Daemon of the Dark Wood (20 page)

“Never doubted it.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Well, I’m going to keep digging until I find out what’s buried beneath the local legend. And you’re going to keep yourself together until we get the whole thing cleared up.”

“You’re not getting it, Al. There’s something out there, something
real
. This isn’t an academic exercise. It’s not something you can ‘clear up’ with facts. Don’t you see that?”

“Sharyn, I have no idea what sort of animal can make a sound that drives people … wild—if that’s what in fact happened—but I can’t believe it will turn out to be any kind of supernatural beastie. I’m sorry, I just can’t.”

“Goddammit, Alfred, get your head out of your journals and smell the feces before you end up wearing it.” She realized she was nearly shouting and lowered her voice. “I’m sorry, but you’re not grasping the reality of the situation here.”

Thorn’s heavy sigh sounded like a stiff gust of wind in the cell’s tiny earpiece. He said, “Listen, love, I never should’ve showed you those journal pages or told you about my project. It was totally insensitive of me and I humbly apologize.”

“You’re pissing me off, Alfred. Stop treating me like a mental invalid and hear what I’m saying. This thing is real. It’s having a real effect on real people. And apparently we’re the only ones with a clue as to what’s really happening. We have a responsibility here.”

“To do what? Tell everybody to beware the ancient god of the woodlands? Just because we’re both tenured doesn’t mean we can’t make ourselves look like fools in the eyes of our colleagues and in the community at large.”

“Yeah, well fuck you, Al. I’m thoroughly disappointed in you. I never imagined you’d be the one to let me down.”

“Calm down, Sharyn. Calm down and just listen. I’m not letting you down. I’m trying to protect you from yourself. I don’t know what it is you think we should do, but whatever it is, I seriously doubt it would be to the good. Now, I’ve been trying to figure out what possibly could’ve made the womenfolk of Widow’s Ridge turn on their menfolk and slaughter them, and so far I haven’t come up with a single plausible idea. You seem to be convinced that it was a Dionysian creature with supernatural powers, but I’m not ready to make that leap myself. Not yet, anyway. You’re approaching the whole thing from a position of panic, and I’m trying to use my allotted powers of reasoning. I mean, how do you know that Dr. Knott’s wife doesn’t have a history of mental problems or that she might’ve gone ga-ga even if they hadn’t heard that mysterious cry? I’m just cautioning you against jumping to unfounded conclusions, that’s all I’m doing. Don’t you see that?”

“Yes, I see. I see very well. Good-bye, Al.”

Sharyn folded her phone and tossed it on the bed. Then she went to the window and gazed out into the night fog.

The startling knock on her door twisted a loop in her stomach. She spun around to see Tom the nightshift PA sticking his balding head into the room.

“You okay?” he asked. “I thought I heard shouting.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “I was talking so loud in my sleep I woke myself up. Sorry.”

He nodded, then withdrew his head and softly closed the door.

Thankful that he hadn’t seen the cell phone, Sharyn retrieved it and returned it to the secret slot in
Smuggler’s Nook
.

Then she sat on the bed and wept tears of angry frustration.

* * * *

She stood before the great haunted tree and gazed up at the moon-frosted limbs bending upward in warped supplication. Crossing her wrists over her chest, she clutched the hand-knitted shawl tighter over her thin shoulders and shivered against the fog-damp air of predawn.

The two-mile walk from her house to this secret burial ground had made her calf muscles burn with a bone-deep ache and knotted a stitch in her side. The hike left her winded, dizzy, and wondering if she’d lost her marbles or had finally slipped into senility.

But she knew it wasn’t senility that had brought her here. The appearance of Asa’s wraith in her bedroom and his ominous utterance of “ghost tree” had done it.

She wondered if Wilbur—God rest his soul—was looking down on her now, his eyes ghosted by the loneliness of deathless existence.

Liza was of two minds about what happens to a person after death; sometimes she was all but certain that the spirit was apt to linger in the very places a body haunted in life, but there were those other times of gnawing doubt when she was sure that death was eternal oblivion, simply a ceasing of existence. She hadn’t given much thought to death as life’s greatest mystery until Wilbur passed. Once he was in the ground she spent the ensuing weeks ruminating on just that:
When a person passes away, where does he pass away to?
Was there truly some ghostly part that went somewhere else, or was the decaying carcass in the ground all that remained? Was there an eternal soul, or was there nothing at the end of worldly life but the eternal sleep in soil?

