“Hey,” Heather called up to the front, her eyes on her phone. “I just uploaded you snowboarding.”
Marcus turned in his seat, knowing she was talking to him since Ian had decided to stick to his skis on this trip. “You got me snowboarding?”
“Yup.”
Marcus clapped his hands, smiling wide as Heather leaned over and let her sister watch the video.
“You put that one on?” Ashley laughed, covering her mouth with her hand.
Marcus’ smile faded. “What are you talking about? What one?”
“That’s low,” Ashley said, shaking her head.
Heather chuckled.
“What?” Marcus fished his phone back out of his pocket. After a couple finger taps, he was on Heather’s YouTube channel and watching himself land on his head. “Are you serious?”
They all laughed.
“Oh yeah?” he said, spinning back around in his seat. “Two can play at that game.”
Heather leaned forward, sudden concern rising on her face. “What does that mean?”
But Marcus was already sharing his own video on YouTube. “Remember the first night we got there?”
Heather’s face dropped. “No.”
Marcus nodded, and Ian let loose a whistle.
“No, Marc, come on!” Heather pleaded.
“And…” he hit a button, “we’re uploading.”
Ashley turned to her sister. “Hope Mom and Dad don’t see that.”
Heather hit the back of Marcus’ seat.
“Hey, Ian,” Marcus said softly, ignoring the blows to the back of his seat, “just found this video on YouTube about a school teacher. The caption says that when she was vacationing in Quebec during winter break, she got trashed one night and decided to sing karaoke at a karaoke bar. Only it wasn’t a karaoke bar.”
“Marc!”
But everyone was laughing too hard to hear her protest, her drunken voice singing U2’s “Angel of Harlem” through the phone that Marcus was holding up to the roof of the car.
Once the video was over, Ian suggested that someone check the weather to see when this storm was supposed to hit and where.
They were passing frozen lakes and ponds all around them, and the scene was straight from some winter fantasy. But the sky above was from a different sort of vision, its ashen smear heading toward them with ominous foreboding.
“I’ll do it,” Heather answered, still muttering something about what her co-workers and students would think if they found her on the internet standing on a restaurant table and singing into a celery stick.
“Is everyone’s phone charged?” Ian asked.
The airline they’d gotten a deal from charged a hundred bucks for carry-ons, and so anything they didn’t need in their pockets ended up beneath the plane. Phone chargers, extra clothes, deodorant… Even Heather’s purse had been shoved into a suitcase at the last minute, Ian begging her to take her wallet and to leave the Marry Poppins’ bag below.
“Ninety percent,” Heather reported.
“Seventy-six,” Ashley said.
“Ninety-five,” Marcus recalled from memory.
“We should try and conserve battery life as much as we can. Just in case.”
“In case of what?” Ashley wanted to know.
Ian shrugged, but his eyes inadvertently drifted away from the road ahead and to the trees pressing in on either side.
Heather tracked her fiancé’s gaze in the rearview mirror, and the look on his face filled her with a sense of unease. “In case we break down?”
His eyes flew off the wildlife and up to the mirror, finding her reflection in it. “I dunno. In case the storm hits and we have to hole up somewhere for a while.”
“Yeah, well,” her eyes fell to the weather report on her phone, “the radar has most of the state completely white in the next hour.”
“Great.” Marcus groaned. His phone sounded, a little hip-hop beat announcing the arrival of a new text message, and he brought it out of his pocket again. The number was blocked. He read the message, and his face fell flat.
YOU ARE GOING TO DIE OUT HERE, NIGGER
Staring at the screen, he frowned, stunned. Then his hand began to quiver, and he clicked the phone off.
“Who was it?” Ashley asked.
“No one.”
