Jones nodded and began backing toward the door. “I’ll have someone stationed nearby tonight,” he announced. “Just to help keep you safe.”
“Thanks, Captain,” Nick said, rising from the couch. “We’ll keep the doors locked, too.”
“Good idea,” Jones agreed. “But make sure you lock the basement door as well.” His voice dropped a notch. “I think you’ve got more to fear from within than without.”
Jenn shut the door behind the police captain and leaned her back against it, staring at the faded leather binding of the ancient book he’d given her. “Everything about this place relates to books,” she said.
“Yeah,” Nick agreed. “Books and blood.”
She walked over to the couch and sat next to him. His arm slipped around her shoulders, but she barely noticed. She’d turned over the cover of the book and looked at the handwritten title on the first page.
“Whoa,” she breathed.
Nick leaned close and read the foreign words without recognition. “You can understand that?” he asked.
“I took French in high school,” she said.
“What does it say?”
“Book of Shadows,” she breathed. “It’s the family book of spells. It’s what I was looking for.”
Jenn turned the page and began to haltingly translate words and fragments. Even without being able to complete a sentence, in her head she saw images of death and bones. Then she flipped deeper, and the page at which she arrived suddenly switched from French to English:
We’ve brought the bones from the old country to the new, the script read. In casks disguised like wine they come, the remains of our saint and his virgin offerings. They’ve loaded them onto a carriage here at the San Francisco dock, and we will be off for the north coast in the morning. We will start here anew, though with the old blood and the virgin bones. We will bring our father’s legacy alive again in the New World. His spirit is never far away from the lives of his children, and we are never far from feeding him death.
“What does it say?” Nick asked.
“It says we’re all doomed,” Jenn muttered.
“Uh-huh.” Nick laughed quietly. “I’m serious.”
“I’m not joking—much,” she replied.
Meredith Perenais’s Journal
November 30, 2009
George isn’t himself anymore. Whatever he was is gone. Eaten. I can’t talk to him now, no more than I could in the last days before his death. He’s getting his revenge—that much is clear. But I don’t know if he’s thankful for it. I don’t even know if he knows I’m here or if he’s got me at the bottom of his list and he’s just crossing off checkboxes one by one until he reaches me.
And I can feel something else gathering, too. Something that my wards can’t stop. It’s too dark to see what it might be, but it’s coming for me, I can feel it.
The door to hell is paved with both dreams and knives. I wrote those words a long time ago, and they’re still true. We never, ever believe the truth until it’s too late.
CHAPTER
FORTY-EIGHT
The pounding caught Jennica by surprise. She was in the kitchen, cleaning up the dishes from dinner. Nick had barbecued hamburgers, so it was simply plates with grease rather than armies of dirtied bowls and burned pots.
“I’ll get it,” she called, drying her hands off on a dish towel before walking into the front room. Behind her she heard Nick close the back porch door, probably headed to the front room as well, wondering who was here.
As soon as she opened the wooden door, a voice began to speak. “You used it, didn’t you?”
The small dark-haired man at her door was the man from the supermarket; Jenn recognized him almost immediately. The thirty-years-out-of-date Buddy Holly glasses. The slightly hunched demeanor. She could picture him in a white stock coat instead of the gray T-shirt he wore now. He stepped inside, not waiting for an invitation.
“You used the Ouija board, didn’t you?”
Jenn shrugged. “Sure, I guess.”
He rolled his eyes as his shoulders sank. “Then we’re all screwed,” he said.
Nick walked in and stopped short when he saw the shopkeep.
“Travis Lupe,” the short man said, holding out a hand. “I work at the general store.”
“Hmmm,” Nick said. “Great. So, why are you here?”
“You all used the Ouija board that Meredith left behind,” the man repeated.
“I wanted to call her,” Jennica said in her own defense.
Nick stepped forward, trying to help. “How do you know?” he asked. “And why do you care?”
Travis absently pushed his glasses up with one finger and then answered, “Because I used to use it with Meredith. And because the Pumpkin Man’s back.” He looked around the room as if expecting something to jump out at him. “So it’s your fault.”
“Whoa,” Nick said. He pointed to the couch, and Travis walked over to it. Nick shut the door behind him. “Tell us how.”
The man from the grocery looked from Jenn’s eyes to Nick’s, and then he nodded, quickly. As if he were going to cop to a very big secret.
“Look,” he said. “Meredith was nice to me. She always tipped me good when I delivered groceries up here. One day, she asked if I could stay a little longer after my delivery to help her out with something. The next thing I knew I was holding her palm with one hand and the wooden circle of a Ouija board thing with the other, we were sitting here in a dark room calling for spirits—and she was happy about it!” He paused. “Oh yeah, she was really happy, ’cuz then I was helping her talk to, like, devils.”
“The Pumpkin Man,” Nick urged. “You said that we were responsible because of the Ouija. How?”
Travis looked at him over the top of his glasses and laughed bitterly. “He’s not a man,” he said. “He’s some kind of devil. Meredith used to call and tell him what to do using the Ouija. So, if you’ve used it, that explains why he’s loose again. Why he killed Teri Hawkins and Erik Smith.”
Jenn sat down on the couch. “We did use the board, and it worked, but we didn’t tell anyone to kill—”
“You opened the connection,” Travis interrupted. “You let him back in.”
“Bullshit,” Jenn snapped. “He’s been here for a while. He killed several people before I came to River’s End. Hell, he killed my father all the way out in Chicago. I didn’t start this.”
“I didn’t say you started it,” Travis admitted. “I just said you opened the connection again and made it easier for him to come back. Meredith set it in motion and then you made it worse.”
Jennica snapped. “Blame me as much as you want,” she said, “but tell me what we have to do to stop him. That’s all I care about. We have to stop him.”
“We need to use the Ouija again,” Travis said. “But this time we need to do it right.”
“Meaning?” asked Nick.
“This time we need to keep him from ever coming back.”
“And you know how to do that?”
“I know how to try.”
“And how is that?” Jennica asked.
Travis watched her for a long time, his lips drawn in a tight line. Finally he spoke. “We need to talk to your aunt. Meredith started this. She is probably the only one who can finish it.”
“Oh no,” Nick interjected, holding up a palm. “We’ve been down this road before.” He looked pointedly at Jenn and said, “We tried to talk to Meredith at my apartment, and the next morning we found a bunch of pumpkin pieces and Jenn’s best friend Kirstin was gone. If the Ouija board is what gets the monster moving, then I don’t think it’s a very good idea to use it again.”