Harm None: A Rowan Gant Investigation (38 page)

“Don’t touch anything yet,” Ben told me as we
advanced farther into the sparsely decorated living room. “Evidence
Unit’ll be here in a few minutes.”

“Yeah. No problem.” I nodded assent and
continued to glance about the room.

My hair follicles were still stinging with
strained discomfort, making my skin seem to crawl, while an arc of
intense energy played up and down my spine. It felt pretty much as
though I was holding on to a frayed extension cord while standing
in a puddle of water. Slowly, my scalp began to tighten and my
temples to throb. I had one hell of a headache coming on.

None of these sensations were new to me. I
had felt them a handful of times in the past, though not often,
thankfully. They were warnings—the physical manifestations of a
“supernatural burglar alarm.” Roger, like any Witch, or
practitioner of ritual magick, had shielded his boundaries. He had
cast protective energy about his home as a way of marking territory
to let others who were aware know that they shouldn’t intrude. In
the physical world, I had simply stepped across the threshold.
However, being an uninvited guest, in the realm of the ethereal, I
had done the equivalent of breaking a trip wire on a hypersensitive
home security system.

Two things immediately occurred. First, the
walls of protective energy enveloped me with urgent warnings in an
attempt to make me leave. Second, wherever Roger Henderson was
hiding, he was made aware of my intrusion. Of course, as I said,
these warnings were for others who are aware, so being the only
Witch in the room, I was forced to endure the increasingly painful
attempts at expulsion in tortured solitude.

The one feeling that wasn’t a direct
descendant of the ethereal burglar alarm was the searing arc of
energy playing xylophone on my vertebrae. Red hot, intense, and
angry, it was the blatant otherworldly signature of the home’s
occupant. The unmasked, undisguised essence of Roger Henderson’s
immortal soul. Vile, putrid, and swelling with evil. I had to
engage my own defenses in order to keep from becoming violently
ill. It was obvious, at least to me, that though he wasn’t here
now, he had been here very recently. We couldn’t have missed him by
more than a few hours.

I was only superficially aware of muttered
apologies and “excuse me’s” as officers pushed past me to go in and
out the door. Several moments passed before I realized I was
standing frozen, one step over the threshold, partially blocking
the entrance of the house. Slowly, I shuffled around the room and
as Ben had ordered, was careful not to touch anything—physically,
anyway. As I moved farther inward, a new feeling joined the
jamboree of sensations that were clawing at me for equal time. The
feeling was fear. It was small and feminine but very intense. It
was the fear projected by a little girl named Ariel. I pushed the
feeling back and placed it on mental “hold” as I realized my
breathing had quickened. I fought to maintain a grip in the
physical realm, and closing my eyes, I willed myself to relax. When
my respirations came back under control, I allowed my eyelids to
flutter open and focused on the scene before me.

The walls in the small square room were
washed with a thin coat of light blue paint, applied lethargically
with what had apparently been a worn roller. Several swaths were
severely lacking in coverage, unabashedly exposing the original
antique white that lay beneath. The floor, at one time smooth,
finished hardwood, was scuffed and gouged, with wear patterns
criss-crossing the surface in a well-beaten path. A lone,
straight-backed chair sat against a sagging card table—the only two
pieces of furniture in the room.

The stained tabletop was littered with
cigarette butts from an overflowing ashtray and a paper plate
containing a half-eaten sandwich. The curl of the drying bread, a
browning crust of mustard, and the unidentifiability of the
luncheon meat gave evidence that the sandwich was several days
old.

“Can’t say a helluva lot for his taste in
decorating.” Deckert was standing next to me. I hadn’t noticed him
until he spoke.

“I know what you mean,” I answered with a
small sigh and began massaging my temples. My head was killing me,
and I knew it was only going to get worse before getting any
better.

“You okay?” Concern crept into his voice as
he rested a hand on my shoulder.

