The Demon Signet (7 page)

“There ain’t nothin’ down there, fellas,” he’d said. “You was probably just scared of the dark. Or listnin’ to those white boys at school again.” When their eyes had responded to the latter diagnosis, James laughed. “You don’t listen to that stuff, ya hear? They just tryin’ to scare ya ’cause they scared of what they don’t understand. And they don’t understand the Jesus we got in our hearts, ya hear?” He’d turned the light off and shut the door. “Go on, git. I won’t tell on ya.”

But Marcus never forgot that day or that feeling. The Darkness. It had not been their imagination. And now, years later, a lawyer and all, he felt just as terrified as he did standing on those wooden stairs, the Darkness laughing at him, coming for him. YOU ARE GOING TO DIE OUT HERE, NIGGER. I WAS THERE WHEN THE IROQUOIS WERE DRIVEN OUT OF THEIR LAND… He shuddered.

“Someone’s just playing a prank on us,” Ian said, noticing Marcus’ distant and troubled stare. His eyes, however, didn’t quite match the conviction of his words.

“Probably Nick,” Ashley guessed.

Marcus wished he could believe that. But Ashley wasn’t privy to the full content of the messages. If it hadn’t been for the racial bigotry, then perhaps Nick would be a viable suspect. Ashley and Heather’s younger brother certainly got a kick out of toying with the boyfriends from time to time. But though Marcus had only met him a couple times, he knew that Nick had more class than to pull something like this.

Marcus considered Ian’s message, and then wondered if perhaps a similar filter hadn’t been applied to Ian’s telling of it. He’d inquire about it later, when the girls weren’t within earshot.

Up ahead, the wilderness began to thin, and everything seemed to open up a little. Houses began lining the street on either side of them.

“Star Lake,” Heather said, continuing to glean information from her phone. “Apparently named after that lake on the left.”

They all turned to look at it, flashes of its surface appearing behind the passing houses, the wind rubbing its surface into a field of white triangles.

Marcus leaned forward and tilted his head, his eyes squinting in concentration.

“What?” Ian asked.

“You hear that?”

Ashley leaned forward, too. “What is it?”

“I don’t hear anything,” Heather said.

“Yeah, I don’t—” Ian paused. He did hear it. He checked all the gauges beyond the steering wheel, but everything looked okay. He looked at the clock on the dashboard. They’d been driving for just over an hour.

“Is it the car?” It was a strange clacking noise, distant but persistent. Marcus recalled Harold’s disclaimer about the car not being prepped.

“I still don’t hear anything.” Heather turned her phone off and listened harder.

“I think it’s coming from outside,” Ashley said, and she turned to look out the back window.

Heather frowned. “Now I hear it.”

It seemed to be getting louder.

Clack. Clack. Clack. Clack-clack-clack-clack…

Louder and faster.

Ian slowed and pulled over in front of a big white house, the driveway empty, an American flag blowing against the ash-gray sky from a pole that stood piercing the center of the front lawn.

“What are you doing?” Marcus’ voice surrendered more consternation than he’d intended, and Ian returned the anxious inflection with a quizzical look of his own. Yeah, they were both creeped out by the text messages.

“Oh my god.” Ashley’s voice stole everyone’s attention, and they all scrambled in their seats to get a glimpse of whatever she was seeing. She was almost completely turned around in her seat, staring out the window.

CLACK. CLACK. CLACK.

Something banging away right beside his own window made Marcus look over to the house, the empty driveway, the flapping flag, the waving branches of nearby trees, and…the mailbox. “What the f—”

Because Marcus never swore, everyone swung their heads to his window, knowing that whatever made him almost drop the F-bomb had to be really important.

They were right.

Standing at the end of the driveway, and erected in the midst of what would be a bed of flowers come springtime, was the mailbox. It was built to look like an old, red barn.

CLACK! CLACK! CLACK!

The plastic barn door was swinging open and shut while the flag rose and fell all on its own.

Turning to look back down the road, Marcus saw that every mailbox on the street was doing the same thing, their doors swinging open and shut as if applauding their arrival.

