Coven (12 page)

“
We knew you’d get here
eventually. So we waited.”

Waited. Get here.
Waiting.
“Then it
was
you in town. In Besser’s De
Ville.”

“
Uh huh,” she
admitted. “We were driving around—scouting, you might say. We were
looking for a suitable enlistee.”

“
Why do you keep
saying
we
? You
mean you and Besser?”

“
No, Dudley’s busy right
now.” Winnifred’s grin spread as wide as her legs had been. “He’s
helping our master.”

Madness,
Tom thought.

“
We,” she went on, “as in
myself, and…her,” Winnifred Saltenstall pointed into the dark.
“Your new sister, Tom.”

A shadow stood in the corner. Tom turned on
the overhead. What stood there looking at him was a freakish hooded
woman in a long black cloak and sunglasses. She
grinned…hideously.

Fluid giggles floated up, like kindergarten
kids laughing.

Madness,
Tom thought again.

“
We need you, Tom,”
Winnifred said.

—
You’ll be happy with us.
Our master will be very happy.

Both women stepped forward.
Winnifred continued, “We’re inviting you to take part in a miracle,
Tom. We
need
you.”

The woman in black kept giggling in abrupt,
wet bursts. On and off, on and off, the giggling went, like the
sped up cackle of a band of witches. The sound made Tom want
to puke.

Winnifred was giggling too. Her sparse trim
of pubic hair showed unabashed, glistening from
self excitation. A black pendant lay between her big, bloused
breasts. It looked like an upside down cross. On her left hand
was a square black ring. In her right hand she held—Tom’s eyes
bulged—a hammer.

The woman in black was holding something
too. It looked small, slender, sharp. It looked like a nail.

A nail? A hammer?

Her shaded gaze shifted in on him; she moved
gently forward. Her lips were red. Her face was lustrous, perfect
white.

Something glistened, and all at once Tom
collapsed. Suddenly his neck hurt. He lay on the floor, paralyzed.
Shadows stepped around him. Winnifred’s face smiled down like a
godhead in the sky.

Did someone say “Destiny”?

The cloaked woman giggled some more. Tom
felt numb. The black pendant swayed as Winnifred, girlishly
uncoordinated, knelt very daintily and placed the nail in the
center of Tom’s head.

««—»»

And at precisely the same
time that Tom McGuire was being introduced to “destiny” in a most
bizarre manner, Wade St. John was having a nightmare. In this
nightmare, Professor Dudley Besser, as an inbred, cannibalistic
creek person wearing size 54 overalls, was dragging screaming
halter topped blondes onto a nighted swamp pier, stripping
them and chopping them up neat as a butcher. Like a machine, the
heavy cleaver chunked through flesh, bone, and wood. As he chopped,
a pendant swung back and forth about his fat, dirt lined neck.
Professor Besser’s eyes were dim silver, and when he opened his
mouth, dim silver light came out, and a silver moon cast dim silver
light onto the dead water. Professor Besser was chopping away like
a regular one man slaughterhouse.
Chunk, chunk, chunk,
the cleaver
went, all night long. Wade was sitting in a lawn chair at the end
of the pier. He was reading a book and drinking a bottle of Samuel
Adams lager. He knew this was a dream and was therefore unconcerned
that his biology professor was dismembering naked blondes mere
yards away. Wade supposed he would help the girls if this weren’t a
dream, but it was, so he didn’t. A casual glance upward showed him
that Besser had kicked his psychotic chicanery up a notch. The
overalls had come down and now he was copulating with one of the
torsoed blondes...or at least trying. His obesity prevented any
effective intercourse and eventually he just said “Damn it!” and
began masturbating with another girl’s severed hand.

Charming,
Wade thought.
Man, this
is some fucked up dream.

