Daemon of the Dark Wood (34 page)

She jogged around strange shapes of kudzu-covered statuary and then there
he
was! So gloriously tall, so utterly masculine, standing atop a wide pedestal-like stump of a bygone tree, his cloven hooves more perfectly formed than any sculpted masterpiece in a museum, his legs and hips fitting together at so odd an angle that they gave his thick muscular torso the graceful arching contour of a wood-carved hero affixed to the prow of an ancient warship, fearlessly facing waves of a storm-roiled sea.

His face! So noble in its goatish aspect, yet so strikingly human in his eyes and in the pleasing physiognomy of his high forehead. The two stubby little horns jutting from his head were, to Jude’s way of thinking, absolutely adorable.

She dropped the ax and fell to her knees before the towering god. Holding the severed head in both hands, she extended her arms and offered it up, her blood-smeared breasts heaving as her lungs fought for air.

He cut her with his dark eyes and she could feel him looking into her hard-laboring heart. She trembled. He reached down and took the offered head. He held it in front of his face and studied it, his wide nostrils flaring, twitching. Then he pressed it between his big hands and crushed it nearly flat, the snapping of bones muffled by the head’s skin and scalp. He dug the yellowish talons of his thick fingers into the fracture and pulled the skull apart as if tearing into a hard-shelled melon. Then he buried his mouth in the pulp of brain-fruit and devoured it. When he was done, he tossed the broken skull-rind away and licked his thick lips and wiped his goatee.

The other women came straggling in, huffing and puffing with exertion. They were such a ragged-looking band that Jude was suddenly ashamed of them. But then as they dropped one by one to their knees at the foot of the stump and held up their offerings, she knew it was all right, that he would accept their worship and what they offered.

With a flourish of his hand, he gave them to understand that they were to place the offered heads on the stump by his feet. This they did, so that he was soon encircled by the unsightly assortment of dead men’s heads.

He began to sing. His song was not shrill like his summoning cry but was softly melodic, middle-pitched and piping, seeming to harmonize with the birds’ singing as smoothly as it did with the percussive cawing of nearby crows.

Then he began to dance, hooves clopping the wooden pedestal without breaking the circle of severed heads. As he danced and sang, his purplish penis hardened and rose to shocking proportion, and Jude was reminded of a snake charmer enticing a serpent to rise and undulate to his piped rhythms. His terrifying cock bobbed heavily between his furry loins. Jude’s breath caught in her throat.

He danced. The women stared, entranced. Jude’s hips began to move with his rhythm. Before her eyes, the goatish god grew more distinct, increasingly vivid as if he were finally coming fully into this world so that he might lord over it as its intended master.

Jude knew what was coming next. He would dance himself into a frenzy of lust and would ravage her and her sister-brides. It wouldn’t be like before. This time it would be totally physical, not like being fucked by a misty ghost but by an in-the-flesh man-beast. His magic wand of a cock would wash away her worldly sins, transform her, turn her into a goddess.

She was going wet between her legs. Her nipples hardened and yearned for his rough touch. She knew his singing and his clopping jig were having the same effect on the other women, but she was determined to be the first one fucked. She deserved as much. She’d earned it, hadn’t she? She’d given up so much! Gave up her life, her lover. And she was the youngest of all the women, the one with the most life to give up. He
had
to take her first, to honor her sacrifice and her youth.

Then an ugly sound intruded and wrecked everything. It came from another part of the woods, distant but close enough to sour his magical song. Jude knew what was making that awful blat and whine: a chainsaw. Some redneck son of a bitch was violating the hallowed wood. Ruining the sacred ceremony!

The effect on the man-beast was immediate. His face turned ferocious. His eyes blazed with wrath. His dance turned violent. His hooves struck harder, faster. And then he crushed the skulls encircling his feet, stomped them one by one until all the heads resembled lumpy pancakes, covered with hair and vile ooze. He suddenly stopped dancing, opened his mouth impossibly wide and loosed a shriek so shrill and terrible that it nearly made Jude lose control of her bowels.

She knew right away that it was a call to arms and a declaration of war. She and her sister-brides seized their weapons and raised them to the thundering sky. The man-beast leapt down from his pedestal and started running toward the sound of the chainsaw.

