Demon Child (14 page)

    “It's a lair of some sort,” Jenny said.

    “Why are the hounds holding back?”

    Jenny pointed at Gabe Atchison who had dismounted to talk to his dogs. “He's holding them back, preparing them, I guess.”

    Atchison ruffled the heads of the dogs, scratched their ears. It was an indication of the enormous control he had over them. They desired nothing more than to invade that cave that stank of their enemy, but they fought down their instincts and listened to their human master. Their eyes rolled in a comic manner. Their tongues lolled, and they pawed the earth desperately. But until Gabe Atchison told them to go inside and flush the beast out, they would remain here.

    Atchison hunkered down.

    The two state troopers had their rifles ready. Everyone slowly fanned out in a semi-circle around the cave mouth. Only Jenny and Hobarth hung back, weaponless.

    “It's impossible to know whether or not it's rabid,” Trooper Halliwell told them. “But we are going to proceed as if we were certain that it is.”

    Men nodded.

    The gray clouds crowded more tightly into the sky than before, and the land seemed to take on a cape of shadow.

    “Okay,” Halliwell said to Richard.

    “Gabe,” Richard said, passing on the permission.

    Gabe snapped some brutal, high-pitched command to his dogs and returned, quickly, to his saddle.

    The hounds dashed forward, disappeared into the confines of that dank, stone tunnel.

    “They don't have any fear at all,” Jenny said admiringly.

    “Oh, yes they do!” Hobarth said. “But with a dog, he never thinks that fear means he should run. Fear makes him attack. If he gets hurt badly, suddenly, then he runs. Dogs are natural optimists. They never seem to see that something bad might happen to them.”

    She wished she had some of that quality herself, she decided. Of course, the dogs only leaped into trouble because of their optimism. They never learned to avoid trouble altogether by being wary.

    Any moment now, they would come roiling out, pursued by or pursuing the wolf.

    She gripped the reins tighter.

    The ungodly racket inside the cave had all of them on edge. The hounds were no longer mewling in excitement, but were growling with deep, fierce hatred. The scent of their adversary was so strong now that it probably burned their nostrils.

    Five minutes after the pack had entered the cave, the sound of fury dropped noticeably, to less than half of what it had been. A minute after that, the first of the dogs came outside, snuffling at the ground, looking so unconcerned about the taunt, expectant men on horseback that all of them felt a little embarrassed.

    The other dogs came out, one by one.

    “What does it mean?” one of the neighbor men asked.

    “The wolf's gone,” Halliwell said. “A smart bugger if there ever was one. Scooted out of here when it heard us-instead of cooping up and trying to hold us off.”

    The men began reslinging rifles in cases. They looked like a group of children just arrived at the movie theater on a Saturday afternoon to see a sign informing them there would be no matinee this week.

    The dogs were reset after they picked up the trail on the other side of the clearing, and the party set out once more.

    “Well, maybe it'll be fun after all,” Walter said.

    Jenny was not sure of that. She guessed she had a different concept of “fun” than men had. But she was determined to stick with it, simply because Walt was staying on and she didn't want to cop out and look like a quitter in front of him.

    But later, when they halted the hunt long enough to take lunch on the lawn behind the Brucker mansion, she opted out of the afternoon's trek. She said she had some things planned, some necessary chores, and that she had hoped they would catch the wolf in the morning and she could finish her business in the afternoon. But since they had thus far failed, she would have to forgo the actual moment of triumph.

    Walter understood, which was a relief.

    Richard seemed delighted that she was staying home and his delight was the one thing that almost forced her to change her mind and continue the hunt.

    Later, when the party returned to the main house at seven in the evening, she was grateful that she had not given in to that impulse, for they had found nothing, absolutely nothing, in all those hours.

    Despite their lack of success, most of the men were in a very jolly mood, as if they felt the fact of the hunt was far more important than the outcome of it. They chatted, complained good-naturedly of their riding bruises and sores. And they consumed a frightening amount of Anna's cooking, again, on the tables that had been set up on the lawn. Much speculation concerned the elusive quarry, but none of them seemed impressed by the fact that a killer wolf, possibly rabid, was loose so near their own homes.

    The two police officers behaved somewhat differently, more like men who have done a hard day's work without seeing any reward for their labors. They ate quickly, drank sparingly, and left the estate with their horses in a government van, long before the others had even finished eating.

    Walter was full of stories concerned with the afternoon's hunt, all of them touched with his special wit and with his perfect sense of comic exaggeration. He kept both Jenny and Cora laughing as he described the antics of the party of hunters. It was far better, Jenny thought, listening to Walt's account of the day than to really have gone along and experienced it.

    As usual, Richard spoiled the mood of good humor that had come to prevail. He stepped up beside Hobarth and interrupted one of the doctor's tales. “I fail to find much to laugh at,” he said.

    They turned and looked at him, saw a weary man with a tight jaw, anger barely controlled. He seemed to have aged ten years in this past week, with dark circles beneath his eyes, his cheeks sunken and his color a rather unhealthy yellow-white.

    “We have to laugh at the world,” Walt observed, cradling his pipe in the palm of his right hand. “If we don't laugh, it will break all of us.”

    “There's still a wolf loose,” Richard said.

    “Perhaps,” Hobarth said. “Or, perhaps, all the mucking around with dogs and horses drove it back where it came from, further up into the mountains.”

    “Wishful thinking,” Richard snapped.

    “What would you have us do,” Walt asked. “We are but two women and a psychiatrist, after all. Shall we go out and challenge the beast to hand-to-hand combat?”

    Richard glared at the older man, then stalked into the house. They watched the door close behind him. And as they were ready to look away, he opened the door and stepped onto the veranda.

    “Traps,” Richard said. “I'll use a thousand traps, if I have to, before I'll give up on it.”

