The End Of Desire: A Rowan Gant Investigation (3 page)

Given the short notice, I was actually
surprised that I had found a room at all. After my first few calls,
it seemed that anything with four walls and a roof was occupied by
someone holding a Federal Emergency Management Agency ID card. They
had been crawling all over the city in response to the disaster,
though if you asked around, the opinion was that they hadn’t
arrived soon enough and were accomplishing even less now that they
were here.

Upon making it to the Airline Courts however,
I was more than just a little amazed that they had accepted a
reservation at all. Especially once I saw the sign in the smallish
lobby that advertised their hourly rate, as well as individual
condoms for a dollar apiece. Of course, profiteering knew no
bounds, and the price I was paying for the all but condemned space
definitely spoke to that fact.

Again, I shook off the thought and tried to
keep my mind from wandering. I was tired. Actually, no, I was
exhausted, and on top of everything else that was happening in my
life at the moment, I’m sure the fatigue had a lot to do with the
sluggishness of my brain. I was fully aware that I was having
trouble staying focused, and that was something I couldn’t afford
right now. The problem was, whether I could afford it or not, I was
too worn out to do anything about it.

I padded over to the side table in the corner
and picked up my bottle of water. The mere removal of those few
ounces of weight caused the piece of furniture to shift and rock
onto one of the back legs, making the lamp that adorned its surface
thump against the wall. It was obvious that not only was the
rickety hunk of pressboard and chipped laminate unbalanced, but
also the room itself wasn’t even close to level. I pressed on the
surface of the table with a very slight touch of my fingers. It
rocked forward and then back as soon as I removed my hand, causing
the tassels—those that remained anyway—on the torn and discolored
lampshade to swing back and forth. Why I had bothered with the
exercise to begin with I couldn’t say—nervous boredom I suppose or
maybe just my mind wandering yet again. Whatever the case, I did it
twice more but didn’t find enough amusement in it to continue past
that.

As if in reply to the clunk of the lamp, a
somewhat spastic thump began against the opposite side of the wall,
random at first, then falling into an increasing, though halting,
rhythm. It was accompanied by muffled words of encouragement—of the
x-rated variety—as well as some thoroughly unconvincing moans.

I glanced at my watch. A few minutes from now
the disharmonic symphony would stop, and shortly after that would
be punctuated by the sound of the toilet, followed by the room door
opening and closing. The flushing toilet would follow that once
again, and then the whole process would start over. If I was lucky,
there might be fifteen minutes of semi-peace in between.

Of course, there was no mystery at all about
what was going on. In fact, my room was probably the only one in
the complex not seeing that sort of action tonight, though I’m sure
it normally did. It definitely smelled like it.

Letting out a heavy sigh, I looked down at
the overpriced bottle of water in my hand, then twisted the cap
from it and took a swig. Wandering back around to the end of the
bed, I rooted through my carry-on and extracted a container of
aspirin. Popping the cap, I poured some into my palm, nudged the
excess back into the neck of the bottle, then tilted it and allowed
a couple of them to fall back into the pile again. I didn’t count
them so much as look at the size of the heap resting in my hand to
judge the self-prescribed dosage accordingly.

The exercise was probably futile in and of
itself. I knew the pain in my head wasn’t one that could be
remedied with over-the-counter medications—or prescription drugs
either for that matter. It was born of an ethereal source and for
the most part would remain staunchly unaffected by the
pharmaceuticals of the mundane world.

I also knew my stomach was going to hate
me—fact is, it already did since I’d been more or less living on
the bitter analgesic and coffee for close to a week. Now that I
thought about it, I would probably need to avoid any serious
injuries as well, lest I bleed out, given the amount of salicylate
coursing through my system and thinning my blood. Still, aspirin
itself seemed to be the only thing that would at least take the
edge off, and I had to do something in that respect. Right now my
head was pounding just as it had been ever since the plane touched
down. Actually, it had been for the past few weeks, but arriving
here had made it thud even harder. If I was going to stem my
exhaustion, I was going to need to dull the pain enough to get some
sleep. Something else of which I was severely lacking.

