Coven (31 page)

“
Vampires, I know,” Wade
picked up. “I was thinking that too.”

“
They had
fangs
,” Lydia
remembered.

“
And in the second grove,
the girl pointed to that thing on the hill—it looked kind of like a
coffin on end.”

Vampires
. Any other time she’d have
laughed at the suggestion. But now after all she’d seen Lydia might
not ever laugh at anything again. “Sunlight,” she said.

Wade had drifted to sleep. She got up and
dressed. She wrote him a note, got his car keys, and quietly left
the room.

««—»»

She drove Wade’s Vette
straight to the station. But where were Porker and Peerce? A bag of
Red Man and several Bavarian cream horns sat on the desk. Wherever
they’d gone, they’d left in a rush. And hot coffee sat on White’s
desk.
Hmmm
. She
felt silly removing the portable spotter from her locker.
Dr. Van Helsing gone high tech,
she thought. Sure, this was a long shot, but so
what? She also took a couple of cordon stakes and a
hammer.

It seemed logical to return to the grove,
where they’d last seen the women. But details bothered her. Why had
Jervis told Wade he’d made his phone call from the shop?

Lydia drove to the shop.

“
Damn it all!” she yelled.
Her passkey didn’t fit the padlock on the garage. Someone had put a
different lock on.
No choice,
she reckoned. She aimed her Colt Trooper and
looked away. One round blew the lock off its hasp.

Inside, she turned on her SL and looked
around. The little used shop existed only for the handful of
students who liked to tune up their Jaguars themselves. No one was
here now, but in the back she noticed three cars covered by
tarps.

She was not surprised when she hauled the
first tarp off. A red 300ZX, Penelope’s car. “And would this be
Sladder’s security car?” she wondered aloud, hauling off the second
tarp. A white Escort, campus security seals on the doors. And the
third tarp slid away to reveal a spray painted black ‘68
Camaro with a bashed in grille.

She checked the trunks,
knowing they would contain no bodies. The ZX and Camaro were clean.
It was the trunk of the security car, however, that released
death’s meaty stench into her face. Her stomach lurched. She held
her breath, roving the flashlight through the trunk space.
Christ!
Maggot fat
and lying in a puddle of coagulated blood was a severed human arm,
chopped just above the elbow.

One pulse short of
vomiting, Lydia slammed the trunk shut. Behind her stood a row of
jugs, like those big metal milk cans with wide mouths and large
handles. But these felt like plastic and scarcely had any weight at
all. She shined the SL in one. A layer of some off whitish
slime covered the bottom, and she remembered the gunk they’d seen
in the sump hole at the gravesite.
Like
lard,
she thought.
Or wet plaster.

A sudden humming sounded in her ears. She
felt it more than heard it, a vibrato in her head. Then the lights
snapped on.

She jerked, turned.

Jervis stood before her, a lit Carlton in
his mouth. He was grinning. “Welcome to my parlor,” he quipped.

Lydia drew her Trooper, aimed, and—

Jervis slapped it out of her hand.

She kicked him in the balls, cracked the SL
over his head. Jervis laughed. Then the merry chase began.

She ran madly through the shop. Jervis madly
followed. Lydia grabbed the largest, heaviest things she could lay
hands on: piston rods, brake drums, torque converters. They all
either bounced off her attacker’s head or were swatted away like
gnats. Last, she heaved an intake manifold, which must’ve weighed
fifty pounds, directly at Jervis’ face. He caught it
one handed and tossed it aside as though it were
Styrofoam.

“
Let me save you some
time,” he suggested, “and show you who you’re fucking with.” He
picked up an entire dismounted engine, which weighed four or
five
hundred
pounds. He held it under one palm, like a shot putter.
“Understand now?” he asked. “You know many guys who can lift a
Chevy 427 with one hand?”

“
Can’t think of any right
now,” Lydia droned.

He shot putted the engine across the
shop. It bounced loudly, pounding cracks in the cement floor.

Jervis smiled, toking his Carlton. “Where’s
Wade?”

