The spirits trapped in the tree had told her it would work. The ghosts of Wilbur and Asa had lingered long enough to facilitate her communication with the imprisoned spirits, otherwise she probably wouldn’t have been able to receive the otherworldly message.
The message was clear enough. One of the original wild women had planted the seed given her by the dark man of the wood in this unhallowed ground, and from that seed this cursed tree hand sprung. As long as the tree stood, the souls of the slaughtered men would remain imprisoned. Take the tree down and their souls would at last be freed, and their righteous rage would be strong enough to drive the goatish god away and break his supernatural hold over the current inhabitants of this hill country. As far-fetched as it seemed to her, Liza had to believe in the hard-won wisdom of the spirit world; she had to believe it would work.
She prayed that it would.
The sun’s shadows were growing long, and she shielded her eyes with her hand because the bright rays hurt her tired eyes. In the ear with the punctured drum, the chainsaw sounded like the buzzing of a mosquito.
She blinked her eyes. She squinted behind her bifocals. What was that coming out of the woods? At first she thought it was another devil dog, but as it charged clear of the underbrush and trees she saw the thing for what it was: a huge bear!
Transfixed by the terrible beauty of the great lumbering beast, she sat frozen in a long moment of pure awe. Then a harsh shudder ran down her spine and the spell was broken.
The others hadn’t yet seen the black beast. She shouted a warning but no one could hear her above the chainsaw’s steady whine.
She threw open the door and half-stumbled out of the car.
The bear was coming up on the professor’s left, gaining speed as it ran toward the haunted tree. Liza knew then that the goat-man demon had sent the bear to prevent the felling of the tree. She knew this as sure as she knew her own name. As sure as God created Heaven and Earth.
She ran with one arm outstretched toward Thorn. Her clunky shoes and arthritic bones made her movements painfully awkward. She wasn’t running, she was shambling, doing the Old Folks’ Shuffle as if on wooden legs and locked ankle joints. Her heart was a fluttering hummingbird trapped in her chest, wings beating in panicked desperation.
The black bear was less than five yards away from Thorn and the two boys. Liza shouted, “Hey!”
Professor Thorn turned his head her way just in time to see her stumble and fall to the hard ground. Her head landed on her outstretched arm, knocking her bifocals off her face.
What she saw from down there was a maddening blur of violent motion colored with heartbreaking splashes of blood.
* * * *
When Thorn saw Mrs. Leatherwood trip and fall, he immediately started toward her, to help her up. He hoped her brittle bones weren’t broken. People her age often died of medical complications resulting from broken hips and such. Her face was a scrunched-up mask of wrinkles, eyes wide, mouth working soundlessly.
As Thorn dropped to one knee beside her, Todd Beasley flew into the edge of his field of vision, tumbling through the air as if doing an acrobatic cartwheel in the sky, a rooster-tail of blood growing from his head.
Thorn turned and saw a giant bear charging toward Carl the Tip Top Tree man. Wearing protective goggles and a yellow hardhat, Carl was bent to his work with the chainsaw and didn’t see the massive beast bearing down on him.
Thorn shouted a futile warning. Then he remembered the pistol under his belt. He drew the .45 and took quick aim at the bear’s enormous hindquarters.
He fired just as the bear plowed into Carl and knocked the man to the ground with stunning force. The chainsaw hit the ground and chewed dirt as it sputtered and died.
Thorn fired again as the bear swatted a big paw at Carl’s head and shoulders. Then Thorn was walking toward the black-furred beast, firing shot after shot into its flanks and ass.
The bear roared as it turned toward Thorn. It was the most terrifying sound he’d ever heard. It communicated all the rage of the animal kingdom. It said: I’m going to rip your flesh apart and crush your bones in my teeth! It said: I’m going to devour you in all your parts and shit your sorry remains in the dirt!
“Kill it!” the Leatherwood woman yelled.
“Jesus Christ!” blurted Jason Darby. Then he threw down his shovel and ran toward the Toyota pickup.