The cold beer was great in
the dank hanging midnight heat of the swamp, but the book he was
reading was not so great. It had a girl on the cover, who was
beautiful in a way that could not be described. Each page of the
book was blood-red. There was writing on them but the writing was
in some indecipherable language that was somehow mocking.
Dream knowledge informed Wade that only women could read the
weird glyphs; men could not. A great fear rose in him, and he threw
the book into the swamp. The
chunk, chunk,
chunk
of Besser’s chopping had ceased. Then
a scream burst forth loud as a trumpet. Terror pricked up Wade’s
back, plucked his skin. Murmurs drifted vaguely in front of him.
What were they? When Wade gazed down the pier, he shrieked.
Professor Besser lay belly down by a rotted piling. He was no
longer dressed in creekman’s overalls but in the usual slacks,
shirt, and tie. He lay very still. Oh, and one other thing: his
head was gone. Wade wondered where it was. He thought:
People don’t take heads. They take exams, they
take vitamins, but they don’t take heads!
This seemed a very workable social rule; you could generally
count on it. But soon the whereabouts of Professor Besser’s head
became immaterial. A far more pressing matter arose. The pieces of
the girls Besser had chopped up began to reassemble. Pretty,
severed legs hopped about, awaiting reclamation. Arms waited to be
reconnected to proper shoulders, while torsos bellied through the
pile of twitching limbs. One girl with high, pointed breasts
twisted an arm off another girl’s shoulder. “That’s not your arm!
It’s mine!” Another girl with a broad rump clumped footless through
the pile. “Where’re my feet?” she asked. “Has anyone seen my feet?”
Slowly but surely the group of butchered girls pulled themselves
back together. Wade wasn’t too keen on confronting a bunch of
reassembled—and probably very pissed off—women. But the only way
off the pier was through them, unless…unless… Wade looked into the
swamp water. It was black, mirror still, and it smelled nice,
like perfume.
I wonder if this bitch is
deep,
he asked himself. “Of course it’s
deep,” chided the girl with the rump. But what was that rasping
noise? Wade’s eyes nearly popped out of his head; the girl was
sharpening her teeth with a crosscut file.
Not good,
Wade reasoned. The
high breasted girl said, “It’s more than deep, Wade.
It’s
bottomless.”
Wade
opted not to jump in the water.
He would just have to fight the girls, and was that so bad? It
should be easy; women were the weaker sex, right? “Right,” one girl
answered. She was petitely slender, ninety pounds if that, with
little cupcake breasts. She picked up Professor Besser’s headless,
three hundred pound body as if it were a bag of packing
peanuts. “See how weak I am?” she said, smiling. She heaved the
massive corpse past Wade, where it hit the water like a pallet full
of mason blocks. The girls rejoiced in laughter. Wade pissed his
pants. No more need be said of the
weaker
sex. The girls were all
reassembled now—perfectly—with no signs of Besser’s methodical
butchery. “Does my hair look all right?” one girl fussed. “Oooo,
that fat guy broke one of my nails!” complained another. “Girls,
girls,” reminded a third. “We have work to do.” “Woman’s work,”
came the low chorus. Their eyes all focused on Wade, but were they
eyes or dim silver gleams? Wade didn’t know. That was the problem
with dreams—you never knew what was what. Was a cigar a phallic
symbol, or just a goddamn cigar? The girls closed in on him now,
stepping in time very slowly. The high breasted girl assumed
the group’s speaking chores. “Wade St. John, it’s time for your
sentence.” “Huh?” Wade intoned. “You are an affront to womankind,”
she said. “You treat women as objects for your own pleasure.” “Not
true!” Wade yelled back. “I have great respect for the female
mind.” The girls on the pier laughed, and their laughter was a song
of truth. Wade faltered. How many girls had he taken for granted,
used, discarded?
Dozens?
he thought. The girls on the pier laughed.
Probably more like a hundred. How many had he deceived for the
mindless entity in his pants, lied to, cheated on, hurt? For the
first time in his life—and in a dream, no less—he realized what a
despicable sexist piece of shit he was. This was the sentence he’d
been waiting since puberty to pay. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m
sorry.” “Tell that to all the girls you treated like garbage, all
the girls you
used.”
“I’ll repent!” he exclaimed. The girls on the pier laughed.
But he would, by God, if only they’d give him the chance. “I’m
sorry, I’m sorry,” he muttered, then heard an absolutely
bloodcurdling scream. A shadow moved away. Wade sat
spread legged in the lawn chair, his jeans down. The women
watched, their eyes full of dim silver light. But what were they
watching, and who had screamed? Then Wade knew: his appeal had been
revoked. The spokeswoman was saying, “…and your sentence shall
hereby be executed at once.” It didn’t take Wade long to figure
this one out. The girl who’d been filing her teeth stood before
them all, chewing something with vigor. Wade finally recognized the
scream—his own—and he looked down in horror to see that he no
longer possessed a pair of testicles. Wade screamed again, long and
hard, and the girls rejoiced at his horror. The girl with filed
teeth grinned as her jaws worked enthusiastically on their new
fruit. “They’re kind of crunchy!” she exclaimed. She rubbed her
stomach and swallowed. Wade threw up. Then someone shouted, “The
Mother’s coming!” “She’s coming back!” the leader rejoiced. “She’s
accepting
another
sacrifice!” Wade was mortified; he gestured at his crotch.
“Haven’t I sacrificed enough?” “Your balls go to us,” the leader
said. “The rest of you goes to the Mother.” Wade was lifted up and
held over the pier’s edge. Behind him something rose from the
water, an entity vast, black and immense. Wade could no more
describe it than describe the notion of how the universe was made.
It was the Mother. That’s all he knew, and all he
needed
to know. Now he
would learn exactly what had happened to Professor Besser’s head.
Wade screamed as his own head was completely encased by a huge,
wet, black mouth. The girls fell to their knees in worship. “The
Mother,” they chanted. “The Mother.” Wade’s head was bitten off. It
was swallowed whole down a silken esophagus and eventually landed
in a cavern, atop a
mountain
of heads. There were thousands, or even millions,
of heads here, deep in the Mother’s belly. Soon the heads began to
be digested in the squirming black stomach. Wade whooped as his
consciousness dissolved, feminine enzymes reverting his psyche to
wet pulp, then granules, then ash. The ashes of Wade St. John mixed
with the ashes of the other men, and over time the ashes were
spewed from some tight, miles high orifice, sifting out in a
trail over sunlit fields and sweet smelling landscapes of
new plowed soil. Moist, pretty things grew from that soil, the
loveliest things, through the ashes of Wade’s soul. In other words,
Wade was fertilizer.