“
I don’t know,” Lydia
said.

A flinching sadness touched his face. He
spoke very quietly. “I made a promise to myself today. You know
what I mean? Have you ever made a promise to yourself?”

“
Yes, Jervis. Lots of
times.”

Jervis made a thoughtful nod. “Well, I
promised that I would never let a girl lie to me again. I was in
love once, with a girl named Sarah. I let her lie to me because I
was too afraid to confront the truth. Without truth, there’s
nothing, right? When we let people lie to us, we become cowards at
our essence. Her lies…hurt me.”

“
I’m sorry to hear that,
Jervis.”

“
I’m not a coward anymore.
No woman will ever lie to me again.” He looked at her, his eyes
flat yet full of…hope? “You mustn’t lie to me.”

“
I’m not lying, Jervis,”
she lied. “I don’t know where—”

“
No, no, no!”
he roared louder than any voice she’d ever heard.
The words were cannon shots which shook the brick joists of the
shop. “Lying mocks me! It takes me back to what I was!”

Lydia wished for a convenient corner to
crawl into. She shivered before him—the impassioned maniac. She
knew she was dead, so what good would lies do?

Jervis quieted, grimaced as
if to push something back. “It’s a complicated thing,” he
whispered, “the rebirth of my
Existenz.
Sartre said one must
recognize existence before essence, and I have. To become the
center of my universe, I must accede to my object of
self.
Do you
understand?”

“
No.”

“
I gave Sarah all my love,
and she gave me lies. Truth is relative, but so is falsehood. It’s
transpositional. If you lie to me, you become Sarah, and if you
become Sarah, you attack my spirit. I’d be forced to do something
really awful to you. Something…hideous.”

The only thing worse than a homicidal
psychotic was a philosophical homicidal psychotic. Lydia’s eyes
remained riveted to him.

“
I could take you apart
like a doll, your arms, your legs, your head,” he cheerily informed
her. He seemed to stand in an aura of darkness. “I could pull your
insides out like yarn. So…I’ll ask you again. Where’s
Wade?”

Truth?
she thought.
I must accede.
Even if she told where Wade was, Jervis would kill
her anyway. So what could she say?

“
Blow yourself,” she
said.

Her feet were off the floor in an instant.
Jervis had her throat in his right hand and something else in his
left. Gagging, her gaze flicked down to see what it was.

What he held was a Craftsman auto body
sander. You used them to sand down putty on fenders, though Lydia
seriously suspected that Jervis planned a slight variation of this
utility. The disc was loaded with fifteen grit synthetic
sandpaper.

An inch from her nose, he turned it on. Its
motor shrieked. The grinding disc spun before her eyes at 4,000
rpm’s.

“
Tell me where Wade is,”
Jervis said, “or I’ll sand your face off.”

In the chokehold, Lydia barely managed to
gasp, “Eat my poop.”

“
So much for Mr. Nice Guy.”
He would do her real slow, would stretch her death out like pizza
cheese. The motor’s screams played foreshadow to her own. Just as
the grinding disc would strike pay dirt—her face—the motor
died.

“
Jervis, Jervis,” Professor
Besser’s voice came from behind. He’d pulled the sander’s cord out.
“If you kill her, we may never find Wade.”

“
She lied to me!” Jervis
spat. “She affronted my
Existenz!”

“
Forgive her, my boy.
Didn’t Sartre also say that one must forgive his universal
counterparts for the sake of the ultimate existential
ideal?”

Jervis’ flat eyes thinned
in rumination. “No!” he shouted. “Sartre never said anything
even
close
to
that!”

“
Bring her to the
labyrinth,” Besser commanded. “We’ll put her in one of the
holds.”

Seething, Jervis let her down and gave her a
smack on the back of the head. The blow laid her out—she nearly
lost consciousness. “You’re fucked, bitch,” Jervis promised her in
a fierce whisper. “I’m gonna do a job on you that would make
Charles Manson puke. Just you wait.”

He began dragging her along by the collar,
but not toward the shop door, she dizzily realized.

