Daemon of the Dark Wood (16 page)

* * * *

Sharyn was still seated at the card table when the ambulance attendants brought the woman in on a stretcher. She was surprised to see Dr. Knott accompanying them. He glanced down the hallway at Sharyn but didn’t seem to recognize her. He had already looked away by the time she raised a hand in greeting.

To avoid returning to her room, Sharyn had agreed to unburden herself to Nurse Sanders, but then the first emergency admission arrived and Sanders had her hands full with getting the new patient admitted and sedated. The woman had walked in with an EMT on each arm. The deer-in-the-headlights look on her face had made Sharyn avert her eyes.

This woman strapped to the stretcher was a different story. She had the look of a wild animal. Her eyes were predatory, and she was actually growling at Dr. Knott, who looked as if he were on the verge of crying.

Nurse Sanders touched Knott’s shoulder and said, “I’m so sorry, Dr. Knott. You know we’ll take special care of her.”

Knott nodded and watched as the Paramedics rolled the woman into the room next to the nurse’s station, the only room on the unit with an observation window visible from the station. Psychiatric intensive care.

Sharyn surmised that the ferocious-looking woman was Knott’s relative—perhaps his sister, or possibly his wife. The poor guy. That had to be a bitch, admitting your own family member.

Sanders and Tom the mental health tech trailed the stretcher into the room. Knott remained in the corridor, looking lost and forlorn. He looked up at the ceiling, and then turned his head and looked at Sharyn. This time he recognized her and started toward her. He wore jeans, a blue shirt with the tail out, and a pair of cordovan loafers and no socks. She thought he looked much younger in casual clothes. He gave her a wounded smile as he stopped at her card table.

“Can’t sleep?” He pulled out the straight-backed chair opposite her and sat down.

“I don’t want to sleep,” she confessed. “I had a booger of a bad dream.”

“I can up the dosage of your sleep medication. But there’s no guarantee you won’t have nightmares.”

“No thanks. I’m not sleepy anyway.” Sharyn sensed that he had something he wanted to say to her and that he was unsure how to broach the subject.

“Are
you
all right?” she asked, glancing at the blood-stained towel wrapped around his hand. Turning the tables on her shrink gave her a sense of power, though she was sincere in her inquiry. She had never been one to engage in one-upmanship with a therapist.

The question startled him, but he quickly recovered. “I’m fine,” he said, though he clearly wasn’t. “I heard something tonight that … made me remember your description of the sound you heard. It was … I’d never heard anything like it. I don’t know if I should even be telling you this …”

Sharyn stiffened her spine. “You
heard
it?”

“I heard
something
. So did my wife. That’s her they just brought in on the stretcher.”

“My God. It … did that to her?”

“Apparently.” His face reddened. “She’s never had any problems before. Behavior problems. But when that shrieking started she ran outside naked. In the rain. She turned violent when I tried to stop her. That awful sound went on for at least five minutes, and when it finally stopped, Susan didn’t come out of it. And now she still wants to take another bite out of me. Unless it’s one hell of a coincidence, that animal cry triggered this wild behavior in her. I can’t help but think it’s the same sound that brought on your panic attack.”

“She did that,” Sharyn said with a nod at his injured hand.

“Yes. She was like a crazed animal. I don’t know what to make of all this. I’ve never heard of any kind of animal cry that can instantly make someone go berserk. And if that’s really what happened, why didn’t it do the same to me? Or to you?”

“When your wife ran outside,” she asked, “did it seem like she was running
to
the … shrieker or that she was trying to run away from it?”

Knott shrugged. “I couldn’t tell where the noise was coming from. It seemed to be coming from everywhere. Maybe Susan could. I don’t know. But my sense about it is that she was running toward it, and that the last thing she wanted was me—or anyone—trying to stop her. Because that’s when she turned violent.”

Sharyn stared at the makeshift bandage on Knott’s hand. She took a breath, then said, “I know of something very much like this. In literature. Not medical literature. In mythology. You’ve heard of the Greek god Pan?”

“Yes?” He raised his brows in anticipation.

“Pan was said to have a shrieking cry that could terrify all who heard it, animals and humans alike.”

