Harm none argi-1

by M. R. Sellars

  “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 bac
k 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.

  “Hey, Storm,” he called as he poked his head through the doorway. “Better come have a look down here. There’s a wad of blue denim behind some paint cans, just like Gant said. Could be the kid’s dress.”

  Ben turned to Agent Mandalay, and a smug grin spread across his face. “Show me one of your PhD’s that can do that.”

  “So, don’t take this the wrong way or anything,” Ben began. “But there’s somethin’ I’m havin’ trouble understandin’…”

  I was relaxing in my seat, eyes closed. Without opening them, I prodded him forward, “And that is?”

  We were belted into his van and in motion toward my house, having only just left the scene. The evidence technicians had arrived soon after the discovery of the little girl’s discarded dress. They were still photographing, dusting, and bagging everything in sight when we finally chose to abandon hope of any immediate clues to her current whereabouts. A palpable sense of urgency surrounded them, and it was spreading like a rampant contagion through every member of the Major Case Squad. Even Agent Mandalay fell victim to its almost ubiquitous virulence. She had elected to remain behind at the scene with Detective Deckert while Ben provided my transportation home. Considering the volatility of one part Mandalay mixed with one part Storm, it was probably a good idea for them to be separated for a while.

  After a full two hours inside Roger’s house, I had begun to feel as if there were nothing left of me to give. A verse from an old Blue Oyster Cult song kept running through my head in an endless loop- You see me now a veteran of a thousand psychic wars. My energy is spent at last, and my armor is destroyed… Funny how things like that seem to drift in from nowhere.

  Even at that, none of them was in any bigger hurry to stop Roger and save this little girl than I was. I would have gladly stayed longer, no matter how I felt, but the final decision hadn’t been left to me. Ben ordered me to go home, and since I had come with him, he was seeing to it personally that I was returned safely. Deckert had seconded the motion, and Agent Mandalay took no convincing whatsoever. She was happy to see me go, though after the incident with the child’s dress, I had caught her looking curiously at me across the room from time to time. But, of course, only when she thought I couldn’t see her.

  “What I don’t get is this,” Ben continued. “If you could sense, or feel-or whatever the hell you do-all that bad ju-ju comin’ off just the house and stuff, then why couldn’t Ariel Tanner and the rest of her group pick it up from him? I mean he was right there in the flesh and all? Shouldn’t they have noticed somethin’?”

  I wasn’t surprised by the question, and I was glad that he had waited until we were alone before he asked it. Knowing him as I did, that shouldn’t have surprised me either.

  “Theoretically, yes.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well, if I’m right, there are a couple of reasons why they might not have picked up anything from him,” I paused.

  “Whaddaya want, a signed invitation? Spit it out.”

  “Number one is the Expiation spell,” I continued, finally opening my eyes and sitting up a little straighter as he merged us onto the highway. “My guess is that he feels pretty good about himself once he’s absolved himself of the guilt. That would make him give off some positive vibes, so to speak. The positive energies would tend to cancel out the negative ones. You know, yin and yang, the great cosmic balance and all that.”

  “Yeah, okay.” He nodded his head thoughtfully. “I can see that. Basically, it just tells me he’s a crazy fuck, and what he did to these women just doesn’t matter to ‘im.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “But why can you pick it up now?”

  “He’s escalating,” I offered. “He’s cycling through the absolution and anger quicker as the time for the sacrifice draws nearer.”

  “Have you figured out why he’s doin’ this yet?”

  “No, unfortunately. I’m not sure that he even knows.”

  We continued in silence while Ben digested my answers. Finally, he looked over at me and spoke, “So what’s number two?”

  I was already regretting that I had told him there was more than one reason. The second was the one that I was still wrestling with myself. Still, I had already opened my mouth, so there was no turning back. Whether I had come to grips with it or not, I needed to tell Ben.

  “Number two,” I said with a tired sigh, “is that he was probably able to mask over his energies because he’s a lot better than I expected him to be.”

