The Demon Signet

by Shawn Hopkins

  The flashlight paused, something catching Ashley’s interest. Heather stepped forward to see what it was. “What is it?”

  The flashlight was still pointing into the glove compartment when Ashley’s free hand passed through its beam and grasped something that sat glimmering under the light.

  “A ring,” she muttered. She held it up and brought it close to the flashlight’s lens, examining it with peculiar interest.

  “Nothing else back here,” Ian was saying, “unless we want to rip out some of the seats and use them, too.”

  “Could we funnel some of the gas out, use it to start the fire?” Marcus wondered.

  Ian nodded, still lying on his back. “We won’t go far from the car. Maybe a passing truck’ll see the fire through the woods.”

  Heather didn’t think anyone else would be coming down this road, but she held her peace, taking another step closer to Ashley instead.

  Wads of paper stuffed into her sweatshirt and coat pockets, Ashley stood beside the car, transfixed by the ring she was still staring at.

  “Ashley.”

  She looked up to her sister.

  “What is it?”

  Ashley shook her head. “I don’t know, but it—”

  Ian climbed back over the front seat and asked Ashley to go to the back of the car. He was going to pop the trunk.

  “Sure,” she responded, not so sure at all. But it wasn’t until she managed to pry her eyes off the object in her hand that she slipped it into her jeans and began making her way to the rear of the car.

  Heather, Marcus, and Ashley stood facing the dented and upside-down trunk, the flashlight’s circle painting a large, red dot in the night.

  When Ian pulled on the trunk release, all three of them stepped back, startled by the sound, but Ashley was able to hold the light steady as the trunk swung open.

  A spare tire, tire iron, and jack fell out into the snow. The tire landed on its side, bounced, and rolled past them. They all turned and watched it disappear into the storm.

  No dead body.

  Ian walked up beside them and joined in staring at the empty trunk space. Even though they were relieved that the body of the missing man hadn’t spilled out into the snow along with the fleeing tire, the absence of a corpse debunked the only theory they had going.

  Ian’s voice broke the silence. “You all have your phones?”

  They checked their pockets, nodding.

  “Let’s find out where we are if we can.” He took the battery out of one pocket, the phone from the other, and went about reuniting them with trembling hands.

  Heather’s map application was still open, and she started to speak when—

  “What?” Ian stepped closer and looked down over her shoulder at the glowing display screen.

  “That can’t be right,” she whispered.

  “What?” Marcus moved in for a look of his own.

  “The map, it says we’re…”

  “We were going north,” Ian whispered.

  Heather lifted her eyes to their surroundings, squinting into the wind and pelting snow. Bending trees. Forest. Mountains.

  “Okay, let’s—”

  Marcus’ cell phone laid down a beat before Ian could finish.

  “Text message,” he announced, but his thumb hesitated over the touch screen. Finally, he tapped it and read the message. “‘I’m coming for you, Blackman. Are you ready for me?’” Marcus swallowed the frigid air, not caring how badly it burned. His eyes found Ian’s.

  Heather’s phone sounded. She looked down and gasped, then dropped to her knees.

  Ashley went down beside her, putting an arm around her. “What? What does it say?”

  But Heather couldn’t answer through her crying. She shot to her feet, threw the phone into the snow, and started stomping on it.

  “Heather.” Ian reached a hand out to her. “Heather…”

  “It’s the phones,” she said, stomping away in a blind rage. “It’s the phones!”

  “Heather…” Ian wrapped his arms around her, trying to get her to relax. He started to whisper in her ear. “It’s okay. Everything’s gonna be okay.”

  Then the phone in Marcus’ hand chimed again. He read the next message. “‘Almost there…’”

  They fell silent again, their eyes moving back and forth through the darkness, feeling the cold travel straight through them.

  “Do you see that?” Ashley pointed down the road, the way they’d come.

  A faint glow seemed to materialize in the distance, a lighthouse shining weakly through the fog. It was getting closer.

