Daemon of the Dark Wood (22 page)

Headlights winked out. Car doors creaked and slammed. Male voices tested the fog-muffled air with short bursts of extraneous comment and glib witticisms. Cigarette lighters made firefly flashes in the fog. Someone coughed and spat. Someone farted, drawing a few hoots and catcalls.

The men moved tentatively toward Rourke, who pointed at a leafless maple tree that stood in a small clearing above the road and said, “Form up by that dead tree and keep your voices down.”

Rourke strode across the road and climbed a low embankment to the clearing. Knott trailed after him. A few minutes later all the men who would make up the search party had assembled themselves in a loose rank facing Rourke, who stood in a wide stance with the dead tree at his back. A few of the men had rifles, a couple had shotguns and one had a machete. Most were unarmed.

“All right,” Rourke said, holding up his arms to catch their undivided attention. “You know why we’re here, so knock off the grab-ass and get serious. Everybody with a gun step forward.”

Six men moved forward, forming a provisional front rank.

“You six will form a wide skirmish line and move up the mountain. Nobody should be walking in front of you. The rest of you will stay well behind the guns. I don’t want anybody catching a bullet in his ass. Keep about a twenty-yard interval between you and the men to your left and right as we sweep up the hill. We’re looking for a cave where the missing women may be stashed. If you run into a bad guy, we want him alive, so don’t get trigger happy.”

“I don’t see how we can find anything in this fog,” someone said.

One of the volunteer firemen said, “I’ve been all over this mountain and I never came across a cave.”

Rourke said, “That’s why we have to do a thorough search. If there is a cave, it’ll be hard to see.”

“Where’s Dudley’s dog?” another man asked. “He can sniff out anydamn-body.”

“There he comes now,” said Travis Tate, pointing down at a black SUV coming up the road.

“Hell, I didn’t know the mutt could drive,” said Dave Deets, part-time deputy and perennial clown.

“Deputy Rourke, is it true that you got the tip about women held captive in a cave from an escaped abductee?” The inquirer was Arvin Sheets, editor of
The Dogwood Weekly
. He nervously rubbed a hand over his bald head as if he were polishing a beloved bowling ball.

“Abductee? Hey now, nobody told me we was huntin’ aliens,” Deets quipped.

“Arvin, are you here to help with the search or as just a reporter?” asked Rourke.

“Both of the above. Though I take umbrage at your ‘just a reporter’ remark.”

“Yes, it’s true, Arvin,” Rourke said with an edge of warning in his voice, “but I’m not at liberty to make her name public.”

Sheets scowled, then put away his notepad and pen. As an afterthought, he said, “Well, maybe you can tell me this. Is Dr. Knott here for some on-the-scene counseling in case we find the missing women?”

“This is not a damn press conference, Arvin,” said Rourke, resting his hands on his hips. “I don’t have time to field your questions. I’m trying to field a search party.”

With his tracking dog leading the way on a short leash, Dudley Wallace came up the embankment.

Rourke said, “No smoking beyond this point. Dudley’s dog has a sensitive sniffer, so put out your smokes.”

With minimal grumbling, the smokers field-stripped their butts.

“The dog goes up first so we won’t contaminate the scent-trail,” Rourke went on. “The weather’s in our favor. The sun should burn off this fog pretty soon but until it does, keep your eyes extra sharp.”

Dudley Wallace approached Rourke and greeted him with a nod. He said, “Sit, Pogo,” and the German Shepherd immediately obeyed his master and sat beside Dudley’s right heel, tongue lolling.

Rourke reached into his pants pocket and brought out the small swatch of the hospital gown Judy Lynn had been wearing in the ER. He had cut off a section of the gown’s sleeve, figuring the lingering scent of Judy Lynn’s armpit would be enough to put the dog on the scent-trail she’d left when she came down the mountain to the road.

He handed the fragment of cloth to Dudley and said, “This has the girl’s scent. Her back trail should lead to the cave where the women are supposed to be.”

“So we’re not looking for the girl,” said Dudley.

“No, she’s safe at home. She escaped, came down the mountain and flagged a ride.”

“Then that’s where Pogo should start.”

Knott said, “I can show you the spot. I was the ride she flagged down.”

