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 16: Caring for the Cat
Maureen’s face and neck had turned deep purple. She wasn’t moving or breathing. Gordon yanked off the sheet and tilted her head so that light from the overhead would let him look into her mouth. She’d swallowed her tongue, probably just as soon as he’d left. Gordon reached in and yanked her tongue out of her throat, but she didn’t gasp. There was no pulse.
Doubly damned, he thought. A bride of Satan and a suicide. From the edge of his vision, Gordon watched the cat make another spasmodic convulsion. Guilt and adrenalin pumped through his system. She’d killed herself rather than give away her coven sisters. He accepted the inrushing guilt, but tried to leaven it with the knowledge that he’d hoped to avoid further torture. He had the urge to pray for her, but knew it would be wasted on her and hypocritical of him.
Okay, he thought, let’s set the stage. He took blood and a skin fragment from Maureen’s chin and lightly daubed it onto the same table the cat had jumped from. Then he untied the sheeting, heaved Maureen up, and dropped her onto the floor next to the table. Just another terrible household accident.
Gordon carefully extracted Maureen’s cell phone from her purse and wrote down the last several numbers that had been called out or in, then equally carefully replaced the phone in the purse. He used all the torn sheeting to bundle up the cat. He shrouded it tightly, knowing that the cat would suffocate but the familiar would not.
He backtracked through the house, wiping clean as necessary. He toted the bundle to the front door, locking and closing it behind him. From the outside everything appeared undisturbed.
Gordon walked over two streets to where he’d parked the car and threw the bundle onto the seat next to him. He began to tremble, then disciplined himself. The bundle next to him shuddered intermittently as the familiar tried to escape.
He pulled off onto an unmarked gravel road, then onto a dirt trail until he was hidden inside a grove of trees. He dumped out the bundle and tore the sheeting off the cat. The animal cat had died, but the familiar was still writhing, and had spewed yellow bile into the sheet and over the cat’s face. Gordon flipped open his knife and sliced into the cat’s chest. Greasy smoke rose. He cut out the cat’s little heart and lay it on the ground, then poured holy water over it until it smoked into a charred husk. You vile little demon, Gordon thought, I did that for the cat’s sake, not yours.
Gordon buried the cat and bed clothes and continued the drive back to St. Johnsbury, thinking hard. Maureen had almost undoubtedly telephoned her coven mates about his identifying her as a witch. Her death had gained him almost nothing. He was no closer to the others in the coven and their leader, and he was now the object of a serious death vendetta. The bishop’s warning echoed. He had become, after all, an executioner.
Once in town he pulled into a back alley behind a McDonald’s and tossed the leather and latex gloves into a dumpster. He took Judy’s laptop out of the car safe, powered it up, and stared at the password prompt. Judy’s password in New Jersey had been “goeticlady,” but that got rejected. He suspected it was something they’d shared, some word or phrase. His stare became vacant as his sight turned inward toward memory. “Mr. Slick” he typed and watched the screen blossom.
No time, he thought. He shut the machine off and stowed it back in the Xterra. Then he took out the phone numbers he’d written down, recognizing most of them. Frequent calls to Sylvie LaGrande and Helen Connelley. And Judy. And another number he didn’t recognize. He called AJ.
“You’re alive! How’s the bitch witch?”
“I can’t have you implicated, AJ, don’t ask. I do need the number of the guy we use to trace phone numbers.”
AJ was subdued, and gave him the number without comment. “You got my message?”
“Yeah. You stay out of this. It’s gotten nasty, and I’m not going to have you implicated.”
“It’s a little late to try and keep my skirts clean.”
“Sorry, AJ, you’re out. Just keep sending me information on the requests I’ve already made.”
“But—"
Gordon hung up. During the drive back to St. Johnsbury, he noticed that the speed-trappy cop had resumed his position. Since the locals all knew where the cop perched, it must be a special benefit for tourists.
The Comfort Inn showed no signs of life, its lights dimly splaying over an empty roadway and half-empty parking lot. As Gordon pulled into his space, hands still on the steering wheel, he noticed the red glow from his ring.
He slammed the car into reverse and spun the wheel. The guy who’d crept up from his passenger side jumped back, swinging a hammer or wrench and cracking off the sideview mirror. Gordon squealed out of the lot and back onto the road toward Barre, then voice-dialed Tassie. Headlights began growing in his rearview mirror.