He turned his attention out the window and tried losing the cold chill through the thick, snow-coated forest racing by them. Despite the emotions such a bizarre and random threat raised, he knew what had happened, or at least what he thought made the most sense. Both he and Heather had just posted videos online, their location being tagged and thus enabling anyone who watched the video (someone most likely following one of their accounts) to know where they were. Though, whether the “out here” mentioned in the text was supposed to be in reference to the ski hills of Quebec or Route 30 was unclear. Did the security and location settings on his phone allow their GPS coordinates to be stamped to the video? If so, then that had to be his explanation, and a friend was either playing a prank on him or someone who didn’t like him much was trying to get beneath his skin (there were a few of them now that he was dating a white girl). Content that this was, indeed, the origin of the message, it still couldn’t prevent a series of tremors from raking his flesh.
He was about to reexamine the text when, from the corner of his eye, he saw Ashley staring at him. He put the phone back in his jacket while reassuring himself of his initial theory, that it was just one of his friends back home playing a twisted joke. Probably Dino. In fact, he now recalled, it was even Dino who had warned him not to go on this trip, wasn’t it? Something about being the only black man on a white mountain. Yeah, he thought, that’s who it was. Dino.
Trying to distract Ashley from his initial reaction to the text, he brought up the question of his snowboarding again. “You know, Heather,” he began, “it was said that no one could stand on his head better than Marcus Hatfield, goalie for the Blue Falcons. ‘Why, that brother was break-dancing right there on the ice, stopping pucks left and right while straight spinnin’ on his head!’ That’s what they used to say about ol’ Marcus of the Blue Falcons. The undefeated Blue Falcons.”
“Well, we’ll see what they have to say about you snowboarding on your head.”
“You played ice hockey?” Ian asked, surprised.
“Four years for township.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Forgot all about hockey once I started playing football.”
“You miss it?”
“Hockey?”
“Football.” They were out of the forest and passing through the town of Sunmount. A school on their left just happened to have a football field that was visible from the road.
Marcus ran a hand over his head. “Like you can’t believe.” Then he pointed ahead at a road sign they were about to pass. “Route 3. We’re on it for at least an hour now.”
Route 3 cut north, skirting Raquette Pond.
“Could you imagine getting stranded out here, though?” Ashley asked, taking in the scenery.
“Stop it,” Heather insisted, the thought again chilling her bones. She pulled her knees up to her chest and leaned against the door while trying to lose herself in the words displayed across her phone.
“It’d be an awfully cold walk, that’s for damn sure.” And even though he’d just looked at the needles a minute ago, Ashley’s suggestion had Ian checking all the gauges again. As he followed Main Street further north and away from the huge pond, he could hear everyone else getting comfortable around him and settling in for the long drive, Christmas lullabies massaging their fatigued minds.
Marcus turned the Christmas music up and reclined in the shotgun chair, repositioning one of the heating vents before closing his eyes and humming along to “Away in the Manger.”
Heather was trying to immerse herself in the thriller she’d downloaded onto her Kindle app while waiting for their departing flight in Dulles all the way back at the start o
f their adventure. The Ninth District by Douglas Dorow. It was a good one, and she was immediately sucked back into it. It was a pleasant distraction from the nagging prospect of breaking down in the middle of the mountains and having to start a fire to keep the wolves away. That and her condition’s suspicion that the car was going to fold up into a tinfoil ball at any moment and seal her inside forever. It was much better in The Ninth District, where an FBI agent was trying to stop a killer from pulling off the granddaddy of all heists.
Beside her, Ashley had resumed an ongoing Scrabble game with friends at work.
The car fell silent, each person overtaken by drowsiness and ushered into the privacy of their own singular worlds.
Ahead, a circle of crows standing across the road took flight, flapping their wings as the red car approached the flattened carcass of a dead animal. Finding perches in the nearby pine trees, they stood, black eyes blinking, and watched the car drive past. It was a few moments before the birds turned away from the glowing taillights and fluttered back down to the blood frozen on the blacktop.
Four
The sun was in the west now, its belly hidden beneath the jagged pantline of pointed trees. Broken shadows were clawing their way across the road in front of them and flickering across the windshield in thatched patterns of blinking shade. The V6 engine hummed along in concert with another Christmas song, a newer one that Ian wasn’t familiar with and that would never be heard on a classic compilation album.
