Coven

“The fall patterns in the stable are literally textbook perfect.” She laid out snapshots of Sladder’s fall, then slid an opened book across the desk. The book was titled The Investigator’s Guide to Bloodfall: Drop Spread Pattern Analysis. The picture she opened to (labeled “Ambulatory dismemberment: right arm”) was almost identical to Lydia’s Polaroids. “See? Sladder’s fall is the same. His right prints are on the pitchfork in the tool stall; that’s what he was reaching for when the perp dropped the ax. He didn’t have time to get his piece out. You can even see the point angles exactly where he changed direction. And from this point on, Sladder stops leaving right hand prints.”

“I’m supposed to believe a sixty five year old rummy tied off his own stump without going into shock?”

“Guys slap tourniquets on themselves all the time. Humans do amazing things in life threatening situations. The girl probably helped him. Besides, Sladder was a marine infantry medic in the war.”

“So where’s the arm?” White asked.

“Probably buried in the woods, with the rest of him.”

“And where’s the car?”

“Probably buried under brush twenty miles away. The girl’s ZX, too.”

White let some time pass to cool off. He picked through her latent photos. “How the hell’d you get prints this clean? Most of the stables are whitewashed or bare wood.”

“Bare wood’s easy,” she said, unenthused. “I fumed the logical areas with iodine sulfate. The tougher ones I jobbed with mercuric oxide. Then I photographed everything with a Kodak 1x1. Each print is labeled and marked.” Actually this job had been easy. At D.C. she’d gotten admissible prints off of human breasts, crumpled paper bags, even chunks of crack. Once she’d sent a multiple rapo up for fifty years by getting his prints off a pair of a victim’s panties with a scanning electron microscope. The agro site had been cake. “This isn’t the stone age, you know,” she finally got around to saying,

White didn’t like that. He snorted smoke. “You show me a few pictures in some A hole textbook, some prints, and some blood types, and now you think you’ve got all the answers.”

“I don’t have anything close to all the answers, Chief. But I reconstructed the steps of the crime, which is what you told me to do. Could your men do better? Shit, Chief, those rednecks don’t know the difference between a fingerprint and a floral print. They think bloodfall is a town in Alabama.”

White didn’t like that either. His temper ticked. “You’re grabbin’ for shit, Prentiss. And if any of this winds up in the papers, you’re gonna be one sorry little girl.”

Lydia was drooping now at the lab table. “I’m not your enemy, Chief. I work for you, remember? Anyhow, I don’t know what you’re getting all whipped up about. The whole case revolves around the one thing we don’t have access to—the agro animals. Until the state finds out what happened to them, we have to tinker with every detail we can. That’s what a police investigation is.”

White toked a new cigar, smirking. “I don’t need you to tell me how to run a police investigation. Leave the concludin’ to me and we’ll get along fine. Go home now, get some sleep.”

It was a good idea; she’d been up twenty four hours now. White was going to believe what he wanted to believe. But there was still one thing… “I need your permission for something first. I want to try to get a line on the ax.”

White squinted. “The ax? You can’t run a make on an ax, girl. Everybody’s got axes.”

“I know, but this ax is different. The line of the blade is straight, and the left hone is planar. There was rust in the initial impactations.”

“Prentiss, what the fuck are you talkin’ about?”

“A rust deposit left by an edged weapon can be analyzed. Different grades of steel are used in different tools and weapons. In other words, by analyzing the rust, you can sometimes determine the ductility and grade of the steel and possibly locate the manufacturer. But I’d need a good crime lab—”

“No,” Chief White said.

“Chief, this ax is so unique I might be able to match the steel grade to a manufacturer and locate the dealer who sold it.”

“No,” Chief White said. “You gotta be outta your mind. I’m not gonna authorize department time so you can run some silly test on a bunch of rust you found in a fence. It’s a dead end, Prentiss. It ain’t nothin’ but a fuckin’ ax.”

“Come on, Chief. I’ve got a hunch—”

“Go home,” White said. That was the final word. “Take tomorrow off. You been up so long you’re numb in the head.” White walked out, drawing a sheen of cigar smoke with him.

Lydia rubbed her eyes. Go home? she thought. What for? All that waited for her at home was her own loneliness.

The rust, she thought desperately. Yesterday she’d coped out the major impactations. Under the Braun microscope, the rust shimmered up at her, actually metallic at 75x. Maybe White was right; maybe the rust was a dead end.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t.

««—»»

“GODDAMN!” Wade shouted.

He stood frozen in his shorts. This morning’s Exham Sentinel shook in his hand. The headline read: “Wade Burned Again.”

The front page picture showed Wade shamefacedly signing tickets, while Officer Lydia Prentiss smiled aside.

Famed campus womanizer, scofflaw, and B.S. artist Wade St. John, above, learns the hard way that Exham police mean business with their new crackdown against drinking and speeding on campus roads. Chief H. C. White told reporters, “A college like Exham, kids tend to take things for granted. Responsible driving habits are part of being an adult, and if students ain’t gonna act like adults, then, by golly, they’re gonna pay. As for Wade St. John, we want to make an example of him whenever we can, since he represents the exact opposite of adult behavior.” Wade, now in his sixth year at Exham but with only a junior standing, averages ten traffic citations per semester, a campus record. It is rumored that Wade was forced by his father to take summer classes as punishment for low marks. A reliable yet undisclosed source stated that an additional punishment was initiated—that Wade has been forced to do something as yet unheard-of in his life: work a job.

“Goddamn!” Wade shouted again. This had to be illegal. Everyone on campus would read this!

Wade is reportedly working as part of the maintenance staff at Exham’s Crawford T. Sciences Center. Sentinel reporters set out to verify this rumor, at the office of Dean C. F. Saltenstall himself, where he was more than happy to address the question of the day. “Oh, it’s quite true. Wade is indeed working at the sciences center, cleaning toilets for minimum wage.”

Wade threw the paper out the window and cursed. The clock only compounded his humiliation; it was time for work.

He felt idiotic in his smock and rubber gloves. It took him two hours to clean the toilets on the first floor. His head ached, his throat was parched. Two hours was enough; he needed a break.

He staggered into the dark hall. There was a Coke machine around here somewhere. He tried to get his mind off the newspaper article but couldn’t. His reputation was ruined now, for good. But as he mused upon his anger, images of Officer Prentiss kept popping up. Don’t be a shithead, he thought. Why bother thinking of her? To her, he was a symbol of antithesis. Perhaps that explained his attraction to her; Wade liked a challenge. He’d had plenty of challenges in his life, and he’d melted a lot of feminine ice in his time. Yes, Wade the Conqueror.

Ooops. There he went again, violating the warning of last night’s dream. The pier girls would haunt him for a long time. Was it in his genes to view women as objects, as trophies for his social and sexual hunting board?

Behind him a door pulled open. Wade turned. A figure advanced from the doorway and nearly walked into him.

“Jesus!” they both said. The figure was Officer Prentiss.

“I was just thinking about you,” Wade enthused. “Just now.”

Lydia Prentiss winced. “You again,” she muttered. She slipped past him down the hall. Wade scampered to follow.

“What are you doing here?” he jabbered, keeping up.

“Police business, which means none of yours.”

Police business? In the sciences center? She walked on, ignoring him. Wade couldn’t fix a good look at her. She was about to drop money in the Coke machine, then she turned. “Please don’t stand so close, Mr. St. John. You smell like mop water.”

This pricked him. “You would, too, if you’d just cleaned as many toilets as I have. Oh, and thanks for spreading my personal business all over the front page of the paper.” His eyes scanned down her back. Long legs, trim waist. Her beautiful bright blond hair hung unbound to her neckline. But her face remained unseen.

I’ve…got to see her face, Wade reflected.

“I was just giving you the tickets you rightfully deserved,” she said. “It’s not my fault the Sentinel was around.” Then she took her Diet Coke from the machine’s mouth and went back down the hall.

Wade followed her, like a puppy. She was working in one of the 400 level bio labs, at a counter full of books, snapshots, and unidentifiable kits, containing brushes, and bottles. Something like a tensor lamp with a carrying handle arched up on its stem. An odd blue light bulb filled its head. What was all this stuff?

She turned and frowned. “You’re still here?”

And that’s when Wade got his look at her face. Officer Prentiss’ beauty glared at him like a bright light, and it was not in any way akin to the brainwashing, socio high fashion beauty that he, as well as the rest of the Western world, had been taught to glorify. This was far more complex than high cheekbones, eye makeup, and vulpine sneers. Too many elements poured into its enigma. Stark yet deeply fluid. Hard yet soft. Cool blue yet fringed with sweetness, which hid searing heat. She was a car crash of contradiction reassembled—like the women in the dream? Her eyes were fine etched, liquid gray.

She thumped down on a stool, paying him no mind. She seemed tired before the spread of notepads, diagrams, and clutter.

“Hey, what’s this?” Wade asked, and picked up a tiny bottle.

“It’s osmium tetroxide, and it’s poisonous. Don’t touch it.”

He picked up the thing that looked like a tensor lamp. “What’s this thing?”

“An ultraviolet spotter. Don’t touch it.”

He picked up a fat book. “This the new Clancy?”

“Not quite. Put it down. And please leave.”

Next he picked up some Polaroids. “What’re… Hey—”

She snatched them away.

“Those looked like pictures of bloodstains.”

“It’s called fall, Mr. St. John, and it’s not your concern.”

“Please, call me Wade.”

Lydia Prentiss slumped. “Mr. St. John, I have a lot of work to do here. I haven’t slept in a day, and what I need less than anything in the world right now is a con man rich kid punk standing over my shoulder—”

“I’m not a con man,” Wade informed her.

“—so I’ll try to say this as politely as possible. Go away! Get out! I’m busy!”

“All right already,” Wade said. “See you later.”

“Hopefully not.”

Is it my imagination, or does this girl hate my guts? Women simply did not treat him like this. He turned at the door, raised a finger. “How would you like me to do you a big favor?”

“I wouldn’t,” she said.

“I know this great little Italian place just out of town.”

The sheer incredulity of this premise caused Lydia Prentiss to glare. “You expect me to go out with you?”

“Yeah. What do you say?”

“I’d sooner drink my own urine,” she replied.

I guess that means no, Wade thought. But no was not an answer he was accustomed to taking. “I’m Wade St. John, the Wade St. John. I’m offering you a rare privilege. Girls stand in line to go out with me. I’m the best known person on this campus.”

“No force on earth could make me be seen in public with the likes of you,” Lydia Prentiss clarified.

Wade visibly winced. He’d met friendlier junkyard dogs. “Is there any reason in particular why you’re shitting all over me?”

And what he saw in her eyes just then—her cool, pretty, luminous gray eyes—was a wide open furnace of disdain. Disgust flattened her words to monotone when she said, “You’re nothing but a spoiled rotten rich brat full of family money and bullshit joyriding through life on a silver platter. You’re the bottom of the barrel, St. John. I wouldn’t go out with you if you were the last living thing on this planet.”

Wade left. The toilets would be better company than this. You win some, you lose some, he thought, but this is ridiculous.

It was possibly the first time in his life that Wade St. John had actually had his feelings hurt.

—

CHAPTER 12

—WAKE, bid the voice.

Tom’s eyes opened.

IT’S TIME.

Tom sat up, then stood. He stretched and grinned.

“Master,” he whispered.

He knew everything at once—things no one else knew, wondrous, miraculous things. The knowledge was a gift, like his new destiny.

“Destiny,” he whispered.

He felt a surge of life reaching out from his brain. There was a big bump on his head, but it didn’t hurt. In the mirror he examined his reflection and saw the tiny bruise on his throat, like a bite mark.

“Thanks, Master,” Tom McGuire said aloud to his room. He threw his head back and laughed, blushing a great and overwhelming joy. And there was more.

There was a black dot on the wall.

