Coven

by David Barnett

  When he dropped the ring into the water, he imagined not the ring but his heart sinking slowly to the bottom of the enslimed, black creek.

  ««—»»

  Old Exham Road unwound like a lay by through a corrupt dimension. Nighted swamps and forests soon gave way to open flat fields and a crystal sky. All the way back to campus, Jervis’ despair seemed to sit beside him like a hitchhiker. He chain-smoked Carltons and drank more beer. Soon he came in range of campus reception; WHPL sizzled in like rain, Brian Ferry crooning about the same old blues and brides stripped bare. Skeletal stalks of fields of corn stretched on forever. The crescent moon looked like a reaper’s scythe—soon it would swoop down and cut him in half. Lying underwater in a foot of black muck, lying in pieces next to the little ring.

  At last the endless ride began to end. The lights of the campus glittered beyond. He sped up Campus Drive, passed the Circle, and turned at Frat Row. The giant Crawford T. Sciences Center stood completely black, like an intricate carved mesa. Distant music floated down the hill, pipe sounds like druid flutes.

  He idled past Lillian Hall, the largest of the female dorms. In the long lot he saw only a red 300ZX, which belonged to that weird redhead who ran the horse stables out at the agro site. But then the massed shadow lapsed. Two more vehicles were parked in the lot: Sarah’s white Berlinetta and the customized white van.

  He stopped to stare at the van. It belonged to the German guy, the guy who’d stolen Sarah from him. He fucks her in that, came the simple thought. She gives him head in it. But sight of both vehicles assured what he’d feared. She was back. She would be taking classes this summer too, and her dorm was right across from his. He’d probably see her every day, her averted eyes and tight squeezed smile, and he’d probably see a lot of the German guy too. Jervis would be reminded of his loss every single day.

  He got out of his Dodge Colt and trudged drunk up toward his own dorm. The moon slice had turned sour yellow. In the center court, his own heartbreak made him look back once more at Lillian Hall.

  The faintest orange light flickered in the end window, second floor—Sarah’s window. They were up there right now. They were together in bed, asleep in candlelight, asleep in love.

  Jervis wanted to bay at the moon. The images dropped into his head like stones. How could he live knowing she loved someone else? A crimson flash sparked through his vertigo. Was it premonitory, these jerking, unbidden mental sights? Again, he pictured himself cut in half. He pictured holes in the ground, graves. He felt that the image might be symbolic: seeing himself cut in half. Could that symbolize a separation of mind and body? Or did it mean something entirely different? Symbols, he thought. The more he looked at the candlelit window, the more he saw himself butchered.

  This sensory ghost seemed to linger as he approached the opposing male dorm. He felt dead as he shuffled up the court. Wait. Dead? Was that how he felt? Yes, a corpse walking, dead but walking. Three quarters to rot and no life left inside but walking still.

  Then the image, or the symbol, magnified—

  —perforated dead arms slick to the elbow with blood—

  (Whose blood? My blood?)

  —and gaps rotted through the hands which held the bouquet of long stemmed roses—

  I still love you, Sarah, he thought, his tears running.

  But in this ghastly and third inscrutable image, why was his shredded green gray face set in a grin?

  “Symbols,” he muttered.

  His hands felt wet.

  —

  CHAPTER 3

  SOMETHING—a word.

  Suuuuuuu—

  Errant rhythms somehow like pictures showed black like onyx. He saw sounds and heard colors—red, pumping. Red running over faces, flesh. Tongues licking red.

  Yes. A word. Supremate.

  Madness was a sound, images—pressure in his head. The word was a name. Someone was trying to tell him something. I am like a promise in the wind. Give me service and I give you power. You will have power untold. Madness, the sound, floated up from the abyss. The sound was screams.

  Orgies? Or meals? Both.

  Underneath, deep in black, the great face smiled at him.

  Red lips sighed and parted. Bare breasts glistened in steam. The lips stretched slowly back, showing mouths full of needle teeth.

  ««—»»

  Power, Besser thought. Power untold.

  He awoke in the dark of his office. Sweat drenched his clothes, grew chill on his face. He nearly screamed.

