What if it was?
Joyce used her anger to force her legs to move, propelling her from the living room and into the hallway. She imagined pulling open the wooden door in front of her to see Agent Isabel standing there, a smiling Rebecca in her arms. But as she reached out to the doorknob, another scenario played out in the theatre of her mind. In this one, Agent Isabel stood there alone, an emotionless expression on her face as she blurted out, “I’m so sorry.” Sobbing, Joyce drew back the chain on the door. She turned the doorknob.
“Who is it?” Bob asked behind her, and she turned to see him peeking around the living room doorway like a frightened child, tears streaming down his cheeks.
Turning back to the door, she threw it open and stared out through the glass storm door at— Nothing.
Joyce blinked wildly, hot tears burned her face.
There was nobody there. Had they been mistaken? Had they both somehow mistaken some other sound for the doorbell?
The early-morning sun illuminated the front porch in orange hues. She grabbed the latch on the storm door and pulled it down, pushing the door open.
“What?” she heard her husband cry. “What is it . . . who?”
She ignored him, stepping out onto the porch, her eyes darting from left to right just in case somebody had been there but left before she could reach the door.
The neighborhood was deathly quiet, and vacant of life.
“Who . . .?” her husband called out again, this time closer. Brave enough now to come down the hallway.
“Nobody,” she practically yelled back to him.
She stepped off the porch, still looking for something—anything. And then it caught her from the corner of her eye—a tongue of white protruding from the closed lip of the mailbox attached to the side of the house. Joyce stared at the envelope, trying to remember the last time she had retrieved the mail, pretty sure that it had been just the day before. They had received a stack of condolence cards, many of them from total strangers, and Agent Isabel had wanted to see them, envelopes and all.
Joyce opened the mailbox with a rusty-sounding whine and plucked the envelope from the slot where it had been fed. Something shifted inside—multiple things, sliding from one end of the envelope to the other.
“What is it?” her husband asked, fear in his tone.
She turned, shaking the envelope playfully. “Mail?” she said. “I don’t know.”
There were no markings on the envelope, no address, stamps, or postal dates. It was just a plain white envelope.
“Who is it from?” Bob asked as Joyce nearly pushed him out her way on the way back into the house.
She felt her own fear rising her imagination caught fire, and the words exploded suddenly within her brain.
Ransom note. “Open it,” he ordered, reaching to take it from her.
“Don’t you dare,” she spat, snatching the envelope away, hugging it protectively to her chest. Her husband recoiled with a look of hurt on his face, but she couldn’t care about that.
Slowly she began to open the envelope. Her hands were shaking so violently that she briefly thought of her long-dead grandmother afflicted with Parkinson’s. She slid her finger beneath the seal and began to run it beneath the lip, but her tremor caused the envelope to tear farther down than she expected. A jagged opening was torn through the paper, and the contents of the envelope spilled out onto the wooden floor, bouncing slightly at her feet.
“What . . .?” she asked aloud, staring down at the pearly white kernels that littered the floor, unable to comprehend what she was seeing.
Her husband gasped, telling her that he knew what they were before she did. “Oh God,” he said, the horror in his voice palpable.
And suddenly Joyce felt the strength leave her legs, as if the tendons and muscles had all been cut. She dropped to the hallway floor, jarred by the force of the impact, reaching down with trembling fingers to pluck the small white contents of the envelope up from the floor.
“Oh God,” her husband wailed.
And this time she had to agree.
One by one she lovingly picked them up, collecting each and every piece in the palm of her hand, desperate to make sure that all the teeth had been retrieved. Then she closed her hand tightly about them and held them close to her heart. Joyce was crying now, too, remembering the last time she had seen them.
Displayed in the most beautiful of little girl smiles.
The knife cut through the perfectly prepared filet with little effort as John savored another bite of perhaps the best steak he had ever eaten. The sides were spectacular as well: grilled asparagus, creamed spinach, and a baked potato with all the fixings.
It was an amazing meal, but he found his enjoyment hampered by the memory of the secret library beneath a monastery, and more specifically the items that were missing.
“What about the episode with the teddy bear?” Anastos asked, making John look up from his food. The dark-skinned, older man had fixed him in a steely gaze.
“The teddy bear?” John repeated, wiping his mouth with a cloth napkin. “I believe there were a few times that we dealt with toys.”
Anastos drank from a bottle of Stella Artois, and set the bottle down. “The one where it looked as though it was dancing across the room. Don’t you dare tell me that was real.”
John chuckled. “Then I guess I won’t say anything.” He picked up his knife and fork and began to cut more of his meat.
“Seriously?” the multimillionaire laughed, slapping the hardwood table top with a large, calloused hand. “You’re telling me that actually happened?”
“You told me not to,” John said through a mouthful of steak as he reached for his glass of spectacular Merlot.
“Get the fuck out of here!” Anastos exclaimed, wide-eyed. He snatched up his beer and took a long drink. “This is fascinating . . . absolutely fascinating.”
“The world is a much weirder place than many suspect,” John explained, feeling as though he were in the midst of a television interview.
