The Timeshare on Douglas Lake

There’s a cabin on Douglas Lake that I go to every year on Memorial Day weekend with two old college buddies, Benny and Alex. We were all Business majors at the University of Tennessee, but that didn’t stop us from making the fiscally-dense decision to go in together on a timeshare right before graduation. It’s been almost a decade since we finished school and moved on; these days we all live in other parts of the country. I live in Chicago now, Alex is in Washington D.C., and Benny’s all the way out in San Diego. But we all still pay nearly $1,000 a year for the Douglas Lake cabin, and that’s on top of the initial costs when we signed the agreement. Like I said, it was a dumb, impulsive move. However, it’s kept us in touch over the years. We haven’t missed one of our Memorial Day cabin trips yet.

Our place sits on the edge of a row of other cabins, and I dare say the other ones are nicer than ours. That especially goes for the place directly next to ours. It’s really more of a posh lake house than a cabin, with a second-story balcony and open-air back deck. Alex calls the behemoth “Catfish Palace”, referring to the most popular catch on Douglas Lake. It was built after we signed on our place, and it sits a little too close to our lot if you ask me. But I’m sure whoever owns that place would doubly prefer to not be so close to our rustic getaway.

As for the other “owners” of our cabin, we only have info for the people that stay there the week before us and the people that come the week after us. This is in case anybody wants to request a time switch. Since we’ve got the Memorial Day holiday during our week, we’ve had offers – generous offers – to trade in exchange for an adjacent week - plus cash. But money hasn’t been tight for any of us, and we really do look forward to that weekend every year. Since the agreement is for a whole week, we’ve let the family that follows us, the Downey family, know that the place is available on the Wednesday after Memorial Day if they want it. I’m sure getting access just after a big holdiay isn’t ideal, but they seem to appreciate the gesture.

This year was one of our best trips yet. I’d been dating a girl named Susanne back in Chicago, and things were starting to get serious between us. I told Benny and Alex that I was thinking about asking her to move in with me, which quickly became the target of a lot of domestic jokes and comments about “living in sin”, as though living together before marriage was a thing that raised eyebrows anymore.

“I hope Father McTuggagin doesn’t find out,” Benny said, referencing a crass, made-up character that we often played with our collectively bad Irish accents. “What’s thess now, young Daniel? Ya be livin’ in sen if she be willin’ to touch ya doon belowww!”

We all laughed and cracked open another round of beers as the sun went down. Old friends are the best friends, especially when you only see each other long enough to tell the same old jokes and recount the same old stories. Alex would talk about the time we scored tickets to see Pearl Jam in Memphis. And every time he did, I’d remind him of the magic mushrooms he secretly took without me and Benny knowing.

“It was incredible,” he’d say. “Just the hum of the lights in the parking lot was more majestic than ‘Yellow Ledbetter’ could ever be."

 

I’d look at him side-eyed. “I would trust your judgement more, Alex, if you’d ever actually made it inside the FedEx Forum.”

“Oh, right.” And then he’d laugh as if he were remembering this fact for the first time. Looking back, maybe he was.

Maybe we all were.

I said that this weekend was one of our best trips, but I guess they were all pretty much interchangeable. Each and every one of them offered a nice, long weekend away from the grind with a couple of good friends. If you could magically align them all, like a stack of photograph negatives over one another, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the same sentences and exchanges matched beat-for-beat. I’m sure there’s a psychology word for it: the more time away from a person, the more likely you’ll do and say the same things when you see them again. The three of us fell into old patterns and habits we had back at UT, those days that we were around each other nonstop.

“Hey, do you think you could hang back an extra day or two?”

It was Tuesday morning. Benny and I were doing our final sweep of the cabin, making sure we grabbed our personal items. The lodging association that ran the timeshare sent a small cleaning crew between each group, but we had learned the hard way that you pretty much have to clean the place top to bottom if you don’t want to leave behind a cellphone charger or favorite pair of sunglasses.

“What do you mean ‘hang back’?” I asked Benny. “You think the mosquitoes need a chance to finish us off?” I was trying to play along, but it was obvious that he wasn’t joking.

