Daemon of the Dark Wood Read online

  I talked to a few of them myself. There was a coldness in their eyes that unnerved me terribly. I could not look long into those dead eyes without fearing the Evil lurking behind them.

  But the thing that terrified me most was coming face to face with the girl I’d previously seen eating human flesh. I remembered her well enough—her gore-smeared face will haunt me to the end of my days—but she recognized me not at all. Looking into her blank face convinced me that the women truly had no memories of their murderous rampaging.

  I confess I was afraid to spend another night upon that ridge. A common burial ceremony was held for the recovered remains of the dead men. I prayed aloud over their graves and silently prayed for the souls of those women responsible for putting them there, and then I departed just before dark. I was more than willing to risk the Dangers of night travel than spend a night near those Possessed women.

  Thorn leaned back in his chair and sucked thoughtfully on his pipe, conjuring a bucolic image of Liza Leatherwood. He was convinced the old girl possessed information he needed to further his investigation, but he didn’t know how to get it out of her. She was a stubborn old bird, too sly to be manipulated into letting anything slip out. But Thorn could be stubborn too, especially when he was on the hunt for buried secrets. He decided he would try her once more before writing her off as a dead-end, a lost source. Tomorrow morning he would have a heart-to-heart with the woman, put his cards on the table, tell her what he knew and hope for the best.

  Somewhere in these hills was an unmarked mass grave hiding the old butchered bones of the missing men of Widow’s Ridge. If Thorn could find it and set up a dig, he might uncover proof that the mass murder Reverend Waller chronicled in his journal had actually happened.

  * * * *

  Asa bent down to examine the gutted corpse. The thunderstorm had moved off toward Goat Head Hollow, leaving a cool drizzle and a light fog, but he was mostly dry inside his poncho. That was good because he knew a chain of storms was coming his way. He pulled the penlight flash from his pocket and clicked it on. He played the beam on the belly of the dead dog, a mongrel with a lot of German Shepherd in him. Something had ripped the mutt open from throat to anus and scooped out its innards. There was no sign of the missing entrails.

  Asa stood up straight and sniffed the air. The rain had washed away much of the vile scent, but it was still strong enough to make him queasy and lightheaded. The Beast was ranging the hills tonight.

  And it was hungry.

  Chapter Eight

  * * *

  Sharyn Rampling went down the dim corridor toward the nurse’s station to ask for her prn sleep medication. It was after eleven but she wasn’t at all sleepy. Remembering Al Thorn’s story about the elderly female patient’s drawing on the wall, Sharyn paused in the doorway of the room housing the only elderly patient on the unit, and looked into the room. The light was off but the light from the hallway partially illuminated the old woman’s room.

  Sharyn looked past the sleeping white-haired woman to the wall behind her and the red markings on it. There wasn’t enough light filtering into the room for her to see any kind of recognizable figure in the markings; she was tempted to switch on the light for a quick peek. Her hand was on the switch when a voice startled her, making her jump back out of the doorway. She spun around to see the night nurse, Carrie Sanders.

  “Did you lose your room, Miss Rampling?” asked the nurse.

  “No. Of course not. I’m not that far gone. I was just trying to see what she drew on her wall.”

  Sanders smiled. “Looks like something a three-year-old would do. Bunch of scribblings all it is. You want your prn?”

  “Yes, please. I can’t get to sleep.” Sharyn smiled apologetically. Then she followed the nurse to the small med room and waited at the half-door while the attractive black woman unlocked a metal drawer, found her sleep medication and dropped it into a tiny plastic cup.

  Sharyn washed the pill down with a swallow of water from a miniature paper cup. “Thanks,” she said. “I don’t usually take sleeping pills but Dr. Knott thought they could help. He seems like a good doctor, but …”

  “But?”

  Sharyn shrugged. “I don’t know if this is something any doctor can help me with.”

  “You feel like talking about it while you wait for your sleep med to kick in?”

