Coven

A wearied face stared at her. Wade leaned up from bed, squinting.

“I don’t believe it,” the trespasser said. “I’m being held at gunpoint by a topless blonde.”

“A topless police officer,” Lydia corrected, but then she thought: Oh my God, it’s true! I’m practically nude!

Wade laughed. “Put away your heat, Annie Oakley. He’s a friend of mine.”

“Goddamn it!” she shouted. Embarrassment flooded her. “Get him out of here! And quit laughing!”

“In the hall,” Wade said to Jervis Phillips, who quickly scooted out. Lydia couldn’t remember ever being this pissed off. “Sorry,” Wade apologized, and put on his robe. “These things happen.”

“Shit!” she yelled at him.

Wade went out to the hall. Lydia quickly put on her cutoffs and top. The conversation was easy to overhear.

Jervis sounded hesitant. “I saw something. I know it sounds crazy, but I think I witnessed a murder. Over at the girls’ dorm.”

“You’re right, Jerv. It sounds crazy. You been drinking?”

“Of course. I guess I passed out at the end of it, because it happened around two A.M. He killed him.”

“Slow down. Start at the beginning.”

More hesitance. “I, uh, I was checking out the dorm with a telescope; I wanted to see what Sarah was doing with the German guy, but they never showed. Anyway, another window was lit up, the Erblings’ window, so I, you know, I—” Jervis spoke with caution, charting his words. “I saw a woman in black. She had a guy with her. The guy was Tom.”

“Tom?”

“Yeah. And then the Erbling girls popped up. That guy Dave Willet was with them, the guy everyone calls Do Horse—”

Wade chuckled.

“—and Tom killed him.”

Wade stopped chuckling.

“He killed him. Then he threw his body in the bathtub. Christ, there was blood everywhere. And then that woman came in, that woman in black. She…ate him.”

“The woman in black ate Do Horse?”

“That’s right. You should’ve seen it.”

“And I guess she ate the Erblings too, huh?”

“No, no, but she did something to them, knocked them out somehow. Something. Tom rolled them up in a rug and took them out.”

Wade was chuckling again.

“I know it sounds crazy. If you don’t believe me, let’s go over there and check it out. I know what I saw. It was Tom.”

Now Wade seemed to be hesitating. He didn’t believe this nonsense, did he? “Tom’s car hasn’t been in the lot for two days,” Wade mentioned. “And last time I saw him, he gave me the slip.”

“Wade, it’s true. I can prove it. Let’s go over there.”

Silence.

Then Wade came back in the room. “Did you—”

“Yeah, I heard it,” Lydia smirked. “Your friend’s a peeper, a drunk, and a nut. That’s three strikes.”

“I’ll admit he’s a little off track; his girlfriend just dumped him, he’s been drinking heavy. But he’s not the kind of guy to make something like this up. Plus, there’s something else…”

“What?”

“It’s better if I tell you later. Just trust me.”

What was he talking about? Was he nuts too?

“There’s no harm in looking into it, is there?” Wade persisted, and got dressed. Lydia said nothing, but she supposed he was right.

««—»»

She felt like a complete ass, knocking on a student’s door at five thirty in the morning, but only for a second. Her first rap on room 208 edged the door open an inch. The doorknob was squashed, just like at the clinic. The latch bolt was mangled, the strike plate half dug out—

“Just like the clinic,” Wade said.

Score one for Jervis the Drunk, Lydia thought.

The faintest ring of dust clung in a circle on the floor, as might be left by a hastily removed throw rug. Hmmm, she thought. The bed was sloppily made; guys made their beds like that, not girls. Hmmm, she thought again.

The hamper was stuffed full of clothes. Among the garments was a pair of men’s jeans. The jeans contained a wallet. The wallet contained a driver’s license: David Ubel Willet.

“Believe me now?” Jervis asked.

Lydia was stumped. “I believe you may have witnessed a break in,” she replied. “I don’t, however, believe you witnessed anything more than that.”

Jervis said three clipped words. “Bathtub. Blood. Everywhere.”

The three of them squeezed into the bathroom. They all looked down at the tub.

“Where’s the blood?” Wade asked.

“Tom must’ve cleaned it up,” Jervis was quick to answer. “There was so much, though. It must’ve taken him an hour.”

“Forget it, Jerv,” Wade said. “The tub’s clean.”

Too clean, Lydia thought. She’d had Jervis tote along her field kit. From it she removed a tiny amber bottle with an eyedropper cap. “This is a detection compound called Malachite Reagent V; it reacts with protein components in hemoglobin. Blood contains free protein electrons which bind to almost any surface. You can wash off the blood, but you can’t wash off the electrons.”

“So if someone got murdered in this tub,” Wade said, “the stuff in that bottle will prove it?”

“Yep. It turns turquoise on contact.” Lydia let a tiny drop fall from the eyedropper into the middle of the tub.

“Nothing,” Wade observed.

“Wait.”

In a second, the drop turned turquoise.

Lydia sprinkled more drops around, all over the inside of the tub, the ledge, the tiled back wall. They all turned turquoise.

Jervis looked unsurprised. Wade looked ill.

This guy’s not bullshitting, Lydia thought, and it was a ghastly thought indeed. There’d been blood all over this tub.

Blood. Everywhere.

««—»»

“I instructed you to be careful!” Professor Dudley Besser bellowed within the cove of pointaccessmain #1. “I told you!”

“I know, sir,” Tom mumbled.

“You left their wallets! Their keys! Everything!”

“It slipped my mind, sir. We had to get out of there. It took me a long time to clean up the mess the sister made. I mean, Christ, can’t they eat here?”

Besser recessed back into the strangely etched darkness. Inaudibly the labyrinth hummed, a vibration more than a sound. The sisters had told Tom that it was the Supremate thinking, but Tom had begun to doubt that, along