“Sorry, it’s just that there’s some stuff I need to tell you before I go back. Just between you and me, Dan. Without Alex.”

“Why wouldn’t we want-“

“You’ll see. Please.”

I considered this for a moment. It wasn’t like Benny to ask something big unless it was important. He wasn’t careless with other people’s time like Alex could be. And another day or two in Tennessee wasn’t such a big deal. I owned a small data analyst company that I could run from almost anywhere. Plus, I’d brought on Susanne when she was let go from her law firm the previous year, and she could easily handle daily operations for the week.

After a quick call to Susanne and cancelling my afternoon flight, I told Benny I was there for him. He asked that I not say anything to Alex, and I kept the plan a secret. We had all used separate Uber rides to get from McGhee Tyson Airport in Knoxville to the cabin, but had planned to return in the same car. Alex had the earliest departure time, so I made up a bullshit story about losing my cellphone at the last minute. Benny said he’d lend a second set of eyes for the search. After a few rounds of protests, Alex relented and left in a solo ride.

With Alex gone, I started to unpack. Benny stopped me.

“Hold off on that, man. I’ve got a surprise for you.” Benny gathered up his luggage and walked out the front door of the cabin. I followed suit, confused. He locked up. Dropped the key in the lockbox on the side of the building, then walked across the driveway toward the big lake house next door.

“Where are you going?”

“I’ve arranged for special accommodations.” Smiling, he removed a key from his shirt pocket and waved it in the air. “Plus, we can’t go back on our deal with the Downeys.” I’d forgotten about them. They would likely be showing up the next day.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, giddy with excitement. “We’re staying at freakin’ Catfish Palace?”

Benny laughed and ushered us inside. It was even more impressive than I could have imagined. The living room and kitchen were combined in an open floor plan with high ceilings. Fruit and other food items were on the counter. There was a hallway that I assumed led to a bedroom. The staircase dramatically curved up the side of the large room. The upstairs held two more bedrooms, but the coolest feature was the large open space in the middle that held a bar and led out to the second story balcony.

“Check the fridge,” Benny said.

I walked behind the bar and opened the small metallic fridge at my knees. It was fully stocked with Seaton tall boys, our beer of choice. None of us had been able to find the brand in town all weekend, assuming the brewery must have folded for good over the previous year.

“Did you do this?” I asked. Benny shrugged and I punched him on the shoulder. “We could have been drinking these all weekend?”

“No, I was saving them,” he said, opening two for us. “They weren’t easy to find.” He then plucked two cigars from behind the bar and opened the balcony door. Walking out, it occurred to me how orchestrated Benny’s seemingly spur-of-the-moment request had been.

“Wait, wait. You have to understand that I have a lot of questions.”

Benny shushed me, then gestured out.

The view from the balcony was astonishing. My mind fell to ease over the cool water of Douglas Lake. It was strange how different it all looked from just twenty feet up. The air smelled sweeter, felt softer somehow.

Benny handed me a cigar. “Dan, I own this place. Bought it last year.”

“You what? I mean, wow. Why didn’t you…I mean, wow!”

“Business has been good. Hell, it’s been so good that I up and sold the company.” The words looked comically natural coming out of a mouth that was also clenching a cigar.

“Yeah, but why tell me all this now, and not Alex?”

Benny paused for a moment and said, “You’ll see.” Off my look he lost the swagger some. “Look, I just wanted one more weekend in the cabin, a normal trip like the old days. Is that so strange?”

I couldn’t argue with that. If Catfish Palace was our future vacation spot, which I assumed would be the case, I was sure going to miss the old cabin.

“Well, congratulations,“ I said. “It looks like San Diego paid off big time. Oh, and you owe me the cost of my cancelled flight, you know.”

Benny laughed till he choked on the smoke from his cigar. Channeling Father McTuggagin, he said, “Danny, mah boy. Tha only thing ya need to ra’member is tha…ah, fook it. Le’s have us a drenk!”

