Daemon of the Dark Wood (35 page)

Thorn saw the ax blade as a gunmetal blur just before it chopped into his right shoulder, the shocking force of the blow knocking the chainsaw out of his hands and him to the ground. The chainsaw’s motor sputtered and died. Gritting his teeth at the excruciating pain, he looked up at the ax-wielding young woman and saw her cock the ax over her shoulder for another blow.

His last thought before the ax fell:
This is it, I’m dead
.

* * * *

When the tree hit the earth with a ground-shaking thud, Jude felt the volcanic fury of her master mounting toward eruption. Though he was well behind her, concealed by woods, she could feel how incensed he was that she and her sister-brides had failed him, and his fury fed her own frenzy. Her first ax-blow had knocked the chainsaw man down and bloodied his shoulder. Now she would have off his head with a vengeful strike.

She cocked the ax over her shoulder and swung it with all her might.

But something went very wrong. Something hit her chest with the force of a mule’s kick, taking her breath away and knocking her backward as the ax flew from her hands. She staggered to stay on her feet. She looked down and saw the hole in her chest, just above her left tit.

I’m shot
, she thought as the rainy world dimmed and her ears began to ring. She tried to catch her breath but couldn’t. Her knees buckled. Her bestial rage drained away as if farting and spewing from the bullet-hole in her chest.

Then she was on the ground, tasting the earth. The rain was cool and almost soothing.

Cleansing.

This wasn’t happening to her.

This was happening to a stranger.

This isn’t me.

I’m Judy Lynn Bowen.

Judy Lynn.

Judy
…

* * * *

Rourke recognized Judy Lynn Bowen just before he squeezed the trigger. Had he hesitated in that flash of recognition? Probably. But it didn’t matter. That dangerous thing he’d glimpsed in her eyes when he spoke with her in the hospital had surfaced to take control of her. He’d
had
to shoot her to save Thorn’s life. Deadly force had been necessary. A clean shoot, any way you looked at it.

Now that Thorn was down, the remaining women turned their murderous attention on Rourke. They advanced in a strung-out line, brandishing their crude weapons.

“Stop!” Rourke shouted. “I
will
shoot you.”

They didn’t heed his warning. They stalked forward.

Behind the women something big and shadowy emerged from the tree line. Rourke knew at once what it was.

The rain-thing.

But this time it was more than an invisible-man outline in the downpour. Now it was solid and very much in this world.

And it was coming at him in a weird gallop that chilled Rourke’s blood and made him want to turn and run.

* * * *

Liza Leatherwood saw the dreaded beast come out of the trees, and her bladder let go with a dribble of pee. She’d watched in horror as the helling women tried their damnedest to stop the felling of the spirit-haunted tree. When the tree finally fell, relief washed over her, and she thought she could hear the spirits’ angry voices above the low rumble of the stump grinder’s motor. But the stump remained, the tree still attached to it by a tough skin of bark.

And now the beast of many a nightmare was
here
. Just as foretold. Here to fight for a foothold in this world. To have his way with frail humanity.

The deputy had his hands full with the mad hellers. That coroner feller had jumped into his van and driven away, the coward. It was up to her to finish the job.

Help me, Wilbur
, she pleaded as she moved toward the chainsaw. She moved more sprightly than she’d moved in years. The rain fogged her bifocals and made everything look as if it were inside a melting cube of ice, but she could see the chainsaw well enough. “Give me strength, Lord,” she said as she bent down and picked it up. It was heavier than it looked and the handle was slippery due to the rain, but she was determined to do what had to be done. She yanked the starter cord. The saw sputtered but didn’t start.

The deputy fired two, three more times, but Liza kept her attention on her task. She yanked the cord again. This time the motor started and the vibration shook her arthritic bones something fierce. She pulled the trigger and the belt of saw-teeth cycled round the metal blade.

Then she bent low, ignoring the pain in her lower back, and guided the blade into the V-shaped swath of tree bark. Sawdust flew into the rain.

Please, Lord, help me do this
.

Then the saw cut through and the tree rolled free of the stump.

She dropped the chainsaw in the mud. She looked up to see the half-man/half-beast knock the deputy to the ground with a powerful sweep of its muscular arm.