  “Oh, thank you, no. I’ll go on to bed and read until I get sleepy.”

  “Okay then. ’Night.”

  “Good-night.”

  She padded back to her room, the old floorboards in the corridor creaking beneath the worn carpet. Behind the closed door of the room next to hers came the loud snore of a deep sleeper, and Sharyn wondered how the snorer could possibly sleep through that buzz-saw racket. Feeling a tinge of envy, she slipped quietly into her room, settled into bed and opened her book on the life of William Shakespeare. Because not much was known of the Bard’s life, the book was loaded with conjecture and read more like a novel than a biography, but for Sharyn, much of it rang true. It was fascinating stuff, and it soon took her out of her nocturnal preoccupations and fearful concerns and transported her to Elizabethan England. Her eyelids grew heavy and she found herself rereading passages, compulsively determined to reach the end of the paragraph before shutting out the light and yielding to sleep without a fight. She glanced at the travel clock she’d brought from home. It was nearly midnight. Her eyes went back to the text and she resumed where she’d left off, though now her vision was a little blurry.

  With a jolt, she opened her eyes and took another look at the clock. Now it was 12:45, and she still hadn’t reached the end of the paragraph and hadn’t even realized that she’d drifted off. She gave up, shut the book and turned off the bedside lamp.

  She dreamed. Though she knew she was in the midst of a dream, she was no less terrified by the thing that came out of the red chaos on the old woman’s wall and stepped brazenly into Sharyn’s world. Towering over her, it moved with a jerky motion on oddly jointed legs, its heavy hooves clomping on the floor as it came forward, broad shoulders hunched and head extended as if to crane down for a close look at her with fierce eyes aflame with lust.

  I want to wake up now, she said to her dreaming self. I don’t want to see this.

  But she couldn’t wake up. All she could do was stand, trembling, in the dream room and subject herself to the creature’s intensely lascivious scrutiny. When she saw the enormous phallus jutting from its lightly furred loins, its bulbous head bobbing above her belly, she screamed herself awake.

  * * * *

  Rourke chased sleep. Sleep eluded him. The steady drone of rain on the roof should’ve easily lulled him into slumber but it hadn’t. The rain only made him more pessimistic, more certain that Dudley Wallace’s bloodhound wouldn’t be able to pick up Gladys Gladstone’s scent tomorrow morning.

  It was after midnight, and he was tired and emotionally drained from his extended workday but his mind simply wasn’t ready to shut down for the night. His thoughts flitted from Sheriff Gladstone to Judy Lynn Bowen and the other missing women, and then darted back to Gladstone’s hard-to-swallow assertion that his wife had beaned him with the iron skillet, only to return yet again to the other women reported as missing. It was dizzying, the way his thoughts darted about like phantom fish in the opaque goldfish bowl of his skull.

  When he tried to focus his thoughts, they went on the lam like wanted fugitives, skulking off in directions Rourke didn’t want to follow, but did because he had no choice. And now he was a captive audience of one to the mental replay of the conversation he’d had this evening with Judy Lynn Bowen’s fiancé, Josh Jordan.

  The young man hadn’t been able to contain his agitation, getting up from his armchair to pace in front of the hearth, occasionally stopping to look squarely at Deputy Rourke with pleading eyes and no words to adequately express his anguish. “Somebody took her,” he said again. “That has to be it, ’cause she wouldn’t just run off and not tell anybo
dy, like that runaway bride that was all over the news awhile back. Somebody took her.”

  Rourke agreed, but he didn’t say so. It was too early in the investigation to be so certain of it, but he was. The urine on Judy Lynn’s car seat was the clincher. Something had scared the piss out of her and then … poof! She was gone. Taken. Spirited away, leaving behind a fiancé well on his way to becoming an emotional cripple.

