The phone on the wall rang.
They all paused, frozen in their seats, and exchanged looks with each other—looks that carried with them the awakening of feelings that had been momentarily forgotten.
Ashley was the one who stood and walked to the phone. She reached for it, but her hand hovered idly just before making contact. Then she snatched it with sudden determination, telling herself that such trepidation was utter nonsense.
“Hello?” She looked over to the table and mouthed with her lips, It’s Joyce. “No, we’re doing great. Yeah. Thanks. Okay. No, not at all. Take your time, please.” She turned her eyes to the window. “Well, just be safe, okay? Don’t hurry back here on our account. Right. Okay…yup. Bye.” She replaced the phone in its cradle. “The storm’s starting. She’s gonna try getting here as soon as possible, but her cousin who she hasn’t seen in years just showed up. She said to help ourselves to anything we want.”
Ian raised the wine glass. “Good to know.”
“Okay, come on,” Marcus said, hurrying Ashley back to the board game. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
“Hold on,” Ashley responded. “I want to see what it’s doing outside.” She stepped out of the kitchen, descended three wooden steps, and passed through the living room where the fireplace was still crackling.
Heather tried easing her mind by letting it carol along to another version of “Winter Wonderland.” She thought it interesting how many times a month she could hear the same songs over and over again without growing tired of them—at least until the last couple days. She wondered how Ian generally felt about all the Christmas songs, given the painful memories they provoked. Whatever their affect on him, she vowed to replace those old memories with new ones. As the years ticked off, surely memories of their own children opening presents beneath the family tree, if not capable of completely replacing the memories of his older brother, would at least push his old pain to the outer limits of the present—or rather their future.
She became aware of her hand resting across her stomach again.
The song began to skip.
“That’s weird,” Ian said. “The songs are playing from an iPod.”
Marcus shrugged. “She probably copied a scratched CD into her library. I’ve done it a few times.”
The skipping grew louder and more obnoxious until it was just a blaring loop of rebounding noise.
“Ashley,” Marcus called. “Can you skip this track?”
She didn’t answer, and the noise persisted.
“Ash?” Marcus got up from the table and walked out of the kitchen. He pointed at Ian. “No cheating.”
But Heather got up, too, a sense of something not right sending her on a mission to find her sister.
Marcus got to the sound system before Ashley and turned off the iPod that was plugged into it. The sonic sledge hammer fell away from their ears.
“Ashley?” Heather called. She followed Marcus out of the living room and into the front of the house where the Christmas tree stood.
Ashley was standing erect, hands shaking at her sides, her eyes wide and unblinking, staring through the windows that overlooked the front yard.
“What is it?” Heather and Marcus ran to her, anxious to see what had her frozen like a statute.
Out in the street, beneath the falling snow and beyond all the candy canes and elves, was a black, 1971 Z-28 Camaro.
Heather’s hand flew to her mouth, but not before a single expletive snuck out of it and hovered in the air around them like a harbinger of doom.
They took a step backward, away from the window.
“Is the door locked?” Heather stammered.
Marcus forced his eyes off the car parked in front of Joyce’s house and summoned the willpower to move his legs to the front door. He engaged the deadbolt and made sure the knob was locked.
They heard the phone ringing in the kitchen, Ian’s distant voice answering it.
Marcus went back to Ashley and grabbed her hand. It was cold. He began pulling her away from the window. “Come on,” he whispered. She slowly complied, though her eyes remained fixed on the dark vehicle that had no doubt come for them. Images of George’s dead body hanging from the ceiling permeated all their thoughts and punched their hearts into overdrive.
When they got back to the kitchen, Ian was standing there with the phone in his hand. When he saw Marcus, he held it out to him.
“He wants to talk to you…”
Marcus stared at him, hesitating. Then he reached for the receiver, brought it to his ear. “Hello?”
“You’re going to die, Blackman.”
But the gravelly voice didn’t come through the dotted holes of the earpiece.
“What the hell was that?” Ashley screamed.
“It came through the speaker system.” Ian’s eyes were focused on the tiny speakers hanging throughout the house.
Marcus hung up the phone. “We need to make sure every door and window is locked. Now!”
When the voice came through the speakers again—this time announcing, “You’re all going to die!”—they were propelled into action. They sprinted throughout the house, checking and locking every door and window they came across before meeting back in the kitchen a long minute later.
“Is it still out there?” Heather asked. Locking the doors and windows seemed to have triggered the walls’ slow move in on her.
Marcus looked around the corner, through the hallway and out into the storm. “Yeah. It’s just sitting there.”
“We should’ve brought the gun in with us.” Ian was in the kitchen, opening one drawer after another in search of anything that might be used as a weapon.
Heather came up behind him. “I think we should call the police.” She watched the manner in which he threw open the drawers, his hands frantically searching for some kind of defense. He was scared. And that scared her. This was no movie in which the audience was acclimated to the scenario by a suspension of disbelief simply due to the movie’s adherence to a certain genre. This reality could never turn to the supernatural as the obvious suspect, even if a sold-out theatre demanded it. “This can’t be happening,” she whispered.
