Crone's Moon: A Rowan Gant Investigation (2 page)

The sound grows louder for a moment as a dim
light falls across the floor in an ever-widening swath. The
luminance chases away just enough of the darkness for her to see
the grey concrete floor. A pair of heavy black lines snakes across
the filthy surface. She doesn’t know what they are, but there seems
to be a familiarity about them. She thinks she should know what it
is, but she just can’t make the connection in her befuddled
mind.

Familiar or not, she knows for sure that she
doesn’t like the look of them.

She hears a low creak of hinges that are in
desperate need of oil, and the faint light slowly disappears as the
motor-like sound is muffled once again.

A noise comes from above and behind her, and
she immediately identifies it. The heavy footsteps are back, but
now they are loud. They begin descending into the darkness, coming
closer with each deliberate thump.

The cold terror returns, and this time it
doesn’t go away.

Friday, June 7

Three days prior to the New Moon

7:32 A.M.

St. Louis, Missouri

The television set tossed light out into the
room as the picture flickered and changed. The logo of the news
station sat prominently in the corner, proudly displaying the
network affiliation along with the current time.

It was 7:32 in the morning.

The picture suddenly switched to a shifting,
bright background overlaid with an artistic shot of a hovering
helicopter, complete with the slow motion blur of its rotors
blending into the gradient of colors. The words BREAKING NEWS
slashed in bold letters across the screen, and a fanfare of
syncopated beats underscored the image.

The screen switched again to a fresh-faced,
young reporter holding a logo-adorned microphone. Behind him was a
lush scene; leafy trees and dense vegetation disappearing into the
unfocused depth of field. It was immediately obvious that he was in
a rural or wooded area somewhere.

As he held one hand to his ear, presumably
listening in for a cue, he began to speak.

“Thank you Chloe and Russ, I’m on the scene
at Rafferty Park overlooking the Missouri River where last evening
a jogger made a gruesome discovery. Mike Rickman was coming down
this path when he stumbled upon what appeared to be a badly
decomposed human arm.

“Authorities were called to the scene and
after a thorough search have confirmed finding more remains in a
shallow grave well off the path.

“While there has been no confirmation as yet,
there has been speculation that the body may be that of Tamara
Linwood, the grade school teacher who disappeared from the parking
lot of Westview Shopping Mall back in January of…”

The man watching this particular television
set this morning might have had an interest in the story had he
been able to hear or see it. Unfortunately, he was sprawled on the
hardwood floor; face down in a puddle of coffee where his cup had
shattered.

He convulsed and postured as the sudden
seizure ravaged his body, forcing him to bite his tongue and writhe
as if holding the bare end of a live extension cord.

M
y tongue felt like
someone had taken hold of it with a meat-tenderizing mallet or some
other equally heinous implement of destruction. Whatever it was
that had happened, at the moment, the salty tang of blood was
effectively presenting its unmistakable flavor to the few taste
buds that remained intact.

My head was throbbing too. Well, maybe not so
much throbbing as imploding and exploding all at once. I knew full
well that such was a literal impossibility, of course; even so,
that was what it felt like all the same. It didn’t take long for me
to realize that trying to think about it too hard made it hurt just
that much worse, so I accepted my brain’s knee-jerk comparison as a
cold fact and left it at that.

Additional sensations began sneaking in
through the tiny fissures in the pain that was hammering my skull;
each of them petitioning to be heard, felt, and otherwise
experienced to the fullest. Unfortunately, none of those sensations
were any more pleasant than the one occupying center stage at the
moment.

Given my current inventory of pains, the only
somewhat neutral feeling I could identify was linked directly to
the right side of my face. In fact, at this very moment, my cheek
was reporting back to me that it was firmly pressed against
something hard. What that something was, I had no idea, but it was
definitely hard… And if my inner ears weren’t deceiving me, it was
horizontal… Not to mention wet. Overall, it was not an
exceptionally painful feeling, but it was most certainly
uncomfortable. Still, combining the uncomfortable with the
excruciating and then multiplying it by a healthy measure of
confusion— well, when you did the math, it all pretty much took on
the same properties, none of which could be considered any more
desirable than any of the others.

