The Demon Signet

by Shawn Hopkins

  Marcus looked down at the ring in his hand, then up at the door. You are going to die, Blackman. He took a step backward…and another. Finally, after what seemed like hours, he made it back to the basement floor. “What are we gonna do?” he whispered, shoulders brushing against Ashley and Ian.

  Ian stared at the window. “We can’t go anywhere, not with him out there and the storm coming.”

  “You don’t think he could get in here if he wanted to?” Marcus had seen the driver navigate the Camaro over twisted, frozen roads at top speeds in a blinding blizzard. He seemed more than capable of breaking a window and climbing into the house.

  “I don’t know. Why didn’t he come after us last time?”

  If there were a set of rules that the Unknown had to follow, there was no guessing as to what they may or may not be. There were no answers for their questions.

  “He hasn’t even gotten out of his car yet,” Ian continued. “If we can ride out the night here…”

  “What about Joyce?” Ashley asked.

  Ian tossed her his cell phone. “See if you can get in touch with her.” He paused. “Try the police first.”

  And that was the final straw, the one that sentenced their situation into the dire reality they had all been hoping against. They had to take their story to the authorities if only to gain protection against the dark driver. Whether Justice would believe their tale or not no longer mattered.

  Marcus watched the light slowly fade from the window, and a new surge of fear coursed through his body. Perhaps what the driver was waiting for…was nightfall. A vampire confined to his V-8 coffin during the day, but—

  A cold chill swept through him as a sudden question whispered into his ear. If the driver was still in his car, then what the hell had just been banging on the basement door?

  He realized then that the others must’ve all thought he was the one banging on the door. He didn’t say anything to them, just bowed his head and mumbled, his voice broken and desperate. “‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places…’”

  This time Ian did interject. “Shut up, Marc. Just shut the hell up.”

  ****

  Ashley opened her eyes and was immediately confused by the light clawing at them. She lifted her head off Marcus’ shoulder and took in the bright glow of her surroundings, squinting. The basement was no longer some mystery cell occupied by eerie darkness. Now it stood naked and bare, no secrets to hide from anyone. Sunshine poured through the window that had been blocked by the shelf Ian toppled over. And there across from her the shelf still lay, paint cans, tools, and magazines scattered across the floor. At first, Ashley thought the Camaro had pulled up to the house and was shining its high beams into the basement window, but when a small bird fluttered into the picture, and her eyes adjusted a moment later, she was able to make out trees in the distance and knew it was morning. Or at least she assumed it was morning. She had no idea how long she’d been asleep. Could have been days.

  She nudged Marcus awake while kicking Heather’s foot. Her sister was entwined with Ian in a tight embrace.

  Marcus’ eyes fluttered open and then closed tight in the face of the blinding rays. Everything hit him at once, where he was and how he’d gotten there. He scrambled to his feet in a panic.

  “It’s morning,” Ashley said.

  After taking in the basement and finding no immediate threat, he rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and watched Heather start making her own entrance through the door of this new day. Ian stirred beside her. “We fell asleep…” Marcus’ tone carried with it the improbability of anyone being able to sleep in such circumstances.

  Ashley nodded as the sunlight’s warmth emboldened her against boogiemen that somehow always seemed so silly in the daytime. But her question didn’t undermine the reality of what they had experienced, no matter how ridiculous the picture looked in the light. “You think he’s still out there?” The singing birds that fluttered by the window stood in stark contrast to such a possibility, but they knew by now that the security and normalcy offered by these daylight hours was nothing but a groundless presupposition. Their enemy was no vampire that had to hide himself from the sun.

  “One way to find out.” Marcus crossed the basement and jumped up to the window, peering out across the yard. When he dropped back down, he turned to see Ashley, and now Heather, both waiting for an answer. “It’s gone.”

  They both let out a heavy sigh of relief.

  “The car’s gone?” Ian asked, taking his time standing up and stretching.

