The Summoning (19 page)

Ryan opened his driver’s door and jumped into his seat – he already had his car keys in his hand ready to stab the key into the ignition. The interior light came on when he opened the door and he felt terribly exposed for a moment.

Amber opened the passenger door and jumped inside. She brought the door almost all the way closed, but she didn’t want to slam it shut yet because Ryan hadn’t started his car.

She watched Ryan as he started the car. The headlights came on – they seemed to be lit up like a spaceship out here on the street. They were vulnerable, her mind whispered. They were targets.

She couldn’t help looking at the living room windows of her house, and she saw a person pull the curtains to the side and peek out.

Lita was about to kick the bedroom door open when she heard Jake yell at her from the living room.

“They’re outside! They’re fucking leaving!”

Lita bolted down the hallway, through the living room, then out the front door which Jake had already opened. She had a split second to see that Jake still had his gun pointed at Gary and that he had a look of anger on his face that she’d never seen before.

They had fucked up.

This guy had told them that Ryan was in the bedroom with his sister and they had trusted him. Jake was going to make this man pay for that piece of misinformation, Lita was sure of that.

She ran down the walkway to the street, her gun in her gloved hand. She didn’t care anymore if the neighbors were watching. The sky was dark, which provided a little bit of camouflage from prying eyes. And it was beginning to drizzle.

She stood in the street and watched the tail lights of Ryan’s car disappear.

“Fuck,” she whispered.

She ran back into Gary’s house and closed the door. Jake and Gary were still in the same exact places, Jake with his gun pointed at the large man who was quaking with fear, his hands up to show them that he wasn’t planning on doing anything stupid.

“They drove off,” Lita said. “You want to go after them?”

“No,” Jake said, “we don’t know where they’re going. By the time we start to follow them, they’ll already be long gone.”

Jake’s voice was too calm, Lita thought. He should be angrier than this. This was when Jake was most dangerous, when he seemed calm, but she knew, much like the storm outside, that lightning was going to strike from Jake soon, and thunder would follow.

Jake turned back to Gary. “Besides, I think our friend here has an idea of where they’re going.”

Gary shook his head no, almost violently. “I’m sorry. I don’t know. Please. I swear to God.”

“Sssshh,” Jake whispered and gave Gary a half smile. “What’s your name, big boy?”

“G – Gary.”

“Okay, Gary. We’re going to have a little talk, okay?”

Gary nodded with his hands still up like he was surrendering.

“It’s very simple,” Jake told Gary. “We’re going to ask you some questions and you’re going to answer them.”

“I don’t know the answers,” Gary said and he began to cry.

“I can show you something that will prove everything I’ve said to you,” Carol told Victor. “Please.”

Victor watched Carol.

“We’ve known each other for a long time,” Carol said. “I’m just asking you to trust me.”

Victor finally nodded.

Carol unlocked the door to the den and walked out into the hallway. Victor followed her out to the living room and watched as she hurried to the front door; she opened the front door and checked the driveway to make sure Ryan wasn’t there.

She closed the front door, locked it, and then walked to the stairs. Victor followed her up the stairs and down the hall, and then they stopped in front of Ryan’s room. Carol took the spare skeleton key out of her pants pocket – the other key was down in her pocket as well, the smaller key, the shiny gold one that unlocked the padlocks on the brown suitcase.

“Carol,” Victor hissed. “What are you doing? We can’t go in there.”

Carol already had the bedroom door unlocked. She opened the door and looked at Victor. She entered the room.

Victor glanced down the hall to make sure Tom wasn’t watching them. The house had grown dark suddenly from the storm outside and there weren’t many lights on.

He followed her inside the bedroom and closed the door. The curtains were drawn back from the window at the far side of the room. The wind outside blew the branches of the trees back and forth and they scraped at the glass – it was a screeching sound, almost like someone screaming at them from far away. But at least the window allowed them enough light to see by.

Carol didn’t waste any time. She crouched down by the bed and pulled out a brown suitcase and lifted it up onto the bed and laid it flat. She felt another twinge of pain in her back, but she had to force herself to ignore it.

