Seventeen
Ian’s phone directed them over a bumpy road that cut a winding path through the watching woods. The morning light, gray and dreary as it was, came splintering down through the knotted canopy above. The large dome, fashioned from barked arms and a million interlaced, twigged fingers, had sheltered the path, sparing it the amount of snow the parking lot had received. The chained tires on the Rover had no problem with a trail long ago established by park rangers and campers. The vehicle rocked, bounced, and shimmied all the way to the end of the trail, where it finally turned onto a paved road. At least that’s what the phone said, anyway. With the amount of untouched snow covering it, it could have easily been a frozen riverbed. The phone, however, proved honest, and Ian had the vehicle heading west back toward I-81.
“How long until we reach 81?” Ian asked. He looked up into the rearview mirror and spent a second watching the two distinct, chained lines that were spreading away from them and going back the way they had come. The tracks stood out as a loud pronouncement of their being there, the only indication of anything having been there. Such evidence of their solitude slightly disturbed him.
Heather had her hair pulled to the side and over her shoulder. A black hair band appeared from somewhere and stretched into a wide O across her spread fingers as she prepared to tie off a morning ponytail. “Half hour,” she answered.
Ashley was biting her fingernails, which she tended to do when she was nervous or troubled about something. Heather’s pregnancy was one of the things driving her fingers into her mouth, the shadowy figure in the bathroom another. There was also the text message. GIVE IT TO US. Just what in the hell did that mean? Give what to whom? And yet, she kept finding herself offering pensive glances at the road behind them, expecting to see that black car on the prowl. But that didn’t make sense, did it? Such a correlation?
A crescent moon detached between her teeth, ripped free from her hand, and she spit it on the ground at her feet, onto the floorboard of Charles’ car. Charles. The nice fellow who first saved their lives and then blew his brains out. Merry Christmas.
Marcus rested a firm hand on her thigh and squeezed it once, reassuringly.
But the affectionate act came with a sharp pain, like there was something sharp in his hand.
Or something in her pocket.
She remembered the ring she’d found in the glove compartment of the Taurus. She’d forgotten all about it, unsure as to what even made her grab it. She reached for it, slipping her hand beneath the weight of her boyfriend’s concerned touch, and got it out after a minor scuffle with her tight-fitting jeans.
“What’s that?” Marcus asked.
She held it up to the window, studying its craftsmanship. “I don’t know. It was in the glove compartment of the car.”
“The Taurus?”
“Yeah.”
Heather and Ian turned in their seats to get a look.
“Maybe it belongs to the guy who’s missing,” Heather wondered. “Tossed his wedding ring in there before picking up the mistress…”
Ashley didn’t think so. It didn’t look like any wedding ring she’d ever seen before. The band was bronze, and a black gem sat fixed to its face. It seemed ancient, something that had been dug up in the desert and belonged in a museum. There was some kind of language inscribed across the metal. The dark stone was…deep. A bottomless chasm contained by its rounded edges, ripples of power leaping forth and splashing against the glass-like prison. As if that made any sense, it pulled her in, luring her with its mystery and hypnotizing her with its energy. For a second, she thought it might open up and swallow her, condemn her to the bottom of some dark, eternal ocean. But the sense of power was—
The night of her rape flashed in her head, her face twisted in terror suddenly paused against her mind’s eye like some token Polaroid that her attacker had returned with, shoving it in her face and mocking her with the memory of his triumph.
She flung the ring away from her, the damn memory with it. It bounced between the two front seats and came to rest at Heather’s feet. It sat there, innocent. Inanimate.
“What’s wrong?” Heather leaned over to pick it up.
Ashley had no answer for her. She didn’t know what was wrong or what had just happened, only that she was trembling. It wasn’t the image alone that had imprinted itself on the backside of her eyes—seeing her own face screaming in protest, the vantage point that of an observer—but also the feeling of it. The violent intrusion, the horror… In that split second, during the fathomless descent she somehow took down into the gem, she had been raped again.
