Orenda - Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4

Patty Sullivan limped across the worn but still comfortable carpet of her bedroom. Ordinarily, her limp was not this pronounced. This morning, however, she had a hangover much worse than normal. It seemed to her that she had aged thirty years during the night. As she stumbled past her full length mirror, she caught a glimpse of herself. She paused, and looked more deeply into the shiny surface. She saw an image of herself as an old woman.

With her right hand, she lifted a few strands of her hair, and held it straight out. It was frumpy, frizzed; damaged by the dehydrating effects of alcohol. She let the hair drop back into place, and pinched at the skin under her chin. It was beginning to sag, prematurely losing its tone. She turned sideways to the mirror and noticed that her posture was slightly stooped. Together with the increasingly obvious limp in her injured leg, she knew these to be signs that her muscles were losing their tone and strength. She realized with a start that if she didn't find some way to stop drinking, she would be dead before she reached thirty.

She turned sideways to the mirror again, and examined the four dimpled scars that ran across her left buttocks and trailed off near her knee joint. She ran her fingers along the smooth scar tissue. These were the only outward signs of the ordeal she had suffered five years before. The only visible signs of the trauma which had lead her to a state of nearly constant intoxication, in which she now existed.

She thought back to the years before the ordeal began. Her school years had been full of the joy of happily growing up. Her parents were by no means rich, but they had been comfortable. She had never wanted for anything material. As an only child, she had been the center of her parent's life. She had not disappointed them. She had achieved well in school, although not a super-achiever. Her parents had never particularly wanted her to be an academic. Their philosophy was one of balance; school, chores, and plenty of time left for fun.

They had taught her to share. Not merely to share her things, but to share her love; to give of herself emotionally to others. Consequently, she was a spoiled child, but not a selfish one. She had matured into a woman of strong will, who went after what she wanted, but not at the expense of others.

As she approached adulthood, her mother taught her how to be beautiful. She had patiently shown the ackward young woman the proper use of make-up and perfume. Patty never looked like a painted clown; but rather knew how to highlight her already attractive features; a hint of color here, a decrease of shading there. The finished effect was stunning, and natural. She had mastered the art of using perfume to its best advantage, also. No odious cloud floated about her, offending everyone within range. Instead, one had to be very close to Patty to catch even the faintest hint of her perfume. It was maddening to men, and drew them closer, like a bee is drawn to the tiniest whiff of a delicate flower. The combined effect of her conservative use of make-up and perfume, and demure bearing was devastating to members of the opposite sex. They could not resist her. Those she liked, she allowed to come within the range of her powerful attraction, and chase her until she caught them.

Her father was strict with her, but fair. He was not one to lay down ultimatums; but would tender advice, and then wait silently to see if she followed it. If not, he was always waiting in the wings to pick her up and dust her off. She loved him dearly, but more importantly, she trusted him. It had taken her quite a while to get over his untimely death.

She was glad that he had died happily. There was only one thing that approached her father's love of his family, and that was his love for hunting. It was his therapy, and his weapon against the stress of his managerial position. He always went, those weekends that he could get away, into the deep woods alone. He would reappear late Sunday evening, loaded with rabbit, quail, deer, or whatever else was in season.

One cold Sunday night in January, he had not come home. They found his body on Monday night. He had died of a heart attack among the high trees of the forest he loved. His shotgun had been discharged, but the search party had found no trace of the game he was shooting at when he keeled over and died. The only thing that disturbed the serenity of the peaceful death scene were his eyes. Open, bulging eyes, that almost made it appear as if he had been frightened to death. But the men who brought him out had carefully closed them before any of his family saw them.

He had left his family well off financially, and Patty attended college on the trust he had left for her education. She had studied journalism, but found her niche in the work world in public relations. It did not pay very well, but she found the work interesting and fulfilling.

Henry had come into her life during her senior year in college. He was one year her junior, so she had taken a job in Baltimore to be near him during his final year. They planned to be married as soon as he graduated and found employment. Henry's low key but manly style matched her soft allure and self-confident personality perfectly. He was much like her father, always there when she needed him.

Henry loved and respected her, but he was not the type to place her high on a pedestal and worship her. More than they loved each other, they liked each other, and the hours they spent together were just plain fun. It was as if the two had been separate halves of a whole, but did not realize it until they came together, and melded into something much more than just the combination of two personalities, two hearts, and two minds. They were as if welded together, but no seam line could be seen; no drop of flux marred the perfect symmetry of their relationship.