This got me laughing. I was still confused as hell, but my incredulity was dulled after a few more Seaton tall boys. I was able to lighten up and eventually meet Benny’s enthusiasm, if not his wild exhilaration. After the sun had set, he revealed a small cache of fireworks on the back deck. He scurried to the edge of the lake with something that looked like a hand grenade on a stick. Lighting it, Benny cried out to the stars overhead. The whole scene seemed very dreamlike to me, but we had moved on to whiskey a bit before then. The display of lights shooting over Douglas Lake was fantastic.

Benny shook me awake the next day. It was after twelve o’clock in the afternoon. I probably hadn’t slept that late since college. Even our “wild” cabin trips had gotten pretty tame as we aged out of our early and mid-twenties. Sleeping so late was surprising, but the hangover was painful. I was barely able to focus my eyes or walk. Benny giggled as he helped me from my bed and back out onto the balcony. I wretched at the sight of the piled cigar butts and empty beer cans we’d strewn across the floor the night before. Benny navigated around the debris, leading me to a side of the balcony I hadn’t noticed the previous day. It was overlooking our old cabin. There were two chairs waiting for us. Benny sat me down in one of them, taking the other for himself.

“What’s this?” I asked. Benny shushed me and nodded to a car that was emptying in the cabin’s driveway. It was the Downey family. I had never seen them before, but they looked pretty much as I had imagined them, except there were two boys instead of a boy and a girl. Also, and I don’t know why I had assumed otherwise, but they were all a bit older than I thought they’d be. Mr. and Mrs. Downey – I think his name was Glen, I didn’t know her name – appeared to be in their fifties. The kids were either late teens or college-age.

Benny whispered to me. “Stay kinda still. I’ll narrate as best as I can, but the next few minutes are pretty crucial.”

This seemed like very odd behavior, but I chalked it up to my hangover. I began to speak up, but Benny leaned over and shook his head with dead serious eyes. I suddenly felt very uncomfortable. I hadn’t been outside for two minutes and I was already sweating profusely.

Benny looked out to the Downeys. “Okay, Dan. Let’s see what you notice.” Mr. Downey went to grab the key from the lockbox from the side of the cabin as the rest of the family unloaded luggage and groceries from the trunk of their sedan. Only, the lockbox wasn’t a lockbox anymore. It was a small panel that slid up with a hidey hole under it.

“What happened to the lockbox?” I said, trying my best to match Benny’s lowered volume even though my head was pounding.

“Oh, good. You got one right off the bat.” He was still whispering, but Benny’s excitement was causing his voice to crack.

“When did they do that?” I asked. Benny stared at me as I watched the Downey family carry their things inside the cabin. I looked back to Benny, but he shot a couple of glances toward the cabin to tell me to keep watching. I didn’t think there would be much to see, except I quickly saw that I was wrong.

The entire cabin was turned a bit. It was as though the building had been lifted and set back down so that, from our chairs on the balcony, Benny and I could now see the entire back half of the cabin. And I could see more than that. The back wall was almost entirely glass, a window where I could see the Downeys unloading their groceries into the refrigerator. The cabin only had one story, that hadn’t changed. But it looked different inside. There were paintings on the wall, and what seemed like hundreds of trinkets, small items like plastic toys or wooden carvings, were splayed around the room on small shelves that were affixed to the walls.

“That’s not our cabin,” I said.

“It is and it isn’t,” Benny said. “Let’s just enjoy the show for a while, huh?”

And he was right. It was a show, just not much of one at first. It started out like the world’s most boring reality show. One son, the Blonde one, would talk to Dad for a minute, then shout something at his brother, the Quiet-looking one. Mom opened up a box of crackers and made everybody snacks. It was very mundane stuff, yet I couldn’t look away. Then something strange happened. One by one, but not at the same time, each member of the Downey family dazedly stumbled over to a specific trinket on the wall, as though the item was pulling their destined soul toward it. The rest of them didn’t notice as this happened, they just went about their business, though the business seemed to grow increasing odd. I’m certain that I saw Mrs. Downey put her shoes in the freezer. And then, once they all stood before their trinkets of choice, they lifted the item into the air and stood there for several minutes.

“What’s happened to them?” I asked. “What the hell is going on, Benny?” I was still whispering.

