The End Of Desire argi-8

by M. R. Sellars

  Storm damage or not, the accommodations certainly wouldn’t garner a rating in the Michelin guide. In fact, I can pretty much guarantee that a large amount of work would have been required to simply bring them up to standard with the most basic building codes. However, under the circumstances, I suppose I had no right to complain. The room was mine, and there didn’t appear to be any leaks over the bed. The bathroom was a different story, but I could work around that. I hoped.

  Given the short notice, I was actually surprised that I had found a room at all. After my first few calls, it seemed that anything with four walls and a roof was occupied by someone holding a Federal Emergency Management Agency ID card. They had been crawling all over the city in response to the disaster, though if you asked around, the opinion was that they hadn’t arrived soon enough and were accomplishing even less now that they were here.

  Upon making it to the Airline Courts however, I was more than just a little amazed that they had accepted a reservation at all. Especially once I saw the sign in the smallish lobby that advertised their hourly rate, as well as individual condoms for a dollar apiece. Of course, profiteering knew no bounds, and the price I was paying for the all but condemned space definitely spoke to that fact.

  Again, I shook off the thought and tried to keep my mind from wandering. I was tired. Actually, no, I was exhausted, and on top of everything else that was happening in my life at the moment, I’m sure the fatigue had a lot to do with the sluggishness of my brain. I was fully aware that I was having trouble staying focused, and that was something I couldn’t afford right now. The problem was, whether I could afford it or not, I was too worn out to do anything about it.

  I padded over to the side table in the corner and picked up my bottle of water. The mere removal of those few ounces of weight caused the piece of furniture to shift and rock onto one of the back legs, making the lamp that adorned its surface thump against the wall. It was obvious that not only was the rickety hunk of pressboard and chipped laminate unbalanced, but also the room itself wasn’t even close to level. I pressed on the surface of the table with a very slight touch of my fingers. It rocked forward and then back as soon as I removed my hand, causing the tassels-those that remained anyway-on the torn and discolored lampshade to swing back and forth. Why I had bothered with the exercise to begin with I couldn’t say-nervous boredom I suppose or maybe just my mind wandering yet again. Whatever the case, I did it twice more but didn’t find enough amusement in it to continue past that.

  As if in reply to the clunk of the lamp, a somewhat spastic thump began against the opposite side of the wall, random at first, then falling into an increasing, though halting, rhythm. It was accompanied by muffled words of encouragement-of the x-rated variety-as well as some thoroughly unconvincing moans.

  I glanced at my watch. A few minutes from now the disharmonic symphony would stop, and shortly after that would be punctuated by the sound of the toilet, followed by the room door opening and closing. The flushing toilet would follow that once again, and then the whole process would start over. If I was lucky, there might be fifteen minutes of semi-peace in between.

  Of course, there was no mystery at all about what was going on. In fact, my room was probably the only one in the complex not seeing that sort of action tonight, though I’m sure it normally did. It definitely smelled like it.

  Letting out a heavy sigh, I looked down at the overpriced bottle of water in my hand, then twisted the cap from it and took a swig. Wandering back around to the end of the bed, I rooted through my carry-on and extracted a container of aspirin. Popping the cap, I poured some into my palm, nudged the excess back into the neck of the bottle, then tilted it and allowed a couple of them to fall back into the pile again. I didn’t count them so much as look at the size of the heap resting in my hand to judge the self-prescribed dosage accordingly.

  The exercise was probably futile in and of itself. I knew the pain in my head wasn’t one that could be remedied with over-the-counter medications-or prescription drugs either for that matter. It was born of an ethereal source and for the most part would remain staunchly unaffected by the pharmaceuticals of the mundane world.

  I also knew my stomach was going to hate me-fact is, it already did since I’d been more or less living on the bitter analgesic and coffee for close to a week. Now that I thought about it, I would probably need to avoid any serious injuries as well, lest I bleed out, given the amount of salicylate coursing through my system and thinning my blood. Still, aspirin itself seemed to be the only thing that would at least take the edge off, and I had to do something in that respect. Right now my head was pounding just as it had been ever since the plane touched down. Actually, it had been for the past few weeks, but arriving here had made it thud even harder. If I was going to stem my exhaustion, I was going to need to dull the pain enough to get some sleep. Something else of which I was severely lacking.

  Of course, that might not even be possible with the continuous traffic next door. I suppose I should be grateful that this room was at the end of the complex. Otherwise there was no doubt in my mind that the strictly adult soundtrack would have been in stereo.

  I popped the handful of pills into my mouth, gave them a quick chew and then took a swig of water and swished them around before swallowing. My hope was to get them into my system a bit faster than they would by simply swallowing them whole. The acrid bitterness caused my mouth to pucker involuntarily, so I took a fresh pull from the water bottle and swished again, trying to rinse the residue if not the taste from my tongue.

  Replacing the cap, I regarded the drink silently and wondered to myself if I should have picked up a bottle or two of antacid to use as a chaser instead. I didn’t get much time to ponder the thought, however, as my cell phone began to trill, softly at first then ramping up in volume as it continued its quest for my attention.

