Never Burn A Witch: A Rowan Gant Investigation

by M. R. Sellars

  My daily objections always fell on deaf ears with Ben. It didn’t matter to him that I felt it unfair that I should receive protection when the other potential targets weren’t; or even that I was worried about what he would end up owing to the parade of cops who came in and out of my home. He had told me before that he was going to protect his “corner of the world,” and there was no stopping him from doing just that—whatever it took.

  Truth was, I was actually relieved to have them there. Not so much for my own safety as for the peace of mind it gave me knowing I wouldn’t have to worry about Felicity if something happened. The real debt being accumulated was on my end. I owed my friends in a big way.

  When the long anticipated other shoe finally did meet the floor, the resulting explosive crash instantly reduced our anxious calm to shimmering crystalline shards that fell abrasively upon the landscape.

  * * * * *

  It didn’t seem like we had been in bed any time at all when I awoke to heavy handed pounding on our bedroom door blended with the distant sound of my name being urgently called. Strategically placed within the stream of noise a duet of angry barks and growls filled out the cacophonous melody. At first, I thought it was nothing more than the dying remnants of a dream as I strained to listen in the darkness and heard only the rhythmic in and out rush of ocean waves droning from a compact disk set on repeat. I had been using the natural sounds for a meditation aid as I urged myself back toward center—not that I had been overly successful. Apparently, on this night, Felicity and I had fallen asleep with the player still running.

  I gave a moment’s consideration to answering the phantom voice and decided I should check the time first. I rolled to the side, and before my eyes were even fully open a square fist of pain rained a double jab down upon my forearm. I winced as I started to move the appendage and sent the agony in a reverberating right hook up through my elbow and into my shoulder. Reflexively I reached for the origin of the torture and was presented with a handful of sticky wetness far beyond anything that had occurred in the past septet of days.

  I knew instantly that the voice had not been a dream at all.

  “Goddammit, Rowan! Felicity! Wake up!” Ben’s muffled demand joined once more with his frantic hammering against the bedroom door, and again the dogs loudly announced their displeasure in return.

  “Hold on,” I managed to croak out through the pain as I sent my hand searching for the switch on the bedside lamp.

  By now the commotion had awakened my wife, and she was groggily dragging herself up from her pillow while yawning, “What’s going on?”

  “Ben’s at the door,” I groaned as I continued to grope for the light.

  “Are you all right?” Felicity questioned as she tossed back the blankets and rolled out of the bed. “You sound like you’re in pain.”

  My hand brushed across the switch, and I fumbled with it for a moment before snapping the device to life. The first thing to meet my eyes was the smear of blood on the nightstand where I had been feeling around. The second was the blood soaked patches on the bed sheets. The third was the puckering Monogram of Christ carved deeply into a purplish welt on my forearm. Blood continued to ooze thickly from the symbol as I stared at it with a dejected frown.

  “Oh Gods, Rowan!” my wife yelped as her bleary eyes fell across the wound. Till now she had only seen the monogram as fading pink scars on my flesh, and the variety of tortures of the past week had never achieved this level of trauma. This was the first time she had witnessed the stigmata in full gory bloom.

  The pain was already starting to subside. My ethereal tormentor had my full attention, and the added push of suffering was no longer needed. “It’s okay. I’ll be all right,” I told her. “Let Ben in. I’m pretty sure I know what he wants.”

  I glanced at the clock and saw that my earlier thought had been correct. We hadn’t been in bed long at all. It was only 10:34.

  * * * * *

  “Jeezus H. Christ…” Ben muttered from behind his hand as he covered the lower half of his face in an attempt to ward off a sweetly vile stench.

  My wife and I were following suit as the malodor grew in intensity with each intake of breath.

  With February racing toward a close, the ever-changeable pattern of Saint Louis’ weather had executed a backflip, and the jet stream was temporarily exacting kindness on the Midwest. The mercury had been hovering a healthy handful of degrees above the freezing point for a few days now in a practice run for the spring thaw. The combination of patchy leftover snow, evaporation, and temperature created the ideal condition for the misty fog that was now rolling in upon us. In a matter of hours it would be an opaque grey veil obscuring everything it touched, but for now it was a clammy humidity that carried with it the stink of burning flesh.

  Through the teaming haze that forewarned of the coming thickness, a discordant flurry of attention-grabbing emergency lights generated blurry star-filtered patterns in the air. Emanating from no less than five Metropolitan Saint Louis City police cruisers, two fire engines, one emergency rescue vehicle, and an undetermined number of cars belonging to detectives with the Major Case Squad, the area was a cluster of strobing illumination. Each pulsing flicker of luminescence was immediately blended, bisected, and bounced in triangular directions by the silvery stainless steel plates that composed the Gateway Arch.

  A sharp twinge insinuated itself through my nerve endings, and I absently reached to my wounded forearm as we walked, feeling the soreness swell throughout. I wasn’t sure why the pain had suddenly returned, but I feared perhaps another mark might be appearing soon.