“Yeah, I’ll be okay. Just a headache.” I
didn’t feel like trying to explain the concept of protection spells
and ethereal burglar alarms at the moment. From what I had come to
know about Carl Deckert over the past week, I was sure he wouldn’t
cast a jaundiced eye upon me, but I wasn’t exactly certain he’d
believe me either. It really didn’t matter anyway. I was the only
one who had to deal with it.

“Probably all the excitement,” he volunteered
in a fatherly tone. “I got some aspirin out in my car, if you want
some.”

“Thanks,” I smiled weakly, “I might take you
up on that later.” All I really needed to do was get out of this
house, but I knew that wasn’t an option at the moment.

“Looks like you got a fan club,” Ben called
to me from a few feet away.

When I looked over, he was motioning to a
bizarre collage. The section of wall directly above the card table
was haphazardly peppered with newspaper clippings regarding the
murders. Upon closer inspection, several yellow marks could be seen
streaking the newsprint, and each of them was highlighting my
name.

“He knows I’m helping with the
investigation,” I offered. “He’s just trying to...”

“Great intel, Storm,” Special Agent
Mandalay’s sardonic tone pierced the even murmur of the other
voices in the room to cut me off. “Did your expert get it from his
crystal ball or something?”

“We didn’t have just a hell of a lotta time,
ya’know,” Ben spit back. “Surveillance showed lights goin’ off, so
we had ta’ assume he was in here. We had no way of knowin’ they
were on timers.”

“Well I’m not impressed,” she returned.

“And what would you have done? Tapped his
phone and sat around with your thumb up your ass?” His voice
increased in volume by a notch.

“I would have made sure he was here,” Agent
Mandalay raised her voice as well. “This place looks like it’s been
empty for days.”

“No it hasn’t,” I interrupted calmly. “He’s
only been gone a few hours.”

She turned and looked at me as if I were a
small child butting in to an adult conversation. “The expert
speaks!” she exclaimed cynically. “Why don’t you let the rest of us
in on it. How do you know he was here a few hours ago?”

“I can feel him,” I answered her barbed
question simply. “He had the little girl with him.”

In an exaggerated motion,
she tossed her head back, rolled her eyes, and then let out a loud,
frustrated breath, “I suppose you can
feel
her
too?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. I can feel her
fear.”

“You ARE kidding. Right? This place is
abandoned. Just look around you.”

Before I could answer, a surge of blinding
pain bit viciously into my skull like a white-hot poker. As long as
I was inside this house, my foothold in this plane of physical
realities was shaky at best, and the sudden stabbing affectation
was all it took to knock me over the precipice. I winced internally
as the pain struck again, and I tumbled backward into the darkened
abyss of the recent past.

Fear.

Confusion.

Pure, unbounded terror.

The terror of a small child.

A dark figure. Stocky and thick. Brimming
with exaggerated excitement. I can smell a mixture of emotions in
his profuse, oily sweat.

His excitement.

Her fear.

His anger.

Her terror.

He enters the room hurriedly. He’s holding a
loosely wrapped bundle. A tattered blanket, stained and filthy with
abuse and neglect. It encompasses a limp mass. Apparently, there is
some weight to the bundle as he struggles to shift it while he
wrestles with the door. Using his knee, he pushes the door shut
then turns and backs against it, forcing the latch to pop into
place. He jerks slightly, and a tiny hand falls into view from
beneath the unclean shroud. The tiny hand of a frightened little
girl.

It doesn’t matter. He’s inside now. He’s
certain no one saw him carry the bundle in. They are all at work.
All of them. Even the prying old bitch across the street is gone.
He made sure of that before getting the bundle from his trunk.

Maybe he should have killed her, he thought.
The old nosy bitch.

No.

No. She was too close to
home. The police would have been crawling all over the place, and
that might have disrupted the Ritual. His chance to
sacrifice
The One
.
Besides, she was too old. Her age-spotted skin hung loosely from
her skinny frame. He could see it in his mind.

Whenever she waved at him
from her yard, it would flop and flap like a banner waving in the
breeze. No. Her skin was definitely too loose. He couldn’t practice
on someone with loose skin. That would never properly prepare him
for
The One
.