“You don’t need to whisper anymore,” Benny said, full volume. “Do you want another beer?”

“No.”

“Suit yourself,” he said as he opened one for himself. I hadn’t seen him bring it with him.

“Did you do something last night? Did you…change things over in the cabin after I fell asleep?”

“The answer to your question is ‘no’. Last night, I got drunk with you and shot off some fireworks. The cabin is as it always has been.”

That wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. I squinted and saw that the paintings in the cabin were violent scenes: torture, animal sacrifice, things that I would have noticed and taken down.

The Downeys all walked outside, trinkets still in hand. They were looking right at us. I instinctively ducked down and Benny laughed.

“They can’t see you. They’re in the cabin.” He said that as though they hadn’t just walked outside.

Benny took a sip of his beer and threw the half-empty can at the family below. It hit Mrs. Downey in the face. The impact left a red welt on her face and spilled beer on her clothes, but she didn’t seem to notice any of it.

Benny did the Father McTuggagin voice again. “Shite. T’was aimin’ for dear old Da, I was.”

“What the fuck?” I shouted. This wasn’t the Benny that I knew. “What the fuck are you doing? Are you somehow behind this?”

“Behind this? I’m not behind this, Dan.” Benny laughed. “You might say that I was in the middle of it for a while, then I crawled my way to the front of it, but I didn’t build the cabin. The cabin just ‘is', okay? I pulled you out so that you could see it.”

Just then, a car slowly pulled into the cabin’s driveway. It was Alex’s Uber ride from the previous day. I squinted and saw that my friend was now driving the car.

“What’s Alex doing here, Benny?” Silence. “What’s he doing here?!”

Alex stopped the car and got out. His face was covered in dried blood. I didn’t see the car’s original driver, and I was afraid of what carnage might be hidden away in there. Alex walked over to join the Downey family, revealing his own trinket, a small wooden spiral thing, from his pocket. They were now all facing us. Their lips began moving, just slightly, but in harsh rhythm. It looked like they were chanting, or perhaps praying. Benny stood up and jumped off the edge of the balcony. He landed sturdily on his feet down below. I arose from my chair as he walked to his congregation standing on the border between the cabin and a place poor Alex had once called Catfish Palace.

As I peered over the edge of the balcony, I saw that Benny had changed. He was twenty or thirty years older. His clothes were the same, but his hair was now wispy and the top of his head was dotted with sunspots. Age hadn’t weakened Benny though. He calmly walked down the line of his dazed parishioners, touching each of them gingerly on their foreheads, one by one. Once Benny arrived at the end of the line, I saw that Alex was also an old man. The blood had dried into the deep wrinkles around his eyes.

I suddenly felt much older myself. I wanted to call Susanne, but I could only remember her name now. If she was ever an actual person who once loved me, I couldn’t imagine her face anymore. Once he finished blessing Alex, Benny turned and smiled up at me, his teeth gray and rotting. He gestured for me to join them. I didn’t want to. I looked away, down to my own trinket, a painted rock. It grew hot in my pale, fragile hands.

The world quickly dulled as I tumbled off the balcony. I never felt the ground below.

Underworld Callers

"Hey, che diavolo! Turn off the overheads, Rory." Angelo said, rubbing his already bloodshot eyes. Rory noted that the oldest Boticello brother's Sicilian accent was getting thicker, and that meant bad times awaited. Angelo continued, "We gotta do this thing in candlelight or is no gonna work."

Standing tall behind Villa Palermo’s oak bar counter, big Rory Sears sighed and flipped the switch by the daily specials chalkboard. The dining room went dark, save for some light spilling in from Huntington’s Main Street, which glowed soft and pink through the restaurant’s dirty front window.

Angelo struck a match and began to light the red glass candles on the two-tops, which were positioned at the five points of the pentagram he’d drawn on the ground. His younger brother, Maximillian Boticello, sat on a booth tabletop in the corner of the dining room, his short legs dangling off the edge as he combed his hair

"Hey, you know those ain't real candles, Angie," Max said. "They's the refillable kind, I think. Whatcha call 'em?"

