Daemon of the Dark Wood (24 page)

Her voice grew stronger with each line of the psalm. The verses resonated within her as they never had before. Tears formed in the corners of her eyes. “‘He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.’”

All three dogs cocked their sharp-edged ears toward her. Liza read indecision in the body language of the biggest mongrel, the alpha mutt— or so she thought. She increased her voice’s volume: “‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.’”
What I wouldn’t give for a big rod right now. I’d crack me some doggie skulls.

She shook the wind chime harder. In spite of her impaired hearing, now she heard a faint tinkling: the wind chime sounding a world away. “‘Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.’”
And I’m about to pee in my britches. Lord, give me strength to see this through
.

The alpha mutt’s tongue lolled out and it stood up on all fours. Its two companions also got to their feet.

Liza virtually shouted the last lines of the psalm, delivering the words with as much evangelical spirit and Bible-thumping cadence as she could muster: “‘Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.’”
But right now I’m going in my own damn house, thank you, Jesus.

She suddenly flung the wind chime high into the air, and it arced over the grass and came down behind the dogs. Involuntarily, they tracked it with their dead eyes. Though they were surely under the influence of a demon, they were still dogs, and thus they did what dogs do. What dog could resist a thrown object?

“Fetch!” she shouted, but she didn’t wait around to see if they obeyed. She spun on the balls of her feet and made a hobbling dash for the screen door. She thought she heard a bark behind her, followed by a snarling growl.

She grabbed the thin rusted handle and yanked the screen door open. She felt the vibration in the floorboards behind her as one of the dogs leapt onto the porch. Then she was through the doorway and spinning around to slam the heavy oak door. She caught a terrifying glimpse of a dog flying at her, its teeth bared and shedding threads of saliva, its eyes finally alive with unnatural hunger.

The door slammed on the leaping dog, the impact rattling the dark oak in its frame. She turned the key and locked the door for good measure. She didn’t know if demonic dogs could turn a doorknob, but she was taking no chances.

Her heart pounded to beat the band, and she was so emotionally and physically drained that all she wanted to do was crawl into her brass bed and pull the covers over her head, but she knew she didn’t have that particular luxury.

She had a phone call to make. And a bargain to make, as well.

Casting wary glances at the curtained windows as she moved through the house, she went into the bedroom, picked up the volume of Hawthorne, opened it and found the business card she’d been using as a bookmark. Then she sat on the edge of the bed, picked up the phone and dialed Alfred Thorn’s cell phone number.

She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she heard—or felt—the dogs knocking and scratching at the front door. There was no doubt that she heard the mournful howling—which began a moment later—right outside her bedroom window. Not even a punctured eardrum could’ve stopped that ungodly sound.

* * * *

Thorn answered his cell with his usual, “Thorn here.”

“… hear me? Professor? I can’t hear a damn thing. You there, Thorn? Speak up!”

Thorn recognized the voice of Liza Leatherwood, who was apparently so hard of hearing that she’d started talking before he’d even answered his phone.

“Mrs. Leatherwood,” he said, almost shouting to be heard. “I’m here. Can you hear me?”

“Is that little buzzing noise you? Lord, I don’t know,” she said. “If you’re there, I got a deal for you. Come up to my house right now and I’ll tell you what you wanna know. And you better bring a gun, ’cause there’s some wild dogs plaguing me. You hear?”

“Yes,” he shouted into the tiny mouthpiece, “I hear you. But I don’t understand. What—”

“Better hurry, though. The dogs are trying to get at me. Hear? I’ll tell ya where the bodies are buried. Just drop what you’re doing and COME RIGHT NOW!”

There was a hollow click and she was gone.

Thorn was seated in his study with a thick volume of mythology open on his lap and a mug of steaming coffee on an antique end-table at his elbow. He closed his phone, and then shut the book, wondering if the old girl had finally fallen to senility.

Wild dogs?
Well, he mused, it was possible. But why had the woman suddenly changed her mind about telling him what he wanted to know? Had she been speaking metaphorically when she said she would tell him “where the bodies were buried,” or had she meant it literally? Dare he hope for the latter? With the hopeful thrill of discovery rising in him, Thorn bolted from his leather chair and went to the roll-top desk, where he kept a .45 caliber semiautomatic under lock and key.

