“Don’t touch me!” Hot tears of anger leaked from Julie’s eyes, though she didn’t want to cry, certainly not after her lover had called her a pussy.
Angela held her open hands in front of her. “Okay, okay. Chill out. I won’t touch you.”
Julie started away again.
Angela hastened to her side and said, “Just because you’re pissed at me doesn’t mean I’m not going to protect you. Whatever that thing was, it’s still out there somewhere and if it comes around again, I won’t miss next time.”
Angela pulled her compact pistol from the breast pocket of her flannel shirt to show she was serious.
“You can’t kill the devil,” said Julie, surprised by the force of her own conviction.
* * * *
Drunk on her lover’s flesh and blood, Judy Lynn fell into a dreamlike limbo between this world—the world in which she now lay on bloodied bed sheets—and the other one, the realm from which her rutting god had come in all his terrible glory, entering through the hidden circle of magic stones at the precise midsummer moment the sun stood still to claim that longest day as his own and to perfume the subsequent nights with his potent musk. Her blood understood that the imposing god would hold sway over the woodlands he trod like a ghostly shepherd, gathering his wayward flock for worship at his loins and to suckle them with his intoxicating phallus. She and the others were his chosen ones, his holy servants baptized in the blood-wine of his lust and spiritually primed for the impending ritual of his becoming.
The shock and revulsion she’d felt when he made her kill the stray dog and eat its raw entrails was blessedly behind her now. That grisly initiation, she now knew, was but a foretaste of the butchery and feasting that was to follow. Her palate had been primed, the godly seed planted in her soul, and in these moments of half-sleep when her surface mind relinquished the mental field to the throbbing under-mind, she knew what her god had planned for her and the others.
She opened her eyes. The low-watt bulb in the bedside lamp cast a dingy pall over the bedroom and lent a sepia hue to Josh’s naked, mutilated corpse.
“My God,” she said as she absorbed the gruesome boudoir tableau. The remnant of her displaced, humane self screamed from its submerged position that she should be appalled by what she’d done: murdered her fiancé in a frenzy of bloodlust. But the screaming complainant had already been subsumed by a new order of self. She was no longer Judy Lynn Bowen, descendent of backwoods hillbillies. Now she was so much more. She had become a vessel for the pneuma of an alien divinity older than humanity; she had the ability to see the world with new eyes; she had glimpsed another world on the other side of the thin skin of this one; her innermost desires were made flesh; her congress with the godly intruder had enhanced her physical and mental powers so much that she divined she was becoming something more than human. Much more.
She got out of bed, licking the last of Josh’s blood from her lips. She caught a glimpse of herself in the dresser’s mirror. The sight of her blood-slicked nakedness thrilled her anew, sent her heart leaping for her throat.
No, that was not Judy Lynn Bowen in the looking-glass.
“Jude,” she said to her reflection. “That’s who you are. Judy Lynn died on the mountain. We’re Jude.”
As she dragged Josh’s body down the wooden steps to the basement, she felt a pang of regret that she wouldn’t be getting married after all, but the little belch of remorse fled in the face of a larger truth: she was to become the bride of a god whose carnal appetites knew no bounds.
She in her turn would become a goddess, a being both bestial and celestial. A fabulous creature in the flesh.
Chapter Twenty-One
* * *
The fog was lifting. It hung in the trees, leaving a few wispy patches close to the ground, where the uneven ranks of searchers moved through flourishing undergrowth and trees, some of the men softly cursing the rising landscape as they went, others maintaining a stoic silence merited by the seriousness of their undertaking. A young woman had been kidnapped and raped; other women might still be on this mountain, held captive in a cave by an unknown pervert, a deviant fiend or worse. This was serious business, not some good-old-boy outing to be capped off with beer-drinking and good-natured shit-shooting.
When Knott’s cell phone chirruped, Rourke shot him an angry look.
“Sorry,” said Knott, whipping out the little phone and flipping it open, “but it could be about my wife.”
Rourke nodded. He couldn’t blame the man for his concern; he was a doctor and had to be available to his patients and hospital staff.
