Coven (3 page)

The trances had started weeks ago. But were
they really trances? That was the only way they’d agreed to
describe them. At first he and Winnifred had feared their own
sanity. “Debris stimulated scotopic maladaptation compounded by
symptomal endophasic perceptual induction,” she’d first
declared. “Inpro-portional catecholamic production causated by
reactive deviations of cerebral synaptic response.”

Whatever would he do with
her? She jumped to conclusions almost as quickly as she jumped into
bed. But Besser knew by now that this “trance” phenomenon was not
relative to any psychiatric disorder. It wasn’t lucid dreaming or
unsystematized hypnagogia, and it couldn’t be scotopic because it
wasn’t visual. In the trances, they saw without seeing. They were
simply
shown
.

“
Power,” he said aloud to
the beautiful strange edged dark.

The trances left no detail unclear. Each
night they came stronger into his head, and emphasized his
importance.

(Yes! Importance.)

—
and the power, the
promised
power
.

He went to the window. The night outside
looked unreal. Colors seemed crisper, blazing, but darker. Lights
glazed. Beyond, the campus looked compressed to a scary, opalescent
clarity, etched in brilliant darkness.

Darkness,
Besser mused. Hadn’t the face—the submerged face
in their dreams—implied that darkness was now their
light?

Behind him, Winnifred
stirred, murmuring like troubled sleep.
If
the dean only knew,
Besser thought.
Winnifred Saltenstall was beautiful by anyone’s standards;
Besser—fourteen years older than her thirty five—weighed over
three hundred pounds. What else but the trances could explain her
sudden, constant lust for him? He’d seen her past lovers:
well built, handsome young men, reminders of what Besser would
never be. So the trances were a bond. Mental. Sexual.

Winnifred Saltenstall was
married to
Dean
Saltenstall. The dean was powerful, important, and very rich.
He was also very gay. He’d merely married Winnifred to verify
respectability. They had a deal which worked out quite well: they
would pursue their own sexual interests as they pleased, discreetly
of course, and serve one another’s domestic needs as necessary.
“It’s easy to be married to someone who buys you a new Maserati
every year,” she’d once said, “and doesn’t care who you fuck on the
side.”

“
Gods,” Winnifred muttered
now. “God and goddess.” Her eyes fluttered open. She breathed deep
in her chair, rousing from the trance. Besser was staring at her
breasts.

“
Oh, Dudley,” she
whispered. “It was so strong.”

“
I know. The trances get
stronger every night.”

Her pose relaxed. Her knees parted. “Are you
sure we’re not crazy? Maybe it’s hallucinotic.”

Professor Besser promptly
frowned. “Delusional behavior and hallucinations are not
shared
.”

“
Folie à
deux
, Dudley. It can happen—it’s
documented.”

“
Yes, I know,” he scoffed.
“Multiple hysterical viewpoints, di exocathesis, and
such. These are
psychopathic
labels, Winnie. We clearly are
not
psychopathic. This is
real.”

“
I suppose it is,” she
conceded. “But it scares me. The trances scare me to
death.”

Besser wasn’t listening anymore; he was
staring. Her breasts showed through her opened blouse, heavy in the
lace bra.

“
Ghosts,” she
said.

“
What?”

“
The trances must be
ghosts.”

For pity’s sake,
he thought. This was not the first time she’d
suggested the supernatural. “That’s ridiculous. Ghosts?
Demons?”

“‘
Paramental entities’ is
the proper term.” She ran a finger across her bare stomach. “The
face in the trances, the voices—it’s all evil.”

“
For pity’s sake,” Besser
said.

Her hand rested on her thigh. Moved up.
Squeezed.

“
Evil,” she repeated, and
smiled.

Here was the sharpest aftereffect of the
trances: raw, pathological lust. They both trembled with it. The
trances accelerated their sex drives, forced them to fuck. How many
times had they done it already today? Eight times? A dozen?

The great face in the trance called it his
love.

Ghosts?
Besser thought.

