Daemon of the Dark Wood (27 page)

The woman whined, reminding Rourke of a scolded dog. She hung her head and crawled forward a few feet on her hands and knees. Then she lifted a knee and let go with a loud fart, which she followed with maniacal laughter.

Rourke neither heard nor saw what happened next between the madwoman and the psychiatrist because a pulsating circle of light at the cave’s doorway and its accompanying subterranean hum completely captured his attention. Immobilized by the sight, he could do nothing but gaze, slack-jawed, into the center of the glowing circle. The ordinary world of daylight outside the cave undulated like a sheer window curtain in a soft breeze, intimating a darker world behind its thinning veneer. He glimpsed—or thought he did—many sets of watchful eyes in the shadowy world. Animals’ eyes, he was sure. Then the center of the circle opened out into a widening vista of ancient ruins, stone columns and mausoleum-like structures overrun with leafless vines and odd tentacle-like creepers.

Rourke felt suddenly sick. Inner darkness crowded his vision and he was sure he was going to pass out. His ears rang. Something was pulling him out of himself, hollowing out his chest and draining his essence. He was all but certain that he was dying. He threw out a hand to brace himself on the wall of the cave but his hand
went through
the granite as if it were made of water, and he fell to his knees, caught in a whirlpool of physical sensations the human body was never meant to experience, nor designed to withstand.

That the world was not made of solid stuff somehow didn’t much surprise him. It seemed now that he’d always suspected as much, though he wasn’t the sort of man given to contemplating such abstract concepts. Solidity was illusion. The very stuff of reality was elusive. Illusory. Which probably went a long way in explaining how Rourke was sinking into the malleable stone floor of the cave.

“We have to go.” The voice came from very far away; its words held no meaning for Rourke as he slowly sank into layers of stone.

Something seized his shoulder and tugged at him.

“Come on, man! Get up!”

He looked up through the haze of porous rock and could just make out the flesh-knitted face of Trey Knott. Then Rourke was rising out of rock and stumbling to his feet, the stone floor of the cave solid beneath them.

“Did you see?” Rourke said, letting Knott lead him out of the cave.

The glowing circle was gone. The hum was still there, though it was very faint now. Rourke’s entire body was singing, vibrating at a frequency only he could hear.

“More than I wanted to see.”

Knott had Sarah Melton off her hands and knees and on a leash, muzzled. Rourke did a double-take and saw that the woman had a leather belt in her mouth, notched tightly behind her head, and that Knott was controlling her with it, directing her out of the cave as well. “I had to muzzle her,” he explained, “to keep her from biting me. I know how this looks but what else could I do?”

Rourke nodded, taking this in stride. What would’ve seemed shockingly extraordinary a couple of hours ago was now merely a matter of course. A naked woman on a leash made perfect sense, given the bizarre circumstance of
this
morning.

“Are you all right?” asked the doctor.

“I don’t know what
all right
is anymore,” Rourke honestly answered. “What the hell just happened here?”

If Knott had an answer, he kept it to himself.

Thorn had never shot and killed an animal larger than a rabbit, and that single experience had soured him on killing for sport and turned him against hunting altogether, so the proposition of shooting dogs was not a pleasant one—never mind that these mangy monsters crouched outside Widow Leatherwood’s house were the antithesis of Man’s Best Friend.

Shoot them he would, if he had to.

He drove up in front of the house and sat on the horn, giving the mutts a steady bleat he hoped their sensitive ears could not long tolerate. The dog on the front porch turned its head, cocked its ears and gave Thorn what he supposed was a look of irritation. The larger and more ferocious-looking mongrel got up from its post at the corner of the porch and came toward the Triumph with ears laid back and teeth bared in a slobbering snarl. The third dog at the other corner of the house didn’t so much as glance Thorn’s way, but maintained its low-bellied crouch and kept its gaze locked on the house.

Laying off the horn, Thorn picked up his .45, put the car in reverse and wheeled into a position that gave him a clear shot over the driver’sside door at the approaching hound. The fact that he hadn’t taken time to put the convertible’s top up meant that he couldn’t afford to miss what he was shooting at; with a muscular leap any one of the dogs could be on top of him and at his throat.

He sighted on the approaching dog’s black head at a spot midway between its close-set eyes. The dog was coming straight on and so unwittingly offered itself as a more or less fixed target. When the snarling mongrel was less than ten yards away Thorn fired. The dog’s head nodded once and then the beast lost its legs and went down in a dead heap of muscle and fur.

