“Yes, I see. I see very well. Good-bye, Al.”
Sharyn folded her phone and tossed it on the bed. Then she went to the window and gazed out into the night fog.
The startling knock on her door twisted a loop in her stomach. She spun around to see Tom the nightshift PA sticking his balding head into the room.
“You okay?” he asked. “I thought I heard shouting.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I was talking so loud in my sleep I woke myself up. Sorry.”
He nodded, then withdrew his head and softly closed the door.
Thankful that he hadn’t seen the cell phone, Sharyn retrieved it and returned it to the secret slot in Smuggler’s Nook.
Then she sat on the bed and wept tears of angry frustration.
* * * *
She stood before the great haunted tree and gazed up at the moon-frosted limbs bending upward in warped supplication. Crossing her wrists over her chest, she clutched the hand-knitted shawl tighter over her thin shoulders and shivered against the fog-damp air of predawn.
The two-mile walk from her house to this secret burial ground had made her calf muscles burn with a bone-deep ache and knotted a stitch in her side. The hike left her winded, dizzy, and wondering if she’d lost her marbles or had finally slipped into senility.
But she knew it wasn’t senility that had brought her here. The appearance of Asa’s wraith in her bedroom and his ominous utterance of “ghost tree” had done it.
She wondered if Wilbur—God rest his soul—was looking down on her now, his eyes ghosted by the loneliness of deathless existence.
Liza was of two minds about what happens to a person after death; sometimes she was all but certain that the spirit was apt to linger in the very places a body haunted in life, but there were those other times of gnawing doubt when she was sure that death was eternal oblivion, simply a ceasing of existence. She hadn’t given much thought to death as life’s greatest mystery until Wilbur passed. Once he was in the ground she spent the ensuing weeks ruminating on just that: When a person passes away, where does he pass away to? Was there truly some ghostly part that went somewhere else, or was the decaying carcass in the ground all that remained? Was there an eternal soul, or was there nothing at the end of worldly life but the eternal sleep in soil?
There was a time when the thought of absolute oblivion chilled her to her aching bones, but in recent years she had come to think of oblivion as blessed relief, a final end to human suffering. When your body grew frailer with each passing week and you lived each day with the aches and pains of old age, it was hard not to see death as a welcome deliverance into nothingness.
But now, as she gazed up at the massive live oak planted more than a hundred years ago on the small burial site of the victims of the Helling, she knew without a doubt that the spirits of the dead were trapped within that tree. As surely as the oak’s roots held those skeletal remains in their twining embrace, the ghosts of the murdered men lived within those oddly bent limbs and massive trunk. She could feel their tortured presence. Their twisted souls reached out to her with spectral fingers, but she remained just out of their clammy reach because they were imprisoned, held back by the great weight and mass of the mighty oak.
She shuddered so hard that her false teeth rattled in her head. She inched forward, shuffling her feet and extending her right hand to touch the rough bark of the trunk. She closed her eyes. The palm of her hand tingled, then quickly turned cold, so cold she felt as if she were touching a coarse wall of ice. A frigid current ran up her arm, traversed her thin shoulder and settled in her breast, centering there like a wintry void that turned her chest into a ribbed ice-box.
Then she understood exactly why Asa Edgar’s wraith had directed her here.
Chapter Seventeen
* * *
“I thought you graduated from the graveyard shift, darlin’,” said the nightshift waitress at the Trucking-A’s diner. “You get yourself demoted?”
“No, not yet,” Rourke said with a wan smile. “You’re looking good, Marlene.”
“I wish,” she said, waving off the compliment. But she really did look good for a woman in her early fifties. Her figure still curved in the proper places, her face retained much of its youthful attractiveness in spite of the lines etched there by years of cigarette smoking, and she somehow made her modified beehive hairdo work to her advantage.
Marlene pulled an order pad from the pocket of her rumpled pink uniform and licked the point of her stubby pencil. “What’ll you gents have?”
Without looking at a menu, Rourke said, “We’ll both have the Eighteen-wheeler Breakfast Platter and a pot of coffee.”
“How do you want your eggs?”
Knott said, “Scrambled for me, please.”
“Over easy,” said Rourke.
Marlene jotted the order on her pad, then stuck the pencil behind her ear. “All right. I’ll be right back with your coffee.”
“Thanks, Marlene,” said Rourke, propping his elbows on the table and interlacing his fingers under his chin.
Knott said, “Marlene’s the archetypal truck-stop waitress.”
“Uh-huh,” Rourke said, though he wasn’t entirely sure what “archetypal” meant. He said, “She’s a honey.”
“I wouldn’t say that too loud. Somebody might think you’re sexist.”
“What? Honey? I didn’t mean—”
“Oh, I know,” said Knott. “But we live in hypersensitive times. A man can’t be too careful.”
“Yeah. I guess you’re right. But Marlene would take it as the compliment I intended. She’s about the most politically incorrect person I know.”
“I don’t doubt it. A place like this must be a bastion of outdated sentiments and old-fashioned values.”
“Yeah. The Truck-stop Time Forgot.”
Knott allowed himself a mirthless chuckle.
