Demon Child

by Dean Koontz

  The two state patrolmen wore simple blue riding uniforms with black rank patches on their sleeves. They were large men, but agile, and they had the most beautiful chestnut stallions Jenny had ever seen, enormous animals with powerful shoulders, thick necks and haunches. Horse and master, here, made a splendid single unit, as if the two were parts of the same organism, some centaurlike being.

  Richard was here, sitting on a black mare, talking to one of the neighbors who had joined the hunt, a fellow who looked-with his gray hair, mustache and full sideburns-like an English baron.

  There was a wiry little man on a spotted mare who kept a pack of hounds around him with nothing but his soft commands. This, she supposed, was Gabe Atchison.

  Walter sat on a mottled black-brown stallion behind the others, holding the tether of a second saddled but unmounted mare which Jenny recognized as a horse called Tulip which was kept next to the stall where Hollycross had died.

  "Here. Hurry!" Walter called. "We're about to begin."

  She ran the last few yards, got her foot in the stirrup and swung onto Tulip's back. The horse snuffled, shivered all over but made no attempt to test the girl's horsemanship.

  "It's the first time I ever saw state policemen riding horses instead of prowl cars," she said.

  "I understand Pennsylvania's state police are supposed to be the best-trained force in the world. They learn how to do nearly everything that might come in handy. That chap there, name's Halliwell, told me that they even have a championship horse team that does nothing but go all over the world from one international show to another. And they win medals more often than not."

  Both of the officers were checking saddle-slung carbines before starting the day's activities. They looked like capable men, and they made her feel safer by their presence.

  "Are you worried?" Walt asked.

  "A little."

  "Don't be. With so many guns about, the beast will be in tatters before he could finish half a charge at us." She saw that not only the police carried rifles. Indeed, only she and Walter were weaponless.

  Jenny looked at the sky and wished it were a better day. Low, flat clouds scudded from horizon to horizon, an even gray color that did not threaten rain but promised no sun either. The morning seemed just a bit chilly for a June day. She supposed it would get hot enough shortly. Then they would all be cursing the humidity.

  "What are you doing here?" Richard asked, trotting his stallion toward them. He was dressed in black slacks and a black, short-sleeved shirt. "Did anyone tell you to come along?"

  It was a rhetorical question. He was not expecting any answer.

  "Yes," she said.

  That surprised him. "Who?"

  "I did," Hobarth told Richard before the young man could say anything. "I didn't see that it was dangerous. If we trap the critter, she and I will stay well back from the action."

  "I don't think it's a woman's place," Richard said.

  "And where is my place?" she asked.

  He did not reply.

  "Oh, look here, Richard," Hobarth said. "It's mostly a game. You look around at these stalwart men of yours and tell me differently. They're all out for sport. If a single man here is expecting danger, I'd be surprised."

  "I'm expecting danger," Richard replied.

  "Are you really?" Hobarth asked.

  Richard looked at Jenny, appeared to be ready to say something, then shrugged. "She might as well stay," he said. He reined his horse to the right and went back to the front of the column.

  Walter leaned across and patted her right hand which gripped the pommel of the saddle.

  "He frightens me," she said, though she had not intended to confide in Walter-or in anyone. Not just yet, at least. She did not want to make a fool out of herself if Richard's rudeness proved to be nothing more sinister than mere bad manners.

  "Who? Richard?"

  "Yes."

  Hobarth looked after the Brucker heir. "He's

  very self-contained, I think. Too self-contained. We all need to open ourselves to other people now and again."

  Richard swiveled a quarter turn in his saddle and addressed the mounted men behind him. "We follow the dogs. We stay in a single group unless the dogs split up. Then, Trooper Halliwell, Gabe, Rudy, Samson and I will form one party. The rest of you will form the other. Both Dr. Hobarth and Jenny will be in the second group. Neither has a gun or is more than an observer, so look after them if the need arises."

  Everyone gave Jenny and the doctor a covert but still obvious inspection.

