ga over it, comparing it to early Picasso.” Thorn moved closer to the drawing. “You know, it does have something in common with certain cave drawings I’ve seen. A primitive archetypal quality, a resonance … Sorry. I got carried away there for a moment. So where is the artist?”

  “In a rocking chair on the front porch. The nursing staff takes her out every day for fresh air. The worst thing for a catatonic patient is—”<
br />
  “By God,” interrupted Thorn, “I think I see it! Look here.”

  The professor stepped closer to the wall and pointed to a dense blob of color amid radiating squiggles and swirls. “See the face? The horns? And here, here’s the body. And these globs of color down here are the feet. Hooves, I should say.”

  Knott was caught up in Thorn’s enthusiasm and tried with limited success to follow his spirited explication of the drawing. “What do you suppose it is? The devil?”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think so. It’s rather more like that creature of ancient myth, the satyr.”

  “Satyr,” repeated Knott. “That would certainly give it a sexual connotation. A satyr being the male counterpart to the nymphomaniac, in traditional psychiatric terms.”

  “Yes, yes, and look here. This suggests an erect phallus, does it not?”

  “Possibly.” Knott’s innate skepticism came to the fore and he suddenly felt that Thorn’s interpretation was a little too tidy, too easy. Too disturbing. “But the patient is well past the age of raging hormones.”

  “Yes, but in the realm of mythical archetypes, timelessness rules. The ancient gods are ageless. As is the human spirit, if you believe in that concept.”

  For Knott, the spell of discovery was now broken. “Well, Professor, I’m afraid we just went beyond my area of expertise. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got patients to see.”

  “Surely,” said Thorn, following the doctor out of the room and into the corridor. “I’m curious, Dr. Knott. What do you make of the title the old girl gave her work? Helling.”

  Knott shrugged. “Well, it does look hellish, if not satanic. What do you make of it?”

  “That’s the really intriguing thing,” said Thorn, lowering his voice and speaking in a conspiratorial tone. “I’ve been looking into the local folklore, just for my own amusement, in lieu of a summer vacation, and I just recently came across that term. The Helling is some mysterious thing only whispered about by some of the local antiquarians. Whenever I press for more information, the seasoned citizens inevitably clam up. It’s as if they’re sworn to secrecy. As if there is a sinister history here, buried beneath some cryptic legend.”

  Dr. Knott said, “So we may assume my elderly patient knows about it and was compelled to express it in her artwork. You’re right, Professor, it is intriguing.”

  “Would it be all right if I took a photograph of that drawing?”

  His first inclination was to refuse the professor’s request. Instead, he said, “As long as you don’t shoot any of the patients, it wouldn’t be violating confidentiality. And of course the artist must remain anonymous.”

  “Excellent. My camera’s in my car.” Thorn was already moving toward the exit.

  “Professor?” said Knott. “I’d like a print myself.”

  “You got it, Doc.”

  Chapter Six

  * * *

  Sharyn Rampling’s day brightened considerably when Alfred Thorn walked into her room and flashed his Cheshire-cat smile. She snapped her book shut and stood to greet him. He engulfed her in a vigorous bear hug and she happily yielded to his hardy show of physical affection.

  “How’re you doing, dear?” he asked as they finally disengaged.

  “Better, now that you’re here. I think I’m going stir crazy. I’m not used to this confinement.”

  “But other than that, you’re … okay?”

  “I’m not crazy, if that’s what you’re hinting at. Dr. Knott says I probably just need my medication adjusted.”

  “Well, anything’s better than an attitude adjustment, eh?”

  Sharyn laughed. “You’re the craziest one in the room, Alfie. Maybe you should check yourself in. I think there’s a vacancy next door.”

  Thorn brought his finger to his lips. “Shhh … That’s our little secret, Professor Rampling. I don’t have the time for a good head-shrinking. I’m on the trail of something verrry interesting.”

  “Really,” she said, smiling sardonically. “I can see it now. The cover story in The American Journal of Anthropology: ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation’ by Alfred Thorn, Esquire, PhD, and all those other letters you’re so fond of putting after your name.”

  “Touché,” he said, clutching his hand over his heart. “But seriously, Sharyn, I am onto something.”

  “Well, have a seat and tell me all about it. As if I could stop you.” She sat on the bed and waved him to the chair. “Anything to get my mind off myself.”

  He drew the chair close to the bed, sat down and leaned forward.

  “You sometimes teach mythology, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but I’m hardly an authority on the subject. Last quarter they had me teaching Business English and Grammar, though I don’t know the first thing about business.”

  Thorn waved off her disclaimer. “What do you know about the Great God Pan?”