Carl the tree man’s head hung at an odd angle, partially detached from his neck. The bear’s claws had easily ripped through the man’s flesh, severing tendons and blood vessels but missing the vertebrae. Carl’s eyes were wide open and still blinking, as if his head didn’t know it was living on borrowed time now, effectively estranged from its body.
The bear’s close-set beady eyes locked on Thorn. It let loose another terrible roar and then came lumbering toward him, gaining speed and quickly eating up the meager distance separating Thorn from a grisly death.
* * * *
Marlene Tew was already exhausted. Her feet hurt, her lower back was achy, and she was getting a booger of a headache. And the busiest hours lay ahead of her. The Trucking-A was a popular stop, not just for truckers but for motorists in general and even for the locals who wanted a tasty meal in homey surroundings. What this meant for Marlene and the Trucking-A’s other waitresses was hour after hour of fast-paced table hopping, modest tips and few opportunities to slip out back for a cigarette or to collapse in a chair and put your feet up.
This afternoon the boss had called Marlene in to cover Karla’s evening shift because Karla hadn’t shown up, hadn’t even called in sick. It wasn’t like Karla to not show up without calling in, and Marlene was concerned for her old friend and co-worker, but the job kept her too busy to do much worrying. She had her designated tables to work, and it was her practice to never get behind, never to let the orders pile up on you. That was the only way to keep from getting worn to a frazzle in this job. Keep up! Stay ahead of the curve. Never get behind the curve. She didn’t exactly understand what that phrase meant, behind the curve, so she’d given it her own interpretation. Like a NASCAR driver, you wanted to stay ahead of the pack if you wanted to win the race. Behind a curve in the track, with other cars ahead of you, was where you didn’t ever want to be.
Right now she was ahead of the curve. It was too early for the supper crowd. There were thirteen diners, mostly men, except for a family of vacationers on their way to Florida, and most of the men were truckers. Sometimes Marlene would see a female trucker but not that often.
Of course, it was a damn site easier to keep up on the nightshift, and having worked all night last night, she hadn’t had her usual allotment of sleep—and no unwind-time at all—before having to put on a fresh pink uniform and return for the extra shift. So she was already exhausted.
And totally unprepared to face the bizarre horror that was about to turn the Trucking-A’s down-home restaurant into a slaughterhouse.
It began when the crazy-eyed topless chick burst through the door with a crooked hickory walking stick in her hand. On her head was a wreath woven from a honeysuckle vine. Her cut-off jeans appeared to be blood-stained, as did her thighs and ankles. She didn’t utter a word as her wild eyes swept the entire room, as if quickly counting heads.
Kenny the fry cook looked up from his griddle and shouted: “Hey! You can’t …” His words trailed off as two, no, three more wild women in various stages of undress filed in through the front entrance, coming to stand with the first one. One of them had an ax. One had a machete. The other had a pick-ax. All of the blades were blood-streaked.
Marlene dropped her tray of food and it hit the floor with a sharp clatter. Her heart pounded with trip-hammer force, making her eyes jump in their sockets. When the woman with the honeysuckle wreath raised her hickory stick and let out a warbling war cry, an involuntary trickle of urine soiled Marlene’s panties, and she began to tremble all over.
There was a brief moment of relief when Marlene told herself that this had to be a
bizarre protest by animal-rights activists or a bit of guerilla theater staged by crazed vegans to shock the meat-eating customers. But her relief died when she smelled this band of wild-eyed women. It was an overpowering feral scent that put unwanted pictures in Marlene’s head, pictures of unspeakable acts of brutality and sexual perversions of the worst kind imaginable.
No, these women weren’t here to protest anything. They had come to do violence. They were here to inflict deadly wounds. These were modern-day warrior women.
When six more of their tribe streamed in through the front entrance and the last one in locked the door and turned the CLOSED sign outward, Marlene turned and ran toward the double swinging-doors to the kitchen, intending to slip out the back door, jump in her car and get the hell out of there. She stopped short, her heels skidding to a halt, when a naked woman with a baseball bat exploded through the swinging doors and bashed the head of Skinny Jenny, the newlywed waitress who weighed ninety pounds in her stocking feet. Jenny went down with her tray of hot food, blood from her scalp spattered on a side-dish of fries.