  Turning, I wandered back to the dumpster refugee that was masquerading as the side table and scooped the device from its surface, making the piece of furniture rock yet again. Glancing quickly at the incoming number on the LCD, I flipped open the phone and put it up to my ear.

  “Yeah, Ben,” I grunted.

  “Your goddamn finger broken?” he replied, more annoyance than concern bolding his words.

  “Do what?”

  “You were s’posed ta’ call when ya’ got there. I been sittin’ here waitin’ all friggin’ night.”

  I glanced at my watch again. It was definitely after midnight, so I couldn’t logically dispute what he’d just said, on either count. Technically it was morning, and besides, he was correct. I had in fact made that very promise.

  “Oh, yeah,” I replied as I reached up and rubbed my forehead. “Sorry about that.”

  “Yeah, well, ya’ oughta be,” he countered.

  “I’m a grownup, Ben. I can ride an airplane all by myself. I’ve done it several times, believe it or not.”

  “Don’t be an ass, Row. That’s not what I’m talkin’ about. It’s not like this is a normal trip, an’ you know it.”

  He was correct yet again. There’s very little one can consider normal about catching a last minute flight bound for a distant city to go in search of a serial killer. Especially one who has most likely been dead for better than 150 years but just happens to be up to her old tricks again because the wrong person decided to play with the wrong kind of magick for all the wrong reasons. It wasn’t as if I was with the FBI, or even a cop. But, I did have a vested interest because that “wrong kind of magick” had been deeply affecting my life and, more importantly, my wife’s for almost a month now. It was time for it to stop, and I was willing to do whatever it would take to make that happen.

  “Yeah, Ben, I know…” I muttered in reply. “But when is the last time you recall anything being normal in my life?”

  He answered without missing a beat, “Nineteen seventy-two.”

  “I’m pretty sure you didn’t even know me in nineteen seventy-two.”

  “You’re
right. Anyway, I was just guessin’. Actually, I’m bettin’ you’ve prob’ly never had a normal day in your life, period.”

  “It feels that way,” I sighed. “But, there was a time…”

  “Yeah, Row, I know there was…” he agreed, his voice trailing off as it lost some of its edge.

  My friend was agreeing because he had been around when things were sane. While 1972 was pushing the limit, we truly had been friends for more years than I could remember. So he was well aware it wasn’t until I started hearing the voices of the dead that things began to get weird. And, while it seemed like a lifetime, especially to me, that affliction had only come upon me somewhere around a half dozen years ago.

  What with me being a Witch, I suppose that most would think I should be used to such things as communicating with the departed. After all, that’s exactly the sort of thing Witches were “supposed to do,” right along with riding brooms and sprinkling bat wings into bubbling cauldrons. To be honest, I sometimes thought that the Hollywood myth about WitchCraft would be a much easier way to live than I did at present. Riding a broom would definitely save me the aggravation of traffic.

  Of course, while the “double, double, toil and trouble” aspect is a disproportionate fiction, Witches do tend to be more open to accepting the unexplained without going to great lengths to debunk it. Magick is certainly a part of our lives, and we know that it is very real. But, by the same token, we also know that real magick isn’t what you see in the movies and on television.

  So, while I wasn’t particularly surprised by the fact that I could hear the dead, or even that they sometimes chose radical measures such as stigmata with which to communicate their distress to me, it definitely didn’t make me see it as the norm. No, I knew for a fact that I was the odd man out. Very few people, Witches or not, get stuck dealing with this sort of thing. I just happened to be one of the unlucky ones and, because of me, so was my wife.

  And there, in the proverbial nutshell, was the root of the whole problem I faced at this moment in time. My wife. Even as I stood here, she was back in Saint Louis, warming a bed in the psych ward of a hospital-which I suppose was better than the jail cell she had occupied only a few days before, after being accused of at least two brutal murders. Those charges had been dropped, but the nightmare was far from over.

  In truth, it was only just beginning because it turned out the thing that went bump in the night was a half sister that, up until a few days ago, my wife didn’t even know she had. And that sister was up to her eyeballs in Voodoo and hoodoo. Of course, that wouldn’t be such a big deal, except for the fact that she had apparently taken a perfectly acceptable religion along with its associated magickal practice and perverted both of them into something vile and grotesque. While her take on that was probably 180° opposite mine, I’m betting that her victims would probably agree with me. In fact, judging from the pain in my skull, I knew for certain they did.

  But opinions weren’t important right now. What was, however, was the fact that whatever she had unleashed was no longer using her alone as a vehicle to inflict pain and death, it had been trying its damnedest to use my wife as well.

  I even had the freshly healing wounds to prove it.

  Still, why Felicity had been sucked into this, other than a familial connection we didn’t even know she had, was something of a perverse mystery in its own right. And, solving that mystery was what brought me here, now, to this seedy motel room in the burbs of New Orleans, with nothing more in my possession than what I could quickly stuff into a single overnight bag and my carryon backpack.

  “Row? You still there?” Ben’s voice drifted into my ear, breaking me out of the semi-dream state into which I’d managed to sink.