“Yes,” Knott answered, keeping his voice down, “this is Dr. Knott.”
Rourke looked ahead at Pogo pulling his master up the steep gradient, and just for a moment it seemed that the animal had the human on the leash.
“How is she?” Knott asked his caller. He listened to the answer, his face expressionless, and then replied: “Good. Take her out of the restraints and tell her I’ll be in later this morning. Thank you.”
“Your wife’s doing better?” asked Rourke.
“Yes. She’s a little groggy from the medication but apparently the episode is over.”
“Glad to hear it.”
Rourke’s radio crackled with the garbled voice of the dispatcher. He pulled it off his belt and responded.
The dispatcher said, “Unit six couldn’t locate Asa Edgar. He wasn’t at his cabin. Over.”
“Copy, HQ. Out.” Rourke clipped the radio back on the gun belt and glanced at his wristwatch. It was three minutes past eight. Though the sun wasn’t yet visible through the thinning mist, the forested mountainside was brightening by degrees; nevertheless, the trees and thickets seemed bent on retaining an ominous gloom.
An unseen crow cawed in a nearby tree, its cry brittle and hollow. The insistent cawing raised gooseflesh on Rourke’s arms and neck, and he got the notion that the bird was simultaneously warning them away and announcing the search party’s presence to a sinister culprit higher up the hill—the rain-thing he’d seen last night.
Rourke shook off his creepy chills and said, “Why don’t you go see to your wife. We don’t really need you here, you know.”
“No, I want to see this through. Susan’s in good hands. If we find any women up there, I might be of more use than you seem to expect.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” said Rourke. “I just thought you might want to be with Susan. I’m sure we can get along without—”
An eerie cry sounded in the distance, piercing the sodden atmosphere.
Rourke froze, as did Knott; as did all the men, stopping in their tracks. The only man not brought up short by the cry was Dudley Wallace, whose dog suddenly tried to break free of the leash and go charging up the mountain. Hanging onto the leash with both hands, Dudley went stumbling after the canine, issuing commands Pogo summarily ignored.
The screaming cry went on for a full minute. The armed men nervously readied their weapons as if fearing an imminent enemy charge. Others exchanged nervous glances and appeared to be on the verge of running back down to their vehicles and driving away fast.
Then the cry trailed off, and the landscape was steeped in silence. No birds sang. No insects whined. The mountainous terrain was eerily still.
Knott broke the silence. “That was different from what I heard last night. A different … song. But the singer’s the same.”
Rourke knew they didn’t have time to discuss what they’d just heard. He’d lost sight of Dudley and the dog, and he was sure Pogo was carrying his master straight to the maker of that spooky cry. He was equally sure that Dudley would not willingly let go of the leash and abandon his beloved dog to the screaming creature. Rourke instinctively knew that whatever had made that sound was incredibly dangerous, and he was certain the other men knew it as well. They couldn’t let Dudley face the thing alone.
He chopped the air with the edge of his hand and shouted, “Move out! Double-time! Let’s go!”
/> Like an unhorsed and unreconstructed Civil War general, Rourke led his reluctant troop up the mountain. Knott jogged beside him, swept along by the momentum of fearful urgency.
A dark shape charged out of a thicket in front of them, growling as it raced along, its belly close to the ground. Dave Deets raised his shotgun but the thing was on him before he could aim and get off a shot, clamping its teeth on Dave’s groin. Screaming, he toppled backward, and the pit-bull sawed its head from side to side, snarling as its teeth tore at the man’s genitals.
Rourke drew his pistol as he ran toward Deets. From the corner of his eye he saw two more dogs burst from the forbidding undergrowth, both of them coming at full speed, their ears laid back for battle.
A shotgun boomed. A rifle cracked. A fourth dog crashed out of a bramble bush and leapt at a rifleman’s throat.
Rourke turned and quickly aimed at the black mongrel that was coming directly at him. He squeezed the trigger and his .38 popped a shot that kicked up dead leaves and dirt beside his charging target. When the black dog was no more than ten yards away, Rourke fired again. The slug struck the mutt’s head, immediately dropping him. Then Rourke returned his attention to Dave Deets and the dog that was now savaging Dave’s throat.