  The red lips, the hungry hungry mouths full of teeth, left his mind. The trances always left the light raw in his eyes, and any other sense perception irritating, like nails across slate. The second hand sounded like someone hitting a garbage can with a hammer. Once he’d heard an ant walk across the floor. Anything but the faintest of light hurt his eyes for at least an hour.

  The trances had started weeks ago. But were they really trances? That was the only way they’d agreed to describe them. At first he and Winnifred had feared their own sanity. “Debris stimulated scotopic maladaptation compounded by symptomal endophasic perceptual induction,” she’d first declared. “Inpro-portional catecholamic production causated by reactive deviations of cerebral synaptic response.”

  Whatever would he do with her? She jumped to conclusions almost as quickly as she jumped into bed. But Besser knew by now that this “trance” phenomenon was not relative to any psychiatric disorder. It wasn’t lucid dreaming or unsystematized hypnagogia, and it couldn’t be scotopic because it wasn’t visual. In the trances, they saw without seeing. They were simply shown.

  “Power,” he said aloud to the beautiful strange edged dark.

  The trances left no detail unclear. Each night they came stronger into his head, and emphasized his importance.

  (Yes! Importance.)

  —and the power, the promised power.

  He went to the window. The night outside looked unreal. Colors seemed crisper, blazing, but darker. Lights glazed. Beyond, the campus looked compressed to a scary, opalescent clarity, etched in brilliant darkness.

  Darkness, Besser mused. Hadn’t the face—the submerged face in their dreams—implied that darkness was now their light?

  Behind him, Winnifred stirred, murmuring like troubled sleep. If the dean only knew, Besser thought. Winnifred Saltenstall was beautiful by anyone’s standards; Besser—fourteen years older than her thirty five—weighed over three hundred pounds. What else but the trances could explain her sudden, constant lust for him? He’d seen her past lovers: well built, handsome young men, reminders of what Besser would never be. So the trances were a bond. Mental. Sexual.

  Winnifred Saltenstall was married to Dean Saltenstall. The dean was powerful, important, and very rich. He was also very gay. He’d merely married Winnifred to verify respectability. They had a deal which worked out quite well: they would pursue their own sexual interests as they pleased, discreetly of course, and serve one another’s domestic needs as necessary. “It’s easy to be married to someone who buys you a new Maserati every year,” she’d once said, “and doesn’t care who you fuck on the side.”

  “Gods,” Winnifred muttered now. “God and goddess.” Her eyes fluttered open. She breathed deep in her chair, rousing from the trance. Besser was staring at her breasts.

  “Oh, Dudley,” she whispered. “It was so strong.”

  “I know. The trances get stronger every night.”

  Her pose relaxed. Her knees parted. “Are you sure we’re not crazy? Maybe it’s hallucinotic.”

  Professor Besser promptly frowned. “Delusional behavior and hallucinations are not shared.”

  “Folie à deux, Dudley. It can happen—it’s documented.”

  “Yes, I know,” he scoffed. “Multiple hysterical viewpoints, di exocathesis, and such. These are psychopathic labels, Winnie. We clearly are not psychopathic. This is real.”

  “I suppose it is,” she conceded. “But it scares me. The trances scare me to death.”

&
nbsp; Besser wasn’t listening anymore; he was staring. Her breasts showed through her opened blouse, heavy in the lace bra.

  “Ghosts,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The trances must be ghosts.”

  For pity’s sake, he thought. This was not the first time she’d suggested the supernatural. “That’s ridiculous. Ghosts? Demons?”

  “‘Paramental entities’ is the proper term.” She ran a finger across her bare stomach. “The face in the trances, the voices—it’s all evil.”

  “For pity’s sake,” Besser said.

  Her hand rested on her thigh. Moved up. Squeezed.

  “Evil,” she repeated, and smiled.

  Here was the sharpest aftereffect of the trances: raw, pathological lust. They both trembled with it. The trances accelerated their sex drives, forced them to fuck. How many times had they done it already today? Eight times? A dozen?

  The great face in the trance called it his love.

  Ghosts? Besser thought.

  Winnifred slipped off her dampened panties and began to masturbate. She did this quite a bit now, anytime it suited her. “I’m so horny, Dudley. The trances make me so horny.”