“Nothing.” She closed her eyes and focused on ridding herself of the memory, of the feeling. She ordered herself to—breathe! “Nothing,” she repeated.
Heather turned the ring over in her hands, setting her own blue stare into its center. Her gaze followed the eloquent lines of the inscription, not understanding any of it but somehow fascinated all the same. The morning light and falling snow reflected off the dark gem and swam circles through the metal. “Strange,” she whispered, feeling something.
“Heather,” Ian said.
She kept staring, unresponsive.
“Heather,” he repeated.
Still she sat transfixed by the ring.
“Heather!” Ian snapped.
Heather blinked and came out of the fugue that had ensnared her. Reaching forward, she opened the glove compartment and tossed the ring inside, slamming the door shut after it. Then she leaned back and away from it, as if the door might not be able to protect her from whatever force was emanating from the old ornament.
Ian stared at her, questions of confusion transmitting wildly through his hawkish glare. “What the hell? You okay?”
She pinched her eyebrows, staring at the glove compartment. “Yeah.” Then she abandoned whatever was bothering her and leaned over to turn on the radio. “See if we can get a weather report,” she deflected.
Ashley watched from the backseat as Ian observed his fiancée with concern. Heather had sensed something ominous about the ring, too. Give it to us… And somehow Ashley knew, just knew, exactly what the dark man had wanted.
Heather found a local station just in time to catch a weather report already in progress. Something about another storm front heading in, one even worse than last night’s.
Though it seemed Ian was having little trouble keeping the Rover on the road, the memory of his cries from behind the wheel of the Taurus as the rental had picked up speed and propelled them into a moose was still too fresh. She didn’t want to be driving in these conditions any more than Heather did, not with that sort of dark magic in the air. Magic? She dismissed the thought and watched from the corner of her eye as it disappeared into a tall, borderless field of the unexplained. “I have a friend that lives in Syracuse,” she said instead. “Maybe we should think about spending the night at her place.”
“You think she’d mind?” Ian asked. It was obvious from his voice that he wasn’t all that thrilled about driving through this either, as if at any moment the brake pedal might sink to the floorboard with no results.
“Let me call her.”
Marcus leaned his head against the cold glass window beside him. “A hot shower, something to eat…”
Ashley looked at her phone, praying silently that it would work. “One bar.” She dialed. “Voicemail,” she reported. And then, “Hi, Joyce, it’s Ashley. From school. It’s been a long time, I know…but I’m actually in the area and wondered if you’d mind us stopping in to say hi. ‘Us’ as in my boyfriend and my sister and her fiancé. We’re north of Watertown right now, so give me a call as soon as you get this. Thanks, Joyce. Look forward to seeing you again. It’s been too long.” She hung up and leaned back against the seat with a sigh.
A series of commercials, their terrible jingles like some Gitmo torture track, came selling weed killer, natural breast enhancement, and used cars. Heather spared their ears by shutting them off. But after a few momen
ts of silence, driving through the white-washed world of eerie solitude, the quietness began to weigh on them and the ache for some sense of the outside world returned.
“Why don’t you find some music to put on,” Ian suggested.
“I’m kinda sick of Christmas music,” Ashley said, playing with the zipper on her jacket with one hand while chewing away the fingers on the other.
“Me, too,” Marcus echoed.
Heather looked around and found a CD in the door pocket beside her. “Charles, my man… Who woulda thought?”
“What?”
“Bob Marley.” She couldn’t help but smile as she slid the disc into the player, and a second later, their frozen frontier was thawing beneath the happy notes of some warm island music. The happy feelings of summer days lit a beach fire in their souls and brought smiles to their faces as they all sang along. The morning light and the Jamaican singer had the events of yesterday seeming rather silly. Though it was a feeling they knew not to trust, even as their bodies swayed automatically to the music, Syracuse their new destination.
****
“I think you should stop and ask,” Heather said. They were coming up on a little gas station.
“Why? We have the phone.”