Like a base runner sliding home, Rourke slid in beside Deets, jammed the .38’s muzzle under the pit-bull’s belly and fired two quick shots. The dog yelped through clamped teeth but did not relinquish its ripping grip on Dave’s throat, which was horribly awash with blood.
Rourke stuck the muzzle against the pit-bull’s skull, angling it away from Deets, and fired once more. The dog fell dead on Dave’s chest. Rourke pushed the canine’s corpse off Deets and pressed his hand into the ragged gash in the man’s throat to stop the bright red blood from jetting into the air.
The other armed men had put down the remaining two dogs by this time, but not before one of the mutts had taken a chunk of flesh out of Harvey Carson’s forearm.
Deets was already losing consciousness—whether from loss of blood or from shock, Rourke didn’t know.
“Doc! Help me here!” Rourke shouted.
But Knott was already there, bending over the bleeding man and pushing Rourke’s hand away so he could determine the severity of the wounds.
“He’s bleeding out,” said Knott. “There’s nothing I can do.”
“Just stop the bleeding, for Christ’s sake,” Rourke said.
“How? I can’t put a tourniquet around his neck without choking him to death. The man needs immediate surgery. Out here there’s nothing I can do.”
“So we just let him die?” Rourke said through gritted teeth.
“We don’t have a choice. His artery is shredded.”
“Clamp it off.”
“With what?”
“Jesus, I don’t know,” said Rourke. “There must be something—”
Rourke dug a hand into his jeans for his keys. He pulled them out and quickly shed his keys from the little metal ring. “Use this,” he said, handing the ring to the doctor.
“I can’t do it with that,” said Knott, staring at the silver ring.
“Try, goddammit. Hurry!”
Some of the other men had crowded around to see the condition of their fallen fellow. A few of them lurched away after getting a good look at Dave’s ruined throat and savaged groin.
Knott put the ring back in Rourke’s hand and then sat on the ground beside Deets and put his fingers into the wound, trying to find the artery he would have to clamp off to prevent Deets from dying.
In a matter of seconds his hands and wrists were covered with blood. “I’ll need another pair of hands to do this,” he told Rourke. “Damn! Too slippery. Wait. There, I’ve got it, by God. I’ll hold the artery while you clamp it off with the ring.”
Rourke knelt on the opposite side of the patient and used his thumbnail to spread open the double rings of metal.
“See it? The little white worm-looking thing? Clamp it off right in front of my finger,” Knott instructed.
As Rourke brought the ring close to the spurting artery, his thumbnail slipped out and the tiny gap in the rings closed. “Shit!”
“That’s okay,” Knott said, “open it again. Don’t panic.”
“I’m not,” Rourke snapped.
Someone suddenly shouted: “Look out!”
Someone else cried out a muffled curse that was cut short by a loud thump.
Rourke glanced up to see a large brown bird—a fucking hawk!—attached to a man’s face, the predator’s talons digging into fleshy jowls amid a flurry of fluttering wings.
“Holy shit!” someone shouted.
“Get it off!” cried the man with the hawk on his face as he stumbled to his knees.
In the commotion, the artery slipped from Knott’s fingers. Blood spurted, but with less force now. “We’re losing him,” said Knott.
Dave’s eyes rolled up into their sockets, and his body shuddered.
“Goddammit!” Rourke shouted.
“It’s too late,” said Knott, solemnly shaking his head. “He’s too far gone.”
“Bullshit,” said Rourke, forcing himself to ignore the man struggling to get free of the hawk’s talons. “Try again.”
“He’s gone, Rob,” Knott said.
Arvin Sheets had managed to get hold of the hawk’s wings, and he yanked the bird downward. The talons ripped free of its prey’s face, slashing the flesh open. The hawk broke free of Arvin’s grip and flew off into tatters of fog. Someone fired a futile shot after the hawk.
