Daemon of the Dark Wood (21 page)

“What does that mean?
National Enquirer
mentality? I don’t follow.”

“Don’t be dense. I mean you’re afraid of being ridiculed for uncovering a fantastic truth. Afraid your work will be front-page news in the tabloids and ignored by the scientific community.”

After a long silence, Thorn said, “It
could
happen that way, you know.”

“Sure it could, but a real scientist wouldn’t let that stop him. Follow Galileo’s example. Screw the establishment. Answer your true calling and do the damn work. Don’t fear persecution.”

Thorn’s windy sigh made static in the earpiece of her cell. He said, “I’m doing the work, but I’m working without a net here. I have to feel grounded. It’s all about the ground for someone in my field of endeavor. The ground gives up its buried secrets of human culture and development. The ground makes it all real. Man doesn’t exist in a vac—”

“Alfred? I know what archeology and anthropology are, and I know all about working without a safety net. I
lived
that way until I got regulated on medication. What do you think bipolar disorder is? There’s a deep end at either pole and no fucking safety net. I’ve gone off the deep end more than once, so you don’t need to tell me what it’s like. Okay? I’ve been there. So don’t expect much sympathy from me.”

“I’m not asking for sympathy. I’m just saying—”

“Take the plunge, Al. Or forget the whole thing and retreat to the classroom.”

A knock on the door gave her a start. “Gotta go,” she whispered into the cell and then hid it under her pillow. The door swung open and the night nurse stuck her head in.

“Still can’t sleep,” said Nurse Sanders.

Sharyn shook her head.

“Who were you talking to?”

“Myself. Don’t worry, I’m not hallucinating. I live alone and I talk to myself sometimes,” she lied. “I’m good company.”

“Why don’t you turn your light out and lie down? You won’t get to sleep sitting up and talking to yourself.”

“I will. Thanks.” She turned off the bedside lamp and slid under the bedcovers.

Sanders gave her a curt smile, then withdrew and quietly shut the door.

Sharyn sighed in relief. Realizing how tired she was, she relaxed and let herself sink into the softness of the bed and closed her eyes.

A moment later she was asleep.

Julie Archer arose at five-fifteen, made her toilet, and went downstairs to the kitchen to brew a pot of strong coffee. She sat at the kitchen table and waited for Mr. Coffee to work his java magic. It was an older deluxe model, red-plated with a softly glowing green clock-face that seemed to stare at her like a malevolently mystic eye from a fifties horror flick.

She fashioned her fingers in the sign of the death-dealing phallus against the evil eye—
mal occhio
—to ward off any bad juju. Then she quietly laughed at herself for being creeped out by a green-eyed Mr. Coffee.

But she was without her guardian angel, and that was no laughing matter. Not when there was a supernatural entity loose in the hills.

Before falling asleep in Angela’s protective arms a few short hours ago, Julie had promised herself that everything would be all right in the morning and that she would feel
normal
. But now that morning had come, she didn’t feel at all normal.

Her thoughts were dark and drear. Darkness still held sway over the land and over her. Come sunrise, things might look better but she didn’t think so. The darkness that cloaked her heart would not be easily banished by sunlight. That infernal shrieking had seeped inside her and deposited something there, some numinous substance that was eating away the layers of her humanity. Beneath those layers something wanton and wild was awakening. She could feel its eagerness to get out, to be born. To come screaming out of her.

“Stop it,” she whispered.
Stop thinking such morbid thoughts
.

She hammered the kitchen table with her fist and bolted out of the chair, making a physical show of her determination to remain in control of herself and her thoughts. She poured French-roast coffee into a large mug and took a sip, hoping to fortify her resolve with caffeine. Even as she did her best to ride out her emotional turmoil, the horror writer within stood back and observed from a place of detachment, looking for a way to use this profound experience in a story. If she could capture just a smidgen of the terror she felt and translate it into the language of fiction …

The thing inside her twisted and kicked like an infant in the womb. Julie clutched her belly and doubled over. The mug of coffee slipped from her grip and clattered on the tile floor, snapping off the ceramic handle.