A big trucker Marlene knew only as Big Bob jumped up from his plate heaped with a T-bone steak and potatoes and advanced toward the woman with the baseball bat. His pinched-face expression suggested a man afflicted with severe constipation. “Give me that bat, you crazy bitch,” Big Bob growled.
The crazy bitch gave it to him. An off-the-shoulder shot right across Big Bob’s prominent jaw, the bat cracking with a homerun sound, and Big Bob staggered backward, stunned, his lower jaw hanging at a strange angle, his eyes red-rimmed and instantly bloodshot. He lowered his head, hunched his thick shoulders, and snorted; Marlene could see that he was going to charge the batter like a mad bull. But Big Bob was too slow. The crazy bitch cocked the bat and swung again, this time connecting with the side of Big Bob’s head, just behind the left ear. The big man dropped to his knees, then toppled forward onto his face.
Marlene had been backing slowly away during the one-sided bout between Big Bob and Crazy Bat, and now she bumped into the lunch counter. She glanced down. Saw the steak knife resting on the edge of a gravy-smeared plate piled with well-gnawed chicken bones that hadn’t yet been bussed. Without giving thought to the consequences, she snatched up the steak knife and held it out in front of her with both hands as if wielding a heavy sword. She pointed it at Crazy Bat and hoped it would discourage the wild woman from coming any closer. Go bat somebody else and leave me alone. But of course, she didn’t. She leered at Marlene, laughed demonically, and then slammed the bat down on the counter just to see Marlene flinch.
Seeing the woman up close, Marlene realized that she knew this woman, by sight but not by name. She goes to my church! Usually on the arm of a distinguished-looking portly man with graying hair. With her face dirtied, her hair disheveled, her long legs streaked with dried blood and breasts bared, she looked more like an Amazon jungle woman than a churchgoer. Nevertheless, Marlene said, “You go to my church. Sweet Jesus, don’t hurt me.” It was a desperate thing to have to say, and it was said to no effect whatsoever.
Crazy Bat again smacked the bat on the countertop. Again Marlene jumped. The woman glanced at Marlene’s nametag and said, “Jesus ain’t here, Marlene. You serve the wrong god. Too bad for you. Marlene.”
Marlene was dimly aware of violent commotion in other sections of the restaurant. She heard the disturbing sounds of blows being struck, of blades chopping into live flesh, going ker-chook! ker-chunk! And the screams, Jesus! the screams and the pitiful cries for help! A little boy crying for his mama—one of the vacationing couple’s towheaded twins. The shouted curses. The whimpers. The desperate pleas. She couldn’t think about that now. She had to concentrate on getting away from the woman with the bat and getting the hell out of this … abattoir.
The wrong god. What the devil did that mean? The woman had said plain as day that Marlene served the wrong god. Ask her! Put her off! Distract her with the question and then run for it.
“Whaddaya mean, I serve the wrong god?” she asked, her voice quaking with mortal fear.
With a casual flick of the bat, the woman knocked the knife out of Marlene’s hands. “Wanna see?” Crazy Bat asked with mad glee. “Wanna see?” Then she chivvied Marlene behind the lunch counter, made her place her hands palms-down on the countertop, and proceeded to use the bat to hammer Marlene’s hands to the countertop with steak knives.
Marlene passed out when the second knife pinned her left hand to the counter. She couldn’t have been out for long, because when she came to, the slaughter was still going on. She was a captive witness. She watched in a painful daze. It was almost as if she were watching a movie. Drunk-sick and watching a snuff film. Bodies sprawled across tables and on the floor in pools and smears of bright blood.
Only one man remained alive. A tall trucker with a CAT hat sitting sideways on his head. He’d taken an ax away from one of the wild women and split her head with it, and now the other women had him backed into a corner and were menacing him with their weapons. He swung the ax but the females stayed just out of his range. The woman with the honeysuckle wreath in her hair poked at him with her hickory stick and he swatted it away. A weaponless woman with short blond hair pegged him with a bottle of hot sauce, right between his eyes. He swung blindly, and the women swarmed over him and wrestled him to the floor.
