The Portal Page 12

“But it certainly did happen,” the reverend said. “In school you learned the myth, a watered-down tale that the elders told, for just the reasons you say. No one wanted Salem’s notoriety. But any myth is only half the truth, and even tonight, I can’t tell you the full tale. But circumstances compel me to tell you some of it.”

  Reverend Snow’s face registered a deeper degree of solemn.

  “I’ll start by telling you that Satan walks among us,” the reverend said, “and not in the non-corporeal state most people believe. He is a physical manifestation, as when he tempted Jesus in the desert, or became a snake in the Garden of Eden. Wherever he walks the Earth, people do evil things that may otherwise only inhabit their fleeting fantasies. He pulls them along in his horrible slipstream, leads them into great sin.”

  “Like Carl Krieger,” Allie said.

  “Yes, like Carl,” the reverend said. “Natalie’s terrible death is what convinced me that Satan walks our island again.”

  “Again?”

  “Without him,” the reverend said, “there would have been no witch trial. The girls didn’t hallucinate. They practiced true witchcraft, under his guidance. He came to Stone Harbor in the guise of a merchant from the East India Company, looking to use our village as a port. He won over the girls with promises of wealth and excitement. But he was using the girls to his own end, one that held the fate of more than Stone Harbor in the balance.

  “Our island is a special place. You know that it’s a lateral link halfway between Massachusetts and Long Island. But it’s also a vertical link. For some reason, this place on Earth is some potential shortcut between our world and Hell. Whatever fabric separates the two places is threadbare here. If that cloth tears, the demons in that world can pass into ours, and I don’t even want to imagine the consequences.

  “The story goes back even further. Norsemen knew of this weak place to what they called Valhalla. The search for it fueled their early visits to the New World. The weak points in both worlds align about every three hundred years. Using the sum of the magic they’d encountered around the world, they created a disk, a portal, that was of our island, bonded to this place so strongly it cannot leave, so coated in magic it cannot be destroyed. It could gather and direct the energy of five souls and focus it on that fragile point between the two dimensions.

  “Legend is that the Norsemen opened the gateway, discovered it was to an evil afterlife and slammed it shut. No one knows what, if anything, happened at the next three-hundred-year opportunity, but at the second event, six hundred years later, Satan tricked the girls of Stone Harbor into trying to reopen that path between the worlds. With the five gathered around the Portal, chanting the right incantations, they would be able to open the door to the Netherworld.”

  “That’s nothing like the story we learned in school,” Allie said.

  “In the 1700s, the truth would have panicked the town,” the reverend said. “Stone Harbor would have been abandoned. The town elders broke up the circle before the girls could start, arresting four of them. A fifth, Providence Neely, escaped with the Portal into the forest. When the townspeople finally came upon her, she was dead from snakebite, in a month when snakes always hibernate. The Portal was nowhere to be found.”

  “Everything going on now has to do with the missing Portal?” Allie said.

  “It had been prophesized. Later, Zebedee Snow had a visitation by an angel that told him of the weakening of the membrane between the worlds every three hundred years. Until then, the Portal is of no use. Our family knew, when the worlds aligned, Satan would return to use the Portal again. That time has come.”

  Reverend Snow’s forthright, solemn delivery made the unbelievable story entirely credible. Allie became a believer. Two people dead in a matter of hours in Stone Harbor was too bizarre to be a coincidence. “So your family took up the mission of guarding Stone Harbor’s future?”

  The reverend raised his chin, just a bit.

  “For generations,” he said with pride, “we have kept the truth alive. Right here inside these walls.” He patted the floor of the church. “Each Christmas Eve, one generation retells the story to the next, and the younger Snows repeat it back. Details I have not shared with you are passed on so that each new minister will be ready to defend his flock. We would be prepared for that day when Lucifer would return to find what he had lost.”

  “Reverend,” Allie said, “I’m honored, but why share all this with me?”

