Coven

Instead of killing her, they’d…

“Why am I here? What do you want me for?”

“We don’t want you,” Winnifred said, stroking herself. “Wade’s the one we want. And when he finds out we have you, he’ll come.”

Would he? “What do you want Wade for?”

“It’s all part of the master plan.” Winnie lapsed back into her muse, touching deeper. She masturbated unabashed.

“What’s that thing around your neck?” Lydia asked.

Winnifred fingered the amulet between her breasts. “An extromission key. You just put it in and walk through. There are extromitters all over the labyrinth. We even installed some at the college and in the woods. Jervis brought you in through one.”

Doorways, Lydia realized. “You think Wade’s going to come here? He doesn’t even know where I am.”

“Jervis left a message for him,” Winnifred said, stroking, stroking, eyes slitted. “He’ll come. Love always follows its heart.”

Lydia wondered.

“And afterward, we have a surprise for you.”

“What?” Lydia asked.

“That.” Winnifred pointed, her face aglow, grinning.

It had been there the whole time in the next temphold, just not close enough to see. Lydia felt very sick very quickly.

It stood up as if on command, pressed the fingerless pads of its hand against the barrier. A stout, flexing holotype with spotted gray skin like a slug’s. It stood on four bent legs, between which hung testicles the size of grapefruits. It grinned from its prognathous face, drooling for her. The thing’s erection, with pulsing blue veins like hoses, was as long and thick as a leg of lamb. The bulbed glans, too, drooled with enthusiasm.

Oh, shit, Lydia thought.

««—»»

Nina McCulloch was just about to leave the bathroom when her world exploded. She heard the front door being broken down. She heard screams like sirens, and dark satanic laughs. When she gapped the bathroom door and peeked out, she saw…hell.

She saw a hooded girl in black and a dead man with an ax.

Elizabeth and her drug friends cowered, still screaming. Kara tried to run, but not fast enough for the huge luciferian ax. It blurred effortlessly like a great sail and sliced her into two pieces, from right shoulder to left hip. Her top slid off her bottom, and innards unfurled. Then Stacy tried to bolt, but she slipped and fell—screaming—on those same innards. The dead man placed his foot on Stacy’s head and crushed it.

Poor Elizabeth was next. Her corkscrew screams blazed away as the dead man dragged her out from behind the couch. He lifted her off her feet, by her ear. Nina was surprised that the ear did not come off. Then the girl in the black cloak approached, and from her mouth shot a long pink cord with a needle at the end. Elizabeth fell silent when the needle punched into her throat.

I’m sorry for my sins, Nina thought.

Now the dead man was yanking up the carpet—he was rolling them up in it! But then he paused, as if perturbed. “I’m gonna take a look around,” he remarked to his hooded companion. “Make sure no one else is here.”

—Hurry, Jervis! the evil abbess replied. She knelt down and began to lick blood off Kara’s legs, giggling.

Jervis, Nina pondered. She recognized him now. The dead man was Jervis Phillips, a boy who’d been in some of her classes. Her eye froze in the gap. Jervis searched Elizabeth’s room, then Nina’s. He stopped to light a cigarette, still perturbed. He was staring straight at the bathroom door.

Nina backed against the wall.

The door pushed open. Jervis stuck his head in, looked around.

Jesus save me, Nina prayed.

He would cut her up like Kara. He would crush her head like Stacy. He would let the abbess lick blood off her legs. Then he would take her body to Satan.

She bowed her head in the dark. Jesus…please…

“All clear.” Jervis was walking away. “I just had this funny feeling that someone else was here.”

The abbess rose, chin smeared red and grinning. She followed Jervis out, who impossibly had rolled the three girls up in the carpet and was carrying them away on his shoulder.

“Thank you, Jesus,” Nina whispered when they were long gone.

««—»»

Wade cut across campus quickly, weaving between unlit buildings and hulking trees. It was embarrassing having to walk when you owned one of the most expensive cars in America. He could call a Yellow, but what on earth would he say? Cabbie, drop me off at the clearing behind the agro site, you know, the mutated one?

But when he rounded Tillinghast Hall, he saw headlights.

A car had turned off Arkham to the Hill. Lydia! he thought at once, but then he noted the headlight configuration. It wasn’t the Vette. It was a Dodge Colt.

Wade dove behind trimmed hedges. The Colt passed under the streetlamp. Jervis’ face was plainly visible. He was smoking a Carlton. One of those girls sat beside him, grinning. The back of the car seemed weighed down.

Wade waited for the tailgate to disappear. They’d come off Arkham, away from Duke of Clarence Hall and the dean’s house. He trotted north, up the drive, to the dean’s estate.

The mansion faced him, quiet, normal. But when Wade rapped on the old brass knocker, the door fell in. It had been broken off its hinges and propped back up, to feign security.

Don’t go in, Wade warned himself, and went in. The hall lights were on; he took the stairs up, watching for shadows, listening. A door down the hall appeared to be open, but when he moved closer he saw that it, too, had been knocked down.

Wade was shit scared. He expected—something. So it almost shocked him when he turned on the lights and found himself standing in a perfectly normal bedroom.

Then he opened the door to the not-so normal closet.

One glimpse was all it took: the dean’s crumpled corpse acrawl with flies, the enormous wash of blood on the clean white walls. All that blood was too much to view at once. Wade didn’t even notice what exactly had been done to the dean. He didn’t need to. This was a butcher’s jubal, party-time for a maniac. Blood was a sacred substance, the Eucharist of life. Here, though, in the dim closet, it had been spilled for the sheer sport of it. For fun.

Wade ran. He pounded down the steps and tore out of the house, and he didn’t stop running until his legs could bear no more of it, his energy ejaculated as a spurt of the basest fears. The night swept him into its velvet black caress, and Wade, brain numb now and exhausted, was left to stumble with feet of lead back to the beginning…

—

CHAPTER 28

Murder, he thought. Blood.

Wade couldn’t stop thinking about it, couldn’t stop seeing it in his mind. There’d been so much blood.

Through the dead, empty night, he drifted more than walked. The campus lay silent behind him, strangely still