The Demon Signet Read online

  “The Adirondack Park.”

  “Huh?” Ian navigated a bend, avoiding a patch of ice formed from the melting snow falling off the trees.

  Heather tapped a lazy knuckle against the window beside her, indicating the conference of barren branches and green-needled evergreens giving privacy to the lakes beyond. “Most famous for Lake Placid.”

  “The alligator movie?”

  “The place that twice hosted the Winter Olympics.”

  “Pretty sure there were alligators.”

  “In the Olympics?”

  “Bill Pullman, right?”

  “Oliver Platt.”

  Ian scratched the black stubble covering his jaw. “Oliver Platt was in the Olympics?”

  “The luge. Lake Placid has the United States’ primary training facility.”

  “One man or two?”

  She tapped the touch screen. “Pretty sure they can use the same facility.”

  “Maybe it was Oliver Platt and Bill Pullman, then. Luging in Lake Placid… I could’ve sworn there was an alligator, though.”

  “There’s over a hundred summits.”

  “In Lake Placid?”

  “In the Adirondacks. There’s a club that climbs the highest forty-six.”

  “Why forty-six?” He subconsciously noted that the song had finally changed, and an unrealized pressure lifted from his chest as the memory of his once-happy family dissolved back into the ethereal.

  “That’s how many are over four thousand feet. The ‘Forty-Sixers Club.’”

  “That’s what the club’s called?”

  “You got a better name?”

  “I’m still stuck on alligators.”

  She smiled before reading off some facts. “It was made a state park in 1892. Jesuit missionaries and French trappers were here in 1642. Part of the French and Indian War was fought along its edge, Fort Ticonderoga on the north end. Part of Last of the Mohicans was set in the Adirondacks.”

  “The Daniel Day-Lewis movie?”

  “I think it’s referring to the 1826 book.”

  “Oh.”

  “The park is the largest national historic landmark in the US. Over six million acres, a million of them wilderness. It’s bigger than Vermont. More than three thousand lakes and thirty thousand miles of river. Two thousand miles of hiking trail.”

  Growing up on a farm, Ian had been raised to respect nature. Though most “Christians” he saw on TV over the years seemed content with paving over creation in the name of capitalism and enterprise, the church farmers actually had deep convictions concerning the stewardship of God’s handiwork. Ian didn’t believe in God anymore, but he still felt the synergy at work in the natural world around him and recognized the good sense in preserving it. If he was political, he’d be a proud member of the Green Party. Maybe. While he figured a person would have to be a complete moron to think that mankind didn’t affect the environment (how could cutting down rainforests, spilling unfathomable amounts of oil into the ocean and dumping an eternity of chemicals into the ground not affect the ecosystem?), he wasn’t on board with all the environmental dogmas being preached by such parties. And thus another reason for his subsequent absence within the political spectrum. Too many boxes, too many labels, too many contradictions. The party mentality was not for him because he couldn’t bring himself, in good conscience, to choose certain issues over the death of others that were equally important to him. He’d rather leave the charade up to the suits in Washington and the people who felt it was their national duty to vote them in.

  The next song was “Winter Wonderland,” a song appropriate to their surroundings. Ian was glad that places like this were protected, that the animals actually had a habitat that wasn’t in danger of being replaced by some resort or shopping mall or corporate center. It was the circle of life, baby, and if humans wanted to maintain a sustaining presence on the planet, it would probably help to keep the planet alive. Of course he’d be called “tree hugger” for thinking such things, again with the labels. Seemed to him you were either huggin’ trees and smoking pot or a parasite raping other countries’ natural resources. He looked into the trees and could see the frozen lakes through the tiny, moving windows. It was beautiful. But beautiful out here could also be deadly, which was where his respect for the wild came into play…and why the facts Heather was reading from her phone were beginning to trouble him. Because if anything went wrong out here…

  His phone began vibrating. Heather’s eyes lifted in feigned interest.

  A text message. Ian read it while keeping one eye on the road.

  WHY DIDN’T YOU MARRY JESSICA?

  He frowned and looked up into the mirror. Why was Heather bringing this up now? “Seriously?” he asked.

  A look of confusion clouded her face. “What?”

  Ian shook his head. Another text.

  DOES ANYONE ELSE KNOW YOUR SECRET?

  “What the hell does that mean?” Ian whispered back to her.

  Heather was quiet for a moment, her eyes sliding back and forth through the car. “You talkin’ to me?” she finally said to the mirror holding Ian’s angry eyes.

  “Yeah, I’m talking to you.” He held the phone up. “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Your text messages. ‘Why didn’t I marry Jessica?’ What are you doing?”

  “I didn’t send you a text message.”

  He looked at the phone, his other hand squeezing the steering wheel. The phone had indeed displayed her name and number as the sender. “This isn’t funny, Heather.”

  She leaned forward and tossed her phone onto his lap. “Show me where I sent you a text message.”

  He exchanged his phone with hers and brought up the list of sent texts. The last text she’d sent to him was last night after leaving the hotel room for ice. He squinted. “My phone says you sent me a text.”

