Coven

“He’ll turn up,” Tom said without having to ask. “He’s probably sleeping off a Kirin shitface back at the dorm.”

Wade hoped so. He caught himself glancing into the gun shop on Huberty Lane. What would he do if he actually saw Jervis in there, buying bullets, buying guns? But that was an absurd idea—besides, the shop was closed.

“Hey,” Tom exclaimed as a car passed. “Was that Besser’s car?”

“What?” Wade was off guard. He turned and saw a big maroon sedan cross the town square and disappear. “Who cares?” he said. The last person Wade wanted to be reminded of was Besser, his janitorial supervisor. “He’s so fat he probably can’t even fit in a car, much less drive one.”

They finished the night at a corner saloon imaginatively named The Bar, which specialized in imported draft like Old Peculiar, EKU Edelbock, and Spaten and Adams, their mainstays. After a few pints, Wade stepped up to the taco bar despite Tom’s warning that tacos never failed to incite horrendous nightmares. As Wade doled on plenty of cheese and chili, he overheard several crim majors whispering about some mishap at Exham’s agro site. He could make no details save for bits of phrases: “deader than dogshit” and “.25 brass all over the fucking place.” Some of the crim students worked security for extra credits; Wade presumed some local rednecks had taken some shots at the agro animals or some such, but he hardly cared. He still felt sidetracked about Jervis, perhaps, but something else too. “Quit worrying about Jervis, will you?” Tom implored when Wade came back to the table.

“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