Five minutes later he was backing his restored 1976 Triumph TR6 out of his driveway, the loaded pistol on the seat next to him. The wide-eyed boy in him was lighting out on a fantastic adventure involving demon dogs and a forbidden burial ground; Thorn the man suffered a nagging disquiet that communicated the need for caution. The mature Thorn remembered keenly the old woman’s warning:
A man who digs cursed earth, uncovers great sorrow.

Arvin Sheets yelped and danced like a madman, stomping and kicking his feet as he tried to dislodge the two fox squirrels that had simultaneously run up his legs, each little rodent now a moving lump under each leg of his trousers. His shambling clog dance might’ve been funny but for the terror etched in his face and the earnest curses he yelled between yelps.

“Drop your pants!” shouted Rourke, keeping a wary eye on the sky. He was ready to drop to the ground and cover his head if the crows launched another attack.

Arvin unbuckled his khaki pants and pushed them down to his ankles. His scrawny legs bore bloody scratches and at least three deeper wounds where the bushy-tailed devils had bitten him. One of the squirrels was hanging by its claws from the crotch of Arvin’s boxer shorts, and the other one was clinging to the pale flesh of the man’s inner thigh as if clinging to the bark of a spindly tree. Arvin slapped the squirrel off his thigh, and then pushed his boxers down, dislodging the second rodent. Both squirrels ran across the ground and scampered up the gray trunk of a tall pine.

“Jesus God!” Arvin shouted after he’d inventoried his bloody wounds and made sure his manhood was still intact. “Do squirrels carry rabies?”

Rourke surveyed the human ruins of his search party. The men were scattered about the landscape as if a giant hand had flung them like unwanted litter. Some of them still hugged the ground, where they’d dropped during the crows’ aerial assault. A few stood with shoulders hunched, dividing their attention between the fog-streaked sky and the ground, aware that the next attack might come from either quarter.

Rourke avoided looking at Dave Deets’s corpse. He wasn’t yet ready to accept that the man was actually dead—and that he must bear some of the responsibility for the death. He caught himself silently cursing Sheriff Gladstone for allowing his wife to knock him out of commission, and then quickly chided himself for thinking so childish a thought. Gladstone, he was sure, would’ve handled things the same way, and the search party would’ve ended up in the same sorry state as it had under Rourke’s leadership. No one could’ve anticipated a concerted attack by the indigenous wildlife, so Rourke was blameless—or so he told himself.

“That thing called the tune,” said Knott, who had come to stand beside Rourke. “You know that, don’t you? It commanded them to attack.”

Rourke nodded. “Sure as hell seems that way. What the hell
is
that thing? I mean, what are we dealing with here? It’s just not …”

“Possible,” Knott finished the thought. “But there’s no other explanation.”

“It doesn’t want us to find the cave,” said Knott.

“What the hell?” said Billy Gatlin as he absently wiped blood from the gash in his cheek, put there by the beak of a furious crow. “What the hell? What the fucking hell?”

“Shut up, Billy,” said Dan Wilcox, a fulltime fireman who stood six-three and had the sculpted physique of a professional bodybuilder. “You’re losing it, man. Don’t be such a pussy.”

At the sound of approaching footsteps in the foliage above them, everyone looked anxiously in the direction from which it came. Dudley Wallace came out of the undergrowth, carrying Pogo in his arms. The dog’s head hung limply from the crook of Dudley’s elbow, bobbing in time to its surviving master’s footsteps. Dudley’s arms were covered with blood; Pogo’s throat had been horribly mutilated. One of his eyes was gone.

“They killed him,” Dudley said as he came closer. “Them goddamn dogs got the best of him. I tried to stop ’em but—” His voice broke in a heart-rending sob. Then he saw the human corpse on the ground and immediately paled. “My God, what happened?”

“Dogs.”

“And crows. And a fucking hawk.”

“And fucking squirrels,” Arvin added as he buckled his pants.

Dudley bent down and laid Pogo on the ground. “Something’s up there,” he said, looking at Rourke. “Did you hear it?”