Winnifred slipped off her
dampened panties and began to masturbate. She did this quite a bit
now, anytime it suited her. “I’m
so
horny, Dudley. The trances make me so
horny.”

Teasing bitch,
he thought. She always liked to tease him first.
She unsnapped her bra, releasing the large, beautiful breasts. She
caressed them, plucked out the nipples. Her ass squirmed in the
chair, and she licked her lips.

Besser had been teased all his life by
people like her. But he was powerless in his lust now. He unbuckled
his size 54 belt, lowered his trousers to relieve the throbbing. He
hated her for this, but he remembered—what? Promises? Yes, and
power.

Then he remembered the faces behind the
face. Who were these forlorn creatures? He felt them watching this
very moment, phantasmal voyeurs. Their lips were so red, their
teeth like slivers of glass. Could they really be ghosts?

Winnifred spread her vulva with her fingers,
showing it to him. “Isn’t it pretty, Dudley?”

“
Yes,” Professor Besser
said.

“
Do you like
it?”

“
Yes.”

“
Do you want to fuck
it?”

Besser groaned. His knees
were buckling.
Teasing, teasing
bitch!
It wasn’t fair that she should be
able to control him only because he was fat. Her lust propped him
up like a dummy, a clown.

“
Come over here and fuck
it.”

He didn’t like to think of himself as a
clown animated by the beauty of women. Yet he obeyed her lewd
command, helpless. He would have his revenge later, when better
things had come…

Power,
he thought, crawling to his nymph.
Power untold.

—
YES,
promised the voice in his head.

“
I love you, Dudley,” she
sighed. She spread her legs, offering the slit of her sex like a
prize. Its pinkened wet glimmer lured him, and seemed to
say,
Be a good clown.

He dragged her to the carpet and kissed the
prize. Squirming, she grabbed his head, rubbed his face in it.

I love you too,
he thought.
Till death do
us part.

—
YES,
the great face repeated.
—OH,
YES.

««—»»

Red pumping over orgies and food.

—
We wish we could be
you.

Chaos wed to perfection. The perfection was
a labyrinth and madness was a sound. Were these memories? Taste:
warm copper, salt, meat. Sight: swollen breasts bared, loins
inflamed.

Sound: screams.

Lips parted over needle teeth. Something—a
word. Supremate. Sleek, white throats gulped gouts of blood.

—

CHAPTER
4

Home for the summer stared
him in the face like an empty smile. Wade stepped off the elevator
onto the eighth floor of Clark Hall, Exham’s largest male
dorm.
Home, sweet home,
he thought dryly.
Some
fun summer. Thanks, Dad.

Silence fogged the hall. There was no noise,
no rock and roll, no ping pong ruckus. No nothing. At least
Jervis would be on for the summer sessions. Jervis took classes
even when he didn’t need to—just to be close to his girlfriend. The
poor jerk was in love, but at least Wade wouldn’t have to spend the
entire summer alone.

Wade had two best friends: Tom McGuire and
Jervis Phillips. Jervis was clearly the more eccentric of the two.
He was a philosophy nut, worshiping any manner of unintelligible
schools of thought, existentialism in particular. On his door hung
an eternal portrait of Sartre. Wade winced at it, as usual.

But the door was open a crack. Wade entered
and announced, “Howdy, Jerv! I’m back!”

Jervis was sitting in the corner. He was
unconscious.

Wade rushed to check Jervis’ pulse, then
looked around and gasped. The room had been ransacked. Lamps were
knocked over, furniture smashed. The Sony TV screen had a hole in
it; in the hole was an empty beer bottle. Bookshelves had been
hauled down. Jervis’ stereo system and record collection had been
thrown onto the floor.

Then Jervis came to. “Wade. Am I...in Hell
yet?”

Wade gaped. Jervis looked in worse repair
than the room. Dark smudges like axle grease ringed his eyes. His
hair, oily and unwashed, stuck up every which way, while his Lord
& Taylor shirt was stained with beer and vomit. He looked
skinny, starved. Empty Kirin bottles lay everywhere, all around
him.