“Pan,” he said, his voice suddenly flat with skepticism.

“That’s right. Pan. The god. Part man, part beast. A very powerful figure in mythology. Not at all like the modern-day emasculated representations you’ve probably seen of him.”

“I shouldn’t be discussing this with you,” said Knott, straightening in the chair as if he were about to get up. “I’m sorry. I apologize for my unprofessional lapse. If you want to change doctors—”

“Cut the shit, Doc. Something really fucking weird is going on here and you know it. Don’t hide behind your damned shield of professionalism. That won’t do me or your wife one bit of good.”

Knott leaned forward and lowered his voice. “You expect me to believe a character from Greek mythology really exists? That he’s come to Georgia to—”

“No, of course not, but I think we have to at least look at the possibility that the myth might’ve been based on a real-life … thing, whatever the hell it is. Some myths are based on real events and actual people. Pagan religious practices …” Sharyn caught herself shifting into a higher mental gear and took a deep breath to tamp down the urgency she felt, lest the good doctor think she
was
manic. Then she went on, slower. “My friend and colleague Alfred Thorn is looking into Widow’s Ridge folklore that seems to have parallels with Dionysian myth. Dionysus is closely identified with Pan. Some scholars believe the two are virtually interchangeable. The point is, Professor Thorn has found evidence that something happened in Widow’s Ridge in the late eighteen-hundreds that suggests a correlation to Dionysian myth.”

“The Helling,” said Knott. “I spoke with him yesterday and he mentioned his … research.”

“Right, right. He told me about the old lady’s wall drawing. Another pesky coincidence? Or synchronicity again?”

Knott’s eyes seemed to dim, as if a curtain had come down behind them. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t accept this … speculation as a serious explanation for what’s happened to my wife. Or to you.”

“Sure you can. You just don’t want to because this isn’t something your pharmaceuticals can make go away. You
heard
it! You know something’s out there.”

He stood, avoiding Sharyn’s eyes. “Excuse me. I have to check on my wife.”

“You’d better get real, Dr. Knott. If Al Thorn is right, this thing that can’t exist killed half the people in Widow’s Ridge a century and a half ago. And now it’s come screaming back.”

Asa had a woman in each hand, his fingers exerting just enough pressure on the backs of their necks to guide them where he wanted them to go. It wasn’t easy because the zombified ladies wouldn’t move under their own steam; he had to gently push them forward to get them to shuffle along on their bare feet. If he pushed too hard or fast, they would slip on the wet ground and stumble and fall, but if he was too slow in leading them away from the magnetic pull of the cave, the Beast would surely catch them.

Judy Lynn Bowen was faring a little better with her charge, as she could use both her hands to marshal the chunky gray-haired woman over the wet ground and around brushy obstacles.

The rain had stopped and the trees were scarcely visible in the night’s gathering mists. Lines of William Blake’s poetry ran through Asa’s mind as he shepherded the naked women blindly through the dark.

…
they buried her in a silent cave. Urizen dropped a tear; the Eternal Man Darken’d with sorrow
.

He wasn’t exactly sure what the words meant; he wasn’t even sure who or what Urizen was, but from his repeated readings of Blake he was pretty sure that Urizen was a misguided demonic god or a demigod responsible for the fall of the material world and giving form to the likes of the Beast. Asa often got the Bible and Blake’s illuminated epics mixed up, but their passages usually served to soothe him, so he rarely bothered to sort them out in his head. Even the appalling passages about vomiting out
scaly monsters of the restless deep
somehow gave him succor; the act of naming the terrors made them a little less terrifying.

But now his terror mounted, filling his breast with contradictory urges. Though the monster’s smell wasn’t getting stronger, he didn’t doubt Judy Lynn’s insistence that it was drawing near, returning to the cave in which it had stashed the women for its nefarious purposes—whatever those might be.

“Hurry!” she said over her shoulder. “He’s almost here!”

Then Asa knew it was too late to escape. He knew he wasn’t
meant
to escape. After all these years, he was finally coming face to face with his weird. It was his destiny to meet the Beast and do battle with the savage fiend. Running away was no option. His
weird
was
here
. He could not run from his destiny. He knew not to try.