As Thorn lowered the pistol the other two dogs left their posts and charged the car, coming at him from two different directions. He snapped off a hurried shot at the one on the left and missed. He gunned the engine and the TR6 shot forward across the lawn and out of the dogs’ paths. He turned hard to the right and cut a wide circle, just missing a willow tree at the edge of the yard. There he braked, drew a bead on the nearest beast and fired. The .45 slug took the dog in the flank, spun the surprised mutt in a half-circle and deposited it in a mound of bloodied fur and exposed flesh and bone.

The last dog righted its charge and took a running jump at Thorn. In a panic he got off three rapid shots, the last hitting the airborne dog in the belly and knocking it off course. The dog banged headfirst into the driver’s door and dropped to the ground, yelping.

Thorn leaned over the door and finished the gut-shot mutt with a blast that blew apart the dog’s skull and spilled its brains on the grass.

Exhilarated by his four-wheel dogfight, Thorn drove a victory circle around the bodies of his canine enemies before parking in front of the house and jumping out to pound on the widow’s door.

“Not bad for a schoolteacher,” Mrs. Leatherwood said from behind the screen door. “Come on in, dogslayer. I have a lot to tell you and little time.”

When she opened the screen for him he saw the rifle hanging from her left hand. “My late husband’s twenty-two,” she said. “I had to shoot the door a few times to keep ’em from tearing it down and coming in after me.”

She stepped aside and he entered. She shut and bolted the door. She suddenly rounded on him and said, “Since you were here last I’ve gone deaf so don’t waste your time asking me questions. Just sit and listen to what I tell you and nod every now and then so I’ll know you understand.”

Thorn nodded. She led him down a creaky hallway and into a small parlor hung with dark floor-length curtains that looked as if they belonged in a larger, better-appointed room. One wall was taken up with unvarnished bookcases interspersed with paperbacks, hardbacks and a few spiral-bound recipe books. On one shelf books shared space with homey knick-knacks, copies of
Reader’s Digest
and small-framed photographs yellowed with age. The room smelled of musty books, fragrant lavender and mildew.

“Have a seat, professor,” she said, waving him to a loveseat with upholstery embroidered with red and pink roses. She collapsed heavily into a stuffed armchair and groaned. “Oh me.”

Thorn perched on the edge of the loveseat, eager to hear what she had to say. He had many questions he wanted to ask but didn’t because they would quite literally fall on deaf ears and go unanswered.

“Thank you for getting rid of them hellhounds,” she said with measured weariness. “The Dark Man of the Wood surely sent them to torment me.”

Good Lord, the old girl’s gone daft
. And she looked as if she’d aged years since he last saw her.

She must’ve caught the alarm in his face because then she said, “Hear me out before you go to thinking I’m a crazy old bat.”

He dutifully nodded and leaned back in his seat. The excitement of the dust-up with the hounds of hell was already deserting him; in its place was a sharp pang of empathetic melancholy. Sitting in this sad room with this glum old woman was nearly more than he could bear, suggesting as it did that he would similarly end his days as a lonely old man, all alone in an equally somber room. He quailed at the image of so bleak a future and averted his eyes.

Liza Leatherwood went on: “When I was a young girl my grandmother sat me down and told me about the Helling—the very thing you’ve been pestering me to tell you about. She swore me to secrecy and it pains me to have to break my vow now, but I’ve come to know something my granny didn’t. It would be sinful if I was to keep it to myself, sure enough. Which is why I have to tell it to you. But before I do, you have to promise me one thing. You have to swear to me that you’ll cut down a tree and remove the stump. Tear it up by the roots. You understand?”

“Yes, no, I mean—”

“Say it,” she said with a fierce look. “Swear you’ll get rid of that tree.”

“I don’t understand. What’s a tree has to—”

“Are you deaf? I told you I can’t hear worth a damn. Now raise your right hand and get ready to swear you’ll get rid of the tree.”

She got up, walked stiffly across the room and held a Bible in front of him. Thorn hadn’t noticed the Bible until now; it seemed to have appeared as if by magic.

“Put your left hand on the Good Book,” she instructed, “and swear it.”

He put his left hand on the Bible, raised his right hand and said, “I swear I will get rid of the tree.”