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. Let’s get the hell out of here.” He stumbled wearily to the stairs and climbed them one noisy step at a time.

  Ashley watched Ian’s legs disappear and could hear him handling the doorknob above. There was something about the casual way her fiancé had welcomed the day that sat uneasy with her. Something seemed different… His eyes. There was something in his eyes, something—

  Joyce! And that sudden thought tackled her, sending her through the wall and into a completely different room of concern. Joyce should’ve been home by now. Wait… The storm. How bad was it? Would they even be able to leave? She followed after Heather and Marcus. Her hand absentmindedly went to her pocket, but what she expected to find there was gone. She looked down, patting all of her pockets while searching the basement floor. No sign of it. Had the driver of the Camaro come in during the night and extracted it from her pants? She didn’t know how that would’ve been possible, but despite the unpleasant prospect of having that man in her pants, she would be okay with it if it was the reason for the Camaro no longer sitting outside.

  “Heather,” she called, moving forward again.

  Heather looked down from the steps above.

  “The ring…” She held out her hands and looked around again.

  “It’s gone?”

  “It was in my pocket, and now…”

  Heather motioned her sister to follow them. “Just come on.”

  Ashley passed them in the kitchen and went straight to the answering machine, checking for any news from Joyce. The light was blinking. She hit the play button.

  The first message was from Joyce’s mother, asking her to bring a board game over with her today. The second message started and was—

  Ian walked over beside her, his eyes fixed on the small machine, his face a knit-work of unease.

  The sound coming through the machine was just the static of an open line, the ambient noise of—

  “Wait,” Ian said, leaning his ear closer to the speaker. “An engine.”

  Marcus concentrated more closely. “I think you’re right.”

  “Do you hear that?” Ashley asked a moment later.

  Heather took a step back, as if the source of the new noise might leap out of the speaker and snatch her soul right out of her body.

  Voices. Whispers. Chanting. It was soft, almost indiscernible beneath the hum of the idling V8 engine, but it was definitely there, wrapped in some ancient-sounding language.

  The unmistakable sound of a snow plow driving down the street suddenly blasted through the speaker and made them all jump.

  Ashley’s face paled, her body as rigid as a board. “Wait…”

  “What?”

  She stepped away from the answering machine and walked into the hallway where she could see the front door. The heavy wooden door they had locked the night before was standing wide open, leaving only the glass storm door to keep the cold air from whisking through the house. But it wasn’t the open door that released her bladder. It was the Camaro sitting at the curb in front of the house, the snow plow’s flashing yellow lights disappearing further down the street and around the bend.

  Marcus was beside her, staring at the black car that hadn’t been there just two minutes ago. Heather and Ian stood motionless behind them. In the background, a voice came over t
he answering machine.

  “We are coming for you.”

  The television blinked on in the living room adjacent to them. They turned their heads and studied it. Filling the hi-def picture was the scene directly ahead of them—the hallway, the storm door, the yard…the Camaro.

  Only on the television, the Camaro’s door was opening, and its driver was stepping out.

  They turned to look out into the yard, but the Camaro’s door was closed, no sign of the driver at all. They turned back to the screen.

  The man with the long coat, hat, and sunglasses, was walking through the snow, coming straight toward them, footprints left in his wake.

  But out the glass door, there was nothing, not even footprints.

  “What the hell is happening?” Heather breathed, hardly able to get the words out.

  On the television, the man was stepping up onto the landing and approaching the door. Dark swirling insects filled the air around him, inky trails left in their wake like charred fairies leaving behind ash rather than pixie dust. But still, when looking straight ahead, there was only the Camaro sitting at the end of Joyce’s property.

  The figure on the screen reached out for the door, his scarred face uttering something that couldn’t be heard. On the television, his gloved hand made contact with the door.

  It exploded with a loud pop, and a sea of glass was sent flying into the house.

  “Run!” Ian grabbed Heather and pulled her after him as he sprinted back into the kitchen and to the back door.

