Coven

Suuuuuuu—

Errant rhythms somehow like pictures showed black like onyx. He saw sounds and heard colors—red, pumping. Red running over faces, flesh. Tongues licking red.

Yes. A word. Supremate.

Madness was a sound, images—pressure in his head. The word was a name. Someone was trying to tell him something. I am like a promise in the wind. Give me service and I give you power. You will have power untold. Madness, the sound, floated up from the abyss. The sound was screams.

Orgies? Or meals? Both.

Underneath, deep in black, the great face smiled at him.

Red lips sighed and parted. Bare breasts glistened in steam. The lips stretched slowly back, showing mouths full of needle teeth.

««—»»

Power, Besser thought. Power untold.

He awoke in the dark of his office. Sweat drenched his clothes, grew chill on his face. He nearly screamed.

The red lips, the hungry hungry mouths full of teeth, left his mind. The trances always left the light raw in his eyes, and any other sense perception irritating, like nails across slate. The second hand sounded like someone hitting a garbage can with a hammer. Once he’d heard an ant walk across the floor. Anything but the faintest of light hurt his eyes for at least an hour.

The trances had started weeks ago. But were they really trances? That was the only way they’d agreed to describe them. At first he and Winnifred had feared their own sanity. “Debris stimulated scotopic maladaptation compounded by symptomal endophasic perceptual induction,” she’d first declared. “Inpro-portional catecholamic production causated by reactive deviations of cerebral synaptic response.”

Whatever would he do with her? She jumped to conclusions almost as quickly as she jumped into bed. But Besser knew by now that this “trance” phenomenon was not relative to any psychiatric disorder. It wasn’t lucid dreaming or unsystematized hypnagogia, and it couldn’t be scotopic because it wasn’t visual. In the trances, they saw without seeing. They were simply shown.

“Power,” he said aloud to the beautiful strange edged dark.

The trances left no detail unclear. Each night they came stronger into his head, and emphasized his importance.

(Yes! Importance.)

—and the power, the promised power.

He went to the window. The night outside looked unreal. Colors seemed crisper, blazing, but darker. Lights glazed. Beyond, the campus looked compressed to a scary, opalescent clarity, etched in brilliant darkness.

Darkness, Besser mused. Hadn’t the face—the submerged face in their dreams— implied that darkness was now their light?

Behind him, Winnifred stirred, murmuring like troubled sleep. If the dean only knew, Besser thought. Winnifred Saltenstall was beautiful by anyone’s standards; Besser—fourteen years older than her thirty five—weighed over three hundred pounds. What else but the trances could explain her sudden, constant lust for him? He’d seen her past lovers: well built, handsome young men, reminders of what Besser would never be. So the trances were a bond. Mental. Sexual.

Winnifred Saltenstall was married to Dean Saltenstall. The dean was powerful, important, and very rich. He was also very gay. He’d merely married Winnifred to verify respectability. They had a deal which worked out quite well: they would pursue their own sexual interests as they pleased, discreetly of course, and serve one another’s domestic needs as necessary. “It’s easy to be married to someone who buys you a new Maserati every year,” she’d once said, “and doesn’t care who you fuck on the side.”

“Gods,” Winnifred muttered now. “God and goddess.” Her eyes fluttered open. She breathed deep in her chair, rousing from the trance. Besser was staring at her breasts.

“Oh, Dudley,” she whispered. “It was so strong.”

“I know. The trances get stronger every night.”

Her pose relaxed. Her knees parted. “Are you sure we’re not crazy? Maybe it’s hallucinotic.”

Professor Besser promptly frowned. “Delusional behavior and hallucinations are not shared.”

“Folie a deux, Dudley. It can happen—it’s documented.”

“Yes, I know,” he scoffed. “Multiple hysterical viewpoints, di exocathesis, and such. These are psychopathic labels, Winnie. We clearly are not psychopathic. This is real.”

“I suppose it is,” she conceded. “But it scares me. The trances scare me to death.”

Besser wasn’t listening anymore; he was staring. Her breasts showed through her opened blouse, heavy in the lace bra.

“Ghosts,” she said.

“What?”

“The trances must be ghosts.”

For pity’s sake, he thought. This was not the first time she’d suggested the supernatural. “That’s ridiculous. Ghosts? Demons?”

“‘Paramental entities’ is the proper term.” She ran a finger across her bare stomach. “The face in the trances, the voices—it’s all evil.”

“For pity’s sake,” Besser said.

Her hand rested on her thigh. Moved up. Squeezed.

“Evil,” she repeated, and smiled.

Here was the sharpest aftereffect of the trances: raw, pathological lust. They both trembled with it. The trances accelerated their sex drives, forced them to fuck. How many times had they done it already today? Eight times? A dozen?

The great face in the trance called it his love.

Ghosts? Besser thought.

Winnifred slipped off her dampened panties and began to masturbate. She did this quite a bit now, anytime it suited her. “I’m so horny, Dudley. The trances make me so horny.”

Teasing bitch, he thought. She always liked to tease him first. She unsnapped her bra, releasing the large, beautiful breasts. She caressed them, plucked out the nipples. Her ass squirmed in the chair, and she licked her lips.

Besser had been teased all his life by people like her. But he was powerless in his lust now. He unbuckled his size 54 belt, lowered his trousers to relieve the throbbing. He hated her for this, but he remembered—what? Promises? Yes, and power.

Then he remembered the faces behind the face. Who were these forlorn creatures? He felt them watching this very moment, phantasmal voyeurs. Their lips were so red, their teeth like slivers of glass. Could they really be ghosts?

Winnifred spread her vulva with her fingers, showing it to him. “Isn’t it pretty, Dudley?”

“Yes,” Professor Besser said.

“Do you like it?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to fuck it?”

Besser groaned. His knees were buckling. Teasing, teasing bitch! It wasn’t fair that she should be able to control him only because he was fat. Her lust propped him up like a dummy, a clown.

“Come over here and fuck it.”

He didn’t like to think of himself as a clown animated by the beauty of women. Yet he obeyed her lewd command, helpless. He would have his revenge later, when better things had come…

Power, he thought, crawling to his nymph. Power