She nodded, her face losing some of its tension.

Outside a crow cawed bitterly, as if protesting Thorn’s vow to fell a tree.

“I don’t expect you to do the cutting yourself,” she said. “Better to hire it done. I ’spect you’ll find a tree-removal outfit in the phone book. But you have to be there to make sure it’s done proper. Nod to show you understand.”

Thorn nodded, wondering how much he would have to go out of pocket in keeping his odd vow.

The woman returned to her chair and to her story. “Here’s the thing, professor. There really is a Dark Man of the Wood, just like Hawthorne wrote about. Only worse. The one hereabouts is more demon than man. I don’t know if it’s the same one Mr. Hawthorne told of. More likely there’s more than one of ’em in the world. This one showed up in these hills back in eighteen-sixty-five. Far as anybody knows, that was the first time. Those that saw it—or
remembered
seeing it years later—said it was part goat, part man, with horns and cloven hooves like the Devil. Maybe it
was
the Devil. It sure enough brought a heap of evil when it came.”

Thorn opened his mouth to speak but she shushed him with a wave of her hand and a stern look. “According to my granny, it cast a spell on the womenfolk of what’s now Widow’s Ridge with its ungodly cry. It called ’em out and they had no choice but to go to him. Evidently, its cry clouded men’s minds too, ’cause most of ’em didn’t do anything to stop their women. In most cases though, it was sly enough to call the women when the men weren’t about.

“What happened when they went to him, my granny didn’t know. She said that most of the women either couldn’t remember or were too ashamed to say what it did to ’em. But whatever it was, it was most unnatural—if you catch my drift. However the demon did it, it turned the women into raving killers. They lured the menfolk into the woods for some sort of orgy and slaughtered every one of them in some sick ceremony to honor the goat-man. Granny hinted that some of the women turned cannibal and actually ate parts of the men. When it was all over, the women returned to their homes like nothing had happened—or like they’d all had the same bad dream.

“When folks in Dogwood got wind of it, they went looking in the woods and found the remains of the murdered men. Nobody could figure out exactly what had happened or who’d done the butchering, so they ended up burying the body parts they found in a common grave about two miles from where we sit. A circuit-riding preacher said a few words, and not long after, somebody decided to plant an oak tree on the gravesite as a kind of memorial. Because they never found all the body parts or any of the heads, nor knew for sure who they’d buried there, they didn’t put up grave markers.”

“That’s the tree you want me to remove! The one on the gravesite.”

She silenced him with a scalding look. Then she continued her tale. “Folks took to calling our little settlement Widow’s Ridge, and rather than pass on the story of the shameful slaughter to the next generation, the women concocted the story that all the murdered menfolk had been killed in the Civil War, hence the name Widow’s Ridge. Folks in these parts went along with the fiction, I guess, because they preferred it to the truth. Nobody wanted to think about what might’ve transpired out in those woods. Made ’em too uneasy, I reckon. Better to think of the dead men as war heroes. A dozen men, all told.”

She paused to stare off into the dim room and to pick a speck of lint from her dress. Then she continued. “Three nights ago—or was it four? I’ve been so out of sorts here lately, I can’t be sure—he came back. The goat-man. I heard its cry. It was just the way my granny said it would be. She warned me that it would come back someday and that I would know its shrill cry when I heard it. I knew it for what it was, all right. It was like nothing I’d ever heard in all my long years. If I hadn’t already been deaf in one ear I’m sure I woulda gone out to meet him. Most women can’t resist the call. Very young children and the mentally afflicted can, but not without going some kind of crazy—or so my grandmother said, and I reckon it’s true. Anyway, hearing that cry scared me so bad I took a hatpin and punched a hole in the eardrum of my good ear so if I heard it again I wouldn’t go crazy.

“So he’s come back and he’s gathering a new band of women to do his murderous work. But here’s the thing, professor.
I know how to stop him
. I won’t bother to tell you how I know ’cause you wouldn’t believe it if I told you. That tree you’re gonna cut down? It’s haunted by the souls of the men that were killed more’n a hundred years ago. That oak tree’s been their prison for all those years. When you have it cut down and the roots pulled up, their spirits will be released and then in their pent-up rage they can drive off the demon. Before you ask how I know this, I know because I
saw
it. Vengeful spirits are powerful like nothing else on this earth.”