  “Oh, I was afraid you were going to ask me something I didn’t know, something about some obscure Asian god or some such. Actually, I know quite a lot about Pan.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, what do you want to know? Specific questions would be helpful. You’re a brilliant man, Alfred, but I sometimes wonder how you ever got through all your schooling, with your bull-in-a-China-shop approach.”

  “Start with the basics. Pretend I’m an ignorant student who thinks Nike is just a brand-name shoe.”

  “Ha! All right then, class. Listen up and learn. You will be responsible for this material.” She winked at Thorn, then proceeded with her mock lecture. “Now, keep in mind that ancient cultures borrowed liberally from one another to the extent that it is very difficult if not impossible to trace the origins of many mythological figures. Pan is no exception to that rule. He was one of the oldest of the Greek gods, and the Greeks claimed that Pan was the same as the Egyptian god Amon-Ra, the supreme god of the sun. Some scholars believe the legend of Pan actually began with Pancika, the Hindu fertility god.

  “The Greeks were unsure of Pan’s parentage. Some said Zeus was his father, others said Hermes sired him. But they all agreed that Pan was born with horns on his head and with the hindquarters of a goat. So, Pan was part anthropomorphic god and part beast. He was raised by wood nymphs called dryads. Even as a youth, Pan was a horny little devil, and he often subjected the nymphs to his lustful passions. I suppose you could say the nymphs brought out the beast in him. Our horny hero went on to become the god of woodlands and pastures, king of woodland beasts and ruler of the Arcadian satyrs. Satyrs, you will recall, were those half-man half-goat dudes with relentless erections and a taste for wine and orgies. They were the original party animals.”

  Thorn let loose a boisterous laugh. “Oh, you’re good,” he said. “You would have even the untamed students eating out of your hand.”

  Sharyn nodded and smiled appreciatively, then continued. “Pan was often identified with Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and revelry. Now Dionysus, too, had his following of satyrs, but he also had a band of priestesses known as Maenads. Named after Maenalus, a holy Arcadian mountain where Dionysus shepherded his odd flock, the Maenads were ‘wild women’ whose drunken orgies usually ended with the killing and eating of male victims. Our hero had carte blanche carnal knowledge of these Dionysian Maenads. As far as I’m concerned—and more than a few scholars agree—Pan and Dionysus are virtually interchangeable, one and the same.

  “The legend of Pan has had quite an impact on our culture. Many words and phrases we use today can be traced back to the god Pan. The best example is the word panic. Pan was said to have had a dreadful cry that could strike such fear in those who heard it as to cause them to—”

  She fell silent with a shudder of cold revelation. The echo of the mysterious, animalistic cry that had so terrified her now reverberated along the paths of auditory memory.

  “Sharyn? What is it? Are you all right?” Thorn moved to the edge of the chair.

  She nodded, took a calming breath of air and forced herself to continue, t
hough her own voice sounded hollow to her now as she recited from memory. “Caused them to panic and flee in terror. Uh, the Greek word for tragedy literally means goat song, after the horned and hoofed Pan. And then there’s panoply, from ceremonial processions in the ancient City of Pan or Panopolis. But perhaps the most telling legacy of Pan can be seen in the traditional view of the Devil. That’s right, boys and girls, Satan got his horns, hooves and wicked character from none other than Pan. Clearly, the medieval church used the pagan god as the prototype for their Ruler of Hell. And why do you think Satanists use the goat’s head in their black ceremonies? That’s right. Pan became the image of the Devil, and his satyrs became Satan’s demons, thanks to a few brooding monks with too much time on their hands.

  “As the centuries went by, Pan’s reputation lost much of its bite. You’ve seen him in cartoons as a cute, harmless little guy playing his hornpipe as he dances merrily through the woods. Thanks to Romantic poets like Byron and Shelley, and to America’s Disneyland mentality, Pan has been reduced to little more than a castrated cartoon. We should not forget that the original Pan was a dreadful god who inspired abject terror in the hearts of mere mortals. Any questions?”

  Thorn softly applauded.

  Sharyn stood and went to the window, trying to conceal her inner turmoil from her friend and colleague. Darkness was gathering outside, piling up like thunderheads before a storm.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Thorn asked.

  “Yes, I’m just feeling a little shaky, that’s all.”

  “Oh, shit!” He suddenly hammered his leg with his fist. “It was a panic attack that brought you here. I’m sorry, Sharyn. I’m a complete ass. I didn’t mean—”

  She rounded on him, startling him to silence with the swiftness of her move. “It’s all right, Alfred. Stop coddling me. I hate that.”

  “Sorry,” he said in a small voice.

  Sharyn’s sudden flash of anger had, for the moment at least, checked her fear. If anger was an antidotal defense against another attack of panic, then she was prepared to be one pissed-off bitch. “And stop apologizing,” she added.