“I don’t trust the phone.”
Ian frowned. “Fine, we’ll stop. Maybe they have coffee.” He turned off the road and drove into the recently plowed parking lot of the gas station. A yellow salt-stained backhoe loader sat off in the corner of the lot, sleeping beside two mountains of snow.
“Might as well get gas while we’re at it,” Marcus said.
Ian pulled the Rover up alongside a pump and threw the door open. Ashley and Heather did the same.
“I got the gas,” Marcus insisted. “Get me coffee if they have any.” He stepped out into the lazy snow, zipped his jacket, and pulled his wallet from his jeans as the others all went to the shop. After removing the gas cap, swiping his credit card, choosing the grade, and removing the nozzle, he set the auto-flow latch on the handle and thrust his hands into his pockets. He stepped away from the Rover and peered across the lot, into the shop’s frosted windows. He could see the shapes and colors of his friends all huddled around the counter and conversing with a fourth shape that was positioned behind it.
A brisk wind shattered the stillness, flying across the parking lot and blowing little tornadoes of snow across the ground. Marcus shivered and turned his back to it. Checking on the status of his purchase, curious just how thirsty the Range Rover was, he came face to face with the pump’s digital display.
His chest tightened as a cold, hard grip clutched his heart.
Instead of rising numbers—the gallons of gas being consumed and the rapidly changing numbers of dollars and cents being exchanged for them—there stood just two words.
DIE BLACKMAN
His feet were frozen to the ground, his legs stiff as tree trunks. The words stared at him, daring him to blink, to turn his back on them and search for some grinning Nazi in the bushes, some sort of transmitter or remote in his hands. Maybe it was the attendant behind the counter. Perhaps he had a White Power poster hanging next to the coffee machine—if there was a coffee machine, and Marcus prayed that there was—and this was how he paid tribute to Hitler’s ghost, scaring any black folks unfortunate enough to have to pump their gas here. Maybe. But Marcus couldn’t turn away to find out. Besides, he doubted the Fourth Reich would be coming from the mountains of New York. No, his fear was that the monster from the church basement had finally been set free and was now looking to cleanse the world of all those who might know of its existence.
A coldness colder than the frigid December air crept up the back of his neck. He shuddered.
The auto-flow disengaged, and the handle snapped with a loud thunk, almost launching his heart out of his throat and into space, the final frontier. The fact that William Shatner’s voice actually uttered those last words in his mind was almost as disturbing as—
The words were gone, the display showing only the numerical sum of what had been consumed.
He squeezed his eyes shut and looked again. Just numbers. “Dear God…” he mumbled. He replaced the nozzle, told the machine he didn’t want a receipt—afraid of what that might say—and slipped into the front passenger seat of Charles’ car, behind the closed glove compartment. His hands were shaking, and he squeezed them on legs that had run pigskin through gauntlets of gladiators hoping to knock his head off. That man, that college warrior, now felt like a child before these forces he couldn’t see or hope to understand. Averting a two-hundred-and-forty-pound football player with the grace and ease of a gazelle was well and good, but this was no football field, and his nemesis was no college linebacker.
He stared into the window of the station, anxious for his friends’ return. When he looked forward again, he was shocked to see the glove compartment hanging open in front of him, a gaping mouth whispering secrets from some other world.
And then he felt it in his hand, resting on his palm.
The ring that Ashley had found in the Taurus. The one that she’d thrown at Heather’s feet. The one Heather had locked away.
Give it to us…
Those four words came, not from the captain’s log of some unknown stardate, but from the annals of a dark and hidden past that transcended his own lifespan. It was the voice of Legion, the voice of hell, of time immemorial. And it was here in the car with him.
Slowly, a Malcolm X sweatshirt began to appear, peeking out from behind an open gray peacoat and dancing before the window across from him. It seemed distant, incomprehensible. But a double tap against the window cleared his vision, and the fog from whatever pit he’d been saved from vanished without further ado. He quickly tossed the ring back into the glove compartment and slammed it shut. Striking the automatic lock on the door panel beside him, unaware that he’d even locked the doors, he welcomed his friends back into the car.