  “Whaddaya mean ‘better than ya’ expected ‘im ta’ be’?” he appealed. “Ya mean like better at the hocus-pocus stuff?”

  “Yeah. The ‘hocus-pocus’ stuff.” I didn’t feel up to arguing over his choice of terminology.

  “But not better’n you, right?”

  I didn’t answer him.

  “Aww, Jeez, white man,” he grumbled, “I hate when you clam up like that… Tell me he’s not better than you.”

  “I don’t know yet” was all I could say.

  CHAPTER 24

  Cally’s van was gone from my driveway, and the lights were out when Ben dropped me off. I had called Felicity from his cell phone shortly after the evidence technicians arrived on the scene and let her know that I was still in one piece. While that fact had been a relief to her, the news was still clouded by bitter disappointment at our having arrived too late to rescue the little girl and apprehend Roger. Before saying goodbye, I reminded her that there was still time before the full moon and that we weren’t giving up. When I pressed the glowing END button on the face of the phone, I lingered, momentarily lost in thought as I wondered to myself if that small amount of time was going to be enough.

  The dogs stirred instantly when I entered the house, doing exactly what they perceived as their canine duty by checking to be sure I wasn’t some unfamiliar intruder. As soon as they had satisfied themselves as to my identity via cold-nosed, doggish snuffling, they both wandered sleepily back to their beds, wagging their tails with lazy contentment.

  Two of our three feline residents, Dickens and Salinger, were in the middle of one of their many nocturnal wrestling matches. My intrusion into what they had declared to be their ring served as sufficient enough surprise to bring them instantly apart. Looking for all the world like two furry, mismatched bookends, they absently licked their paws and peered up at me as if to say “What? We weren’t doing anything.”

  I kicked off my shoes then made my way softly into the bedroom. My wife was sound asleep, curled in the center of our bed, tightly hugging my pillow. I thought of crawling in as well, but she looked too peaceful, and I feared I would wake her. Besides, even though it was rapidly approaching two in the morning, I wasn’t actually sleepy. I had far too much on my mind to relax at
the moment, and my earlier headache still plagued me in the form of a dull throb running down the back of my neck. Gently, I pulled the sheets up over her shoulders then quietly padded back through the house.

  The wall clock rang out its familiar double chime in proclamation of the hour as I stretched out on the couch. If I were ever going to relax, I would have to clear away some of the annoying debris that had collected in my mind over the past few days. Of course, after the infusion of adrenalin I had received earlier this evening, my guess was that such a task would be next to impossible, at least for the time being.

  Dickens jumped stealthily up to the arm of the couch nearest my head and announced himself with a throaty feline trill before crawling determinedly around me. After a false start or two, he stretched across my chest and proceeded to purr himself to sleep. He remained there undisturbed, even when I slowly stretched and yawned. My eyes seemed to almost itch, and my eyelids felt oddly heavy as I let out a long-winded sigh. As they slowly closed, I reminded myself that I wasn’t sleepy. I wasn’t sleepy at all.

  “ Hey, Mister.” A little strawberry-blonde girl, wrapped in a white lace dress, was tugging at me. “Hey, mister, wake up.”

  Falling.

  Darkness.

  Light.

  Darkness.

  “ Wake up, Mister!” her tiny voice more urgent now. “It’s almost time. We’re going to miss it.”

  “ Miss what?” I try to ask.

  I can see my words, but I can’t hear them. They visibly leave my mouth in a rush and shoot skyward like helium-filled balloons. I watch them as they disappear into the darkness. When I turn my gaze back downward, the little girl is staring up at me urgently.

  “ We have to go now!” she exclaims, pulling on my hand. “Now!”

  I’m running.

  I can hear my footfalls on thin carpeting. My heart is pounding behind my ribs. My breaths are deep and labored, and the cold air stings my throat and lungs. I don’t know if I’m running from or running to. The little strawberry-blonde girl is nowhere to be seen.

  I’m running.