“Professor Alfred Thorn,” the dispatcher said.
“He say what they were doing out there?”
“Negative.”
He sped past the old Leatherwood place and turned onto the twin ruts of Haunted Tree Trail. With the wild-animal attacks on his search party still sorely fresh in his mind, he was obliged to wonder if the bear attack might’ve been—for whatever reason—directed by the same “supernatural” entity, Rourke’s new nemesis.
The trail was bumpy and Rourke slowed down. Even so, the cruiser’s shock absorbers were stressed to the max. The trees and thick undergrowth encroached upon both sides of the trail as if they meant to overtake and obliterate it.
When the top of the fabled tree came into view, Rourke recalled some of the silly stories he’d heard about it in his youth, spooky tales suggesting that tree’s twisted trunk and gnome-like limbs resulted from an ancient witch’s curse. Of course, he’d never believed any of them, but there had been that one time when he, a senior in high school, had parked near the tree with his sweetheart Cheryl Tatum and she swore that she heard eerie voices coming from the tree. Cheryl, normally a levelheaded girl, was so frightened by those voices that she refused to go near that “creepy place” ever again. She was crying as he drove them away in his restored Impala. “They sounded so angry,” she said of the spirit voices. Rob asked what they had said. “Nothing in words,” Cheryl answered. “Just angry screaming.”
Now, as he pulled up and parked the cruiser behind the Tip Top Tree truck and got his first hurried look at the mauled victims of the bear attack, memories of Cheryl Tatum and her spirit voices fled and Rourke steeled himself for a close-up look at the decedent.
Alfred Thorn and an old woman in a long black dress watched as the two paramedics loaded a stretcher bearing a bloodied victim into the EMS vehicle. The biggest black bear Rourke had ever seen lay dead in the dirt, gunshot wounds evident in its head and face. Rourke slid out of the cruiser and joined Thorn and the old lady he now recognized as Mrs. Leatherwood.
“What the hell happened here?” he asked.
Thorn looked at him as if he were a dim-witted student and said, “Isn’t it obvious?”
Then the Leatherwood widow rounded on Rourke and said, “Tell him he has to cut down that tree! You tell him!”
“A man is dead!” Thorn shouted at the old lady, as if this explained his apparent reluctance to do her urgent bidding.
“For God’s sake, make him finish that tree!” Mrs. Leatherwood implored. “More people will be dead if he don’t.”
Rourke looked at the haunted tree and saw that a wedge had been cut from the heart of its trunk and that it wouldn’t take much work to finish the job. Then he glanced at the partially decapitated corpse lying at the foot of the tree, a chainsaw resting close to the corpse. “Calm down and tell me what’re you doing here and what happened,” he said. “You first, Professor Thorn.”
The EMS vehicle sped off to deliver the injured man to the medical center.
A few minutes after Thorn launched into his sketchy story of buried bones, murder and ancient myth, Mrs. Leatherwood said, “Lord help me,” and marched stiffly toward the tree. She bent down, picked up the chainsaw, and said, “How do you start this damn thing?”
* * * *
Carrying the head of the man she’d decapitated with an ax, Jude followed her sister-brides out the back of the restaurant and into the woods behind it. Two of their number had fallen in the furious revelry so now they were eight, each bearing a severed male head. Jude knew no remorse, felt nothing for their two dead sister-brides. Judy Lynn Bowen might’ve mourned the loss, had she not been reborn as Jude. Jude’s higher calling did not allow for such human weaknesses as remorse, guilt or horror. Such emotions were transformed once you were washed in the blood. Remorse became joy. Guilt became pride. Horror became ecstasy.
They moved without words through the deepening woods, ranging with alacrity over hill and dale. Blood-sated yet still hungry, they moved with animal sureness to answer the summons of their beloved master—their betrothed. His call had never been so urgent as it was now. He needed them. He commanded them to run faster.
Answering the summons singing in her blood, Jude ran as hard as she could. She quickly outdistanced her sisters and grinned with prideful pleasure as she led the wolfish pack.
* * * *
Knott parked his Jag in front of Ridgewood and went inside to see his wife again and his other patients. After a shave and a vigorous scrubbing in the shower, he felt presentable, but the miasmal residue of that mysterious creature still clung to him as stubbornly as the stench of a skunk’s spray, although it was subtler and not as rank. It wasn’t unpleasant exactly, but it conjured unwanted images of that cave and of unspeakable depravity. He’d splashed on extra cologne in hopes of covering it up.
He decided to see Sharyn Rampling first again because he didn’t wish to give the appearance of providing his wife special treatment. Maybe it was silly but it seemed the right thing to do.