The beast glared at her with its goatish face. It gave an angry shriek and danced toward her on hellish hooves.

Sharyn followed Susan Knott down the semi-dark corridor toward the nursing station. The thunderstorm had knocked the power out and the emergency generator had kicked on to power a meager allotment of lights. A staff member was passing out supper trays from the food cart but took no notice of the two women striding with dark purpose toward their freedom. Susan was still in her bloody hospital gown, held together by three ties on the back and flapping open to reveal that she wore no panties. Sharyn admired her shapely ass and wondered if the woman worked out to maintain her pleasing physique. This was just one of many thoughts racing through her head with dizzying speed.

A middle-aged male patient standing in his doorway said, “Hey, nice bum, baby.”

Sharyn shot him a warning look. She half expected Susan to round on the cretin to scratch his eyes out or rip his tongue from his offensive mouth, but Susan didn’t slow down.

“Yours ain’t bad either, honey,” the cretin said in a consoling tone to Sharyn.

Sharyn gave him the finger and kept walking. She felt strong. There
was
power in sisterhood, especially when the sisters were in service to a greater power. A daemon. An undying demigod. How amazing that the myths of Pan and Dionysus were based on an actual entity!
Imagine the lecture I could give now to those quacking mush-headed students. “We have a very special guest today, students. A living legend, come to fuck you stupid in an orgy of bloody sex. One way or another you’re all going to get fucked.”

Susan turned into the nursing station, grabbed the charge nurse by the throat and said, “Give me your keys, bitch. Give me any shit and I’ll snap your neck.”

Sharyn stepped into the chart-lined cubbyhole, grabbed a ball-point pen off the desk and brandished it like a dagger. “Do it,” she said, reinforcing Susan’s demand. “We’re not playing, I promise you.”

The nurse nodded her head the best she could and then reached into a pocket and pulled out a set of keys. Susan snatched them away and shoved the nurse to the floor.

A blond female Mental Health Tech sitting at the desk grabbed the phone and her voice boomed over the intercom: “Doctor Strong! Doctor Strong to the Adult Unit!”

Sharyn knew there was no Dr. Strong on staff. “Doctor Strong” was the hospital’s code for a psychiatric emergency, usually signaling that a patient was acting out and was in need of being forcibly restrained. All available staff were supposed to rush to the designated location and help subdue the out-of-control patient or patients.

Susan grabbed the phone out of the blonde’s hand and began to pummel her with it, cracking it against the young woman’s head and smashing her nose. Sharyn menaced the floored charge nurse with the ball-point and said, “Stay down, goddammit.”

Then the world dropped out from under her. Sharyn had to lean against the desk to keep from falling. The sensation of falling overwhelmed her. She was falling out of phase, falling out of step, falling, soon to crash to the earth like a toppling tree.
What’s happening to me?

Susan continued to batter the blonde with the bloodied phone. Sharyn wanted to tell her to stop before she killed the girl but her tongue was glued to the roof of her mouth, stuck there by bitter bile as viscous as the fluids of extreme sexual excitation. And still she felt the falling. Falling into a dark void, their escape plans falling to ruin. Falling too was her fated calling, her response to the daemon’s irresistible summons. Now there would be only a calling to accounts. Now there would be hell to pay. The
helling
wasn’t supposed to be this way, was it? Her mind raced to catch up to events gone wrong, far-away events whose effects were undiminished by distance.

And now Sharyn did fall. She sank to the floor and dropped her ballpoint weapon. Susan stood over her, shouted at her: “Get up!”

Sharyn gave her a blank stare. Didn’t Susan feel it? Didn’t she know everything was going to hell, whirling down into the underworld, to Hades itself? It was then that Sharyn recognized the falling sensation for what it was.

When a god falls, it makes deep ripples in the world
.

Sharyn felt those ripples acutely with her mania-sharpened senses, but Susan seemed oblivious to them, probably because she was in a bloodfrenzy—because she was normally a
normal
, not a nutjob.

“Get up, they’re coming!” Susan said as she kicked Sharyn’s thigh with the ball of her bare foot.