Victor watched her with wide eyes. “Wait a minute, isn’t that
Ryan’s
suitcase?”

“Someone delivered it here to Ryan, left it on the front porch with his name on a card,” Carol answered as she dug the small gold key out of her pants pocket and unlocked the padlocks quickly and tossed them aside. She opened the latches and unbuckled the straps that held the suitcase shut.

“This is going too far,” Victor said, ready to bolt.

She opened the suitcase and backed away. She turned and looked at Victor with wild eyes in the semi-darkness. “Just look inside, Victor. Please. We need to hurry!”

Victor was ready to run out of this room, ready to run away from this madness, from this insane woman that he thought he’d known all these years. She had been keeping secrets, he now realized. She had a pentagram painted on her den floor underneath the area rug, and there were scorch marks there where she had burned God knows what.

Offerings to the Underworld,
a voice whispered in his mind.

And now he was in a tenant’s room with her, snooping through this man’s stuff.

But he hadn’t run yet, because he had known all along that there was something wrong with Ryan, something about him that had never set well with him. He’d known this all along and Carol was about to show him proof of his theories.

Victor felt his legs moving forward, he heard his shoes thumping on the floor with each step, and throughout it all he heard the screeching on the bedroom window glass from the pointy twigs and branches scraping back and forth – they looked like the arms of some kind of spidery monster trying to scratch its way into the house, he thought.

He was at the side of the bed and he looked down at the open suitcase and its contents inside. The first thing he saw was a large sealed jar full of a yellowish liquid. Inside the jar was a man’s head. The man’s eyes were swollen shut, and his mouth hung open. The face was disfigured, a lot of the flesh around the mouth was gone and Victor could see the man’s teeth and gums. He saw the gashes on the sides of the face that ran up to the ears. And he saw the red hair that floated in the liquid above the mutilated face.

The next thing Victor saw in the suitcase was an odd collection of trinkets in trays and compartments that had been built into one side of the suitcase and covered with green felt. In one of the compartments was a small clear bottle that contained human teeth; various bones that looked like they could possibly be human finger and foot bones were in another compartment. A few knives and other instruments of torture were carefully tucked away in other compartments behind ribbons that held them in place. But the prominent weapon that was displayed was a straight razor; it was obviously the centerpiece of the collection. It was an old-fashioned straight razor with a word carved into the handle – a word that Victor recognized right away, a word that tugged at nightmare memories from ten years ago when this town was terrified of a killer. Cutter.

Victor could feel his stomach doing flip flops inside of him. He could feel his balls shriveling up from fear. He could feel a tingling sensation running along his skin, almost like an electrical charge, standing his arm hair up, like lightning was going to strike any moment.

He looked at the face in the jar again, and then he looked at Carol as the dread wormed its way through his body. He knew that face in the jar as well as he knew the word Cutter on the straight razor’s wooden handle.

And Carol knew that face, too.

“Oh God, Carol,” Victor said.

Carol only nodded, watching Victor like she wanted him to say it, like she wanted to hear it out loud to make her certain that she hadn’t been hallucinating, certain that what she’d seen was really there.

“That’s your … your …” But Victor couldn’t spit the words out.

“My husband’s face,” Carol finished the words for him. “Cutter’s last victim before he killed himself.”

“But how can that be?” he asked. “Your husband was buried … did Cutter hide his head somehow?”

“No,” Carol said and shook her head no almost violently. “His head was still on his body when they found him in that shack. I had to identify his remains. I know he was buried with his head.”

“Maybe Ryan went to the cemetery …” Victor said, but left the rest of his words unsaid.

Again Carol shook her head no. “I went to the cemetery yesterday. His grave hasn’t been disturbed. There’s no way someone could’ve gotten his head.”

“But that doesn’t explain …” Victor just glanced down at the open suitcase in the gathering darkness. “I don’t understand any of this.”

“I summoned him, Victor. I summoned my husband back from the dead. I wanted him back so badly. I missed him so much. I found someone who showed me how to summon him. But something went wrong, it didn’t work right. At first I thought he might be inside of Ryan, but with some memory loss.”

