While Ashley was talking, whether she was conscious of it or not, Heather had slowly begun wrapping her arms around her stomach. More tears fell.
“I was pregnant once,” Ashley said, her brief anger melting into something else.
Heather’s liquid eyes widened.
“From when I was raped.”
“Oh, Ashley…”
“I had all the damn reasons in the world not to have it. And I wasn’t going to. No way in hell.” Water began rising in her eyes, cradling the gentle curve of both irises. “One of my friends found out, told me that she’d had an abortion two years before… She tried to show me what it was like for her, the living with it. And at some point I realized that the baby wasn’t just his, it—he—was mine, too.” She smiled through the tears now dropping down her own face. “A son that might’ve had my eyes, Dad’s smile, your toes, Uncle Barry’s chin…” They both giggled pathetically at the thought of Uncle Barry’s chin. “He was mine, Heather, whether I wanted him then and there or not, he was mine. And I was going to take care of him, because I was his mother. He didn’t deserve to be robbed of life just because of who his father was. He didn’t have any say in that.” She tore down the dam with fierce surrender, all the years spent plugging it up, trying to keep it her own secret, suddenly crumbling beneath the weight of such relief.
Heather laid a hand on her shoulder. “What happened?” She had to ask.
“Miscarriage.”
“I’m so sorry…”
“His name was Benjamin. After Grandpa. In the end, I wanted so much to have him…and I couldn’t.”
Heather stepped forward and wrapped her arms around her sister, squeezing her tight and crying on her shoulder.
After a few moments of clinging to each other, Ashley whispered into Heather’s ear, “Please think about it. Think about what Ian would do, what your future children would think, what you would be carrying around with you…”
“Okay.”
“I love you, sis.”
“I love you, too.” Standing back, Heather observed her younger sister in a way she never had before. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that alone. I would’ve—”
“I know. It’s okay.” She wiped her nose with the sleeve of her coat.
Heather just stood there staring, a flood of emotion hammering away at her soul. Finally, she wiped her own face with her sleeves and joined Ashley, facing the mirror.
“It actually felt really good to tell someone,” Ashley admitted. Under any other circumstances, the two of them would have held each other tight all night long, talking and crying until the sun came up. But here, now, in the Adirondacks, in a blizzard, something terrifying following them…
Heather bent over to put her hands beneath the faucet, and something in the mirror caught Ashley’s attention. She stared at it for a long moment, but the scene behind them was empty. She was just spooking herself. She grabbed the old knob and was about to turn it when, again, something in her periphery made her pause. Movement. She stood still, perched over the sink, and searched the mirror. Nothing but the two stalls, a window up in the corner, a trash can—
There it was.
A dark shadow, crouching above the last stall.
She tilted her head to the side, examining the reflection closer, trying to determine whether or not it could be more than a shadow on the ceiling. She swore she’d seen it—
Move.
There it went, crawling across the wall in quick, jerky movements. Human-like arms and legs, upside-down, crawling across the ceiling.
Ashley gasped. She didn’t dare turn around to set her eyes on the thing itself.
But then the shadow slithered past the edge of the mirror and moved beyond the realm of the glass border. She had no choice now. She spun around, her eyes searching back and forth, expecting whatever the thing was to pounce down at them, to grab them and pull them kicking and screaming into some bottomless hole out in the middle of nowhere.
But there was nothing there.
“What’s wrong?” Heather shut the water off and lifted her head away from the sink. She flicked water from her hands as she looked around the room, wondering why Ashley was staring at the ceiling like she’d just seen a ghost.
“Let’s get out of here.” She led Heather back into the wind and snow.
Ian and Marcus were there waiting for them.
Sixteen
They made it back to the Range Rover Sport without Ashley disclosing what she’d seen—or thought she’d seen—in the bathroom. She didn’t see how sharing the experience could benefit them now when all they wanted to do, needed to do, was relax.
Charles greeted them with a tired smile as they climbed back into the warm seats, the howling wind stretching its frosty fingers through the cozy interior and following them inside. They closed the doors on Mr. Snow Miser and relished the heat that came stroking their aching faces.
“Everything okay?” Charles asked, his eyes more weary than before.
“Yeah, thanks.” Ian leaned back in the front passenger seat, brushed snow off his peacoat, and closed his eyes.
Charles had the radio on, a local news station that was reporting on the storm, but the static was thick and made a mess of the reporter’s words.
“Damn thing,” Charles whispered to himself, hitting the dashboard with his palm. “Was coming in crystal clear while you were gone.”
The static got so bad that he ended up flipping the station.
“Some Christmas music okay?” he asked.
They didn’t care. They only wanted to rest in the embrace of his vehicle, to try and put this strange day out of their minds.
“Not a big fan of Christmas, myself,” Charles was saying. “I figure the Good Lord’s probably offended by what we’ve done to His birthday. Not that December twenty-fifth is His birthday, but you know what I mean.”
Marcus nodded in the backseat, stroking Ashley’s hair.