"Sterno," Rory answered in his low, flat voice.

Max nodded. "Yeah, that."

"Don’t matter," Angelo said, dipping the match into a red globe. "Bright overhead lights are no good, a capisce?" He blew out the match and lit another.

"I just don't wanna piss off whatever we got coming, alright?" Max said, running his comb through his hair once more before returning the cheap piece of plastic to his inside coat pocket. The ancient book, its leather binding cracked and dusty, laid on the tabletop beside him.

Rory poured himself a shot of warm grappa. Being associated with the Boticello family used to hold clout in Long Island circles, but the past year had been one bad beat after another. He had been at their side through it all, especially during the kicker of it all - Carlo "Knuckles" Boticello's grand larceny trial. Rory had done his best to help keep the head of the family out of the slammer, had even attempted to bribe two jurors who later went mysteriously missing (though they were replaced by assholes of equal morality). However, nothing seemed to stick, meaning that everything did. All done, Knuckles ended up with a 25-year sentence at Fishkill Correctional, leaving a power vacuum wide open for certain interested parties around the neighborhood.

However, Rory felt that the Angelo and Max’s new tactic was faced entirely in the wrong direction, somewhere south of desperation.

Angelo finished lighting the points around the pentagram. Rory shook his head for the hundredth time that day and slammed the grappa into his mouth. If the liquor was supposed to have a numbing effect, Rory didn’t feel it.

Angelo surveyed the space around the pentagram, craning his neck around the room to make sure no detail was botched. According to the old book, the lights had to allow shadows and the room had to be mostly quiet, which is why they were starting after midnight. Most importantly, the ancient text specified that the circle outlining the star of the pentagram must be unbroken. However, the piece of chalk he'd used to draw it on the floor was just a nub, left over from when Villa Palermo’s was still open for business and had daily specials to advertise.

"Hey, Maxie," Angelo said, squinting to see if he’d missed a section. "Get down. Wanna you make sure this outside line is no smudged and it’s got to be no gaps."

Max hopped down from the corner booth, grabbing the ancient book. When he got to the circle on the ground, he gingerly stepped over the outside line. The balletic maneuver caused Rory to roll his eyes. Max carefully laid the book down on the makeshift, three-sided altar at the center of the pentagram and inspected Angelo’s chalk lines.

"Okay, now Rory," Angelo said. "Need you to bring over some of that salt. And quit being such a stronzo, tu mi capisci?"

Rory understood the message, if not the exact translation. He grabbed the large cylindrical container with the umbrella girl logo and suppressed the urge to mock Max’s awkward grace as he walked inside the pentagram. Rory handed Angelo the salt.

"Lines look good, Angie," Max said. "Just like the book said. You want I should find the words now?"

"Yeah, do that." Angelo sprinkled some salt into his hands and tossed it on the floor inside and out the chalky circle of the pentagram.

The binding of the ancient book creaked as Max opened it to the section he and Angelo had bookmarked the previous week. They had grown up with the old tome, a winking gift by way of a great aunt from the old country, but never had it been more than a curious joke until the past year. Now it was the Boticello's secret weapon, maybe the only weapon left in their arsenal. Max carefully ran his finger down a partially-rotted page until he found the passage in question.

"Yeah, this is it. You ready?"

Angelo nodded. Max turned to Rory who signaled with a slight nod. They each took their place standing around the altar.

"Do we gotta hold hands or something?" Rory asked.

"Nah, nah. We only gotta stay inside the circle," Angelo said. He lifted his shoulders a couple of times and rolled his head in a circular motion, like a boxer who had just stepped into the ring. Closing his eyes and nodding feverishly, he said, "Okay. Hit it, Maxie."

Max removed a toothpick from the corner of his mouth and cleared his throat. The evening street noise had subsided for the night and every creak on the floor beneath them was audible in the echo of the dining room. Phonetically, Max began to read aloud the strange, foreign words from the ancient text.

"Flavus ama ferox...tracto aevum gusto..."