There was a time when the thought of absolute oblivion chilled her to her aching bones, but in recent years she had come to think of oblivion as blessed relief, a final end to human suffering. When your body grew frailer with each passing week and you lived each day with the aches and pains of old age, it was hard not to see death as a welcome deliverance into nothingness.

But now, as she gazed up at the massive live oak planted more than a hundred years ago on the small burial site of the victims of the Helling, she knew without a doubt that the spirits of the dead were trapped within that tree. As surely as the oak’s roots held those skeletal remains in their twining embrace, the ghosts of the murdered men lived within those oddly bent limbs and massive trunk. She could feel their tortured presence. Their twisted souls reached out to her with spectral fingers, but she remained just out of their clammy reach because they were imprisoned, held back by the great weight and mass of the mighty oak.

She shuddered so hard that her false teeth rattled in her head. She inched forward, shuffling her feet and extending her right hand to touch the rough bark of the trunk. She closed her eyes. The palm of her hand tingled, then quickly turned cold, so cold she felt as if she were touching a coarse wall of ice. A frigid current ran up her arm, traversed her thin shoulder and settled in her breast, centering there like a wintry void that turned her chest into a ribbed ice-box.

Then she understood exactly why Asa Edgar’s wraith had directed her here.

“I thought you graduated from the graveyard shift, darlin’,” said the nightshift waitress at the Trucking-A’s diner. “You get yourself demoted?”

“No, not yet,” Rourke said with a wan smile. “You’re looking good, Marlene.”

“I wish,” she said, waving off the compliment. But she really did look good for a woman in her early fifties. Her figure still curved in the proper places, her face retained much of its youthful attractiveness in spite of the lines etched there by years of cigarette smoking, and she somehow made her modified beehive hairdo work to her advantage.

Marlene pulled an order pad from the pocket of her rumpled pink uniform and licked the point of her stubby pencil. “What’ll you gents have?”

Without looking at a menu, Rourke said, “We’ll both have the Eighteen-wheeler Breakfast Platter and a pot of coffee.”

“How do you want your eggs?”

Knott said, “Scrambled for me, please.”

“Over easy,” said Rourke.

Marlene jotted the order on her pad, then stuck the pencil behind her ear. “All right. I’ll be right back with your coffee.”

“Thanks, Marlene,” said Rourke, propping his elbows on the table and interlacing his fingers under his chin.

Knott said, “Marlene’s the archetypal truck-stop waitress.”

“Uh-huh,” Rourke said, though he wasn’t entirely sure what “archetypal” meant. He said, “She’s a honey.”

“I wouldn’t say that too loud. Somebody might think you’re sexist.”

“What? Honey? I didn’t mean—”

“Oh, I know,” said Knott. “But we live in hypersensitive times. A man can’t be too careful.”

“Yeah. I guess you’re right. But Marlene would take it as the compliment I intended. She’s about the most politically
in
correct person I know.”

“I don’t doubt it. A place like this must be a bastion of outdated sentiments and old-fashioned values.”

“Yeah. The Truck-stop Time Forgot.”

Knott allowed himself a mirthless chuckle.

Rourke glanced around at the other customers seated in booths or hunkered at the lunch counter. At half past four o’clock in the morning, the place wasn’t crowded, and except for the tipsy young man and woman in a corner booth, they were all big-rig drivers with vacant faces and thousand-yard stares. Weary road-riders making a welcome pit-stop along their Southeastern routes.

Marlene brought a pot of coffee, wordlessly filled their cups and then sashayed to another booth.

“You want to tell me what you think you saw?” Knott asked.

Rourke heaved a sigh. “Like I said, I didn’t get a good look at it.”

“But you saw enough to make you doubt your eyes.”

Rourke cocked a brow. “Did I say that?”

“You didn’t have to. I read it in your face.”

“What I get for taking a shrink to breakfast,” Rourke said, smiling.

“Come on, Rob, let’s not play games with each other. This is serious.”

Rourke took a sip of black coffee. “Okay. If you swear you won’t try to have me committed.”

Stone-faced and stolid, Knott waited for Rourke to get on with it.