“If we call the police, then we’re gonna have to explain the diner and George. How are we going to do that?”
“We have the truth,” she pleaded.
“And what’s the truth, Heather? Huh? What are you gonna tell them when they ask why we were driving north into the mountains after leaving the diner, why we took Charles’ car and failed to tell the authorities about his ‘suicide’? Why we came back to the diner the next morning?”
“I understand that, Ian. But there’s a man sitting out there who has been following us! What are we supposed to do about that? Because if that man did kill George…” Her voice faded.
“I don’t know.”
“What?”
“I don’t know, dammit!” He slammed a drawer closed and leaned on the counter, dropping his head. “I don’t know what the hell is happening!”
The voice slithered back through the speakers. “We want what is ours.”
Ian stormed out of the kitchen with a knife in hand and slashed the wires that connected the speakers.
Silence for a moment.
And then, “I am the Crest of Dragons…”
A bang against the front door.
“In the basement! Now!” Ian shouted. He pushed Heather in the back, urging her toward the door in the hallway. Ashley and Marcus followed.
Heather flung the door open and descended the stairs into darkness.
****
He sits in his purring V8 chariot, staring out into the snow and across a landscape obnoxiously littered with an overabundance of blinking lawn trinkets. The house lies beyond. The sun is setting through the trees directly behind it, and he has to squint behind the tinted lenses of his glasses.
It’s in there. He can feel it, can sense its power pulsating in intermittent bursts of psychic energy. He is unsur
e of whether or not the people who have it know what it is, but he considers the possibility extremely unlikely. Again, he tries to open the door, to step out into the street and make his way across the snow. But he can’t. Something is preventing him from moving toward the house. It frustrates as much as it confuses him. Once more, it is right there within his grasp. All he has to do is go get it. It would be such a simple thing to do, to kill them and finally take back Solomon’s ring for himself. It’s what the demons want him to do.
Isn’t it?
He knows they have led him here, to this place. That they have been aiding him in his search—and for what other reason than to reacquaint themselves with him in that special way? To forge their presence to his physical being as before. It is what they want. He is the Crest of Dragons, the one they will use to destroy the world. They tell him this. Over and over again, they whisper it in his ear. They guide him through the spiritual universe, directing him from behind the veil of a truer reality, yet one that limits their ability—which is why they need him.
But why, then, can’t he get out of the damn car? He growls at the dilemma, mumbling curses at this strange opposition, at the Lookers who would see into his soul and convict him if he let them. He stares at the house, burning it down with his eyes. “Why have you led me here only to stop me now?” he asks the seemingly empty seat beside him, and he’s shocked at how similar the question is to that of the Hebrews’ own charge against their God, when they found themselves trapped between the Red Sea and the Egyptian army. Why have you brought us out here to die? But God had split the Red Sea for His chosen and then destroyed the Egyptian army with it. Can he expect the same from his god? Of course, he has no god. He is his own god. Yet he can’t even step out of the car.
Voices begin tickling his ear, hundreds of them all at once, each humming a different song. He feels them slither into his ear and travel into his brain, controlling it. They enter him, the shadowy spirits filling his body with a presence he has learned not only to love, but to depend on.
Tilting his head back, Jonathan opens his mouth and communes with the Other Side, seeking the will of his Master… Yes, whether he knows it or not, he does have a Master.
When he finally opens his eyes, he understands that it is something within the house that is keeping him from approaching it. It isn’t the demons. It isn’t the angels.
There is another power at work here, one that he only has a vague sense of. He curses this strange obstacle, understanding that he will need all the strength his comrades have to offer in order to move forward against such a Light.
He sits and waits for them to finish filling him.
Twenty-two
Marcus was locked in the old church basement, and one look at Heather told him she was back in her prom dress. Her wild eyes were trying to focus through the darkness and find the walls, as if they might try taking her by surprise. A red glow came courtesy of Ian’s flashlight app, and though it provided some idea of their surroundings, the red tint and its show of shadows painted the basement like a cell nestled in the arms of hell. Ian switched the color to yellow.
“What are we doing down here?” Ashley asked, catching her breath.
Ian was walking around, holding his phone out in front of him and casting the yellow light into dark corners, trying to get a feel for their environment.
Marcus watched the glowing beacon move about like a huge, prehistoric firefly, its light illuminating Ian’s hand and wrist as it carried the severed arm to its nest. It flew to a concrete wall and began gliding up and down its face. “What are you looking for?” he asked.
“A window.”
Instead, he found a shelf filled with paint cans, a wheelbarrow, a toolbox, a washer and dryer.
“How ’bout the light switch?” Heather’s voice trembled through the void.
“I don’t think there’s a window down here. The sun hasn’t set, you’d see light.” But Marcus watched as he continued searching the walls anyway.