Max continued as Angelo impatiently bounced on the front balls of his feet, though his eyes were still closed tight. Rory saw that the dark circles had returned to their familiar home on his face. He couldn't say for sure that Angelo had started using again just yet, but he made a note to sweep the older Boticello's coat pockets later for dope. Angelo’s head tilted forward a bit as Max carried on, syllable by syllable.

"...suavis terni orior..."

Rory's thoughts wandered to the first time he had met the brothers, years earlier at a beach party in Montauk. They seemed like royalty to him then, holding court in a lush cabana, surrounded by beautiful women - not girls from the neighborhood, but real women. To Rory, the Boticellos lent the entire evening a feeling of importance, just by simply being present. Their confidence then, along with their solid leadership later, carried Rory through nearly a decade of loyal service.

However, those young princes were gone, replaced by two desperate primates that stood before Rory now. Of all the lines they had asked him to cross over the years, he never imagined the unsteady, chalky lines that outlined the pentagram at his feet. He looked at the rickety altar between himself and the brothers and imagined the discarded wooden crates from the alley behind the restaurant that they must have scavenged to build it. How could a royal family stoop so low so fast?

"...precor osculum linea tracto..."

Rory saw Angelo open one bloodshot eye to peer into the restaurant's shadowy dining room. His eyebrows furrowed in disappointment, as though he had expected the ceiling to be ripped off, or perhaps the floor to open up beneath them. Getting more agitated, Angelo opened both eyes and looked to his brother as Max finished reading the final words of the incantation.

"...ab perca gravis."

Max tensed as he stumbled to the end of the spell, like a marathon runner reaching an uncertain finish line. He tensed his shoulders, as though bracing for a cataclysmic event. But nothing changed and nothing arrived. After a moment, he relaxed and looked around. He popped the toothpick back into the corner of his mouth.

"Ah, well." he said, shrugging. "We had to give it a shot, ya know?"

"Yeah," Rory said. "Yeah, sure."

Angelo spun as he surveyed the room around them. He got on his hands and knees to inspect the pentagram's lines beneath them.

"No, no, no!" His voice cracked into a higher octave. "This ain't gonna do! We gotta get this right, guys." He stood up and Rory could see Angelo's eyes begging for a second attempt, perhaps a third and a fourth after that. But Max just yawned.

"I dunno, Angie," he said. "Maybe we've been looking at this thing from the wrong side of it, ya know? Maybe we need to reach out to the old country or something." Max took out his comb and ran it through his hair. He shrugged again and stepped away from the altar. "I could use a drink," he said and began walking toward the bar.

"Hey, Maxie," Rory said. "Hold on a second."

"Huh?" Max said, surprised to hear Rory call him Maxie. He was about to correct the misplaced familiarity as his foot crossed over the edge of the pentagram's outer circle. But before any of them could register the moment, Max was ripped from Villa Palermo’s, New York, and the dimension he had called home for thirty six years.

"Holy hell!" Rory screamed as he lost his footing and knocked over the altar. He quickly steadied himself and, in his mind, the boundaries of the pentagram became as concrete as prison walls.

"Maxie?" Angelo said. He walked to the edge of the circle where Max had last been Max. "Where'd you go, paisano?"

"Careful," Rory warned, his stomach fighting a violent wave of nausea "It got him. It got Max."

"Whatta you mean 'it'?" Angelo's eyes narrowed.

"Something took Max. We gotta stay in the circle now."

Angelo digested this information slowly. He walked along the borders of their symbolic cage. Finally, the corners of his mouth bent upwards into a nasty grin. He looked up to the restaurant's ceiling.

"You think you got Maxie, eh pally?" he asked the thing in the restaurant. "Well, listen up! You can give him back now, or give him back later, eh? But we got some things to discuss, you and me."

The world outside the circle did not respond.

"I said, capisce?" Angelo spun around to face all sides of the threat, letting it know that he wasn’t used to backing down. Rory, as frightened as he was, was almost inspired by Angelo’s defiant attitude. He’d seen a thousand tiny retreats over the past year, including the closure of the very building in which they were standing. It was almost nice to see the Boticello fire burning again. Almost.