Jude and the others ran after as their beloved goat-man led them into battle.

Julie wasn’t used to so much physical exertion. Though she possessed a slender frame, her sedentary vocation as writer had in no way prepared her for jogging cross-country through hilly landscapes of thick woods. Running naked with the knife, she felt somehow as if she were playing a role in an archetypal fairy tale. In fact, an old nursery rhyme tune was looping through her head:
See how they run, see how they run/They all ran after the farmer’s wife/Who cut off their tails with a carving knife
…

She added her own spin:
Cut off their heads with a carving knife. Cut off their heads
…

She stopped a moment to catch her breath, bent over with her hands on her knees, her breasts pendulously hanging, heaving, aching. Then she was running again, going toward the caller, though the call had been too far away to hear with her ears, she’d heard it with her spirit’s ears. And with her blood.

Thunder crashed all around her. Raindrops pattered on a carpet of dead leaves and pine straw. She became aware that someone was following her. Chasing her? Chastening her? Calling her off?

Michael?

Never mind Michael, she told herself. Too late for that—for the guardianship of angels. He’d had his chance and he’d let her down, left her in a lonely lurch. She’d been called by one more powerful, called upon to abandon the horrors of imagination, to leave behind the tired tropes and trappings of bookish horror. Now was the time to plunge your hands into the blood and guts of real life, plunge up to the elbows into bowels of reality, dive whole-heartedly into the bleeding thick of it, for once and for all, and most especially for the sake of the Dark One calling you on.

Julie Archer was running to meet her destiny. Buoyed by this knowledge, she ran faster, and the pain of exertion sloughed off and fell by the wooded wayside, left behind like her old identity and her misguided stabs at life.

* * * *

Rourke watched as Thorn worked to complete the job begun by the dead tree man. From the assured way the professor handled the chainsaw, Rourke knew the man must’ve felled a few trees in his time.

A tug at his sleeve. Rourke turned. Mrs. Leatherwood was beside him, pulling him toward her lips. Just for a moment he thought she was going to kiss him, but then she was shouting into his ear: “You’ve got to get rid of the stump too!”

He nodded. He believed her. Believed she knew exactly what she was talking about. Thorn would have the tree ready to fall in minutes, and Rourke wasted no time in getting the motor-operated stump grinder off the little trailer behind the Tip Top Tree Service’s truck and ready for action. He had never operated a grinder but he’d seen them in operation and knew he could do a serviceable job with it. He started the grinder’s motor and stood ready. It was a boxy robotic-looking piece of equipment on squat wheels. It stood waist-high and possessed a blade-like disk with teeth designed to eat up a stump and turn wood quickly into mulch.

Through the noise of the grinder’s motor and the chainsaw’s whine, Rourke thought he heard the same beastly cry that had set off the animal attacks on the search party. But no, he couldn’t have heard any such thing amid this machine-made clamor. And even if he had, it wouldn’t matter. He and Thorn had their respective jobs to do and accomplishing them was their best defense, according to Old Lady Leatherwood. She believed this with such intensity that he made her beliefs his own. Having seen the beast—the rain-thing—with his own eyes, it wasn’t difficult to believe. He had failed to defeat the creature with the ordinary means at his disposal. Extraordinary means were all that was left to him now. They
had
to work.

Thorn glanced up from his work and gave Rourke a nod, signaling that the next go with the chainsaw would bring the tree down. No more than five yards away from the tree, Rourke nodded back, his hands on the controls of the humming stump grinder.

Dave Sikes leaned against his van, smoking a cigarette as he watched over the dead man while waiting for the ambulance to arrive and remove the corpse from the scene. The shaken young man who had come along to help the professor with his initial dig finally emerged from the Toyota pickup and was keeping a wary distance from the hulking bear’s carcass. He announced that he was going to drive to the hospital to see how his injured friend was faring, then he got back in the truck and drove off. Mrs. Leatherwood was leaning against the front of Thorn’s sports car, arms folded across her chest, chin jutting with the unmistakable authority of an old-timey schoolmarm.

As Thorn began his final cut, a band of bare-breasted women armed with primitive implements came screaming out of the woods, running straight at the man with the chainsaw.

