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 10: A Small Bribe
Horace’s bouffant was visible above the shelves of canned goods. He was sitting in the folding chair, staring out onto the road. It was the only east-west road for five miles, and Gordon realized that the puffy-haired sentinel probably noticed anyone driving to and from the pond.
“Horace?”
“Hi. Got a FedEx box for you.” His shrill tenor was unmistakable.
“Thanks. I assume the troopers have been by?”
“Oh yeah. They’ve taken quite an interest in you. Don’t like you much though.”
“There’s no pleasing some folk. I’m guessing there’s a FedEx office in St. Johnsbury?”
“Yup, open twenty-four hours. You going into town? You could eat at Vinnie’s. Best of a bad lot.”
“Thanks, Horace. When Harrowgate asks, you can tell him I expect to be back around 10 p.m.”
“Don’t worry about that. He asked me to call as soon as you showed up again.”
Gordon zipped open the FedEx box in his cabin. He applied his thumb, plugged in his password, and for an hour scrolled through AJ’s reports. The laptop also stored several reference works on finding and destroying witches, among them Remy’s Demonolatry, from 1595; Guazzo’s Compendium Maleficarum, from 1608 and, of course, Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum, from 1487.
The kind and number of dark magic items shipped to the area suggested that only one coven was in operation: large and active, but only one. About half of the material had been shipped to the FedEx office he’d be visiting, and the rest to Barre. He repacked the laptop and materials, and carried the box out to the truck. Time to hit the bright lights.
Most of St. Johnsbury was a haphazard scattering of struggling small businesses. The FedEx office seemed contrastingly chic. Gordon brought in the afternoon’s Baggie, wrote a note, and slipped it into an envelope along with the sample. There was a middle-aged man at the service desk. “Need to send an envelope, please.”
“Yes, sir, sorry if I was nodding off when you came in. It’s awful quiet here this late, and they won’t let me watch television.”
“That’s okay... Charlie, is it? I’ll never tell. Charlie, are you working most nights here?”
“For the last year. They won’t let me on days.”
“They probably need somebody like you to handle the rush of late night weirdos.”
“Nah. I wish. I’m lucky if I get three or four customers between midnight and 6 a.m.”
Gordon paid for his parcel, addressed to AJ in New Jersey. Then he pulled out a business card listing his contact information and proclaiming Gordon Lormor Investigations. “Charlie, I need your help with something.”
“Like what?”
“I’ve got lists of FedEx tracking numbers from three different companies, all sent here rather than a home or office. The insurance company I work for thinks these companies are being ripped off and wants to track down the recipients. The names they used to sign for the parcels are fake, but we’d really like descriptions of these people. We’d be glad to pay you a consulting fee.”
“Gee, I don’t think they’ll authorize me to tell you that.”
“Charlie, we’re pretty sure they would pick up the packages when the store is empty; late at night, when you’re here. Probably women, which would also be unusual. There’d be no record of your help, and the consulting fee is $300.”
“$300? For some descriptions? When would the parcels have gotten here?”
Charlie fired up the desktop log, and Gordon went around the counter to watch the screen with him. Charlie was able to describe three women; Judy and Helen for sure, and an unknown third woman, thirtyish, with long black hair and noticeable pock marks on her face.
Once back in the Xterra, Gordon called AJ.
“How dumbly have you been acting?”
“Relax, AJ, I keep my ass lined in fireproof silk. I’ve just sent you a sample of shit and blood. I need DNA, blood type, the works.”
“That’s gross even for me. What makes you think the DNA is significant?”
“Whoever prepared it only had an hour to concoct and apply it. That means they probably had to use their own blood. It’s a long shot, but pay one of our rent-a-cops to run the information through their files.”
“Charming. Okay. There was nothing left for David to do, so I took him back off the clock. Any luck finding that woman’s laptop?”
“Her name was Judy, AJ. And no, not yet. I’ve ID’d Judy and a woman named Helen Connelley as receiving the goodies in St. Johnsbury.”
“The FedEx clerk?”
“Yeah. Greed and boredom are so wonderfully predictable. They would’ve used the same fake names for shipments to Barre.”
“You’ve been busy. Stay close to your truck and cell phone so I can track you if I have to.”
“Nag, nag. Good night, AJ.”
Gordon’s next call was to St. Eulalia. “Father? My name is Dexter. I believe the bishop’s office has been in touch? Good. No, I’m sorry, but no questions, please. Would it be all right if I stopped by in fifteen minutes to pick up those items? Eximius est. See you then.”
The parish priest, Francois Bertrand, had some used half-gallon plastic bottles for the holy water and set them inside a cardboard box. Gordon poured some of the holy water into an inscribed ceramic flask, and placed several of the hosts inside a similarly inscribed silver case. He had a vagrant memory of having to borrow an empty wine bottle so he could fill it with water from the spring at Lourdes.
After making a healthy donation to the parish, he asked for a favor. “Francois, I’m moving around a lot. I need a place to store the water and hosts. The best place for consecrated materials like this, I think, would be one of the vestment lockers in the sacristy, but I’d need to have a key to the side door so I could retrieve the material when I needed it. Would that be possible?”
Father Bertrand openly studied him. “His eminence said you were a shifty type, but that you could be trusted and that your work was serious. Professional courtesy, I guess. I’ll do it.”
Gordon sincerely thanked him and left. Nothing like having a stash on consecrated ground. “One more thing, Father. Did you hear about the LaChapelle baby?”
“Yes. A terrible, terrible thing.”
“Are the mother and father parishioners?”
“The mother used to be, as a child. She had the child out of wedlock, and the father’s long gone.”
“Was the baby baptized?”
“No. I was hoping to see her and encourage her to have the baptism performed.”
“Bad luck all around. Would it be all right if I spent a few minutes in the church?”
“Of course.”
The church was very like the church of his youth: stained-glass windows with leaded panes, regimented wooden pews facing front, realistic and mildly gruesome stations of the cross. Gordon sat in one of the pews but didn’t kneel. He knew he was there on sufferance. He asked not for reacceptance but for help in saving a life and removing an evil.
Once back on the road his body told him that his mainspring was badly over-wound. He urgently needed sleep, but took his time getting back. On the way into town, he’d noticed a cop lurking just off a wide-open stretch of road and, on the way back out, he held the SUV to the legal limit, disappointing the still-skulking cop. He saw the smoke backlit by the night sky just before he got to the general store.
Copyright © 2018 by Edward Ahern
