Coven. Part 28

It all fit well with the course of the day: a dream that made no sense. Was it premonitory? Wade dreamed he was paralyzed, his jaw locked open by pegs. The women in black were stuffing slabs of putrid meat into his mouth. The meat was black and full of parasites. -This is what we eat at home, Wade. Isn't it good? It was not good. Each helping crawled down his throat, warmly alive, and every time he thought the dream was over, another dainty white hand appeared to push still more of the squirming meat into his forced open mouth...

When he awoke, he felt empty headed. He sat up in bed and felt for Lydia, but she wasn't there.

Wade, I borrowed your car, hope you don't mind. I got this idea about the sunlight stuff, and I have to check it out on my own.

Stay here till I get back.

Lydia Wade crumpled up the note. He had two choices. He could sit here naked and do nothing, or he could act. He couldn't imagine what her "idea about the sunlight stuff" could be, but where else could it lead but back to the groves?

He dressed, checked out, and left. It was just past 3 A.M. If he walked fast and cut across campus, he might make it to the groves in an hour.

The warm night seemed to welcome him in his solitude; the moon gave him light. d.a.m.n it, Lydia, he thought, and stepped up his pace. Where the h.e.l.l are you?

"You're in the labyrinth," Winnie said. "Our master's palace."

"The Supremate," Lydia muttered.

"That's correct."

"Who is he?"

"He's...G.o.d, I think.

Great. I knew I never should've stopped going to church. Lydia could see very little within the temphold, which seemed vaguely lit by some bizarre blackish light. This is a jail, she realized. A black rod in the ceiling gave the impression that she was being watched. She'd already tried, and given up on, simply walking out. The hold's barrier, though invisible, couldn't be pa.s.sed. Beyond it she could see nothing.

Except Winnifred, who stood on the other side. She was nude, her flesh like mist in the labyrinth's static blackness. "You can't feel it in there," the woman said, "but out here, the Supremate's breath is on me. It's the psilight, it's his influence. The Supremate is a G.o.d of great pa.s.sion, and he breathes his pa.s.sion on all of us." Her hand then ran over her pubis.

Lydia recalled the events that brought her here-the student shop, Jervis, and the solid cinder block wall. Instead of killing her, they'd...

"Why am I here? What do you want me for?"

"We don't want you," Winnifred said, stroking herself. "Wade's the one we want. And when he finds out we have you, he'll come."

Would he? "What do you want Wade for?"

"It's all part of the master plan." Winnie lapsed back into her muse, touching deeper. She m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed unabashed.

"What's that thing around your neck?" Lydia asked.

Winnifred fingered the amulet between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. "An extromission key. You just put it in and walk through. There are extromitters all over the labyrinth. We even installed some at the college and in the woods. Jervis brought you in through one."

Doorways, Lydia realized. "You think Wade's going to come here? He doesn't even know where I am."

"Jervis left a message for him," Winnifred said, stroking, stroking, eyes slitted. "He'll come. Love always follows its heart."

Lydia wondered.

"And afterward, we have a surprise for you."

"What?" Lydia asked.

"That." Winnifred pointed, her face aglow, grinning.

It had been there the whole time in the next temphold, just not close enough to see. Lydia felt very sick very quickly.

It stood up as if on command, pressed the fingerless pads of its hand against the barrier. A stout, flexing holotype with spotted gray skin like a slug's. It stood on four bent legs, between which hung t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es the size of grapefruits. It grinned from its prognathous face, drooling for her. The thing's erection, with pulsing blue veins like hoses, was as long and thick as a leg of lamb. The bulbed glans, too, drooled with enthusiasm.

Oh, s.h.i.+t, Lydia thought.

Nina McCulloch was just about to leave the bathroom when her world exploded. She heard the front door being broken down. She heard screams like sirens, and dark satanic laughs. When she gapped the bathroom door and peeked out, she saw...h.e.l.l.

She saw a hooded girl in black and a dead man with an ax.

Elizabeth and her drug friends cowered, still screaming. Kara tried to run, but not fast enough for the huge luciferian ax. It blurred effortlessly like a great sail and sliced her into two pieces, from right shoulder to left hip. Her top slid off her bottom, and innards unfurled. Then Stacy tried to bolt, but she slipped and fell-screaming-on those same innards. The dead man placed his foot on Stacy's head and crushed it.

Poor Elizabeth was next. Her corkscrew screams blazed away as the dead man dragged her out from behind the couch. He lifted her off her feet, by her ear. Nina was surprised that the ear did not come off. Then the girl in the black cloak approached, and from her mouth shot a long pink cord with a needle at the end. Elizabeth fell silent when the needle punched into her throat.

I'm sorry for my sins, Nina thought.

Now the dead man was yanking up the carpet-he was rolling them up in it! But then he paused, as if perturbed. "I'm gonna take a look around," he remarked to his hooded companion. "Make sure no one else is here."

-Hurry, Jervis! the evil abbess replied. She knelt down and began to lick blood off Kara's legs, giggling.

Jervis, Nina pondered. She recognized him now. The dead man was Jervis Phillips, a boy who'd been in some of her cla.s.ses. Her eye froze in the gap. Jervis searched Elizabeth's room, then Nina's. He stopped to light a cigarette, still perturbed. He was staring straight at the bathroom door.

Nina backed against the wall.

The door pushed open. Jervis stuck his head in, looked around.

Jesus save me, Nina prayed.

He would cut her up like Kara. He would crush her head like Stacy. He would let the abbess lick blood off her legs. Then he would take her body to Satan.

She bowed her head in the dark. Jesus...please...

