Coven

“Run!” Lydia yelled. They tore for the extromitter. Lydia was plugging in her key. Wade glanced back. Fangs glittered from flashes of wailing faces. Smoke poured out of frantic black cloaks as the phalanx of sisters hulled into the field of ultraviolet light. Flesh sizzled amid the onslaught of shrieks. Spheric eyes ruptured, torrents of fresh, black blood fell like rain as crisped hands reached out from the billow of oily smoke. Then the rank of corpses fell atop the spotter and died. But the spotter was under them, its deadly invisible light buried by their sizzling bodies.

“Oh, shit,” Wade muttered.

The last and largest sister remained. Spots of flesh cooked on her face, yet she had survived. Her fangs protracted, and she lunged over the corpses.

Lydia grabbed Wade’s hand and pulled him through the humming slit.

On the other side, Wade again caught only glimpses of things, unstable fragments: the rocking backdrop of Besser’s office, paneled walls, furniture, the carpeted floor, and Lydia tugging on him trying to drag him through. The desk clock read 11:59. Wade had oozed through the extromitter by everything but his right ankle. Lydia pulled and pulled but he wasn’t moving—

The sister’s hand had his ankle, pulling him back. Lydia yanked from one side while the sister yanked from the other. This was a tug of war, and Wade was the rope. He was being pulled between the threshold of two worlds.

Lydia gave a final heave, and Wade’s ankle came through the wall, along with the sister’s arm.

The desk clock’s lighted digits read 12:00.

A sound like an air raid siren whistled into the room, and a terrifying, vibrating drone. The extromission egress turned bright red, then snapped closed. Wade’s release came as suddenly as a knife to a climber’s rope. He was thrown into the middle of the office, tumbling into Lydia’s lap.

The sister’s arm had detached at the elbow and lay severed on the carpeted floor.

Wade and Lydia looked up at the wall.

The extromitter dot was gone, which could only mean that the labyrinth was gone too.

—

CHAPTER 43

Nobody ever knew what happened, except, of course, for Lydia and Wade. The newspapers did their best to speculate as to Exham College’s spate of disappearances and murder. One paper blamed a clandestine drug ring. Another blamed the Dixie Mafia, while still another blamed, of all things, a satanic cult. Wade was tempted to write an article himself, about aliens abducting humans for genetic hybridization experiments, but he doubted that even the lowest of tabloids would go for anything so farfetched.

As after any great calamity, things eventually returned to normal. Dean Saltenstall’s murder had been blamed on a burglar. Peerce, Porker, and Chief White had fallen in the line of duty to drug merchants. Within days, the campus had appointed a new dean, and the town counsel had elected a new chief of police.

««—»»

“Hi, Dad. This is Wade!”

“I would never have guessed,” came Dad’s stolid reply over the phone line. “What did you do this week, son?”

Wade contemplated the full weight of the answer. I saved the world, he wished he could say. “Oh, the usual,” he said instead. “Worked, studied, that sort of thing. Just another week in the life of a diligent student.”

“Sounds like the usual bullshit to me,” Dad commented.

Wade lay back in bed, eyeing Lydia. She stood at the bathroom mirror brushing her teeth. Wade nearly swooned: All she wore was a pair of devil red frilled panties.

“Wade, Wade? Are you still there?”

“Yeah, Dad, I’m still here… Look, there’s something I have to tell you—”

“Goddamn it! Not another traffic ticket!”

“No, Dad. This is good news. I’m…engaged.”

“You’re what?”

“Engaged. You know, as in getting married.”

“I know what engaged means, Wade. Engaged to who?”

Wade smiled. “The chief of police.”

“You’re telling me that you’re engaged to Chief White?”

“No, Dad. The new chief of police. Her name’s Lydia. She’s a little bitchy sometimes, but boy has she got a great ass.”

A wet washrag flew from the bathroom and slapped Wade in the face. “You’re gonna love her, Dad. Guaranteed.”

“You never cease to amaze me, son.”

“Sure, but isn’t that how it’s, supposed to be?”

Wade left his father with the expected doubts. The old ballbuster would come around in time, like just about anyone’s dad. Wade saw it as the first smart decision of his life. And with any luck it would be the first of many.

“So I’ve got a great ass, huh?” Now Lydia was brushing her beautiful white blond hair. “That’s the son to father consensus?”

“Great legs too. And hooters…” Wade whistled.

“You’re a sexist pig, but I guess I can live with it.”

Wade lounged back in the pillows. Happy ever after? he wondered. Who knew? Who ever knew? But he just had a funny feeling that this was going to work.

“Sweetheart?”

Lydia glared. “Don’t call me sweetheart. It’s so domestic.”

“Okay…honeybunch. Something just occurred to me, just now when I was on the phone with Dad.”

“What?”

“We saved the world.”

Lydia’s expression widened in the mirror. The black bomb would’ve destroyed the vital tracking systems. Right now, the labyrinth was space junk floating lost across the galaxy. It would never return to where it had come from.

“And I just thought of something else,” Wade continued his muse. “I wonder what happened to Besser?”

««—»»

On that particular night, Besser had crawled brokenly across the grove. He’d escaped the labyrinth only to find himself trapped in this thing laden morass. He choked on green fog. Horned insects drilled into his flesh; hot gourds and carcasses plump with moist rot crumpled beneath his paddling hands and knees. His leg was numb now; it dragged along behind him like a ball and chain. Things like eyeless rats the size of groundhogs bit chunks out of it as he crawled farther into the grove. The leech mouthed fog snakes swam about him en masse, biting out a piece of flesh here, a collop of fat there. Even the vegetation attacked him as he crawled on. Bulbs dipped from sagging branches, spreading jaws full of crystal teeth. Grime caked vines threatened to entangle him. Some large shivering pod burst at its tip and vomited a gush of seeds and stinking black slop into his face. Oh, Mother, he thought beneath his sobs.

One of the fog snakes tore out the seat of his pants, then more—many more—converged to take bites out of his huge buttocks. Professor Besser screamed louder than the horn on his De Ville when something unseen sunk teeth like sewing needles into one of his testicles. The entire grove was conspiring to consume him bit by bit. Just