Daemon of the Dark Wood (26 page)

Sharyn had to get away from this madwoman, or else go mad herself. Already she felt herself drawn into the maze of the woman’s ambiguous words, tossed and battered between poles of meaning. She wanted to turn around and march out of the room, but she couldn’t make her legs move, couldn’t resist the urge to touch Susan’s tantalizing skin. She reached out to take the enchanting woman’s offered hand. Static electricity arced and snapped between their fingertips just before they touched.

And then the woman was pulling Sharyn onto the bed, groping her breasts and running a hand roughly between her legs. Sharyn tried to voice a protest but what came out was a moan of passion. She slipped her hands inside the hospital gown to cup Susan’s small breasts and caress their rigid nipples.

Sharyn sank into the mattress, dizzied by desire, hungry to taste the other woman’s body. Sex with another woman was nothing new to her. She’d had a drunken sexual experience with another female when she was a sophomore at the University of Georgia, and thereafter had enjoyed physical relations with both sexes. Nonetheless, the lust she felt now was stronger than any she’d ever known. She kneaded the lithe breasts in her hands as Susan, moaning, straddled her hips.

Susan reached behind her neck, untied the gown and shrugged it off her shoulders. Then she leaned down and fed a breast into Sharyn’s rooting mouth.

“He’s coming,” Susan said, throwing her head back. “Coming …”

Sharyn shifted her attention to Susan’s other breast. She took the long nipple in her mouth and vigorously sucked it, occasionally teasing the areola with the tip of her tongue. She could taste the lingering musk of the otherworldly beast and it drove her to heady distraction, unleashing fresh waves of lust low in her belly. She echoed Susan’s ecstatic cry: “Coming …”

As sharp and clear as the facets of an exquisite diamond, the realization that she wanted the bestial god to come informed her passion and drove her to the edge of screaming release; the orgasm, when it came, would be but a minor prelude to the dark god’s advent and to the perverse revelries that were sure to follow in his phallic wake. Sharyn was no longer afraid; novel desire had burned the old fears and reactionary taboos to ashes. Now there was nothing to stop her from throwing herself into the purifying flames of sexual alchemy.

Susan’s foot found its way to Sharyn’s sex, bare toes teasing her inflamed vulva through the denim of her jeans.

“God,” Sharyn said, moaning the word as a prayerful imprecation.

“Damn,” said Susan with a sinister laugh.

A sharp rap on the one-way-glass window to the nursing station did not stop the lovers’ illicit exploits. Sharyn scarcely heard it, all her senses effectively befogged by the smoky heat of carnal delirium. She unfastened her jeans and pushed them off her hips to give Susan access to her pussy.

Susan took immediate advantage; she trailed kisses down Sharyn’s belly and then buried her mouth between her swollen lips and lapped at the silky wetness.

Sharyn tangled her fingers in Susan’s thick hair, closed her eyes and gave herself over to a darkening maelstrom of lust. Swirling images appeared on the undersides of her eyelids. She saw a ring of glowing stones, and beyond the pulsating circle of light she saw startling snatches of a world made of fire. It was no surprise that the fiery visions throbbed in time to her racing heartbeat. The inner and outer worlds were coming together in her, and at the heart of the consequential third dominion was a roaring furnace of refiner’s fire. Carnal heat fueled the fire and quickened the spirit. Immutable flames threatened to consume the tenuous walls dividing coexisting realms of reality and unreality, and she was poised at the delicate nexus, flesh-petals opened wide to receive what was coming.

A dark shape appeared in the wall of fire, and it came forward, flames dancing on its form without burning it. Surely this was a god, glimpsed now because there were pictures hidden in the scent Susan carried in her pores, vision-giving pheromones Sharyn hungrily absorbed as their bodies intermingled.

The sharp rapping of skin and bone on glass became more insistent but it seemed worlds away and had nothing to do with her. And even if it did, whatever business the old world might have with her paled in the blood-red firelight that haloed the god stalking through sacred flames. More than she’d ever wanted anything, she wanted that holy fire to engulf her. Wanted the blazing god to fill her, to fuck her yielding flesh until her soul ran red with blood.