“
Jesus
,” she said with a gasp. She had to lean on the kitchen counter to keep from falling down. Then another cramp wrenched her intestines and she hobbled as fast as she could go to the downstairs bathroom. She threw the lid up with a bang and plopped her rump down on the cool seat.

Just a bad case of the runs
, she told herself.
Not a wild thing ripping its way out of me
.

Not yet
,
anyway
.

* * * *

Fearful that something had followed her home from the haunted burial ground, Liza Leatherwood mounted the steps to her front porch and collapsed in the rocking chair. Her heart thudded so hard that she feared she might be in the early stages of a heart attack. She couldn’t seem to catch her breath. Predawn darkness deepened, swirling round about her like the black robes of Grim Death.
No, no, no, not yet, please, not yet
.

A glowing shape appeared out of the wispy fog in the front yard and hovered above the grass like a slender white cloud. It glided toward her. As it neared, it slowly resolved itself into the shape of a tall man with craggy features.

“They Lord,” she said. “Wilbur?”

She rocked forward, clutching a hand to her old dugs and squinting behind her bifocals for a clearer look. Yes, it
was
Wilbur. There was no mistaking his noble homeliness or the kindness shining in his eyes.

“You come to take me home?” A mournful groan escaped her lips. “Oh, sugar, I can’t go just yet. I do want to, but …” She had to pause to catch her breath. “I got something I have to do first. Then I’ll come directly. Hear?”

Wilbur’s ghost shimmered, guttering like a lanky candle-flame above the porch steps.

Liza’s heartbeats lost some of their frightening force. She breathed a little easier, knowing her time on earth wasn’t quite over. She reached out with a gnarled hand and said, “Please? Touch me, Wilbur. Before you go.”

The specter extended his long fingers and touched Liza’s hand. A current of cool warmth made her fingers tingle. Bittersweet memories flooded her consciousness, a profound sense of nostalgia gilded with sensual tensions she’d thought she would never feel again. Touching death, she knew her nine decades of life were but a brief tick of Heaven’s cosmic clock, and she was deeply aggrieved that she and her beloved husband couldn’t have had a larger allotment of time together.

Wilbur withdrew his spectral hand. His face was a sad ghost-mask of regret.

“Wait for me,” said Liza, sobbing. “I’ll be coming soon.”

Her late husband withdrew and disappeared into the fog.

Three dark shapes crouched like unmoving gargoyles in the front yard and watched her with luminous eyes.

* * * *

Judy Lynn Bowen had to use the cordless phone to call Josh because she’d lost her cell phone the night she hit the deer and met
him
—the dark god of the mountains.

She sucked hungrily on her cigarette, the ninth from the fresh pack of Virginia Slims she was chain-smoking her way through, greedily drawing the smoke into her lungs as if it could satisfy the intense lust that burned within her.

But of course it couldn’t. Tobacco was a poor substitute for what she really craved. Which was why she was phoning her fiancé at so early an hour to tell him she had returned to the world.

Her mother had wanted to take Judy Lynn home with her, but Judy Lynn assured her that she would be fine at her own home, so her mother reluctantly dropped her off at the rented house in Widow’s Ridge. Judy Lynn intended to feed her fierce appetite as soon as possible, and she didn’t want to have to worry about the ruckus she might raise in her enthusiastic feasting.

Josh answered his cell, his voice slack with sleep. “Hello?”

“Hey, baby, it’s me.”

“Judy Lynn! Thank God! Where—”

“I’m home. I need you to come over. Right now. I need you, Josh. I need you so bad.” She touched her bare breast, pinching the taut nipple.

“What time is it? Six? Where’ve you been? Are you okay?”

“I will be when you get here. Hurry, baby. I’m dying for you to touch me.”

“I’m on the way.”

She hung up, stubbed out the Slim and fired another one. Then she lay back into the pile of pillows, spread her legs and ran her fingers between the sodden lips of her sex. She shuddered pleasurably. She sucked down more smoke. She spread her thighs wider, slipping her fingers deeper.

“Hurry, you prick,” she said, “I can’t wait much longer.”