  Richard turned to Gabe Atchison. "Are they ready?"

  "They're more than," Gabe said.

  Richard turned back to his fellow hunters. "And remember: no indiscriminate shooting. If we spot it, the dogs will run it down and corner it. We'll shoot it like a pig in a pen."

  Several of the men nodded agreement.

  Richard looked back at Gabe Atchison. "Okay," he said. "Turn them loose."

  Atchison yelped something that sounded like it was in a foreign language. The dogs replied. A caterwauling mass of tails and legs and snouts stumbled over each other and were off-all in the same direction, across the open fields to the north of the stables, toward the dense woods.

  "None of the woods is too thick for single-file horsemanship," Richard said.

  Then they were off.

  The thunder of horse's hooves made Jenny's teeth vibrate in her jaw. The ground bounced around them as her mare galloped to keep up with the others.

  Walter waved at her and bent toward his own stallion's neck. He was obviously enjoying all this.

  She decided she would too. She hugged her mare and let it go full steam toward the shadowy forest at the top of the long, rising field.

  * * *

  12

  The hounds reached the woods and ran parallel to the trees, their noses to the ground, ears flapping, barely managing to keep out from under one another. They might have been a comic sight if their purpose and their prey had not been so grisly. Several times, they stopped to regain the scent, backtracked a few feet, turned and hurried confidently forward, whining and snuffling, now and then pausing to bay in anticipation as they inclosed on their quarry.

  For those on horseback, it was alternately exciting and trying. One moment, they would be urging their mounts forward at top speed in order not to lose the hounds. The next moment, the hounds had stopped, forcing the hunters to rein in and mark time until the next frantic burst of forward movement.

  Jenny didn't mind the breaks as much as the others, for she was not accustomed to such a furious pace and needed the short moments of rest to regain her breath and reposition herself in the saddle. Too, the pauses gave her and Walter time to talk, exchange brief observations on the hunt and the land. She valued these especially. Every time they spoke and shared a joke, she was less apprehensive about the day ahead and where it might lead them.

  After they had run along beside the fringes of the forest for more than five-hundred yards, the hounds surprised the men following them by abruptly taking to the trees and the brush. They were almost instantly gone from sight, leaving mountain laurel trembling in their wake. Howling more excitedly than ever, slavering and yelping, falling over one another in their haste to make contact with their quarry, they somehow still managed not to lose sight of their objective.

  The scent had grown stronger; the wolf was nearer!

  The state trooper named Halliwell led the procession along a narrow, beaten trail between the elms and the pines. Far ahead, in the dark tunnel of foliage, the last of the hounds was in sight. Halliwell spurred his mount forward. Behind him, the rest of the hunting party followed in single-file as many of the men began unsnapping the flaps of the rifle cases strapped to their saddles.

  "It looks as if it might not be a long affair, after all," Walter said in the short moment before it was Jenny's turn to goad her horse into the woods. "Those brutes are yapping right on the heels of something. It might be only minutes now."

&n
bsp; Then the horse before her had gone forward, and she had to follow it into the shade of the trees where the sunlight came through in thumb-sized patches and dappled everything beneath the branches. Behind her, Walter Hobarth followed, enjoying himself.

  But he had been mistaken. The hunt was not about to be concluded at all. They followed the noisy dogs for another hour, twisting through dangerously narrow forest paths, urging their horses around low-hanging branches, sometimes crossing blessedly open fields only to enter the trees once again at some other point.

  Shortly before ten-thirty, they found the cave.

  "What is it?" Hobarth asked as he drew his mount even with Jenny's mare, wiping at perspiration that beaded on his broad forehead.

  They had come out into a mid-forest clearing some two-hundred yards across and roughly circular in shape. On three sides, there were trees, a few meandering animal trails like the one they had just left. On the third side, to their right, there was a stone wall approximately forty-feet high. Set into this was a wide-mouthed cave that wound backwards into the land, into purple darkness.

  "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...

  * * *

  13

  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.