The One
would be young. Her skin elastic and unblemished. Not wrinkled
and flaccid.

The One
.

She was resting in his arms
right now. This very moment. He was so very pleased to have
found
The One
.

Bright, glaring lights flared suddenly,
burning like flash powder ignited in direct contact with my
eyes.

Mommy!

Where is my mommy?!

I’m so scared.

It’s very dark. My eyes still sting from the
flare of light. There seems to be a dim glow coming from just
behind my head, but I’m not sure. It may only be a phantom
image.

I can feel the little girl’s presence in the
room. Her fear. Her mental cries for her mother. Still, I can’t see
her.

My eyes are beginning to slowly adjust to
the murky light. I’m in the basement. I can barely make out a shape
across from me. It appears to be moving.

My eyes adjust some more.

I can tell that the shape is the stocky man
I had seen upstairs. He is huddled over something on a long plywood
and two-by-four workbench. The dirt floor is uneven and littered
with trash. My legs feel like heavy, metal fence posts set securely
in cement.

I try to move.

The man stops suddenly as if he hears
something. He cocks his head to the side and turns it slightly. I
stop my struggle to move.

He waits, listening intently.

I hold my breath.

Finally, slowly he turns back to his task.
Once again, I try to move forward.

Mommy!

Daddy!

I’m so scared.

I’m standing directly behind him now. I can
clearly see what he is huddled over. The nude, bound body of the
little girl.

He pulls a tourniquet tight on her upper arm
and then uses two fingers to slap the tender inner flesh in search
of a vein. In his other hand, he expertly holds a full syringe. The
needle glistens in the dim light.

Carefully he slips the needle into the vein.
I can feel the stinging pinprick in my own arm.

Mommy!

Daddy!

A tiny plume of blood spurts into the
syringe, mixing in a milky cloud with the other fluid. He drives
the plunger forward. Slowly. Evenly.

“
You can’t stop me, you know,” he says
without turning.

I know that he is talking to me.

He moves quietly to the end of the bench and
tosses the used syringe into a bucket already overflowing with
trash.

“
She’s
The One
,” he tells me.
“This is her destiny.”

The little girl’s nude body is stretched
out, loosely bound on the table, her denim dress wadded next to
her. He reaches out and grasps it, crushing it into an even tighter
ball. With an angry toss, he flings the faded blue fabric
projectile across the room. It smacks against the wall with a
muffled thump then slides raspily downward, slipping behind a pile
of paint cans, and disappears.

“
You’re too late, Rowan
Gant,” he says, turning to me. “You weren’t there to save Ariel
Tanner, and you won’t be there to save
The One
.”

The last things I saw were his cold grey
eyes.

“He said he had a headache a few minutes
ago,” Detective Deckert’s voice began distantly and grew quickly
closer.

“Rowan? Hey, Rowan? You all right?” Ben was
looking at me questioningly.

I felt myself grab firmly back onto the
physical plane and cling for dear life. My head was still
throbbing, and the angry burn of Roger’s ethereal signature was
maintaining its hold on my spine.

“Some expert,” Special Agent Mandalay’s voice
reached my ears. “You ask him a question, and he passes out on
you.”

“Shut up,” Ben barked at her without turning.
“Rowan. You okay, man?”

“Yeah,” I returned weakly. “Sorry about
that.”

“You went all
Twilight Zone
, didn’t
you?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “What did you
see?”

“Downstairs. In the basement,” I recited.
“There’s a workbench. That’s where he kept her when he was here
this afternoon. He’s keeping her drugged. You’ll find her dress
behind some paint cans. Her blue denim dress.”

“Give me a break,” our resident FBI skeptic
declared in exasperation. “He sounds like a tabloid psychic.”

Ben ignored her spiteful comment and instead,
turned to one of the other officers. “Ackman. Check it out.”

We stood waiting quietly as the man carried
out the order, disappearing down the hallway, then the basement
stairs. After a few protracted moments, we heard him coming back up
the wooden stairway.