An hour later the phone rang, jolting him out of a light doze. He groped for it.
‘You’re next, Norm.’
‘Vinnie?’
‘Man, she was like one of those clay pigeons in a shooting gallery. Wham and splatter.’
‘I’ll be at the school tonight, Vinnie. Room 33. I’ll leave the lights off.
It’ll be just like the overpass that day. I think I can even provide the train.’
‘Just want to end it all, is that right?’
‘That’s right,’ Jim said. ‘You be there.’
‘Maybe.’
‘You’ll be there,’ Jim said, and hung up.
It was almost dark when he got to the school. He parked in his usual slot, opened the back door with his pass-key, and went first to the English Department office on the second floor. He let himself in, opened the record cabinet, and began to flip through the records. He paused about halfway through the stack and took out one called Hi-Fi Sound Effects. He turned it over. The third cut on the A side was ‘Freight Train: 3.04’. He put the album on top of the department’s portable stereo and took Raising Demons out of his overcoat pocket. He turned to a marked passage, read something, and nodded. He turned out the lights.
Room 33.
He set up the stereo system, stretching the speakers to their widest separation, and then put on the freight-train cut. The sound came swelling up out of nothing until it filled the whole room with the harsh clash of diesel engines and steel on steel.
With his eyes closed, he could almost believe he was under the Broad Street trestle, driven to his knees, watching as the savage little drama worked to its inevitable conclusion .
He opened his eyes, rejected the record, then reset it. He sat behind his desk and opened Raising Demons to a chapter entitled ‘Malefic Spirits and How to Call Them’. His lips moved as he read, and he paused at intervals to take objects out of his pocket and lay them on his desk.
First, an old and creased Kodak of him and his brother, standing on the lawn in front of the Broad Street apartment house where they had lived. They both had identical crew cuts, and both of them were smiling shyly into the camera.
Second, a small bottle of blood. He had caught astray alley cat and slit its throat with his pocketknife. Third, the pocketknife itself. Last, a sweatband ripped from the lining of an old Little League baseball cap. Wayne’s cap. Jim had kept it in secret hopes that some day he and Sally would have a son to wear it.
He got up, went to the window, looked out. The parking lot was empty.
He began to push the school desks towards the walls, leaving a Tough circle in the middle of the room. When that was done he got chalk from his desk drawer and, following the diagram in the book exactly and using a yardstick, he drew a pentagram on the floor.
His breath was coming harder now. He turned off the lights, gathered his objects in one hand, and began to recite.
‘Dark Father, hear me for my soul’s sake. I am one who promises sacrifice. I am one who begs a dark boon for sacrifice. I am one who seeks vengeance of the left hand. I bring blood in promise of sacrifice.’
He screwed the cap off the jar, which had originally held peanut butter, and splashed it within the pentagram.
Something happened in the darkened schoolroom. It was not possible to say exactly what, but the air became heavier. There was a thickness in it that seemed to fill the throat and the belly with grey steel. The deep silence grew, swelled with something unseen.
He did as the old rites instructed.
Now there was a feeling in the air that reminded Jim of the time he had taken a class to visit a huge power station – a feeling that the very air was crammed with electric potential and was vibrating. And then a voice, curiously low and unpleasant, spoke to him.
‘What do you require?’
He could not tell if he was actually hearing it or only thinking that he did. He spoke two sentences.