She set the cigarette in the ashtray so she could use both hands for pleasuring herself. As good as one hand felt, it wasn’t enough. Nor would two hands be. Neither would Josh be. He was a good lover, but she was different now. She’d been touched by a pagan devil, and that touch had awakened feelings she never knew she had. Feelings she was only just beginning to understand.

She shut her eyes and the mouth of the mountain cave opened to her. She entered into its glowing darkness and fell on her knees before
him
. He stamped his hooves like a horse straining at the bit. His humongous erection quivered just above her head and she got the crazy idea that he was going to knight her with his throbbing wand and initiate her into his royal court. She gazed up into his eyes but quickly looked away, instinctively knowing that if she looked too long into those oily black orbs she would surely go mad. After a momentary relapse into the terror she’d felt when she first heard his shrieking summons, she bravely parted her lips and drank the sweet blood-wine from his engorged fount. The effect was immediate. A luminous river of lust flowed through her, around her, and then she was riding those wine-dark rapids through a timeless land of dark miracles, a realm inhabited by ancient gods and servile humans. The river spat her onto the shore and she found herself stumbling into a circle of naked revelers, wild women capering around a great roaring fire. She danced with them as they whooped and stomped, shaking primitive weapons at the night sky. Bare breasts bouncing, they danced themselves into a frenzy of unspeakable lust. Then he came out of the fire and took them one by one, ravaging them with his tireless member, savagely plundering them until they cried mercy. Then, having no mercy, he took them again with his great glistening staff.

She rode the swollen waves of her orgasm back to the reality of the bedroom and opened her eyes. The cigarette in the ashtray’s groove had burned down to the filter and gone out. The first faint light of dawn nuzzled softly against the windows. She floated on a magical bed that she hoped would provide conveyance from the torture of covetous longing.

Josh stood at the foot of the bed, his boyish face a mask of shock at seeing his betrothed asprawl on the twisted bedcovers, her swollen labial folds gleaming with silvery mucus.

“Jesus Christ, Judy Lynn. Couldn’t you wait for me?”

“Fuck me, Josh. Fuck me harder than you ever have.”

He grinned uncertainly. “What the hell’s got into you?”

“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you. C’mere, stud.” She cocked her knees, slipped the backs of her wrists along her inner thighs and waggled her fingers in welcome.

He unsnapped his jeans and stepped out of them. He pushed his jockey shorts down his long legs and then kicked them into the air, laughing.

He crawled onto the bed and let her slender beckoning fingers guide him to the core of her outrageous craving.

He rode her with abandon until he realized it was she who was riding him from below, humping him with frightening violence. When he faltered, she raked his buttocks with her fingernails, drawing trickles of blood. When he tried to pull away, she held him in place by wrapping her legs about his hips and squeezing him with strength that bordered on superhuman.

Her rushing bloodstream carried the echo of the pagan god’s shriek, and it entranced her anew. She dug her nails deep into her lover’s taut ass cheeks and he cried out in protest. His pain and his sudden terror fanned the flames of her volcanic passions, and when they finally erupted she sank her teeth into the pliable flesh of his throat and drank deeply of his arterial ejaculations.

He struggled desperately for his life, thrashing between her muscular thighs, but to no avail; she’d depleted too much of his energies. Her vice-like leverage was too precise, her strength insurmountable. His final convulsions brought Judy Lynn to orgasm.

When he was dead, she released him, rolled his slack carcass off her, took his wilted cock in her mouth and chewed it off at its root.

The small caravan of cars and pickup trucks followed the police cruiser up the mountain road; a second cruiser brought up the snaking motorcade’s rear. Blue lights flashed from the racks atop both official vehicles and lit the convoy at both ends, lending the illuminated fog a stroboscopic pulse of veinal blue.

The lead cruiser pulled to the side of the blacktop and parked on the shoulder in front of a Watch For Falling Rocks sign. The trailing vehicles followed suit and parked along the side of the road.

Rourke stepped out of the lead cruiser and waited for the others to disembark. Knott stood beside him, arms habitually folded across his chest. Neither man spoke.

Low-hanging clouds blanketed the mountain and leached much of the color from the chilly dawn. Though it was June, the mountainous elevation would keep summer’s heat in check until later in the morning, when the cloud cover would burn off and the hills would turn as steamy as the lowlands.