M Sellars - Never Burn A Witch

A sudden roar mixes with the rush of the fire and marries with a high-pitched grind before fading away on the night.

Flames consume all that is.

A multi-pitched, mechanical groan emits from beneath the van, audibly announcing the improperly meshed gears.

A cold tingle dances up my spine and my scalp tightens painfully.

My head is killing me. The thick rush of blood fills my ears in pulsing time with the hammering inside my skull. The sound of a metal sliding door, badly in need of adjustment and lubrication forces itself past the din…

A sudden roar mixes with the rush of the fire and marries with a high pitched grind before fading away on the night.

I look up the street to check for traffic and see only what appears to be a large delivery van parked parallel to the curb.

“… I toad her about thuh truck.”

“… Did’ju see thuh truck too?”

“… But I’d almost swear she said ‘truck.’”

A sharp icepick of agony bites deeply into the core of my being as a black panel van, greyed with a patina of salt and grime pulls away from the curb. The low mechanical roar is underscored by the high-pitched grind of recalcitrant gears as the vehicle accelerates and hooks almost angrily around the corner.

That damn truck.

Delivery trucks don’t run that late anyway.

“… But I’d almost swear she said ‘truck.’”

“… But I’d almost swear she said ‘truck.’”

“ROWAN!” My wife’s determined voice once again waded through the flotsam of remembrances.

The present collapsed inward to replace the rampant kaleidoscope of the past pin wheeling through my mind, and the stream of thoughts crashed forcefully into the wall of reality.

“She did say truck,” I whispered as the snippets of visions and conversations blended into a solid, tangible deduction.

“What?” Felicity asked as she searched my face. She had stopped the insistent shaking but her hands remained tightly entwined in my shirt.

“She did…” My voice came as a thin wisp once again, and I aborted the sentence to clear my throat before finally continuing in a stronger tone. “She did say truck. The killer is driving an old delivery truck.”

As I voiced the revelation, I could almost physically sense the dull pestilence of confusion as it drained from my being.

The disconcerting light show had lessened considerably once the fire trucks and rescue vehicle had departed the scene. The coroner’s hearse would be arriving in due course, and Amanda Stark’s remains would be zipped into a body bag and driven the short distance to the morgue. Even now the CSU technicians were packing up, and the crime scene would soon be officially cleared.

“That’s right, a dark colored panel van. Probably black. Like a delivery truck,” Ben said into his cell phone and shot me a questioning glance at the end of the sentence.

I nodded assent and mouthed the color.

“Yeah, I can hold for a second.”

Once I had convinced Felicity and he that I was okay, we had moved away from the crime scene proper to put some distance between Amanda Stark’s corpse and me. My wife was diligently maintaining preternatural defenses around the both of us, but the physical distance was an added measure of safety. I was feeling particularly helpless at having to depend upon her for protection in an arena I was so familiar with, but I was also beginning to feel confident that my vulnerability was rapidly coming to its end. At almost the very instant the staccato barrage of memories had cemented themselves into a single lucid and meaningful thought I had automatically grounded. The connection had remained strong and unchallenged since, and the adjunct to my recent revelation that came as a deep feeling of calm was still with me. Things were starting to make sense.

“So how’re you feelin’?” Ben addressed me with a stab of his finger while he was placed on hold. Out of habit he shifted the mouthpiece back out of the way as he spoke. “You’re actin’ like ya’ just came out of a coma or somethin’.”

“In a way I did,” I confessed. “I think maybe my inability to connect the dots is the reason I’ve been so out of it.”

“You’ve had trouble makin’ sense of stuff before, and it’s never done this to ya’. Why now?”

“I think it might go back to that night at the morgue…”

Ben held up a finger in a “hold that thought” motion as he was summoned back to the phone. “Yeah, black,” he repeated to the person at the other end. “So, what I need ya’ ta’ do is pull all the motor vehicle registrations for panel vans in the city and county, then cross reference the owners against their DMV files. Start with black ones and work into the other colors if ya’ don’t get a hit. What we’re lookin’ for is a male, over six feet, most likely Caucasian, mid ta’ late thirties.”

He listened to the device for a moment then barked into the mouthpiece once again, “You’ve got computers, don’t ya’? Uh-huh, yeah… So turn ‘em back on or whatever. Whaddaya mean ya’ can’t? Yeah, well your maintenance schedule ain’t my problem. No, tomorrow afternoon isn’t good enough. You’ve got till I get there which is about,” he stole a quick glance at his wristwatch. “Ten minutes from now… Uh-huh…Sure…Well I guess you’d better get started then, shouldn’t ya’? Yeah? Well right back at ya’.”

My friend stabbed the device off with a disgusted frown then tucked it into his jacket pocket. “Sorry ‘bout that. So what about the morgue?”

“The night I channeled Kendra Miller,” I continued. “I don’t think that connection was ever fully severed. What’s been happening to me ever since has probably been me channeling her frustration at not being able to get her message across.”

“And?”

“And it just created a vicious circle,” I explained. “As I channeled her frustration I became even more disconnected and frustrated myself. I was trying so hard to understand that I wasn’t focusing. For want of a better analogy, I couldn’t see the forest for the trees.”

He took a moment to smooth his hair and give his neck a thoughtful massage before resting back against the side of his van and folding his arms across his chest.

“Okay, so I guess that’d explain why you’ve been all fucked up,” he finally stated. “Ta’ be honest I was just beginnin’ to think you’d gone off the deep end.”

“You and me both.”

“Okay, now what’s the deal about the delivery truck outside police headquarters?”

“Like I said,” I explained. “It was the day you brought Allen Roberts in for questioning. That night, when I left the station, the killer was waiting for me. If it hadn’t been for the fact that an officer came up right behind me at the street corner, I’d probably have been the latest victim.”

“So why the hell didn’t ya’ say somethin’ about it before now?”

“Because until now it was just another delivery van parked on the street. I didn’t know that it was the killer stalking me,” I answered. “I’ll admit that at the time something did seem familiar, but I was still fighting a headache from our session with the old guy, not to mention everything else that had happened that day. Plus, by that time I’d been so far out of it that nothing clicked, and I just spaced it off. Now that everything has come together it seems obvious. The sound was really the key.”

“How so?”

“It’s the way the transmission sounded when he drove past me that night at the station. When I channeled Kendra Miller at the morgue, I heard the same grinding sound in the background. It didn’t seem to fit, but I can’t say that I know exactly what you’re supposed to hear when you’re being burned alive, so I just wrote it off. When we arrived at the Cherrywood Trails crime scene, a plain black panel van passed right in front of us when we were crossing the street. Remember? The driver slowed down, and when he shifted gears, there was the same high-pitched grinding noise.”