As soon as he walked onto the unit, he knew things were getting out of hand. A female patient in the seclusion room was shouting curses and banging her fists on the padded door, demanding to be freed. A middle-aged man in pajamas was arguing with one of the nursing staff, threatening to sue the hospital if he couldn’t get his street clothes back. Down at the end of the hall, two young female patients were engaged in a shouting match in a disagreement over who was next to use the pay phone. The shorthanded staff was doing its best to put out these little fires before they could erupt into a behavioral conflagration. Knott ignored the uproar and went directly to the door of Sharyn Rampling’s room. He raised his hand to knock and then hesitated. He was suddenly inexplicably afraid. He did not want to enter this room, intensely afraid of what might lie in wait on the other side of the door. He wanted to run back to his Jag, drive away from this place and put this waking nightmare behind him forever.
Thunder rumbled and the lights in the dim hallway flickered.
Knott’s fist remained frozen inches from the dreaded door.
* * * *
Something was wrong. She felt it in the muggy air of her room. She felt it like a knot twisting low in her belly. Where before she had been certain of her place in the coming fantastic events, now she felt an acute uncertainty, as if the world were turning the wrong way, leaving her to spiral out of control, far afield from her rightful place in that world.
Sharyn knew she was cycling. But this time it was happening too fast. She hadn’t been off her lithium long enough to feel this manic so soon. But it was more than that. What she was experiencing now had more to do with the goat-man god than with her chemical imbalance.
Things were going so wrong. Things outside herself. An encompassing wrongness. Smothering her. She couldn’t sit still for it. She had to act.
Susan Knott. Yes, she needed to be with her now. Susan would reassure her, tell her what to do, or at least give her a sign.
She jumped up from the bed and snatched the door open. Freshly shaved and showered, Dr. Knott stood in the doorway with a raised fist, and Sharyn recoiled as if she expected him to strike her down.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I was just about to knock.”
Backing away, she said, “I can’t … I can’t talk to you now.”
“Why not? What’s wrong?” He came into the room and softly shut the door.
She blurted: “I want to sign myself out.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Sharyn.”
“I can’t be here anymore. I have to go.”
“It will be AMA,” he said. “Against medical advice. Your insurance probably won’t pay if you leave that way.”
“I don’t care. Get the papers ready. I’ll sign them. I have to go.”
She would’ve said anything to get him to leave her alone. She was afraid he would see the mania smoldering behind her eyes. Perhaps she would sign herself out! But not before she saw Su
san Knott once more.
“All right,” Dr. Knott said, “but first tell me why you feel you have to leave.”
Then she smelled the scent of the beast again. It remained on him beneath the aroma of expensive cologne, the same scent she’d smelled on Susan, but stronger. A dizzying, maddening scent that sent her spiraling faster toward chaos. The creature’s persistent scent no shower could wash away. Further proof—as if she needed it!—of the existence of the demigod behind ancient myths.
“I just told you, I can’t talk now. I’m done talking. Please get out of my room, Doctor. My AMA papers, don’t forget. Please. Now, okay? I have to go. Talk, talk, talk, I’m all talked out and more’s the pity.”
“Did you take your lithium today?” he asked, cocking a brow.
“Yes, yes, I took the damn stuff, now get out before I … I …”
“Before you what?”
Sharyn didn’t get a chance to answer because the door suddenly burst open and Susan Knott shoved her husband from behind, making him stumble into the unmade bed.
Still in a hospital gown, Susan glared at him and said, “You thought you could slip past me, Dr. Freud? Give me the old Freudian slip again? Well, fuck you, Doc! You never could slip anything by me. I know all about your harem of nurses. And I don’t doubt you fucked more than a few of your patients, using your godlike position to seduce defenseless women. You’re a pig. A male chauvinist pig. But guess what? You’re all done. It’s time to take this pig to slaughter!”
Susan shot her hand out and jabbed something into her husband’s neck. Then she yanked it out and jabbed it in again. Blood spurted from the first puncture. Knott fell backward on the bed and his wife went after him, relentlessly stabbing at his throat.
Sharyn watched, fascinated by the violence. After the third or fourth jab, she understood that the weapon Susan was using was a pink plastic toothbrush handle sharpened to a lethal point.
Dr. Knott’s complexion went swiftly from angry red to ghastly white as his blood ejaculated into the air and in thready spurts onto his wife. He slapped at her but his defensive efforts were ineffectual, weakened as he was by shock and rapid blood-loss.
His eyes rolled up into their sockets and he lay still. Susan straddled him and began to lap and suck blood from his wounds. After a long moment of noisy slurping, she smiled up at Sharyn, licked a bit of gore from her upper lip and said, “Join me?”
Sharyn returned the smile and said, “Yes, thank you.” Then she fell upon the wounds, feeling as if she had regained at last her proper place in the world.
Chapter Thirty-Three
* * *
Julie Archer had thought nothing could stop the demonic flow of her words onto the laptop’s screen and into the electronic file. Not even the slow seep of her menses leaking onto the seat. (Any other time she would’ve gotten up for a Tampax, but then, any other time she wouldn’t have been writing naked. And anyway, this wasn’t any other time. This was NOW.) Not even the fierce thunderstorm blowing up right outside the window overlooking her Garden of Angels had deterred her. She owed it to herself, to her art and to Angela for her sacrifice to keep working, to keep the inspired narrative going full-tilt boogie, baby, like a ghost train bound for hell. Nothing could stop her.