Victor felt like he was going to be sick – this couldn’t be true.

“But I was wrong,” Carol said and grabbed Victor’s arm with a fierce and surprising strength. Her eyes were wild and her mouth a thin slash on her face. “There’s been someone else inside of Ryan the whole time – Cutter. He came back instead; somehow he was summoned instead of my poor husband.”

Victor only nodded at Carol. He couldn’t believe any of this. Somehow Carol had things mixed up. This couldn’t be real.

“Cutter’s coming back soon,” Carol whispered to Victor in the darkness. It had grown much darker now, and he could barely make out the items in the suitcase and he was happy about that – he didn’t want to see that face floating in the yellowish liquid again.

“You and Tom need to go,” Carol whispered. She still hadn’t let go of his arm and her fingers dug into his flesh. It hurt a little, but he was too afraid to tear his arm away from her. “Go find somewhere to stay for the night.”

“We should call the police,” Victor said.

“No,” Carol hissed. “They won’t understand. I brought Cutter here and I have to send him back. It’s the only way.”

Victor finally nodded. “Okay. No police. I’ll go get Tom.”

“Thank you, Victor,” she said and surprised him with a quick kiss on his cheek.

He nodded and left the bedroom and headed down the hall for Tom’s bedroom door – but he wasn’t going to leave with Tom; he had a different plan.

Ryan sped down the streets of Edrington as the rain began to pour down from the night sky.

Amber looked at him. “What’s going to happen to Gary?”

Ryan drove in silence for a moment. “I guess they’ll question him,” he said.

“Are they going to hurt him?”

Ryan didn’t answer.

“Are they going to kill him?”

Her voice was calm, almost detached, like she wasn’t talking about her own brother.

“I don’t know,” Ryan finally answered.

“I brought this to him,” Amber said and looked out the window, and now Ryan could hear emotion in her voice. Even though her brother was a monster, she still cared about him somewhere deep inside of her. And that’s why Ryan was sure that he loved her.

“You had no way of knowing,” Ryan told her.

She looked at Ryan. “Pull the car in there.” She pointed at a spot next to a building not too far from Main Street.

Ryan looked at her. For a moment he wasn’t going to pull the car over – they needed to get to Carol’s house, but he slowed the car down and pulled up next to the building.

“Go around back,” she told him. “We won’t be seen from the street if those guys are looking for us.”

Ryan drove around to the back of the building and put the car in park. He didn’t turn off the engine. The motor rumbled as the rain poured down on the car.

“I’m not going to Carol’s house with you until you tell me everything,” she said.

She waited for Ryan to argue that he’d already told her everything. But he didn’t argue. Instead, he looked out at the rain for a moment, thinking. Then he looked back at her.

Ryan unbuttoned the front of his shirt and opened it up. She could see his muscular torso, but she saw what he wanted her to see, the three round scars, one on his abdomen, and two on his chest.

“I know I should’ve told you about this before,” he said. “But if you’ll go with me to Carol’s house, I’ll tell you everything you want to know. I swear.”

Carol closed the suitcase back up and slipped the small padlocks through the gold loops in the straps. But she didn’t close the padlocks. And she didn’t slide the suitcase back underneath Ryan’s bed. She grabbed the suitcase by the handle and carried it out of the room into the hall. She didn’t bother locking Ryan’s door; the time for sneaking around was over now.

She glanced down the hall and saw Victor standing in front of Tom’s door. She wasn’t sure if he had knocked on Tom’s door yet, and she didn’t care. She had warned Victor to take Tom and leave – and that’s all she could do.

Carol went downstairs and carried the suitcase into her den. She shut the door nearly all the way. It was very dark in the room with the curtains and blinds drawn shut, but she could feel her way around. She set the suitcase down carefully on the floor; she wanted to be very careful with the contents inside. She grabbed the lighter from the desk and lit the few candles around the room with a trembling hand, the same candles she lit when she prayed. The flickering light pushed back the darkness, but in the corners the shadows danced and moved.