The Demon Signet

by Shawn Hopkins

  “The GPS says we’re on I-81,” Heather reassured her, evidently understanding her sister’s source of concern. “We’re going the right way.”

  Why Ashley thought they might be going the wrong way, Marcus didn’t know. They couldn’t see anything, and Ian barely dared take the car up to five miles per hour as the blizzard rocked them back and forth. Nevertheless, Marcus opened his eyes and looked at his watch. “We’re going north,” he exclaimed.

  “What?” The statement almost took Ian’s eyes off the road.

  “No, look.” Heather held her phone up between the two front seats.

  Marcus looked at it, growing concern sliding down his vertebrae and wrapping itself like a python around his nervous system. “Do we trust my compass or your phone?”

  Ian swore under his breath, and the sound of the windshield wipers swinging back and forth on the highest setting filled the ensuing silence.

  Marcus was scared. More scared than he’d been in a long time, perhaps since the day in the church basement. The only other experience that he thought might come close was the time in North Carolina when his dad was away and a bunch of the neighborhood kids got wasted and decided to come banging on his door, Confederate flags pinned to their shirts. But that had been stupid, blind hatred empowered by alcohol. This…this was something else entirely. But what? And why?

  As if reading his mind, Ashley asked, “Why do you think this is happening?”

  No one responded.

  “I mean, first it was the radio. Okay, weird coincidence. Then the mailboxes. Earthquake? But the diner…the toilets, the lights, the storm…” She paused, the wipers squeaking away. “This is about us.”

  Ian slowly took a bend in the road. “What do you mean?”

  “If this was a movie, I’d think that Star Lake was haunted, that the diner was haunted. Maybe all of North Country. But the text messages were sent to our phones…text messages about us.”

  Marcus looked up from the floor and back to Ashley. “Us as a group?” That didn’t seem to make sense. “Why?”

  “Maybe we did something along the way,” she suggested.

  “You mean like piss on an ancient burial ground or something?” Ian smirked.

  Marcus cringed. Had it really come to this? Characters in some horror story? Was that their reality now? Granted, there was nothing in the toolbox of his own human experience that could offer any explanation for what he’d seen at the diner, but…hauntings? It was too much. Too ridiculous. There had to be another explanation. This wasn’t a movie with a fictional script for its context. This was the real world.

  “The car,” Heather breathed, interrupting his thoughts.

  “The car?” Ian frowned.

  “It all started when we got in the car, with the radio.”

  Marcus realized that she was right, even if it didn’t make any sense.

  “You’re saying that the car is haunted?” Ian risked a quick glance into the rearview mirror. “It was the car that made the storm go away for a minute?”

  “Harold said the last guy who rented the car disappeared, that they found the car abandoned. What if…”

  Ian let loose the condescending laugh of an unbeliever. “What if he was killed in this car? What if his spirit is—”

  “What if he’s in the trunk?” It came to Marcus so fast that he hadn’t had time to properly filter the idea.

  Shock worked its way across Ian’s face. It was a ridiculous idea, that the spirit of some dead guy was haunting them through the car he’d died in…but the very prospect of an actual body being in the trunk was no laughing matter, no matter what it meant. Harold did say the car hadn’t finished being prepped. “What if they never even checked the trunk?” He heard himself ask.

  Heather and Ashley leaned forward and away from the backseats that separated them from whatever might be behind them.

  “What if he’s back there?” Heather asked.

  “What do you want me to do?” Ian asked. “Pull over and check it out?”

  “I can’t believe we’re in a friggin’ haunted car!” Ashley shouted.

  “We’re not in a haunted car!” Ian countered. “Knock it off.”

  “Then you explain what the hell is going on!”

  “Listen, just because we can’t explain what’s happening doesn’t mean it’s ghosts and goblins! Besides, the car wasn’t in the diner. And what, you expect me to believe that this spirit, or whatever the hell you think it is, is sending us messages on our phones? Threatening Marcus because he’s black? Was the guy some psychic racist before he died and now he just wants to scare whoever rents the car? What’s that movie called, The Curse of the Red Taurus? Or Poltergeist in the Trunk?”

  “What’s he talking about, threatening you because you’re black?” Ashley asked, looking at Marcus.

  “The table,” Ian answered for him. “It was etched into the table back there.” He wasn’t sure if Marcus wanted to get into that aspect of his messages or not, and he felt bad for letting it slip.

  “Maybe you should slow down, Ian,” Marcus warned.

  This time Ian did turn and look at Marcus. “Slow down? I’m just saying—”

  “No!” Marcus shouted, thrusting a finger at the speedometer. “Slow down!”

  Ian looked down and saw the needle swing past ten. He swore and applied pressure to the brake.

  Nothing.

  He swore again.

  “What?” Marcus clutched the handle beside him.

  Ian was pumping the break. “Nothing’s happening!”

  Ashley leaned forward and gripped the sides of Ian’s chair. “What do you mean?”

  “No brakes!”

  The needle passed fifteen.

  “Try the emergency break!” Heather shouted. She was beginning to hyperventilate.