Dudley and the dog accompanied Knott down to the blacktop. When they were in front of the Falling Rocks sign, Dudley held the gown fragment under Pogo’s nose and said, “Find!”

The dog immediately set to the task, sniffing the ground as he pulled his master along with the leash. After less than a minute of scent-searching, Pogo obviously had the trail and started back up the mountainside with Dudley in tow. Man and dog circumvented the gathering of men in the clearing and made a beeline into the trees above them.

“All right,” Rourke said to his search party of sixteen men, “front rank move out. And keep your intervals.”

Knott rejoined Rourke and they hastened after Dudley and Pogo, staying close behind the skirmish line of armed men.

“And a dog shall lead them,” muttered Knott.

“What’s that?” Rourke looked askance at the doctor.

“A bunch of grown men following a dog. Seems a little strange, that’s all.”

“
Strange
is the name of the game,” Rourke said with a brittle laugh.

Julie sat lotus fashion at the sculpted feet of a lofty stone angel. The marble pedestal beneath her rump was hard and cool, but it wasn’t all that uncomfortable to one accustomed as she was to the discipline of meditation. Though she’d been a little scared in coming here alone, now that she was here she felt as if the small fog-kissed army of angels would protect her from the thing that had called her out last night. Though made only of stone, they were nevertheless angels, and thus should afford her some measure of protection in the same way a crucifix protects one from evil; such symbols had power if you believed in them. And she did. She
had
to. Otherwise, last night’s terror would still be with her and she wouldn’t have been able to set foot out of the apartment to come here in search of her guardian angel and for some semblance of security and peace of mind.

“Michael? Are you here?” Her voice echoed hollowly within the hedges and ricocheted redundantly off the garden of rocks and statuary, changing its timbre so much as it traveled its erratic course that it was scarcely recognizable as her own. “Please answer me. Give me a sign. Michael, please? I need you.” Treble-edged echoes haunted her voice.

Here among the angels, Julie found it a little easier to disbelieve her earlier suspicion that something dark and inhuman was growing inside her, yet she needed reassurance from Michael.

But her guardian kept his stubborn silence, leaving her to face her fears alone.

“You shouldn’t be out here by yourself. Not after last night.”

She looked around to see Angela walking toward her in a man’s blue-and-gray flannel shirt, bare-legged below the long shirttails. Julie patted her chest as if to quiet her startled heart. “You scared me.”

“Sorry. I woke up and you were gone. You should’ve left a note.”

“Sorry.”

“We’re a sorry pair, aren’t we.” Angela smiled as she sat beside her on the pedestal. She looked warily up at the angel towering over them, fingered the top button of her shirt and said, “Stop staring at my tits, you stone-faced pervert.”

Julie laughed. Then she planted a kiss on Angela’s cheek. “I think you’re going to have to be my guardian angel since Michael’s derelict in his duties. Would you?”

“Thought you’d never ask.” Angela slipped her arm around Julie’s back. “Guardian Angela, at your service.”

“You saved my ass last night.”

“That’s ’cause I love that pretty little ass.”

“I know. And I love you too. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“I do. You’d get your tit in the wringer and your ass in a sling. Just for starters.”

“And you’ll save me from myself.” Julie said with skeptical inflection.

“Absolutely.”

She placed a hand on Angela’s bare thigh and caressed the soft stubble. “Ange, what did you see last night?”

“Same thing you did.”

“Then you saw the devil. ’Cause that’s what I saw. Sure as hell.”

“That was your over-developed imagination, babe. All I saw was a shape in the rain.”

“You must’ve seen more than that or you wouldn’t have shot at it.”

“I shot at it because of that fucking noise it was making. That screaming cry. Whatever makes a sound like that
has
to be dangerous.”

“Then you really didn’t get a good look at it.”

“No, and I didn’t want to either.”

“It was the devil.”

“There’s no such thing, Jools.”

“How would you know that?”

“Because I’m not a rightwing Christian moron. I think maybe you should switch to writing romance or mystery. All this horror crap is warping your mind.”

“That’s a mean thing to say. The Christian thing too …”

Angela shrugged. “I’m just saying …”

Julie jumped up and stalked off.

