Coven (28 page)

“
I came to similar
conclusions,” Wade said. “But tell me more about what Besser and
Winnie said.”

Lydia lit another cigarette. “Weird stuff,
crazy. He used some funky word—supremate, I think.”

Wade’s innards twitched.
“Tom used the same word. Supremate. It’s someone he works for, and
he said Besser and Winnie work for him too, along with
sisters.
He said one of
these sisters
ate
Dave Willet. Same as what Jervis said. A woman in
black.”

The bend was coming up.
Wade slowed through the turn.
There’s the
tree.
He stopped on the shoulder. “This is
it,” he said.

Lydia scanned the bend. “I don’t see any
wrecked Camaro.”

Wade jumped out and ran up and down the
road. Lydia got out more slowly, watching his antics.

“
The car’s gone!” he
yelled. He jabbed his finger at the tree. “It was here, I swear!
Right fucking here!”

“
Well, it’s not right
fucking here now.”

“
Somebody cleaned it up,”
he declared. “Somebody came out here, cleaned up the glass, and
towed the car.”

Lydia’s mouth twisted into a smile.

“
Thanks a lot, baby!” he
shouted., “I believed
your
crazy ridiculous story! The least you could do is
believe mine!”

“
Here’s what must’ve
happened, Wade. You drove the car into the tree. Tom got knocked
out, but you thought he was dead. You left, he woke up, and he
drove the car away.”

“
What, Tom’s
head
drove the car away?
His body got run down by a fucking semi rig! And the car was
totaled!”

“
Calm down. There’s a
logical explanation.”

“
No, there’s
not!”
Wade screamed.
“Tom’s head got
cut off,
and his body got out of the car and
walked around!”

But—wait a minute,
he thought.
The—

He dashed into the woods. “It’s got to be
here somewhere!”

“
What?” Lydia
said.

“
The head! I kicked it in
the woods after it started talking!”

Lydia began to laugh slightly.

It figured. Women only
stood behind their men when it suited them. He’d show her, by God.
He’d hold Tom’s head right up to her face and
shake
it at her…

He crawled through brambles for fifteen
minutes. No head.

Lydia was back in the Vette, smoking. When
Wade got in, she asked, “Did you find the head?”

“
Does it look like I found
the fucking head?” he smirked.

“
Forget the head, Wade. You
said Tom held a gun on you?”

“
Yeah. I suppose you don’t
believe that either.”

Lydia held up a small .25 automatic.

“
That’s it!” Wade
exclaimed. “That’s the gun he had!”

“
I found it on the
shoulder. And look what else I found.” She raised a necklace with a
black amulet on it.

“
Tom was wearing that thing
around his neck,” Wade said. “I asked him what it was but he
wouldn’t say.”

Lydia looked at it. “Yeah? Well, Besser and
Winnifred were wearing these things too.”

««—»»

—
SOON WE WILL BE ON OUR
WAY TO GLORY ETERNAL. TOGETHER, AS ONE. BUT MY BIDDINGS MUST NOT
FAIL. I HAVE
NEVER
FAILED.

“
I know, my
lord.”

—
MY POWERS ARE YOURS. DO
WHAT YOU MUST AND SPARE NOTHING.

“
It will be done, my lord.
We have authorities here who are contrary to us. But through your
grace we can avoid them.”

—
OUR TIME PERIOD IS VITAL.
IT MUST NOT BE VIOLATED.

“
I swear on my
life.”

—
DO NOT COME BACK TO ME
UNTIL YOU HAVE SUCCEEDED.

The Supremate’s face blended away. Besser
and Winnifred retreated from the shrine and extromitted to the
servicepass.

“
He’s pissed,” Winnie
said.

“
Thanks to you, yes,”
Besser acknowledged. “I can’t believe you masturbated in front of a
police officer.”

“
I couldn’t help it! You
know what the psilight does to me. Anyway, I told you she was onto
us. I was trying to distract her.”

You called me fat,
was all Besser could think. “Don’t worry, White
won’t believe her, and even if he does, the sisters can repulse any
amount of adversity.”

“
I hope you’re right,
Dudley. I want to be a god too.”

Don’t count on it,
Besser thought. There was only room for one god
between them. He’d already discussed the matter with the Supremate,
and it was settled.
But not yet,
he thought.

The gorgeous image of murdering her hardened
his penis at once. Nevertheless, he lied: “We will be gods, my
love. In some bright and future eon, we will rule this world
together.”

Winnifred kissed his fat
face, extruded her plump breasts from her dress, and rubbed them
against his mammoth chest. “Oh, Dudley, I love you! I can’t wait to
be a god!” Several sisters watched and giggled. “Not here,
darling,” he whispered, though he was truly tempted in the furious
psilight. It would be sweet, wouldn’t it, to just drag that dress
off her skinny body and fuck her to death right there on the
floorwall? So he was fat, was he? He would
smother
her with his fat. He would
plug his cock into every orifice, and perhaps form some of his own.
Yes, he would fuck her to death and crush every bone in her skinny
body as he came. The sisters would love it.

“
Not now,” he repeated in a
whispered pant. “We need a new productionvassal, and we better get
that tow truck back to the garage.”

—

CHAPTER 22

“
I love you,” Wilhelm
said.
“Mein Liebchen.”

“
Oh, Willy!” Sarah
squealed. “I love you too! Forever!”

In the telescope’s eye, they embraced and
kissed.

Jervis watched it
all—again. He watched them do
everything,
like last time, right
there on the couch. Their passion glowed in their eyes, on their
skin, shimmered through every gesture in radiant waves.

Jervis could’ve puked.

He pushed away the
telescope, dropped Czanek’s bug receiver.
In the middle of the day, even. They must do it round the
clock.
He finished another Kirin, smoked
more cigarettes, and stared at the wall.