He moved his eyes away from the dizzying hash marks flowing steadily toward the car and glanced at the clock on the dashboard. Almost four o’clock. The sun would be gone soon. Though he wouldn’t admit it to the others, he wasn’t fond of driving through this land of nowhere at night, especially in a snow-storm, which—he looked east—was surely coming.
He turned and was about to mutter something to Marcus, but Marcus was facing away from him, his eyes closed.
Ian let his eyes linger on his black friend for a moment and wondered just how bothered he’d been by whatever the skinheads had to say about him. It wasn’t the first time in the last six months that Ian had witnessed his friend being targeted by such ignorance, and he was amazed at how Marcus just seemed to shrug it off, as if never even noticing. Ian didn’t understand how it couldn’t affect him. Was it possible to be so secure in your own skin—no matter what color it was—that public opinion meant nothing? That the world’s best-selling book of lies about you could only provoke a hollow indifference toward the author? Or maybe these situations really did bother Marcus, and he was just able to hide it after so much practice.
Ian’s relationship with Marcus was only six months old—the lifespan of his and Ashley’s relationship thus far—but their online X-Box campaigns and Saturday morning basketball games at the gym allowed for the forging of a rather quick camaraderie. He found that he rather enjoyed Marcus and couldn’t help hoping that things might work out between him and his future sister-in-law. He recalled the story of how Ashley met Marcus, wishing again that he could’ve been there to see it. According to Ashley, she had been working at the salon when he walked in under an afro so big that—
The memory vanished in light of a new thought, one that wondered just how much their “chance” meeting had altered his own life, what subsequent events hinged on that haircut. This trip they were on now was a good example of one. But he wondered what Marcus’ preacher-man would have to say about such a theory—that their so-called “date with destiny,” along with everything else, was nothing other than the product of random chance. No doubt the London preacher would agree with his own mother’s view, that there was no such thing as luck, only divine purpose. But why it would please the sovereign God of his mother to take from him his older brother was something he could not hope to understand…or get over.
Jimmy…
But not wishing to revisit the slums to which that thought would lead, he put it out to pasture and shot it dead, as was his custom whenever his thinking reached that point. Instead, he wiped his mind clean by urging it to focus on an entirely different matter: how to go about handling Heather’s father. He liked the idea Marcus had suggested at the airport but didn’t know if Heather would go for it. Why hadn’t he just asked for his blessing in the first place? He’d known that her father was a man of tradition and that he would fully expect any respectful, family-oriented, would-be son-in-law to ask his permission before placing a ring on his daughter’s finger. He sighed. This was not going to go down well.
A lone truck materialized on the horizon, its red taillights growing as the distance between them quickly evaporated. Ian casually crossed over the dotted line and took the Taurus up to sixty. The truck faded in the rearview mirror, and besides a herd of white-tailed deer standing nearby and watching after them with stoic indifference, the road was empty again.
The new song faded away, and Andy Williams singing “Deck the Halls” took its place, instantly taking Ian back to a 1987 Christmas on the farm. He remembered snowflakes fluttering through the sky outside the big bay window in the living room, the tree lit, wrapped presents surrounding it (one of them even barking), the crackling fireplace, the smell of Dad’s strong coffee, Jimmy’s uncontained excitement, his two sisters jumping up and down in their nightgowns with pigtails flapping, Mom and Dad singing along with Andy while holding hands…
The memory was so real, so vivid, that Ian could actually smell the coffee and feel the heat of the fireplace…like it was some kind of new special effect on a remastered version of the old song. A tear began forming in the corner of his eye. They never had another Christmas like that again. The following year changed everything forever.
“You okay?”
Heather’s voice snatched him out of his seven-year-old body and brought his eyes up to the rearview mirror. He forced a smile when their eyes connected. “Yeah,” he said softly. “Memories.”
“Jimmy?” she probed.