  Felicity had hastily bandaged my arm while we both shrugged into clothes in record time—record time at least for someone who was not a firefighter. All the while Ben had impatiently waited in the living room where earlier he had been keeping vigil. His anxious shuffling was marbled throughout with frustrated hurry up’s and come on you two’s. When all was said and done, we were ready to go in less than five minutes. It had only seemed longer. With my friend behind the wheel of his van and the corner of the roof adorned with his own madly flickering red emergency light, traffic signs and speed limits became instantly null and void. In just less than twenty minutes from the time we left the driveway, we sped down the park access road and jerked to a halt on the grounds of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.

  Now that we were here, I would just as soon have been almost anyplace else. And the more I dwelled on that desire, the more my arm began to throb.

  An ashen-faced rookie clad in the uniform of the city police department was just unfurling a roll of bright yellow barrier tape when we signed in to the crime scene. The vacant look in his glassy eyes was reminiscent of inner redolence brought on by abject horror. His cold emptiness combined with the unmistakable fetor wafting from a point several dozen yards behind him acted as a harbinger of the abomination we were about to witness.

  “Who’s runnin’ the scene?” Ben asked the officer while Felicity and I penned our names on the log.

  “Detective McLaughlin,” he answered distantly.

  I had grounded myself before leaving the van, and thankfully, for the moment at least, I didn’t seem to be having any trouble maintaining the connection. However, compared to my normal level of ethereal protections, the shield I had cast about myself was a fragile eggshell in danger of cracking at any moment. Unwanted visions were angrily demanding ingress through the porous envelope, and the fearful disgust felt by the young man was already seeping through to bathe me with frigid anxiety. What he had witnessed had brought him close to his own personal threshold, and I could feel his need to retreat.

  The emotion injected itself into me, gelling in my heart and oozing outward through arteries and veins to poison my body on the whole. I had to beat back an overwhelming desire to turn and flee. My forearm tensed as blackjacks of pain threatened to crush it.

  “She with the body?” Ben prodded information from the traumatized officer.

&nbs
p; The uniformed man simply nodded as if his voice had left him and continued mechanically about the task of cordoning off the area.

  Our end-on angle of approach to the south leg of the metal half-parabola had obscured our view when we arrived. Now, as we ventured past the young officer and toward the active portion of the scene, the sickening charred odor grew thicker with each step. The lighter tang of kerosene slipped through the heaviness to layer itself with the fetid stench and lift it higher on the moist night air, making it inescapable.

  “Look, I know you’ve been havin’ some kind of problem with the hocus-pocus stuff, Row,” Ben stated as we walked, “so if ya’ don’t think ya’ can handle this…”

  “I have to handle it,” I answered matter-of-factly as his voice trailed off even though I desperately wanted to grab his offer of escape and run as far away as it would let me.

  That very thought brought another blinding stab of pain to bear on my forearm. I could feel the warmth of the blood soaking through the bandages and trickling along my skin.

  “No ya’ don’t.” He stopped in his tracks and turned to me. “You’ve been way too weirded out on this whole thing, Row. I don’t know what’s goin’ on, but ya’ ain’t right, white man. Especially here lately.”

  “Aye, Ben is right, Rowan,” Felicity added with more than a hint of personal fear in her voice. “You aren’t balanced, and you know it. Maybe we should wait at the van.”

  “You can wait there if you want,” I offered. “But I don’t have any choice in this.”

  “The hell you don’t!” my friend admonished. “I just gave ya’ a choice, and I’m damn near ready to make it an order. I should cuff your ass and park ya’ in a squad!”

  “Do it now then because that’s the only way you’re going to stop me.”

  “What the fuck? Stop you?” he appealed angrily. “Just what the hell has gotten into you, Rowan?”

  “I was summoned here, Ben,” I told him with absolute conviction. “Just as I was summoned to all of the other scenes.”

  “You were what?”

  I thrust my arm out for them both to see. Though the fabric of my shirt and jacket covered it, I knew all they would need to see was my bare hand. In the wildly choreographed splash of lights, the crimson rivulets of fresh blood streaking it were plain to see. I winced as yet another stab of pain twisted through the hot flesh.

  Felicity closed her eyes and sighed.

  Ben merely shook his head and muttered, “Jeezus, white man.”

  “Do you think I WANT to be here?” I asked. “Do you think I actually WANT to see what this sick bastard is doing to innocent people? Trust me, I’ve let the thought of running from this investigation cross my mind more than a few times tonight. I didn’t invite these marks to appear on my arm. Someone on the other side who is trying to tell me something is putting them there, and if I can believe the last dream I had, that someone is Kendra Miller.”

  “But what is she trying to tell you?” Felicity pleaded.

  “I still don’t know. But I can tell you this—every single time I’ve thought about turning and running from this, the pain has intensified. Judging from the bleeding, my guess is that this wound has gotten worse, not better. The last time I didn’t pay attention to one of these marks, I ended up with pool water in my lungs.”

  “And Christine Webster had been drowned…” my friend admitted quietly.

  “This time he killed with fire again. I really don’t want getting my attention to progress to that step if you know what I mean.” I fell silent and allowed my arm to drop back to my side. Ben and Felicity simply stared at me. After a moment I let out a long sigh. “I’m here for a reason. I was summoned. I don’t have a choice until I figure out what that reason is.”