Of course, that might not even be possible
with the continuous traffic next door. I suppose I should be
grateful that this room was at the end of the complex. Otherwise
there was no doubt in my mind that the strictly adult soundtrack
would have been in stereo.

I popped the handful of pills into my mouth,
gave them a quick chew and then took a swig of water and swished
them around before swallowing. My hope was to get them into my
system a bit faster than they would by simply swallowing them
whole. The acrid bitterness caused my mouth to pucker
involuntarily, so I took a fresh pull from the water bottle and
swished again, trying to rinse the residue if not the taste from my
tongue.

Replacing the cap, I regarded the drink
silently and wondered to myself if I should have picked up a bottle
or two of antacid to use as a chaser instead. I didn’t get much
time to ponder the thought, however, as my cell phone began to
trill, softly at first then ramping up in volume as it continued
its quest for my attention.

Turning, I wandered back to the dumpster
refugee that was masquerading as the side table and scooped the
device from its surface, making the piece of furniture rock yet
again. Glancing quickly at the incoming number on the LCD, I
flipped open the phone and put it up to my ear.

“Yeah, Ben,” I grunted.

“Your goddamn finger broken?” he replied,
more annoyance than concern bolding his words.

“Do what?”

“You were s’posed ta’ call when ya’ got
there. I been sittin’ here waitin’ all friggin’ night.”

I glanced at my watch again. It was
definitely after midnight, so I couldn’t logically dispute what
he’d just said, on either count. Technically it was morning, and
besides, he was correct. I had in fact made that very promise.

“Oh, yeah,” I replied as I reached up and
rubbed my forehead. “Sorry about that.”

“Yeah, well, ya’ oughta be,” he
countered.

“I’m a grownup, Ben. I can ride an airplane
all by myself. I’ve done it several times, believe it or not.”

“Don’t be an ass, Row. That’s not what I’m
talkin’ about. It’s not like this is a normal trip, an’ you know
it.”

He was correct yet again. There’s very little
one can consider normal about catching a last minute flight bound
for a distant city to go in search of a serial killer. Especially
one who has most likely been dead for better than 150 years but
just happens to be up to her old tricks again because the wrong
person decided to play with the wrong kind of magick for all the
wrong reasons. It wasn’t as if I was with the FBI, or even a cop.
But, I did have a vested interest because that “wrong kind of
magick” had been deeply affecting my life and, more importantly, my
wife’s for almost a month now. It was time for it to stop, and I
was willing to do whatever it would take to make that happen.

“Yeah, Ben, I know…” I muttered in reply.
“But when is the last time you recall anything being normal in my
life?”

He answered without missing a beat, “Nineteen
seventy-two.”

“I’m pretty sure you didn’t even know me in
nineteen seventy-two.”

“You’re right. Anyway, I was just guessin’.
Actually, I’m bettin’ you’ve prob’ly never had a normal day in your
life, period.”

“It feels that way,” I sighed. “But, there
was a time…”

“Yeah, Row, I know there was…” he agreed, his
voice trailing off as it lost some of its edge.

My friend was agreeing because he had been
around when things were sane. While 1972 was pushing the limit, we
truly had been friends for more years than I could remember. So he
was well aware it wasn’t until I started hearing the voices of the
dead that things began to get weird. And, while it seemed like a
lifetime, especially to me, that affliction had only come upon me
somewhere around a half dozen years ago.

What with me being a Witch, I suppose that
most would think I should be used to such things as communicating
with the departed. After all, that’s exactly the sort of thing
Witches were “supposed to do,” right along with riding brooms and
sprinkling bat wings into bubbling cauldrons. To be honest, I
sometimes thought that the Hollywood myth about WitchCraft would be
a much easier way to live than I did at present. Riding a broom
would definitely save me the aggravation of traffic.