It was beautiful somehow. It was like art. A pendant hung around his neck, he discovered. It, too, was black and equally beautiful. He touched its warm cruciform shape and shivered.

I can do anything, he thought.

He started with the small stuff. He crimped coins with his fingers. He bent a pair of scissors in half, crushed a metal file drawer like an accordion. Concentrating, he punched a hole into the center of his desk, then he picked up his History 202 text, History of a Free People, and tore it in half.

At once the Supremate’s voice was in his head, like a chord:

—OURS IS A SACRED MISSION, MANIFOLD IN DESIGN, HOLY IN PURPOSE. WE NEED YOU TO DO WHAT WE CANNOT.

“I am your servant forever,” Tom said to the air.

—I GIVE YOU STRENGTH, WISDOM, ETERNAL LIFE.

Tom couldn’t resist. “Your wish is my command.”

The Supremate’s voice steepened in silence. —JOIN US NOW IN A GREAT DESTINY. YOU WILL BE WORSHIPED SOMEDAY.

The word slipped around his head, fine as brandy in a snifter. Worshiped, he thought. Like a…god.

“I will do anything…”

—WORK STEADFAST AND ALONE IN THE DAY, AND WITH MY DAUGHTERS AT NIGHT. THEY WILL GUIDE YOU INTO THE REALM OF AN IDEAL THAT KNOWS NO FLAW.

Tom could only nod now, bliss choking out his words.

—TOGETHER, TOM, WE WILL MAKE HISTORY.

««—»»

Lydia Prentiss jerked out of sleep, not terrified but shaking from some monumental despair. She grimaced at the clock: 6 P.M.

Gradually stabs of her dreams re formed. She’d dreamed of dead, bloated animals. She’d dreamed of anthracene headaches, fingerprint tape, and blurred vision from too much UV light. She’d dreamed she found Sladder’s arm. It was withered and gray, the hand drawn into a claw. She’d been injecting glycerin under the fingertips to distend the ridge patterns when the arm twitched to life, its claw hand snatching for her throat…

The sweat on her skin felt chill when she got up. She always slept nude for it made her feel less lonely—often she’d wake with her arms wrapped about the pillow, a stuffed dummy for a lover.

She purged herself in the shower. The water felt wonderful. White had given her a couple days off; he wanted her out of the way until the people from the state left. He would downplay it all, to believe the safest scenario. White was a horse wearing blinders.

Forget it. Think about something else. She soaped herself, imagining someone else was doing it. Some strong beautiful man’s hand glided the sudsy bar around her breasts and stomach.

She gave in, closed her eyes. Then the fantasy showed Sladder’s hand on her flesh. She rushed out to dry herself, grimacing.

“You know what your problem is, Lydia?” she asked the mirror. “You treat everyone like garbage because it’s easier than facing the fact that you’re a rotten, detestable cunt. No wonder nobody likes you. No wonder you don’t have any friends.”

The mirror didn’t argue.

It was all true, she knew that. She pictured herself going from job to job, place to place, with no one. She would grow old and die alone—a wizened wretch.

She sat down naked on the bed, already bored. Television was useless, she hadn’t watched it in months. On the nightstand, next to her Colt Trooper Mark III, yesterday’s Marlboro stood on end. She’d been too tired to smoke it, so tonight she could have two, which mildly excited her. The cigarette thing was the only promise she hadn’t broken. The others lay in pieces about her life.

Absently she looked down at her feet, her legs, her clean pubic hair and belly button. She had a nice tan already. No one knew that lying on the apartment roof was the bulk of her social life. She always wore a minuscule string bikini. She jogged every day, worked out with dumbbells, and did lots of sit ups to keep her stomach flat. Why she worked so hard to remain physically attractive mystified her: she showed her body to no one, and hadn’t in years. She presumed she was attractive but was unimpressed by the presumption. She’d read in Cosmo that women who felt ugly on the inside compensated for that by making themselves beautiful on the outside. The idea distressed her.

She glanced secretively at the blinds. They were closed, not that anyone could peep in at her on the third floor. She felt silly. She parted her legs, then gently touched herself with her finger. Why should she be embarrassed? Everybody did it, didn’t they? She’d also read in Cosmo that even women with active sex lives masturbated regularly. Well, then…

She filled her head with pictures of muscular men. Broad hands roamed her breasts and thighs, hard penises rubbed against her. Mouths kissed her neck and sucked her nipples. In her mind, she was penetrated and humped by a gorgeous, curved cock. But…

Nothing. Perhaps so much conceit had turned her the other way. She thought of women making love to her but flinched at once. No, this was no good at all. Her finger slackened; the inlet of her supposed passion felt as cold and unresponsive as the rest of her.

She knew the reason. No one liked her because she didn’t like herself enough to let them. The one lover in her life she’d chased away with her sarcasm and ridicule. She was awful to everyone. It was easier that way, wasn’t it? Easier to just be awful.

She’d been awful to Wade St. John, and she’d delighted in it. What was wrong with her? How could I have said those things to him? He was just a harmless punk kid and she’d gone after him like a shark to blood, as if by natural response.

At once she was disgusted with herself.

Lydia Prentiss stood up. Isn’t this ridiculous? A college-educated twenty six year old nude female police officer making promises to a wall? Yes, it was ridiculous, but just the same, to the wall she made her vow: “I am not going to treat people like garbage anymore. I will not look down on others, and I will not be unkind. I am going to be a good person, and I’m going to start right now.”

She heard the world laughing.

««—»»

And as Lydia Prentiss made promises to a wall, a girl named Penelope blinked and breathed and fidgeted, jammed immobile and plumply swollen in a sheen of some hot, mucoid slime, her face stupidly collapsed against what was now her home.

Her big, squashed eyes stared out, aglow.

—

CHAPTER 13

“Hey, Jerv,” Wade greeted. “Am I interrupting something?”

Jervis turned guiltily. “Uh, no,” he said. There was another guy in Jervis’ room—greasy hair, gaunt face, tacky sports clothes. He looked like a bookie. He gave Wade a fast once over.

“If you have any problems,” the guy said to Jervis, “call me.”

Jervis nodded. The guy slipped past Wade and left.

“Who was that slimeball?”

“Just a friend,” Jervis said. “Have a Kirin.”

Wade got the message that Jervis didn’t want to talk. He opened a Kirin from Jervis’ fridge. The Japanese made beer of notable quality, like their torpedo bombers. “Missed you last night, man. Tom and I went out and had a few beers. We were a little worried.”

Jervis sipped his own Kirin from his desk, inspecting something that looked like a pocket radio. “I was studying at the library.”

Right. Studying. Never mind that classes don’t start till next week. “Well, we’ll be partying again tonight, so you can catch up.”

“Can’t make it tonight either,” Jervis said.

“Why the hell not? We got bad breath or something?”

Jervis went to the fridge for another Kirin. He was acting…funny. “I got some personal business, that’s all.”

“Oh,” Wade said. He wandered to the desk, picked up the radio. A sticker on the back read: “49MHz Simplex Receiver Unit. Not for commercial use, not for sale.”

“Jerv, what’s this ridiculous thing?”

“Just a transistor radio.”

“Oh, yeah? Forty nine megahertz? That’s not a very popular station—it’s off the dial.”

Jervis frowned. He pulled the end off a Carlton and lit up.

“Jerv, Jerv,” Wade said. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“It’s still this Sarah thing, isn’t it? I don’t know what you’ve got cooking, I don’t know what this thing is, and I don’t know who that scuzzy looking guy was. All I know is my best friend is weirding out. You’ve got to let Sarah go.” Every time Wade said “Sarah,” Jervis winced. “You’re starting to scare the shit out of us, man. We think maybe you’re cracking a little.”

Jervis smiled like a ghost. “Nothing’s wrong.”

“All right, I get the message.” Wade got up, “You seen Tom?”

“I saw him leaving earlier, couple of hours ago, I guess.”

Great, Wade thought. I’ll be drinking alone tonight. “Later.”

“Hey, Wade…don’t worry about me, okay?”

Wade stopped and turned at the door.

“I’m not cracking up. It’s just that I’ve got something going right now. A quest, a cleansing. Like the Sartre novel.”

Not that Sartre shit again, Wade fretted. The fucker’s been dead ten years and he’s still fucking up people’s lives.

Jervis gulped smoke and continued. “Don’t worry about me. You and Tom are my best friends. Just trust me on this, okay?”

“Sure, Jerv. We’re always around if you want to talk.”

Wade went back to his own room. He didn’t like any of this. It was bad enough to lose a friend to outside forces, but inside forces were worse. They were the ones that tore you apart.

He felt depressed. The whole day had been depressing, cleaning toilets, mopping floors. Being shit on by Officer Prentiss hadn’t exactly livened him up either. He was getting himself a bottle of Adams when he heard footsteps in the hall.

He ducked out and saw Tom disappear into his room.

“Hey! Hey, Tom! Are we…”

Tom’s door closed. Had he been carrying something under his arm? It looked like a briefcase or something.

Wade strode down the hall, pushed open Tom’s door. “You must need a hearing aid. Are we going downtown tonight or what?”

Tom wasn’t in the room. Wade looked around slowly. He was sure he’d seen Tom enter, or at least he thought he was sure. He checked the bathroom, the closet. Tom wasn’t here.

Wade sputtered back to his room. The hall was dark; maybe Tom had gone to the exit stairs at the end of the hall, or maybe it had been someone else, a new student coming on. Or maybe—

Or maybe Lysol fumes are making me see things, he finished.

He had to find something to do tonight—there were only a few more days before classes started. Call up an old flame, he decided. Shit, he had enough old flames to start the Chicago fire. There were lots of girls who’d drop everything this minute to go out with him. He called Melissa over on the Hill, a gal who really knew her stuff. “Melissa, baby! This is Wade. Sorry I didn’t return your call the other day, but you know how it is.”

“No, Wade, I don’t. So tell me. How is it?”

“Well, you know, babe. I’ve been busy.”

“Yeah, I heard. Sorry, I don’t go out with toilet cleaners.”

“I—I—”

Click.

Next number. Wendy. Yeah. Real hot stuff. “Wendy, baby! This is Wade. You want to go out tonight? Dinner, a few drinks, a little cruising around in the Vette?”

“Well,” she said. “How about…no?”

“What do you mean no? We went out a lot last semester.”

“You didn’t clean toilets last semester either. What gall!”

Wade hung up. Don’t get discouraged, he thought slowly.

Wade got discouraged. Quickly.

He tried six more girls and struck out six more times. Nobody wanted to go out with guys who cleaned toilets—they’d all read the paper. In one day he’d gone from status symbol to comedy symbol.

The phone rang, a further mocking shrill. “Toilet Cleaners, Inc.,” he answered. “You flub ’em, we scrub ’em.”

Silence like reluctance stretched across the line. Then a dryly sexy woman’s voice inquired, “Is this Wade St. John?”

“Yes, it is, or what’s left of him.”

A long pause. Then: “This is Lydia Prentiss.”

Now it was Wade’s turn to pause. Hang up! Hang up! his thoughts barked. Don’t talk to the bitch! Hang up!

But he couldn’t. Somehow, he simply…couldn’t.

“You’re lucky you caught me,” he said. “I was just about to go out for some ‘joyriding through life on a silver platter.’ You know, a ‘spoiled rotten rich brat’ like me tends to keep active. Must be all that ‘family money and bullshit’ keeps a guy slick. This is quite a surprise, though. I didn’t know the ‘bottom of the barrel’ had a listing in the phone book. What can I do for you?”

Her voice faltered in snatches. “Mr. St. John, I’m calling to…” She sighed, almost forlornly. “I feel terrible about the things I said to you this morning.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, I really do.” She actually sounded choked up. “I don’t know what got into me. I had a really bad day in the first place. I got in an argument with my boss, then you walked in and I took it all out on you. I’m really sorry.”