  A distant growl rumbled through the blizzard like far away thunder. It was growing louder and louder, the light shining brighter, and soon it was a roar.

  Heather waited in anticipation, either for some creature to snatch her away from this world or for some Good Samaritan to save her. But in light of her most recent text message, she seemed to know that whatever was coming would be anything but salvation.

  Ian held his arms out and forced everyone back off the road. They peered intensely through the snow, daring to hope.

  And just like that, with a deafening growl from some mechanical beast, a black blur screamed past them, falling snow redirecting and curling after the shadow and its two red eyes as it disappeared into some other realm. A second later, the only evidence of the apparition’s existence was the two wide, treaded paths stretching north and south through the snow.

  “That had to be doing seventy!” Marcus shouted above the wind.

  “That’s not possible,” Ashley stated.

  But there were the tire tracks, perfectly imprinted in the snow, streaking past where they stood.

  Heather could barely feel Ian take her hand it was so numb, but as they stood there staring after the speeding car, her freezing hands became the least of her worries.

  Red eyes blinked open in the storm.

  “What the hell…” Ian took a step toward the glowing lights.

  The two pinpricks of red brightened, white lights immediately following and growing wider.

  “It’s backing up,” Marcus whispered, pulling on Ashley and leading her a few steps further from the road.

  The radio in the overturned Taurus suddenly sprang to life, broadcasting, “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” The invisible wilderness around them echoed the satirical lyrics with a sort of perverse mocking.

  “This isn’t good,” Ashley whispered.

  The snow falling over the road separated, as if some vortex had opened a clear path for the reversing car. Suddenly, the wide wheels locked, and the vehicle, flat black, came sliding through the snow like a sled from hell.

  It came to a stop directly across from them, its engine growling, its headlights staring off into the collapsing vortex.

  “What is that?” Heather breathed.

  “A Camaro,” Ian said. “A 1971 Z-28…”

  A door swung open, and a tall figure stepped out. He stood there, on the other side of the short muscle car, and stared over the hood at them.

  Ashley couldn’t help pointing the flashlight in his direction.

  Beneath a large, wide-brimmed hat, mirrored glasses reflected the flashlight’s gaze, making his face an indiscernible bright spot in the storm.

  “Hello?” Marcus called. His phone sounded. He didn’t check it.

  The man didn’t reply, just stood there staring at them.

  Ian squinted through the snowflakes. “We hit a moose back a ways…”

  No response.

  The lyrics to the song rebounded through the cold silence with alien strangeness.

  The tension was thicker than the snow on the ground, and Heather pulled at Ian’s hand, trying to urge him away from this dark figure.

  Finally unable to keep himself from looking, Marcus checked his cell phone. With a shaking hand, he held it out so that everyone else could see it, too.

  I AM HERE. WE ARE HERE. GIVE IT TO US.

  “Run,” Ian whispered, pu
shing Heather toward the trees. “Run!”

  Thirteen

  They ran blindly through the woods, their feet slipping on rocks and leaves buried beneath the snow. Despite each of them being propelled forward on the wings of their own individual terror, they managed to stay together in the crushing darkness.

  “Is he following us?” Marcus shouted from up ahead. He was leading them, the flashlight jerking in his hand, its beam a crazy dance beyond any hope of interpretation.

  Ian looked behind but only saw the open mouth of night—trees for teeth, snow its tongue. “Keep going!” he cried.

  Ashley went down in front of him, and he tripped over her. They both tumbled into a patch of prickly underbrush.

  The laser beam of light swung back toward them, revealing their desperate escape from the clutches of dead vines and rotted wood.

  “Come on!” Heather screamed, reaching out and helping pull her sister to her feet.

  Ian was too cold to tell if he’d been hurt, but he knew that someone was going to get seriously injured if they kept this up. “Let’s slow it up a bit,” he said, back on his feet. “We won’t be going anywhere if one of us breaks something.”