  “Allison, my girl, I did not fulfill my duty. The mandate was to leave a son so that a fresh generation was always ready to carry on the fight. But in my life, I found no spouse. I could not bring myself to try to marry, committing another to a lifetime on our small island, without a mutual bond of love. That love never blossomed. So now the danger generations of Snows prepared for has arrived, all I can send into battle is one tired old man.”

  Allie imagined the weight of this responsibility settling on Reverend Snow over the years. It was no wonder that he looked so drained.

  “I’m not strong enough for the task ahead,” he said. “I will need some help. I think that you are that person.”

  “Me?” Allie said. “I’m the last one qualified for that job.”

  “Don’t worry, girl,” Reverend Snow said. “Trust that I have good reasons. That is enough.”

  “I’ll do whatever I can,” Allie said.

  “You must be careful. We never trusted our secrets to anyone outside the family. We were warned that Satan’s agents would be waiting on the island, generations waiting to open the Portal just as we waited to keep it closed.”

  The reverend moved to rise. He grimaced. Allie stood and helped him up. He looked away for a moment in embarrassment.

  “For now, go home, girl,” the reverend said. “Come back at eleven tomorrow. There is more to share with you. We will need a good plan. I sense that bad things are happening all across the island tonight.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Later that night, Scott pulled his truck into the empty marina parking lot and rolled into a spot near the water. He killed the lights. Only the two lamps at the edge of the dock lit the area. Scott drew some comfort from the cloaking darkness between him and the speedboat tied to the dock.

  He didn’t doubt Charlie Cauble’s warning that the boat was wicked. The thing delivered Oates, the match that lit the fuse of everything suddenly wrong at Stone Harbor. Even this far away, Scott felt some sort of ominous threat from the craft.

  If it brought Oates here, it might tell Scott more about the man. With the Canale Road search running hot, heavy, and apparently behind schedule, Oates would no doubt be there. If Scott was going to check out the boat, now was the time.

  Scott got out of his truck and closed the door with barely a click. The wind blew a damp, frigid taste of the upcoming winter from across the harbor. He jammed his hands in his coat pockets, hunched his shoulders against the cold, and headed for the dock. His pulse beat faster with each step. The marina was unnaturally still, the only sound the lapping of the waves against the abutments.

  The tide was in. At the dock’s end floated the long black speedboat, riding high, deck nearly even with the thick wooden slats.

  At first, he thought it was an optical illusion, a trick of the pier’s shadow and the water’s reflection. But as he got closer, his pulse bumped up a notch. The boat didn’t move. A shallow-hulled boat should rock with the waves, but this boat just stayed parallel with the dock. The securing lines didn’t flex an inch.

  Scott inched down the dock, eyes locked on the ship with every step. His feet edged along the thick yellow safety line on the plank’s edge farthest from the boat. He pulled his hands from his pockets and the cold air chilled the sweat on his palms. He caught himself holding his breath.

  He passed the boat amidships, and then looked down at the stern. Gold letters on the transom read:

  Killin
’ Time

  Nothing about that name made him feel any better.

  Scott stepped over to the boat and looked over the transom. The spotless cockpit was empty of the usual pleasure-boating debris, no stray lines, no empty beer cans. The fiberglass bench seats had no cushions. The boat looked like it would on a showroom floor. It was hard to believe that someone had driven her across the Sound.

  Smoked-glass hatch covers blocked his view inside the cabin. Even in broad daylight, he doubted he would be able to make out anything inside. The rear hatch, though closed, was unlocked. All he had to do was step into the cockpit and slide it open.

  Now that he stood beside it, the idea of boarding the boat set every warning alarm in his head off at once. If stopping at Canale Road was stupid, then getting on this boat would be stupid times ten. But answers to his questions lay secreted within that glossy black fiberglass. With no one around, this might be his only chance.

  The gap from dock to boat was small. He crouched to leap.

  He spied a symbol on the cockpit deck between the seats and froze. His heart skipped a beat. A circle with two odd concave triangles inside it, the same symbol on the disk his father had left hidden in the hardware store.