“In other words, you’re…apologizing?”

“Yes,” she said.

Hmm. This could be interesting. “Well, it just so happens that I’m a very forgiving kind of guy, and, yes, I accept your apology.”

“Thank you,” she uttered.

“But of course apologies are just rhetoric, just talk, and talk lacks meaning. Don’t you agree?”

“Well—”

“And the best way for you to prove the meaning of your apology is to go out with me. Tonight. So what time do I pick you up?”

Now her pause raced for an exit. “I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”

“Oh, I see,” Wade said. “You’re just apologizing to clear your conscience.”

“It’s not that. It’s—”

“I know. You’d sooner drink your own urine than go out with me. Who writes your stuff, by the way? Rickles?”

“No, please. I…”

“That’s all right, I accept your apology anyway. Good night.”

Wade calmly hung up. He dropped his empty Adams bottle into the trash compactor and got himself another. When the phone rang again, he answered, “Joe’s Used Silver Platters. May I help you?”

“I’ll go out with you,” Lydia Prentiss said.

“Smart girl. Where do you live?”

“I’ll just meet you someplace.”

“All right. The Exham Inn? Nine o’clock?”

“That’s fine,” she said. “I’ll see you then.”

Confidence returned. He busied to get ready. Who knew? Perhaps the day wouldn’t be a complete catastrophe after all.

««—»»

The dark office tingled in the Supremate’s influence. Tom liked that. He liked the dark and its dim silver edge.

Hope this is the right stuff. Botching his first assignment was no way to begin an eternal relationship. Eternal. The word seemed to glow. I give you strength, the Supremate had promised. Wisdom. Eternal life.

Besser hadn’t been pleased with Tom’s methods. “Sloppy,” he complained. “We can’t afford that, not this early.” He grumbled further, flipping through the folders. “Be more careful in the future. At this stage, an influx of police would cause problems.”

Tom didn’t understand. “Who cares about the police? The Supremate has made us immortal.”

“You, yes. But not Winnie and me.”

Tom gave that one some thought. It didn’t add up.

“You’re one to talk, Dudley, about being careful.” Winnifred Saltenstall sat back in a chair. She looked bored. Her hand moved idly beneath her dress. Is that all she ever does? Tom wondered.

Besser’s hog jowls tensed. “What do you mean by that?”

Winnie laughed. “Look at the mess you left at the agro site. Talk about sloppy. You left footprints, bloodstains. You didn’t even pick up the empty bullets. I heard my husband talking to White about it. He’s got that new police officer working on it. She used to be an evidence technician.”

“White’s just pacifying the dean,” Besser argued. “He’s a brownnose; the police have nothing, and even if they did, White would bury it. He knows a campus murder would jeopardize his job.”

“You better hope so, Dudley—”

Tom smiled at their silly bickering.

“—and would you please send that thing away,” she was saying.

It took Tom a moment to catch on. She means me, doesn’t she? Send that thing away. Me.

“Don’t be unkind, Winnie. Tom’s part of the family now.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s unnerving,” she fussed. “Tell it to go.”

Tom didn’t like being called an it or a thing. He looked at her very blankly. He wondered. He just wondered.

Besser was pretending not to be on the spot, the fat, no balls wimp. Tom knew who wore the real pants in that relationship. Besser just said: “Winnie and I, and the sisters, of course, have to get Penelope ready. Things didn’t work out, the poor girl. It couldn’t be helped, so there’s no reason to feel bad about it.”

I could care less, Tom thought.

“Meet us back here in an hour,” Besser instructed.

“Yes, sir, an hour. No problem.”

“Oh, and Tom?”

“Yes, sir?”

Besser’s bald spot gleamed. “Bring a shovel.”

—

CHAPTER 14

She’s not going to show, Wade felt convinced. The Mitchell’s Brewery clock over the mantel showed 9:15. He should’ve known.

He sat sipping an Adams at the upstairs rail. Several girls sauntered in. They looked at him and immediately burst into laughter. “Hey, Wade!” one called out. “How’s the new job—”

“—cleaning toilets!” added a second.

“—for minimum wage!” finished a third.

“Laugh it up,” he muttered. He didn’t even care anymore; there was no more face left to save. His depression rose to new peaks.

When Lydia Prentiss walked in, Wade didn’t even notice her—that is, he noticed the full tilt blonde who stood scanning the bar, he just didn’t realize it was her. She stood skintight in stone washed black jeans and scarlet high heels, and a bright yellow tube top which her breasts filled to its physical limit. Then she spotted him and walked up.

“Hello, Mr. St. John.”

“Woe ah!” Wade said.

“Sorry I’m late. I don’t have a car so I took a cab.”

“Hemmina, hemmina, uh,” Wade said. “Let’s get a booth. It’s more private.”

“Okay.”

On the way to the rear booths, Wade stepped on his shoelace, tripped, and fell. Heads turned, some chuckles rose up. Suddenly Wade was the town fool.

“Are you drunk?” she asked.

“No, I swear. I draven’t hunk—I mean I haven’t drunk a thing all day.”

She just shook her head, faintly smiling. He felt much better in the booth. Stationary now, he thought. Back in control. Go get her, King of Charisma. “What would you like?”

She relaxed in the padded booth. “I think I’ll have a beer.”

But all Wade could see was her—her beautiful body, her beautiful face. She was radiant. “Kut bind of weer?” he asked.

“Huh?”

Idiot! “I mean, what kind of beer?”

She scanned the beer list with interest. As a rule, women always ordered either Michelob Light or Corona. Wade saw no point in the existence of light beers, and as for Corona, he refused to drink anything with the same name as the end of a penis.

“Surprise me,” she said.

He ordered an Adams for himself and an Old Nick for her, neglecting to mention that Old Nick had more alcohol than any beer in the house.

He was grinning at her, enraptured. He felt charged with nervous current. Her beauty was too much to perceive at once. Say something! a voice like an alarm ordered. Make conversation!

Brilliantly he inquired, “So, tell me about yourself.”

“I think I’d be more interested in hearing about you first.”

“Ask anything you want. My life’s an open book.”

“An open comic book, by the looks of you now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for one thing, you’re grinning like Alfred E. Newman. You’ve asked me kut bind of weer I want, and sworn you draven’t hunk a thing all day. And to top it off, you tripped over your own two feet. Are you this smooth with all the girls?”

At that moment, the beers came. When Wade went to pour, he knocked his over. Half the bottle emptied into his lap.

Lydia Prentiss could suspend her laughter no more. The waitress was laughing too, and so were several patrons. Wade bounced to his feet, a sweating, grinning idiot. “Excuse me,” he said, and marched stiffly to the men’s room. Before the mirror, he shouted: “What the hell is wrong with you! You’re making a jackass out of yourself in front of quite possibly the most beautiful woman on earth!”

The mirror was warped; his head looked slanted. Two guys at the urinals were laughing it up real good.

It was the foreignness of the situation that was causing this debacle. Something—perhaps everything—about Lydia Prentiss had pulled the rug out from under his social feet. Wade had commanded virtually every encounter in his life that involved women. But now…now…

Now it was all gone. This female cop had reduced him to a gibbering nudnik in the space of five minutes.

Control, he thought. I must regain control.

He stared himself down. Then, as hard as he could, he slapped himself in the face.

There. Now. Ready.

He went back to the booth, mindful of his shoelaces. He sat down carefully. In his absence, she’d put a good dent in her Old Nick. “This stuff’s pretty good,” she admitted.

“I may not know trigonometry but I do know beer.” He ordered another round, and pointed to the cigarette she’d set up on end before her. “Aren’t you going to smoke that?”

“Not yet.” She seemed dreamy, relaxed. “I’m going to look at it awhile first. I allow myself only one per day.”

“Oh, yeah? My friend Jervis allows himself four per day. Four packs.” He sipped his Adams for moral support and began: “Sorry about making a spectacle of myself. I must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed today.”

“Well, I’m sorry too,” she said, looking down. “About this morning, I mean. I’m not always like that.”

Wade rubbed his hands together. “Okay, now that we’ve got that settled, let’s start over again.”

And something quite unusual followed. A kind of bridge rose between them, a pleasant neutrality that lacked the pressure of appearances. For the next hour and a half they…talked. A day ago they’d been antagonists, but now they each provided buried commonalities. He told her things about himself in ways she found amusing. He told her far more than he planned. He told her about his school problems, his inabilities at decision making, the situation with Dad. She told him about her work problems, her inabilities in respecting others, the situation with Chief White and the other police. A wordless conclusion came at the end, that they both dealt with their problems from the wrong angles. Wade was fleeing from himself by being what others expected him to be, while Lydia made the same flight by being just the opposite. Wade seemed to be providing something she desperately needed without knowing it, and it occurred to him that he was probably seeing a part of her that no one else had for some time. In the course of an evening, they’d become each other’s confessors. A few shreds of their shadows had been freed.

Afterward they looked bewildered at each other. A shocking acknowledgment exchanged. Did I say all that? he thought. And did she say all that? To me? Lydia looked down and gulped. “Wow, I… I didn’t mean to drag you through my whole life.”

“I did some dragging of my own. Look” —he touched his Adams— “our beers got warm. It’s not just any woman who can divert me from my beer.”

“I’m honored. Order some more. I’ll be right back.”

She excused herself for the obvious. Wade felt pleasantly exhausted, and still bewildered. The place had become packed. Up front was standing room only. Abruptly, though, the crowd began to quiet and part. People were frowning. They were making way for someone, someone big. Then Porker lummoxed through.

“Well, well. Wade St. John, every toilet’s favorite guy.”

“Aw, Porker, tough luck. The all you can eat pasta bar is closed.”

“You’re a funny guy, St. John. And you were real funny on the front page of the paper today.”

“Thanks… Say, have you lost weight?”

Porker ignored the comment. His shadow engulfed the entire table. He and Besser would make a great tag team: the Blobsy Twins or something. “Who you here with?” Porker demanded. “Your deadbeat friends? Or one of your usual fast lane bimbo types?”

Wait’ll you see, big guy, Wade thought, ’cause here she comes.

Porker’s mastodonic physique turned. He gaped, balloon faced in lust. The sight of Lydia nearly caused him to fall backward, which surely would’ve collapsed the entire brass and wood bar. “H hi, Lydia,” he yammered. “You’re sure lookin’ good tonight.”

“Thank you,” she said. Very primly then, and to Porker’s complete outrage, she sat down across from Wade.

Porker’s hooded pig eyes flashed panic. “Y you’re with him?”

“That’s right,” she answered.

“D don’t you know who that is?”

“Yes, Porker, I do. I’m a big girl now.” She flashed him a seductive white smile. “But would you do me a favor?”

“Yuh yuh yeah.”

“Don’t tell anyone, okay? The chief might get the wrong idea.”

“Sh sh sure, Lydia.”

Her smile brightened. Her crossed arms drew closer, to articulate her breasts. “Promise?”

Porker gulped, staring. “Pruh pruh promise, sure.”

Wade was duly amused. This wasn’t body language, it was body hypnosis. Porker’s portable radio squawked, and as he answered it his eyes remained riveted to Lydia’s breasts. Then he snapped it off. “Shit! We gotta big nine out on the Route!”

“See ya,” Lydia said.

Porker hustled out. “What’s a nine?” Wade asked her.

“Traffic accident. White probably needs him for a roadblock.”

“I hope you’re not going to get in trouble being here with me. I don’t guess police are allowed to fraternize with students.”

“I can deal with it,” she said.

Before Wade could say anything more, Porker rushed back in. “Lydia! I just got another call after the nine. Vandalism out at North Admin. Chief White wants you to check it out.”

“I’m off duty,” Lydia objected. “Send someone else.”

“There is no one else—the whole shift’s on the Route. A gas truck jackknifed, spilled gas all over the place. Come on, take the call. It’ll only take you a few minutes.”

