Daemon of the Dark Wood Read Online Free PDF Page B

Mrs. Leatherwood. I hope you enjoy the book.”
    She watched him drive off, secretly saddened by his departure. The truth was, she liked the man and rather enjoyed being in the company of a gentleman of such scholarship. She regretted having to send him off so rudely, but she’d had no other choice. The one thing he wanted from her was the very thing she was sworn to keep to herself. She had sworn an oath before Granny and God never to speak of the Helling; she had kept that oath for a passel of years and she didn’t intend to break it now that her remaining years on this earth were surely numbered in single digits. You didn’t get into Heaven by breaking a sacred oath. On the other hand, Liza questioned the wisdom of taking such terrible knowledge to the grave. Would not her soul be tainted by carrying that sinful knowledge so close to her heart for so many years? Though she wasn’t Catholic, she believed confession was a necessary means of unburdening the soul and cleansing the spirit. Dare she stand naked before her Maker with this guilty secret still in her bosom?
    There had been times when she hated her grandmother for telling her of the Helling, times when she couldn’t fathom why the old woman had deemed it necessary to impart the horrible secret to her innocent granddaughter; but as she matured, Liza came to understand Granny’s motive. The elder had brought her into the sisterhood of truth and baptized her with the bloody knowledge so that she, Liza, would be forewarned against a recurrence of the abominable incident. “Forewarned is forearmed,” as Wilbur used to say, usually in reference to matters of politics and weather. Granny had forewarned her so that she might be able to resist the “shrill and dark summons” if it ever came again.
    And last night it
had
come. Howling out of the dark wood, the dreadful summoning had ripped the night with its evil cry. Piercing and irresistible, the demonic shriek echoed across hill and hollow, seeking resonance in souls pricked by its barbed waves of sound. Liza had been snapping pole beans at the kitchen table when the unearthly screech found her. As insidious tendrils of sound slithered around her, she stiffened her spine and felt the dribble of warm urine in her crotch. Even as she felt the commanding force of the shrieker behind the shriek, she found the will to clap her hand over her good ear to muffle the sound, and when the shriek finally ended in eerie silence, she crumpled forward to rest her head on the kitchen table, exhausted by the effort of resistance. The deafness of her left ear had undoubtedly saved her by diminishing the effect of the shrieking summons. Yet she instinctively knew she was far from safe; the next commanding cry would find her weakened and afraid. She didn’t believe she had it within her to fend off the summoner a second time.
    Drastic measures were required, and now that Professor Thorn was gone, Liza could get on with what she knew she had to do. She picked up the Mason jar, removed the lid and drank some of the potent brew (corn liquor Otis King brewed in his basement for his personal consumption). Liza had never been a teetotaler, but she couldn’t remember the last time she had imbibed
spiritus fermenti—
which was all to the good because it meant that the brew would hit her hard and fast, numbing her senses and dulling the pain she was about to inflict upon herself. She didn’t want to do it, but she could think of no other way to defend herself against the evil shrieker.
    The Black Man of the wood.
    When the jar was half emptied, she knew she was drunk enough to proceed. She pulled up the skirt of her long dress and withdrew the hatpin from the bottom hem, then she dipped the sharp tip of the long pin into the jar of spirits to sterilize it.
    As she gazed out over the hamlet of Widow’s Ridge and at the complex of new townhouses below it, she paused a long moment to listen to the singing of unseen birds, and then she