Rourke nodded.

“Let’s go get the sumbitch,” said Dudley. His cheeks regained some of their former color, but his expression was as grim as a gray tombstone.

Rourke said, “Anybody who’s not up for it can wait here for the ambulance. The rest of us are going after that fucking thing.”

* * * *

Knott fought the urge to call the hospital for a status report on Susan. It had only been an hour since the charge nurse had phoned him with the welcome news that Susan appeared to be back from her excursion into madness, but the improbable attack of the animals and the chilling cry that had signaled the assault left him in a state of mounting anxiety. At its root was the certainty that Susan would not be safe as long as the maker of that uncanny cry remained at large. As badly as he wanted to get in his car and drive to the hospital to be by his wife’s side, to hold her hand and anchor her to reality, he wanted even more to charge up the mountain to find and exterminate the unknown creature; he knew that the key to Susan’s cure was in finding a way to eradicate the cause of her “illness.” Knott intended to do just that.

Holding a dead man’s shotgun in the crook of his right arm, he trudged beside Rourke, leading the ten other men who were willing to proceed up the forested face of the mountain in search of the monster and the women alleged to be in its insidious thrall.

The higher they went, the thicker became the mists of low-hanging clouds. Pearly moisture caressed their faces and fogged their eyes. The trees and undergrowth were thick with gloomy shadows, and Knott imagined faces in them, small-animal faces with empty sockets from which the all-seeing mystery-beast watched the trespassing hunters. He shivered.

To dispel the phantasmal image and the feeling of being watched, he thought of Susan. He imagined her naked on their bed, knees bent and thighs parted to exhibit her bearded sex. She slowly slipped two fingers of her right hand below her belly and parted the red, swollen lips to show how wet and ready she was for him. The tantalizing image made his penis grow fat with lust. He dropped a hand over his crotch to surreptitiously shift his growing erection to one side.

“What’s that smell?” asked Billy Barker. “Smells like …”

“Cum,” said Dan Wilcox.

“Like wet pussy,” offered Harvey Carson. “Goddamn! I’m horny as a billy goat. What the fuck … ?”

Knott smelled it too. And
felt
it. For all their crudity in expressing it, the men were right: the air was rife with the intoxicating musk of sex.

“Must be some weird kind of plant,” Wilcox said.

“No,
it’s
doing it,” said Arvin Sheets. “It’s another defense mechanism. A distraction.”

“Well it’s sure as shit working,” said Harvey. “All I can think about is getting laid. Them women in that cave better look out if we
do
find ’em.”

Knott and Rourke exchanged worried glances. “He could be right,” Knott whispered. “This thing apparently has more than one way to affect behavior. Another weapon in its arsenal. We could be a real danger to those women.”

“Are you serious?” asked Rourke. “How could—”

“Don’t you feel it?” Knott said, no longer able to whisper. “Aren’t you … stimulated?”

Rourke blushed. Then said, “This is crazy. I feel like we’re all caught in the same crazy nightmare.”

“Yes, but it’s not our nightmare. It’s his.
Its
.”

“You honestly believe it can make us resort to rape? I’m sorry, Doc, I don’t buy that.”

“Think of the consequences if you’re wrong.”

“So, what? We should give up, turn around and go home?”

“I want to get this thing as badly as you do, but …”

“But what?”

Knott shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m afraid we might be walking into a trap. That we’re up against something so … bizarre we don’t know how to defeat it.”

“I don’t know about you,” Rourke said, somewhat belligerently, “but I know I’m not a rapist. I just don’t have it in me.”

“One thing I’ve learned in my practice of psychiatry is that none of us knows the extent of the darkness that lives within until it comes out into the light. I believe we’re all potential murderers and rapists. Don’t forget, humans are animals. Civilized, but nonetheless animals. We’re high-functioning primates.”

“Some of us believe we’re made in the image of God.” Rourke eyed the wooded landscape above them as if he expected the Devil to suddenly appear and whisk them to Hell.

“Animals, just the same. Mammals with carnal urges and instincts,” said Knott. He didn’t want to be having this conversation, not now. Not here. Not with that brawny scent of sex in the air and his penis in a state of semi-arousal.