“Go,” Marcus whispered, unable to take his eyes off the mailboxes of Star Lake.

Heather reached for Ashley’s hand as Ian floored the gas.

They were flying down Route 3 again and getting deeper into town, all the mailboxes they passed falling open in their wake. Marcus thought back to a similar scene in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
and wondered if they were about to be abducted by little green men. That would be a new genre for Christmas tales. “What’s going on, man?”

“I have no idea,” Ian whispered. He looked up into the rearview mirror and made eye contact with Heather. “You okay?”

She nodded, though her face looked as if she’d seen a ghost…which she might have.

The radio began flipping through stations—static, talking voices, static, music, voices, static, and then “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” Everyone fell silent, waiting for something to happen. Three minutes later, however, the town was behind them and they were in the mountains again. No more mailboxes.

Ian turned the radio off.

“What the hell was that?” Ashley whispered.

No one said anything for a while, and then Ian started to laugh. Soon they were all laughing. It seemed all they could do to keep themselves distracted from the terror that was there knocking on their skulls.

YOU ARE GOING TO DIE OUT HERE…

“That was like something from the
X-Files
,” Heather commented, beginning to settle down. “We should check and see if we lost any time.”

Marcus nodded. “I was thinking of
Close Encounters
, myself.”

Ian looked cautiously into the mirrors. “Neither one a detour I’d prefer.”

They retreated into silent consideration, wondering where to file such an experience in their brains, how to compartmentalize it as sensible. Marcus and Ian had a bit more going through their minds, but that would soon change.

Snowflakes began fluttering out of the sky as clouds rapidly moved to block the sinking sun from view, its climactic exit shielded from viewing eyes.

Six

Forty minutes later—after having passed through Lower Oswegatchie and the towns of Pitcairn and Harrisville—they were rolling through North Croghan, and Heather was fidgeting in her seat. That all-too familiar feeling was beginning to snake its way through her limbs again, a subtle restlessness that usually signaled the beginning of an oncoming episode. She’d need to get out of the car soon, to breathe open air, but she was determined to endure the agony as long as possible before making Ian pull over. She didn’t like the idea of standing on the side of the road out here, not since the beauty of their surroundings had been banished into an evil portal back at Star Lake. The snow that was falling harder and harder with every new shade of twilight wasn’t helping soothe the ominous feelings either. She tried to associate whatever ghosts and goblins were behind the odd phenomena not with the occupants of the Taurus nor the Adirondack mountains as a whole, but rather that single town of Star Lake, a town behind them and no longer any of their concern. There were “real” problems they were facing now, and possessed mailboxes would have to wait for the ghost stories around the fire—a holiday tradition the coming storm was going to try keeping them from.

She saw a graveyard coming up and nudged her sister. “Hey, remember the game Grandmom used to play with us?”

Ashley followed Heather’s gaze to the scattered tombstones. “The cow game?”

“Yeah.”

“Cow game?” Marcus inquired.

Ashley explained, “On long drives, we would play this game…”

“The cow game?”

“The cow game.”

Ian chimed in. “How does one play this ‘cow game’?”

A flood of memories reached the shores of Heather’s mind. “If you’re sitting on the right side of the car, the right side of the road is your playing field. If you’re on the left, then you have the left side. Whenever you pass a farm, you have until the farm fades from view to count as many cows as you can. That’s your score, the number of cows you can count on your side of the road along the way.”

“Left cows versus right cows?” Marcus was grinning.

“Yup. You keep a tallying score and whoever has the most cows at the end of the trip wins.”

“But,” Ashley interjected, “there’s a catch.”

Ian raised his eyebrows. “Ooh.”

“Whenever you pass a cemetery on your side of the road, all your cows die and you have to start over at zero.”

Both men laughed in the front seats.

“Not sure we’ll be seeing too many cows out here,” Ian remarked. And then he frowned. “I did surgery on a cow once.”