  Somewhere in the back of her mind, Ashley registered Marcus tugging on her, but she couldn’t bring herself to move. Not until she felt something warm breathing down her neck and her belt being tugged at. She screamed at the top of her lungs, her paralysis shattered as her mind’s eye was bombarded by images of a terrible past experience. She struck out with all her might, kicking and punching at the invisible force, but none of her efforts made contact with anything physical. Yet her belt was alive, slithering like a snake out of the loops in her jeans and away from her. Then Marcus came around in front of her, positioning himself between her and whatever foe was attacking her. The hold was broken, and she was free to run. She followed Marcus out the back door, reaching out and grabbing her coat as the others had, and circled around the house through new snow.

  Joyce.

  She was hanging from a tree, her stomach spread open and displaying all the frozen details of human physiology. One particular snake-like intestine stretched away from her, encircling her neck before heading north to a swollen knot around a tree branch. Her face was freeze-framed in terror, her mouth agape, eyes bulging. Her feet swung lazily in the breeze, the branch groaning. It didn’t seem plausible that her intestines should be strong enough to hang from…but there she was.

  Ashley screamed again, hands covering her mouth, body doubling over, feet pounding the ground beneath her. The scream pierced the day and echoed through the neighborhood.

  Marcus swept her into his arms and ran through the candy canes lining the front yard.

  Ian was running back toward them and screaming something about the Rover’s tires being slashed. “I saw Joyce’s keys in the snow!” he shouted as he passed them.

  Marcus had Ashley to the black Saab just as Ian returned with a set of keys sticky with blood. Hitting the unlock button, Ian flung open the driver’s door as Marcus tossed Ashley into the back seat. He slid in beside her and shut the door just as Heather shut hers and Ian slammed the gas pedal, spinning the front wheels in the snow. Ian cursed and applied less pressure, turning the wheel. The tires caught, and the car went backward out of the driveway. Heather turned to the back seat, reaching to touch her sister.

  Ian had expected to see the dark man come sprinting out of the house after them, but his black car was already gone.

  Ashley couldn’t breathe as Marcus helped her into her jacket, and he tried calming her by rubbing her back once it was on. When she finally did catch her breath, she puked all over the carpeted floor at her feet.

  The clock on the dashboard said it was past noon.

  Twenty-three

  Ian doesn’t know where he’s going, doesn’t care. He just wants to get as far from wherever they are as possible. The Saab has just over half a tank of gas, plenty to get somewhere else. Ashley is crying in the back seat, and her sobs are grating against his frayed nerves. He wants to tell her to either shut the hell up or to get out of the damn car. It’s all he can do to keep from saying so. And isn’t that strange? he thinks. Behind the disdain, his rational self ponders why he feels this way and why he wishes he had Charles’ rifle to stick in his fiancé’s sister’s mouth. The thought seems so utterly satisfying. Anything to stop that voice, her sobbing voice! It’s maddening, a mangled potato peeler taking layers off his brain. But why? He’s never felt like this before. His true self marvels at the observation as through a periscope peaking above choppy waves of insanity.

  He glances in the rearview mirror and sees Marcus trying to comfort Ashley. The smell of her piss and vomit is nauseating.

  “Shut her up.”

  Ian wonders if he said it aloud, and judging from the look that comes from Marcus through the mirror, the answer is an indubitable yes.

  Heather reaches over and places a hand on his thigh. He throws it off. Her touch repulses him.

  The part of him that is sitting at the periscope again wonders what is going on, why he is acting so strangely. He can tell that something has changed inside him, these wild seas an undiscovered country. But even that realization comes in the form of a faint echo, whispered from some fading semblance of his former self.

  “What’s wrong?” Heather asks.

  “What’s wrong?” He laughs. “For starters, we just left all our prints at another crime scene and sped off in the victim’s vehicle! Not to mention that we just left Charles’ Rover sitting there. We’re leaving a nice little connect-the-dots trail linking George, Charles and now Joyce all back to us.”