Rourke glanced around at the other customers seated in booths or hunkered at the lunch counter. At half past four o’clock in the morning, the place wasn’t crowded, and except for the tipsy young man and woman in a corner booth, they were all big-rig drivers with vacant faces and thousand-yard stares. Weary road-riders making a welcome pit-stop along their Southeastern routes.
Marlene brought a pot of coffee, wordlessly filled their cups and then sashayed to another booth.
“You want to tell me what you think you saw?” Knott asked.
Rourke heaved a sigh. “Like I said, I didn’t get a good look at it.”
“But you saw enough to make you doubt your eyes.”
Rourke cocked a brow. “Did I say that?”
“You didn’t have to. I read it in your face.”
“What I get for taking a shrink to breakfast,” Rourke said, smiling.
“Come on, Rob, let’s not play games with each other. This is serious.”
Rourke took a sip of black coffee. “Okay. If you swear you won’t try to have me committed.”
Stone-faced and stolid, Knott waited for Rourke to get on with it.
“A goddamn devil. Horns, cloven hooves, the works. That’s what I think I saw. But it was … what’s the word? Immaterial? Like a ghost, like it hadn’t completely materialized in our world. The rain outlined it, but I had the impression the thing wasn’t getting wet. Know what I mean? Like it was walking along in some other place that I only got a glimpse of. Like a window into another world. Is that crazy enough for you?”
“And it didn’t make a sound?”
“Not a peep. It stopped and looked right at me, though. I think it sort of smiled at me. Not a friendly smile either. More like a predator grinning at his dinner.”
Then he added, “If it hadn’t been for my dog, I might’ve thought I imagined the whole thing. She went a little wild barking at it, and then at me just for getting close to it. Lucy Fur was my reality check.”
“Lucifer? What—”
“My dog’s name. First name Lucy, last name Fur.”
“Cute.” Knott pinche
d the bridge of his nose. “But I have to wonder if you have some sort of preoccupation with Satan that might’ve influenced your interpretation of what you saw in the rain.”
“Hell no, Doc. I don’t believe in Satan, and I certainly don’t have a preoccupation. This is exactly why I didn’t want to get into this with you.”
“Sorry. It’s my training. I had to ask.”
“Yeah, okay. I get that. And it’s my training that makes me ask if you and your wife are having marital problems. Was tonight the first time you ever roughed her up?”
Knott gave him a cold stare. “I didn’t rough her up. I had to restrain her for her own protection. I’ve never laid an angry hand on Susan. Never. And I resent it that you would—”
“Hey, I believe you. But I had to ask. You got your training and I’ve got mine. No offense.”
“Fair enough. None taken.”
“Damn,” said Rourke, “that reminds me, I’ve got to line up a tracking dog for the search. Excuse me.” He pulled his two-way radio off his belt and called HQ. When the dispatcher responded, he said, “Call Dudley Wallace and confirm him and his dog for the search party.”
Knott said, “I could show you a very effective technique for improving your memory.”
Marlene saved Rourke from making a defensive smart-ass comment when she plunked their breakfast platters on the table and said, “There ya go, guys. Enjoy your breakfast.”
* * * *
Sharyn was almost asleep when Smuggler’s Nook chirruped like a mechanical insect. She got out of bed, grabbed the book and quickly seized her cell phone. “Hello?”
“Sharyn, it’s me,” said Thorn. “I couldn’t get back to sleep with the thought of you being mad at me. I’m sorry if I—”
“Forget it, Al. It’s all right. But don’t call my cell while I’m here. I’m not supposed to have it. If they hear it ringing, they’ll confiscate it.”
“Right. Sorry,” he muttered. “Listen, I’ve been thinking …”
“Oh Lord.”
He laughed half-heartedly, then said, “The hitch in my working theory is this: What could make a group of women go on a rampage and slaughter their menfolk? When you take away the supernatural catalyst of a Dionysian figure, what would make the women behave so violently? Something in the well water? Some contaminate that only affected females? Or were the women secretly practicing black magic and performing rituals that worked them into a state of frenzy?”
“A hillbilly witches’ coven,” Sharyn reflected.
“Yes, but that just doesn’t feel right. My imagination fails me. I can’t come up with a reasonable hypothesis for their motive.”
“You know what I believe. But you’re too goddamned stubborn to seriously consider it. I’m not saying it’s supernatural. More likely, it’s a life-form unknown to modern man. A very old one that just missed extinction. Maybe it hibernates for a century and a half, and then wakes up to do its thing. I don’t know, but whatever the explanation, it’s awake now and it’s doing it again. But you won’t believe it until you hear it or see it for yourself. I’m telling you, Al, it’s out there and it’s real.”
“Bigfoot with Pan-like shriek. Hmmm.”
“Don’t mock me.”
“I’m not. That’s what you’re suggesting, is it not? Or something along those lines.”
“You know what your problem is?” Sharyn caught her voice rising with her level of anger and lowered the volume. “You’re hamstrung by a National Enquirer mentality. You’re letting your self-doubt stop you, already imagining the ridicule your colleagues will heap on you. Just do the goddamn science, Thorn. Stop worrying about your precious reputation. It will take care of itself if you do your job.”
