The Demon Signet

by Shawn Hopkins

  “Doesn’t look like it’s letting up anytime soon,” she said, and Ashley thought she could detect a slight tremble in her voice.

  Letting Heather’s shaking hand go for now, Ashley said, “Mom and Dad gotta be freakin’ out.”

  Marcus frowned. “I wonder why they haven’t called any of us.”

  Something in Ashley’s gut twisted in response to hearing those words, but Ian just shrugged, still staring at the menu. “Maybe they’ve been trying, and they just can’t get through.”

  Heather already had the number dialed and the phone held to her ear, waiting. But she shook her head in frustration. “Line’s busy or something.”

  “Let me try.” Ashley took out her phone and called. “Same. That’s weird.”

  “Tomato pie!” Ian announced from behind his menu. “It’s your lucky day, babe.” He put his arm around Heather and gave her a playful squeeze, trying to lighten the mood.

  George was back to their table with a pitcher of coffee, mugs, and packets of sugar and cream. “I’ll give you folks a few more minutes,” he said happily, and he turned and disappeared again.

  Ashley wrapped her hands around her mug, relishing the heat’s upward crawl through her arms. She was instantly transfixed by the wispy fingers rising from the black liquid.

  “It’s good coffee,” she heard Ian saying from across the table. She didn’t look up, though. It seemed she couldn’t. There was another small slurping sound and Marcus’ voice whispering an “amen” to Ian’s pronouncement, but still Ashley couldn’t lift her eyes away from the twirling tendrils of steam spinning toward her face. They churned inwardly, the eye of a hurricane hovering above her coffee mug, hypnotizing her.

  The letter R appeared.

  Ashley’s eyes, still under some spell, narrowed. There was no mistaking it for anything else. It was as clear as a 3D image coming out of a movie screen, growing, expanding, drifting higher.

  She could hear her name being called, but it sounded a thousand miles away. The steam continued moving. And then, right before her eyes, the letter R transformed into an A.

  The A to a P.

  She blinked, and the letters were gone. A surge of electricity slithered up her spine.

  “Ashley!”

  She blinked, feeling Marcus’ hand on her arm, shaking her.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  Finally, she moved her gaze from the coffee to his concerned eyes. “Yeah…”

  “Where’d you go?”

  She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing would come out. And though there were no longer hovering letters spelled out in the steam still rising from her cup, she didn’t dare sip from it. She pushed it away from her.

  “You sure you’re okay?” Heather asked.

  She forced a transparent smile that she knew wasn’t fooling anyone. The fun, light-hearted, spunky, always seeing the good in everything, “We can do this—ra-ra!” Ashley wasn’t in character right now. Before she could manage an answer, however, George was back.

  “Here you go, folks.” He slid hot bowls of soup onto the table in front of each of them. “Cream of chicken. My special recipe. On the house.”

  “Thanks,” Marcus started, “but you didn’t have to—”

  “No, no. I insist.” Then he stood straight and put a hand on his hip. “Listen, I have a lost-and-found box for things people leave here. You know, in case they call or come back. I’ve only ever had people come back for wallets, credit cards, keys… Anyway, there’s a few sweatshirts and jackets back there that I’ve had for a few weeks now. At this point I was just gonna give them to charity, but it looks to me like you folks might be able to use them yourselves.” He blinked, looking back and forth between them. “What do you say? Want me to bring them out?”

  Ian shrugged in his peacoat, suddenly conscious of only the white T-shirt beneath it. “Sure.”

  Marcus nodded, and Heather thanked him.

  “All right.” George walked away again.

  “That’s nice of him,” Heather commented, lifting the mug to her lips.

  “You know what you want to eat?” Ian asked her.

  “Yeah. Tomato pie. Three slices.”

  “Whoa.”

  “What is it they say, ‘Eat when you can because you never know when you’ll eat next’?”

  “Something like that.”