  They speed down recently-plowed streets at eighty miles per hour.

  “Don’t you think you should slow down a little?” Marcus asks.

  Ian smirks. “I can handle it.”

  “Do you know where you’re going?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yeah, it might.”

  Ian takes his right hand off the wheel and starts working the GPS on the dashboard without even looking at it. “Looks like we’re in Syracuse.” He pulls the wheel hard to the left and narrowly misses a truck backing out of a parking lot.

  “Ian,” Marcus cautions.

  “Don’t ‘Ian’ me, Blackman.”

  Spiders crawl up his spine at the sound of his own words, and he sees Marcus sit upright in the backseat, feels Heather’s stare burning into the side of his face. Even Ashley falls silent.

  Marcus’ voice can barely be heard through his attempt to control it. “What did you say?”

  “I said you’re just like the rest of them. ‘Woe is me! I’m a descendant of slaves, of white oppression!’ You know what I say, Marc? Get the hell over it.”

  Ashley begins sitting up.

  “Yeah, that’s right. You and all your reverse racism shit. Hasn’t that card been played enough? Isn’t it about time we all ‘move on’?”

  Ashley’s eyes are ablaze now. Ian can see them in the mirror. It excites him and makes him sick at the same time. “What, Ashley? You have something to say in defense of this monkey?”

  She actually lunges at the driver’s seat, but Marcus holds her back, restraining her. “It’s okay,” he whispers. “It’s okay.” Though Marcus’ eyes clearly indicate otherwise.

  Ian can see books of sociology and cultural anthropology flashing before his eyes, floating off the sharp and defensive tongue of his fiancée’s younger sister, their pages opening and their words flipping from her mouth—stuff like: centuries of treating a race of people like friggin’ dogs is sure to leave a lasting fingerprint on its collective psyche! Yeah, stuff like th
at. She’ll probably even suggest that, as a white person, he has no right to expect the victimized race to so easily forgive and forget most of its history, to pretend that their skin color had never been despised and persecuted…that reverse racism wasn’t the racism of hatred but of simple distrust. Reverse racism doesn’t hang white children from trees. Reverse racism has yet to lead to genocide! Yeah, that’s the type of garbage he can see bubbling in Ashley’s eyes. It’s the crap that had motivated her to write her stupid Ernie Davis story. Does it really matter that the running back couldn’t score a southern touchdown and expect to escape the stadium alive? It’s the past. Get over it. Nothing but love and tolerance now, baby. The white man says so. And so it is. Anything to the contrary is reverse racism…which is actually worse than racism, because the natural reaction to the crime is always worse than the crime itself, isn’t it?

  Ian hears Marcus’ preacher in his ear, the Prince of Preachers claiming that American slavery is “a soul-destroying sin,” “the foulest blot,” which “may have to be washed out in blood.” He knows that Spurgeon’s sermons were burned and censored by the Southern states because of his stance on slavery, that the self-righteous preacher refused to even eat with a fellow Christian who owned a slave… How he knows this is a mystery that doesn’t really concern him, and he’s distracted by more bickering pages turning past his eyes, pages that suggest prejudices targeting religion and political ideologies can simply be avoided by recanting or conforming, that those victims can hide if their pride allowed it. But when the very source of the hatred is the color of skin…there is no hiding, there is no conforming, there is no “getting over it.”

  He enjoys the realization that such hatred for skin color will never be eradicated as long as there are different colors of skin. A poor person can escape the hawkish gaze of the elite by finding success, a Christian can deny his or her faith to find mercy from Muslims and vice-versa, and an Irishman and a Jew can learn to blend into the melting pot. But where to go when you bore the mark of Cain, as the Mormons once taught? When the source of hatred wasn’t geographical, political, religious, or class, but the very body you were born with? The snaking darkness writhing within him relishes the conflict even while realizing that such thoughts more than justify the “reverse-racism” rhetoric that he had just, a second ago, found to be intolerably fictitious.