  Rourke’s conversation with Judy Lynn’s parents hadn’t been any easier. Reverend Bowen had tried to be strong, the pillar of faith he was expected to be, but Rourke hadn’t missed the fear in the preacher’s eyes nor the tremor in his hands. Mrs. Bowen had done a better job of hiding her anxieties, denying that anything bad could’ve happened to her sweet daughter and asserting that Judy Lynn would turn up with a good explanation for why she’d disappeared. The Lord would protect her.

  But the fact was, nobody Rourke interviewed had any idea what might’ve happened to the young woman.

  She was just gone.

  And Sheriff Gladstone was out of commission with a cracked skull, leaving Rourke solely responsible for investigating the disappearances. It was a make-or-break situation. If Rourke blew it, his chances of one day getting elected sheriff would be blown as well. He tried not to think about the future political implications; he knew his prime concern should be finding the victims—if victims they were—and determining exactly what had happened to them, but he was too tired to exert mental discipline, and his renegade thoughts refused to be apprehended.

  He got up and went to the bathroom. Flicked the light on.

  Lucy Fur roused herself from the oval rug on the floor at the foot of the bed and padded after him, giving him a questioning whine.

  He reached down to scratch her head. “Am I keeping you awake, girl?”

  She licked his fingers.

  “You sleep and I’ll be the watchdog, huh? Why not? Can’t dance. Can’t sleep either.”

  He relieved himself with Lucy sitting on her haunches behind him, her head erect and ears at attention, poised to receive any command forthcoming from her master. He flushed the toilet and went to the sink, bent down and drank cool water from the faucet.

  Lucy Fur whined, then suddenly scampered out of the bathroom with a soft woof.

  Rourke wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and followed her.

  She trotted to the bedroom window, on full alert now. She barked at the curtained panes, her barks sharply ringing against the high ceiling.

  “What is it, Luce?” Rourke stood behind her in the long rectangle of light falling from the bathroom doorway.

  She barked three times and then crept closer to the window sill. Her hackles were up, as if she sensed imminent danger.

  Rourke cocked his ears to catch any sound outside that shouldn’t be there but he heard nothing but the unremitting murmur of rainfall. Usually, the only time Lucy barked like this was when strangers had come into the yard; the occasional trespass of a raccoon or possum never warranted such an intense reaction.

  Rourke slipped into his jeans and grabbed the Colt .45 semiautomatic and the flashlight he kept in the drawer of his bedside table.

  “Stay,” he said. Lucy obeyed, though Rourke could see she wasn’t happy about being left out of the action.

  He left the bedroom, went down the hallway and through the kitchen to the back door and stepped out onto the screened-in back porch he’d added onto the house a couple of years ago.

  The heavy rainfall had cooled the summer night, and he shivered as he moved to his left, the side of the house his bedroom was on, and crept between the picnic table and the metal glider that furnished the back porch.

  He clicked on the flashlight and shone the beam through the screen. The rain fell in slanting streaks, looking like a jeweled curtain in the cone of battery-generated light. Stepping close to the screen, he angled the beam left, toward the lawn outside his bedroom window.

  He saw nothing but sheets of falling rain and wet grass that needed cutting. The hazy backwash of light from screen hindered visibility. If he wanted to be sure nothing was out there, he would have to go out into the rain. So be it.

  As he started toward the screen door a movement caught his eye and he swung the light beam toward it.

  At first he thought it had been a trick of the light because there was nothing there but falling rain, but then he saw it again. Or more accurately, he saw the shape of it, saw the rain painting the form of something that wasn’t entirely visible—wasn’t entirely there.

  For a very brief moment Rourke thought he was seeing a special-effects movie illusion, the Invisible Man walking in the rain, the rain diverted just enough to reveal his shape. But this rain-made shape shining in Rourke’s meager beam of light was not that of a man, not exactly. It was bigger than a man, at least seven feet tall. The contours of its upper legs suggested the hindquarters of a horse, though this was certainly a two-legged creature. It walked like a man on crooked stilts, yet there was a strange agility in the way it moved through the rain with otherworldly gracefulness.