  Teasing bitch, he thought. She always liked to tease him first. She unsnapped her bra, releasing the large, beautiful breasts. She caressed them, plucked out the nipples. Her ass squirmed in the chair, and she licked her lips.

  Besser had been teased all his life by people like her. But he was powerless in his lust now. He unbuckled his size 54 belt, lowered his trousers to relieve the throbbing. He hated her for this, but he remembered—what? Promises? Yes, and power.

  Then he remembered the faces behind the face. Who were these forlorn creatures? He felt them watching this very moment, phantasmal voyeurs. Their lips were so red, their teeth like slivers of glass. Could they really be ghosts?

  Winnifred spread her vulva with her fingers, showing it to him. “Isn’t it pretty, Dudley?”

  “Yes,” Professor Besser said.

  “Do you like it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to fuck it?”

  Besser groaned. His knees were buckling. Teasing, teasing bitch! It wasn’t fair that she should be able to control him only because he was fat. Her lust propped him up like a dummy, a clown.

  “Come over here and fuck it.”

  He didn’t like to think of himself as a clown animated by the beauty of women. Yet he obeyed her lewd command, helpless. He would have his revenge later, when better things had come…

  Power, he thought, crawling to his nymph. Power untold.

  —YES, promised the voice in his head.

  “I love you, Dudley,” she sighed. She spread her legs, offering the slit of her sex like a prize. Its pinkened wet glimmer lured him, and seemed to say, Be a good clown.

  He dragged her to the carpet and kissed the prize. Squirming, she grabbed his head, rubbed his face in it.

  I love you too, he thought. Till death do us part.

  —YES, the great face repeated. —OH, YES.

  ««—»»

  Red pumping over orgies and food.

  —We wish we could be you.

  Chaos wed to perfection. The perfection was a labyrinth and madness was a sound. Were these memories? Taste: warm copper, salt, meat. Sight: swollen breasts bared, loins inflamed.

  Sound: screams.

  Lips parted over needle teeth. Something—a word. Supremate. Sleek, white throats gulped gouts of blood.

  —

  CHAPTER 4

  Home for the summer stared him in the face like an empty smile. Wade stepped off the elevator onto the eighth floor of Clark Hall, Exham’s largest male dorm. Home, sweet home, he thought dryly. Some fun summer. Thanks, Dad.

  Silence fogged the hall. There was no noise, no rock and roll, no ping pong ruckus. No nothing. At least Jervis would be on for the summer sessions. Jervis took classes even when he didn’t need to—just to be close to his girlfriend. The poor jerk was in love, but at least Wade wouldn’t have to spend the entire summer alone.

  Wade had two best friends: Tom McGuire and Jervis Phillips. Jervis was clearly the more eccentric of the two. He was a philosophy nut, worshiping any manner of unintelligible schools of thought, existentialism in particular. On his door hung an eternal portrait of Sartre. Wade winced at it, as usual.

  But the door was open a crack. Wade entered and announced, “Howdy, Jerv! I’m back!”

  Jervis was sitting in the corner. He was unconscious.

  Wade rushed to check Jervis’ pulse, then looked around and gasped. The room had been ransacked. Lamps were knocked over, furniture smashed. The Sony TV screen had a hole in it; in the hole was an empty beer bottle. Bookshelves had been hauled down. Jervis’ stereo system and record collection had been thrown onto the floor.

  Then Jervis came to. “Wade. Am I...in Hell yet?”

  Wade gaped. Jervis looked in worse repair than the room. Dark smudges like axle grease ringed his eyes. His hair, oily and unwashed, stuck up every which way, while his Lord & Taylor shirt was stained with beer and vomit. He looked skinny, starved. Empty Kirin bottles lay everywhere, all around him.

  “You’re drunk,” Wade said.

  Jervis burped. “I ain’t drunk. I’m just drinkin’.”

  “Jerv, what happened here? Do you owe someone money?”

  “Yes, my Existenz,” Jervis mumbled. “I have been forsaken.”

  He opened a bottle of Kirin with his teeth. Wade winced.