  “Yeah, sorry,” I mumbled. “Drifted for a minute there.”

  “Twilight Zone?” he asked.

  That was his personal catch phrase to describe any time that I would experience an ethereal event, especially one that would push me into a trance or something even worse, such as a seizure. The first few times he had witnessed it happening to me he had been frantic, not that I had reacted much better. These days, however, he just took it in stride-as much as one could with that sort of thing, anyway.

  “No… Just tired,” I told him. “So, did you just call to chew me out for not calling you first, or was there something else on your mind?”

  “Little of both, I guess,” he grunted.

  “Okay, if you’re finished with your lecture, are you ready to move on to the other?”

  “What the hell is that?” he asked, confusion in his voice.

  “Ummm…I don’t know. You called me, remember?”

  “No, White Man. I mean what’s that fuckin’ noise?”

  Apparently my next-door neighbor had another transaction waiting in the wings, either that or one of her co-workers had been in the queue. I’d already identified the voices of two separate bad actresses operating out of the same room. At any rate, it appeared my hoped for fifteen minutes of peace wasn’t going to happen, at least not during this particular hour.

  “Exactly.”

  “Exactly what?”

  “Just like you said, it’s fuckin’ noise, Ben,” I told him, echoing his raw terminology. “Let’s just say there is a lot of nightshift work here at the Inn.”

  “Jeezus, Row… You aren’t gonna…you know…”

  “Come on, I think you know me better than that.”

  “Well couldn’t ya’ get a decent room somewhere else?”

  “Believe me, I wish I could. Right now I just need to be happy it has a roof and electricity.”

  “So you at least got a TV?” he asked.

  “Actually, no. I don’t think the people who normally use these rooms are all that interested in TV. Why do you ask?”

  “Just wonderin’ what you’re doin’ for entertainment?”

  The non sequitur queries were really starting to aggravate me, so I snapped, “I’m not here for entertainment, Ben, and you know that. Now, are you going to tell me whatever it is you had on your mind or not?”

  “You sittin’ down?”

  “No. There isn’t a chair, and I’m not so sure I want to use the bed from the looks of it. I’m not even sure where I plan to sleep in here now that I think of it.”

  “Yeah, great. Well hold on ta’ somethin’ anyway.”

  “Come on, Ben. What’s with the melodrama?”

  “Payback’s a bitch.”

  “What?”

  “You kept me waitin’, I’m just returnin’ the favor.”

  I shook my head and let out a heavy sigh. “I already said I’m sorry. What more do you want?”

  “You gettin’ pissed at me yet?”

  “I think you can safely say that I am, yeah. Why?”

  “‘Cause that’s what I wanted. Like I said, payback.”

  “Then I think you can consider the debt cleared,” I told him. “Now do you actually have something to tell me, or is this all just part of your grand plan?”

  “Actually, I do have somethin’. Figured you mighta heard it on the news, but I guess not…”

  “I haven’t seen any news since I left Saint Louis, so you guess correctly.”

  “Yeah, well like I said, brace yourself. It looks like your evil sis-in-law is at it again.”

  CHAPTER 2:

  I was suddenly feeling very ill. Under different circumstances I would have blamed the acidic churn in my gut on the healthy dose of aspirin I’d swallowed only a few minutes before. However, the sour nausea was accompanied by hollowness in the pit of my stomach that told me this was a different kind of sick. It was the queasiness that bore its way into your intestines at right about the moment you realized you had seriously screwed up.

  Whether I wanted to admit it or not, my impromptu trip here to New Orleans had been born only partly of logic and reason. The majority of the impetus was pure emotion that I had been all too willing to ascribe to gut instinct without really giving it any serious thought. W
hat I realized now was that any of the calculating and planning I had done was probably nothing more than the inner ramblings of someone on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The truth is, I probably belonged in a hospital bed in the psych ward right next to my wife’s.

  Of course, this was nothing new. I had always acted on impulse, and even when I was wrong, fate somehow allowed me to come out on top. But, my luck in that arena couldn’t last forever. It was bound to change at some point, and I feared that time had now arrived. I’d let haste guide my actions and doing so led me here, almost 700 miles due south of where I apparently needed to be, with no one to blame but myself-which is exactly what I was doing at this very moment.

  “Okay…” I finally said as I let out a heavy sigh and desperately tried to process everything that was bouncing around inside my skull. “Let me get off here and see if I can find a flight back right away. I’ll call you back as soon as I know when I can be in Saint Louis.”

  I received no response. I waited a moment and wondered if I’d lost connection due to problems with cell towers in the area. I even pulled the phone from my ear and glanced at the LCD to check the signal strength. Finding it well within limits, I spoke again, “Ben? Are you still there?”

  “Ya’know,” he finally replied, “I could be a total ass and just let ya’ do that.” He let out a heavy breath, which told me he’d been at the other end all along. He’d just been thinking, most likely rocked back in his chair with his free hand massaging his neck as he had a tendency to do whenever pondering something serious. After another brief pause he added, “Hell, I should let ya’ do it ‘cause ya’ had no business goin’ down there anyway.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Ben?” I asked.