  Ian didn’t have any other choice. They were going twenty miles an hour on a wilderness road in a blizzard. If the brake worked, they’d skid, temporarily losing control of the car. But if he did nothing, they would only pick up more speed, having no way of following the next turn. “Hold on.” He pulled the brake.

  Nothing happened.

  The girls began screaming.

  Marcus closed his eyes, one hand on the door handle, the other out against the dashboard. “‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…’”

  “Shut up, Marc!” Ian snapped.

  Thirty miles per hour.

  Ian’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. “Everyone buckled?”

  Then something materialized from out of the moving void, standing right there in the stunted glow of the headlights.

  They all saw it in that fraction of a second before impact.

  Ian reflexively slammed on the useless pedal while thrusting himself back against his seat, spinning the wheel at the last second and forcing the car to spin sideways.

  Marcus braced as a slew of random images flashed across his mind’s eye. His life. It would take half an hour to write down all that he’d seen and felt in that split-second, even longer to explain it, but there was no pad and pen waiting for him on the other side, just an incredible noise—the crack of a cosmic snare drum and cymbals of exploding glass.

  Marcus felt the restraints holding him back as his world spun…overturned…and blinked out.

  Twelve

  She’s giddy with the prospect of what’s going to happen, of what Matt’s hand on her thigh ensures is going to happen. He keeps leaning over and tracing the nape of her neck with his tongue, setting her senses on fire, filling her with anticipation. At sixteen, it won’t be her first time, but it has to be better than the last. Matt is older than her, a senior and captain of the varsity football team. He’s experienced. He knows what he’s doing. He already has her well beyond self-consciousness and any feelings of guilt. He has her wanting it. Bad.

  She takes his hand from atop her dress and moves it beneath the prom gown. His hand on her skin is electric. As it slides upwa
rd, she holds her breath, not able to hear anything in the car anymore. Matt’s other hand is on her chest, and he’s leaning into her, his body pushing her against the door. The door handle presses into her side, but the pain is no match for the hurricane of emotion raging inside her. His fingers reach the hem of her panties, and she lets a sound escape from her lips. Suddenly she’s aware of her surroundings again, slightly embarrassed that John and Kimberly next to them and Doug and Patricia up front might have overheard her pleasure. But John and Kimberly are busy in their own world, Kimberly’s dress up around her hips and John…she can’t tell where John is. And Patricia is straddling Doug as he tries to navigate the Pontiac faster down the road. They’re kissing like crazy, Patty moving her hips back and forth on his lap.

  Something about this seems off to Heather, but Matt’s hands are clouding her judgment, and she can’t seem to process what it is that’s wrong with the situation.

  A violent jolt and an explosion of noise instantly replaces all feeling of pleasure with dizzy vertigo and hot flashing pain…

  She thinks, floating, spinning, “Ashley! She was raped!”

  The thought of that sickens her, and she can’t seem to bring herself to actually believe it. Her little sister…raped. It’s too much. How did that happen? Why hadn’t she told anyone? She marvels, time at a standstill, at how close she’d come to revealing her own secret to Ashley. It doesn’t matter. There is no way her little sister is going to forget that a revelation had been dangling from the tip of her tongue. She’ll be back for a full explanation as soon as their situation allows it. The question then becomes, “When she does bring it up, do I tell her?” Of course she will…

  She opens her eyes, disoriented. She doesn’t know where she is or how she got there. Everything’s dark. After a few minutes, her body begins issuing reports of pain. She tries to move but can’t. Something’s pressing against her, trapping her. She looks down and sees nothing. She looks up and can see moonlight shining off pieces of broken glass outside a window.

  A window…

  She becomes aware of something slithering up her arms and neck. Something wet. She can hear crickets. Able to move her head slightly to the right, she can just make out a single beam of light cutting a path through the darkness. It’s illuminating a strange shape surrounded by grass. She squints, trying to figure out what it is, because it looks so much like…

  Suddenly, it all comes back to her.

  She screams, knowing.

  Patricia is lying out in the grass, her blue prom dress now red beneath the lone spotlight. Her face looks peaceful, like she’s sleeping. Heather knows she’s not.

  Doug.

  He’s lying in a bed of small, glass cubes. He’s in the car, on the roof, and out of the car, in the grass. But how…

  The slithering sensation… She understands then that she’s hanging upside down, blood running up her arms and neck, her hair hanging toward the roof of the car! The pressure against her, pinning her against the door is…Matt, John, and Kimberly! And she can’t move.

  “Matt,” she manages to whisper.

  Nothing.

  “John? Kim? Are you okay?”

  Nothing.

  She starts to cry.

  Half an hour later, still hanging upside down in the car, she begins to come apart.

  She begins to think, “But I can’t tell Ashley, because what if Ian… No! That’s not why. It can’t be why! I’m not that…” Her thoughts swirl, her fracturing psyche unable to process any of it. “Ashley was raped!” just keeps playing on a loop, torturing her, disorienting her.

  She hears something cutting into her scrambled thoughts. The police. They’re finally here. She thinks that she must’ve been here, trapped in this damn car for hours.

  “Heather,” the voice says. “Heather.”

  She doesn’t remember the officers knowing her name…

  “Heather!”