Ian opened the door and extended a steaming cup across the center console. Marcus took it, the smell of the burnt coffee invigorating. “Thanks,” he said, as Ian climbed back behind the wheel, setting his own coffee down in one of the twin cup holders. “Where are the girls?”
“Bathroom.” He closed the door, blew warm air into his hands.
“Of course.”
The unease in Marcus’ voice and the manner in which he was staring out the window didn’t go unnoticed, and Ian paused. “You okay? Something happen?”
“The gas pump just told me to die.”
Ian’s non-reaction was testament to the yoke of bizarre still hanging around their necks.
“The next thing I know I’m holding that ring in my hands and the doors are locked.”
Ian still didn’t say anything.
Lifting the cup to his lips and savoring every station of the hot liquid’s journey through his body, Marcus muttered, “So much for the haunted car theory.” He took another sip. “Unless we just happened to find the only other haunted vehicle in New York, and the spirit haunting it has the same nickname for me.”
“Give me the ring,” Ian said, holding his hand out.
Marcus considered him for a moment. Then he retrieved the thing from the glove compartment and handed it to him.
Taking it from his hand, Ian opened the door, stepped back out into the cold, and launched the ring into the air with quarterback mechanics that would have made Drew Brees proud. It might have even cleared the shop if a strong wind hadn’t risen to clip its wings. Instead, it fell well short of the woods in back, rolling to a stop against a pile of snow beside the station’s front doors.
Ian returned to his seat with satisfaction riding his top lip and pressing it down into a smirk. He turned the key, and Marley’s voice was back to singing again.
“Every little thing gonna be alright…”
Marcus stared after the ring, unable to see where it landed. Relief that complemented the look on Ian’s face filled him, and he began to believe the song’s promise, t
aking it as his own. “So what’d he say?” he finally asked, it coming back to him why they’d stopped here in the first place.
“We’re northeast of Watertown. To get to 81, we have to get back on Route 3 and go through Watertown again, same as before. We just made a giant loop.”
“What? How the heck did that happen?”
“I have no idea.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folded map. “But we’re using this from now on.” He tossed it onto Marcus’ lap and reached for his coffee.
Marcus set his cup down and spread the map out. “The ghost in the machine…”
“Huh?”
Marcus shrugged. “The spirit possession of technology. The ghost in the machine. An evil presence operating through computers and what not.” He looked at Ian. “You never saw any of those shows?”
“I think I saw an X-Files episode once… Some AI operating system developed a free will or something, started using the building to kill people. What’s your point?”
“Cell phones. A modern twist to the ghost story.”
Ian raised his eyebrows, his fingers again finding solace in the thickening carpet growing over his jaw. He didn’t have anything to say to that and changed the subject. “Guy said we’re supposed to get slammed with another storm tonight.”
“Hopefully we’re at Ashley’s friend’s house by then.”
“Hopefully.”
Marcus folded the map back up. “Can’t believe we haven’t been able to get in touch with their parents yet.”
Ian pulled out his cell and tried sending them an email. “I’m still getting my emails sent back with failure notices.”
“Ghost in the machine.” Marcus reflected back on how concerned he’d been about meeting Ashley’s parents for the first time, and now the anxiety of it all struck him as silly and insignificant in light of recent events.
“Here they come,” Ian announced.
Heather and Ashley stepped out of the store, plastic bags in hand. A gust of wind blew something out of one of the bags, and Heather bent to retrieve it from the snow pile resting beside the still-closing doors. They crossed the parking lot, climbed into the back of the Rover, and immediately started digging into their bags. Combos and candy bars—the breakfast of champions, or the breakfast of the damned? Marcus figured it was still too early to tell. Could this all be chocked up to that ring? He hoped so, even if he had no clue what it was or why it would be so important to the driver of that ’71 Camaro.
The Demon Signet Page 13