“Tassie, it’s Lormor. The guys who missed me two nights ago are back on my tail. This car’s not built for speed and they’re going to catch up quick... The road to Barre from St. Johnsbury... No way I can turn back around with them behind me... Look, I’m going to blow by a local cop in a couple minutes at around eighty. Tell him to just follow, no heroics; I don’t think these guys play nicely with others... I’ll leave the phone on, you can listen to me pant and wheeze... They’re in a gray sedan, full-sized, Vermont plates... No, I can’t read the plates, and by the time they get close enough, I’m going to be busy. Going by the cop now — there’s his lights and siren. He’s joining the procession... Yeah.”
Gordon slowed a little so the patrol car could catch up. His stare flickered between the road and his rearview mirror, watching as the squad car flashed its lights and squawked something on a loudspeaker at the sedan. Then the police cruiser pulled up alongside it in the oncoming lane.
“You dumb son of a bitch, follow, I said.” Gordon yelled aloud to no one. He heard faint shots and watched the squad car lights pile into the left hand ditch and overturn.
“Tassie!”
“Yeah?”
“The cop just got shot. He’s in the left-hand ditch. Send an ambulance.”
“Where are they?”
“Coming right up on my ass. I’ve got no hope on pavement, I’m going to grab the next plowed trail.”
“Stay on the road so we can find you.”
“My ass, my call. Track my phone if you can.”
The Xterra was top-heavy and, when Gordon spotted a plowed gravel road to his right, he had to slow considerably to swerve into the turn. Snow had fallen since the road had been last plowed, and Gordon threw the car into four-wheel high. The gray sedan took the turn at higher speed and slewed, but recovered quickly and ran down the Xterra’s tracks without hesitation.
Bad idea, Gordon thought. They can cruise along in my tracks and it looks like they got them a four-wheeler as well. He reached a clearing and slewed the Xterra around to face the other car. The sedan, a Lexus, slid to a stop on the trail, blocking his exit.
Gordon punched the auto-down on his driver’s side window and accelerated straight at the other car, spraying mud and snow as he went. He stuck his left hand out the car window and rapid-fired the Glock at the driver’s side windshield. Blood sprayed back onto the sedan’s riddled glass. The passenger side door on the sedan flew open and a man jumped out and into a stand of trees, where he began firing into the side of the Xterra.
Gordon had meant to ram the Lexus but realized there was no longer any point. As the man in the trees shot at him, he rolled over to the passenger side and out the door, dropping to the ground. The cold was brutal, and Gordon almost dropped his gun. The only light came from the two sets of headlights, and Gordon ran outside the beams over to the sedan. The driver had taken a chest shot and was gurglingly drowning in his own blood. But the passenger, who was now firing back at his own ride, had thought to take the car key.
Double chocolate-covered shit, Gordon thought, and grabbed the driver’s bloody gun, another Glock. He crouched momentarily behind the Lexus and forced himself to think. They’d chased him down with no thought of an escape, so they weren’t just hired, they were committed to the cause. Tassie would probably be wandering around for another half-hour. Gordon’s feet, hands, and face were quickly numbing from the cold.
He crawled through the snow to the rear of the Lexus, jumped up, and emptied his clip at the stand of trees, letting the gun click on an empty chamber, then dropped back down. His shooting partner snapped three rounds into the trunk of the car, then realized what he’d just heard. Lormor was perhaps out of ammo.
“Hey,” the man yelled. “I don’t need to kill you, just take you somewhere. You don’t have to die. Just toss your gun out in front of the car where I can see it.”
“Screw you.”
“You got a choice? You’re going to freeze to death in fifteen or twenty minutes.”
Gordon paused, then tossed his empty gun out into the tire tracks in front of him. “Don’t shoot, I’m coming out.”
The passenger remained hidden in the trees until Gordon had moved out in front of the car and he could see two empty, raised hands. “Don’t shoot,” Gordon repeated. The other man stepped cautiously out from the trees, gun in hand, until he could retrieve what Gordon had thrown and verify that it was a gun.
“You stupid shit,” he said, raising and aiming his gun.
Gordon dropped into the snow and rolled, pulling the sedan driver’s Glock from the pants belt behind his back. Both men rapid-fired, but the stander was the easier target. Gordon watched him shudder with the impact of two rounds before he dropped. It was only when he tried to stand that Gordon realized he’d also been shot.
Copyright © 2018 by Edward Ahern
