The Demon Signet (21 page)

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. But 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.

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 the 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.