Jervis cried in silence for a long time.

The rap on the door sounded like a dream.
Lost now, and insane, he answered it. Professor Besser and
Winnifred Saltenstall faced him in the doorway, smiling as brightly
as messiahs.

“
Jervis,” Besser’s dark
voice fluttered.

“
Jervis!” Winnifred
greeted.

“
We’ve come for you,”
Besser whispered.

Jervis faltered back as they entered. “What
do you want?”

Besser: “We want you, Jervis.”

Winnie: “We
love
you,
Jervis!”

“
Nobody
loves me,” Jervis replied, thinking of
Sarah.

“
That’s not true,” Besser
assured him. “There’s so much love waiting for you. But to have it,
you must accept our gift.”

“
What gift?”

Besser’s bulbous smile deepened. “Destiny,”
he answered.

Jervis stepped back. Winnifred kissed him,
licked the tears off his cheeks. “Trust us!” she whispered. “Come
with us!”

“
I want to be free!” Jervis
cried.

“
Then bow your head,”
Besser said.

Jervis bowed his head.

Winnifred positioned the
transceptionrod.

Besser raised the hammer.

««—»»

Nightfall.

“
Tom said Besser wanted me
for something,” Wade told her. They’d been driving for hours, off
town through twisting backwoods roads. “He said something about
bringing me in.”

“
The agro site, you mean,”
Lydia said.

“
I guess so. Whatever’s
going on, it seems to point there. Actually he said
behind
the agro site. In
the woods.”

“
The smart thing to do,
then, is check it out.”

Wade nearly coughed up his
Coke. “No, Lydia, that’s the
dumb
thing to do. The smart thing to do is tell the
state cops.”

Lydia frowned. “You do the driving, Wade.
I’ll do the thinking.”

“
Fine. You want to get us
both killed—fine.”

Lydia held up her polished Colt Trooper Mark
III. “We won’t get killed as long as my good friend Colonel Colt is
with us. He specializes in ass kicking.”

That’s all I need,
Wade thought. Dirty Harry with boobs.

««—»»

The old road behind the agro site proceeded
as a humped gully. Wade couldn’t believe he was driving a
limited edition Corvette over this root routed excuse for
a road. The deeper they traveled, the thicker the forest grew, but
eventually a clearing appeared, choked with weeds and refuse.
Garbage lay in piles, rusted car parts, and dozens of tires flaked
with dry rot. “Looks like we found the local trash dump,” Wade
commented.

“
Somebody’s been dumping
more than trash. Look.”

Near the tree line, several mounds showed in
the Vette’s headlights. A shovel leaned against a tree.

Graveyard,
Wade remembered.
I can
show you our little graveyard back there,
Tom had said. “Probably just piles of dirt,” Wade tried to
convince himself. Yellow moonlight streamed into the grove. Lydia
got out with her fully charged state of the art
SL 35 flashlight. Wade got out with his
cheap piece of shit dying Peoples Drug Store
flashlight.

“
This place
stinks!”
Lydia
whispered.

That it did. Wade gasped in the open,
stagnant air. A stench hung, like raw meat in the sun. “What is
it?” he asked.

“
Death,” she
said.

They approached the mounds, pointing their
lights down. Fresh earth, newly turned. Empty Spaten bottles lay
about the shovel.

They both scouted around. Wade was disgusted
by the stench; it was everywhere. He kicked over a pile of tires
and almost shouted: a fat hognose snake lay there with a dead field
rat in its maw. But the snake was dead too. Had it died halfway
into its meal? Under more tires, he found more dead snakes.

“
Look at this,” Lydia said,
waving him over with her SL.

Just past the mounds was a deep hole. Not a
grave, though—it looked like a grease sump. At the bottom lay a
thick puddle of some congealed whitish effluence.

Wade stuck a branch in it. “It’s wet,” he
observed.

“
Looks like plaster, or
lard. I wonder what it is?”

“
I don’t particularly care,
Lydia. I can’t take too much more of this stink. Let’s get out of
here.”

“
In a minute. I want to
look around a little more.” She handed him her spare gun, an old
Colt O.P. “Go check out the other side of the clearing.”

“
Where’s the safety on this
thing?”

“
It’s a revolver, stooge.
Revolvers don’t have safeties.”

“
Can I help it if I’m
not
Gun Digest?
Jesus.”

“
Just point it and squeeze
the trigger. You’ve got six shots.”

She really pisses me
off,
he thought.
Too bad I’m in love with her.
But
what a place to even think such a thing: a makeshift graveyard full
of garbage and dead snakes. He moved off to the other side of the
grove. The stench clung to him. Then his foot sank in something
crunchy and soft. He nearly retched when he saw what he’d stepped
in: a big dead maggot plump possum.

A footpath opened against
the tree line. Wade took two steps in, walked on another dead
possum, and stopped, aghast. Dead animals clogged the path, their
heads all pointing in a straight line away from him.
What the hell is all this?
Possums, coons, skunks, foxes—multiple dozens—all lay dead in
the flashlight beam. But what had killed them? It looked as though
they’d been
drawn
into the trail. But drawn by what?

Follow the yellow brick
road,
he thought. He stepped between the
carcasses, proceeding into the path. Frequently he misstepped and
another carcass would collapse under foot. Each wet crunch sent a
shiver through his guts.

The trail of carcasses led to another,
higher clearing. The low moon afforded him every detail of what lay
beyond.

Wade stood agape, as if rooted in place.

The grove was a nightmare
chasm. He could not be seeing what he saw: a sliver of his world
turned perverted, natural orders upheaved by compounded
impossibilities, as though he’d stepped from his world into some
obscene, mocking
other.
An eldritch knowledge had crept into this place
and molested it. Wade was standing at the foot of the
untenable.