  “I didn’t,” she protested. “Do you see a text sent from me on there?” She leaned back. “Why the hell would I ask you about your ex-fiancée, anyway?”

  She was genuinely upset now, so she obviously hadn’t intended this to be some kind of game. But then what the hell was it? And from whom? Who else knew about…“the secret”? The reason he’d broken up with Jessica? “You seriously didn’t send them?”

  “No.”

  A few moments passed in silence, the Adirondacks whirling by them.

  “Well, that’s kinda strange.”

  Five

  Marcus wasn’t really asleep, just thinking with his eyes closed. He listened to the exchange between Ian and Heather, and what he heard unsettled him. As much as he’d like to pass his own text message off as the work of Dino or some other prankster back home, Ian receiving a strange text from some unknown source within minutes of his own complicated the likelihood of what he wanted to believe. Was someone playing a joke on all of them? Would Ashley and Heather be getting strange messages soon? If so, then whoever was behind the plot seemed to know about Ian’s last fiancée, something even he wasn’t familiar with.

  His phone hip-hopped.

  Forcing his weary eyes open, he brought the phone up, expecting to see a “Ha-ha! Gotchya!” text from Dino. Instead it read:

  I WAS THERE WHEN THE IROQUOIS WERE DRIVEN OUT OF THEIR LAND. AND I WILL DRIVE YOU OUT OF THIS PLACE TOO, BLACKMAN.

  There was no fighting back the wave of needles sweeping over his scalp this time.

  “You okay?” Ian asked, looking over.

  It took him a moment to respond. “Just got a weird text, too,” he muttered.

  “What’d it say?”

  From the look in his eye, Marcus could tell that Ian had no reservations in assuming their texts to somehow be related.

  “Says, ‘I was there when the Iroquois were driven out of their land, and I will drive you out of this place, too.’” He left out the racial designation as well as the previous text. He didn’t want to bring that up. Not yet.

  “The
hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You don’t know who sent it?” Heather asked.

  “It’s blocked.”

  Heather looked at her phone, her thumb dancing across its surface. “Says the Adirondacks are within the boundaries of what used to be Mohawk First Nation. Their population was decimated by European diseases before they were driven out of the land by foreign settlers. After the Revolutionary War, most of their land was seized. Then the US forced most of the remaining Iroquois into reservations in the Midwest.”

  Ashley’s voice surprised them all when she added, “Iroquois chiefs were actually invited to the meeting hall of the Continental Congress.” She shifted in her seat. “They say the Six Nations, or the Iroquois Confederacy, was the oldest participatory democracy in the world. Jefferson and Franklin’s representative democracy was inspired by it.”

  Heather looked over at her sister. “You’re saying the Indians had their own democracy?”

  She nodded.

  “What,” Marcus asked, closing his eyes and trying to forget the texts, “you never heard that the Red Man could govern himself?”

  She didn’t respond. She didn’t need to. Everyone knew how American history portrayed the “Indians.” There wasn’t a cap-gun, badge-wearing boy in the whole of the Unites States who didn’t know the Injun was evil.

  They fell into silence, their eyes resetting to the wilderness around them, and imagined what it might have looked like a few hundred years ago, before Europeans decided that they should have it all for themselves.

  But Marcus couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. His sense of normalcy, and security along with it, was beginning to cloud, making him uncomfortable. He felt the peripheral influence of something infernal, and it was stirring an unpleasant, childhood memory from when he was still living in North Carolina.

  After church one Sunday afternoon, he and Terrell, the two youngest boys in the choir, had snuck down into the church basement to see if the rumors were true—if the Reverend really did keep young white girls chained up in some old, rat-infested cell. It was something they’d heard whispered among the white boys on the school bus. As they had slowly crept down the old wooden stairs, as terrified of what might be in the darkness as they had been of being found out, they’d thought they could hear the soft sobbing of a girl.

  “You hear that?” Terrell had whispered.

  “Yeah. Let’s git outta here.”

  But when they turned to run back up the steps, the white boys’ tales confirmed, the door had slammed shut, sealing them in total darkness. “Whatta hell was that?” Terrell’s voice had cried out. “Hey, watch yo’ mouth. We in church, Terrell! The Good Lo’ gonna strike ye dead for swearin’ like that in His house.”

  But Terrell’s voice had grown cold, and just thinking about it now gave Marcus gooseflesh. He’d said, “This don’t feel like His house.” And it had not. There had been laughter, barely audible, ascending from somewhere below, and as they’d stood motionless on the steps, it had grown louder, closer. Marcus remembered clinging to Terrell, scared to death that Satan himself must have some kind of gateway that linked the basement right to hell. It was a good plan, he’d thought. Who would ever look for such a device in a church? But as the laughing—a strange, sickly gaggle—had continued creeping up on them, the girl’s sobs also turned to laughter. And they’d felt it. Never talked about it after that day, but in the moments afterward, they had acknowledged that feeling. Darkness. Darkness darker and of a different sort than just the absence of light. Something else. Something sinister, a presence. Satan.