  Ashley found the implication disturbing. “I want French toast.” Then she looked at Heather. “I have to use the bathroom.”

  “Me, too.”

  Sliding out of the booths, the boys let the girls escape to whatever it was that a girl couldn’t face alone in a public restroom.

  “Order for us?” Heather asked.

  “Yup.” Ian returned to his coffee. So did Marcus.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked Ashley once they were out of earshot. “What happened back there? You drifted off or something.”

  Ashley shrugged, but there was no hiding her feelings. “I don’t know.”

  They approached a sign nailed to the wall in the back of the diner that read LADIES and pushed open the door beneath it.

  “Let me ask you something,” Ashley started, turning to face Heather in front of the sink and mirror. “What happened with you back in the car?”

  “You know how I get…”

  “No. That’s not what it was. You saw something on your phone. What was it?”

  Heather stared at her, wanting desperately for all this to be a dream. Some irrational part of her even believed that it could be a dream so long as none of them actually put words to what was happening.

  “Heather,” Ashley prodded.

  She took a deep breath, and then told her sister about Snowy the cat.

  After listening with unblinking interest, Ashley whispered, “Are you sure it was the same cat? I mean, it’s not really possible that…”

  “I know.”

  They stared at each other for a moment.

  Ashley was smart—all honor classes and a degree in sports medicine—but, unfortunately, it was her athleticism and her stunning looks that most people acknowledged to the exclusion of the other. She’d gotten into college on a soccer scholarship and was on her way to making it pro but, to everyone’s surprise, wasn’t all that interested in a soccer career. There were too many other things she wanted to do. Like write. And she was writing—a novelization of the Ernie Davis story, actually. Not many people knew that, only seeing her as a pretty girl who cut hair for a living…someone who passed on a golden opportunity to play a professional sport. Heather was not one of those people, though, and now, as she looked into Heather’s deep, blue eyes, she could see the wealth of respect her older sister had for her. She was begging her for her insight, knowing that her opinion could either exonerate or condemn her.

  Before Ashley could respond, though, her phone began to buzz.

  “Could be Mom or Dad,” Heather said, glad for the sudden distraction.

  Ashley checked the phone. “No. It’s my move in Scrabble…” But then the color drained from her face.

  “What?” Heather stepped forward.

  Ashley turned the phone around so that Heather could see it.

  Taking in the digital field of blocked letters, she shook her head, not understanding.

  Ashley chewed on her lip and pulled the phone back to her chest, daring to look again. It was, indeed, her turn in a game long underway…only, somehow, the game board had been reset. But that wasn’t what was disturbing. What was disturbing was that every letter on the board was either an E, R, P, or A.

  She looked up into Heather’s eyes. “I have to tell you something.”

  Marcus poured himself another cup of coffee, looked out the window, and then returned his gaze to the table. After taking a sip, he carefully asked Ian, “What was with that text message you got?”

  Ian looked up from his complimentary soup, holding his friend in consideration for a while. Then dismissed his concern by casually waving the spoon around. “It was
nothing.”

  “Yeah? Well, I got a ‘nothing’ text, too.” He leaned forward onto the table and whispered the entirety of his first received message. “‘You are going to die out here, nigger.’ That’s what it said, man. And the second one I got, about the Iroquois…that ended with, ‘And I will drive you out of this land too, Blackman.’” Marcus looked around the diner. “So are you sure your text was really nothing?”

  Ian swore, dropped the spoon back into the soup, and leaned onto the table himself. “I was engaged to this girl named Jessica about seven years ago.” He picked up a sugar packet and began playing with it, his eyes focused on the past. “Thought she was the one.” He scratched the back of his neck. “She was the one.”

  When he didn’t continue on his own, Marcus prodded him. “What happened?”