“And it seems as though it’s getting weirder,” Anastos commented, going back to his own meal.
John said nothing, his thoughts flashing back to that night when everything had changed. Ever since then, things had been escalating, growing so much worse.
So much more evident.
“So, when will we see the next season?” Anastos asked, dark eyes twinkling mischievously. “You can tell me. I won’t share with anyone.”
John shook his head. “I really don’t know,” he said to his host. “I’m not sure if there will be one.”
Anastos leaned back in his chair.
“Don’t tell me that,” he said. “Is it because of your wife? Has she recovered from the explosion?”
“She’s still recovering,” John said, absently playing with his potato. He allowed his host to believe an explosion was the cause of the catastrophe of their last broadcast, as did most of the world. After all, how does one explain that an old urn cracked and released demonic entities that now inhabited his wife’s body?
“Is she all right?” Anastos asked. “Are they saying she’ll recover?”
The image of his wife overtaken by the demonic filled John’s head. “Yeah,” he said simply, setting down his fork, no longer hungry. “I’m sure she’ll be fine.”
“I certainly hope so,” Anastos said, having more of his beer. “How was your steak?” he asked, changing the subject. “Cooked all right?”
“Perfectly, thank you,” John replied.
“Can I get you anything else?”
“God, no,” John said with a polite smile. “If I have anything else I’ll burst.”
Anastos looked to a corner of his dining room and gestured. A flock of white-coated waitstaff suddenly appeared and immediately began clearing the table.
“Thank you so much for your hospitality,” John said, savoring his wine.
“It’s my pleasure,” Anastos said. “I am more than happy to play host to my
favorite television personality.”
“What? He or she couldn’t make it?” John joked.
Anastos laughed. He then picked up his beer bottle and, seeing that it was empty, held it aloft, gesturing for one of his people to take the empty and bring him another. “You wouldn’t believe the thought I put into getting you here,” he said, a sly smile creeping across his tanned, handsome face.
“That was pretty slick,” John said.
Anastos continued to grin. “You were actually the first person I thought of when I received the call about the Demonist library,” he said.
John was taken aback by the man’s familiarity with the ancient brotherhood.
“Ah, so you do know of the Demonists,” John said. “I shouldn’t be surprised, but their existence has all but been lost to the ages.”
Anastos looked smug as one of his waitstaff brought him a new beer. “What, did you think my interest in the weird began with your show?”
John lifted his wine in a mock toast and took a sip.
“How lucky was it that I found a Demonist repository under a property that I owned? Pretty wild, eh?”
John studied him, and the smirk that was teasing the corners of his mouth. “Then it wasn’t an accident?” he asked.
Anastos stood up from the table, holding the beer bottle by the neck. “There were hints in some old documents I uncovered about the possibility that the brotherhood had hidden their possessions beneath places of holy power,” he explained.
“I’m guessing then that this isn’t the first monastery you’ve purchased?”
“Bingo!” Anastos said, and began to laugh. “But let that be our little secret. I can just imagine what would happen if word got out that one of the world’s richest men was obsessed with finding the hidden stashes of an ancient order of exorcists. Something tells me people just wouldn’t understand.” He brought his beer to his mouth and took a healthy pull on the bottle.
John drained his own glass and set it down on the table. Anastos immediately grabbed one of his waitresses as she passed, directing her toward the bottle on the table.
“No, thank you,” John said, holding up his hand. The waitress smiled politely and took his empty glass away.
“You’re going to make me drink alone?” the man asked. “Okay, then.” He gestured for John to follow him.
John rose from his chair, following his host from the elaborate dining room. They walked down a long corridor, priceless paintings spaced sporadically on either side, and stopped before a set of double doors. Anastos set his bottle of beer down on a tall, corner table that displayed a porcelain eighteenth-century Chinese vase from the Qianlong Dynasty. Anastos looked over his shoulder at John as he took hold of the doorknobs.
“Are you ready for this?” he asked, before throwing open the doors to a beautiful study.
John followed Anastos inside and at once saw the level of collector the man was. Some of the books he saw on the expertly crafted bookshelves were so rare that he’d only seen them before in museums, some in the forbidden archives of the Vatican Library.
“Impressive,” John said.
Anastos sat on the corner of his desk and offered that smug grin again.
“Yeah, it’s pretty good,” he said, looking around the room and nodding. “But it’s nothing compared to what was found in the secret library.”
“I can imagine.”
Anastos stared at him intensely. “I don’t think you can.”
“Show me.”
“You don’t think it’s going to be that easy, do you?”
“We had steak together—thought we were bros now.”
Anastos chuckled. “Oh no,” he said.
“What do you need?” John finally asked.
“See, this is what I was hoping for,” Anastos said. “Us talking . . . sharing.”
John waited.
“I know there’s so much more to you than a television star, a ghost chaser. I need your expertise . . . your accumulated knowledge . . . your experience.”
“And if I give it to you?”
“The keys to the kingdom,” Anastos said, and smiled wickedly.