“What does that mean? National Enquirer mentality? I don’t follow.”
“Don’t be dense. I mean you’re afraid of being ridiculed for uncovering a fantastic truth. Afraid your work will be front-page news in the tabloids and ignored by the scientific community.”
After a long silence, Thorn said, “It could happen that way, you know.”
“Sure it could, but a real scientist wouldn’t let that stop him. Follow Galileo’s example. Screw the establishment. Answer your true calling and do the damn work. Don’t fear persecution.”
Thorn’s windy sigh made static in the earpiece of her cell. He said, “I’m doing the work, but I’m working without a net here. I have to feel grounded. It’s all about the ground for someone in my field of endeavor. The ground gives up its buried secrets of human culture and development. The ground makes it all real. Man doesn’t exist in a vac—”
“Alfred? I know what archeology and anthropology are, and I know all about working without a safety net. I lived that way until I got regulated on medication. What do you think bipolar disorder is? There’s a deep end at either pole and no fucking safety net. I’ve gone off the deep end more than once, so you don’t need to tell me what it’s like. Okay? I’ve been there. So don’t expect much sympathy from me.”
“I’m not asking for sympathy. I’m just saying—”
“Take the plunge, Al. Or forget the whole thing and retreat to the classroom.”
A knock on the door gave her a start. “Gotta go,” she whispered into the cell and then hid it under her pillow. The door swung open and the night nurse stuck her head in.
“Still can’t sleep,” said Nurse Sanders.
Sharyn shook her head.
“Who were you talking to?”
“Myself. Don’t worry, I’m not hallucinating. I live alone and I talk to myself sometimes,” she lied. “I’m good company.”
“Why don’t you turn your light out and lie down? You won’t get to sleep sitting up and talking to yourself.”
“I will. Thanks.” She turned off the bedside lamp and slid under the bedcovers.
Sanders gave her a curt smile, then withdrew and quietly shut the door.
Sharyn sighed in relief. Realizing how tired she was, she relaxed and let herself sink into the softness of the bed and closed her eyes.
A moment later she was asleep.
Chapter Eighteen
* * *
Julie Archer arose at five-fifteen, made her toilet, and went downstairs to the kitchen to brew a pot of strong coffee. She sat at the kitchen table and waited for Mr. Coffee to work his java magic. It was an older deluxe model, red-plated with a softly glowing green clock-face that seemed to stare at her like a malevolently mystic eye from a fifties horror flick.
She fashioned her fingers in the sign of the death-dealing phallus against the evil eye—mal occhio—to ward off any bad juju. Then she quietly laughed at herself for being creeped out by a green-eyed Mr. Coffee.
But she was without her guardian angel, and that was no laughing matter. Not when there was a supernatural entity loose in the hills.
Before falling asleep in Angela’s protective arms a few short hours ago, Julie had promised herself that everything would be all right in the morning and that she would feel normal. But now that morning had come, she didn’t feel at all normal.
Her thoughts were dark and drear. Darkness still held sway over the land and over her. Come sunrise, things might look better but she didn’t think so. The darkness that cloaked her heart would not be easily banished by sunlight. That infernal shrieking had seeped inside her and deposited something there, some numinous substance that was eating away the layers of her humanity. Beneath those layers something wanton and wild was awakening. She could feel its eagerness to get out, to be born. To come screaming out of her.
“Stop it,” she whispered. Stop thinking such morbid thoughts.
She hammered the kitchen table with her fist and bolted out of the chair, making a physical show of her determination to remain in control of herself and her thoughts. She poured French-roast coffee into a large mug and took a sip, hoping to fortify her resolve with caffeine. Even as she did her best to ride out her emotional turmoil, the horror writer within stood back and observed from a place of d
etachment, looking for a way to use this profound experience in a story. If she could capture just a smidgen of the terror she felt and translate it into the language of fiction …
The thing inside her twisted and kicked like an infant in the womb. Julie clutched her belly and doubled over. The mug of coffee slipped from her grip and clattered on the tile floor, snapping off the ceramic handle.
“Jesus,” she said with a gasp. She had to lean on the kitchen counter to keep from falling down. Then another cramp wrenched her intestines and she hobbled as fast as she could go to the downstairs bathroom. She threw the lid up with a bang and plopped her rump down on the cool seat.
Just a bad case of the runs, she told herself. Not a wild thing ripping its way out of me.
Not yet, anyway.
* * * *
Fearful that something had followed her home from the haunted burial ground, Liza Leatherwood mounted the steps to her front porch and collapsed in the rocking chair. Her heart thudded so hard that she feared she might be in the early stages of a heart attack. She couldn’t seem to catch her breath. Predawn darkness deepened, swirling round about her like the black robes of Grim Death. No, no, no, not yet, please, not yet.
A glowing shape appeared out of the wispy fog in the front yard and hovered above the grass like a slender white cloud. It glided toward her. As it neared, it slowly resolved itself into the shape of a tall man with craggy features.
“They Lord,” she said. “Wilbur?”
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