Songs_of_the_Satyrs (6 page)

Had it been his imagination or was the ground fog seeping
out of
the wood bordering the farm?

Then the thing in the dream had bubbled to the surface of his mind. At the remembrance of the shadowy, horned figure, Ryan had slammed the window shut and pulled the drapes.

The spooks of the night had vanished with the rising, yellow, midsummer sun. And Ryan had shuffled out to the dew-covered Audi in his bathrobe to grab his laptop. Now he connected a cable between the laptop and the obstinate machine on the graffiti-covered desk and powered up.

He shook his head as the lines of code scrolled up the screen. How the hell did they get so corrupted? It was like somebody had thrown a wrench in there. He let the two machines fight it out and turned to the safe at the side of the desk. He opened the folder Rebecca Kimball had given him yesterday after he had leaned over the hood of her Volvo and scribbled his signature with her silver pen. He found the combination on the back of her business card and spun the dial, left-right-left.

Nothing.

Okay, fine.
Right-left-right.

Still, the steel lever refused to budge.

Ryan cursed under his breath and rattled the handle.

“You ain’t gonna open it like that.”

Ryan swiveled in the office chair. Sophie leaned against the door jamb in the same purple-stained cotton shift she’d worn the day before. Her bare toes cracked as she curled and stretched her feet like a ballerina warming up. Ryan slid back to the desk and checked the scrolling numbers on the computer.

“You know how to get it open?”

Her full brown lips bent into a smile. “Don’t matter. Becca changed the combination after the funeral.”

Sophie pounced out of a
pas de chat
and landed next to Ryan, her thigh sending the chair into a spin. He pulled himself back to the desk as Sophie leaned over to peer at the business card lying on the laptop keyboard.

“Yep. That’s Mom’s old combo.”

Ryan cursed again, slamming his fist down on the desk. The laptop jumped. He needed to get his broker moving on the Vale Corp stock. Craig would bail soon, and Fast Cat Electronics would be history. How could these people not have a phone? He’d have to drive into Greenfield later, but first he needed to crack the safe.

He started as a warm brown hand covered his. Sparkling hazel eyes met his own when he looked up.

“Temper, temper, Mr. Stockbridge. You got some Montfort in you, after all.”

They both jumped at the knock on the open door.

“Am I interrupting?”

Tom adjusted his baseball cap, stepping aside as Sophie stormed out of the office. Ryan shook his head, slid the office chair back. Tom lifted the bamboo fly rod he was holding and tapped Ryan’s shoulder.

“Brookies bite in the mornin’.”

***

“The trail ends at the falls. No need to go farther than that. You get into the wood on the other side of the brook—things get weird.”

Tom’s words echoed in Ryan’s head as he stared into the dark pool of swirling water. The falls rumbled deafeningly, trembling the ground underfoot.

His oxfords skidded on a wet rock, and he wrapped his desperate fingers around an overhanging branch. He hung there a moment, above the churning water, then caught hold of a flatter, drier rock.

I’m not exactly dressed for this. If I fall in, no one will ever hear me.

He wiped the mist off his face, pulling at his damp dress shirt. He’d left his tie and jacket at the farmhouse and had rolled his white sleeves up past the elbows. The midsummer sun blazed overhead, racing toward the zenith, but the shade in the wood on the opposite bank only seemed to grow darker.

Ryan unhooked the Royal Coachman from the cork handle. The reel spun and clicked as he stripped some line and snapped the rod back. The rod loaded nicely, and the coiled line at his feet shot through the guides on the forward cast. He shook the tip, paying out some slack, and let the fly drift.

The thunder of the falls cocooned him in silence, but he caught the changing shadows in the trees, nonetheless. His eyes shot away from the white wings of the Coachman. He peered into the darkness under the leafy branches, his hand tightening on the rod’s cork grip.

There it was again.

A familiar unease crept into Ryan; its chill seeped into his limbs. There, on the far bank, was the thing from his dream. The horned shadow tilted its head, then turned and disappeared among the thick, gnarled trunks.

A cold compulsion shook Ryan out of his stupor.

I need to get the hell out of here.

He tossed the fly rod onto the bank and scrambled away from the seething pool. He looked up the trail, winding its way back to Montfort Farm, but his feet turned to lead.

No, not that way.