“A goddamn devil. Horns, cloven hooves, the works. That’s what I
think
I saw. But it was … what’s the word? Immaterial? Like a ghost, like it hadn’t completely materialized in our world. The rain outlined it, but I had the impression the thing wasn’t getting wet. Know what I mean? Like it was walking along in some other place that I only got a glimpse of. Like a window into another world. Is that crazy enough for you?”

“And it didn’t make a sound?”

“Not a peep. It stopped and looked right at me, though. I think it sort of smiled at me. Not a friendly smile either. More like a predator grinning at his dinner.”

Then he added, “If it hadn’t been for my dog, I might’ve thought I imagined the whole thing. She went a little wild barking at it, and then at me just for getting close to it. Lucy Fur was my reality check.”

“Lucifer? What—”

“My dog’s name. First name Lucy, last name Fur.”

“Cute.” Knott pinched the bridge of his nose. “But I have to wonder if you have some sort of preoccupation with Satan that might’ve influenced your interpretation of what you saw in the rain.”

“Hell no, Doc. I don’t believe in Satan, and I certainly don’t have a preoccupation. This is exactly why I didn’t want to get into this with you.”

“Sorry. It’s my training. I had to ask.”

“Yeah, okay. I get that. And it’s my training that makes me ask if you and your wife are having marital problems. Was tonight the first time you ever roughed her up?”

Knott gave him a cold stare. “I didn’t rough her up. I had to restrain her for her own protection. I’ve never laid an angry hand on Susan. Never. And I resent it that you would—”

“Hey, I believe you. But I had to ask. You got your training and I’ve got mine. No offense.”

“Fair enough. None taken.”

“Damn,” said Rourke, “that reminds me, I’ve got to line up a tracking dog for the search. Excuse me.” He pulled his two-way radio off his belt and called HQ. When the dispatcher responded, he said, “Call Dudley Wallace and confirm him and his dog for the search party.”

Knott said, “I could show you a very effective technique for improving your memory.”

Marlene saved Rourke from making a defensive smart-ass comment when she plunked their breakfast platters on the table and said, “There ya go, guys. Enjoy your breakfast.”

* * * *

Sharyn was almost asleep when
Smuggler’s Nook
chirruped like a mechanical insect. She got out of bed, grabbed the book and quickly seized her cell phone. “Hello?”

“Sharyn, it’s me,” said Thorn. “I couldn’t get back to sleep with the thought of you being mad at me. I’m sorry if I—”

“Forget it, Al. It’s all right. But don’t call my cell while I’m here. I’m not supposed to have it. If they hear it ringing, they’ll confiscate it.”

“Right. Sorry,” he muttered. “Listen, I’ve been thinking …”

“Oh Lord.”

He laughed half-heartedly, then said, “The hitch in my working theory is this: What could make a group of women go on a rampage and slaughter their menfolk? When you take away the supernatural catalyst of a Dionysian figure, what would make the women behave so violently? Something in the well water? Some contaminate that only affected females? Or were the women secretly practicing black magic and performing rituals that worked them into a state of frenzy?”

“A hillbilly witches’ coven,” Sharyn reflected.

“Yes, but that just doesn’t feel right. My imagination fails me. I can’t come up with a reasonable hypothesis for their motive.”

“You
know
what I believe. But you’re too goddamned stubborn to seriously consider it. I’m not saying it’s supernatural. More likely, it’s a life-form unknown to modern man. A very old one that just missed extinction. Maybe it hibernates for a century and a half, and then wakes up to do its thing. I don’t know, but whatever the explanation, it’s awake now and it’s doing it again. But you won’t believe it until you hear it or see it for yourself. I’m telling you, Al, it’s out there and it’s
real
.”

“Bigfoot with Pan-like shriek. Hmmm.”

“Don’t mock me.”

“I’m not. That’s what you’re suggesting, is it not? Or something along those lines.”

“You know what your problem is?” Sharyn caught her voice rising with her level of anger and lowered the volume. “You’re hamstrung by a
National Enquirer
mentality. You’re letting your self-doubt stop you, already imagining the ridicule your colleagues will heap on you. Just do the goddamn science, Thorn. Stop worrying about your precious reputation. It will take care of itself if you do your job.”