Lydia frowned. “All right.”

Porker was gone again, and Lydia was regretting, “Looks like I—” She slackened suddenly. “Shit, I forgot! I don’t have a car!”

Wade smiled. “Don’t worry. I have a car.”

««—»»

Wade floored the Vette out of the inn’s lot, dumping 400 plus horsepower onto the hardball. He did zero to sixty in four seconds. Lydia’s gorgeous bright blond hair was a flying mane. “Slow down!” she yelled.

Nonsense, Wade thought. The Vette sucked down onto the road as he slowed off the exit and blew through the campus gate. A minute later he side skidded to a halt at the front steps of North Admin.

“Jesus Christ!” she yelled. “That’s a highway, not the Indy 500!”

“Relax,” Wade said. “I got you here in” —he looked at his watch— “less than three minutes.”

“Come on,” she said.

North Administration was the main records hall. It stored all student personnel files and all the medical files for the campus health clinic. Lydia’s high heels clipped along the floor. Behind, Wade watched her figure traverse in the tight black jeans.

“Hey, you kids! What’cha doin’ there?”

A bent duffer with a red nose approached, holding a mop. Wade sympathized with him. Lydia flashed her badge and ID.

“Damn,” the janitor said. “I only called three minutes ago.”

Wade smiled proudly.

“I’m Officer Prentiss. You reported some vandalism?”

“That’s right. While I was buffin’ the north wing floors, I noticed the clinic door open, and I know I locked it earlier. First thing I see is the door frame split, like it was kicked in, and I notice file drawers open, folders layin’ about. Come on.”

He took them several doors down and turned on the light. The clinician’s desk sat adorned with Hummel curios, a Cross desk set, and a petty cash box. “Don’t touch anything,” Lydia said. The whole scene distracted her, and Wade, too, felt the wrongness of the room. Several file drawers hung open, and a lot of folders had been tossed around the room, but that was it.

“This sure is patsy vandalism,” Wade said. “They busted in just to throw a bunch of files?”

“This isn’t vandalism, it’s burglary,” Lydia said.

“Right. Blind burglars?” He gestured at the desk. “They left the desk set, the clock, the cash box?”

“That’s not what they were after.” She bent over the violated file cabinets. Someone had forced the drawers open.

“The files?” Wade asked.

Lydia nodded. “They knew exactly which ones to hit, too.”

“But who would want a bunch of files?”

Lydia didn’t answer. She breathed on the metal cabinets. “Will you take me back to the station for a minute? I need some things. I’ll also need you to help me, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure. I’ve got nothing to do.”

She got the janitor’s name and sent him on his way. Before they left, she stopped to examine the door. The doorknob was gone. Knocked off, Wade guessed. “Hey, here it is,” he said, looking in.

“Don’t touch it!” Lydia exclaimed.

They both stooped over. It hadn’t been knocked off, it looked crushed. Wade glanced at the door frame itself. “Take a look,” he said.

It was hard to see at first. A palmprint had been embedded in the wood. Closer inspection revealed more. It wasn’t a print—it was an indentation. But this was a solid wood door!

Lydia exhaled on the impression, checking for a ridge pattern. When Wade stepped back to give her light, he stepped on something. He could feel it under his shoe.

He looked down and flinched.

It was a beer cap.

He picked it up quickly, careful to conceal it from her. He knew it was tampering with evidence, but the cap provided a disturbing giveaway; he knew it at a glance. It was gold with a trademark: a malt shovel and the red Gothic letters “München Spaten Oktoberfest.”

««—»»

Tom poured back the rest of his Spaten Oktoberfest. Damn, it was good! Malty but not harsh. Smooth, and a pleasant aftertaste. Prime stuff, that was for sure.

Rebirth, he thought. The night was his home now, his sanctuary and his power. What more could a natural man ask for? Good beer, a good car, and…immortality. He drove the Camaro through quiet campus roads, looking around, seeing, feeling. Everything was new, and everything old was behind him. Forever.

Who are they? he wondered. Or what?

Tom laughed out loud. His laughter trumpeted, and cracked echoes into the night. It sounded like cannon fire.

“Rebirth!” he shouted at the top of his lungs.

It didn’t matter who they were, really, or what.

Did it?

“Destiny!” Tom shouted.

He swigged his beer and opened another.

The Camaro roared off back to the sciences center.

—

CHAPTER 15

Jervis sat in darkness before the open window. The yellow quarter moon barely cleared the flat roof of the opposing eight-story dorm, Lillian Hall. Jervis smoked, drank, and waited.

Waiting for the truth, he pondered. It’ll be arriving soon.

Czanek’s phantom brand receiver came with the price. Jervis extended its antenna. To his left stood the telescope, already focused on the black second story window. It was a Bushnell 400x refractor; he bought it that afternoon for $220 at Best Buy.

Czanek’s bug would let him hear, and the telescope would let him see. A full window-shot at this distance only required the 40x eyepiece. Seeing was important to him. He needed to see, not as a voyeur, but as a seeker. Why did he want to hurt himself by witnessing what he already knew? Why did people do that? To see, he thought. To see the truth with his own eyes and be caressed by its finality.

Then he heard something. A spark of static. Voices?

He heard: “He’ll be here soon. Be patient.” A man’s voice.

Jervis held the small speaker to his ear. More: —We mustn’t waste time! We only have a few more days!

That was a woman’s voice, but clearly not Sarah’s. It sounded silly with excitement like a little girl’s. Then: “I’ll be going over these while you’re gone.” A second woman’s voice.

Jervis looked into the telescope. Sarah’s window was still dark, and there was no sign of Wilhelm’s love van in the parking lot. The dorm, clearly, was empty.

Then where were these voices coming from?

“Goddamn!” Jervis sputtered. He realized then that his receiver was picking up someone else’s bug. Czanek must’ve inadvertently planted another bug for another client in range of Jervis’ receiver.

The voices crackled on from the box. So far Jervis accounted for two women and one man. Then the first woman said, even more excitedly: —I can’t wait to begin! It’ll be so much fun!

And the man again: “I just hope it works out this time.”

Jervis shook his head in the dark. Just wait till he got hold of Czanek. He hadn’t paid six bills to hear someone else’s goddamn bug! Yet something distant bothered him. Something…

The man’s voice sounded familiar.

It sounded older, more mature than a student. But then he heard another man, a second man. What was this?

“Sorry I’m late, boss. I’m all ready.”

First man: “Excellent!”

Second woman: “Damn it, Dudley! I told you not to bring that thing in here!”

The first woman seemed to giggle.

First man again: “Bring the box to the car. Use your key. We’ll meet you at the labyrinth.”

That finished it. Only static followed. Labyrinth? Jervis puzzled. Key? And the second woman had said Dudley. Dudley Besser? That must be where the other bug was, in Besser’s office.

This bothered Jervis. But one thing bothered him more—the second man’s voice. It had sounded just like Tom.

Lights blared outside. Everything Jervis had heard cleared from his mind. Wilhelm’s white van pulled into the lot.

The truth had arrived. Jervis’ heart skittered. He smoked down the rest of his Carlton and waited. A minute, or an oblivion, later, Sarah’s window came alight. Jervis pressed his eye to the telescope.

They walked in clear as day. Sarah picked up the cat, named Frid, and cuddled it. Wilhelm was dressed in brown Euromod yuppie shit. His cropped blond head was equally plain, his broad neck, his sturdy arms and legs. He took a beer out of the fridge, a Kirin from a six pack Jervis had forgotten to reclaim after the breakup.

“Scheiss!” Wilhelm exclaimed. “Das bier?

“Oh, it’s something Jervis left,” Sarah apologized. “I forgot it was in there.”

Wilhelm put the rest of the six pack in the trash.

Next they were kissing. Wilhelm grabbed Frid by some scruff and lobbed the animal aside. As they embraced, Sarah’s hand went unhesitantly up the crack of Wilhelm’s ass, while his hand, frightfully larger, plowed down her pants front.

Wilhelm was pulling her toward the couch. Sarah was tee-heeing, feigning reluctance. Wilhelm peeled off his jacket and shirt. Then he peeled off all her clothes as impassively as skinning a piece of fruit. Jervis quailed.

Wilhelm had an upper torso like a Mr. Olympia contestant. He wore black briefs which bulged, and the size of the bulge was terrifying to contemplate. Sarah was rubbing against him, moaning. Frid watched from atop the end table, eyes wide as opals. Jervis felt corpse still as he peered on.

What happened after that seemed devil inspired, a mocking one act sex play that somehow knew Jervis was in attendance. This was the girl he loved more than anything on earth, giving herself aplomb to this egotistical German muscle-rack.

In a trance of sadness, Jervis continued to watch as Sarah lay back on the couch. Wilhelm stood feet apart, legs like corded, sculpted wood. He hauled down the tight briefs. Sarah’s eyes widened as Wilhelm posed for her appraisal. “Oh, Willy, it’s huge!”

“No,” Jervis pleaded. “Please, God. Don’t let me see this.”

Sarah leaned forward, lust glowing off her face. All Jervis could see was Wilhelm’s ass and Sarah’s hands kneading the muscled glutes. He could hear the awful sound of what she was doing to him. Lewd, wet smacking. Muffled sounds of delight. Thanks, God, Jervis thought. Thanks a heap.

He began to cry.

Soon Sarah finished with the oral warm up. She lay back again, woozy with lust, shiny around the mouth. “Willy! It’s just so big!”

“Mein stander? Ja? Das gute.” He turned to let her look at it again, offering a full side shot, which unfortunately offered a full side shot for Jervis too.

“My God,” Jervis uttered. “My God.” Then tears slipped off his cheeks as he continued to stare. Wilhelm pushed open Sarah’s legs and mounted her.

He teased her navel with the gorged glans, slapped her stomach with it five or six times. Then he drew it down…

Jervis felt hairs standing out on his neck. This guy’s bigger than a rolling pin, he thought. Where’s he going to put all that?

Then he shuddered. Wilhelm proceeded as if on cue. He sunk it all into her at once, one quick stroke to the hilt. Bam! Sarah went momentarily rigid, then wrapped her legs around his herculean back, riding the sudden, relentless movement. Hot, delighted girl squeals shrilled from Jervis’ receiver; his eye pressed harder to the eyepiece.

Wilhelm went on for more than a half hour. Sarah maintained her excitement with equal vitality. Her orgasms were obvious: multiple vibrating shrieks, legs tensing each time she went.

Eventually Wilhelm withdrew. He grunted like a fearless knight having just shorn down an enemy, and ejaculated all over Sarah in dolphin spurts of seed. When he finished, her breasts, stomach, and thighs shined as if shellacked.

Jervis was falling apart, his eye welded to the telescope. Wilhelm got up and walked briefly out of view. Sarah lay worn and shining on the couch, blissfully spent. Her pink sex gaped. A moment later Wilhelm reappeared, holding a blue garment of some kind.

“Please, God,” Jervis quavered. “No, God. No.”

What hung from Wilhelm’s hand was a blue dress shirt, just your average Christian Dior, about thirty bucks at any men’s shop. But this shirt in particular was one of Jervis’, one he’d left in Sarah’s closet. He’d left it there on purpose, hoping it would remind her of him in the future. The shirt was allegorical, a psychic remnant. It was the last part of him in her living space and, hence, her life.

Wilhelm put the shirt to immediate use, guttering evil laughter. He very efficiently wiped his semen off her breasts, abdomen, and thighs. “I wish Jervis could see this!” Sarah bubbled. Then Wilhelm wiped his cock off as well and stuffed the shirt into the garbage.

Satisfied? he asked himself. Any English major would appreciate the obvious existential symbols here. It wasn’t just a shirt Wilhelm had wiped his cock off with, it was Jervis. The shirt was Jervis.