Angela went after her. “Hey, wait up. Don’t be such a pussy.”

“Leave me alone, dyke.”

Angela caught up and put her hand on Julie’s shoulder, and Julie rounded on her, drew back a fist and threw it at Angela’s face. Angela blocked the punch with her forearm and stepped backward. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

“Don’t touch me!” Hot tears of anger leaked from Julie’s eyes, though she didn’t want to cry, certainly not after her lover had called her a pussy.

Angela held her open hands in front of her. “Okay, okay. Chill out. I won’t touch you.”

Julie started away again.

Angela hastened to her side and said, “Just because you’re pissed at me doesn’t mean I’m not going to protect you. Whatever that thing was, it’s still out there somewhere and if it comes around again, I won’t miss next time.”

Angela pulled her compact pistol from the breast pocket of her flannel shirt to show she was serious.

“You can’t kill the devil,” said Julie, surprised by the force of her own conviction.

* * * *

Drunk on her lover’s flesh and blood, Judy Lynn fell into a dreamlike limbo between this world—the world in which she now lay on bloodied bed sheets—and the other one, the realm from which her rutting god had come in all his terrible glory, entering through the hidden circle of magic stones at the precise midsummer moment the sun stood still to claim that longest day as his own and to perfume the subsequent nights with his potent musk. Her blood understood that the imposing god would hold sway over the woodlands he trod like a ghostly shepherd, gathering his wayward flock for worship at his loins and to suckle them with his intoxicating phallus. She and the others were his chosen ones, his holy servants baptized in the blood-wine of his lust and spiritually primed for the impending ritual of his
becoming
.

The shock and revulsion she’d felt when he made her kill the stray dog and eat its raw entrails was blessedly behind her now. That grisly initiation, she now knew, was but a foretaste of the butchery and feasting that was to follow. Her palate had been primed, the godly seed planted in her soul, and in these moments of half-sleep when her surface mind relinquished the mental field to the throbbing under-mind, she
knew
what her god had planned for her and the others.

She opened her eyes. The low-watt bulb in the bedside lamp cast a dingy pall over the bedroom and lent a sepia hue to Josh’s naked, mutilated corpse.

“My God,” she said as she absorbed the gruesome boudoir tableau. The remnant of her displaced, humane self screamed from its submerged position that she should be appalled by what she’d done: murdered her fiancé in a frenzy of bloodlust. But the screaming complainant had already been subsumed by a new order of self. She was no longer Judy Lynn Bowen, descendent of backwoods hillbillies. Now she was
so
much more. She had become a vessel for the pneuma of an alien divinity older than humanity; she had the ability to see the world with new eyes; she had glimpsed another world on the other side of the thin skin of this one; her innermost desires were made flesh; her congress with the godly intruder had enhanced her physical and mental powers so much that she divined she was becoming something more than human. Much more.

She got out of bed, licking the last of Josh’s blood from her lips. She caught a glimpse of herself in the dresser’s mirror. The sight of her blood-slicked nakedness thrilled her anew, sent her heart leaping for her throat.

No, that was not Judy Lynn Bowen in the looking-glass.

“Jude,” she said to her reflection. “That’s who you are. Judy Lynn died on the mountain. We’re Jude.”

As she dragged Josh’s body down the wooden steps to the basement, she felt a pang of regret that she wouldn’t be getting married after all, but the little belch of remorse fled in the face of a larger truth: she was to become the bride of a god whose carnal appetites knew no bounds.

She in her turn would become a goddess, a being both bestial and celestial. A fabulous creature
in the flesh
.

The fog was lifting. It hung in the trees, leaving a few wispy patches close to the ground, where the uneven ranks of searchers moved through flourishing undergrowth and trees, some of the men softly cursing the rising landscape as they went, others maintaining a stoic silence merited by the seriousness of their undertaking. A young woman had been kidnapped and raped; other women might still be on this mountain, held captive in a cave by an unknown pervert, a deviant fiend or worse. This was serious business, not some good-old-boy outing to be capped off with beer-drinking and good-natured shit-shooting.

When Knott’s cell phone chirruped, Rourke shot him an angry look.

“Sorry,” said Knott, whipping out the little phone and flipping it open, “but it could be about my wife.”