Patty had inherited her father's love of the outdoors, and finally succeeded in talking Henry into a camping trip into the mountainous terrain of extreme north-western Maryland. That tiny strip of Maryland sandwiched between West Virginia and Pennsylvania contains some of the most rugged country in all of America. They had gone in early winter, during the Christmas break, and Patty had packed tinsel and a few ornaments in order to decorate a natural tree in the festive holiday spirit. She had also packed plenty of warm clothing, although she didn't expect to spend much time in them. They would warm each other in the depths of the large Eider-down sleeping bag her father had given her for her sixteenth birthday.

They were in the sleeping bag, in fact, in the act of making love when the rampaging bear ripped through the flimsy material of the tent. The attack was so unexpected and ferocious that the only reason Patty survived it was because Henry was atop her. Indeed, he was holding her right on the brink of shrieking ecstasy, ready to topple her into that state of euphoric oblivion that no other man had ever been able to send her, before or since.

With one tremendous blow of its paw, the creature had broken Henry's back. Henry did not die immediately, but he was paralyzed, and could not even scream out his agony. She had seen it in his eyes, though. Then, with the same furred limb with which it had broken his spine, the monster picked Henry's limp form up and tossed it aside. In terror, Patty rolled out from beneath Henry, and tried to roll under the far side of the tent.

She was just starting under the edge when the beast caught her left leg. Its long claws knifed through the soft flesh of her buttocks, grating on the bone. Patty was still thrashing violently, panickly pulling to get her upper torso out from beneath the tent. The claws slid along the bone of her thigh, laying the flesh open, until they stuck in her knee joint. The monster stood upright, and cleared the ramainder of the tent away with its right arm. With the shrieking Patty dangling from its left paw, it began swinging her in a wide arc. The swirling blur of the winter forest flashing by her eyes ended when her head slammed against the trunk of a large pine tree.

Patty remembered only the searing pain of the beast's claws rending her buttocks, the wrenching jerk of her knee giving way, and the colorful explosion in her mind, and, of course, the silent, agonized scream in Henry's eyes. Then she passed into a deep blackness.

The park rangers who found them the following morning described it as a classic bear attack with the exception of two oddities. One was that bears would normally be hibernating this late in the fall. The rangers politely questioned her as to the possibility that she and Henry had somehow awakened the hibernating bear. Bears brought out of their winter sleep at the wrong time often display testy and sometimes downright nasty dispositions, they explained. Had they done something to rouse the sleeping monster? No, they had not seen or done anything to antagonize it, she had explained. In fact, they had not even been aware that there were bears in the park.

The second oddity would have been explained if the two lovers had been responsible for arousing the bear. Extremely hungry bears will eat a kill immediately after dispatching it, but the normal course of action is to wait a couple of days. When they decide to wait, they almost always cover the carcass with twigs or dirt to preserve it from scavengers. This bear had not attempted to eat them, and it had not bothered to cover them up. It appeared that the monster simply wanted to kill them, which would probably be the attitude of one roused early from hibernation.

Patty asked the rangers about Henry's condition. She received her answer by their lack of words; that Henry had died during the night while she lay unconscious. She thought of the horror of his death. Unable to move, even to blink his eyes against the dryness, while he heard her scream out in horror and pain. She wondered if he had been forced to stare at her still form, crumpled against the tree trunk, not knowing if she was alive or dead.

"Oh, Henry." She moaned softly, and passed back into the healing blackness.

During the long weeks of surgery, convalescence, physical therapy for her leg, and surgery again and again, Patty relived over and over the immense paw coming down onto Henry's arching back. She felt again the searing pain of the claws slicing into her buttocks and leg, and the numbing slam against the tree trunk. The nightmare always started with the thickly furred arm, and always ended with Henry's pain filled eyes. Her body healed slowly and with great difficulty, but the wound to her psyche would not close. It remained open and festering, refusing all attempts to sooth it. Patty wished with all her heart that she had died in the mountains with Henry.

The psychiatrist had sneaked through her defenses, had befriended her before she even knew what he was there for. He told her that she was too young, too vibrant, too beautiful to die; or to want to die. He said that he could help her over the trauma; he and his greatest ally, time. Had she realized, at first, what he was and why he came visiting her in the hospital, she would have refused to see him. But he was kind, soft-spoken, and persuasive. He held many of the traits that had drawn her to Henry, so by the time she found out that he was a psychiatrist, it was too late to send him away. Patty's mother had been very selective about the doctor she had sent to heal her beloved daughter's torn psyche.

After Patty left the hospital for the final time, she continued to see the psychiatrist for two years. She fell briefly in love with him, but was far too intelligent to pursue a substitute Henry. She took his advice, and began to see other men. Soon, she was caught up in the eternal chase again, and the psychiatrist discharged her. She confided to him that she had not as yet been able to bring herself to have sex with any of the suitors who had flocked to her with little or no encouragement. He told her that she should try, for once she passed that milestone, she would be completely cured.