To end the scene, Frid hopped onto Sarah’s belly, purring. The blasted animal looked directly into the telescope…and smiled.

Jervis collapsed.

He lay there for quite a while. The telescopic scene remained in his mind like a lit ghost. Sometime later he crawled to the wastebasket and threw up. It was a violent, clenching emesis. He’d emptied himself as much from his heart as from his stomach.

He’d wanted the truth and he’d gotten it. Only one thing left, he thought. Dead love’s final flight.

The idea had a sweetness now, like a song, like a nocturne.

You don’t have the guts, his mind told him.

“Yes, I do,” Jervis answered the dark. “Watch me...”

He got up and lit what he presumed would be his last cigarette. He smoked deep. He let the room stay dark, for it should be that way for this. Yes, dark. Sweet, sweet dark.

He pulled the Webley out of the sock drawer. It was cold and heavy. It was big. His grandfather had given it to him on his deathbed. “A young man needs a good pistol,” he’d said, death already tinting his face. The Webley was a unique automatic revolver, British made. Jervis cocked it, inspired by its heavy, steel click. He was proud of his lack of reluctance.

I love you, Sarah, he thought. He put the big machined barrel to his head. I still love you. With all…my…heart.

Jervis squeezed the trigger. The hammer fell shut.

And nothing happened.

“Fuck me!” he shouted. He flipped open the Webley. The cylinder was empty. He rummaged through the sock drawer for his box of .455s, but it wasn’t there. Someone had taken it.

He heard mad laughter in his head, a noise like a flock of grackles. Poor Jervis just couldn’t win. Consciousness heaved up and out, and he collapsed to the carpet like an empty suit of clothes.

««—»»

Wade felt skittish driving her home. How could he sum up an evening like this? Their discussion at the tavern had been very weird, but the kookiest part of all was what had followed at North Administration, where, for two hours, Wade had played apprentice evidence tech. Helping a police officer fingerprint a crime scene was one thing he couldn’t ever recall doing on a date before.

He’d held lights for her as she Polaroided the entire clinic office, and the door, the door frame, and lock. She’d spent considerable time using extreme light angles to locate major latent areas. It amused Wade the way she softly talked to herself as she worked. She’d “dusted,” “taped,” “fumed,” or “snapped” anything of interest. Wade was particularly impressed by her ability to raise prints on the manila file folders and the squashed door knob.

He didn’t tell her about the beer cap.

Lydia lived in an apartment complex just out of town. She seemed played out, pleasantly bequieted as Wade drove on. The breeze through the open t top played with her hair.

This night of contradictions was still flourishing. Wade grew jittery as they approached the apartments. He wondered what she thought of him, really. She seemed to like him, she seemed comfortable around him, she seemed to… That was the problem. There was too much about her that seemed. She was indecipherable. He wondered if he’d even get a good night kiss.

That idea dizzied him. Just a kiss, just one…

“I’ll make it up to you,” she said. She sort of laughed. “Being dragged to a crime scene probably isn’t what you had in mind for a date.”

“Oh, it was…interesting,” he said.

“What I mean is I’d like to see you again.”

Wade almost lost the wheel. “You would? I mean, great.”

“I liked talking to you. I’m sorry I misjudged you. And I really liked the Old Nick.” She pointed. “Here’s my building.”

Wade parked. She was smiling when they got out. Crickets chirruped, and tall bushy pine trees stood by the entrance. She stopped and turned around.

Wade tried to sound casual. “Hey, I really had a good—”

She came right up to him and kissed him. One second he was standing there, trying to act in control, and the next second she had her arms around his waist and she was kissing him. It was a wondrous kiss, which seemed an absurd way to describe a kiss, but nothing else fit. It was soft, warm, delicate, wet, fervent, precise, and a hundred other things at once—a subtle mystery in moonlight. Her lips parted; the tips of their tongues touched. He could feel her bare shoulders in his hands, her breasts pressing. Her hair smelled lovely, clean; her skin felt hot. Pine needles brushed his back, their aromatic scent mixing with hers. Suddenly she was squeezing him so tightly it almost felt desperate.

When they stopped, they didn’t say anything. She was just looking at him, her eyes big and bright. She was beautiful. She was stepping slowly back. Back, back, his own eyes fixed, and she was smiling half happily, half sadly. And then she was in the door and gone.

««—»»

Tom poured Penelope out of the box.

It was very late, a quiet, warm moonlit night, and perfect for the work ahead. Tom had driven them in the Camaro to a suitable clearing back in the woods. Besser rode up front, and one of the sisters in back. Tom could see the idiot kiddie grin and sunglasses in the rearview. The sight pricked his nerves.

Penelope rode in the trunk, in a sturdy cardboard box.

Tom had dug the first hole in minutes, nearly breaking the shovel once or twice. He’d dug eight feet deep and six around. This was no easy feat but it was a milk run for Tom. Strength was one of the Supremate’s gifts. Tremendous, indefatigable strength.

He buried Mr. Sladder’s remains, then dug another hole. The low yellow moon glowed through tall trees, dappling the hidden grove. Besser stood in supervision with a Coleman lantern; he looked a bit pale. The sister stood right next to him, grinning. Tom dug the second hole with the lackadaise of a gardener hoeing a bed of petunias.

Penelope was blubbering something. She lay boneless beside the hole, a rubbery mass of flesh. She smelled good, though, like barbecued pork or something. He could see her collapsed face, her widely spread eyes, the formless mouth trying to talk. Her tongue lolled out and sputtered, slobbering.

Besser was paling at the sight.

Break time, Tom thought. He leaned against the shovel and chugged more Spaten—nothing like a cold beer after hard work, whether you were mowing the lawn, laying shingles, or burying girls alive.

“She’d been in some of my classes,” Besser lamented.

“Too bad she didn’t take,” Tom said.

“We’ve got it all worked out now.” Besser looked fearfully to the hooded sister. “No more mistakes.”

A froth of foam and bubbles drooled from Penelope’s mouth. What a grosser. The gelatinous loops of her arms and legs slopped uselessly, like tentacles on a speared octopus. Tom figured she was folded in half backward, her big wet breasts lolling at her armpits. At least she smelled like good barbecue.

The sister pointed to the hole.

“Bury her,” Besser said.

Tom pushed her into the grave with his boot sole. She didn’t fall in, she oozed in, like muck. Besser held up the lantern and groaned when he looked into the hole.

At last Penelope’s words blubbered up. “Plub plub please don’t bulup bulup bury me, Tom!”

“Don’t let the minor fact that she’s still alive dissuade your heart,” Besser regretted to Tom. “It must be done.”

“W where’s where’s my blay blay baby?”

Besser cleared his throat. “Regrettably, dear, your baby’s dead. Don’t blame yourself. You simply didn’t take.”

“I lyly rup want m m m my baby!”

Where was it? Tom looked around. Ah, there. The jellyish thing was crammed in the corner of the box. Tom picked it up by what he guessed were its feet and held it up to the lantern light. It hung limp as a rooster’s wattle.

Penelope blubbered a high pitched shriek.

—Give me it! the sister ordered. She held out her white hands.

Besser recoiled. “Oh, for God’s sake. Please.”

Tom shrugged. He gave it to the woman in black. Grinning, she let its bloated head swing back and forth like depended pizza dough, throwing a pendulous shadow. Tom watched with little interest. It wasn’t like it was a real baby, right? Not like the kind he’d been once, not like the kind mothers cuddled and loved. Not really anyway.

“Please,” Besser objected, nausea in his face. “Please don’t.”

—Shut up! the sister said like an irked grade-school girl. Her bleating wet giggles palpitated up. She turned the dead baby thing in her white hands and squeezed its head till its eyes popped out.

Penelope was flopping madly in her hole, shrieking, trying to get out. Motherly love, Tom supposed. He was amazed at her sudden ability to move. For a moment he feared she might actually churn herself out of the grave.

Besser winced. “Just throw it in the hole. Please don’t—”

Gnarled doglike teeth bared through the sister’s grin. She bit into the top of the dead baby’s head with a sound much like biting into a crisp apple. The sister sucked its brain till the boneless bag for a head collapsed. Then she giggled, munching. Someone should teach her some manners, Tom thought. Judith Martin would shit railroad ties if she could see this.

Wet smacking sounds followed, and slurping. The sister chewed her meal heartily; a big lump slid down her throat when she swallowed.

Revolted, Besser dropped the lantern. He stumbled away rubber kneed, fell between some trees, and vomited in grand style. Now, this was not something you got to see every day, a three hundred pound college professor throwing up like a sludge pump in the middle of the woods. Watching a black cloaked woman eat a dead baby’s brains wasn’t something you got to see every day either. Even Tom had to raise a brow at these shenanigans. The sister’s giggles splayed out into the grove, quite loudly. Tom still hadn’t gotten used to that awful sound—that giggling. Who could giggle while eating a baby’s brains? They were one wild crew, that was for sure. Yeah, real party animals.

She flung the head sucked baby into the hole. Splap. Penelope was still flopping in throes of absolute amorphous rage. Her high pitched blubbering shriek blurted out loud like a faulty train whistle.

—Bury her.

“Yes, ma’am,” Tom said. The shovel bit into the ground. He tossed in the first load. Ba bump! Penelope squealed again. Tom dropped the second load into her opened mouth. That should quiet her down some, the little dickens. She gagged and coughed up wet clumps of earth.

—This is so much fun, isn’t it, Tom?

“Yes, ma’am, it sure is. I haven’t had this much fun since the last Polanski Festival.”

He buried Penelope without reservation. He whistled that great old Guess Who song “Share the Land” as his shovel gradually filled the hole. Burying girls alive wasn’t exactly fun for the whole family, yet despite the grimness of the task, Tom supposed it was a fair trade.

Shit, he thought. For immortality, I’ll dig graves from here to Seattle.

—

CHAPTER 16

An alarm was blaring.

Lydia sat up naked in bed. She could still hear the alarm, but then she realized it was only the telephone. The clock read 5 A.M.

She snapped up the phone and yelled, “What!”

“You have a nice sleep?” a voice inquired.

This was outrageous; it was Chief White. “How come you’re calling me at five in the morning?” she complained. “You gave me the day off, remember?”

“I need ya to do me somethin’. I’d have the night boys do it ’cept they been out all night flaggin’ traffic. Some stoner done rolled fifteen thousand gallons of super unleaded all over the Route. My boys are plumb wore out and stinkin’ fierce of gas.”

“Okay, Chief. What do you want me to do?”

“Go out to agro. Them state guys are finally packing it up. Some geek named Latin is runnin’ the show. They’ll be trucking out by nine.”

Trucking out? “Chief, what—”

“They got a prelim for us. Go pick it up.”

“All right,” Lydia groaned.

“Good girl. Report to me when you’re done. Now, this Latin guy’s got a bug up his bum the size of my Buick. Be nice to him or else he won’t tell you squat. Nose around, try and see what they’ve been up to. Use your” —White gave a typical hick laugh— “your feminine powers of persuasion.”

Lydia rang off, sputtering. White didn’t want to go himself because he figured Lydia’s tits and ass would prompt a more cooperative response. She suited up quickly, enjoying the early morning silence. Dawn had not yet broken when she pulled into the agriculture/agronomy site. State cadets were loading signs into a van. “Quarantine Area, Do Not Enter,” they read. Three semi rigs were parked in a row behind the stables. A state sergeant directed her to a wheeled trailer. Gas powered generators pumped racket into the air, like jackhammers. But the electricity had been fixed. Why would they need generators?

A work booted nerd in khakis met her at the trailer door. He looked bony, had short hair and a long neck. “My name is Dr. Hatton,” he said. Hatton, Latin. This must be the guy with the bug up his bum the size of White’s Buick. His voice was uncharacteristically dark. “I’m senior field officer for the state department of agriculture. You may have seen my picture in the Enquirer last year. I delivered twin Berkshire hogs joined at the head.”

