Coven

with her. They washed each other in silence; it was like getting new skin. Afterward, they coupled brutally on the bed, not in passion this time, but in desperation. Lydia didn’t need to be made love to, she needed to be fucked, primitively and without endearments. They gave their bodies to the other for use—to release the steeped horrors of the last day. They did it repeatedly, fucking and coming, coming and forgetting, venting the mad energy of their fear. The complete inappropriateness of sex—after all they’d seen—made it completely appropriate. They used each other’s bodies to purge their minds.

Later, Wade lay panting into the crook of her neck. Lydia gingerly unwrapped her legs. Her sex was sore. She could feel his semen in her, still warm as it trickled. She liked it. She liked the idea of a small remnant left inside of her. An obscure gift.

He rolled off to her side, a hand on her breast. I’m going to tell him I love him, she thought immediately. But what would he say? And would any purpose be served in saying it?

No, she thought. She’d save it for another time, if fate saw fit to grant her one.

Lydia found her senses suddenly sharp. Perhaps the furious sex had given her reason back. “Those women at the graveyard… Besser said they couldn’t come out in the daytime?”

“He said sunlight does something to them. They can’t even come out in the moonlight without sunglasses and cloaks.”

Daytime, Lydia thought. Sunlight. “Maybe they’re—”

“Vampires, I know,” Wade picked up. “I was thinking that too.”

“They had fangs,” Lydia remembered.

“And in the second grove, the girl pointed to that thing on the hill—it looked kind of like a coffin on end.”

Vampires. Any other time she’d have laughed at the suggestion. But now after all she’d seen Lydia might not ever laugh at anything again. “Sunlight,” she said.

Wade had drifted to sleep. She got up and dressed. She wrote him a note, got his car keys, and quietly left the room.

««—»»

She drove Wade’s Vette straight to the station. But where were Porker and Peerce? A bag of Red Man and several Bavarian cream horns sat on the desk. Wherever they’d gone, they’d left in a rush. And hot coffee sat on White’s desk. Hmmm. She felt silly removing the portable spotter from her locker. Dr. Van Helsing gone high tech, she thought. Sure, this was a long shot, but so what? She also took a couple of cordon stakes and a hammer.

It seemed logical to return to the grove, where they’d last seen the women. But details bothered her. Why had Jervis told Wade he’d made his phone call from the shop?

Lydia drove to the shop.

“Damn it all!” she yelled. Her passkey didn’t fit the padlock on the garage. Someone had put a different lock on. No choice, she reckoned. She aimed her Colt Trooper and looked away. One round blew the lock off its hasp.

Inside, she turned on her SL and looked around. The little used shop existed only for the handful of students who liked to tune up their Jaguars themselves. No one was here now, but in the back she noticed three cars covered by tarps.

She was not surprised when she hauled the first tarp off. A red 300ZX, Penelope’s car. “And would this be Sladder’s security car?” she wondered aloud, hauling off the second tarp. A white Escort, campus security seals on the doors. And the third tarp slid away to reveal a spray painted black ‘68 Camaro with a bashed in grille.

She checked the trunks, knowing they would contain no bodies. The ZX and Camaro were clean. It was the trunk of the security car, however, that released death’s meaty stench into her face. Her stomach lurched. She held her breath, roving the flashlight through the trunk space. Christ! Maggot fat and lying in a puddle of coagulated blood was a severed human arm, chopped just above the elbow.

One pulse short of vomiting, Lydia slammed the trunk shut. Behind her stood a row of jugs, like those big metal milk cans with wide mouths and large handles. But these felt like plastic and scarcely had any weight at all. She shined the SL in one. A layer of some off whitish slime covered the bottom, and she remembered the gunk they’d seen in the sump hole at the gravesite. Like lard, she thought. Or wet plaster.

A sudden humming sounded in her ears. She felt it more than heard it, a vibrato in her head. Then the lights snapped on.

She jerked, turned.

Jervis stood before her, a lit Carlton in his mouth. He was grinning. “Welcome to my parlor,” he quipped.

Lydia drew her Trooper, aimed, and—

Jervis slapped it out of her hand.

She kicked him in the balls, cracked the SL over his head. Jervis laughed. Then the merry chase began.

She ran madly through the shop. Jervis madly followed. Lydia grabbed the largest, heaviest things she could lay hands on: piston rods, brake drums, torque converters. They all either bounced off her attacker’s head or were swatted away like gnats. Last, she heaved an intake manifold, which must’ve weighed fifty pounds, directly at Jervis’ face. He caught it one handed and tossed it aside as though it were Styrofoam.

“Let me save you some time,” he suggested, “and show you who you’re fucking with.” He picked up an entire dismounted engine, which weighed four or five hundred pounds. He held it under one palm, like a shot putter. “Understand now?” he asked. “You know many guys who can lift a Chevy 427 with one hand?”

“Can’t think of any right now,” Lydia droned.

He shot putted the engine across the shop. It bounced loudly, pounding cracks in the cement floor.

Jervis smiled, toking his Carlton. “Where’s Wade?”

“I don’t know,” Lydia said.

A flinching sadness touched his face. He spoke very quietly. “I made a promise to myself today. You know what I mean? Have you ever made a promise to yourself?”

“Yes, Jervis. Lots of times.”

Jervis made a thoughtful nod. “Well, I promised that I would never let a girl lie to me again. I was in love once, with a girl named Sarah. I let her lie to me because I was too afraid to confront the truth. Without truth, there’s nothing, right? When we let people lie to us, we become cowards at our essence. Her lies…hurt me.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Jervis.”

“I’m not a coward anymore. No woman will ever lie to me again.” He looked at her, his eyes flat yet full of… hope? “You mustn’t lie to me.”

“I’m not lying, Jervis,” she lied. “I don’t know where—”

“No, no, no!” he roared louder than any voice she’d ever heard. The words were cannon shots which shook the brick joists of the shop. “Lying mocks me! It takes me back to what I was!”

Lydia wished for a convenient corner to crawl into. She shivered before him—the impassioned maniac. She knew she was dead, so what good would lies do?

Jervis quieted, grimaced as if to push something back. “It’s a complicated thing,” he whispered, “the rebirth of my Existenz. Sartre said one must recognize existence before essence, and I have. To become the center of my universe, I must accede to my object of self. Do you understand?”

“No.”

“I gave Sarah all my love, and she gave me lies. Truth is relative, but so is falsehood. It’s transpositional. If you lie to me, you become Sarah, and if you become Sarah, you attack my spirit. I’d be forced to do something really awful to you. Something…hideous.”

The only thing worse than a homicidal psychotic was a philosophical homicidal psychotic. Lydia’s eyes remained riveted to him.

“I could take you apart like a doll, your arms, your legs, your head,” he cheerily informed her. He seemed to stand in an aura of darkness. “I could pull your insides out like yarn. So…I’ll ask you again. Where’s Wade?”