The Witches’ Bane
by Edward Ahern
Gordon Lormor is a defrocked priest and con man. And something more. He walks a precarious path between light and dark magic. When a former lover calls him, pleading that he help free her from a coven, Gordon leaves his business behind and travels to upstate Vermont.
Death arrives before he does, and Gordon is thrown into a worsening spiral of assaults and murders and the threat of an infant sacrifice. He is joined by his assistant, AJ, and helped by a Catholic cardinal in chipping away at the wall around the witches’ conspiracy. He soon realizes he is teetering ever closer to his own spiritual and physical death.
Chapter 13: Purification
Gordon slept until 9:00 a.m., then made the short drive over to Littleton, New Hampshire, where he charged $200 worth of clothing and toiletries at a department store. He drove back to St. Johnsbury, checked into a Comfort Inn, threw his old underwear away, took a long shower, and went to sleep.
Once he got up, he purged himself both orally and anally, and began the process of clearing out his mind. Gordon felt the surge of familiar dread: not fear of failure but fear of where he was taking himself again, fear that he would stray off the narrow safe path the rituals gave him.
His stomach had gotten used to being regularly filled and was already rumbling. It would be rumbling and cramping until the next morning. Still nude, he began the ceremony irremovably welded into his memory. As he chanted, he could visualize the Aramaic, and had a distracting thought of how similar the letter shapes were to runes.
He took his large folding knife out of his pants pocket and opened it with reverence. He had made the knife himself: the multi-folded Damascene steel inscribed with concealed words of power and hardened with the most consecrated of materials. The bone handles were relics of the blessed. It had been his constant companion for a decade, and there were moments when he had thought about talking to it.
Gordon chanted for two hours, then combined the holy water and consecrated hosts into a thick gruel and applied it to the knife blade and handle. The blade sucked in the moisture as if thirsty. As he had done in the past, he muttered justification for the sacrilege by vowing to only use the knife in defense of his life and soul. The remainder of the paste he put into a Baggie to keep it moist for insertion into the Glock’s hollow-point ammunition.
The knife was laid gently down, and Gordon assumed a lotus position, which he would hold to for the next ten hours. He spellcast through the excruciating pain and into the familiar numbness. The rituals were completed the following morning. Gordon required several minutes to unfold his legs and stand, still lightheaded, but with senses burningly acute.
He drank orange juice and black coffee at a local diner and returned to his room to plan consciously. And he made the first phone call.
“Lieutenant Tassie? It’s Gordon Lormor.... No, I’m all right, thanks.... Listen, these guys must have known I’d be staying at that motel. Harrowgate and Horace Wittson knew where I was staying, and who knows who they told... No, no, I’m not suggesting anything, just trying to figure things out. Did you report my location to the barracks? Who would Clifton have told? Ah, I see, he does talk a lot then? What? I’m staying at the Comfort Inn in St. Johnsbury.”
Gordon was getting into telemarketer rhythm and began to hum. “Hello, Sylvie LaGrande? This is Gordon Lormor.... No, please, wait just a second. I’ve found out a couple of things I wanted to clarify with you. Helen tells me you and Judy were friends.... No, I understand, but I think it’s better to discuss this with you rather than having to go through the police... Today, maybe? Around 2:00 pm tomorrow? Great.”
Their move, he thought. If his buddies from the shooting party didn’t show up again, he had arranged to set himself out like a Judas goat the next afternoon. He began to read and absorb the files that AJ was sending him.
His phone rang late that afternoon. “Hello, Mr. Lormor? Gordon? This is Brenda, from the bookstore.”
Gordon could visualize her. Focus, you lecherous perv, he thought. “Hi, Brenda. I was hoping we’d have a chance to talk again. What’s up?”
“I was cleaning out Judy’s locker when I noticed that the floor plate had been unscrewed. Judy’d hid a laptop and some other stuff there. She left a note stuck on top of the computer saying you should get it. Should I turn it over to the police?”
Gordon lied without effort. “Brenda, it’s probably better if I have a quick look at it first and then turn it over. I can be there in an hour.”
“Great.”
Gordon swung by the FedEx office, picked up the Glock and the needles, and used the drive time to Barre to think. If Judy had stashed the laptop in Barre rather than her cottage in Big Eddy, she had probably wanted to keep it out of the hands of her coven sisters. He called AJ again.
“AJ, put Dave back on the clock and have him run some serious background checks: Harrowgate, Tassie, Wittson, Connelley, Lagrande, and Perry. Crimes and misdemeanors, family tragedies, the works. Try and get medical records too: blood type, DNA; they might help in figuring who left shit on my windshield. I think I’ve got Judy’s laptop, which might help. If I can’t get into it, I’ll ship it off to you.”
“Hello to you, too. Got it. The shitty-bloody DNA tests are back. The shit wasn’t human.”
“Goat?”
“Yeah. We’re shopping the blood results around to try and get a match. No search results yet on possible sacrifice locations. Background checks should be available late tonight. One thing, though....”
“Yeah?”
“I found out that a six-month old nephew of Tassie’s went missing three years ago. Never found. Tassie’s brother had been killed in Afganistan a year before that.”
“Thanks, AJ. I think that’s why Tassie is taking such a personal interest in a possible witchcraft case.”
“Try not, just for today, to let anybody else take a shot at you.”
“So far so good. Call me with any new info.”
As he hung up, Gordon crossed the city line into Barre.
Copyright © 2018 by Edward Ahern