Sharyn stammered: “Yu-you killed your hu-husband …” As she said this, she knew she couldn’t absolve herself for her part in Dr. Knott’s death, but she hadn’t killed the man, she’d only imbibed his blood, tasted his sacrificial flesh.

Then Susan Knott did an astounding thing. She pointed a finger at Sharyn and said, “You’re crazy. I didn’t kill him. You did!”

It flashed through Sharyn’s mind that perhaps Susan
did
feel the falling and that now she perhaps realized that no god was going to save her from the consequences of her murderous deed. And she was setting Sharyn up for a fall of her own.

Sharyn’s outrage drove her to positive action. Her realization that she wasn’t the one falling had recalled and restored her equilibrium.

She got to her feet and said, “You’re not going anywhere, you crazy cunt.”

* * * *

Thorn’s relief that he hadn’t been killed by the girl with the ax was short-lived. His wounded shoulder knew no relief from the deep pain, but he could deal with that well enough, just as he now could accept the fact that he might have to shoot some of these crazed women if he wanted to survive. It was no longer an issue for moral debate. The thing that deeply troubled him now—confounded him, in fact—was the astounding thing that had come loping out of the woods and into Thorn’s unsettled reality.

Pan. The goat-man. The mythical god of the woodlands was
there
before Thorn’s eyes! Sharyn had been right about that too.

Thorn rolled onto his back and fumbled at the pistol in his belt. His hand was shaking so badly that he couldn’t free the gun from its denim snag. Though the heavy rain blurred his vision, he kept his eyes on the goat-man as it advanced on Deputy Rourke. He saw Rourke shoot down another woman and then turn his pistol on the terrifying man-beast of antiquity. The bullets seemed to have little or no effect on the monster. The creature was wounded and bleeding—hit twice in its massive chest—but did not slow down.

It flung out an arm and knocked Rourke down.

“Per-fess-or!” cried Mrs. Leatherwood. “The stump!”

Thorn gazed dumbly at the tree stump.

“Grind it down!” the old lady yelled. “Hurry for God’s sake!”

Thorn got to his feet and finally freed his .45 from his belt as the beast stalked closer to Mrs. Leatherwood. A skinny woman with long teats came at him with a baseball bat. He raised the gun and shot out her right kneecap and she went down screaming.

Thorn fired three shots into the beast’s back, diverting its attention from the old woman. It turned and snarled at Thorn with its hideously wide mouth. He fired another shot into its muscle-rippled belly. The thing threw its head back and howled with such volume that Thorn feared his eardrums would burst.

And then it charged him.

Rourke was up now, firing at the goat-man. With two guns shooting slugs point-blank into the beast’s belly and chest, finally the monster slowed and staggered a little.

A peregrine falcon swooped down out of the rain and would’ve sunk its talons into Thorn’s face if he hadn’t thrown up a forearm in time to block the attack. But now the bird was attached to his forearm and he tried to fling it off. On his third attempt, he did get free of the falcon but the pistol slipped from his grip and landed several feet away.

“Per-fess-or!” Mrs. Leatherwood shouted with a scolding inflection.

“Right,” Thorn said, more to himself than to her. He ran to the rumbling stump grinder, took a moment to familiarize himself with the controls, and then he put the thing in gear and guided it right up to the stump of the felled tree. The grinder’s spinning teeth began to chew up the stump, spitting out shreds of mulch.

The falcon attacked again, this time striking the back of Thorn’s neck and shoulder and digging in its talons. He shrugged his shoulders and did his best to bear up under the painful assault. He couldn’t have said when he’d begun to believe the old lady’s assertion that the beast could be driven away by the vengeful spirits trapped in the ghost tree, but the fact was, he did believe it now. He believed it with all his heart. And it was going to take more than a fucking falcon to stop him from grinding the tree stump to smithereens.

When the goat-man saw what Thorn was about, the beast came at him in a desperate, jerky lurch.

* * * *

Rourke had reloaded and was leveling his pistol at the rain-thing when the woman with the blown-out kneecap struck his wrist with a baseball bat and knocked the gun out of his hand. She swung again, this time without benefit of a windup, and he managed to thwart the blow by throwing up both arms. He took the bat away from her and used it to sweep her legs out from under her.