Coven

COVEN

EDWARD Lee

Coven © 1991 by Edward Lee

For Amy & Scott.

—

PROLOGUE

Murder, he thought. Blood.

That’s all the student could think about, all he could see in his mind—the blood. The afterimage burned behind his eyes like red neon: the still corpse in the closet, castrated, headless. And the blood. Had they actually painted the walls with the man’s blood?

Alone now, the student lay exhausted on the jail cot. The station’s murky light drained into the cell; he felt submerged in dark. He tried to sleep, to forget about the blood, but even worse images flushed in and out of his head. He was standing in the moonlit dell, eyes peeled back like skinned grapes. Around him, the woods dripped and shivered. Carcasses, dozens of them, lay swollen to bursting beneath the foot deep fog. The student wore the stench of rot. He breathed it, tasted it. From the trees, and from beneath the fogtop, faces of things peered at him and shrieked. Not animals. Not people…

Things.

Mother of God, the student thought.

—then jerked awake on the jail cot.

Trying to sleep was useless. He remembered too much, in too much detail: his mad sprint out of the fog sodden dell, the sound of pulpous horrors crunching underfoot, and the monstrous laughter, their chitinous witchlike liquid giggles…

Please let me be insane.

What a relief that would be, to dismiss it all to insanity. But the student knew he could not, he knew it was real. Images continued to march through his head, and a parade of morbid questions. What in God’s name were they doing back there? How many people had they murdered? He’d seen their little graveyard in the woods. How many bodies had they buried? And whose? How much more blood had been spilled?

But amid the questions, one certainty remained.

I’m next. They’re coming for me next.

In the half dark, the student leaned forward and touched the jail’s cement walls. Yep, that’s cement, all right. Need more than a French bread to bust through that. His fingers ran down the frame of bars, jerked the locked steel door hard against its mount. Yep, this is a jail. No doubt a fucking bout it.

Safe, he thought.

Yes, he was safe; this was a secure cell. For the time being at least, the student was safe from those women…those hideous women in black.

—

CHAPTER 1

Exham College was, in a sense, exclusive. It was the college of choice for those whose GPAs and SATs wouldn’t get them into reform school, much less Harvard or Yale. As for its exclusivity, you had to be rich. Anyone with money could get into Exham.

The school occupied 160 odd acres of the Deep South, at the very end of State Route 13. The nearest towns were Crick City above and Luntville below, and that was it. The college owned the nearby half town, also called Exham, which was run by a small police department and a white washed city council. After that, though, for thirty miles in any direction, there was just tract upon tract of open farmland. In other words, Exham was the Alcatraz of the college world.

Despite its primary devotion to the upper class brain dead, the school ran very well, which was no surprise considering the amounts of money being dumped into its tills. There were two regular semesters between September and May, and two summer sessions for students to retake the courses they’d failed during the regular school year. The average Exham student took six years to attain a four year degree. Actual matriculation was about sixty percent, and the ratio of dropped classes to classes registered for was the worst in the country.

In all, Exham proved the paramount education institution for the black sheep of America’s wealthiest families. Being a complete fuckup in this world scarcely mattered as long as you were a rich fuckup. This might suggest a colossal indictment that all men and women are clearly not created equal, and that unmoderated wealth leads to a breeding ground of all manner of abandon.

««—»»

The eighteen hour drive from New Canaan, Connecticut, to Exham usually took Wade St. John about fifteen hours. What he drove was a car called a Callaway Twin Turbo, a $55,000 limited edition Corvette. Maintaining 120 mph for vast stretches of 1 95 was a breeze with the Uniden radar detector. The Vette was Wade’s sanctuary from reality, his cocoon. He’d just sit back in the leather seat, crank up the Nak deck, and put the pedal to the metal. Time stood still in the Vette. He was ageless. He was invincible.

Yeah.

Exham College entailed a series of circumstances he’d just as soon forget. Summer was for fun, not college. But goddamn Dad had put a damper on that faster than greased shit through a city pigeon. Wade could’ve killed the mailman; the way he’d felt waiting for his report card was probably close to the way those guys at the Alamo had felt waiting for the Mexican Army.

Dad’s voice needed no exclamation points: “Goddamn it, Wade. Two C’s, two D’s, and you failed history. Again. God in goddamned heaven. How could you fail history twice?”

“Be real, Dad. Does the Battle of Hastings really have any bearing on my life? Will I be made a better person knowing that Peter the Great put a tax on beards? What’s the big deal?”

“The big deal, son, is your brain, and you’re wasting it. These grades are beyond goddamned belief.”

“But, Dad,” Wade asserted, “I’ve done my best.”

“You haven’t done dick since the day I enrolled you at Exham. A chimpanzee could make better grades than these. You’re twenty four goddamned years old and you don’t even have enough good credits for a two year degree. Your marks don’t get better, they get worse.”

“I’m working on it, Dad.”

“Working on it? My God, son. Your grade point average is 1.4. That’s absolutely fucking outrageous.”

Uh oh. Fucking. That was a bad sign. Dad would say goddamn a lot, and occasionally shit, dick, and bullshit. But when he started modifying those adjectives and nouns with fucking…that meant trouble.

««—»»

The trouble had come the next day, with such devastation that Wade felt like someone had just dropped a thousand pound safe on his head.

“It’s ultimatum time, son,” Dad had announced.