The Portal Read online

  Scott flipped to the second page. It contained a drawing of the diagram etched in the stone. It wasn’t an exact replica. A pentagram filled the center rather than the stone’s twin triangle symbol. Also, the inscription along the edge was made up of random letters. But the handprints were there, dead center.

  The description underneath referred to the stone as a Summoner, a direct link to the demonic. This was like having a demon’s personal cell phone number. It created a connection strong enough to travel around the world or between the realms of Earth and Hell. The paper described the link it would create and it was exactly like the hologram Oates had conjured up on the dock. A demon gave a Summoner only to the most trusted, because the demon had no call waiting. The link always went through. In the margin, Scott’s father had written an equation about power dissipation over distance, then scribbled Closer = Stronger and Can’t ignore. Loud.

  The letters around the edge of the drawing were nonsense because no one knew the actual text inscribed in a Summoner. Each inscription, in reversed Latin, was specific to only one demon. Recite it three times, with your hands in the center, and you were connected.

  Scott traced his fingers counterclockwise along the stone’s inscription and now nomead spelled daemon and eratacov spelled vocatare which looked a lot like calling someone. He pulled his finger away, afraid that touching it or sounding out the words in his mind might somehow dial up some demonic wrong number.

  Scott’s father had never been a wizard on the internet, but it looked like his encounter with Oates (and there was no denying it now for Scott) had prodded him into it. He flipped to the next page.

  This page contained a recipe for blessed iron, a concoction of iron, gold, and holy oils forged over a wormwood fire. Supposedly a demon repellent.

  Rusting spots of inlaid iron dotted the edge of the Summoner. Apparently Scott’s father didn’t want Oates to repossess the Summoner.

  The last page of the packet was the most detailed. Scrawled across the top in blunt pencil were the words Demon Trap. Underneath was a diagram of strange symbols around a circle, and several measurements like the circle’s diameter and the distance between symbols. Must be in red ran along the paper’s edge. Each symbol had smudged notes scribbled beside it, most of which Scott couldn’t decipher. At the bottom, Scott’s father had written Temporary prison or permanent??

  Scott sat back against the wall and flicked off the flashlight. He let the quiet darkness cover him like a quilt, and took a deep breath.

  His father had really made a deal with Satan to kill someone. Scott couldn’t imagine a scenario where his father would plot a murder. It probably hadn’t been on the island, because a murder would have been big news, Carl Krieger being Exhibit A on that one. The reality was hard to accept, but even harder to accept was that on top of it he’d made a deal with the Devil. But it looked like his father had second thoughts about the arrangement. He’d researched what he could, and came up with a viable defense, or maybe he thought the demon trap was more like a viable offense. Whichever it was, his father had sought a way to put Oates on ice.

  Scott had a premonition that that kind of information might come in pretty handy. And soon.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The door of the old police cruiser creaked closed with a comforting thud. The car’s thick glass and heavy insulation sealed Scaravelli away from the outside world. He exhaled into the comforting silence as he sat in the car outside the station. A few moments alone were just what he needed now. The seams that joined the fabric of his plan with Oates were starting to unravel, and he needed a place to figure out how to stitch them back up.

  All day he’d relished his clean dispatch of Krieger. The arrival of Kyler and his fake agents recast him as a bit player. His primary task completed, Scaravelli feared Oates now had him tagged as expendable.

  All day, he’d reacquainted himself with his favorite remedy for worry, a bottle of Russia’s great contribution to the world, vodka. The odor-free, on-the-job drinking favorite was clear and mixed with anything. By the time Milo had arrived to relieve him just now, Scaravelli’s minor buzz had been all that kept him from firing the clueless dipshit.

  Scaravelli now nursed a bout of healthy paranoia. He looked through the bullet hole in his windshield to Krieger’s van, parked cockeyed behind the station where the tow truck had dumped it. He replayed his story in his head, reviewed the evidence in his cruiser and in the van. He tested for inconsistencies, anything that would contradict the fiction he’d passed around town. He knew he’d missed something. The guilty always do. But his blood alcohol level muddied his thoughts. He decided to obliterate them altogether.

  Minutes later, he pulled his cruiser into the Rusty Nail’s pitted gravel parking lot. A history of haphazard additions left the worn-out white building looking like a collection of adjoining mismatched boxes. The bar’s moniker graced the façade, with a crude picture of a clipper ship in the background. A single steel door faced the parking lot, and the building was devoid of any windows, permitting the patrons to avoid daylight, darkness, and any other intrusions from the outside world.

  Scaravelli’s car was no odd sight at the bar. It was common for him to stop for a visit with Mr. Jack Daniel, the sum of his company at the Rusty Nail. He was there for alcohol, not fellowship. He couldn’t imagine backslapping with these inbred island yahoos over a Pabst Blue Ribbon. He had his table. He drank alone. No one approached the imperial chief of police, and that suited him. Especially tonight. He got out of the cruiser and went inside.