“People get trampled to death at Walmart, shooting each other over video games…buy, buy, buy, get, get, get, spend, spend, spend…all in the name of Jesus’ birthday. You ask me, ‘Merry Christmas’ has become nothing but the Lord’s name used in vain.”
“Never thought of it that way,” Marcus mumbled, his eyes following the snow blowing across the dark parking lot.
“I know the religious right wants to keep Christ in Christmas and all that, just the same as they want to keep ‘In God We Trust’ on the dollar bill, but most of the religious right don’t have a damn clue why the two should even be associated with each other. Why should God’s name be on money? The root of all evil? Why should a nation that doesn’t believe in Him be forced to repeat His name when referring to a holiday that really has nothing to do with Him?”
Ian glanced at him.
“I mean, it does have to do with Him in some ways, I guess. ‘Christ’s mass.’ The Catholic replacement of the already-established pagan holiday, or rather the joining of the two.”
“It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” was playing through the Rover’s speakers.
“I did always find it kinda strange that we cut down trees and stand them up in our living rooms,” Heather said. The back seat was tight with her, Ashley, and Marcus, and she was trying to keep the gates to her past nightmare from opening, to think of anything but three dead bodies pinning her against the door. But the tiny garter snake of angst was sticking its head beneath the door, its tongue flickering, sensing her weakness. What had begun as the Rover’s comforting cradle was beginning to squeeze too hard.
“The two have nothing to do with each other,” Charles began. “At least not to begin with. At some point, someone tried redeeming,” he held up his hands and used his fingers to make invisible quotes around the word, “the pagan practice by applying some lame Christian meaning to it, but…” He closed his eyes, not concerned with finishing the thought.
“Any thoughts on that, Marc?” Ian asked, needling his friend’s faith.
Marcus shook his head while unzipping his leather jacket, not about to be drawn into all that his friend’s snide grin was hoping for in response. “Jesus didn’t know anything of Christmas, the apostles didn’t celebrate it, and the early church didn’t establish it. It is utterly unimportant to Christianity as a whole.”
“Bah, humbug,” Ashley teased, nestling her head against his new sweater. It smelled like someone else.
“My friend,” Charles said, looking up into the rearview mirror and picking out Marcus, “you are certainly right about that.”
Ian smiled. “Don’t you have a preacher quote for me?”
“I do, actually.”
“By all means.”
“‘We do not believe in the present ecclesiastical arrangement called Christmas. We find no scriptural warrant for observing any day as the birthday of the Savior. Consequently, its observance is a superstition.’ How’s that for ya’?” He’d edited out some of the Protestant’s words, not wanting to offend Charles if he happened to be a devout Catholic—which, based on where this conversation had come from, he guessed he wasn’t…or had at least entered some recent crisis of faith.
“Double humbug,” Ian muttered.
“Where do you live, Charles?” Heather asked sleepily, changing the subject.
“About forty-five minutes away.”
“Married?”
“Once upon a time.” He paused. “Cancer.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
He dismissed her polite apology with a heavy shrug.
Ian focused on the man resting behind the wheel and began observing him from a new angle. “Must be a tough time of the year for you, then,” he probed.
Charles nodded, and a sparkle gleamed from the corner of his eye. “Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.”
But Charles just leaned forward and turned the volume up on the radio, letting “We Three Kings” carry the conversation away. The song pulled them into its grip, soothing most of them with past memories and the warm feelings they conjured.
By the time Charles decided it was time to turn the engine off, his four guests were fast asleep around him. He considered them for a while and then stared out into the storm.
Tears began traveling down his face.
****
Marcus opened his eyes and was surprised by the brightness that now revealed their surroundings. It was morning. He leaned forward a little, his entire body sore from sleeping against the door and having Ashley use him as a pillow, Heather leaning against her. The car crash from the night before also added to the stiff pain knotting his human frame. The girls were both sound asleep, as was Ian in the front passenger seat. The driver’s seat, however, was empty.
He rubbed his eyes and tried to stretch as much as possible without waking up the girls. The Rover was running, heat blowing through the vents, the keys dangling from the ignition. Out the window, boots had marched away from the front door beneath the still-falling snow, leaving an ominous trail behind for following. Marcus brought a hand to his head and scratched his scalp as he tried spotting Charles’ orange jacket through the thicket.
“Immanuel” played in a whisper over the radio.
Ian began to stir.
“Hey, man,” Marcus whispered, greeting Ian to a new day.
Ian blinked, stretched. He surveyed the back seat. “Where’s Charles?”
Marcus shrugged under his leather jacket. “His tracks go into the woods. Doesn’t look like he’s been gone too long.”
Ian cursed.
“What?”
But Ian was too busy looking around for something.
“What are you looking for?”
“A note.”
“A note?”
Not finding one, Ian sat back, folded his arms over his coat, and stared into the morning. “He wasn’t out here to hunt.” He rubbed his eyes, scratching at another shade of stubble.
Marcus frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Come on.” He opened the door, planting his dry Oxfords back into the snow.