She did try, the very next weekend. She allowed the handsome young man to seduce her, and talk her into going to a motel with him. She had been fine during the foreplay, and appreciated the man's gentleness. But when he mounted her, his face seemed to change, and became Henry. A huge, hairy paw arced out of the motel wall, and Patty screamed hysterically, slapping at the stunned young man and scrambling out from under him. She pulled the cheap coverlet from the bed as she rolled, and ended up in a corner of the small room, cowering under a small table, clutching the thin blanket in front of her for protection. The young man, in silent disgust, put his clothes on and left. He did not call her again.

She could not face the possibility of that happening again, and discussed the problem with her mother. She suggested a change of location, far away from the memories of Henry. Patty secured a transfer to the company's office in Roanoke, Virginia, and left Baltimore within the month.

The next two years in Roanoke proved to be some better, but the change of location did not alter her inability to have a normal sexual relationship. It was a grave short-coming in her life, for her body craved satisfaction. She simply could not achieve it, and every time she tried, the horrifying flashback occurred. Her violent and panicky actions invariably brought her feelings of shame, inadequacy, and guilt. The stunned suitor would soon move on to more lucrative relationships. The one man she had tried to explain it to, the only one who had remained in the room long enough for her to overcome her fear, had listened to her halting and painful explanation. He had then patted her on the head sympathetically, and said, "You're sure fucked-up, aren't you." He left, and never called on her again.

The past year had been the worst. Out of sheer desperation, Patty had tried a lesbian relationship with one of the women she worked with. Early on the woman had made it plain to Patty what she was, and that she not only liked Patty, but craved her. Patty allowed herself to be seduced.

In the privacy of her apartment, the older woman had slowly, in a practiced way, removed Patty's clothing piece by piece. She had then ministered to the nubile younger woman with her long fingers and moist mouth. Patty began to enter a state of passion that had been barred to her for nearly five years. She moaned in mounting ecstacy when the older woman used her mouth to bring release.

Patty was writhing deliriously with passion when the older woman straddled her body; placing one knee on each side of Patty's head. She lowered her womanhood onto Patty's face. Patty felt her passion begin to drain, then flee from her. She could not breathe, and struggled upward against the enveloping crotch of the other woman; who moaned, rotating her hips against Patty's shoulders. In panicky revulsion, Patty grabbed the woman's thighs, and literally threw her off the bed. She ran towards the bathroom, vomit dribbling from her lips. She bent low over the toilet long after her stomach was void of its contents, gagging and upheaving. Faintly, over the blood pounding in her ears, Patty heard the apartment door slam loudly.

She had given up on sex after that. The shame and guilt brought on by her flashbacks were worse than the sexual frustration she suffered. She began to consume more and more alcohol. It soothed her, and numbed her mind from sexual cravings. For six months, she offset the loss of sex with a moderate consumption of alcohol, and struck a balance which she felt would sustain her. She did not drink constantly, or even nightly; only during those periods when her hormones ran strong and the urges became too much to bear, did she drink alcohol in large amounts.

She felt that she had reached a precarious balance in her life, but one that would allow her to go ahead. The new horror had quickly upset that notion. This was not the flashback she had been suffering during sex, and infrequently as a nightmare. This was worse, for in this replay of Henry's death scene, there was a subtle but profound difference. It started as usual, with the paw flashing out of nowhere, then Henry's stricken eyes, then the unbearable agony of the claws rending her soft backside. But then, before the dizzying whirl through the woods and the slamming of her head, there was a new development. As she was rolling for the side of the tent, just as the beast began to cut into her rear, she looked back and up at the monster's face. The horrifying thing about her observation of the face was not the open maw of a monster bear, its fangs gleaming wetly with dripping saliva, but the fact that it was not the face of a bear at all. It was the face of a man! A dark-skinned man with an oriental cast to his eyes, long black hair, and features contorted with rage and hate. The eyes haunted her. Red eyes! Fearful red eyes!

She awoke screaming. She had seen the face so clearly that she remembered every crease, every wrinkle, every mar on the hairless skin. She sobbed the rest of that night. Was there to be no peace, no respite, no escape from that horrible night five years before? She searched vainly for a razor blade to end the agony with. She found an unopened fifth of whiskey first, and before it was completely empty, found that she could, indeed, find dreamless sleep.

She found that if she drank enough before going to bed, the face did not appear. For six months now, she had nightly barricaded her mind from the man-faced beast with her staunch ally and only true friend. Once in awhile, to make sure that it did not sneak up on her at work, she had a few drinks for lunch, also.