But the summons, when it came, proved Julie wrong. The shrill call superseded everything, dashed all previous concerns. It was the wild card that trumped all others. The wildest card.
The summons said: Ditch the fiction and come taste real horror!
The summons said: You’ve always had a taste for horror.
The summons said: Come or die.
Julie closed the laptop, glanced longingly at her dead lover on the floor, then went downstairs to collect the biggest kitchen knife in the silverware drawer before dashing out into the rising storm to answer the irresistible call to sublime action.
* * * *
“We’re in for a big blow,” the coroner said with a wary nod at the threatening sky. Storm clouds hung low over the mountains like overripe fruit ready to fall to earth. Thunder rumbled in the western sky. The weather leached light from the late afternoon and lent the landscape a pallid blush.
Rourke absently nodded, distracted by Mrs. Leatherwood’s persistence in pestering him. When he’d taken the chainsaw away from her, the old woman had gone into hysterics, and his attempts to reason with her had fallen on deaf ears. Thorn had said, “Save your breath, deputy, she can’t hear worth a damn.”
“Why does she want that tree cut down?” Rourke had asked.
“Long story,” Thorn had cryptically replied. “Not one you would believe.”
Then Dave Sikes the coroner had arrived in his black station wagon to discharge his official duty and pronounce the corpse dead of a bear attack. “Didn’t know we had bears this big around here,” Sikes had said of the dead animal.
“Me either,” Rourke had muttered, keeping an eye on Mrs. Leatherwood to make sure she didn’t have another go at the chainsaw.
And now, having got her second wind, the old lady was at it again, berating both he and Thorn for failing to fell the haunted tree.
Thorn said in a loud voice, “I will finish the job, Mrs. Leatherwood, but we have to wait until they remove the body. Understand?”
Then the professor turned to Rourke and said, “Those bones, if they’re there, will be of the Civil War era. That’s why I’m here. After the tree’s removed, this will be the site of an archeological dig. The coroner may have to come out here again in a day or two, if I have any luck.”
“What makes you think they’re buried there?” Rourke asked.
“Mrs. Leatherwood says they are.” Thorn lowered his voice and added: “She also thinks the spirits of the dead will be freed when the tree is cut down and that they will drive off some mythical boogeyman. I believe her about the buried bones, though.”
“Boogeyman …” echoed Rourke.
“Yes, she believes—”
“Mr. Sikes, let’s remove the body,” Rourke said with authority. Then to Thorn, he said, “As soon as the body is clear, I want you to take that tree down.”
* * * *
She was so tired, all she wanted to do was shut her eyes and go to sleep, perhaps never to wake. But she knew she had to see this through to the end. She had to see the tree cut down at last. Only then could she rest.
She was back in the professor’s little sports car, surprisingly comfortable in the bucket seat. So comfortable that it was hard to keep her eyes open. Thorn had put the canvas top up to keep the rain off her, but so far they’d had no more than a light sprinkle of big splattering drops.
As Thorn picked up the chainsaw, Liza looked round at the dark woods with the expectation of seeing more minions sent by the Dark Man to prevent the felling of the tree and the release of trapped souls. Where the bear had failed, the next assault might succeed. She looked but saw nothing sinister lurking in the woodsy shadows. Her bifocals weren’t as effective as they used to be. She regretted that she’d put off a visit to the eye doctor for a new prescription. Just the same, she could see well enough to recognize new dangers when they came. And they were coming. The withering sensation in her heart told her so.
* * * *
They ran and ran. The mountainous terrain was torturous but still they ran, ignoring the cuts and scrapes on their bare feet and naked flesh. The running had been too much for one of them (the oldest and heaviest among them: the sheriff’s dowdy wife) and she had succumbed to an overtaxed heart, but the rest of them ran without falter, with Jude leading the way.
The booming thunder seemed to drive them on, adding urgency to their calling.
Jude’s lungs were on fire and her limbs were heavy with fatigue but she didn’t let herself slow down. Her mind was steeled, her resolve firm as her tits. She was already thinking of herself as First Bride to their omnipotent groom. Damned if she would allow one of the others curry his favor ahead of her. She was going to be the first to present him with the vital offering
of a dead man’s head.
The world of houses, streets, cars, phones, power lines, humdrum people and humdrum places—that world was no longer real. The dark woods were real. Judy Lynn’s make-believe civilized world was gone, as was Judy Lynn the pretend person. Reality was Jude running to meet her eternal beloved. Running was reality. Reality was running, running through an Eden-like paradise, running away from mundane cares and workaday concerns. Running to a reward older than mythical Eden. Jude ran for all she was worth. She ran after the ultimate blood-promise of deliverance.
Ax in one hand, dripping head in the other, she darted across the forested earth, dodging trees and patches of briar, skipping over rotting logs and skirting grabby vines, cross-country running for glory, for glorious release.
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.
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