    With that, he went back into the house and slammed the door so hard that the windows adjacent to it rattled in their frames.

    By now, the hunters had been an hour and a half at their meal. The sun was beginning to pull down the traces of light that it had left behind when it had first set earlier. Darkness stained the eastern horizon like spilled ink on a tablecloth. A few of the men were already preparing to leave, making the rounds with goodbyes.

    At this moment, with the scene so pastoral and Richard's recent unpleasantness beginning to fade from their minds, everything changed in the instant. They were all, quite suddenly, transfixed, rooted to the earth by one, impossible, cold and maddening sound that swept down on them like the first icy wind of winter.

    It was the howl of an angry wolf…

    

    That same Tuesday night, Freya slipped quietly into another of her comas. She had entered it, in fact, only minutes before the lone wolf had cried in the deeps of the forest and startled everyone on the lawn. On Wednesday afternoon, according to Walter, Freya again recounted her experiences as a werewolf. Walt made no attempt to use the situation for the sake of humor. This most recent gruesome account had dealt with the murder of Lee Symington rather than with the demise of Hollycross.

    Freya remembered-or pretended that she did-attacking the veterinarian, going for his throat, tasting him…

    That evening, Cora returned from a trip to town in her old Cadillac. She brought back to the house all the books on the occult which were carried by the local bookstore and which she did not already own. Immediately after supper, she secluded herself in her room. Light seeped under the door, sent grasping fingers across the dimly lighted upstairs hallway. It burned until the early hours of the morning as she perused the books.

    Thursday morning, she was hollow-eyed, gaunt. She moved with a strange, manic hurriedness. Her hands trembled; her eyes seemed never to come to rest on any single object for long.

    She harangued them with anecdote after anecdote that she had gleaned from the new books. She told them about Jennie Soriee, the French girl who had been mauled by an invisible beast, before witnesses, time and again, taking bloody wounds without ever seeing her attacker. She told them about Robert Lundquist, the British civil servant of the early 1950s who had been caught robbing graves to taste the flesh of the newly buried. These were stories, Jenny felt, best left unpublished-and certainly best left unspoken at the breakfast table!

    It was terrible to watch Cora growing more and more agitated through the day. It was inevitable, Jenny supposed, that the older woman's nerves would get the best of her in such a hideous atmosphere as this. But, though she loved Cora, she felt a bit ashamed for the woman. It was obvious that not much of Grandmother Leona Brighton's courage had rubbed off on this daughter.

    When Cora collapsed of nervous exhaustion immediately after dinner that evening, Jenny was not surprised. Dr. Malmont was sent for, arrived, and sedated the woman. He ordered Anna to take the occult volumes from Cora's room and dispose of them before morning.

    “I don't mind what anyone reads or believes,” he said in way of explanation. “But when your beliefs begin to interfere with your good health, it's tune to draw the line.”

    He and Walter conferred in the library for some fifteen minutes. When Malmont had gone, Walter told her what they had discussed.

    “I'm going to persuade Cora to talk with me tomorrow. Before the session with Freya.”

    “You're going to treat her?” Jenny asked. “She's going to argue about that. She won't believe she needs a psychiatrist. I'm not sure she does, in fact.”

    “Everyone needs a psychiatrist,” Hobarth said.

    “Everyone?”

    “Yes.”

    “Even you?”

    Walter laughed, took her hand and squeezed it affectionately. “Yes, in fact, even me. None of us escape societal pressures as we grow up. And it's some of those pressures which lead to various neuroses.”

    He was explaining again, rationalizing again. She felt safe and oddly complete, just listening to him.

    “But when someone goes to a psychiatrist, it doesn't mean that they are insane or bordering on insanity, you know. Generally speaking, it means they are saner than most-because they have seen they need help and are willing to go obtain it.”

    “I guess so,” she said.

    “But I'm not actually going to analyze Cora,” Walter said. “That would take a great deal of time, and it should really only be embarked upon later, when she is feeling less pressed to the wall.”

    “Then I don't understand what you can do for her.”

    “Hypnosis,” Walt said, making big eyes and waving fingers before her eyes. “I can delve at least a little into her confusion and use some post-hypnotic suggestions to help her cope with things.” He let go her hand and sat back in his chair. “If I suggest to her that there are easily explained natural causes for all this and that nothing supernaturally evil will happen to her, she can get over some of this fear.”

    Could you help me get over mine? Jenny wondered. And are you really sure that all of this business with the wolf is truly not supernatural? If it were not supernatural, wouldn't your hypnosis work better on Freya than it has?

    But she did not vocalize any of her doubts. She did not want him to be unsure, pessimistic. She wanted him to maintain his cool, logical approach to life. If he had to ignore some of the questions which had arisen from these strange events, if that was the only way he could maintain his iron grip on the world, then she preferred to let him ignore them.

    He must never grow indecisive.

    He was a post.

    He was a rock.

    He was all the things that she, so often, was not, and he was at least one point in existence where the unknown and the unexpected could exert no influence.

    He was her haven.

    The next day, Friday, Cora had her first session with Hobarth, and Freya's treatment continued. Cora did not seem much better after her hour with the doctor, but Walter assured Jenny it would take a day or two.

    Richard was seldom in evidence around the house, rushing here and there on errands of his own concern. When he was about, he sulked and watched Jenny silently. He knew better than to try to corner her again. She had made it quite clear that she wanted no part of him. There had been a nasty scene Wednesday morning which had established a brick wall between them.

    Saturday, both Freya and Cora were treated again. And Sunday. But after Freya's turn on the couch in the library, Dr. Hobarth made it plain that he had reached some conclusions which he would like to discuss at supper that evening.

    By the time dessert had been taken and second cups of coffee were begun, there was an air of expectancy about the table.