“Jimmy, Mom and Dad, my sisters…”
His father, a long-time deacon at their local church, had died of a heart-attack while coveting his neighbor’s wife…right there in the front pew beneath the shadow of the hanging cross. In a way, he had been lucky to die in the act, to escape having to live through the humiliation of being caught—which happened just two minutes afterward when an old woman entered the sanctuary for a time of peaceful prayer. What she’d gotten instead was a screaming woman running naked up the aisle and calling out for 911 while a nude, sweaty corpse lay sacrilegiously exposed beneath the symbol of mercy’s marriage to justice. It was just another reason he didn’t have time for religion. Between his father’s hypocrisy and his brother’s suicide…
“I wish I could’ve met them,” she said thoughtfully, shifting her gaze outside the car.
“Me, too.” He didn’t necessarily hold his father’s cheating against him. The neighbor’s wife had been incredibly hot, and he was sure there were few men on the planet that would’ve been able to resist her. Besides, he knew that Mom wasn’t always the easiest person to get along with, especially after Jimmy’s accident. She’d blamed him for taking Jimmy horseback riding that day. According to her way of thinking, with God getting a free pass and luck not available to take the fall, there had been only one suspect left to be blamed. She’d never come right out with it, of course, but then she’d never needed to. It had been evident in every look and behind every word. The coldness that had settled over their marriage was impossible to misdiagnose, and it had tortured his father. At least at first. Eventually, it had just pissed him off. Those two years that Jimmy’s paralyzed body had spent imprisoned in bed had morphed their family into something ugly. Then one day, Jimmy had somehow gotten himself over to the open window and leaned right out of it. It hadn’t mattered to his mother that she was the one who had left the window open. How could it possibly have been her fault? It was a mystery as to how Jimmy could even make his way over to it in the first place. That was when everything went from veiled insinuation to a raging w
ar.
So he understood his father’s adultery. Was he justified? No, of course not. There was the other woman’s husband to consider if nothing else. But Ian wondered what would happen to his and Heather’s marriage if such a thing were to befall them. He didn’t think he would ever cheat on her, but what if the roles were reversed? What if something tragic happened to their child and she was, in some way, clearly responsible? Could he forgive her and move on, no grudge or resentment chaining itself to their marriage? He wanted a child more than most things, but he loved Heather and wanted to believe that, if the unspeakable did happen, they’d find a way to make it through those waters together.
“Is Ash asleep?” he asked as he turned down the song.
“Yeah.”
Ian studied his fiancée in the mirror, admiring the way her hair was hanging down over her face while she studied something on her phone. He loved the way her lips pursed in thought beneath her slender nose. Most people were quick to express her striking similarity to Nicole Kidman, but Ian was sure that his lover was even more beautiful than the esteemed actress—whom many believed to be one of the most beautiful women in the whole world. Ian had a nagging suspicion that Harold the rental agent would share his view on the matter, as would many of the other guys he’d seen over the years tripping over themselves whenever she crossed their paths. And as Harold had learned, Heather’s sister was a lovely piece of creation herself, internet programs matching her face to Charlize Theron’s with a ninety-one percent accuracy rating. When Ian took the test, he’d ended up matched with Ben Kingsley. He didn’t put too much stock into those things. Everyone agreed he looked more like Chuck Norris than Gandhi, though Heather—as well as his first fiancée—smiled sweetly whenever making Hugh Jackman comparisons. How people were able to end up with either Chuck Norris or Hugh Jackman was beyond his realm of concern. Regardless, no one agreed with the Kinsgley results, least of all him, so he wouldn’t have thought twice about Ashley coming just nine percent short of replicating Theron’s face (or even Queen Latifah’s for that matter) except that in this particular case, the program actually did itself justice; the event back at the airport with Harold was proof enough of that. “The Sisters.” That’s what he’d overheard them being called. “Hey, did you see the Sisters the other night?” “Yo, you think the Sisters will be there?” “Man, what I wouldn’t give for ten minutes alone with the Sisters…you think they—”
The Demon Signet Page 4
