Perfect Trust: A Rowan Gant Investigation by M. R. Sellars

I’d gotten here.
These simple facts may seem obvious and mundane to virtually
everyone else, but to me they were comforting revelations.
    As to the why I was here, well that was
obvious—it was the middle of the night and I was trying to sleep.
Unfortunately, there was a perverted mantra running around inside
my head that was insisting that I do otherwise.
    I rolled to the side, upsetting Dickens in
the process, and sleepily scanned the face of the clock. The
digital readout showed it to be almost a quarter past four. For all
intents and purposes that simply meant 4:00, since my wife kept the
timepiece set fifteen minutes fast to avoid being late. The
self-imposed mind trick didn’t actually work for her, but that’s
another story entirely.
    My arm was beginning to regain its feeling,
and every moment that passed was bringing me closer to being fully
awake. The eerie echo reverberating inside my skull had been absent
for a good number of minutes now; however, it had been replaced by
my own inner voice repeating the rhyme over and over.
     
    D-E-A-D-I-A-M!
    D-E-A-D-I-A-M!
    What’s that spell?
    Dead I am!
    Louder!
    Dead I am!
    One more time!
    DEAD I AM!
     
    The seeming approbation of death was
imprinted upon my consciousness with indelible permanence, and it
continued to loop like a snippet of a song that you simply can’t
get out of your head. If its intent was to keep me from sleeping,
it was accomplishing that task with absolute perfection.
    Letting out a resigned sigh, I climbed out of
the bed as quietly as I could in order not to wake Felicity. My
eyes were fairly adjusted, and I managed to pull on some clothes
without much fuss and then retrieved my glasses and Book of
Shadows—a Witch’s dream journal of sorts—from a drawer in the
nightstand. Even though I knew I was in no danger of forgetting the
morbid ditty, I figured I’d best make written record of it because
I was certain that anything this insistent meant something
important.
    I just didn’t know what.
     
    * * * * *
     
    “How’ya feelin’?” The left field greeting
issued from the handset immediately following my “hello.” Ben’s
down to business approach to telephone conversations, sans the
typical salutations, was as identifiable as his voice, so I wasn’t
at all phased by the abruptness.
    “About as well as can be expected, I
suppose,” I returned, glancing at the clock in the corner of my
computer screen, “considering that I have an appointment with your
sister in a couple of hours.”
    I didn’t offer the fact that I had been up
since 4 a.m. because I was pretty sure I knew where the
conversation would turn from there. I was also fairly certain that
he wouldn’t accept the uneventful truth for an answer. He would
assume I was hiding something then belabor the point, and I really
didn’t need any more distractions right now. As it was, I’d been
parked in my office for the better part of my somewhat expanded
morning trying to get some work done. So far I’d accomplished
little more than going through the previous day’s mail and moving a
pile of paperwork from one side of my desk to the other. I hadn’t
exactly been what you could call productive.
    What I really needed to do was return a few
phone calls and put together some proposals for clients, but I
simply didn’t have the motivation. Even though I was trying, I was
still feeling so overwhelmed by everything; it seemed useless to
attempt anything more than simply existing.
    “Cheer up, white man,” he told me. “She’s
good at what she does. It’s not like she’s gonna bite or
somethin’.”
    “I know, Ben. I know.”
    We both fell speechless, him becoming just
the sound of someone breathing on the other end of the phone and me
turning quietly introspective.
    “Well, there’s really no easy way ta’ tell
ya’ this,” my friend finally spoke. “But I’ve got some news ya’
prob’ly don’t wanna hear.”
    “The handwriting?” I asked.
    “Yeah. It’s