Marcus managed to slide out from beneath Ashley without waking her and joined Ian in the barren lot. He closed the door gently and zipped his jacket. “What is it?”
But Ian just turned and walked in front of the car, following Charles’ footprints.
“We’re just gonna leave them here?” Marcus whispered, raising his hands to the slumbering Rover.
Ian turned, lifting his Malcolm X hood up over his head. “They’ll be fine.”
“What if they wake up and decide to come after us?”
“Then they have our tracks to follow. Besides, I don’t want them to see this.”
“See what?”
“You’ll see.”
Marcus shook his head and stuck his hands into his pockets as a bad feeling, the first of the day, began scaling his back.
The footprints entered the woods in no clear strategy. The covered path that led to the concrete bathrooms was fifty feet away, stretching in the opposite direction. Charles hadn’t gone to use the john, but cut straight through the untamed wildlife, en route to nowhere in particular.
Marcus observed the bare trees standing motionless around them, the snow drifting lazily from the gray skies. It was quiet, the crunch crunch of snow beneath their feet the only sound within the muffled, still world.
Ten minutes later, the tracks finally disappeared behind a large boulder.
“It’s actually pretty beautiful.” Marcus was focused on a group of evergreens dipped in white.
Ian nodded, but he was more concerned with the footprints left by their friendly hunter. He followed them around the boulder, stopped, and hung his head.
Marcus saw the defeat in Ian’s body language as he stared down at something out of sight. “What?” Marcus ran up beside him, that feeling of scaling dread doubling its pace. When he reached Ian, he slid to a stop, shocked at the sight before him. “Oh, no…”
Charles was sitting on the ground, his back leaning against the other side of the rock, his footprints disappearing beneath his outstretched legs. A hunting rifle was in his hands, the barrel of it still wedged in what remained of his mouth. The rock behind his head was coated with what looked like frozen tomato soup, chunky tomato soup. A white dusting covered his clothes.
“He came out here to kill himself,” Ian muttered, his words floating away on wispy tendrils of hot air. “He wasn’t planning on going home.”
Marcus turned away, upset, and began walking back to the Rover.
But Ian stepped forward, bent over the freezing corpse, and took the rifle.
“What are you doing?” Marcus’ deep voice rumbled through the stillness.
“I think I’d just feel better having it with us.”
“You’re taking a murder weapon from a crime scene.”
“It was a suicide.”
“Tell that to the cops when they find you in his car with the gun that killed him.”
“I think we’re beyond the law here, don’t you?”
Marcus bit his lip. They couldn’t go to the police with any of this. If they went to the authorities bearing news of possessed mailboxes, haunted cell phones, and old muscle cars, the Law would laugh in their faces and then detain them while setting out to figure just how they really knew Charles, and what they were really doing out there driving north through the Adirondacks. He turned back to the car without a word and looked at his watch. 7:43.
Ian wiped the rifle’s barrel off in the snow and slung the weapon over his shoulder. He hurried after Marcus, allowing only a quick glance into the pressing woods, the sound of branches moaning beneath the added weight of snow urging him on.
When they stepped out of the woods, Heather and Ashley were standing beside the black Rover, arms crossed against their chests and their shoulders raised in opposition to the cold.
“Where the hell did you go?” Ashley cried out, leaving her station and sprinting for Marcus. She ran with a limp at first, her joints stiff and bruis
ed.
“You scared the crap out of us,” Heather exclaimed, throwing her arms around Ian. “What happened?”
“Sorry.”
Heather noticed the rifle and released her grip on him. “Where’s Charles?”
“Shot himself.”
“What?”
Ashley frowned, saddened. “I had a feeling.”
“Wait.” Heather wasn’t catching on. “You’re saying that Charles killed himself out there?” She pointed to the woods.
“Put the gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.”
A tear twinkled in her eye.
Ian put his arm around her. “Come on. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Wiping her own eyes, Ashley said, “Snow’s gotta be almost a foot deep. You think we can drive in this?”
Ian shrugged and opened the Rover’s door. “I’m hoping the trees over the road caught most of the snow. We’ll see. It’s either that or we walk.” He swung the rifle off of his shoulder and stepped up behind the wheel.
Without another word, the rest of them joined Ian in the Range Rover, Heather up front next to Ian, Marcus and Ashley in the back. Ian turned and handed the rifle to Marcus, and Marcus carefully set it down in the small space behind his seat.
“Should we try calling the police?” Heather asked Ian. “We should tell someone…”
Ian fished his cell out of his pocket and handed it to her. “See if I have a signal.”
A second later, she was shaking her head and handing it back to him.
“Keep it. Maybe try emailing your parents. Tweet them or Facebook them or something.” He glanced down at the needles before him. “Half a tank of gas.” Turning down the radio, he asked Heather to bring up a map on his phone. Then he put the car in drive and gently applied the gas. The chains on the tires caught and propelled the vehicle forward. “Let’s get the hell outta here,” he muttered.
Marcus couldn’t keep from offering a silent amen to that.
The Demon Signet Page 12