He was dragging her toward the wall—

—
then into the
wall—

—
then
through
it.

—

CHAPTER 26

Nina McCulloch prayed for forgiveness for
her sins. She could hear the others in Elizabeth’s room, but her
prayers blocked their voices out. Nina believed that Jesus had died
on the cross for her, expurgating any sin she might ever commit. To
pay Jesus back, she followed the Commandments, offered thanks and
praise, and fully accepted him as her savior.

“
Amen,” she
whispered.

Now she lay in bed, restless. She could hear
them in the next bedroom: Elizabeth, and Kara and Stacy, two girls
from down the hall.

Nina knew what they were doing.

“
What a rush!” Elizabeth
could be heard through the wall.

“
Class A shit, Liz,” Kara
observed.

“
Cut me another rail,”
Stacy requested.

Nina, of course, never joined them. They
always offered, claiming: “You only get addicted if you do it every
day”; “It’s harmless in moderation”; and “Nina, all that antidrug
stuff on TV is just propaganda. Come on, try some.”

But Nina’s reply was always the same: “No.
It’s a sin.”

The body was a temple of the Lord; it said
so in the Bible. If you put bad things into your body, you were
defacing that temple. A tract she’d read once said that if you used
drugs, alcohol, tobacco, or even ate junk food, that was the same
as throwing garbage in a church. Nina believed this fervently. She
also believed that even responsible drug users were actively
participating in the denigration of society. The money that Liz and
her friends so harmlessly spent on a little cocaine went to the
same people who supplied crack to elementary school kids. Every
penny helped fuel the giant drug machine which ruined people’s
lives. It helped make the weak weaker, and the helpless more lost.
Drugs were the soldiers of Satan’s army.

Nina got up and sneaked to the bathroom. She
hoped they didn’t hear her. They might laugh at her and persecute
her for her beliefs. Nina, of course, would forgive them, but that
was beside the point.

Tinkling, she heard their uproar. They were
talking about sex now, and how much better drugs made it. “His cock
was hard all night!” Stacy exclaimed. “Shit, I musta come ten
times!”

Babylon,
Nina thought, perched upon the toilet. But she
mustn’t judge them; only God could judge. She couldn’t escape the
thought, however, as their reverie rose:
The wages for sin are death.

««—»»

Jervis fumed as Besser handed him the
parcel.

“
Drop this off, then meet
the sister at the sciences center.”

“
Yes, sir,” Jervis tensely
replied. “Anything you say.”

Besser stood at the servicepoint of the
detentionwarren. “And there’s one other thing the Supremate would
like you to do.”

“
What?”

“
Kill Dean
Saltenstall.”

Jervis’ brow knit. The dean was harmless.
“Why?” he asked.

“
He runs the college. He’s
an authority figure,” Besser explained, “and authority figures
offend the Supremate’s superiority; they blemish his grace. To the
Supremate, the dean is a graven image. So kill him.”

Graven image? What an
ego.
“Right. Kill the dean.”

Besser seemed to sense Jervis’ upset. He
peered at Lydia beyond the repulsion screen. “Ah, you’re angry
about her. You feel I’ve injured your existential self by denying
you her death.”

“
Something like that,”
Jervis restrained himself.

“
For now we need her
intact, as a lure for Wade. But afterward, Jervis, I promise you’ll
have her.”

“
Thank you…sir.”

“
Good. Go now. Serve well
for our master.”

Jervis extromitted back to
his room. They’d barriered Lydia Prentiss into one of the
tempholds. He’d just have to have his revenge later, and it would
be sweet. He would put some holotypes in there with her and see how
she liked that. Some of those holotypes had been locked up in the
deep holds for years, going mad with lust in the psilight. Some had
knobbed tentacles for cocks, or things that looked like big
plungers wide as coffee cans. There were even a few that had
multiple
penises…

He walked down the hall
into Wade’s room.
Be creative,
he thought.
Creativity is
the key to existential awareness.
It was
only a matter of time before Wade returned to his room. Jervis left
the parcel where Wade was sure to see it.