“Jesus Christ,” Rourke said, not knowing whether he’d just uttered a prayer or a blasphemous curse.

* * * *

“He needs us,” Susan Knott said as she wiped blood from her mouth and chin with the back of her hand.

Sharyn Rampling looked at the dead doctor on the floor and knew
he
no longer needed anything.

“We have to go to him,” Susan said with pressured speech.

Sharyn understood then. Susan was talking about
him
. Pan. Dionysus, or whatever name the ancient entity might go by now in this modern world. Not that
he
needed a name. He was beyond naming. Her thoughts were racing so fast it was hard to stay with the slowly unfolding events. Was she drunk on the dead man’s blood? Drunk on feminine power in service to a masculine god? What was this aching emptiness she felt in her chest. Was it remorse at having had a hand in the doctor’s death?

Susan bent down and dug keys from her husband’s pocket. “We’ll take his car. It’s fast. A Jag. We have to hurry. Don’t you feel it? He needs us.”

“We’re locked in,” Sharyn reminded her blood sister.

Susan smiled. “We’re stronger than they are. We’ll
kill
our way out if we have to. Ready?”

Sharyn nodded. She
was
ready. With the taste of one kill still on her tongue, she realized that her aching emptiness was actually hunger for more mayhem. She hadn’t struck the killing blows but she was nonetheless complicit in the gory deed.

* * * *

Wearing the dead man’s protective goggles, Alfred Thorn caught movement out of the corner of his eye as the chainsaw’s teeth tore into the tree on the side opposite the gaping wedge sawn in the trunk. The tree listed toward the vacant wedge and Thorn peered through the smudged, sweat-rimmed goggles to see a handful of naked and semi-naked women running toward him.

He pulled back the chainsaw and straightened up to face the female chargers.

My God! Maenads! It’s all true! Sharyn was right!

He understood in a flash that they intended to stop him from felling the tree. The old woman had been right too, in her assertion that someone or something would go to any length to try to protect the tree’s integrity. And here they came, armed and wild, bearing down on him. Was that war-paint streaking their skin? No, it was blood!

All right, Alfred old boy, this is life or death. Defend yourself!

There came a moment of indecision wherein he couldn’t decide if he should drop the chainsaw and draw his pistol or use the saw to fend off his attackers. In the end, he chose to stay with the chainsaw because he doubted that he would be able to actually shoot a woman. With the saw he might be able to keep them at bay or scare them off. Even a wild woman would have to think twice before running into the dangerous teeth of a chainsaw. He held it up in a threatening gesture, absurdly reminding himself of the murderous “Leatherface” in that Texas Chainsaw movie he’d seen back in the seventies.

But the women did not slow their charge. There were six, no,
seven
of them and they all were about to converge on him. He bent his knees a bit and went into a crouch with his whirring weapon held high in front of him. He decided to use the saw only defensively; if a woman ran into its teeth, it would be her own fault, not his.

When the closest woman was no more than ten feet from him with a machete raised over her head and her face twisted into a mask of pure rage, a gunshot popped off and she went down. She slid headlong at his feet, forsaking her machete and grabbing her thigh, screaming.

Thank God the cop had no compunction about picking off attackers with well-place non-lethal shots. After all, these women weren’t in their right minds, weren’t responsible for their reprehensible actions.

Distracted by a redhead with a sling blade, Thorn didn’t realize how close the woman with the pickax was until she swung it at his head. He reacted on reflex and tried to parry the blow with the chainsaw. The saw’s spinning belt of teeth sliced into her thin wrist and took off her hand, and the pickax struck Thorn’s left shoulder a glancing blow.

More gunshots sounded above the chainsaw’s whine. And then came a loud cracking noise as the tree began to fall on its own, toppling toward the ground in maddeningly slow motion.

A boom of thunder unleashed a sudden heavy downpour of rain.

A heavyset woman bringing up the rear of the disorganized formation of women froze, looked up at the tree coming down on her and then tried to scamper out of the falling timber’s path, but she was too fat and sluggish, and the tree crushed her into the earth, its leafless limbs snapping hollowly and gouging the ground.