An icy chill ran up and down John’s spine. What was he getting himself into now?
It was like something out of a James Bond movie, John thought as he was led to an isolated section of Cyril Anastos’ multimillion-dollar house, under armed guard and a sophisticated security system.
It appeared that Anastos had a thing for armed thugs, the blacksuited security with their deadly submachine guns sneering at John as he followed their employer.
“This is pretty elaborate,” John said as Anastos stopped before a chrome elevator door.
“And all completely necessary,” the man said, pulling a small key from his pocket and inserting it in the lock. The metal doors parted, beckoning them to enter.
“After you, John,” Anastos said with mocking familiarity.
John entered as Anastos followed.
“Does what you’d like my help with have anything to do with something found in the Demonists’ library?” John asked, his curiosity getting the better of him.
“Something, yes,” Anastos said as the doors slid silently closed and the elevator began its descent, the trip down talking far longer than John would have expected.
How deep had they gone? he wondered before they came to a stop.
Anastos looked over his shoulder and smirked, as if to say, Prepare to have your mind blown, or something to that effect.
And as the elevator doors slid open, John had to admit, the smirk was pretty damn correct.
Mind blown. The Bond movie comparison continued.
The elevator had opened onto what looked to be a sprawling, underground research complex, lab-coated technicians busily moving about. John tried to catch what they were doing, and saw with growing interest that they appeared to be examining items of great age.
Items likely removed from the Demonists’ library cache and brought down here.
“So, what’s all this?” he asked.
“A little this and that,” Anastos said, walking farther into the space. “Some cataloging, some translation, a lot of verification.”
The shipping mogul stopped and looked around at the operation.
“It is said that many of these objects, liberated by the Demonists’ brotherhood, were said to have a capacity for great power,” Anastos said.
John glanced over to see a technician placing what appeared to be a golden crucifix beneath the lens of a powerful electron microscope.
“My business partners and I would like to know if this is true.”
“Your business partners share your interest in the arcane?” John asked. “What are the odds of that?”
“Like minds and all that,” Anastos said, crossing the room, as his employees greeted him respectfully. “They were very keen on you coming here, even before the Demonists’ cache discovery.”
“Before?” John asked. “And why was that?”
Anastos stopped before a room made entirely from glass, a transparent cube, filled with activity.
“This is why,” Anastos said, not bothering to turn around.
John slowly sidled up alongside him, trying to see around the multiple technicians buzzing about inside. “What is . . . ?”
One of the techs moved aside to reveal a table, and the item that sat on it.
It took a moment for John to realize what it was.
“A Devil trap,” he then said in reference to the cigar-box-sized container resting in the center of the table. The icy chill of foreboding was back, crazily running up and down his spine.
“Basically,” Anastos said. “Though a tad more complex, we think. You wouldn’t believe the number of supposed experts that we’ve had in to look at it.”
John looked at him as Anastos continued to stare through the glass at his prized possession. “I want to get inside it.”
“Are you saying that you want me to open the box?” John a
sked.
“That’s exactly what I want you to do,” Anastas said. “And in exchange I’ll give you access to any and all findings from the Demonist library.”
John stared at the box, taking in what details that he could. In his vast research into the paranormal and ancient arcane, he had encountered similar Devil boxes. Sometimes they were just empty containers that were supposed to be receptacles for representations of people’s guilt, and trauma, while in other cases they were prisons for lesser and bothersome demonic entities, put there by a competent practitioner of the magickal arts.
By the looks of this receptacle . . .
“May I take a closer look?”
“Of course,” Anastos said excitedly, approaching the door to the cube and wrapping a knuckle on the glass.
One of the men, a bespectacled gentlemen with an enormous Afro of curly gray hair, looked up from a tablet, his eyes widening when he saw who was there. He swiftly darted to the door and pushed it open to allow his employer access.
“Good evening, Mr. Anastos,” he said.
“Penderton,” the millionaire acknowledged. “This is John Fogg. He’s come to look at the box.”
“Of course,” Penderton said. “It’s right over here.”
The tech escorted him over to the table. The others who had been tending to the container quickly dispersed, leaving the glass room.
John stared down upon the box and immediately felt his heart begin to rapidly beat. This wasn’t a container for trinkets, or troublesome spirits in need of taming. This was serious business. The first thing that he noticed on the lid of the wooden box was the engraving of the fifth pentacle of Mars—a scorpion surrounded in a circle of ancient symbols of binding.
“Terrible unto demons,” John muttered beneath his breath as he continued to study the box.
“Excuse me?” Anastos asked. “What was that?”
“Terrible unto demons,” John repeated. “It’s what this is,” he said, moving his hands above the box’s lid. “It’s from the lesser key of Solomon. A spell of entrapment.”
“Impressive,” Penderton said, nodding at his employer.
“I told you he knew his stuff.”
John was annoyed by their interaction, but what lay on the table before him was far more a distraction. He leaned closer to the box and felt the air around it charged with some unknown energy, feeling the hair at the back of his neck stand on end.