Coven

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?

“We knew you’d get here eventually. So we waited.”

Waited. Get here. Waiting. “Then it was you in town. In Besser’s De Ville.”

“Uh huh,” she admitted. “We were driving around—scouting, you might say. We were looking for a suitable enlistee.”

“Why do you keep saying we? You mean you and Besser?”