Daemon of the Dark Wood (12 page)

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.

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.

He cries out to the earth: “Mother! Help me now!”

But the Great Mother is oblivious to his cries, and his grip on the tree begins to slip. The yawning void relentlessly wrenches him, intent on stealing him from the precarious cradle of the earth.

The tree slips from his grasp and he tumbles end-over-end toward the abominable void, mercilessly unmanned, an astronaut astray, falling sideways into a black hole.

* * * *

Julie sat in the flickering light of two berry-scented candles and stared into the soft glow of her laptop’s screen. A forgotten cup of cold tea rested on the desktop to her right. She tapped her cigarette against the ashtray to knock off a long ash, and then took another draw of smoke from the filter. Night nuzzled against the bedroom window with the spooky stealth of a prowling cat.

She stared at the blank screen, her mind similarly blank. She had never experienced that dreaded malady known as “writer’s block” before, but here she sat, most certainly blocked. Her creative juices simply refused to flow. She’d been sitting here for … what? An hour? Hands poised over the keyboard, fingers ready to stroke the sensual entity of creativity that lived within her and to inveigle smooth-flowing verbiage from the mysterious word-spring. To no bloody avail.

She angrily stubbed out the smoking butt, sat back in a huff and sighed: “Michael …”

She suddenly hit the CapsLock key and typed: “DAMN DAMN DAMN.”

The Ravenwood Horror
was stuck in neutral. She’d written the first three chapters in an inspired rush of words and gripping images before leaving Atlanta, and now she couldn’t resume her place in the make-believe world of Ravenwood Manor. It was as if she had been branded an intruder, turned away and locked out by the sentient manor house. Barred from her own creation.

Michael was AWOL and she couldn’t write a word without him at her shoulder, guiding her through the manor’s hidden passages and into forbidden rooms and deeper into the dark heart of the rambling old house. Her story was stalled. She was dammed up.

She heard the softest whisper of movement behind her. She stiffened in the chair. Her heart pounded.

Fingers touched her hair, pulling it off her neck. Warm lips touched the sensitive skin behind her ear.

Without turning, she reached back and stroked Angela’s cheek. “Mmm, what are you doing still up?”

Angela withdrew her lips. “Trying to entice you into my bed.”

“Don’t tempt me.” Julie swiveled the chair around and looked up at Angela, who stood with one knee cocked and a hand on her hip. She wore a baggy Vidal Sassoon T-shirt that tented over her plump breasts and erect nipples.

“Why not?” Angela nodded at the screen. “You don’t seem to be getting anywhere with your book.”

“That’s exactly why not. I’ve got to work through this block. If I let it get the best of me, I may never break out of it.”

Angela frowned and crossed her arms over her breasts. “You know what you are? A control freak.”

“Don’t be ugly.”

“I’m not. You
are
a control freak. All novelists are. I guess you have to be when you’re pulling all those strings, getting inside your characters heads, and unfolding the plot just the way you want it, but what irks me is when you try to do it in the real world, always with your hand on the control buttons, trying to make things happen the way you want them to. Well, here’s a clue, Jools. The real world isn’t like that. There ain’t no control buttons.”

Julie narrowed her eyes, then slipped her hand between Angela’s thighs. As she suspected, Angela wore no underwear. She tenderly ran her fingers up the spongy lips until she found the hard little knob nestled in tiny folds of flesh. “What were you saying about control buttons?” Julie asked with a small laugh.

“Not a damn thing.” She shifted her feet to widen her stance. Her breath came faster. “I was beginning to think you’d gone back to the dark side.”

“The hetero side? No, it’s not that. It’s just that I’m
stuck
. Can’t get no traction, can’t get no satisfaction.”

“What about your dream? As bad as it scared you, I would’ve thought you’d find a way to use it in your book.”

“No,” she said, withdrawing her hand. “Unfortunately, I dream in clichés. The otherworldly message coming through cyberspace has been done to death. And it wouldn’t fit my story anyway. But it did spook me. It was almost as if Michael were trying to reach me through my dream. Trying to warn me.”

“So then … my dream was those stone angels telling me they really wanna fuck me? I don’t think so, Jools. A cigar is just a cigar, and bad dreams are just bad dreams.”

“You know what Gail says.” Gail was the lesbian art teacher who’d helped them discover the true nature of their sexuality. She was an authentic bohemian, heavily into the occult, and brilliant.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Just because she’s a card-carrying member of Mensa and her IQ is higher than yours and mine together, doesn’t make her right about dreams and all that occult junk. The only time that New Age crap makes sense to me is when I’m stoned out of my mind. I think that says it all, don’t you?”

Ignoring Angela’s antagonistic answer, Julie said, “‘Dreams are doorways to other dimensions, and they’re every bit as real as the waking world.’ That’s what Gail says. And I happen to believe it. So did Carl Jung, Indian medicine men and lots of other cosmic pioneers.”

“I don’t want to argue with you, Jools. I want you to come to bed with me. You can believe what you want.” Angela smiled lasciviously. “If you want to believe you’re making love to an angelic being of divine light, that’s cool with me if that’s what it takes to get you off.”

Julie turned laconic. “Sorry. Not tonight.”

Angela stroked her cheek again. “
I’m
sorry. I didn’t mean to piss you off.”

“Didn’t.” Julie swung back to face the laptop. She back-spaced her triple-DAMNS into oblivion. “Sweet dreams, Ange.”

“Slim chance of that.”

Angela’s bare feet whispered over the carpet as she retreated from the room.

Julie rubbed her palms together as if conjuring magic into her fingers, then held them over the keyboard, charged and ready to strike at the writer’s block and beat it down to rubble.

The screeching seemed to come from a long way off and grew rapidly louder, as if the screecher were approaching at an impossible speed, covering vast distances of darkness in a matter of seconds.