Coven (11 page)

“
Can’t help it,” Wade
admitted. “I can’t shake this gut feeling that something’s happened
to him.”

“
I’ll tell you what. I’ll
stop by the campus drunk tank on my way back to the dorm, just to
be safe.”

“
Good idea. Maybe he got
trashed, busted.”

But that wasn’t it either. Something itched
at Wade. And what he never noticed was that the same car had driven
by the saloon a half dozen times. A big maroon sedan, like
Besser’s.

««—»»

Penelope found she could move a little now.
She could move her head up, she could move her fingers and toes.
She looked down the side of her body. She was naked. She’d been
laid out on her back in some strange, dim light. Was it a floor she
lay on? A table? It was warm here, and humid like a steam room. She
could see with great clarity, and there was another feeling,
something internal. A sharp dazzle seemed to radiate along her
boneline. Had someone given her drugs? It felt strange but not
unpleasant.

None of this made sense, yet even that did
not occur to her. She’d been assaulted tonight, abducted, and
inexplicably paralyzed, but amazingly she felt no fear. She felt
giddy, happy even. One of her arms she could move. She guided her
hand to her neck, to the faint stinging. It felt like a bump with a
hole in it, and right next to it was another hole, which didn’t
sting at all. All she knew was that she had two holes in her throat
and she didn’t care. She even giggled at the revelation.

Next she moved her hand across her chest; a
pleasant tingle followed. The feeling spread in a wishbone from her
breasts to her sex, glittering along the inside of her thighs and
up her belly. Her breasts felt impossibly large. When she squeezed
them, a painful yet prurient pressure gusted to her genitals. In
her sedate confusion she finally realized what it was.

She was horny. Inexplicably
and irrepressibly
horny.

She kneaded her own breast,
feeling the swollen nipple. Next her fingers walked down and rubbed
the little button of her sex, then plucked it, twirled it, as
though it too were a nipple. The sensation was delicious. Suddenly
her mind filled with the most lewd imagery, a recollection from
that video of her father’s,
Little Oral
Annie,
but at once it shifted slightly,
to
Little Oral Penelope.
In her mind she saw her mouth stuffed with
erections, one after another, balls slapping her chin. She sucked
and sucked, and one after another, each penis slid out of her mouth
at the crisis-point, emptying lines of sperm into her face. She let
the bitter sauce run warmly down her breasts, as her hand raced at
her sex. An inexplicable feeling was mounting in her—more images
assaulted her: massive, veined penises whacking in and out of her
vagina like mindless pistons of meat, then tremoring, then filling
her to overflowing with more delicious, wet heat...

Something clicked.

The images abandoned her, replacing the
unbidden lust with an edgy curiosity. What had that sound been?
And, more importantly…

Where am I?
she thought.
A house? A
basement?
Where exactly had Professor
Besser taken her?

She seemed to be lying in a
narrow, dark room whose confines were etched very dimly in orange
and silver light. And what were those things above her? She turned
her head, looking up.
Shelves?
she thought. They looked like butts of bottles in
a wine rack, so maybe she
was
in someone’s basement. The things in the rack
glinted like glass in the dim, orange light.

Voices suddenly rang in her head like
bells.

—
Penelope!

—
Penelope! We promised you
a great destiny.

—
Oh, you’re so lucky! We
wish we could be you!

—
We love you,
Penelope!

The voices were a madness in her ears. They
blurred from side to side like stereo. They were the woman’s voice,
the woman who’d been in her car, the woman in black.

—
We have a great silver
lord, and you’ve made him very happy!

—
Yes!

—
And now it’s time for us
to fulfill our promise.

The slush voices blanked, replaced by a
vast, amplified silence. Penelope could hear her heart, her eyes
blinking, her blood as it pulsed through her veins. Her breasts and
sex throbbed in the remnants of her sexual fantasizing.

Distantly a door opened. A bent block of
light lolled across the floor. The orangish hue disappeared
altogether, leaving only what she guessed must be moonlight. A
figure came into the room, tiny in the distance and crisply black.
It cast no shadow.

More and more Penelope felt pleasantly
drugged. There was only lethargy and the intense, primitive
horniness that made no sense. The figure stood at her feet now.
Penelope recognized it at once as the woman in the black cape and
hood, yet now she seemed younger and thin, like a girl in puberty.
The white, smiling face gazed down through onyx black
sunglasses.

—
We wish we could be
you.

But why should she wear sunglasses indoors?
And, yes, she was very young, for her cape fell open and revealed
small, predeveloped breasts and a hairless pubis.

Suddenly the girl seemed very sad.

Penelope was not herself and never would be.
Images of sex remained stuffed into her head, stupefyingly precise.
How could such thoughts, once terrifying, once her worst fears, now
delight her to madness? Penelope, a virgin, cringed to be
fucked.

—
I have what you want
right here. Our master’s gift.

“
What?” Penelope was
finally able to speak.

—
YES,
came the voice. But this voice was ragged and black. The
single word concussed in her head.

It was a man’s voice.

Penelope moaned. She quivered in heat. The
dim, silverish light seemed to smother her in lust.

The girl set something down
and backed away.
—We wish we could be
you,
she said sadly. Then she
left.

Was someone breathing? Penelope heard a
noise.

Grunting, she propped herself on her elbows.
She looked past her bare feet at what the girl had left.

It was a bucket. It was just a bucket.

She fixed her eyes on it. The sound grew
louder. It reminded her of gurgling, of respiration. Then—

Did something bulge over the bucket’s
rim?

The gurgling quickly rose to an excited, wet
sputtering. The bucket began to rock back and forth, over and
over—

—
until it tipped
over.