“You go,” he said. “Leave the lady and get away from here as fast as you can.” It was better to save one than to lose them all.

“I can’t just leave her,” she said, her voice thick with confused emotions.

“Yes you can. Go now! Run! Don’t look back.”

She dropped her hands away from the older woman and then dashed into the mists.

Asa unsheathed his bone-handle hunting knife and stepped boldly forward, putting himself between the women and the thing coming at him out of the mist.

* * * *

She ran through the dark as if guided by a divine hand, or perhaps by an inner light, preternaturally benign, that prevented her from slamming into a tree or tripping over limb or rock. She didn’t know where she was going, other than
down
.

Down was good. Down would take her off the mountain and away from the screaming beast.

And it was screaming now, shrieking in the distance behind her, but she didn’t slow down, didn’t respond to its shrill call. Not this time. She would not give in to its evil summons. Never again would she give up her humanity to the stinking bestial creature. Never! Not after the horrible things it did to her.

Despite her fierce determination to resist the otherworldly cry, Judy Lynn could feel her resolve weakening in the sound-wave assault of the echoes chasing her down the mountainside and through the fog. She clamped her hands over her ears as she ran, and though having her arms thus elevated threw off her balance, she managed to stay on her feet by slowing her pace.

Until a thin tree branch slapped her across the face at the exact same instant her left foot came down in a slippery patch of mud.

She twisted and tumbled headlong to the ground, throwing her hands in front of her just in time to save her face from a bone-crushing impact. The fall knocked the air out of her lungs, and for a long moment she felt as if she were suffocating. Her ears rang, but that was to the good; the ringing muffled the distant (but nonetheless insistent) cry of that hellish devil. She lay still and waited for her lungs to replenish their ration of air.

Never again would she make fun of Josh’s father for his hellfire-and-brimstone sermons.

The Devil was real.

From the horns on his head to his cloven hooves, he was as real as real could be. And he had come up from Hell to torment her, to corrupt her soul and make her perform unspeakably evil acts. And even if nobody believed her, she knew she had to tell people what she’d seen and what had happened to her … and to the others—those poor women stranded back there with nothing to protect them but that crazy old one-eyed geezer, Old Edgar.
Asa
.

But he saved my life
. If the creepy old man hadn’t found the cave and shined the light in her face, she might’ve remained there at the mercy of the Devil. And everybody knew Old Scratch was merciless. Asa’s little light had somehow brought her back to herself, and now the poor old man was back there wrestling with Satan, sacrificing himself so that she could live.

With the notion that Asa’s penlight had been imbued with holy power and had fired a blessed beam of angelic light into her eyes, Judy Lynn took a painful breath, pushed up and resumed her descent.

The fog thinned as she went lower. She no longer heard the Devil’s howl. The moon was visible now through breaking clouds and she could better see where she was going.

The road was down there somewhere. If she kept going, she would eventually find it and then she would hike back to the safety of houses and electric lights and place herself under the protection of God-fearing Christians. If she could keep the blessing of divine grace round about her.

And then she would warn them that Satan had come to these mountains.

* * * *

“Urizen!” he shouted. He brandished his knife before the Beast. Then the words came, unbidden, from his memory: “I will cast thee out if thou repentest not, and leave thee as a rotten branch to be burned with Mystery the Harlot and with Satan for ever and ever.” Words of Blake, though somewhat paraphrased, nevertheless shouted with all the baritone authority Asa could muster.

The Beast stepped forward through sinuous strands of ghostly fog, its hooves scarcely touching the ground. Asa blinked his eye to clear his mist-blurred vision. The thing standing tall in front of him didn’t appear to be completely in this world, its shadowy form merely outlined by the mist. While the creature wasn’t transparent, neither was it solidly there. It came to Asa that the Beast had one foot in this world and one foot in some other, which probably explained why he’d had such a hard time catching wind of its musk. Even now, its scent wasn’t strong. But the thing’s undeniable presence and harsh aura of menace sent Asa’s pulse into overdrive.