Lydia told him regrettably that she’d missed that issue.

He handed her a single piece of paper. “This the prelim?” she asked.

“There is no preliminary report. This is a state quarantine release form. It authorizes that your agro site can now be safely reoccupied.”

“Then what happened to the agro animals?”

“We’re not prepared to release any conclusions as of yet.”

“In other words,” Lydia observed, “you have no intention of cooperating with the local authorities.”

“I am the only authority here,” Dr. Hatton said.

White’s got this guy pegged pretty good. “Okay,” Lydia agreed, “but do you think you could take that Buick out of your ass long enough to give me something to tell my boss?”

“It’s none of your boss’s business… Buick?”

This might be fun. “You know what I think, Dr. Hatton? I think you’re not giving me answers because you don’t have any. You guys don’t know what you’re doing out here. You’re a bunch of pussies.”

Hatton was getting pissed. “Pussies?” he challenged.

“That’s right. Lightweights. You’ve been sitting out here for two days, blowing tax dollars and doing nothing.”

Hatton glowered.

“Did you at least autopsy some of the animals?”

His tension strained further. He was getting closer to the line she wanted him on. “Of course,” he said. “Dozens. There was an inconsistency in some aspects of the structural pathology.”

“Great answer, Doc. Show me.”

Hatton smiled. “You don’t have the stomach for it.”

Lydia laughed in his face. At D.C. she’d broken into hardhouses full of weeks old corpses of junkies. She’d hauled up maggot swollen floaters. She’d cut down drug stoolies who’d been hung upside down and gutted like deer. “I’ve seen things that would make your worst nightmare look like Ronald McDonaldland. You talk big, Hatton, but if you had any real guts, you’d show me what you’ve got in those rigs.”

Now Dr. Hatton’s true self was beginning to glimmer through. “It would be a pleasure,” he said.

He took her out to the closest semi rig. This would be his morgue on wheels; that’s what the generators were for, to run the coolers while the trucks were parked. Inside, buzzing tubes lit a tiny office. There was a water cooler, a coffeepot, and a little fridge for snacks. Cozy, she thought. A metal door stood opposite.

“So we’re all pussies, is that it?” He pulled on a yellow raincoat and hood, then a plastic face shield. He looked ridiculous in it. “Well, I’ll show you what this pussy has been doing for the last two days.” He heaved open the metal door and led her in.

Inside was very cold. High coolers gusted chill and noise through metal grilles. In back, pairs of animals lay strapped to steel shelving, probably a dozen pairs. Each had been split like a cleaned fish; body cavities were stuffed with bagged organs, and an eye had been removed from each beast, to check ocular potassium levels, she assumed. This great bulk of bagged meat whelmed her.

Dr. Hatton stood by a metal table. On the table lay a dead horse. “You wanted to see? Well, take a look at this.”

He tossed her a small plastic pouch which contained several ounces of some red marbled gray mush. A tag on the bottom gave an index number, time and date of dissection, and Hatton’s initials. The next line read: Palomino, white, 2 yrs. approx., testes.

“They’re balls!” Hatton yelled at her. “Horse balls!”

Confusion screwed up Lydia’s face. “It’s just mush,” she said.

“They’re balls!” Hatton reiterated. “You know, nuts, pecker jewels, doodads! Those are from the first horse I autopsied yesterday! It’s the same for every male animal on the site!”

Lydia had no idea what he meant. Hatton patted the horse on the table. “I was saving this baby to open for the people back at AHL, but what the hell! Who the fuck are you to come here and question my competence!”

“Doctor, I wasn’t—”

“Shut up!” Hatton barked. Then he laughed. “It’s show time!”

Lydia gasped. Hatton raised a sixteen inch Homelite chain saw. It started up on the first try. Hatton flipped down his visor and went to work. He delved the blade up into the animal’s top hind leg, through the joint. The sound was atrocious, a searing, hitching scream. Lydia almost couldn’t watch.

“This is what I’ve been doing the last two days, bitch!”

He’s crazy, she thought. He’s fried.

Hatton continued to saw. Clumped blood and shreds of muscle spat out of the meaty groove; his face-shield and coat were flecked with it. Then the horse’s leg flipped over on the floor. Hatton turned off the saw, then went right to work with a big autopsy scalpel, cutting a deep gash into the animal’s rear belly. He was a maniac. He grinned like a madman through the flecked visor.

“Lo!” he shouted. From the gash, bare handed, he yanked out a flap of yellowed tissue. “A little of the old mesovarium! See?” He threw it on the floor and ripped out more. “A little peritoneal tissue, a little stroma!” Flap, flap! It all went onto the floor. “Ho! A kidney! My mistake!” Flump!

What he withdrew next looked like a large strip of steak with a lump on the end. He slapped it down on the table. “See that?”

Lydia nodded rather morosely.

“It’s the infundibulum, ampula, left side. See that lump?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“That’s the ovary. Next to the brain, it’s the most complex organ in the body, and, like the male testes, it’s the hardest. Harder than the heart, the kidneys, etcetera. It’s dense, heavily celled, firm. Understand?”

“I think so.”

Hatton punctured the ovary’s germinus with the scalpel. Globs of reddish gray mush oozed from the puncture. “See, see?” he said. “It’s almost liquefied, just like the testes on the other horse. But they’re not supposed to be like this. They should still be firm.”

“They’re decomposed,” Lydia ventured.

“No, no, no!” Hatton snapped. “There wasn’t time. The things hadn’t been dead twelve hours before we got them cooled down; they were still in rigor. These organs could not possibly decompose to this consistency in twelve hours under any condition.”

“Maybe it’s a disease, cancer or something.”

“Cancer! In every single animal, at the same time? That’s not how it works.” He washed his hands at a metal sink then shook them dry against the wall, disgusted. “I’m supposed to be the expert here. Shit. My people are going to want an explanation and I can’t give them one. I don’t know anything more than I did the minute we pulled in.”

Now Lydia understood why he’d been stonewalling. He was a preposterous sight, a grown man sitting dejected in a gore-splattered raincoat, hood, and face-shield. “How can you determine that the agro site is safe to reoccupy if you don’t know what killed the animals?”

“State protocol,” he said, shrugging. “We simply followed the standard legal procedures. The bloodwork all came back negative, which satisfied the state quarantine criteria. We screened for everything and found nothing; I had lab couriers coming in and out of here day and night. We exhausted every standard detection test. There were no mold toxins in the feed, no poisons, no bacteria, and there was nothing wrong with the water. We even ran tests on the grass, the soil, the water table. Nothing.”

“So what about this?” She pointed to the punctured ovary.

“All I can say is we’ve got some thus far undetectable factor that has degenerated the reproductive organs of every animal on this site. Even the chickens, for God’s sake.” He shook his head in sheer disillusion. “Have you ever tried to autopsy a chicken?”

“Can’t say that I have,” Lydia said.

««—»»

“Chief White’s at the main office,” Sergeant Peerce informed her when she walked into the substation. He quickly stashed a glossy magazine, titled Pizza Slut, into a drawer. Porker sat at the booking desk, taking care of a box of SafeWay chocolate cream wheels. He kept his face down when Lydia entered.

Peerce was smiling, flipping the cylinder of his Ruger Blackhawk open and closed. Click, clack. Click, clack. Other officers in for shift-change were smiling too. She glanced again to Porker, but he still refused to look up.

“Better get that prelim to Chief White,” Peerce advised. Click, clack. Click, clack. Smiling. “He’s been waitin’ on it.”

Lydia left for Main Administration. Something was going on and she didn’t like not knowing what. White’s personal cruiser was parked next to the dean’s Rolls. Inside, she passed the dean’s office. The man looked up from his huge teak desk as she passed. “Officer Prentiss! Please come in!”

Lydia hedged in. “Good morning, sir.”

“And a very good morning to you. That was fine work you did at the agro site yesterday. Chief White told me all about it.”

Did Chief White also tell you he’s putting a lid on it? “Thank you, sir.”

“And I hope you appreciate the necessity to accentuate certain details of the incident for the time being.”

Sure, lie to the public for convenience sake. Lydia nodded.

“Good, good!” the dean said. He was trying to be cordial, but Lydia knew he’d only called her in to bust her chops a little. “Keep up the good work,” he added. “And have a nice day!”

“You too, sir.” Lydia went back into the hall. Long display cases adorned the main lobby, local relics and artifacts disinterred by Exham’s archaeology department. Several battles of the Revolution had taken place nearby. One case displayed an array of sabers and bayonets. Another held firearms: flintlocks, wheel locks, cap and ball pistols. Lydia should’ve looked harder at the last case, which was hung with common tools of the colonial period. Rusted froes, cradle scythes, hammers, and mattocks. One space was labeled “Beam hewer, St. Clement’s Island, circa 1635.” But the large space over the label was empty.

She killed some time scanning the cases. What could she tell White? Eventually she dawdled into her boss’s office. White was drinking from a coffee mug with a Confederate flag on it. “Ah, there’s my girl,” he said. “You get that prelim?”

“It’s a health order, not a prelim,” she said, and gave it to him.

White stuffed it in a drawer. “That guy Latin say what happened?”

“It’s Hatton, and no, he didn’t. He’s taking the animals for more tests. He said whatever killed them isn’t contagious.”

“Well, then, that’s good, ain’t it?”

“Not when the papers ask about it.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. The papers don’t know about it, and they ain’t gonna. It’s all taken care of.” He gave her the eye. “You get what I’m sayin’?”

“Sure. You read my report on the burglary last night?”

“A’course I read it. What about it?”

“You want me to keep working on the prints?”

“Why? It wasn’t no burgle anyway, just some two bit vandalism.”

“Files were stolen, Chief. Someone specifically targeted them.”

“So what?” he said. “Some punk joker probably just grabbed a handful and throwed ’em all over the Route. Big deal.”

“So forget that too, huh? Like the agro site? Like the ax?”

White gave her a big shee it shake of the head. “You still thinkin’ on that goddamn ax? Shee it. You wanna take a couple days off regular duty and follow up on that shit, then go ahead. I’ll even pay ya. How’s that sound?”

“You’re serious?”

“Sure I’m serious. Go on an’ do your thing.”

This didn’t sound right. “Do I get a cruiser?”

“Hell, no. What I look like, fuckin’ Santa Claus?”

Take what you can get, Lydia. “Okay, Chief. Thanks.”

“You’re quite welcome, Prentiss, but remember. Anything you find out about any of this agro business, you report to me and to me only, ya hear?”

“Loud and clear, Chief.” Lydia turned to leave, but—

“Oh, and Prentiss?” The chief clapped once, rubbed his knees. “I almost forgot. I heard somethin’ a mite funny today, real funny.”

“Oh, yeah?” Lydia asked.

“Yeah, see, I heard you got a new boyfriend, and what’s funny about it is—and I mean real funny—”

“Real funny, I heard you,” she said, and now she knew why Peerce had been smiling and why Porker hadn’t looked her in the face.

“I heard this new boyfriend of yours is Wade St. John.” White stopped laughing. His face turned to brick.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” she said. “I had a drink with him, and since when does my private life have any bearing on work?”

White was rubbing his eyes. “Prentiss, Prentiss, I been dealin’ with that phony con man cock hounding rich punk for the last six years. He’s a user, Prentiss. He’ll chew you up and spit you out, just like all the others. That nut chase son of a bitch goes through women faster than I go through cigars.”

“Thanks for the warning.” Lydia walked out, bemused. For the first time this morning, she thought of Wade. Was he really as bad as White claimed? At least he’s a good kisser, she thought frivolously. No, a great kisser. And with that frivolity she finally acknowledged what she’d been repressing since last night. She liked Wade St. John.

She liked him a lot.

She wondered if that was a big mistake.