  The bottle cap pried off with ease, along with the side of an incisor.

  “Jesus Christ! What happened! Did your entire family die? Did your father’s stocks crash? What?”

  Jervis spat out bits of tooth. He emptied half the Kirin in one gulp. “The end—that’s what happened. The end of the world.”

  When Jervis got drunk, Wade knew, he became indecipherable with all that existential crap. “Is Tom around?” Wade asked.

  “I think he’s down at the shop working on his Camaro. I asked him to drive me to Hell when he gets it running.” Jervis finished the Kirin on the second pull. “Yes, I’d like that. I’d like to go to Hell.”

  “Jerv, your whole room is wrecked. I gotta know what happened.”

  “Sartre was wrong, you know,” Jervis drawled on. “Existence precedes betrayal, not essence. There is no essence. There’s…nothing” —and with that, Jervis passed out again.

  Stepping over empty Kirin bottles, Wade dragged his friend to the bed. Then he took another glance at the damage. It was hopeless. This would take days to clean up.

  But what had happened?

  He’d have to find Tom. Maybe he knew what had turned Jervis into a drunken, rambling waste.

  He stowed his bags in his own room two doors down. Its sameness somehow comforted him. Wade’s room came with every luxury. There was a small kitchen, a fridge, a separate bathroom and study, even a trash compactor. How could Dad expect him to do well in school without a trash compactor?

  The red light blinked on the answering machine. But nobody even knows I’m back, he thought.

  Beep: “Wade, I know you’re back,” said a voice on the machine. “This is Jessica. I…oh, shit, I miss you! Please call me!”

  Old flames never die. Sure, babe, I’ll call you. Next century.

  Beep: “Wade, I know you’re back,” claimed the next voice. “Word gets around when the best looking guy on campus returns unexpectedly. This is Sally, in case you’ve forgotten my voice. Maybe you’ve forgotten my body too, so why don’t you come over right now, and I’ll give you a little lesson in refamiliarization.”

  No thanks. Body by Fisher. Brains by Mack truck.

  Beep: “Wade! I can’t believe you haven’t called me yet—”

  He reset the machine, ignoring the nine remaining messages. It was nice to be wanted, but Wade figured that was their tough luck. Only so much of this handsome devil to go around, girls. Be patient. Chuckling, he locked his room and went out to the Vett
e.

  The campus roads were close to empty. Wade sped past the liberal arts buildings, watching for the famed Exham police, who all seemed to have an affinity for radar guns. Wade’s Corvette was definitely on their Ten Most Wanted List, and so was Wade. He probably had enough tickets from these chumps to paper his dorm room.

  The campus glowed green with grass and sun, placated in lazy tranquility. Crosswalks stood vacant, hall entries deserted. This vast emptiness made him feel sentenced; it reminded him of all the fun he’d be missing out on. Summer school, he thought, in disgust and despair. The rest of the world will be partying, and I’ll be stuck here.

  Next he passed WHPL, the campus radio station—progressive, not pop, he thanked God—and around the next bend the Crawford T. Sciences Center loomed. Wade felt dismal driving by. Here, he’d not only be retaking a biology course he’d flunked last year but also starting his new job in toilet maintenance. Wade valued his reputation very much—handsome rich kids in Corvettes had appearances to maintain—but if people found out he was cleaning johns for minimum wage, he could kiss the rep goodbye. He pondered this potential nightmare so intently he missed the next stop sign.

  A horn blared. Wade slammed his brakes.

  A burgundy Coupe De Ville blew by, missing Wade’s front slope by inches. Wade immediately recognized the car as Professor Dudley J. Besser’s, head of the biology department as well as the most miserable ballpopper on the Exham faculty.

  You fat hot air bag! Watch where I’m driving!

  As the De Ville turned, Wade noticed a woman sitting next to Besser, and sitting close. Did Besser have a girlfriend? Impossible. Only a prostitute or a vision impaired Weight Watchers reject would date that anal retentive walking lard barrel.

  Then Wade did a double take, took a closer look.

  No fucking way! he thought.

  This woman appeared to be Mrs. Winnifred Saltenstall, who was not only beautiful but also the wife of the dean.