  It seemed as if only the neon ads on the barroom walls challenged the shadows of the Rusty Nail’s dim lighting. Scattered tables tried in vain to attract errant chairs. Sagging stools stood sentinel at the bar, and a smoke-hazed mirror covered the wall behind it. The pungent aroma of ancient beer and long-vanished cigarettes scented the stale air. Scaravelli felt right at home.

  The locals scattered around the room took no notice of Scaravelli as he entered the bar. With a nod to the bartender, he went to his usual table in the far corner. The bartender poured two shots of whiskey, the usual first delivery. Scaravelli dropped into a seat facing the room.

  The bartender brought the drinks to his table without a word. Scaravelli downed the first one with one gulp, in a hurry to get hammered.

  “Chief?” he heard from his right.

  Scaravelli looked up at Chet Wheeler’s round, ruddy face. He owned Wheeler’s Wheels, the used-car lot in town.

  “Yeah?” Scaravelli replied in a tone he hoped conveyed he was in no mood to hear the usual petty complaints.

  Chet extended his right hand like a man trying to pat a lion.

  “I just wanted to say thanks. You hunted down that son of a bitch Krieger and delivered a dose of real justice. You’re a hell of a police chief.”

  Scaravelli relaxed and grinned. This was what he envisioned when Oates told him the plan. He reached out and gave Chet’s hand one firm, hard pump.

  “Just doing my job,” Scaravelli said, emulating the modesty he’d seen others display. “Anybody would do the same.”

  “No they wouldn’t,” said a voice on his left.

  Three other faces hovered at the side of his table, like moths to a streetlight. Several more shots of Jack landed in front of him.

  “You iced that bastard good,” the admirer continued. Scaravelli did not even recognize him. “Saved the town an expensive trial. Probably woulda gone free on some technicality, anyhow. Best thing you could have done.”

  Scaravelli beamed and downed his next shot in one swallow, this time in celebration rather than escape. Faces began to fill the opposite side of his table.

  “Tell us the story, Chief,” someone asked from behind the growing knot of men.

  Scaravelli began the tale he’d spun earlier for Tackett. Patrons gravitated to his table and jockeyed for a ringside seat, way more receptive than Tac
kett had been. Their eyes locked on Scaravelli’s. They hung on every word. Scaravelli added a few superlatives he might have overlooked in the first telling. The crowd soaked it up like a sponge.

  Questions rolled in from the group.

  “How did you catch him?”

  “How close was the bullet when he shot at you?”

  “What did he do to Natalie?”

  Scaravelli rose and added some embellished details, punctuated with a sloshing thrust of his drink for enriched emphasis. Adoring eyes stared riveted, heads nodded as the crowd followed his every word. He enhanced his expertise and diminished Krieger’s humanity, as he gave birth to a myth he was certain generations would retell.

  “How did you get such a clean shot at him from inside your cruiser?” interrupted someone from the crowd.

  Even with the Jack coursing through his bloodstream, his fogged perception caught the question as more of an accusation. He squinted and failed to identify the questioner. The crowd quieted awaiting his answer.

  “It’s training…you just fall back on it….”

  The adulation in the eyes of the gathering drifted away, replaced by confusion.

  Chet looked down at his hands and crossed his right over his left. “But sitting in your car, you’d have had to shoot left-handed….”

  “Kind of odd you’d know Krieger was out in that exact spot in the woods, isn’t it?” boomed a question from the other side of the room.

  “Well, I had this hunch….” Scaravelli felt the crowd’s opinion take a U-turn. The throng of admirers had transformed into a tainted jury. The claustrophobic press of people trapped him in the bar’s dark corner. The exit seemed a thousand miles away, and between it and his table floated a sea of eyes, staring at him, staring through him, waiting for him to tell the truth.

  “Chief, why’d you sell out to Oates?”

  Scaravelli’s glass slipped from his hand and smashed on the floor. He flattened against the wall. Sweat broke out along his bushy moustache.

  “Who said that?” he yelled. “Who knows about Oates?”

  “Who said what?” Chet asked. “Who’s Oates?”

  “Get out of my way!” Scaravelli ordered.

  He pushed his way through the crowd. Whispers passed between them, more questions he did not want to answer. He practically ran the last few feet to the door.

  He threw it open and burst outside into the night. The cool, clean air washed over him.

  “Now that I think about it,” Chet Wheeler said as the door swung shut, “the whole thing’s kind of odd.”

  Scaravelli took a deep breath and decided he needed to get home, do less thinking, and way more drinking.

  * * *

  The crowd in the bar broke into groups of two or three. Concurrent animated discussions about Scaravelli’s story blended into a low, anxious rumble. In the back of the room, a stout, bald man dressed in black stepped back into the corner’s shadows, all his questions for the night asked. No one had noticed his arrival, and no one noticed when he disappeared.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Scott couldn’t put it off any longer. Even if she’d had access to all the normal, less personal, but more immediate, twenty-first century methods of communication, Scott had to see Allie face-to-face. He’d immersed her into something horrible last night, and now he was certain that his dealings with Oates were about to enmesh her in something even worse. Even if all that happened was she told him to go away, he’d settle for that right now.

  He pulled up into her driveway. Her car was there, but the dark house was silent, no radio, no TV. A light burned somewhere within. Dread built as he approached her front door. He knocked. No answer. He knocked again.

