Daemon of the Dark Wood (13 page)

Julie’s fingers froze over the keyboard. Her eyes fell out of focus. Saliva suddenly swamped her tongue and drooled from the corner of her slack mouth. Caught in a Pavlovian paradox, she wanted to go to the screecher, and at the same time wanted to run and hide, wanted the shrill cry to cease before her head exploded.

The unceasing screech grew louder and louder. Julie’s ears popped as if in response to a sudden altitudinal pressure change. She shivered feverishly. Her teeth clenched, then began to chatter.

The spiky sound wrought strange changes in spatial dimensions. The bedroom and everything in it shrank to postage-stamp size, then just as suddenly expanded to include the outside world of endless darkness—the realm of the terrifying screecher.

Julie lost control of her bladder and urinated in her shorts. The liquid warmth triggered deep spasms of arousal.

She rolled her chair backward and bolted out of it, bumping her thighs on the desk and spilling the cold cup of tea. She turned and stumbled toward the bedroom door, certain now that the way to the screecher was down the stairs and out the front door of the townhouse, certain that the screecher was waiting for her out there in the night and the rain. The surrounding walls wavered in and out of her sight as if they were unable to maintain solidity against the incessant shriek of the one calling her out. The carpeted stair steps were spongy, scarcely solid enough to support her bare feet as she descended them and made for the door.

As she reached for the doorknob, she half-expected her guardian angel to grab her by the scruff and stop her headlong plunge into the grasp of the thing waiting on the other side of the door.

She wanted Michael to stop her.

She
didn’t
want him to stop her.

She turned the knob and threw the door wide. A rainy gust of wind hit her face, as did the overpowering odor of the unseen screecher.

Like wash on a clothesline, sheets of rain fluttered before her in the yellow glow of the porchlight, threatening to open like jeweled curtains upon a world beyond this one, to once and for all reveal the maker of the unrelenting sound that held her in its thrall. A painful fullness in her breasts yearned to be expressed, to be violently suckled.

A hazy shape appeared in the rain. Raindrops splashed off its wide shoulders as it came forward, growing taller with each jerky step.

“My God,” she said, or thought she said, looking up at the looming shape.

Then Angela came through the doorway, pushed her aside, raised a pistol and fired. The screeching cry abruptly ceased with the firearm’s sharp report. The shape in the rain began to dissolve, bleeding into the darkness and disappearing in a matter of seconds.

The rain-curtains closed.

“What the hell
was
that?” Angela pointed the handgun at the rainy darkness.

Julie didn’t answer. She shuddered violently.

“You all right?” Angela put a protective arm around her.

“N-n-no. I’m-m not.”

Rourke drove through the stone archway of Mountview Villas, the Ford Explorer’s headlights carving thin rain-streaked swaths out of the night. Only a few of the streetlights were on, and all of the buildings were dark except one at the back of the compound. He turned right on a narrow lane and drove toward the townhouse with the lighted windows and porch.

Not long after he’d seen—or imagined he’d seen—the rain-thing in his backyard, Rourke remembered the phone call from the Atlanta builder whose daughter and her roommate were already here at Mountview Villas, just the two of them in an otherwise vacant apartment complex. He had told the man he would check on the girls, but he’d forgotten them until he was crawling into bed. He’d made a mental note to pay them a visit in the morning.

But the backyard visitation had left him on edge, too restless to sleep, and the thought of some mysterious beast roving the night made it imperative that he drive to Mountview Villas to make sure … to make sure what? That there was no rain-thing lurking about? Well, yes. And just to be able to say he’d been true to his word and checked on them. The girls would no doubt be in bed for the night at this late hour so he wouldn’t actually lay eyes on them, but he would do a drive-by, identify their vehicle and then feel better about things—maybe even good enough to be able to get some sleep when he returned home.

Because it was raining, he had the SUV’s windows up and the air-conditioner running to defog the windscreen. The wipers flogged the glass noisily and the rain drummed on the Explorer’s roof. Rourke nevertheless heard the unmistakable
crack
of a single gunshot as he drove toward the building with the Dodge van parked out front.

He accelerated, simultaneously powering the driver’s-side window down so he could get a better fix on the next shot, if it came.