He spotted a thick plank thrown across the brook, its far end buried in the mossy bank.

That way.

He planted an oxford on the gray, weathered board and hesitated.

Into
the wood?

Ryan shot a look over his shoulder.

I need to go. Now.

He bounded across the board and sprang onto the far bank, scraping against the rough trunks as his hurried steps became frantic strides. His footsteps fell silent on the soft carpet of moss and dead leaves, and the roar of the waterfall dwindled into the distance. The unyielding paper bark of an ancient white birch brought his flight to an abrupt halt.

He rubbed the swelling knot on his forehead and spun around.

I’m lost.

“You can see him.”

Ryan tensed at the cold splash of adrenalin and backed into the trees. He looked up at the limb of a giant oak and followed the bare foot to the dangling brown leg and up to the stained cotton shift. A pair of hazel eyes burned among the leaves. Sophie sat on the branch and stretched, arching her back like a cat.

He raised an eyebrow. “See who?”

The full brown lips twisted into a knowing smile. “Herne.”

Sophie raised her fingers to her temples and wiggled them. Ryan’s gaze flickered among the shadows, but Sophie shook her tangled locks.

“He’s gone now. He’s got what he wanted.”

“What’s that?”

Ryan took a step back as Sophie dropped from the overhanging branch like a panther.

“You’re here, of course.”

They both turned as a gunshot cracked, its report echoing back off the mountain. Sophie stepped closer to Ryan and slipped a trembling arm around him, her thumb hooked into his belt loop. She nodded at the question in his eyes.

“Falls are back that way.”

Ryan leaned down to hear the words fall from her lips.

“Can’t shoot him no more. Herne’s done all the dyin’ he’s gonna do.”

“What is it?”

Sophie glanced up at Ryan.

“Things just got weird.”

***

“Wait.”

Sophie slapped the back of her hand on Ryan’s chest, and he paused. She’d led him back across Hunger Hollow Brook and through the trees, but she had shunned the trail. Ryan followed her outstretched finger to the spot where the trail entered the wood.

Tom’s Red Sox cap flashed blue and red in the undergrowth as he tromped out of the trailhead. Ryan’s eyes narrowed as he spotted the fly rod in Tom’s left hand, then they widened at the shotgun he carried in his right.

What the—

Sophie grabbed his arm and tugged. He turned, his mind racing. The brown hand gripped his bicep like a vise.

“You can’t go out there,” she said.

“What am I supposed to do, stay in the woods all day?”

He winced as she dug her fingers into his arm.

“Who do you think that shotgun was for? Why do you think he went to the falls?”

Ryan looked into the hazel eyes and sighed. For a moment, in the wood, he had thought maybe Rebecca had exaggerated. But no. The paranoid look in her eyes, the crazy talk of Herne—

Except you saw it, too.

“Don’t you go out there, Ryan Stockbridge. I’m tellin’ you, Tom wouldn’t need a gun this time of year for ’else.”

Ryan pulled her hand off his arm.

“Why would Tom be after me?”

Sophie looked past Ryan and blew a deep breath. “He’s gone. Out into the field. I hear the tractor startin’. Must be why Becca changed the combination, why she took Olivia’s books out of her room and put ’em in the safe. They don’t want you to know.”

Ryan looked back toward the barn. The sputtering of the tractor had faded over the top of a knoll.

“Know what?”

“’Bout Herne, of course.”

***

Ryan chirped the lock on his Audi and popped the trunk. As he pulled out the tire iron, his ears strained to hear the puttering of the tractor. Satisfied that Tom was still busy, he grabbed Sophie’s hand and dragged her into the house.

The safe was probably decent enough for Greenfield, but Ryan figured it’d been ordered out of an office supply catalog. He made quick work of the hinges and the steel door thudded on the floor. Sophie reached in and grabbed a leather bound journal.

“Your grandmother’s. Before that Stockbridge fella took her away to Hartford.”

As she handed Ryan the journal, a sepia-toned photo fell out of the yellowed pages, landing facedown. Ryan swiped the photo off the floor and flipped it over.

“This can’t be real.”

***

He stared at the large brown eyes of the shirtless boy gazing at him out of the photograph. He was drawn to the twin prongs jutting up from the thick patch of black hair on the boy’s head, just above his temples. The photograph had been taken from the waist up. Ryan was beginning to think he knew why. The back porch of the old Victorian filled the background, and there was the giant maple, only a sapling.