  His first, blackest thought was that Oates had beaten him here, done something terrible to her. His heart sank. He grabbed at the doorknob. Locked. Panic started to take hold.

  From behind the house, he heard something soft and beautiful, light as a whisper, musical. He ran to the side of the house. When he turned the corner to the backyard, it became crystal-clear and he stopped in his tracks.

  A clarinet.

  A small fire pit on the rear patio lit the area in a warm, buttery glow and fought back the descending evening chill. Allie sat cross-legged on a lounge chair in a pair of baggy sweats and an old flannel shirt. The clarinet was to her lips, and the most beautiful sounds floated from it.

  He watched her play with the awe of the musically incompetent. Joy filled her face as her fingers danced over the instrument and called sweet cascading notes out into the air. Allie looked radiant as she created a melody out of thin air and talent.

  In high school, Allie’s singing and acting had garnered the accolades of her peers. But Scott had loved her music. He would often cut class during sixth period, sneak into the school auditorium, and watch from the darkened back row as Allie practiced with the band, just as he watched her now, filled with awe and adoration.

  Allie finished the last note. The clarinet left her lips and she smiled.

  “That was beautiful,” Scott said.

  Allie looked up, startled.

  “Scottie!” she said.

  She smiled in recognition. Scott exhaled in relief that she was okay, and seemed happy to see him. He took a chair beside her on the patio. The fire warmed his face.

  “You still play beautifully,” Scott said

  “I just started again when I came home. It really sounds awful, but it feels wonderful.”

  “It looks like it does,” Scott said.

  “Well, I appreciate a sympathetic, if surreptitious, audience,” Allie said.

  “It’s late, but I had to check on you,” he said, “after last night.”

  Allie’s face got serious.

  “Oh, last night was awful,” she said. “That poor girl. I had to get home. I was about to start crying, the kind of performance that didn’t need an audience.”

  “I understand,” Scott said. “I should have never stopped there with you in the car. The important thing is that you feel okay now.”

  “I do,” Allie said. “Believe it or not, I went over and talked to Reverend Snow. He was a big help.”

  “It’s in his genes,” Scott said. “His family’s been consoling Stone Harbor for generations.”

  “He’s been doing more than that,” she said. “He shared something with me. Natalie’s murder is just part of what’s going on here. Something’s been hidden here for three hundred years.”

  Allie proceeded to tell Scott everything the reverend had shared with her about the Portal, the witches, and his family’s role keeping the Portal from being reopened. Scott had to wait for her to catch her breath before he could ask a question.

  “Who’s come looking for this Portal?” Scott asked.

  “It sounds incredible,” Allie said, holding her hands up in a sign of embarrassed resignation, “but Satan himself. I know that’s hard to swallow.”

  Scott sighed in relief at someone validating his own terrifying experiences.

  “Not really,” Scott said. “I’m taking it in smaller bites than you think. I’ve met him.”

  Allie’s eyes widened. “You’re kidding.”

  Scott filled her in on the boat at the dock and the mysterious Oates, the man who made a frozen wilderness sprout in your chest. He left out his discovery of his father’s involvement, and the Summoner in the hardware store.

  The flames in the fire pit died down. Allie’s face fell half into shadow. She shivered.

  “Let’s go inside,” she said.

  Scott followed her in through the sliding glass door. She flipped on the living room light. Two big couches faced an enormous television. Original oil paintings of coastal scenes hung on the walls. Allie locked the door behind them. She returned her clarinet to the case on the counter to the kitchen.

 
Scott marveled at how completely comfortable he felt walking into a stranger’s house rented by a woman who, before yesterday, he hadn’t seen in ten years.

  Maybe that bond we had back then never really dissolved, he thought. Maybe over the years it twisted and curled and stretched very thin, but never severed.

  He took a seat on a couch. She sat down beside him.

  Scott told her about the dangerous-looking men posing as FBI agents who were scouring the woods north of town. “Since they didn’t look like they were searching for clues to the crime, and they were reporting to Oates, I’ll bet they were looking for the Portal.”

  “Reverend Snow admitted he’s too old and frail to defend the Portal,” Allie said. “He asked for my help and I agreed. I think you should too.”

  “We were always a good team,” he said.

  Allie smiled. She slid down and on her side, tucked her legs and laid her head against his thigh. He ran his fingers through her hair. It still felt like silk. He rested his hand on her shoulder and gave her a squeeze. They just stayed like that in silence for minutes. Scott felt the rise and fall of her breathing against his leg. The weight of the tasks ahead of them sank onto Scott’s shoulders.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “For?”

  “For ten years ago,” Allie said. “Fame got ahold of me and I let everyone and everything go. I abandoned you without even a goodbye. I’m sure you think it was just teenager stuff, but I owe you an apology. I’m way late. I missed your part of my Twelve Step Process.”

  The conversation Scott dreaded yesterday now seemed like a relief compared to the events that had unfolded since. “I appreciate that. I took it hard at the time. It would have worked out different if we’d gone to school together, I guess.”