“
You’re drunk,” Wade
said.

Jervis burped. “I ain’t drunk. I’m just
drinkin’.”

“
Jerv, what happened here?
Do you owe someone money?”

“
Yes, my
Existenz,
”
Jervis
mumbled. “I have
been forsaken.”

He opened a bottle of Kirin with his teeth.
Wade winced.

The bottle cap pried off with ease, along
with the side of an incisor.

“
Jesus Christ! What
happened! Did your entire family die? Did your father’s stocks
crash? What?”

Jervis spat out bits of tooth. He emptied
half the Kirin in one gulp. “The end—that’s what happened. The end
of the world.”

When Jervis got drunk, Wade knew, he became
indecipherable with all that existential crap. “Is Tom around?”
Wade asked.

“
I think he’s down at the
shop working on his Camaro. I asked him to drive me to Hell when he
gets it running.” Jervis finished the Kirin on the second pull.
“Yes, I’d like that. I’d like to go to Hell.”

“
Jerv, your whole room is
wrecked. I gotta know what happened.”

“
Sartre was wrong, you
know,” Jervis drawled on. “Existence precedes betrayal, not
essence. There is no essence. There’s…nothing” —and with that,
Jervis passed out again.

Stepping over empty Kirin bottles, Wade
dragged his friend to the bed. Then he took another glance at the
damage. It was hopeless. This would take days to clean up.

But what had happened?

He’d have to find Tom. Maybe he knew what
had turned Jervis into a drunken, rambling waste.

He stowed his bags in his own room two doors
down. Its sameness somehow comforted him. Wade’s room came with
every luxury. There was a small kitchen, a fridge, a separate
bathroom and study, even a trash compactor. How could Dad expect
him to do well in school without a trash compactor?

The red light blinked on
the answering machine.
But nobody even
knows I’m back,
he thought.

Beep:
“Wade, I know you’re back,” said a voice on the machine. “This
is Jessica. I…oh, shit, I miss you! Please call me!”

Old flames never die. Sure, babe, I’ll call
you. Next century.

Beep:
“Wade, I know you’re back,” claimed the next voice. “Word gets
around when the best looking guy on campus returns
unexpectedly. This is Sally, in case you’ve forgotten my voice.
Maybe you’ve forgotten my body too, so why don’t you come over
right now, and I’ll give you a little lesson in
refamiliarization.”

No thanks. Body by Fisher. Brains by Mack
truck.

Beep:
“Wade! I can’t believe you haven’t called me yet—”

He reset the machine,
ignoring the nine remaining messages. It was nice to be wanted, but
Wade figured that was their tough luck.
Only so much of this handsome devil to go around, girls. Be
patient.
Chuckling, he locked his room and
went out to the Vette.

The campus roads were close to empty. Wade
sped past the liberal arts buildings, watching for the famed Exham
police, who all seemed to have an affinity for radar guns. Wade’s
Corvette was definitely on their Ten Most Wanted List, and so was
Wade. He probably had enough tickets from these chumps to paper his
dorm room.

The campus glowed green
with grass and sun, placated in lazy tranquility. Crosswalks stood
vacant, hall entries deserted. This vast emptiness made him feel
sentenced; it reminded him of all the fun he’d be missing out
on
. Summer school,
he thought, in disgust and despair.
The rest of the world will be partying, and I’ll be stuck
here.

Next he passed WHPL, the campus radio
station—progressive, not pop, he thanked God—and around the next
bend the Crawford T. Sciences Center loomed. Wade felt dismal
driving by. Here, he’d not only be retaking a biology course he’d
flunked last year but also starting his new job in toilet
maintenance. Wade valued his reputation very much—handsome rich
kids in Corvettes had appearances to maintain—but if people found
out he was cleaning johns for minimum wage, he could kiss the rep
goodbye. He pondered this potential nightmare so intently he missed
the next stop sign.