  “You still aren’t grounding very well,” Felicity softly intoned with a razor sharp edge of seriousness in her voice.

  “I know,” I answered simply.

  “So what about all the Twilight Zone stuff?” Ben questioned. “You mentioned somethin’ about not bein’ grounded the other day when you had that backlash thing. Isn’t it dangerous?”

  “It can be,” I assented.

  “Aye, it can, so I suppose you leave me no choice either then.” Felicity shook her head. “Someone has to be there to keep you from going too far.”

  * * * * *

  As we rounded the base of the Arch, the picture of the horror was revealed to us at first in small, disorganized sections. It took several moments of pondering the scene before the pieces began to interlock into a meaningful panorama.

  Disheveled detectives in various modes of dress, most looking as though they were just dragged kicking and screaming from the warmth of their beds, were milling about in a loose group. One of the throng was interviewing a pair of uniformed officers, and another was talking to a park ranger who looked to be just this side of hysterics.

  CSU technicians focused their attentions on a lamppost at the landing of the stairs that led down from the park grounds above. Flash units added their intense brilliance to the dancing lightshow as techs took pictures of the metal pole as well as the marred concrete surrounding it. White residue caked itself to sections of the post and spread out across the walkway to partially obscure a spray painted rendering of the ever familiar Monogram of Christ. A few feet away, a tented marker inscribed with the number two rested on the ground next to a carelessly abandoned and recently used fire extinguisher.

  Other members of the CSU were closely scanning the stairs with powerful lights, searching for anything out of place. Every now and then one of them would pause, stare intently, and then with an almost dejected fall of the shoulders, continue on.

  Near this tightly contained work envelope, a white sheet covered something roughly the size and shape of an average human being. Plastic IV tubes snaked beneath the fabric, and the detritus of various emergency medical supplies littered the ground. Two chalky looking paramedics were carefully and systematically returning the tools of their trade back to their respective cases.

  My temples were already beginning to throb.

  A trim figure clad in blue jeans and a leather bomber’s jacket stood apart from the center of the activity. I instantly recognized her as a city homicide detective who had pulled several shifts watching over Felicity and me.

  Detective Charlene “Charlee” McLaughlin stood almost motionless, her right arm across her chest, palm cupping her left elbow as the appendage angled upward to rest her loose fist against her chin. She stared quietly at the shrouded body, her eyes wide and glazed. She hazarded only a brief, lethargic glance at us as we drew closer.

  We stood wordlessly for a long measure before Ben finally broke the silence in a solemn voice, “Fill me in, Charlee.”

  “Caucasian, female. Tied to the lamppost and torched,” she said in a thick monotone. “She was still alive when I got here, Ben.”

  My friend allowed the comment to rest for a beat before continuing, “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” Charlee nodded her head under a thick shag of ash blonde hair. “Yeah, I’ll be all right.”

  “They work on ‘er long?”

  “Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. She arrested pretty soon after they got here,” she detailed with a deep sigh. “Probably for the best. From what the paramedics said, she most likely wouldn’t have lived through the night anyway. Just would have been that much more suffering for her.”

  “Yeah, well she shouldn’t’ve had ta’ suffer at all,” my friend expressed dully. “Any witnesses?”

  “Not that we’ve found yet, but I’ve got some uniforms out looking. I’m not expecting much, I mean, look where we are.” She tossed her hands out palms upward and glanced around. “Not much activity around here in the middle of the night.”

  “Yeah, but we can always hope. What about the ranger?”

  “He’s giving a statement to Ackman right now. He told me she was already on fire when he pulled up. Says he didn’t even realize she was a person until he started
on her with the extinguisher. Called nine-one-one as soon as the fire was out. The uniforms with Osthoff were first on the scene.”

  No one had noticed that I was drifting closer to the sheet-covered corpse. Even Felicity was so involved in listening to the conversation that she had missed my slow but steady movement as well. I wasn’t even consciously aware of it until I found myself kneeling next to the body.

  “Don’t suppose there was an ID?”

  “No, she was nude, just like the others, and the fire didn’t help of course… but from what we can tell she does fit the description of Amanda Stark. We’ll have to wait on the coroner for a positive.

  “We did find a Bible.” She pointed at the stairs where another tented marker, this time adorned with the number one, stood next to a book.

  “What’d the asshole have to say this time?”

  “Pretty straightforward,” Detective McLaughlin replied. “Exodus 22:18. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

  “At least he’s consistent,” Ben spat. “I hate ta’ ask, but did the victim say anything before she died?”

  “Actually yeah. Didn’t make much sense, and to be honest I’m not sure I heard her right considering what the fire did to her throat and all, but I’d almost swear she said ‘truck.’”

  I barely heard her utter the word before my own scream of agony exploded into the foggy night.

  CHAPTER 24

  “Amanda Marie Stark, in accordance with the thirty-third question, in as much as you stand accused of the heresy of WitchCraft by another of your kind, and as you have admitted these crimes and remain still impenitent…”

  Terror, cold and absolute punctures my bowels.

  I don’t know how long he has had me captive, but it seems as though it has been forever.