I wondered for a moment if the wet portion of
the present feeling was, in part, the blood I thought I tasted. It
seemed logical: it was wet, warm, and in the vicinity of my face.
Unfortunately, I was forced to abandon the whole idea with urgent
haste in order to escape the sharp stab of pain in my skull that
the simple act of wondering about it had invoked. Apparently, at
this particular moment, my brain wasn’t much interested in logic or
anything else for that matter.

Between throbs, I noticed that my forehead
felt cold. Not just cool but actually flat-out, ice pack cold. It
was the only portion of my head that wasn’t embroiled in pain at
the moment, but judging from the sensation it was announcing to me,
that might only have been because it was well on its way to numb.
Of course, it hurt to think about that too.

It occurred to me that there was something
else just as disturbing as the pain. A pair of something’s
actually: One, I had no idea what had happened to me in order to
bring about this level of agony; and two, I didn’t know where I
was. If I actually knew the answers to the two questions, I
couldn’t remember them, and that wasn’t good either. I briefly
considered the idea that I might be able to obtain one of the
answers simply by opening my eyes. However, considering and doing
are two different things entirely, and it seemed my eyelids weren’t
listening to my brain right at this moment.

My vision wasn’t the only sense that was
nullified either. Up to this point, my auditory nerves had
apparently been on vacation somewhere in the land of white noise,
as all I seemed to be hearing was a nondescript roar in my ears.
The good news was that they now returned from their sabbatical, in
a manner much like a radio being switched on and the volume being
turned slowly upward. A distant voice began echoing down the hollow
tunnel that was my hearing, and even though the simple act of
concentrating brought with it an overtone of pain, I strained to
make out the words.

The voice sounded male, young, somewhat
tinny, and was coming across as no more than a garble of
meaningless syllables. The distorted edge of the voice competed for
my attention through the warbling hum that still invaded my ear. I
swallowed hard and steeled myself for the added aches I feared that
I was about to bring down upon myself, and then I concentrated
harder.

Another mish-mash of sound worked its way
into my ear and with each beat morphed from the unintelligible into
a Doppler distortion of noise that whistled past me, only to fade
quickly away. I seemed to recognize some of the clamor as words.
However, what registered was, “…to be a badly decomposed human
arm.”

I pondered the incomplete sentence and
decided that I was hallucinating, because I just knew the voice
couldn’t have actually said ‘decomposed human arm.’

My addled brain locked in on a piece of the
distant voice once again. “…have confirmed finding more remains in
a shallow grave well off the path.

“While there has been no confirmation as yet,
there has been speculation that the body may be that of…”

The sharp taste of metal suddenly filled my
mouth, overpowering the salty blood that had dominated the sense
moments before. Every muscle in my body tensed at exactly the same
moment, pulling up like rubber bands stretched to their limits and
then tugged just a little farther for good measure. I could feel my
teeth gnashing against my already tortured tongue once again as my
body shuddered uncontrollably through some manner of violent
seizure. My face took on a fresh ache as I felt my eyes rolling
back in my head.

A vague memory wandered through the maelstrom
of my thoughts, and I realized I had been here before. At a
different time certainly, and even a different place, maybe. I
wasn’t sure about the latter, but the fact remained that this was
not something new.

I could feel my consciousness starting to
flee, and I wasn’t so sure that it was a bad thing. However, the
split second before it managed to exit, the elastic strands that
were my muscles and tendons released. Without warning, they snapped
instantly back to relaxed positions— or, as relaxed as they could
be under the circumstances. Thankfully, the abuse my tongue was
taking from my teeth stopped as well.