  Marcus slowed, his light becoming less sporadic.

  Ian had the most experience in the great outdoors, and he preferred to be the one holding the flashlight and leading the way, afraid that Marcus might lead them off a ledge or onto a not-so-frozen lake. But there was something about making the only black guy in the group take up the rear that just wasn’t right. Too many movies. Or maybe not, he thought. After all, he realized, Marcus had been the only one to receive an actual threat on his cell phone. In any case, he imagined that their frozen bodies would be found days from now, once the storm cleared and troopers began searching the woods for the passengers of the flipped rental.

  Marcus let out a holler, and the light suddenly swung upward, highlighting the snowflakes dancing through the branches above them.

  “Are you okay?” Heather asked him. Her voice was heavy and slow, barely making it past her chattering teeth. It wouldn’t be long before every word was its own sentence and every movement an act of concentration.

  “I’m fine,” Marcus answered back.

  “We have to try starting a fire,” Ian said.

  Ashley started to protest.

  “We’re gonna freeze if we don’t.” He held his hand out to her, gesturing for the paper contents from the glove compartment.

  But what she handed over was just a ball of soggy trash.

  “Sorry,” she whispered. “Guess it got wet.”

  Marcus started patting his pockets. “Crap.”

  “What?”

  “Dropped my phone.”

  “You still have the map?” Ian wanted to know.

  “Sorry,” he muttered gravely.

  Ian sighed, crossed his arms, and squeezed himself as tightly as possible. “Maybe we should go back to the road…”

  “Are you crazy, man?”

  “For all we know that guy was about to offer us a ride.” He tested the words out on his tongue but knew better.

  Ashley snorted in disbelief. “To where?”

  He fumbled with his cell phone. “Maybe there’s something nearby.”

  Heather turned on her phone that she’d rescued from the ground before running off into the woods. She didn’t know if she’d broken it by stomping on it or not. It worked. The battery was almost dead, but for now, it worked.

  Ashley stared into the glow of her own smartphone. “Maybe we can find a Zippo app or something.”

  Ian swore. “Says it can’t acquire my coordinates at this time.”

  “I got it,” Heather said. “Assuming we can trust it.”

  They all huddled together, looking over her shoulder. Her hands were shaking so much that it might have been comical under different circumstances.

  “Why don’t we find a place to set it down,” Marcus offered, shining the flashlight around them.

  “There,” she said, pointing. “There’s a flat rock over there.”

  Heather placed the phone down on it, finally stopping the image from moving.

  She put her fingers on the target indicating their current location and slowly began spreading her fingers, zooming in tighter on their position. The screen showed nothing but the road they’d run from and forest all around them.

  “Zoom back out a little,” Ashley said.

  She brought finger and thumb closer.

  “There.” Ashley pointed to a spot near the edge of the phone. “Zoom in there. What is that?”

  Heather was using the satellite image of the map, an actual overhead image of their location that looked to have been taken in some past October. “Looks like a parking lot,” she said. She zoomed in closer.

  “That’s a road,” Ashley commented. “And a building.”

  “Maybe just a pavilion,” Marcus cautioned. The unlabeled road stretched away from whatever it was, heading off east and deeper into the forest.

  “That road has to go somewhere.” Ian blew a long, warm breath into his hands. “Let’s go.”

  They started to move again, and before long, the ceiling of branches and pine needles began to spread apart, granting the falling snow a clear path to the ground. They had to take bigger strides now, the snow reaching their shins.

  “How can this possibly be happening?” Marcus mumbled to himself. He kept turning around and shining the flashlight behind them, making sure the man in black wasn’t standing there watching them.

  “What?” Ian shouted over the wind. “No preacher quotes?”

  Marcus didn’t respond. He was too cold to respond.

  “My…f-f-face…feels…f-f-frozen,” Heather stuttered.

  “Mine…t-t-t-too…” Ashley asked, “How…m-m-much…further?”