“Here we go,” he said a moment later. There was a loud scraping sound and then a huge crash that boomed through the basement as the glow of snow-reflected twilight suddenly appeared in the form of a hovering rectangle floating in the wall above them. “Everyone okay?” Ian turned his phone off and turned to take in whatever the new light, as dim as it was, had to reveal. There didn’t seem to be any collateral damage inflicted by cans and tools that had been sent flying from the tall rack of shelves he’d knocked over.
“We’re fine,” Ashley answered.
“Is it still out there?” Marcus wanted to know.
Ian slipped the phone into his pocket and pulled himself up to the glass window. The bottom half of the window pane was buried beneath snow, so he had to pull himself higher in order to get a glimpse over it. His arms burning, feet hanging two feet off the ground, he answered, “Yeah, it’s still out there.” He let go and dropped back down to the floor.
“What the hell does he want?” Heather shouted.
Marcus blinked and was suddenly struck with the very real sensation of being watched, as if some floating eye was surveying the room and looking them over one at a time. He couldn’t help imagining that one invisible eye so famously framed in a capstone. But to whom did the eye belong? Horus? The Illuminati? Satan himself? And with that question, any remaining reticence to classify their predicament as strictly “paranormal” or “spiritual” vanished, the chains of “can’t” and “impossible” no longer there to restrain their hopeful ignorance. The mailboxes, the radio, the cell phones, the diner, the weather, the moose, the Camaro…George pinned to his ceiling. It was all real, a haunting concocted from some other dimension, some other realm—the realm of demons and spirits. There was no natural explanation for what was happening. Evil was here with them, and it wanted something. I am here. We are here. Give it to us. He prayed, sank to his knees and prayed, as earnestly as he ever had before. “‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff they comfort me…’”
No remark came from Ian this time.
“It wants something,” Heather whispered. She sat on the floor, holding her knees against her chest.
“It?” Ian asked.
“She’s right,” Marcus said.
“About ‘it’ or about it wanting something?”
“The text message I got said, ‘Give it to us.’ And the speakers upstairs just said, ‘We want what is ours.’”
They fell silent beneath the weight of things they couldn’t hope to explain, knowing that sitting around and reconsidering the spiritual nature of reality was a predetermined act of futility. They all knew this, subconsciously if not actively, and their predicament went from needing to deny the extreme to suddenly accepting it as the new axiom. It was a collective knowledge now, even if one unexpressed.
“At first, when I saw the ring Ash found,” Marcus explained, “I thought maybe it all had to do with that. I mean, it seemed to have some kind of strange…” He sought for the right word.
“It did. I felt it,” Heather interrupted.
Again, there was no use sitting around discussing why that might be or whether it made any sense. They were into things beyond their world, so the thought of a finger ring found in the glove compartment of their rental car being the reason for a ’71 Camaro sitting out front of Joyce’s house and communicating through the severed wires of the home’s speaker system was no longer all that unrealistic.
“But I tossed the ring at the gas station,” Ian objected. “If it’s the ring he wants, we don’t have it.”
Ashley’s hand drifted to her pocket. “Maybe he doesn’t know that.”
“Whatever he knows, and how he knows it, he knows enough to keep finding us.”
She slipped her hand inside her jeans.
Heather began rocking back and forth, an episode forthcoming.
Ian swore, went over, and knelt beside her. “It’s gonna be okay,” he said. B
ut everyone knew those words meant nothing. How could things they had no control over or ever hope to understand be made better?
Marcus was staring at Ashley, sensing from the look on her face that she was about to shed some light on the game board, that she was somehow going to reveal more pieces to the puzzle. He didn’t know how he knew this, or how she would be able to help them understand, but the expression of horror that lit up her face could be nothing short of some terrible realization.
“What?” he asked.
Ashley pulled something from her pocket and held it up so that they could all see it. The light that remained outside shone through the window and settled on the object in her hand.
The ring.
“I didn’t even realize I had it…”
Ian frowned, eyebrows sliding-boards of puzzlement. “But I threw it—”
“I saw it on the ground when we walked out of the store. I picked it up and put it in my pocket.”
“And forgot about it?” Marcus couldn’t take his eyes off the metal loop. His heart was pounding.
“I…” Her own confusion soured her face, understanding that she’d betrayed herself but unable to explain why or how.
Marcus reached over, grabbed the ring from her hand, and stormed up the basement steps with loud thumps that came back echoing off the walls around them.
“Where are you going?” she shouted after him.
But just as he reached the top of the stairs, his hand about to grab the doorknob, there was a loud bang that rocked the door from the other side. It startled him, and he almost went tumbling back down into the basement.
He paused, staring at the door, ring in hand.
BANG!
The door shook in its frame.
“What do you want?” Marcus screamed at it, expecting the wooden door to splinter into shrapnel at any moment.
Silence.
Ian called up after him. “Get back down here, Marc!”
“Don’t open the door,” Heather pleaded through the hands covering her face.
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