Sophie tapped the portrait. “Bernard. Your gramma Catherine’s father and my great-great-grandfather. Herne’s son.”

Ryan squinted at the faded handwriting on the back of the photo.

“Bernard. Bernard Montfort.”

He looked down at the old desk. His finger traced the BM inside the heart. Sophie’s finger was on the ES.

“Emilia Stoddard. Catherine’s mother.”

Ryan looked up with understanding in his eyes. “Stoddard? Like Tom Stoddard?”

Sophie nodded, and Ryan’s gaze drifted to the window looking out on the barn.

“Oh, shit.”

Sophie grabbed his hand. “Wait till you see what I got upstairs.”

He followed Sophie to her bedroom at the opposite end of the hall from his. He raised an eyebrow at the wooden barrels in the corner, connected to each other by plastic tubing. A crate of empty green wine bottles sat nearby. The fireplace was dominated by an oversize replica of Bouguereau’s
Nymphs and a Satyr,
the unwilling beast being dragged toward a woodland stream by a tangle of naked limbs.

Sophie grabbed the half-empty wine bottle on her bureau, popped the cork, and took a long swig. She smiled knowingly at Ryan and handed him the bottle.

“Ain’t no harm, not for us anyways.”

He lifted the bottle to his lips.

Sophie knelt down by her bed, pulled a wooden trunk out; she opened the lid and grinned. “Wanna meet him?”

“Herne’s in the trunk?”

She reached in and raised her arms reverently, like a priest raising a chalice of wine. Ryan set the bottle back on the bureau and took a step forward, mesmerized. Kneeling, he stared into the deep eyeless sockets, gazed at the row of yellowed teeth in the upper jaw, and gasped in disbelief at the curved horns protruding from the top of the skull.

“Old Samuel Montfort kept it after he shot Herne for messin’ with his daughter. If it weren’t for Emma meetin’ Herne in Westminster Wood, you and I wouldn’t be here.”

Ryan reached out to touch the skull, paused, and drew his hand back. “So how many were there?”

“Well, there was Bernard—you saw him—then the male Montforts, and finally Gerard, my daddy. None of ’em lived long.”

Sophie turned the skull around and gazed lovingly into the eye sockets.

“He’s been watchin’ over his children. He saved you from Tom today, brought you to me. He knows we’re the last.”

Ryan’s face darkened at the mention of Tom’s name. “Good God, he really was after me, in the wood?”

Sophie nodded, running a finger over the horned skull. “The Reverend Stoddard was furious when his daughter Emilia ran off with Bernard. I guess Tom must be carryin’ some kinda family grudge.”

Ryan stood up, went to the window, and threw it open. “I don’t hear the tractor anymore.” He turned away from the window and grabbed Sophie’s arm.

“Rebecca hid all this from me on purpose, and I’m guessing she sabotaged your mother’s computer, as well. She’s working with Tom. We’ve got to get the hell out of here.”

Herne’s skull clattered to the floor as Ryan dragged Sophie toward the door. He grabbed the handle to throw it open and had time for one surprised gasp before the butt of the shotgun crashed down on his head, sending the room into blackness.

Sophie’s screams pulled Ryan back from oblivion. Rough cords of rope bit into his wrists and ankles. The room sat at an odd angle. Ryan realized he was hanging off the bed, head down.

Tom threw him a wink as he dragged Sophie toward the door by her bound wrists. Blood ran down Ryan’s forehead, pooling in his eyes. He blacked out.

It was there when he blinked the crusted blood out of his eyes. The horned shadow in the corner grew, looming closer. He fought the searing pain in his skull, fought to keep from slipping back into blackness. His voice croaked.

“Help me get to Sophie.”

The door banged open. Ryan squirmed in the ropes. He grunted in surprise when, instead of Tom and his shotgun, Rebecca Kimball sat down next to him on the bed. Her fingers tugged at the knots around his wrists.

“He wasn’t supposed to hurt Sophie. She’d be harmless with you out of the picture. No way to make any others.”

The frayed rope ends finally budged, and Rebecca worked faster as she pulled out the knots. Ryan’s wrists broke free. He struggled against the spinning room as he sat up, working on the knots at his ankles. Rebecca paced in front of the fireplace while he freed himself.