  Heather looked at the phone, through its cracked face, but she had to stop and hold it with two hands in order to keep it from shaking. “H-h-half…way…th-there.”

  Ian knew that if what awaited them was merely an empty parking lot beside an open pavilion, they could be done for. They needed shelter and warmth. They could follow the path to wherever it led, which would be a lot safer than trying to navigate straight through the woods, but if it didn’t lead to something close by, they’d be in bad shape come morning.

  “How are…your feet?” he asked Heather.

  “I…think they’re…still…th-th-there. Can’t…feel th-them at all.”

  He was worried about frostbite, too. There was no way they were all getting out of this without their fair share of it.

  Marcus brought them to a wall of thick underbrush they couldn’t get through, and they had to walk around it until finding an opening.

  “You sh-should see where the-the-the road leads,” Marcus called back to Heather. But the wind snatched most of his words from the air, and he had to try again, louder.

  “When we get to the-the-the b-b-b-uilding,” Ian answered for her. “Let’s keep m-m-moving.” He frowned. This was bad. Earlier, back in the Christmas-carol warmth of their blessed Ford, when Heather expressed displeasure toward thoughts of breaking down and being stranded out here, Ian had just laughed it off. Yeah, that would suck, ha-ha. What were the chances? And what the hell were the chances that that driver was able to travel these roads at nearly seventy miles per hour? And then to spot them on the side of the road while passing? Impossible.

  “Kinda w-w-weird,” Marcus shouted, loud enough to be heard by everyone. “Heather’s phone sends us n-north, we hit a m-m-moose, then I get a text that says ‘I’m coming f-f-for you’ and ‘Almost th-there.’ And then when that guy shows up, a m-m-message says, ‘I am h-here.’”

  “It’s the phones,” Heather whispered again.

  “Th-that doesn’t make sense,” Ashley argued. And then she walked into a tree. “Motherf-f-f—”

  “You okay?” Marcus swung the flashlight around and lit her up. She was bent over, holding a hand to her head.

  �
��Yeah…”

  “What do you think the guy m-meant when he said, ‘Give it to us’?” Ian’s joints were feeling more and more corroded with each miserable step.

  “He m-must think we’re someone else,” Heather offered.

  Ian didn’t buy it. “If the text messages, somehow, are connected with him…then th-there’s no way he has the wrong people.”

  They walked on, spreading branches, climbing rocks, and falling over each other while letting Ian’s words permeate their breached sense of reality. If the messages were related to that dark man driving a ’71 Camaro through the Adirondacks at seventy miles per hour in a blizzard…then he would know the contents of the messages, wouldn’t he? Which meant that he knew secrets about them that not even their closest friends and family members knew. How was that possible?

  “The t-t-text said ‘We.’” Marcus was walking slower now. “S-so whatever’s goin’ on involves more…than…just one…p-p-person.”

  While Ian told himself he didn’t believe in God anymore, he’d never stopped to consider whether or not he still believed in Satan, or a spiritual realm at all, for that matter—demons, ghosts, spirits… Did his denying the existence of God also deny him the metaphysical? He didn’t know. All he knew was that his skin was covered with gooseflesh, and not just because he was freezing. All the hair on the back of his neck was standing on end, antennas picking up signals of foreboding loud and clear—signals his rational mind kept trying to prove weren’t real.

  But the Camaro was real, as had been the man who stepped out of it.

  “Let’s j-j-just keep walking,” he shouted through the blinding snow. His ears were freezing! “No more t-t-talking.” He couldn’t stop stealing glances behind him, still expecting to see the driver in the big hat and sunglasses walking after them, unimpeded by the darkness or the density of the forest.

  Ten minutes later, and with not one more step left in them, the flashlight’s beam swept over a clearing.

  “Th-th-th-th…” Heather’s teeth were clattering so loudly that she had to summon the will to work her way through it. “This…is…it.”

  Marcus swung the beam around the corners of the lot, tracing its edge, looking for the building they all needed to be there.