  “She got pregnant.” He tossed the packet into the center of the table as a mournful smile tugged the corner of his mouth. “We got pregnant.” His hands wouldn’t stop moving, as if they had to busy themselves in order for his mouth to work. They touched the handle of the coffee mug, tapped against the surface of the table, scratched at his jaw… “She decided she didn’t want the baby, though. Got an abortion.”

  “Without telling you?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. She never told me she was pregnant, but I found the test in the trash. I thought she was just waiting for the right time to tell me, to surprise me. After a month went by and she still hadn’t said anything, I brought it up.” His hands fell still. “What a scene that was.”

  Marcus sat stunned. “Oh, man…”

  Ian tried laughing it off, dismissing it as old news, but the sudden glimmer in his eyes betrayed his true feelings. “For a month I’d planned on being some little kid’s daddy, you know? I let my imagination run wild with it, all the things we’d do together…the things I’d teach him if he were a boy. How to throw a football, to fish, to field a ground ball…” He smiled a more genuine smile, raising his eyebrows as he went on. “And then all the anxieties if it were a girl. ‘Daddy’s little girl…’ Damn, you know how intimidated I was by that thought? The prospect of having to be responsible for an innocent girl in this world? I mean, here I was at night, lying beside Jessica, not able to sleep because I was worrying about first dates, proms, posters of boy bands, all the pressures of Madison Avenue… I was George friggin’ Banks in Father of the Bride for god sakes, my nightmare standing there at some altar and watching my baby walk away from me…” He swallowed and stared into his soup. “We were supposed to wait another year before getting married, but I figured we’d speed things up as soon as she told me the news. I had names and everything ready for her. Even got a couple parenting books from the library.”

  Marcus just stared, not knowing what to say.

  “When she told me she’d…” He bit his lower lip, shook his head.

  Marcus reached a hand out across the table and grabbed Ian’s elbow. “It’s cool, man. Don’t…”

  “I just hate thinking about it. Wondering whether it was a boy or a girl, what color eyes, their smile… Who they would’ve been, you know?” He paused. “It was all I ever wanted, and she threw it away without even telling me.”

  Marcus had no words for his friend that wouldn’t sound cheap or cliché.

  “It was more than the death of a life…” He poked the air with his finger, suddenly animated by another thought. “And it was a life. Don’t try feeding me this shit about ‘is a baby alive when’… It was alive. It was a biological life-form, growing, consuming energy. That’s called life. If you want to argue about when the soul comes into play, that whole ‘I think therefore I am’ philosophical stuff, fine. But don’t tell me the thing wasn’t alive. We search the universe for signs of so-called ‘life’ on other planets. If we found a human embryo on Mars, it would be the biggest discovery in history. Hell, if we found a plant, it would be the greatest discovery of our time! Life on Mars! So can you ‘kill’ a plant? Of course. Well, then you can damn-well kill a fetus, can’t you? Isn’t that what ‘abort’ means?” He sighed, his shoulders drooping. “Anyway, I slapped her. Called her a selfish bitch and told her I never wanted to see her again. The way I saw it then, she’d just gone behind my back and killed my child. And how could we go on from there? How was I supposed to get over that?” He began twirling a butter knife in circles on the table’s smooth surface. “I don’t know. I suppose it would’ve been different if I hadn’t found out. If I hadn’t spent a month anticipating it, letting myself get attached to the fantasy of it all.” He sent the knife spinning on its own and then slapped his hand over it, bringing it to an abrupt stop. “The thing is,” and now his eyes did swell, “boy or girl, we would’ve been great together.” He wiped an eye. “It’s kinda weird to miss someone who was never born, huh?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Thanks. Never really told anyone any of this.”

  “Not even Heather?”

  He shook his head.

  “You think you should?”

  “Probably.” He wiped his eyes and cleared his throat. “So that’s what the text said, ‘Why didn’t you marry Jessica?’ and ‘Does anyone else know your secret?’”

  “Who else does know your secret, Ian?”

  “Jessica. And I guess whoever she decided to tell. Though I can’t imagine it’s something she goes around broadcasting.”