  “What the hell?” he whispered.

  “You recognize my mark, little Scottie?” Oates said.

  His voice nearly startled Scott off the edge of the dock. He spun around. Oates stood two feet away, between him and the safety of land. The sense of dread he’d felt the last time he saw Oates rolled back in at twice the intensity, this time coupled with the panic of a trapped rat.

  “I-I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I taught mankind how to lie, don’t insult me by thinking you can do it convincingly. Your father’s brand.”

  This time, Scott really didn’t know what Oates was talking about.

  “My gift?” Oates said. “The receipt for the special contract?”

  Oates waved his hand in a circle. A ghostly, 3-D vision whirled into existence to their left. The setting was the main counter of the hardware store. Scott’s father stood in front of the counter.

  “Dad?” Scott said.

  The hallucination, or whatever it was, had to be almost ten years old, before his father had grown a beard after his mother’s funeral, before he’d gotten sick himself. This was the father Scott remembered, robust, strong, commanding. Scott had erased the images of his father in his hollow, final days.

  Oates stepped into the frame. He looked the same, but wore a black turtleneck.

  “May I call you Gary?” Turtleneck Oates said. “After all, this kind of transaction puts us on a first-name basis.”

  “Should I call you Lucifer?” Gary said.

  “Most do. I’m good with it. But let’s stick with Mr. Oates.”

  The revelation that Scott stood in the presence of Satan was somehow anticlimactic. But his father speaking to Oates was like a nightmare.

  “Now, you understand what you’re about to do is murder,” Turtleneck Oates said to Gary. “Murder has consequences. In prison, you’ll lose all this, and your son.”

  Gary nodded. “I don’t see any other options.”

  “No one ever does. I’ll wipe away the consequences. You’ll never be caught, never punished.”

  “For my soul, I assume?”

  Oates laughed. “No, once you kill, I’ve already got your soul. But while I keep you free, you work for me.”

  “I’m not killing anyone else.”

  “Nothing so active is necessary. You’re just gonna watch. Something valuable of mine is on the island. If it surfaces, you’ll tell me. Simple.”

  Gary gave Oates a wary look. “And no one, especially my son, will ever know I’m a murderer?”

  “You’ll die with your name untarnished. All you have you’ll leave to him.”

  Real-life Oates spun his hand in a circle. The vision went into fast-forward. “There’s some negotiations over details here.” His hand stopped and the vision went back to normal speed.

  “You have a deal,” Gary said.

  Turtleneck Oates nodded at Gary. Gary screamed in pain and dropped to his knees. A patch of his shirt above the left breast pocket flashed into flames. When they extinguished, Oates’ symbol glowed red on Gary’s pectoral. It cooled to white scar tissue. Gary’s head sagged to his chest.

  Real-life Oates waved his hand and the vision vanished.

  “That symbol there? You saying you never saw it?”

  Scott never had. Even through his father’s illness, Scott had never seen him without his shirt on, which did not seem odd at the time. But now he remembered in his last years how his father had stopped going shirtless, even out on the water, how at the depths of his illness he’d never let Scott help him dress or bathe. Scott had chalked that all up to pride, but maybe this was the real, darker reason. The revelation made his stomach turn.

  And he’d seen the symbol on the disk under the hardware store counter. That thing had some connection to Oates. If that was Oates’ missing property Scott wasn’t about to return it. But if Satan really could spot him lying….

  “I never saw that scar on my father’s chest,” he said.

  Oates cocked his head, “Yeah, I guess not. A shame he never showed it off. I only bestow the gift on the specially recruited, those with chosen tasks.”

  The whole scenario was more than he wanted to absorb. His father, who he idolized, shown as a murderer in league with the Devil. He refused to accept it.

  “This is all a lie,” Scott said. “The Devil lies.”

  Anger flashed red in Oates eyes. “Watch it, kid. I never lie. My contracts hold up because I never lie. Never have to. They all come to me, they all sell cheap. Like your father did.”