"All clear." Jervis was walking away. "I just had this funny feeling that someone else was here."

The abbess rose, chin smeared red and grinning. She followed Jervis out, who impossibly had rolled the three girls up in the carpet and was carrying them away on his shoulder.

"Thank you, Jesus," Nina whispered when they were long gone.

Wade cut across campus quickly, weaving between unlit buildings and hulking trees. It was embarra.s.sing having to walk when you owned one of the most expensive cars in America. He could call a Yellow, but what on earth would he say? Cabbie, drop me off at the clearing behind the agro site, you know, the mutated one?

But when he rounded Tillinghast Hall, he saw headlights.

A car had turned off Arkham to the Hill. Lydia! he thought at once, but then he noted the headlight configuration. It wasn't the Vette. It was a Dodge Colt.

Wade dove behind trimmed hedges. The Colt pa.s.sed under the streetlamp. Jervis' face was plainly visible. He was smoking a Carlton. One of those girls sat beside him, grinning. The back of the car seemed weighed down.

Wade waited for the tailgate to disappear. They'd come off Arkham, away from Duke of Clarence Hall and the dean's house. He trotted north, up the drive, to the dean's estate.

The mansion faced him, quiet, normal. But when Wade rapped on the old bra.s.s knocker, the door fell in. It had been broken off its hinges and propped back up, to feign security.

Don't go in, Wade warned himself, and went in. The hall lights were on; he took the stairs up, watching for shadows, listening. A door down the hall appeared to be open, but when he moved closer he saw that it, too, had been knocked down.

Wade was s.h.i.+t scared. He expected-something. So it almost shocked him when he turned on the lights and found himself standing in a perfectly normal bedroom.

Then he opened the door to the not-so normal closet.

One glimpse was all it took: the dean's crumpled corpse acrawl with flies, the enormous wash of blood on the clean white walls. All that blood was too much to view at once. Wade didn't even notice what exactly had been done to the dean. He didn't need to. This was a butcher's jubal, party-time for a maniac. Blood was a sacred substance, the Eucharist of life. Here, though, in the dim closet, it had been spilled for the sheer sport of it. For fun.

Wade ran. He pounded down the steps and tore out of the house, and he didn't stop running until his legs could bear no more of it, his energy e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed as a spurt of the basest fears. The night swept him into its velvet black caress, and Wade, brain numb now and exhausted, was left to stumble with feet of lead back to the beginning...

CHAPTER 28.

Murder, he thought. Blood.

Wade couldn't stop thinking about it, couldn't stop seeing it in his mind. There'd been so much blood.

Through the dead, empty night, he drifted more than walked. The campus lay silent behind him, strangely still and very black. Insentient, he made his way along trails once familiar but now forgotten, past buildings and halls dark and blank as gravestones.

The sky seemed depthless, a slate void. Phantom reefs of clouds roved past a darkled moon. Far and away, the chapel bell tolled, signaling 4 A.M. The monotonous, dull peals incited him, chipped cracks into his shock. Then he saw the lighted sign: "Campus Police."

Wade stepped in unnoticed. Leaving the hot night and its murder behind him was like stepping into paradise...

Porker was eating microwaved cheese dogs at the booking desk. He was eating them with his fingers, without rolls. Sergeant Peerce sat at his own desk, intent on a magazine called Babes with Big b.o.o.bs.

"The dean is dead," Wade announced.

Porker's immense face floated up. Babes with Big b.o.o.bs lowered to the desk, unveiling Peerce's typical hillbilly smirk.

"You heard me," Wade said. "The dean's dead. Murdered."

"Probably dumped his fancy car in a ditch," Porker surmised, "and wants us to tow it out for him."

"Just another daddy rich smart a.s.s," Peerce added.

Wade could not believe this response to his announcement. "Are you guys deaf? I just got done telling you the dean is dead!"

"You mean Dean Saltenstall?" Porker inquired.

Wade slumped. "No, Dean d.i.c.k. Is there any other dean on this campus, you fat jughead? He's been murdered."

Peerce and Porker stood up at the same time. They looked at each other. Then they looked at Wade.

"Just like that, huh?" Peerce asked. "The dean's been murdered?"

"Yes! You understand Englis.h.!.+ Praise G.o.d!"

"And just how did he come to be murdered, boy?"

"Well, I don't actually know," Wade admitted. "But-"

"Ya hear that, Porker? He don't really know."

"What difference does it make, you brickhead? I saw him in the closet! and I saw the...I saw the...blood."

Peerce and Porker chuckled. "St. John," Peerce said. "This is just another one of your practical jokes."

"You must think we're pretty dumb," Porker added.

Dumb? Wade thought. Naw.

"We been bustin' our tails all night. We got one missing security guard and two dormitory break ins. We ain't got time for your practical jokes."

"Look," Wade said. "All that stuff you just said-missing persons, break ins-it's all part of this. A lot of crazy s.h.i.+t has gone on tonight, and it all starts in the dean's closet."

Chewing cheese dogs, Porker inquired, "What would the dean be doing in a closet at four in the morning?"

"Getting murdered," Wade answered. "Don't believe me? Go check."

Peerce made a contemplating face. He got the dean's number out of White's directory. He paused. Then he dialed the number.

"You're wasting your time," Wade declared. "He won't answer."

Peerce listened and waited, tapping his foot. He waited some more and hung up. "He didn't answer."

"Of course he didn't answer, you crawfish for brains Cajun moron! How can a dead man answer a f.u.c.king telephone?"

Then Porker said, "It can't hurt to take a look, Sarge."

"Shee-it," Peerce agreed. "All right, punk. Lead the way."