A large puddle of dark slop poured out of
the pail. It seemed brown, shining; it shifted slightly. Clumps of
gurgling bubbles escaped its amorphous center. The mass floundered;
it seemed to be straining upward…

Within the mass, a pair of lopsided white
lumps emerged.

They were eyes.

It’s seeing me,
Penelope slowly realized. Though merely blobs
bereft of pupil and iris, these floating white lumps were
seeing
her.

The thing was staring at
her. Did it desire her? Did her raw, sweating nakedness excite
this…this
thing?
She thought so, for next it strained upward again, with much
more force. Streams of bubbles spurtled out below the two white
lumps.

Penelope giggled. She
wished she could touch the atrocious mass. She wanted to put her
feet in it and draw the bubbling slop between her legs, coddle the
lumpy gelatin.
The woman in black must be
a witch,
she thought, and giggled again,
Witches. Devils. What else could explain the percolating thing
before her? The woman in black must be a witch, and she’d conjured
up this devil from Hell.

But why?

Now Penelope realized what the mass of glop
was straining to do. It surged upward again. It held there,
shaking. Then, something gave—

—
and it stood
up.

It stood before her like a man. In relief,
it shivered. It had a lumplike head, stringy brown legs, and arms
that sagged nearly to the floor.

—
YES,
she heard.

And the woman:
—Yes!

The thing’s erection stood out like a
knotted post.

Penelope sighed.

The thing chuckled.

In hitching, dripping slowness, it knelt
sloppily between her legs and lay on her in a delicious, warm
weight. Penelope cooed, already beginning to tremor in orgasm.
Passions merged like intent plumes of flame; beauty and revulsion
coalesced.

Then the face of held together muck
lowered, dripping, and gave Penelope a big wet hot lumpy kiss…

—

CHAPTER
10

At the precise moment that a grossly
maladjusted redhead named Penelope was, with much delight, losing
her virginity to a man shaped cohesion of slop, an
old joke prone conservative business major named Tom
stepped into his dormitory room on the eighth floor of Clark Hall
and witnessed what, within minutes, would describe the end of his
life. What he saw, exactly, was an attractive woman sitting on his
desk, wearing only a white blouse and high heeled shoes.
That’s right—no skirt, no panties. And what this woman was doing,
exactly, was masturbating. To say the least, this struck Tom as an
oddity. When you walked into your dorm room well past 2 A.M., the
very last thing you expected to see was an attractive woman sitting
on your desk masturbating. No, you did not expect that at all.
Especially when the woman was Winnifred Saltenstall, the wife of
the dean of Exham College.

««—»»

Earlier Tom had stopped at the campus police
station to see if his friend Jervis Phillips had involuntarily
checked in for the night. The night cop, a rather bulbous young man
known as Porker, was applying Giant brand peanut butter to a
row of English muffins. He was using an ice cream scoop
instead of a spoon.

“
Excuse me, Officer
Porker,” Tom said. “Anyone booked tonight?”

“
No,” Officer Porker
replied. He seemed addled by this intrusion. “You want to be the
first?”

“
Not really. Say, I saw in
the Sears ad that they’re having a sale this week on backyard
sheds.”

“
So?”

“
Thought you might want to
know, in case you’re in the market for a new lunch box.”

Porker stopped clicking the scoop. “My
patience is getting thin.”

“
Yeah, but the rest of you
sure isn’t.”

“
You’ve got about a second
to get out of here, McGuire.”

“
A
second?
It’d take you that long just
to get out of the chair.”

“
That’s it.” Porker began
to get up.

“
All right, I’m leaving.”
But Tom paused at the door. He could not resist. “Hey, Porker,
here’s an old one. How do you get your mother into an industrial
freight elevator?”

“
How?” Porker
asked.

“
You grease the doorway and
throw in a Twinkie!”

Tom roared laughter. Porker grabbed his
nightstick, yelling, “McGuire, I’m gonna kick your
motherfucking—”

Tom boogied, revved the
Camaro, and split.
What else am I going to
do with all these jokes?
he
rationalized.

But cruising down Campus Drive, his levity
waned. The night seemed creepily dry of life. Hollowness followed
him back to the dorm like a tailgater, and soon odd thoughts probed
his mind, thoughts that seemed like someone else’s, a mad person’s,
perhaps. Rhythms of words whose meanings made no sense creaked back
and forth in his brain. He heard colors and saw screams. Then he
saw something else, much more clearly: a murky shape in spattered
moonlight—a man. The man’s face was blacked out. He held a shovel
in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other.

Tom’s stomach shimmied. He
cringed at the image, almost veered off Pickman Way.
One too many Spatens,
he
dismissed.

This, of course, all tracked spoor back to
the last significant event of Tom’s evening. He rode the elevator
up to 8. When he walked into his dorm room, what he heard was:

—
He’s here.

What he saw was:

Winnifred Saltenstall masturbating on his
desk.

And what he said, after an appreciable
pause, was:

“
What the hell are you
doing!”

Mrs. Saltenstall’s face was
flushed and lightly asweat. She’d been caught, not with her pants
down, as the saying goes, but with them
off
. Her pose lost its tension, and
she sat upright. “What’s it look like I’m doing?” she answered
huffily. “I’m masturbating.”

Tom could only stare in disbelief. This
situation required some consideration. When he finally spoke, the
strain of forethought made the next sentence seem guillotined.
“Why—is Dean Saltenstall’s wife—masturbating—uh—on my—desk?”

“
I hate just sitting
around, Tom.” She tossed her head, brushed back her hair. “I had to
find
something
to
do while we were waiting.”

“
Waiting for
what!”

“
For you,” she said, and
grinned.

Tom’s head seemed to tick.
He stalled again.
Waiting?