Of course, while the “double, double, toil
and trouble” aspect is a disproportionate fiction, Witches do tend
to be more open to accepting the unexplained without going to great
lengths to debunk it. Magick is certainly a part of our lives, and
we know that it is very real. But, by the same token, we also know
that real magick isn’t what you see in the movies and on
television.

So, while I wasn’t particularly surprised by
the fact that I could hear the dead, or even that they sometimes
chose radical measures such as stigmata with which to communicate
their distress to me, it definitely didn’t make me see it as the
norm. No, I knew for a fact that I was the odd man out. Very few
people, Witches or not, get stuck dealing with this sort of thing.
I just happened to be one of the unlucky ones and, because of me,
so was my wife.

And there, in the proverbial nutshell, was
the root of the whole problem I faced at this moment in time. My
wife. Even as I stood here, she was back in Saint Louis, warming a
bed in the psych ward of a hospital—which I suppose was better than
the jail cell she had occupied only a few days before, after being
accused of at least two brutal murders. Those charges had been
dropped, but the nightmare was far from over.

In truth, it was only just beginning because
it turned out the thing that went bump in the night was a half
sister that, up until a few days ago, my wife didn’t even know she
had. And that sister was up to her eyeballs in Voodoo and hoodoo.
Of course, that wouldn’t be such a big deal, except for the fact
that she had apparently taken a perfectly acceptable religion along
with its associated magickal practice and perverted both of them
into something vile and grotesque. While her take on that was
probably 180° opposite mine, I’m betting that her victims would
probably agree with me. In fact, judging from the pain in my skull,
I knew for certain they did.

But opinions weren’t important right now.
What was, however, was the fact that whatever she had unleashed was
no longer using her alone as a vehicle to inflict pain and death,
it had been trying its damnedest to use my wife as well.

I even had the freshly healing wounds to
prove it.

Still, why Felicity had been sucked into
this, other than a familial connection we didn’t even know she had,
was something of a perverse mystery in its own right. And, solving
that mystery was what brought me here, now, to this seedy motel
room in the burbs of New Orleans, with nothing more in my
possession than what I could quickly stuff into a single overnight
bag and my carryon backpack.

“Row? You still there?” Ben’s voice drifted
into my ear, breaking me out of the semi-dream state into which I’d
managed to sink.

“Yeah, sorry,” I mumbled. “Drifted for a
minute there.”

“Twilight
Zone
?” he asked.

That was his personal catch phrase to
describe any time that I would experience an ethereal event,
especially one that would push me into a trance or something even
worse, such as a seizure. The first few times he had witnessed it
happening to me he had been frantic, not that I had reacted much
better. These days, however, he just took it in stride—as much as
one could with that sort of thing, anyway.

“No… Just tired,” I told him. “So, did you
just call to chew me out for not calling you first, or was there
something else on your mind?”

“Little of both, I guess,” he grunted.

“Okay, if you’re finished with your lecture,
are you ready to move on to the other?”

“What the hell is that?” he asked, confusion
in his voice.

“Ummm…I don’t know. You called me,
remember?”

“No, White Man. I mean what’s that fuckin’
noise?”

Apparently my next-door neighbor had another
transaction waiting in the wings, either that or one of her
co-workers had been in the queue. I’d already identified the voices
of two separate bad actresses operating out of the same room. At
any rate, it appeared my hoped for fifteen minutes of peace wasn’t
going to happen, at least not during this particular hour.

“Exactly.”

“Exactly what?”

“Just like you said, it’s fuckin’ noise,
Ben,” I told him, echoing his raw terminology. “Let’s just say
there is a lot of nightshift work here at the Inn.”

“Jeezus, Row… You aren’t gonna…you know…”

“Come on, I think you know me better than
that.”

“Well couldn’t ya’ get a decent room
somewhere else?”

“Believe me, I wish I could. Right now I just
need to be happy it has a roof and electricity.”

“So you at least got a TV?” he asked.

“Actually, no. I don’t think the people who
normally use these rooms are all that interested in TV. Why do you
ask?”