Now, standing in front of her mirror, she saw the deterioration of her beauty. She had always been proud of her appearance. The once lush brunette hair had outlined once sharp and clear almond eyes. Now, her hair hung in frizzy strings, as if to emphasize the dull, bloodshot orbs. She straightened her back, but noticed that it did not pull her breasts to their previous up-tilted prominence. Tears formed in her eyes and rolled down her washed-out cheeks. She realized that she was on the verge of losing everything that was still attractive about herself. When the bottle ceased to work, she knew, there would be nothing left, and her world would end in suicide.

In desperation, she sought the help of another psychiatrist. After a few visits, he told her that he had her problem isolated down to two possibilities.

The first possibility was that she had a true memory of the man-bear, and her conscious mind had suppressed it from reappearing in her memory. Now, many years removed from the traumatic experience, the memory was attempting to surface, pushing at the barrier her mind had erected around it. He did not feel that this was valid scenario, however, as very few bear-men exist in real life. She laughed with him at the joke, but wondered how she could have such a vivid image of somthing imagined.

More probably, he told her, was that she was consumed by guilt over Henry's death. For some reason, she felt responsible for it. Perhaps she had insisted they go camping when Henry really did not want to? No matter why she felt the guilt, the problem was that she transposed Henry's face over that of the bear, thereby laying some of the guilt off on Henry, and punishing herself; making certain that she found no pleasure in this life.

"But it's not Henry's face that I see!" She insisted.

"Perhaps the form is not Henry," He told her, "But the content is. Your mind has transformed Henry into a vengeance seeking monster, which aids you in your subconscious plans for self-destruction." The doctor had then smiled patronizingly at her.

She gave the diagnosis a great deal of thought, and finally concluded that it simply was not accurate. The psychiatrist must be mistaken. Henry had been blond and blue-eyed, not even remotely resembling the face which appeared in her dreams. Perhaps the doctor was correct in that she was trying to self-destruct, and had called forth a forgotten memory of some childhood nemesis who had injured or frightened her sometime in the past.

Try as she might, she could recall no one that remotely fit the description.

Patty next decided to trace all the way back through her childhood. Perhaps there was a forgotten boogey-man that lurked in her distant past, and had been triggered in her traumatized mind. Perhaps she could find out who or what it was, and facing reality, overcome the problem. She found no one.

Perhaps an evil uncle or a perverted cousin, whom she had merely heard stories about, could be equated in her subconscious with the bear. She traced her family until she ran out of records. They stopped with mention of one of her earliest ancestors, a General in the Revolutionary War.

No mention was made of him before the time he left the small village where he had met his wife. A strange name for a town, she thought. Zoar. The records stated that the General had left Zoar and returned to New Hampshire. She wondered how the family had ended up in Baltimore. The records took up again with mention of her great-grandfather, who had been murdered on the streets of Baltimore, shortly after her grandfather had been born. There were too many gaps in the history to satisfy her.

What finally made her decide to trace her family's history all the way back to Zoar was an entry, scrawled in an old heirloom Bible. The Bible was printed in German, but the intriguing message she found was written in flowing English script.

`There is a curse on the line of John Sullivan the Indian slayer, and on all the three families. It menaces us no mattter how far we travel in distance or time.'

She puzzled over the inscription. She was not given to superstition, but this sinister mention of her family tree in an old German Bible had stimulated her interest more than anything else in the past five years. For the first time in that many years, she felt truly alive. She made up her mind on the spot to travel to Zoar, Ohio, and continue her investigation.

She telephoned her mother, and told her what she had found, and what her plans were. Her mother objected, urging Patty to work with the psychiatrist. She did not put much stock in Patty's idea of tracing down her family tree for a hidden booga-boo. She didn't believe that there were any, and Patty's insistence on continuing with her plan made her mother worry seriously about her child's mental state.

Her employer agreed to the two week vacation, and hoped that the short break was all she needed. Her work had been steadily deteriorating over the past few months, and the situation was fast approaching the point where he would be forced to let her go. He did not want to, for he liked the pretty brunette, and knew that she was capable of excellent work.

While Patty was stowing her bags in her four year old sedan, she noticed that unthinkingly, she had packed four bottles of whiskey. She shuddered at the thought that it had become as much a part of her life as her clothing. Resolutely, she removed the bottles from the car, and made a promise to herself that she would drink no more alcohol until her investigation was complete.

She was fighting for her sanity, desperately, and in her quest for knowledge of her family background, she had found the weaponry she felt she needed to win back her life.