I felt limp, weak, and maybe even a bit more
disoriented than I had been before if that was possible. I took in
a deep breath and laid near motionless; panting as a distant ring
echoed in my ears then faded into a low buzz that eventually became
a voice.

“…
From the Major Case Squad have
arrived on the scene and will be taking over the investigation from
municipal authorities. Back to you Chloe and Russ.”

There it was again, that distant, tinny
voice.

This time it had said, “Major Case Squad.”
Then it said, “Chloe and Russ.” Now, these things actually made
sense. A by-product of that sense was an answer to one of my
earlier questions.

Maybe.

From the sound and content, I thought that
what I was hearing might be the audio from a television newscast. A
partially revealed memory lumbered through the inside of my skull,
and I took hold of it.

I was watching the morning news at home in
my living room before heading upstairs to my office and getting to
work. I got up from my chair during a commercial break and went
into the kitchen. I poured myself a fresh cup of coffee, then
turned and went back into the living room.

After that, the remembrance grew a bit fuzzy
around the edges. Well, actually it was completely obscured from my
view because the real truth was that I had absolutely no idea what
had occurred in whatever span of time had elapsed since I had
poured that cup of coffee.

Still, maybe I wasn’t hallucinating as I’d
earlier thought. Of course, if I could get the rest of the memory
to come into some kind of focus, I might get a better handle on my
current situation.

The thud in my skull was actually starting to
subside, for which I was more than grateful. The bizarre in and out
thrum, however, continued rumbling in my ear, competing with the
sound of the television. I started taking stock of the other
sensations and happened across the fact that while my forehead was
freezing, my neck was actually warm— very warm. In fact, it was
downright hot.

I thought about that for a moment and then
realized that there also seemed to be something soft but weighty
involved. As I continued pondering this latest sensation, I started
feeling pressure against my left cheek that seemed to be moving in
time with the warbling hum.

I took another shot at opening my eyes, and
slowly my left eyelid responded to the instruction. I looked out of
the corner of my eye and found that the majority of my limited
field of vision was filled with black fur. The soft pads of a pair
of feline paws continued pushing against the side of my face as
Dickens, one of our trio of cats, kneaded in rhythm with his own
purr.

Some semblance of clarity was beginning to
creep back into my head as the various pains began to subside. I
rolled my eye forward and saw a close up view of polished hardwood
strips stretching out before me, although the tableau was a bit on
the fuzzy side. While this was a vastly different angle than to
what I was accustomed, I recognized what I was seeing to be my
living room floor.

A few inches in front of my face, I could see
shapes rising out of the horizontal plane. These were also tinged
by blurriness but still identifiable as my eyeglasses and as the
fragmented remains of a ceramic coffee mug. I guess that would
explain why the side of my head was wet.

Well, at least now I knew where I was, which
was a plus. Unfortunately, I also had a nagging suspicion that I
knew why I was in my current, uncomfortable position. I felt my
stomach do a double flip at the very thought and decided not to go
there. Not yet, anyway. Maybe I was wrong, and this had been
nothing more than me being a klutz. At least, that’s what I tried
to tell myself. In the back of my head, I knew better.

I let out a groan and gently shoved the now
drooling feline off my neck then pushed myself up to my hands and
knees. I let my head hang for a moment and took a deep breath. A
chilly draft tickled my bare arms, and the reason behind my
semi-frozen forehead became immediately obvious— I had been lying
directly in front of the air conditioning vent.

The television was still chattering in the
background when I dragged myself to my feet. The newscasters had
moved on to another, far less horrific story, and the screen was
filled with the image of a hyperactive blonde feature reporter
whose actual name escaped me at the moment. Synapses were
continuing to fire with fewer misses each time around, so I tried
to grasp at the obscured bit of information for no other reason
than to take my mind off the things I didn’t want to face. But, it
didn’t help. I could still sense the foreboding tickle growing in
the back of my brain, and in the end, all I seemed to remember was
that she was named after a state.