  She tries to open her eyes but grows confused because she’s sure they’re already open.

  “Heather?”

  Her eyes fluttered open.

  “Oh, thank God!” she heard someone exclaim.

  A sudden pressure squeezed her chest, and she realized that she was being embraced. Not by the police, but by Ian.

  He unbuckled her seatbelt, and she dropped into his arms.

  Throwing aside the lingering sensation of events long past, she wrapped her arms around him and held him with all her might, tears running down her face. “What…happened?” She brought her hand to her head, where the pain was. She saw for herself what had happened, and she was sixteen all over again.

  “We hit something,” Ian said.

  Heather’s mind worked to untangle the two accidents, sorting out the past from the present…her dead boyfriend from her living fiancé.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I think so.” Other than a headache, she seemed fine.

  “Come on.” Ian helped her out of the Taurus, which was now upside-down on the side of the road.

  Heather stumbled against Ian, letting herself be guided through the heavy snow, when she suddenly stopped moving, her body shooting upright and rigid. “Where’s Ashley?”

  “She’s okay. She’s with Marcus. They went to see what we hit.”

  She left me here? she thought. But then she heard her sister’s voice cutting through the storm.

  “Heather!”

  She couldn’t see Ashley until she was just a few feet in front of her and throwing her arms around her neck.

  “Are you okay?” Ashley cried.

  “Yeah. Are you?”

  “We’re all fine. Not even a scratch, can you believe it?”

  They separated.

  “How long was I out?” Heather asked, figuring the soreness would come greeting them in the morning.

  “Five minutes,” Ian’s voice informed her, but he was concentrating on Marcus. “What was it?”

  “A moose.”

  “A moose?”

  Marcus nodded.

  “I hit a freakin’ moose?” He looked back at the overturned rental. “It’s dead?”

  “Dying.”

  The veterinarian stirred inside, and Heather put a hand on his shoulder. There was nothing to be done about it now. He swore.

  “It’s a miracle we’re alive,” Marcus said, his own gaze fixed on the Ford.

  Heather nodded, but they were still standing on a snow-covered road in the middle of a blizzard with nothing but mountains surrounding them. She crossed her arms over her chest, suddenly thankful for the striped sweater beneath her coat and no longer minding the stench of the perfume it had been marinated in. Even with the added layer of warmth, though—in these temperatures, in this wind—it wouldn’t be long before…

  “What now?” Ashley asked, her own arms crossed, eyes darting back and forth through the falling snow.

  The wind was howling through the trees around them. Snow melted and froze against their clothes.

  “We have to get off the road.” Ian started walking to the car, his breath leaving a trail of clouds in his wake. “Another car could come down here and wipe us all out. We should go into the woods, try to find some kind of shelter until morning.”

  Heather shuddered, her previous concern of being stranded in the Adirondacks now a horrible reality—only worse because of the blizzard. Her face was already numb, and her words were beginning to slur through lips capable of only moving in slow motion. “Should we check the car?”

  They all stood still and looked at her, thinking of the trunk and what none of them wanted to believe might be inside.

  “For things we’ll need,” she explained. “Flashlight, first aid kit, a lighter…”

  “She’s right,” Ian said, and in fact, that was why he’d started toward the car in the first place. As he crouched down in the snow and wiggled his way back behind the steering wheel, Ashley appeared across from him, crawling in through the passenger side and working the glove compartment.
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  Heather watched them, or imagined that she was watching them. She could hear more clearly than she could see. Out here in the mountains at night…it was only the dim luminance of the snow on the ground and in the trees that added any sort of light to their surroundings. She shuddered again, thinking of how dark it would be in the woods, beneath the forest’s canopy where snow may not have been able to make it to the ground. It wouldn’t be like in the movies where there was always some mysterious light by which the characters were able to see in order to move the story along. No, she was quite certain that, unless the clouds broke and the moon was allowed to shine, they wouldn’t be getting very far at all.

  But then a click introduced a beam of light within the car.

  “Thank God,” Marcus said beside her. She jumped, not realizing he’d been there.

  Ashley pointed the flashlight into the glove compartment and sifted through papers, looking for anything else they might need.

  “Take all of it,” Ian told her. “We’ll need it to start a fire.”

  So Ashley began shoving the owner’s manual and other documents into her coat pockets. When they were filled, she moved to the pouch of her new Bills sweatshirt, her hands glowing red and shaking in the cold as she stuffed herself with anything that would burn.

  Ian turned and lay on his back, shimmying beneath the driver’s seat so that he could reach up and search the pouch attached to its back. He pulled out a large book and held it out the back window. “Take this,” he said to either Heather or Marcus.

  Marcus stepped forward and grabbed it from him. “An atlas.”

  “We’ll save that,” Ian said, blowing warm breath into his cupped hands. “At least the pages we can use.”

  Marcus nodded, rolled it up, and stuck it into his back pocket.

  Heather’s eyes were still hostage to the flashlight’s beam that was swinging back and forth in the front passenger seat of the car. As she stared, the wind continued to whistle through the nearby trees, their branches clapping hands and high-fiving each other.