Then he saw the two girls huddled on the lighted portico of the townhouse. In T-shirts and little else, they both looked ready to bolt as he drove up to the curb in front of them. The dark-haired young woman stared blankly while the blonde shielded her eyes against the glare of the headlights and held a pistol in her other hand, keeping it down by her bare leg.

Out of uniform and behind the wheel of a civilian vehicle, Rourke knew he had to proceed with caution to avoid getting shot as a late-night miscreant. He opened the door and stepped slowly out of the Explorer with his hands raised, palms forward. Wearing a pullover shirt, blue jeans, and cowboy boots, he felt naked and vulnerable as he softly shut the driver’s door with his foot and said, “Easy now. Don’t shoot me. I’m Deputy Sheriff Rob Rourke. Mr. Archer asked me to check on you girls.”

The dark-haired girl whined: “Daddy …?”

The blonde with the gun said nothing.

Rourke said, “What’re you shooting at?”

Then the blonde spoke: “If you’re a deputy, where’s your uniform?”

“Hanging in the closet. I’m off-duty. Tell you the truth, I didn’t remember I promised to check on you until I got home.” He hoped his confession would break a little ice and make him less threatening to the girls—especially to the one with the gun. “What’s going on?”

The blonde said, “We saw something …” Her words trailed off as she looked off into the rain.

“It was screaming,” said the dark-haired young woman. “Screeching. It was terrible. It …”

Rourke advanced slowly. “Let’s get in out of the rain and you can tell me about it. Okay?”

“You got some identification?” asked the blonde. She seemed more with it than her shaken companion.

He pulled his wallet from his hip pocket and held it out in front of him like a warrior’s miniature shield as he went close enough for her to see his official ID. “Okay? Can we step inside now? I’m getting waterlogged out here.”

“Come on in,” said the one with the pistol, which appeared to be a .25-caliber automatic with a pearl handle. She stepped aside and let him enter first. She showed good instincts, not letting him get behind her.

“What exactly did you see?” he asked when they were inside and the door was shut against the rainy night.

The girls looked at each other as if they were both unsure of what they’d seen. Rourke knew the feeling. He didn’t know exactly what he’d seen in his own backyard.

“I don’t know what the hell it was,” said Blondie. “It was raining so hard and it was like … it wasn’t all the way there. If that makes sense.”

Remembering his rain-thing, he thought it made perfect sense. “Can you describe it?”

“It was just a big shape in the rain,” said the dark-haired woman. “But that screeching sound scared the pee out of me. Literally.” She blushed.

Rourke nodded uneasily. “Which one of you is Miss Archer?”

“I’m Julie Archer,” said the blusher. “And this is my roommate Angela Raynor.”

Rourke said, “Miss Raynor, would you mind putting your pistol down.”

She stared into his eyes a long moment, then set the gun on the coffee table. “I have a permit.”

He nodded.

“I didn’t know you brought your gun,” said Julie Archer, seeming a little more oriented and confident now that she was inside and in the company of an officer of the law—even if he was out of uniform and unarmed.

“Don’t give me any shit about it either. What do you think would’ve happened if I didn’t have it?”

“I don’t know what would’ve happened. I’m not even sure what
did
happen. I’ve never felt so strange in all my life. Didn’t you feel it?”

“Not like you did, apparently. Girl, you were zoned out. Why the hell did you go outside after hearing that god-awful shrieking?”

Julie shook her head. “I don’t know. I was … like in a trance or something. Like it was calling me and I had to …” She shrugged.

A puzzle piece snapped silently into place in Rourke’s mind. He pictured Judy Lynn Bowen leaving her car on Widow’s Ridge Road and walking into the woods to answer the spellbinding call of something altogether wild. Something that defied rational description. Like the thing he’d half-seen in the rain. “And you shot at it,” he said to Miss Raynor. “Do you think you hit it?”

“I don’t know. I’m a pretty good shot, and I aimed center-mass, you know? But the damned thing just … disappeared. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was like some supernatural beastie out of Julie’s books. She writes horror stories.”

“What if it was?” Julie Archer widened her dark eyes.

“Don’t
even
go there,” said her roommate. “Not if you want me to stay here.”

“But you just said—”

“I said if I didn’t know better. I do. Know better. It was some kind of animal. Or maybe a shared hallucination.”

“You don’t know what it was and I don’t either. So don’t tell me what it wasn’t, Angela.”