  “Never lie? I just saw you promise that his son would never know what he did.”

  “I promised he’d die with his reputation untarnished. And he did. Untarnished enough for you to sacrifice it all to live your life like he did.”

  Scott hadn’t thought of it that way, true though it was. “My father wasn’t a killer.”

  “Little Scottie, you’re so clueless. You’re all murderers given the chance. And he took to it. The gleam in his eye, the thrill of ending a life. The whole thing awakened him. Kinda like Krieger. Afterward, I had to stop him from doing it again. He had a job working for me then.”

  Scott thought about all the people on the news who always said the mass-murdering neighbor seemed so nice. Then the cops find a dozen skeletons under the guy’s floorboards. But not his father….

  “Big things are gonna happen around here,” Oates said. “I’d advise you not to try to intervene.” He waved a hand like he was erasing a whiteboard. “Strike that. Please do. Because when times get tight, you’ll break my way, just like your old man did. Weakness is in your genes, boy. He sold out, you’ll sell out.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “I’ll prove I do.” Oates stepped aside and gestured toward the parking lot. “You’re free to go. You ain’t no threat.” Oates vanished and reappeared in the cockpit. “See, no tricks. Take yourself a hike.”

  Scott backed away down the dock. Oates began to examine his fingernails.

  “You go on back to little Allie Cat.”

  Scott bristled as Allie’s nickname touched Oates’ poisoned tongue. Fear flamed to life inside him. First, he’d exposed Allie to Natalie’s murder, and now she might get dragged into something spun from his father’s dealings with Oates. If Oates had Allie in his sights as well….

  Scott turned and jogged off the end of the ramp and across the parking lot to his truck. Oates’ laughter rolled across the water, infused the darkness surrounding Scott, and sent a chill down his spine.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Scott went straight to the hardware store. The unnerving experience with Oates an
d the revelation about his father was a double gut punch. He had to disprove the little drama Oates had just shown him. The place to start was with whatever that was hidden under the counter. He parked in back and went in the rear door.

  He’d planned on reexamining the disk earlier. But deliveries took forever, and then customers came in all day. Well, more visitors than customers, everyone looking for someone to talk with about poor Natalie, or to offer Scott condolences since he’d been friends with the Olsens so long.

  A part of him had been happy for the interruption. If he didn’t pull the disk out again, he could continue in the state of half denial about his father’s connection to the satanic. But Oates’ little display on the dock had sent denial packing, and he had to see what the disk was about.

  There was no reason to announce his late-night visit to the store to the world by having all the lights on. He took the emergency flashlight he left plugged in by the door and switched it on instead. The beam lit his way straight to the cash register. He knelt and pulled the cover off the hiding place. With a groan, he slid the granite slab out onto the floor.

  He set the flashlight to the side and swiveled its head down so the beam illuminated the circle-and-triangles symbol. In the angled light, the handprints were just a dark shadow, as if their interiors plunged deep into some eternal abyss. No question the symbol around it was the one from Oates’ boat, and the same one seared into his father’s skin in whatever that hologram was. Upon closer inspection, the edge lettering appeared to be Latin, with some letters like A and E combined into one. But while sometimes Latin words often resembled their English descendants, none of these words looked familiar.

  This time the slab dragged out a piece of paper pinched between it and the floor. Scott moved the slab and pulled the paper the rest of the way out. It was actually several sheets of paper, stapled together and crushed where the stone had shoved them back into the recess of the hiding spot. Scott straightened them out on top of the stone.

  The pages had been run off a computer printer, the one at the hardware store to be exact. The telltale black streak along the right side was a dead giveaway. The first page was a printout from a website. Scribbled notes along the margins were unmistakably in his father’s handwriting. The text contained a description of the relationship between the realms of Heaven and Hell, with Earth being the buffer between the two. Angels came down, demons came up. The Devil himself could not cross over. Scott’s dad had crossed out that sentence and written BULLSHIT in capital letters in the margin.