Overwhelming sensations brought revelation. Sharyn’s detached inner eye—the neutral observer that had always been present as dispassionate witness to the wild swings between the poles of her disease—saw and made sense of what was happening now. Dr. Knott had withheld her medication, and the chemical hurdle that had perverted her response to the call of the goat-man was collapsing now, making her vulnerable to forces older than humanity. The echo of the goat-man’s seminal summons and his enchanting scent hung in the ether, ineradicable and irresistible.

Susan’s mouth found Sharyn’s clitoris and tongued it with dagger-like precision, sending Sharyn closer to the great wall of fire burning at the border of two worlds. And closer to orgasmic cataclysm. The duality of her disease could not survive such devastation—or so she fervently hoped. If she survived, she would live to see the final reconciliation of the two halves of her battered psyche: this was the goat-man’s unspoken promise to her. This was revelation.

Rough hands suddenly wrenched Susan off Sharyn.

A man’s angry voice said: “This is inappropriate! Control yourselves!”

Sharyn opened her eyes and saw Susan Knott floating in the air above her, held aloft by a big black man with giant, muscular arms. But Sharyn was too close to climax to control herself. She shut her eyes and gave herself to the consuming fire.

“Goddammit, Jools, let me in!” Angela pounded the fleshy part of her fist on the bedroom door. Then she kicked it, growling in frustration.

Hunched naked over her laptop, Julie said, “Go away.” Then her fingers resumed their mad dance on the keyboard, tapping letters magically onto the screen. Since returning from the garden of stone angels, she’d sequestered herself in her room, desperate to vent the teeming stuff in her head and her gut. The damn of her writer’s block had finally collapsed, unleashing a crashing cataract of creativity that she captured as quickly as her fingers could fly, transposing the flood of images to the bright page.

She was writing the bones. Writing down the flesh. The blood. The viscera. All that was in her had to come out or it would surely poison her. She was writing to preserve her sanity. Writing for her life.

She’d stripped off her clothes as she wrote; she didn’t pause to analyze her sudden need to be naked. It simply felt right to keep physical encumbrances to a minimum. She was midwife to her own birthing. The sonic seed implanted in her psyche last night had already come to term, and the hour of birth was now at hand.

With
The Ravenwood Horror
aborted and forgotten, she was free to tell this new tale with a
tabla rosa
mind. But the slate didn’t stay blank or pristine for long; the words and images spewed forth in sick gouts of blood and black fluids, letters like bird tracks in the pornographic gore.

“Julie, please,” said Angela at the door, “I’m really worried about you now. Why have you locked me out?”

“You’re sweet,” Julie said, her lover’s distraction truly trying her patience now. “But you have to leave me alone now. I’m
working
.”

“But we were supposed to go into town, remember? For groceries?”

“Goddammit, woman, go away!”

Ange kicked the door again. “You know what? You’re a first-class bitch. You want me to go away? Fine. I’m fucking outta here.”

Julie made a guttural sound in the back of her throat that wasn’t quite a growl. She hammered a fist on the desk, then jumped up and went to the door. She unlocked it and threw it open. “Angela, wait …”

But Angela was no longer there.

“Angela? I’m sorry,” she said to the empty hallway. “I just need a little more time alone. If I don’t get this stuff down now …”

She heard the front door slam. She went to the top of the stairs, and stood there a moment, debating whether she should go after Angela. A few seconds later, she heard the van crank up and drive away, tires screeching.

“Be a bitch, then,” she said.

Then she returned to her writing to resume the scene wherein a slatternly madwoman has sex with a big black dog. She’d never written of such perversity before, certainly not with Michael looking over her shoulder, but that was of no consequence now. She no longer needed a guardian angel.

She’d found something more suited to her purposes. Something dark and primal, mysterious and terribly exciting. A godly
thing
that was changing her from the inside, out.

* * * *

Rourke was the first to see the dark mouth of the cave, partially hidden behind a twisted thicket of vines. He put his hand on Knott’s shoulder and then pointed at the cave’s entrance. The physical contact with his companion heightened the extraordinary sexual tension he’d been trying to ignore. He snatched his hand off Knott’s shoulder, and then brought his index finger to his lips to urge silence and stealth. Knott nodded. They crept as quietly as they could toward the cave.

Rourke drew his pistol, momentarily relieved by the physical rush of unambiguous masculine power. He unclipped the flashlight from his belt, aimed it at his face and clicked it on to makes sure the batteries were good. They were.