  Marcus brought a hand up to his chin, severity settling across his face. “So let me get this straight. You get a text from Heather’s phone, though her phone didn’t send it, about something that no one knows about?”

  He nodded.

  “Right after I get a racist text from a blocked number that knows where we are and threatens to kill me?”

  “You just gave me the chills, man.” Ian turned his eyes to the storm outside.

  “What’s going on here, Ian?”

  “Here you go, guys.” George was back with an armful of sweatshirts. “I think I pegged your sizes right.” He nodded toward the soup as he placed the pile of clothes on the bench beside Marcus. “How is it?”

  “It’s great,” Ian said.

  “Good. You want anything else?”

  “Yeah.”

  They ordered dinner.

  “Listen,” George said after committing the list to memory. He bent over and leaned against the table. “I only live about ten minutes from here, but there’s no way I’m getting home as long as this storm is blowing. I guess you can say we’re all in it together.”

  They stared at him, unsure of where he was going.

  George laughed. “What I’m sayin’ is, feel free to stay as long as you want. I ain’t gonna kick no one back out into the cold. I’ll be here all night, anyway, so…you just make yourselves comfortable, okay? And I’ll keep the coffee coming.”

  “Wow, thanks. We really appreciate that.” Marcus did his best to return the smile, but it felt cheap on his lips. “God bless you for it.”

  That seemed to startle George. “You a Christian man, my friend?”

  “Yes, sir,” Marcus answered.

  “Well, praise the Lord for that! Hallelujah!” He walked away once more.

  Unsure of whether George was being sarcastic or not and caring even less, he turned in the booth and looked toward the girls’ room. “What the hell’s taking them so long?”

  Ashley took her sister’s hands in her own and leaned against the tiled wall for support. “Five years ago…” She paused to suck air into her lungs, held her breath for a moment, and tried summoning the strength to share her dark secret.

  “What?” Heather’s eyes filled with concern.

  “I was raped.”

  Heather’s mouth fell open, but nothing came out. The hum of the fluorescent bulbs overhead filled the silence. Then her shock melted into a string of tears. “Wh—what?” she stuttered softly.

  Ashley squeezed Heather’s hands. “When I was in college.”

  Heather tried to say something, but Ashley continued before she could get
her thoughts together.

  “I was walking back to my dorm one night. We’d gotten back late from a game…the bastard jumped out of the bushes, wrapped his arms around me from behind, and carried me into the woods.”

  “How?”

  “How?” She grunted. “The guy was like six four, two-hundred and thirty pounds. I wasn’t getting away from that. Believe me, I tried.”

  Horror settled onto Heather’s face, and her hand went to her mouth, tears still streaming. “Was he a student?”

  “I don’t think so. I never saw him before or after.”

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

  She shrugged. “Lots of reasons.”

  “Ash…” Heather threw her arms around her sister, squeezing her tight and sobbing as if her little sister had just been attacked mere moments ago. As far as Heather was concerned, hearing the news for the first time, she had.

  “It’s okay,” Ashley was saying. But her eyes were full, too. She’d never told another person before and knew it was the coffee ghost and the Scrabble game pushing her into doing so now.

  Heather pulled back. “Oh, kiddo…I would’ve been there for you. You know that, right?”

  “I know.” Hot tears began gliding down her face.

  “Do you want to talk about it? I mean…now?”

  She wiped the tears away with the back of her hand. “Now I’d just like to know what the hell is going on.” She held the Scrabble game up again. “Your special relationship with felines, my being forced upon by Goliath… I mean, just what the hell is happening to us, Heath? What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know, but…” Her eyes, still raining with sorrow, fell to her feet. “There’s something else I should tell you.”

  “What?”

  “I’m—”

  A knock sounded at the door, and they both jumped.

  “Heather? Ashley? You girls okay in there?”

  It was Ian’s voice.