  Big James had heard them banging on the door and let them out, and there they’d told him about the voices. Skeptical, James had ruffled their hair with his big hands, switched the light on, and descended. Marcus and Terrell hadn’t thought they’d ever see him again and waited to hear his screams when Satan pulled him through the portal to hell. But Big James had come bounding up the stairs a minute later, and if it wasn’t for their trembling, he would’ve thought they were toying with him.

  “There ain’t nothin’ down there, fellas,” he’d said. “You was probably just scared of the dark. Or listnin’ to those white boys at school again.” When their eyes had responded to the latter diagnosis, James laughed. “You don’t listen to that stuff, ya hear? They just tryin’ to scare ya ’cause they scared of what they don’t understand. And they don’t understand the Jesus we got in our hearts, ya hear?” He’d turned the light off and shut the door. “Go on, git. I won’t tell on ya.”

  But Marcus never forgot that day or that feeling. The Darkness. It had not been their imagination. And now, years later, a lawyer and all, he felt just as terrified as he did standing on those wooden stairs, the Darkness laughing at him, coming for him. YOU ARE GOING TO DIE OUT HERE, NIGGER. I WAS THERE WHEN THE IROQUOIS WERE DRIVEN OUT OF THEIR LAND… He shuddered.

  “Someone’s just playing a prank on us,” Ian said, noticing Marcus’ distant and troubled stare. His eyes, however, didn’t quite match the conviction of his words.

  “Probably Nick,” Ashley guessed.

  Marcus wished he could believe that. But Ashley wasn’t privy to the full content of the messages. If it hadn’t been for the racial bigotry, then perhaps Nick would be a viable suspect. Ashley and Heather’s younger brother certainly got a kick out of toying with the boyfriends from time to time. But though Marcus had only met him a couple times, he knew that Nick had more class than to pull something like this.

  Marcus considered Ian’s message, and then wondered if perhaps a similar filter hadn’t been applied to Ian’s telling of it. He’d inquire about it later, when the girls weren’t within earshot.

  Up ahead, the wilderness began to thin, and everything seemed to open up a little. Houses began lining the street on either side of them.

  “Star Lake,” Heather said, continuing to glean information from her phone. “Apparently named after that lake on the left.”

  They all turned to look at it, flashes of its surface appearing behind the passing houses, the wind rubbing its surface into a field of white triangles.

  Marcus leaned forward and tilted his head, his eyes squinting in concentration.

  “What?” Ian asked.

  “You hear that?”

  Ashley leaned forward, too. “What is it?”

  “I don’t hear anything,” Heather said.

  “Yeah, I don’t—” Ian paused. He did hear it. He checked all the gauges beyond the steering wheel, but everything looked okay. He looked at the clock on the dashboard. They’d been driving for just over an hour.

  “Is it the car?” It was a strange clacking noise, distant but persistent. Marcus recalled Harold’s disclaimer about the car not being prepped.

  “I still don’t hear anything.” Heather turned her phone off and listened harder.

  “I think it’s coming from outside,” Ashley said, and she turned to look out the back window.

  Heather frowned. “Now I hear it.”

  It seemed to be getting louder.

  Clack. Clack. Clack. Clack-clack-clack-clack…

  Louder and faster.

  Ian slowed and pulled over in front of a big white house, the driveway empty, an American flag blowing against the ash-gray sky from a pole that stood piercing the center of the front lawn.

  “What are you doing?” Marcus’ voice surrendered more consternation than he’d intended, and Ian returned the anxious inflection with a quizzical look of his own. Yeah, they were both creeped out by the text messages.

  “Oh my god.” Ashley’s voice stole everyone’s attention, and they all scrambled in their seats to get a glimpse of whatever she was seeing. She was almost completely turned around in her seat, staring out the window.

  CLACK. CLACK. CLACK.

  Something banging away right beside his own window made Marcus look over to the house, the empty driveway, the flapping flag, the waving branches of nearby trees, and…the mailbox. “What the f—”
r />   Because Marcus never swore, everyone swung their heads to his window, knowing that whatever made him almost drop the F-bomb had to be really important.

  They were right.

  Standing at the end of the driveway, and erected in the midst of what would be a bed of flowers come springtime, was the mailbox. It was built to look like an old, red barn.

  CLACK! CLACK! CLACK!

  The plastic barn door was swinging open and shut while the flag rose and fell all on its own.

  Turning to look back down the road, Marcus saw that every mailbox on the street was doing the same thing, their doors swinging open and shut as if applauding their arrival.

  “Go,” Marcus whispered, unable to take his eyes off the mailboxes of Star Lake.

  Heather reached for Ashley’s hand as Ian floored the gas.

  They were flying down Route 3 again and getting deeper into town, all the mailboxes they passed falling open in their wake. Marcus thought back to a similar scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and wondered if they were about to be abducted by little green men. That would be a new genre for Christmas tales. “What’s going on, man?”

  “I have no idea,” Ian whispered. He looked up into the rearview mirror and made eye contact with Heather. “You okay?”

  She nodded, though her face looked as if she’d seen a ghost…which she might have.

  The radio began flipping through stations—static, talking voices, static, music, voices, static, and then “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” Everyone fell silent, waiting for something to happen. Three minutes later, however, the town was behind them and they were in the mountains again. No more mailboxes.