Crone’s Moon argi-5 Read online

  Crone’s Moon

  ( A Rowan Gant investigation - 5 )

  M R Sellars

  Crone’s Moon

  M. R. Sellars

  When the moon is high and new, kiss your hand to her times two.

  When the moon rides at her peak, then your hearts desire seek.

  When the moon turns to the Crone, in Saint Louis, don’t walk alone…

  Couplets #5-6, The Wiccan Rede

  Thursday, January 10

  Three days prior to the new moon

  10:00 A.M.

  North of Granite City, Illinois

  PROLOGUE:

  Her jaw is hurting.

  It isn’t the only part of her body that is aching by far, but at the moment, it is in the forefront of her mind. She can tell she has been grinding her teeth. There is no doubt about it, because she always does when she sleeps.

  Bruxism, that’s what her dentist calls it. Pain, that’s what she calls it; especially right now. She has a plastic mouth guard she sleeps with that is specially designed just for the affliction, and it helps; but, she knows that considering the amount of pain she is experiencing and the fact that she can’t feel it in her mouth that the appliance must not be here.

  Thinking about it doesn’t help much.

  She is beginning to take notice of the laundry list of aches plaguing her body. Her head, her chest, her wrists, her ankles… hell, there isn’t an inch of her that doesn’t hurt. There are just some parts that are screaming louder than the others.

  She starts to move, then flashes on a distant memory. She’s not supposed to move? She shouldn’t move? She can’t move? She tries anyway and finds that option three is apparently the winner. She doesn’t know why she can’t move, but she decides not to think about it. It just seems easier not too.

  It is odd to her that she can remember the word bruxism, but for some unknown reason she can’t recall much else. She has no idea how long she has been here. A day? A week? A month? No clue. But what does it matter? She doesn’t know where ‘here’ is.

  Come to think of it, she doesn’t even know WHO she is. Confusion seems to be the order of business, and she has absolutely no idea why. The only thing she knows for certain is that it is dark, cold, smells odd, and she is hurting.

  She lets out a sudden whimper as a glut of visceral fear gives her stomach a hard twist. She has no idea where it is coming from, but it blindsides her. The terror starts winding its way up from her gut, driving along her spine, and rushes into her brain. She catches her breath as the flush of warmth spreads over her face. She thinks she is going to vomit and swallows hard. She feels a wet tear streaming across her cheek.

  A moment later, the fear passes with the same urgency and no more warning than when it had attacked. Again, it seems easier to just forget than to try analyzing it. The question ‘why’ seems so moot.

  She decides to move.

  “Oh, that’s right,” she thinks to herself. “I can’t move.”

  She wriggles her hands, but that only serves to make her wrists hurt more. She tries to move her feet and they hurt too, but there is something more.

  She moves her feet again and hears the splashing sound of water. She can feel it against her skin, but it isn’t the soothing sensation one would expect. It actually feels as if her feet have been soaking for days.

  “Why are my feet in water?” she wonders to herself and then answers the query within the same stream of thought. “Good question. Where am I again?”

  She moves her feet and listens closely. Other than the sound of the water, it is quiet.

  It’s almost too quiet.

  She doesn’t like that at all. She wishes it wasn’t so still. It can’t be this quiet.

  She stops moving and listens.

  Distant footsteps.

  Heavy. Deliberate.

  She’s not so sure she likes that sound any more than the quiet. But she keeps listening.

  She feels the fear welling in the pit of her stomach once again and tries to focus on something else.

  “Who am I?” she wonders aloud in a barely audible whisper.

  Her brain feels scrambled, and even the past few moments seem like a washed out memory from another lifetime. She forces herself to concentrate and begins whispering whatever she can grasp from the disjointed thoughts.

  “T…”

  “Tee?”

  “Tuh?”

  “Tay?”

  “Two?”

  “Two, what?” she wonders.

  “Two. Two times one is two. Two times two is four. Two times three is six. Two times four is twelve… Twelve? That’s right isn’t it? Of course it is. Two times four is twelve. Two times twelve is sixteen… Wait… Sixteen? No… Wait… I’ll start over. Two times two is eleven… No, that’s not right… What was it I was trying to remember again?”

  She gives up. It doesn’t seem worth it.

  She notices that her mouth tastes funny- strangely metallic.

  “That’s weird,” she murmurs. “Hmph. I can remember what metal is, so why can’t I remember what time it is? It sure is dark. Maybe that’s why. There’s that sound again. Like a motor or something. I wonder what it is?”

  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.

  CHAPTER 1:

  My 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 an
d 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.