Despite the token return of his general, Rory lowered himself onto the ground, fearful that Angelo might try to shove him outside the circle, Sumo-style, to prove some kind of point to their demon visitor. As Angelo shouted, the room outside the pentagram began to look less like itself and more like a suggestion of an Italian restaurant, and Rory shifted as close to the center of the circle as he could.

"First, we gotta get some rules going. I ain't gonna live inside this, what you call it, this thing on the floor, so first thing is that you no gonna grab me if I walk outside it."

Rory saw that Villa Palermo’s had completely faded away, and that they were surrounded by pitch black emptiness now. The cylinder of salt rolled back and forth on the ground, as if they were adrift on a dark ocean. As if to underline the sensation, Rory saw that the little umbrella girl on the logo had disposed of her umbrella and was now aiming a jagged harpoon at a severed foot. She smiled at Rory with shark’s teeth. He looked to Angelo, who seemed to not notice any of this as he ticked off more demands.

"Now, we get down to business. The Boticellos run Huntington, we run the northside of the island. Che diavolo? We run the whole damn thing from now on. Capos grande, that be us!" Angelo was now pacing, though he seemed very aware of his path. "Them other families are gonna stop harassing me and Maxie. And they gonna pay for not keeping papa out the joint – that’s the place from where you gonna bust him out."

Rory watched as Angelo continued to threaten the thing they had summoned, his accent becoming even thicker as his voice went shrill. Rory figured that Angelo might have lost his mind, but he couldn’t be sure that he hadn't gone off the deep end himself.

If I am, he thought, at least I'm aware of it.

In this clarity, Rory stood up, grabbing the altar as he steadied his feet.

"Hey, Angie," he said. Angelo turned to face him. Rory shook his head. "This was a terrible plan."

He threw the wooden structure hard at Angelo, completed the move with a hard, clumsy kick to the chest, which caused Angelo to crash through the invisible wall of the circle.

In the inky ether around the pentagram's boarders, Rory saw Angelo land on what appeared to be solid ground. He tried to crawl back in, but his body blurred and distorted when he pressed himself against the invisible edge. He began to scream.

Behind Angelo, Max emerged from the dark. The skin on his face sagged unevenly around his eyes, which were now a putrid cream color. The old toothpick was back in his mouth, but his teeth were much sharper. Angelo turned to see his new baby brother. After that, his screams turned into short shrieking bursts.

Rory closed his eyes and covered his ears as he again lowered himself onto the safety of the pentagram. He kept his eyes closed for a very long time, even after a dull white noise had replaced Angelo’s screaming inside his skull.

He opened them much later, after he realized that he might miss an opportunity for escape if he kept them shut any longer.

When Rory did open his eyes, the restaurant was back. Everything seemed normal, albeit wrecked from weeks of disuse and the Boticellos last ditch attempt to reach out for help. The altar Rory had thrown at Angelo had knocked over one of the two-tops, but was very much still there. He even saw Max's plastic comb on the floor by the bar. He knew Angelo and Max were gone for good though, changed forever by the thing they’d called.

Rory stood up, walked to the edge of the circle, and stopped. Sunshine pressed firm against the dirt on Villa Palermo’s front window. It was daytime on Main Street, though the caked filth on the outside glass obscured all but shadows of street lamps and a pair of city-planned sidewalk trees.

That can’t be right, Rory thought. Max read those words from the book maybe five or six minutes ago, and…

"Where's the book?" Rory asked the empty restaurant.

And then something else occurred to him, there in the silence of the morning.

Rory remembered the first time he every walked inside Villa Palermo’s. It was ten in the morning and Carlo "Knuckles" Boticello was sitting in the corner booth. Angelo and Max were behind the bar arguing about the restaurant's location. Max said it was great for foot traffic, but Angelo countered that there was never any peace from dawn till dusk on Main Street, that if it wasn't the big trucks roaring by, it was all the assholes shouting at each other. And Angelo was right. Both brothers had to yell at each other to fight the street noise.

So, why is it that don't I hear one person, one car, some trace of anything on Main Street now?

"You won’t hear until after you see," a dissonant group of voices said behind Rory, easing their way into the circle.