The man with portions of his face badly shredded was Billy Barker, a volunteer fireman and ne’er-do-well, whose exploits with married women were the stuff of local legend and provided the punch-lines for more than a few ribald jokes in Dogwood’s bawdier quarters. His rugged handsomeness was said to be irresistible to ladies of all ages, sizes and shapes. Rourke caught himself wondering if Billy’s bloody lacerations would become alluring scars to further tempt the young man’s female prey into future illicit liaisons. The kid sure wouldn’t be getting much action before the ugly wounds healed.
“Think you can do something about his wounds without killing him?” Rourke asked Knott.
Knott glanced at Billy Barker, then shot Rourke an angry look. “Don’t be an asshole,” he said. He wiped his bloody hands on his jeans and started toward Billy.
Rourke grabbed Knott’s arm, and said, “Sorry. You didn’t deserve that. I just …” He shrugged and glanced at the dead man at his feet.
“I know. Forget it.”
“What the hell’s going on here?” Arvin Sheets wore an expression of dismay as he addressed the question to his comrades. “Hawks don’t attack people like that. And those dogs—”
“It ain’t natural,” said Harvey Carson, nursing his wounded forearm. “That weird cry called ’em down on us, sure as shit. What the hell was that thing? Weren’t no wildcat, that’s for damn sure.”
“By God, I think you’re right, Harv,” said Arvin. “As unbelievable as it is, I think you’re right on the money. That thing ordered the attack. Don’t you think so, Rob?”
Rourke didn’t answer; instead, he drifted away from the clot of men and used his two-way to call for an ambulance and for the coroner. “Dave Deets is dead,” he said into the radio, “but don’t mention his name to anybody. All you know is we’ve had one fatality and a couple of injuries.”
Another eerie cry sounded from the upper reaches of the terrain. This time it came in staccato bursts that brought to Rourke’s mind a cartoonish wildcat with a stutter. The odd cry brought the cawing response of countless unseen crows; the crows’ raspy caws raised new gooseflesh on Rourke’s arms and puckered his anus. Every man in his company of searchers stiffened with palpable fear, sensing what was coming next.
“Holy shit, here they come!” someone shouted.
A murder of crows swooped down out of the fog in attack formation.
A shotgun blast greeted them.
And still they
came.
Chapter Twenty-Two
* * *
Liza Leatherwood came awake with a shudder. A muscle spasm in her lower back brought a whimper to her phlegmy throat. A film of fog blurred the lenses of her bifocals, trapping a tiny piece of faded rainbow there, but she nevertheless saw that the dogs still sat in her front yard, keeping their evil vigil. Three dangerous-looking mongrels with dead eyes and dark, mangy fur. Watching her.
“Lord,” she said with a guttural moan. “I’m too old and feeble for this nonesuch.”
Her trek to and from the haunted tree had exhausted her, and she’d fallen asleep in the front-porch rocker before sunup. Now daylight filtered through the thinning fog, and she judged that she’d slept for at least an hour in the chill air. Her arthritis pained her something fierce, especially in her fingers and in the joints of her arms and wrists. She wanted to get up and go inside the house for some pain medicine and to escape the malicious gaze of those dead eyes, but she couldn’t find the energy to make a single move. Moreover, she was afraid that the dogs wouldn’t let her out of their sight. No doubt they had followed her from the spirit-haunted tree, in unholy service to the Demon of the Dark Wood. Their vile master somehow knew what she intended to do, and he would do his damnedest to stop her. She wondered if the bugger also knew how stubborn she could be once she set her mind to do something.
“Aye,” she said for the benefit of the hounds, “when I make my mind up to do something, by God I do it. And it’ll take more than the likes of you ugly fleabags to stop me.”
Trouble was, she couldn’t do the chore herself—she wasn’t physically able. She would have to get somebody else to do it for her. But that was all right, because she knew just the man for the job. All she had to do was get up, go inside, pick up the phone and call him.
When the spasms in her back subsided, she drew in a big breath, braced her knotty hands on the flat arms of the rocker and pushed up to a tentative standing position. She swayed a little, keeping her eyes on the three dogs. They didn’t move off their haunches, but they did seem to sit up a bit straighter, as if alerted for action.
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