««—»»

Wade leapt from bed, swearing. The goddamn Baby Ben hadn’t gone off, and now it was past 9 A.M., and he was going to be late for that humiliating parody he now thought of as “work.” Besser would come down on him, literally, like a ton of bricks. Wade grabbed a towel, dashed for the shower, when someone knocked on the door. Must be Jervis or Tom, he reasoned, and, dressed only in sagging Fruit of the Looms, he yanked open the door. “Can’t talk now, I’m late for—”

It was Lydia Prentiss who stood in the doorway. She did not seem shocked by his appearance; it was Wade who was shocked. Instead of the usual tan cop suit, she wore flip flops, cutoffs, and an orange bikini top. Her hair in a ponytail, she appraised him through mirrored shades. Her faint smile betrayed her amusement.

“Nice briefs,” she said.

“Uh, um,” he said. “Excuse me.” He left her at the door and pulled on his robe, hoping that his trapdoor (a mysterious provision of all underwear manufacturers) had not disclosed what dangled within. “Welcome to my humble abode,” he said.

Lydia propped her sunglasses up and walked in. To his dismay, she was toting a small suitcase. “This is some dorm room,” she said. “You’ve got your own shower, kitchen. Even a trash compactor.”

“Reckless luxury is what makes Exham College unique. Too bad the same can’t be said for academic performance… What’s with the suitcase?”

She glanced at it, then shot Wade the biggest, brightest, sexiest smile he’d ever seen. It was an angel’s smile—the kind of smile, in other words, that a girl flashes when she’s going to ask for something. Wade felt lost in it.

“Will you drive me to county police headquarters?”

“Sure,” Wade said.

Her smile faltered. “It’s only a hundred and fifty miles away.”

“Sure,” Wade said, still floating on the smile. But then it all came tumbling down. “Oh, no, I have to go to work. I have to clean toilets today, and I’m already late.”

“Well, not to sound presumptuous, before I came over, I took the liberty of asking the dean to give you the day off. He said yes. It’s all taken care of.”

Wade gaped. “You mean I’m off? Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

Wade rejoiced in silence. No toilets today, hot damn! He was showered and ready to roll in record time.

“I really appreciate this,” Lydia said when they got into the Vette. Wade took off the sunroof and put the suitcase in back.

“Think nothing of it,” he replied, starting up his 400 horses. “I’d drive you to Timbuktu if it’d get me off work.” Within minutes he was out on Route 13. He noticed the same change in her composure as he had last night driving her home. The Vette seemed to unwrap some of her wires. He supposed that being a cop—particularly a beautiful female cop in a department full of shucksy Java men—had taken a toll on her. He saw that stress run out of her now, her hard edges going soft. “So what’s in the suitcase?” he eventually asked.

She rested back. “A cope of impactation,” she answered.

“A what of what?”

“It’s a hunk of wood—evidence, in other words. The county crime lab agreed to take a took at it.”

“How important can a hunk of wood be?”

“Sometimes very important. Anytime you hit something with a metal object, it leaves a molecular trace of its surface oxidation—its rust. Analyzing the rust can sometimes identify the grade of metal used, and from that, if you’re lucky, you can ID the manufacturer of the metal object. Unfortunately you need special equipment and indexes, and that’s why they generally only do stuff like this for a major crime. White doesn’t think this is major, but he’s letting me do it anyway. He just wants me out of his hair for the time being; I’m a troublemaker in his book, so he doesn’t want me fanning any fires.”

So Lydia’s a troublemaker, Wade thought. This could be interesting. “What did he think of the break in at the clinic?”

“He’s burying it,” she said. “Says it’s not worth pursuing. He also says you go through women faster than he goes through cigars. Is that true?”

That depends on how much he smokes, Wade thought. “You don’t believe everything you hear, do you?”

“Of course I do. I’m a gullible woman. Oh, and here’s something you might find interesting. I talked to the physician this morning. He told me about the files that got ripped off.”

“What kind of files were they?”

“Just basic medical records, a rundown on each student’s medical history, major operations, illnesses, drug allergies, stuff like that. All big campuses keep those kinds of records on their in house students. But the missing files are only those of the students specifically registered for the first summer session.”

“I’m registered for the first summer session,” Wade exclaimed. “One of the files must’ve been mine.”

“That’s right.” Lydia began to diddle with an unlit Marlboro. “The question is, what good are medical files to a thief?”

It made no sense. Who would steal files? he wondered. But whatever this was, Wade’s own files were involved, and sitting right in the middle of it was a Spaten Oktoberfest beer cap. The average burglar didn’t drink expensive imports. He drank Bud. Only one store in town sold Spaten to go, and Wade knew only one person who drank it regularly.

Tom.

Tom’s Camaro hadn’t been in the parking lot last night, had it? Come to think of it, it hadn’t been there this morning either.

««—»»

Czanek walked into Andre’s, surprised to find it half full at this hour. In the back booth, a shadow waved at him.

Czanek, of course, knew “Mr. Tull’s” real identity: Jervis Phillips, an upstate resident herded to Exham by rich parents. The boy had left a message on Czanek’s answering machine. There’d been a problem.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Tull.” Czanek took a seat. A cold Heineken stood in wait for him. “Our little insect’s not working?”

“It works great,” said Jervis, “but I have a question. Did you plant one of those things for another client? On campus?”

What a question. As a matter of fact, Czanek had, but how could the boy know that? “I’m not obliged to say, Mr. Tull.”

“Like maybe at the sciences center, in Dudley Besser’s office?”

Czanek’s gaunt face drooped. Right on the money. “How did—”

“I heard it,” Jervis Phillips said. “My receiver picked it up; I recognized Besser’s voice.”

“That’s impossible,” Czanek declared. “It’s out of range.”

“If it’s out of range, how come I’m picking it up?”

“I…hmm. Good question.” Czanek felt inept, his pride excreted upon. “I would never have agreed to plant your bug if I thought there was a chance of this happening. And that’s just it—there isn’t. These things only transmit eight hundred feet or so.”

“Besser’s office is over a mile from my dorm,” Jervis replied. He absurdly pulled the filter off a cigarette.

Czanek stared perplexedly into his beer. He was a bad man—even he would not argue that—but he had ethics. The sins of others were Czanek’s treasure. He was a destroyer of reputations. He’d ruined marriages, families, careers. He’d promoted divorce, abortion, estrangement. Like an alchemist, he turned love into hate, but he was not ashamed. If he didn’t do it, someone else would. Czanek’s pride was his justification—to do an unspeakable task with grace. The kid had paid him to do a job, and Czanek had fucked it up. It was this simple fact he could not accept.

“Okay,” he told Jervis. “I’ll give you your money back.”

Jervis started his second beer. “I’m not asking for my money back, I just want to know what’s going on. I heard some strange shit last night. There were four people in that office. One guy was Besser, but there was another guy who’s a friend of mine. What the hell is a student doing in Besser’s office at two A.M.?”

“I don’t know,” Czanek admitted.

“And the dean’s wife? I made out her voice too.”

Czanek gulped hard. The kid had too many pieces. “You said there were four people. Who was the fourth?”

Jervis seemed to catch a chill. “That’s the strangest part. The fourth person’s voice sounded like running water or something. I can’t describe it. It was just…weird.”

Czanek’s embarrassment crested. “All right, between you and me, last month I bugged Besser’s office for another client. The client thinks Besser may be fooling around with his wife.”

“You mean Dean Saltenstall,” Jervis prodded. “Everybody knows that his wife cheats on him. Even the dean knows that. Why would he hire you to find out something he already knows?”

“Because he has a tremendous life insurance policy,” Czanek admitted. “If you were an old homosexual millionaire married to a thirty five year old bombshell, wouldn’t you want to know what your wife was up to, regardless of any mutual sexual agreements made within the marriage?”

“So that’s it,” Jervis said, smoking slowly.

“Here’s what I’ll do,” the detective offered. “I’ll go into Besser’s office tonight and replace that bug with one on a different frequency. Then it won’t butt in on your transmissions anymore, and the problem’ll be solved.”

Jervis lit still another cigarette.

This kid smokes more than a coal furnace.

“I’d appreciate that very much, Mr. Czanek.”

Czanek watched Jervis leave. The kid was cracked—Czanek could see that—just like most of Czanek’s clients. Paranoia, jealousy, and inferiority complexes were more nuggets in Czanek’s treasure. But that wasn’t what bothered him. It was what the kid had said. The fourth person, he thought. A voice like running water.

The kid, it seemed, knew more about Czanek’s case than Czanek did.

««—»»

County police headquarters loomed like a neoteric brick fortress. TV cameras probed the enclosed entry. Two uniformed cops ID’d Lydia at the door and searched her suitcase. She took out a tiny pistol in a wallet holster and gave it to them to lock up. Then they frisked Wade, a bit too thoroughly for his liking. The only gun I’m packing is the love gun, buddy. These boys didn’t fool around.

They passed doors with queer plastic signs: Toolmarks, SEM, Electroporesis, and finally Spectrometry.

A sergeant showed them in and left.

The room was long and narrow. Bulky machines hummed in ranks, regurgitating rolls of paper. One machine sported a face of dials and jumping meters, with a hatch for a belly. Lydia told Wade this was a BV Model 154 peptide analyzer. It identified trace foreign substances in the digestive system by measuring peptidal deviations. It cost $100,000.

A stoop shouldered bald man was reading a book at the desk. Wade caught the sensational title: U.S. Bureau of Standards, Japanese Automotive Paint Index, 1991 1992. A tag on his lab coat read “Glark, TSD.” “I hope you’re the cop from Exham,” he said.

“That’s me,” Lydia said. “Thanks for making a space for me.”

“What have you got?”

“Oxidized residuum, two eight inch counterabrasions.”

“Depth?”

“About .23 mils.”

Glark whistled. “Anything that thick should be easy. Let’s get to it.” He seemed not to notice Lydia’s cutoffs and top. Was he a county eunuch? Rust, evidently, was his turn on. Lydia withdrew from her case, of all things, a King Edward cigar box. Glark pulled up a stool behind the biggest microscope Wade had ever seen. It had the word “Zeiss” on its condenser. Glark removed a cutting of old grayed wood from the box. He placed the “cope” under the triple objectives and focused down through dual eyepieces. His mouth twisted up. “This is funny,” he said.

“I know,” Lydia commented. “That impactation was the first strike; I’m assuming the striking object hadn’t been used for a long time.”

“You assume right,” Glark said. “And I can tell you, if it’s stainless steel, it’s something way down in the low scales.”

“How could it be stainless steel?” Wade asked. “Stainless steel doesn’t rust.”

“Anything made of metal rusts,” Glark grumbled to him. “Lead rusts, titanium rusts, aluminum, lithium, mercury, anything. If it’s metal, its surface molecules rust. You just can’t see it without some form of magnification.”

“I knew that,” Wade said. “I was just testing you.”

Glark frowned. Lydia leaned over. Wade found her cleavage much more interesting than whatever they were inspecting. “The color’s what threw me,” she said. “It’s too…”

“Asperous,” Glark finished for her. He changed to a higher objective. “It’s old, whatever it is, and I don’t mean the residuum, I mean the source metal. Usually you can see the alloy constituents, but I don’t see any here. This stuff is crude, adulterated.”

“Do you think it’s indexed?”

“Unlikely,” Glark said. “But let’s run it anyway.”

Wade smirked. This was Dullsville. He followed them to a bank of low machines. Glark closed a circular lid and turned on a CRT. Actually four machines made up this apparatus. Lydia explained that the process was called A/N spectrophotometry spectrography. Wade didn’t know what the “N” stood for, but he thought he could make a pretty good guess when he noticed a label on the hatched machine: “Warning, this device contains radioactive isotopes.”

Great, Wade thought. A miniature Three Mile Island.