Knott brought the shotgun up to his shoulder as he moved toward the cave. He handled the gun with the aplomb of an experienced hunter.

The sun was a hazy ball of fire above the breaking fog, but the woods seemed somehow darker now, filled with sinister shadows. The scent of sex was stronger this close to the cave, and Rourke reckoned that they were walking into a trap set by the devious creature of unknown origin. He sensed that his law-enforcement experience and tactics would be of little use here. He didn’t want to go into that granite maw of darkness, didn’t want to step into its throat; the horrors within would surely swallow him.

Then he recognized an underlying smell: the coppery odor of fresh blood, mixed with the suffocating smell of raw flesh. He glanced to his right, looked down, and saw blood spatters and scattered pools of blood. Something—or someone—had been recently slaughtered on this ground, but there was no evidence of animal skin or body parts.

He silently prayed that this was only the blood of a large woodland creature.

He froze a few feet from the entrance. Knott glanced his way, eyebrows raised. Rourke steeled himself as best he could, then nodded to Knott and together they went into the cave.

The hairs on his arms stood at attention as he moved into the electromagnetically-charged air. He raised the flashlight in his left hand and braced his pistol-holding right hand on his left wrist to synchronize the aim of gun and flashlight.

“Oh Christ,” said Knott, who was the first to see the abomination on the floor of the cave.

Rourke saw it then and put the beam of light on the two rutting figures. The woman was oblivious to the presence of her disgusted spectators. On her hands and knees, she stared blankly at the cave wall in front of her as a large brown dog went about his business of humping her from behind. The mongrel’s ears were laid back, his teeth bared in a wicked canine grin as he fucked the dazed woman.

“No!” shouted Knott as he stepped toward the dog and raised the shotgun as if to hammer the mutt’s head with it.

“Wait,” Rourke said. “I’ll do it so there’s no chance he can bite her.” He cautiously walked up to the dog and stuck his gun’s muzzle an inch from the side of the dog’s head. The mongrel cut his yellow eyes at Rourke but he was too deep into the throes of bestial lust to pull out of the woman and escape with his life. The dog whined and humped faster, its tail flagged over its furry flanks as if to protect its genitals.

Rourke cocked the hammer, angled his aim so that there was no chance of hitting the woman with the shot, and squeezed the trigger.

The dog’s head flopped to one side and hung limp even as his flanks made two, three final thrusts into the woman, then the mutt convulsed and fell still, draped as limp as an animal skin over human haunches.

“God,” said Knott, his face starkly pale in the dim light.

Rourke shone his beam about the cave to confirm that there were no other occupants. “Where are the others?” he asked.

“
He
took them,” said Knott. “And the son of a bitch left this poor woman just to taunt us. Do you know her?”

“Sarah Melton,” Rourke said. “A schoolteacher.”

Rourke holstered his gun and then bent down and peeled the dead dog off Sarah Melton’s fleshy rump. She looked back at him and growled, her eyes ablaze with rage. He tossed the reeking dog to the ground and backed away from the furious woman.

Knott intervened, kneeling beside her but taking care to stay out of range of her teeth. He said, “Sarah, it’s all right. We’re here to help you. You’re safe now. I’m Dr. Knott and this is Deputy Rourke. We—”

She made a mewling noise and shifted her weight so that she was offering her “hindquarters” to the doctor. Rourke realized he should’ve brought a blanket to cover her with, but in her present state of mind keeping her covered wouldn’t have been easy anyway.

“No, Sarah,” Knott said, exercising the patience of a man accustomed to dealing with deeply disturbed individuals. “This is not appropriate behavior. I want you to stand up now. Take my hand, Sarah. Take my hand and stand on your own two feet.”

Knott straightened up and extended his hand.

Sarah cut angry eyes at him and snarled, baring her slight overbite.

“I don’t think”—Rourke started, but didn’t finish his thought because the woman suddenly lunged at Knott’s hand, snapping her teeth and just missing his fingers when he snatched his hand away.

Undaunted, Knott spoke again in the calm but firm voice of the therapist: “Sarah, I won’t allow you to bite anybody. You need to get control of yourself right now. You’re a human being. Act like one. You are not a beast of the field. What would your students think if they could see you acting like a wild animal? Now stand up and walk out of here with me.”