  Rourke went rigid with fear. There was a falling sensation in his belly, as if he were trapped in an elevator jerking him up and out of this world. His scalp tingled. His fingers around the handgrip of the .45 went partially numb and the gun felt impossibly heavy. He had the sudden urge to urinate, though he’d only moments ago emptied his bladder. His pulse quickened, thudding noisily in his ears above the sound of the heavy rainfall.

  He was suddenly certain that he was seeing something man was not meant to see, witnessing an intruding life-form from some lost and ancient world. Surely the gods would punish him for seeing this.

  He shook off the yoke of fear, cast out his outlandish thoughts, pointed his pistol at the moving shape and shouted: “Freeze!”

  Later, he would feel foolish that he’d ordered the rain-thing to freeze, but right now all he felt was fear and the familiar fight-or-flight surge of adrenaline.

  His finger tightened on the Colt’s trigger.

  The apparition halted in the rain. It turned toward him, and just for an instant Rourke saw—or thought he saw—the thing’s goatish face. Eyes glittering like bright jewels below the surface of oil-black pools. A nose like an outcropping of eroded rock on a craggy cliff-face. A lipless gash for a mouth, teeth a luminescent green like the wood of young bamboo. Thick shoulders slightly slumped, suggesting nonchalant arrogance. A bulky torso growing out of the hips and legs of an indeterminate beast, the lower back arched at an odd angle for balance.

  Its mouth opened wider and twisted up into what might’ve been a smile. Its eyes bore into Rourke, chilling him.

  Then the curtain of rain closed on the creature and it was no longer there.

  If it ever had been.

  Rourke went out the screen door and into the rain. He followed the flashlight’s beam to the spot upon which the thing had paused to look at him. He shone the light all around the backyard. The rainfall was so heavy he could scarcely see the big magnolia tree by the toolshed or the stone barbeque pit that resembled a Stonehenge-era throne.

  There was no visible sign of the phantom intruder.

  But beneath the scent of rain on the wet earth Rourke smelled the unmistakable musk of a feral beast.

  He went inside to dry off. He carried with him the odoriferous spoor of something wild.

  Lucy Fur caught the bestial scent and growled at him.

  Chapter Nine

  * * *

  Asa trudged through the rain and the dark. He’d lost the scent of the Beast, and now he was relying on his tracker’s intuition to tell him which way to go.

  Over the years he’d come to think of this inner sense as his Spirit Tracker. Whether tracking man or beast, Asa believed he had the ability to home in on his prey’s spirit and go after it. In some ways, spirit tracking was more reliable than following the physical spoor of his prey, but employing his internal tracking mechanism took a lot out of him; it drained him very quickly, taking more
out of him in mere minutes than did ranging for hours over treacherous terrain, so he didn’t do it often. Each time he used it, he lost a little piece of his soul. If he relied on it too much it might kill him outright or leave him a soulless wanderer, a roaming ghoul. A being with no soul was a dangerous thing, like Blake’s abominable void, a void to tempt a demon.

  Asa glided over the wet woodland ground, scarcely making splashes in low-lying puddles, his body seeming to operate independently of his Spirit Tracker now. His focus ranged ahead of him, psychic sonar seeking a target, eyes seeing but not seeing the trees and brush immediately in front of him.

  There.

  Just to the left of a rain-slick outcropping of rock.

  Just there. A void, a dead pocket of empty space that reflected nothing. A hidden hole in the world drawing him toward it, resolute waves of gravity pulling at him, hungering for him.

  Time slips its moorage, casting Asa adrift on crests of chronological chaos, only to drop him in a bottomless trough between ghostly waves.

  Every hair on his body stands on end. Static electricity crackles and sparks darkly in the rain. Electromagnetic fields overlap and intermingle. Asa wraps his arms around the trunk of a young white pine and presses his face to the bark, desperately holding on to the arboreal anchor amid the raging electromagnetic storm. And still the void exerts its irresistible pull, weakening his tenuous hold on the world.