“Really?” Heather grimaced. That was something, standing at the podium after being crowned Prom Queen, she’d never dreamed would come from her future husband’s mouth. An apolitical farm boy with his own veterinarian practice?
Really?
It was an affront to all her old
Sex in the City
aspirations, a step in the opposite direction from all the athletes, doctors, and lawyers she was used to being with, but after only her first date with Ian, she felt the need to be on the glamour scale of meaninglessness slip away from her, no longer compelled to be the superstar model-actress that everyone had always encouraged her to be. Ian made her feel like herself—a person who had become a stranger, even to her. He’d freed her, liberated her. Loved her for more than her body, for more than what she could do for his reputation. She wasn’t an accessory to him. And from that first night together, she knew that she would never let him go. Even if he did prefer cows to people.

“Heath, can you see how far we are from the nearest city?” Ian was looking more concerned with every layer of darkness unfolding across the sky.

“You thinking of stopping?” Marcus asked.

“Depends how bad this gets. We can’t navigate these roads in a whiteout. We’ll end up in a lake.”

Heather and Ashley both sighed, knowing how disappointed their parents—
their parents!

“Crap!” Heather glanced at the time displayed on the dashboard. “Forgot to call Mom and Dad again.”

Ashley turned her phone on. “I’ll do it.”

When Heather brought her own screen to life, she tried accessing their progress on the map application she’d been using, but the app wouldn’t open for her. Instead, and even though the search bar was empty, Google Images opened to thumbnail images of—

She gasped, and the hand that held the phone began to tremble, the car’s physiology shrinking.

Dead cats.

The images were all of
dead
cats
.

No. Not cats plural. Cat. They were all images of one cat. White, bigger than a Cocker Spaniel, green eyes, the point of its tail dipped in black ink…

No way in hell
, Heather thought, staring at the thumbnails.
No way.

But she knew. The primeval chalice, brimming with the metaphysical, had been sipped of and its contents had her drunk with fear.

The cat.
That
cat. They were all pictures of
that
cat. But how? What—

Mr. and Mrs. Jennings had lived next door when she was ten years old. They had a cat, Snowy, and they treated the thing like it was a child, their only child. But the big white cat never liked Heather, and Heather hadn’t cared much for it in return. It was always hissing at her, bearing its pointy teeth like some vampire cat wanting to feast on her neck and bathe in her blood. One day, on her way home from school, Heather ran into Snowy on the sidewalk. The cat had somehow gotten out of the house. It stood there, hissing, challenging her with those fangs. Heather hadn’t meant to kill it, just to send it a message. But the tip of her Converse sneaker snapped Snowy’s vertebrae, killing the cat instantly. After looking around and seeing no witnesses, Heather had tossed the dead cat into the street and then continued on her way. Later, she rode her bike past the scene of the crime and saw with satisfaction that Snowy’s white hair was barely noticeable beneath the crimson blanket that covered it. Its entrails had slithered out of its exploded stomach like alien parasites escaping its host. Mr. and Mrs. Jennings, to this day, believed that their cat had been hit by a car. And indeed it had been…

But here was Snowy now, thumbnail after thumbnail, four rows of six and many more available to her if she would just scroll down. They were all different angles of the same scene, the scene she’d ridden her bicycle past after dinner more than eighteen years ago. But who had taken the pictures? And how was it possible that they just showed up without even—

“No answer,” Ashley said, hanging up. Then she asked, “You okay?”

Heather brought her eyes up from the phone and tried to swallow. “I’m gonna need some air…”

Ian looked back. “Did you find the nearest city?”

But Heather couldn’t look down at her phone again, at the dead cat. She began shaking.

“I’ll look it up,” Ashley offered, and two minutes later she was announcing her findings while resting a hand on Heather’s knee. “Watertown. It’s about half an hour away. Looks pretty big, lots of traffic lights.”

“Okay, half an hour.” Ian looked back to his fiancée. “Think you can make that, Heath?”

She nodded. She didn’t think she could make five more minutes, but if half an hour meant warmth, food, and the company of other people in an open, civilized setting, then she would try her hardest to hang on for Watertown. She didn’t know why “civilization” should bring added comfort, as if the tremors shaking her grasp of the natural world would be warded off by internet cafés, traffic lights, and McDonalds. For some reason, though, she thought she would feel better in a modern, concrete city.