Marlene shut her eyes after a fat woman with a huge heart-shaped ass planted a meat cleaver in his throat. She tried to shut her ears to the ungodly sounds coming from the killing corner, but of course it wasn’t possible to shut your ears. Your ears were defenseless when your hands were pegged in place with knives and helpless.
Marlene drifted in and out of consciousness. At one point, she felt an overwhelming presence and was suddenly certain that if she opened her eyes she would see the powerful god she’d neglected to serve, but all she saw was a wicked bunch of gluttonous women hungrily eating the raw flesh of severed limbs.
Chapter Thirty-Two
* * *
In recent years Liza Leatherwood had sometimes imagined how Death might take her, how she would finally succumb. She’d never believed that she would die peacefully in her sleep. She doubted that anyone ever died peacefully in sleep. Death might find you abed, in the middle of the night, but there was no way you could sleep through it. There had to come that moment when you found yourself in Death’s cold grip and you knew your time on earth was up. When your heart stopped or something vital exploded in your brain, there had to come that moment of panic or regret when you realized you were about to be evicted from your body and that your body was only hours away from the undertaker’s table, days away from burial or cremation. Dying peacefully in sleep was nothing but a tall tale people told themselves, hoping to take comfort in the myth.
But of all the ways Liz imagined Death would claim her, she’d never dreamt that Death would come in the guise of a ferocious bear. Yet, there the bear was, charging down on the professor, chuffing like a steam engine as it closed in for the kill. If Thorn couldn’t stop the giant beast with his little pistol, the bear would surely take her after it was done with him. It was to be her punishment for daring to interfere with the Dark Man of the Wood’s unholy plan.
The tree remained standing, the souls still imprisoned within it, and the man who’d tried to cut it down lay dead, nearly decapitated. It galled her that she might die in such abject failure. Her own noble plan had come to nothing. The goat-man would win and have his way, and Liza’s pitiful soul would journey from this mortal realm bearing that failure. She would have to stand before God in shame, knowing that her failure had needlessly cost many innocent lives.
She found her bifocals and slipped them on, and then pushed herself up into a kneeling position so that she could bear solemn witness to Thorn’s demise (she owed him that much) and so that she might offer a final prayer for forgiveness before the beast savaged her.
Liza had to admire the man’s bravery. He stood his ground, aimed his gun and didn�
�t shoot until the bear was less than five yards away. Bam! Bam! Bam! Three rapid shots that should’ve hit the animal dead in the face, but Liza couldn’t see if they did. The bear didn’t slow down. And then it was too late anyway, because the bear was right on top of the professor.
“Lord …” Liza began her last prayer.
Then the miracle happened.
Professor Thorn turned on his heels and let the bear go past him like a bullfighter waving the bull by with his red cape in a graceful veronica. But Thorn had no cape, and the bear didn’t actually go by. The bear crashed headlong into the ground like a locomotive that has run out of track and must plow into earth like a doomed Leviathan.
Liza raised her clasped hands to the sky, shook her doubled fists and said, “Thank you, Jesus!”
* * * *
Rourke was cruising a back road near Widow’s Ridge when the dispatcher radioed the report of a bear attack on Haunted Tree Trail. One fatality, and one severe injury. EMS was already en route.
He turned around, switched on the emergency flashers and gunned the engine as he headed for Widow’s Ridge Road.
Haunted Tree Trail was the Department’s unofficial designation for the dirt road that dead-ended at the “haunted” tree. The place was a popular make-out spot for horny teenagers, and on weekends it was a routine checkpoint for patrolling deputies. You had to show the colors to keep the kids honest, to keep them from going too far. The kids understood that if you caught them with their clothes off or if two heads weren’t visible when you put the spotlight on their car, they would be in for an embarrassing police escort to their respective homes, where they would be made to confess their fumbling sins to their parents.
But now it wasn’t even dusk, so Rourke doubted that the victims of the bear attack had been teenagers out for a little early park-and-spark action. Besides, if you stayed in your vehicle, you shouldn’t be vulnerable to a bear attack.
Rourke radioed the dispatcher. “Who called in the bear attack?” he asked.
Daemon of the Dark Wood Page 25