Angela rolled her eyes and said to Rourke: “You’ll have to excuse her. She also believes she has a guardian angel, who happens to be curiously absent tonight. She sometimes gets her spooky stories mixed up with reality.”

“I do not.” Julie crossed her arms over her chest.

Rourke said, “Keep your doors locked at all times and don’t go out after dark. Is your phone turned on?”

Julie nodded. “And we have our cells.”

“Any problems, call nine-one-one.” He looked at Angela. “And don’t you go taking pot-shots at anything. I’m gonna take a look around outside. Starting tonight, I’ll have a deputy make nightly checks here. Okay?”

They both nodded.

“Good night, then, ladies. Welcome to Dogwood.”

He went outside and checked the tiny front yard and the parking lot for blood, but he found nothing to indicate that the phantom prowler had been wounded. He hadn’t really expected to. A rain-thing wouldn’t bleed.

Would it?

* * * *

Julie fired a furious look at Angela, who had just locked, bolted and chained the front door. “Why’d you shoot off your mouth about me to that man? Don’t you
ever
put my business in the street again.”

Angela met her fury with a cold stare. “I didn’t put anything in the street. The man’s a cop, for Christ’s sake. He was looking out for us. Which is more than you can say for your alleged guardian angel.”

“You didn’t have to tell him about Michael.”

“Cool it, Jools. Didn’t you see the way he reacted when we told him what we saw? He already
knew
. Whatever that thing was, Deputy Dog knows something about it. I could see it in his bloodhound eyes.”

Julie’s eyes brimmed with tears. “I don’t
know
what I saw,” she said, shoulders slumping as she collapsed on the couch. “Or what it did to me. I’ve never felt anything so … so …”

Angela sat beside her and snugged an arm around her sagging shoulders. “It’s okay,” she said. “You’re safe now.”

“I don’t feel safe. What if it comes back? What then? That sound did something to me. I was … I lost control. It called me and I couldn’t stop myself from going out to meet it. Didn’t you feel it?”

“Not like you did. I felt scared. Then angry. Tell you the truth, I felt sort of stoned and paranoid, like I’d smoked some kick-ass weed. But mostly I was pissed off.”

Julie exhaled a shuddering sigh. Angela stroked her hair and added, “I’ll tell you what I really felt. I felt like a mean-ass bull dyke ready to take down a lounge lizard for trying to put the moves on my woman. How fucked up is
that?
”

Julie snorted, then hiccupped. “You’re not a dyke. You don’t have a bullish bone in your bod.”

“But I felt like I was shooting testosterone bullets, babe.” Angela comically deepened her voice and said, “C’mere, little honey, and suck on my peashooter.”

Julie chuckled. Then sniffled. “Let’s go to bed. I want you just to hold me.”

“Sure, baby. Go on up. I’m gonna make sure the back door and the windows are locked.”

Julie stood unsteadily, chewed her lower lip, and then padded toward the stairs. Over her shoulder she said, “Bring your gun when you come up.”

* * * *

Rourke drove at a crawl through Mountview Villas’ maze of narrow little streets, looking for any sign of a prowler lurking in the wet darkness. It was simply a matter of routine; he didn’t expect to find a prowler too insubstantial to go bump in the night. Of course, it was possible that the young ladies had been stoned on illegal drugs and only imagined they saw something—or jointly hallucinated the thing in the rain, if that was possible. But what about the screeching they had described? Hallucinations didn’t scream, did they?

Besides, Rourke had seen it himself in his own backyard. Or something very like it. He couldn’t write that off as freaky coincidence. His rain apparition and the thing the girls had seen and heard were—or at least
could
be—one and the same. He’d lived all of his thirty-nine years in Dogwood, and he was familiar with all of the indigenous wildlife, but he had never seen the likes of that rain-thing anywhere, outside of illustrated books of mythology. Wildlife, indeed. How wild could it get?

He braked and rolled to a stop atop a small hill overlooking the hedge-walled courtyard in the center of the compound. The Explorer’s headlights illuminated the eerie statuary standing in the slanting rain within the rectangle of dark green hedges, majestic stone angels and cherubic gnomes arrayed in mystic formation amid the Oriental rock garden. It was a creepy spectacle; it brought Rourke’s thoughts back to mythological beings and creatures of fantasy.