—

CHAPTER
11

Lydia Prentiss was staring at the single
Marlboro 100. It beckoned her, like lust. Rather symbolically, it
stood on end.

“
Sladder’s not the perp,”
she said. “I’ve told you ten times.”

Chief White had put her up in an empty lab
at the sciences center. Yesterday she’d made a breakdown of the
agro site as fast as she could. Department of agriculture officers
had swarmed in just as she finished. They’d sealed the site
“pending investigation.”

“
You know what I think?”
White said. “You’re grabbin’ for shit.”

All Lydia wanted was her cigarette and some
sleep. She didn’t want to argue. “Chief, just look at the plain
facts.”

“
The plain facts are that
Sladder was packin’ an illegal gun!”

“
Illegally carried, but
legally owned. Wake up, Chief. Security guards are notorious for
carrying pocket pieces like this.”

“
And I suppose you know
exactly what kind of gun it was.”

“
Sure, a Raven Arms Model
P25. Costs about eighty bucks. Don’t they teach your men anything
in the academy? All I had to do was call State Handgun Records and
ask. Sladder bought the piece,
legally,
in 1981 from a local gun
shop. The guy’s got no rap sheet at all. He’s never even had a
traffic ticket.”

“
Neither did the Boston
Fuckin’ Strangler. He was still a nut.”

“
Sladder had forty years of
steady employment; his only black marks were a few reprimands for
booze. He won medals in World War II.”

“
I don’t give a shit. He
was a rummy who carried an illegal handgun. That’s good enough for
me.”

“
Fine, Chief. Think what
you want.”

White rolled a King Edward
cigar in his mouth. “Just give me your
technical conclusions,
Prentiss, not
lip service.”

The cigarette would be good now, real good.
“My conclusions are as follows. Two or more perpetrators entered
the agro site shortly after the power failure, about midnight. The
girl, Penelope, was with him; several girls on the hall said she
often visited the site at odd hours, to see the horses. In the
horse stalls, she and Sladder stumbled onto one of the perps, the
one with the ax. Here, Sladder sustained a serious injury to his
right arm. I believe his arm was completely severed, judging by the
trajectory of the bloodfall.”