Coven

Lydia held up her polished Colt Trooper Mark III. “We won’t get killed as long as my good friend Colonel Colt is with us. He specializes in ass kicking.”

That’s all I need, Wade thought. Dirty Harry with boobs.

««—»»

The old road behind the agro site proceeded as a humped gully. Wade couldn’t believe he was driving a limited edition Corvette over this root routed excuse for a road. The deeper they traveled, the thicker the forest grew, but eventually a clearing appeared, choked with weeds and refuse. Garbage lay in piles, rusted car parts, and dozens of tires flaked with dry rot. “Looks like we found the local trash dump,” Wade commented.

“Somebody’s been dumping more than trash. Look.”

Near the tree line, several mounds showed in the Vette’s headlights. A shovel leaned against a tree.

Graveyard, Wade remembered. I can show you our little graveyard back there, Tom had said. “Probably just piles of dirt,” Wade tried to convince himself. Yellow moonlight streamed into the grove. Lydia got out with her fully charged state of the art SL 35 flashlight. Wade got out with his cheap piece of shit dying Peoples Drug Store flashlight.

“This place stinks!” Lydia whispered.

That it did. Wade gasped in the open, stagnant air. A stench hung, like raw meat in the sun. “What is it?” he asked.

“Death,” she said.

They approached the mounds, pointing their lights down. Fresh earth, newly turned. Empty Spaten bottles lay about the shovel.

They both scouted around. Wade was disgusted by the stench; it was everywhere. He kicked over a pile of tires and almost shouted: a fat hognose snake lay there with a dead field rat in its maw. But the snake was dead too. Had it died halfway into its meal? Under more tires, he found more dead snakes.

“Look at this,” Lydia said, waving him over with her SL.

Just past the mounds was a deep hole. Not a grave, though—it looked like a grease sump. At the bottom lay a thick puddle of some congealed whitish effluence.

Wade stuck a branch in it. “It’s wet,” he observed.

“Looks like plaster, or lard. I wonder what it is?”

“I don’t particularly care, Lydia. I can’t take too much more of this stink. Let’s get out of here.”

“In a minute. I want to look around a little more.” She handed him her spare gun, an old Colt O.P. “Go check out the other side of the clearing.”

“Where’s the safety on this thing?”

“It’s a revolver, stooge. Revolvers don’t have safeties.”

“Can I help it if I’m not Gun Digest? Jesus.”

“Just point it and squeeze the trigger. You’ve got six shots.”

She really pisses me off, he thought. Too bad I’m in love with her. But what a place to even think such a thing: a makeshift graveyard full of garbage and dead snakes. He moved off to the other side of the grove. The stench clung to him. Then his foot sank in something crunchy and soft. He nearly retched when he saw what he’d stepped in: a big dead maggot plump possum.

A footpath opened against the tree line. Wade took two steps in, walked on another dead possum, and stopped, aghast. Dead animals clogged the path, their heads all pointing in a straight line away from him. What the hell is all this? Possums, coons, skunks, foxes—multiple dozens—all lay dead in the flashlight beam. But what had killed them? It looked as though they’d been drawn into the trail. But drawn by what?

Follow the yellow brick road, he thought. He stepped between the carcasses, proceeding into the path. Frequently he misstepped and another carcass would collapse under foot. Each wet crunch sent a shiver through his guts.

The trail of carcasses led to another, higher clearing. The low moon afforded him every detail of what lay beyond.

Wade stood agape, as if rooted in place.

The grove was a nightmare chasm. He could not be seeing what he saw: a sliver of his world turned perverted, natural orders upheaved by compounded impossibilities, as though he’d stepped from his world into some obscene, mocking other. An eldritch knowledge had crept into this place and molested it. Wade was standing at the foot of the untenable.

Mother of God, he thought.

The moon swept grove stood like an alien lake. Greenish fog lay flat, motionless, and beneath its surface lay hundreds more swollen carcasses. Trees in the wood line had grown fat and twisted, limbs tipped heavy by weird brush. From the woods came an incessant dripping, unearthly foliage sweating mucoid moisture. Lobes of leaves exuded slowly depending cords of fluids; flower stamens glistened, pistils disgorging further lines on slime.

The grove had mutated, had changed into something it couldn’t be. Wade stepped forward. The pale fog, a foot deep, dissipated along his course. Things were growing from the carcasses. Buds sprouted, boring roots into putrifying meat. Things worse than maggots burrowed through dead animal flesh—white grublike things with ringed mouths, pulsing. Wade backstepped against a tree; its warm bark felt like an old person’s skin. Clinging bagworms showed faceless from hairy sheaths, some as large as loaves of bread. All this teeming life could not possibly be of Wade’s world. Scarlet slugs chewed bark from shuddering trunks. Gilled snakes coursed about beneath the fog. Even more unnerving were the shining snotlike threads webbed between low branches—spiderwebs. Some of the spiders were as big as apples, but covered with moist hair and squashed, twitching faces.

What have I walked into? he thought.

—Wade! You’re here with us!

Wade’s heart could’ve exploded in his chest. Betwixt a pair of oozing trees, a young girl stood. Her bright white face grinned from within a drooping hood. Her mouth looked wet. She wore sunglasses and was dressed completely in black.

Wade found he could make no sound at all.

—We want to eat, please! the young girl exclaimed.

««—»»

Where the hell did he go? Lydia thought. It was time to leave. She’d seen too many things which defied explanation. All these dead animals, their heads all pointing south. She remembered her first trip to the agro site. The animals’ heads all faced the same direction, even the few cows in the field.

But the mounds were what interested her most. Should she dig them up now? And what the hell was that sump?

But she had to find Wade. This expedition was over. When the keepers of this place returned, Lydia did not want to be around.

She marched back across the dell. If she stepped on one more dead animal, she would scream. He went this way, didn’t he? Toward that path. She passed the sump again, and the mounds. She knew Sladder was under there, and probably that Penelope chick too. She stopped midstride and stared. Was the second mound moving?

She aimed the SL, stooping. Suddenly an arm, or something like an arm, pushed out of the mounded dirt.

“Jesus Christ!” she shrieked.

In the hole, a misshapen face appeared. Its jawless mouth blubbered, the flaccid arm reaching out.

“H h helup helup help me!” the stretched face blabbered through spittle. Lopsided eyes like hard boiled eggs beseeched her from the sagging sack of flesh that was a face. The big rubbery mouth chewed on words: “They ate my baby! They took out my b b bones!”