Lydia went on to explain. A trace substance was burned at a phenomenal temperature. The light from the combustion was then focused through a prism structure and photographed. The photograph was processed as a line of colors ranging from white to dark purple. This was called the source spectrum. The colors represented the trace substance’s constituents, which were then identified by comparison against indexed control samples. The total cost of the four machines was over a million dollars.

Wade noticed bright white light leaking from the hatch lid’s seam. Numbers and letters, the numerical equivalents of the combusted molecular factors, began to pop up on the CRT. Within seconds the machines clunked off. A slit in a fat Canon film processor ejected a slip of paper, the source spectrum. All this work for that? Wade thought. A million fucking dollars?

Lydia and Glark began to pore over thick ring bound books full of similar colored strips. Wade doubted that he’d ever been this bored in his life.

“I think I found it,” Glark announced almost an hour later. He removed a laminated sheet from the binder. Atop read the index listing: Antiquations.

Lydia looked at it and frowned. “Iron? How could it take us so long to find iron?”

“Because it’s not commercial,” Glark said. “We couldn’t find a manufacturer’s index because there is no manufacturer. This control sample isn’t exact but it’s close enough to give us our answer.”

“I don’t get it,” Lydia said.

“The tool that caused your impactation was hand forged,” Glark enlightened her. “According to this index, you’re looking for something that’s at least three hundred years old.”

—

CHAPTER 17

At the red light, the Camaro rumbled through Hooker headers and chambered pipes. Bright red tails, like liquid, reflected off the slope of the immaculate white hood. The car shimmered.

Tom stared. The sister was showing him things.

Beyond the dusk, Tom saw cities, or things like cities: a geometric demesne of impossible architecture which extended along a vanishing line of horrid black—a raging terra dementata. Concaved horizons crammed with stars, or things like stars, sparkled close against the cubist chasms. He saw buildings and streets, tunnels and tower blocks, strange flattened factories whose chimneys gushed oily smoke. It was a necropolis, systematized and endless, bereft of error in non Euclidean angles and lines. It was pandemonium. Gutters ran black with noxious ichor. Squat, stygian churches sang praise to mindless gods. Insanity was the monarch here, ataxia the only order, darkness the only light.

Ingenious, unspeakable, the monarch stared back.

Tom saw it all. He saw time tick backward, death rot to life, whole futures swallowed deep into the belly of history. And he saw people too. Or things like people.

Tom shook out of the terror’s glimpse. The light changed green and he pulled through. In the passenger seat, one of the sisters grinned. She was hideous. White faced, red lipped, and hungry—always hungry, for food or whatever. Thank God the sunglasses hid her eyes. Tom could feel the madness buried there, the sheer disorder.

—Tom, what’s that?

In the headlights, a matty white poodle sniffed at the shoulder. “It’s a dog,” Tom said.

The sister looked puzzled. —What’s a dog?

“You know, an animal, a pet.”

—What’s a pet?

Jesus, Tom thought. These bitches are stupid. He swerved and promptly ran the poodle over. Its little body was dribbled beneath the car, then crunched. The sister shrilled with delight, looking back. The crushed poodle twitched in the road.

—Tom! What’s that?

Up ahead, some big redneck looking guy had his thumb out. A cardboard sign about his neck read: “Bowie, Maryland, or Bust.”

“It’s a hitchhiker,” Tom said.

—What’s a hitchhiker?

Tom snickered. “A hitchhiker is a person who, on dark nights, gets run over by cars. That’s what a hitchhiker is.”

—Oh, replied the sister.

Tom shifted down the Hurst. The hitchhiker’s face beamed. This fucker thinks he’s gonna get a ride, Tom thought. He began to pull over, but at precisely the proper moment, he swerved and mowed the hitchhiker down. Jesus Christ, it was fun running things down! The sister shrieked over the muffled thump. Tom smiled. The hitcher’s head popped under the wheel, then his crumpled body was spat out behind them.

The sister was exhilarated, giddy and wriggling her white fingers. —I liked that! she exclaimed. —Let’s find more dogs and hitchhikers!

Tom wished he could, but he’d almost forgotten there was business at hand. He drove a ways, then pulled over. Sure, running people down was fun but it wasn’t a good idea when you had a college student in your trunk. She could bang her head or something, break some bones. Hell, she could die back there.

Tom got out and opened the trunk. She was all right, just a little jostled. “Sorry about that last bump, Lois,” he apologized. She was kind of cute. Nice rack too, he concluded when he pulled open her blouse. She would at least appreciate it all in the end. Fuck college. This was destiny.

He got back in the car and drove on. He paused to wonder. The sister had settled down, placated by her own nameless thoughts. Tom couldn’t imagine what went on in their malevolent little heads. Who were these bitches? Who were they really?

The girl in the trunk had been on Besser’s list. Lois Hartley, an art history major who lived on the Hill. Tom had seen her around. She was into the art scene—avant garde, formalism, and all that. She hung out with the campus dilettantes. They all pretended to be bored and disaffected, swank in resigned ennui. They wore dark clothes and freaky hairstyles, listened to the Communards, and smoked blue cigarettes while they discoursed over the decline of aesthetics: phony misplaced Dadaists who thought it stylish to have nothing to do.

Plucking her had been easy. They’d found her wandering the Pickman Gallery’s abstract expressionism exhibit, which always gave Tom a hoot. You could slop paint randomly onto a canvas, blindfolded, call it Mother with Child, and that would be abstract expressionism. Lois had been standing in front of a mural entitled The Fighting Temeraire Part II, which looked like someone had gotten drunk after a big Burger King meal and then vomited on the canvas. Lois Hartley barely turned when the sister put the zap on her. That was some trick. All Tom had to do was carry her out and toss her in the trunk. Mission accomplished.

But he wondered what it must be like for them, what they must feel and think during the process. What did destiny feel like?

Tom pulled up at the Town Pump. “Beer stop,” he said.

—What’s beer?

Tom didn’t bother answering. “Howdy, partner,” said the proprietor when Tom came in. “We gotta special on the Rock this week.”

“No thanks,” Tom said. “Get me two cases of Spaten Oktoberfest.”

“Comin’ right up,” the prop replied. He was chunky and old, with a gray crew cut. He wheeled up a handcart with the two cases, then rang the total. “Say, fella, you don’t look so good.”

“I know, but I feel great,” Tom said. Then he picked up the two cases and held them easily under one arm. “Thanks,” he said.

“Hold up a sec, son.” The prop tittered nervously. “You’re forgettin’ somethin’.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”

Another titter. “You owe me $52.96. Tax included, of course.”

“Oh, but I’m not paying,” Tom said.

“Uh, ya mean you’re robbin’ me? Is that what you’re sayin’?”

“Well, I guess you could put it that way,” Tom agreed.

Now the prop’s voice gave way to cracks. “I don’t want no trouble, son, so do us both a favor. Just you set that beer down, turn around, and walk out that door.”

Tom grabbed the man by the throat and lifted him over the counter—the two cases of Spaten still under one arm. The man’s legs pumped like he was trying to run away in midair. “Listen, Pops,” Tom explained. “I don’t expect you to understand this, but I have to get back to the Supremate. I have destiny to tend to. You get the message yet? I’m not paying. I’ve got more important things to do right now than pay for beer.”

The prop made choking noises, trying to nod. His face was turning blue. Tom flung the man sideways into the sale display, a six foot high pyramid of six packs of Rolling Rock. The pyramid toppled, green bottles exploding. So much for that sale, Tom thought.

He felt more like himself with a cold Spaten in his hand and the cassette deck going; he felt more human. Back on the highway, he opened his smallblock up and hit it. The sister giggled wetly. They traveled the Route into darkness, trees and fields sweeping by, on their way to the old dirt utility road which would take them home—

To the labyrinth.

««—»»

All Lydia knew was that she liked him.

She thought of a mouse in a maze. She felt as though something was expected of her, but she didn’t know what.

The answer, she knew, was in her heart. In her heart she wanted to sleep with Wade St. John. She wanted to physically love him.

But…

Why was it you never knew when to trust a man? Too often, the good ones, the ones who seemed honest and sincere, were the ones who wound up writing your name and number on the bathroom wall, with a list of proficiencies. Then they’d brag to their friends about the latest horny bitch they’d knocked the bottom out of. Jesus, what a nightmare—damned if you did and damned if you didn’t, because if you didn’t, you were frigid or a lesbian. Reading men was like reading foreign magazines. All you saw were the pictures.

Lydia felt jittery. She knew what she wanted—of course! She wanted things to be perfect. Didn’t everybody?

She lit the Marlboro she’d been tapping for the last two days.

“I don’t believe it,” Wade exclaimed. “You finally lit it.”

Lydia smiled moronically. She rested back and caught that beautiful first drag wallop to the upper bronchi.

“You look like you just took a toke of Jamaican.”

“Shit on that garbage,” she said. “This is better.” She dragged again; she was stalling. The exit signs were coming up in their lights. What am I going to do? she pleaded to herself.

“It’s still early,” Wade said. “How about a nightcap?”

“Okay,” but then she looked down at her cutoffs and top. “But I don’t think they’ll let me into the Exham Inn dressed like this.”

“Forget the Exham Inn. We’re going to Wade’s Inn. The selection is limited but the service is outstanding.”

Lydia smoked and nodded. He’d made the decision for her, extending her reprieve. There was nothing like borrowed time.

Wade parked up close in the lot. Lydia got out with her suitcase, as though someone might steal it. She smoked her Marlboro right down to the butt and flicked it. Yes, a glamorous habit, she thought. Wade was scanning the lot and seemed confounded.

“What are you looking for?” she asked.

“Friend’s car, it’s not here. I was just wondering where he is.” He walked around the Vette, toward the path. “Come on, I won’t bite. I had my teeth pulled weeks ago.”

Immediately, he put his arm about her waist. She felt comfortable like that, his hand touching her skin, his pinky stuck in her belt loop. They walked close, bumping hips.

The security guard at the dorm desk was reading Shotgun News. He gave them a quick eye, then reburied his face in the ads. She and Wade rode the elevator up to 8. She could not escape the absurd image of herself: standing in an elevator with a student’s arm around her, badge pinned to her cutoffs, and holding a suitcase full of spectroanalyzed impactation. The perfect “What’s wrong with this picture?” He led her down the silent hall to his room, turned on the light, and said, “There’s a surprise for you in the refrigerator.”

Beside the trash compactor—which she still thought of as the height of indulgence—was a small fridge devoted to extravagant beers. Right up front stood the devil’s face on a bottle of—

“Old Nick!” she exclaimed. “I’ll bet you got it just for me.”

“Actually I didn’t,” Wade confessed. “My friends and I are beer snobs. We keep our refrigerators stocked with a variety of the best brew. In a world of Bud, the true beer connoisseur must maintain vast reserves.”

Lydia took his word for it. He poured two Nicks into good pilsner glasses and proposed a toast. “To spectrophotometry.”

“Cheers,” she said.

But she thought: What now?

««—»»

It had to be a dream. It had to be.

Lois Hartley lay naked beneath smothering, moist heat and orange light, paralyzed. I’m paralyzed, she thought, and felt idiotically compelled to laugh. For she was horny too—very horny—and that’s why she wasn’t afraid. Paralysis plus nudity plus sexual excitation could only mean one thing: nightmare.

I’m having a nightmare, that’s all.

Blobs of voices oozed around her ears. Besmeared faces hovered, inquisitive before the sourceless orange field. They were dream voyeurs, another paradigmatic symptom. Yes, this was a classic nightmare. Sigmund Freud meets Krafft-Ebing in the House of Gustave Doré. The hot light and its confines, of course, symbolized the womb: birth trauma. Paralysis while naked and painfully aroused equaled hidden desires to be dominated, or what her psych prof called the Rape Fantastique. This was a sex nightmare. It was harmless, so she might as well lie back and enjoy it.

“There.”

—Good.

Lois could still not see the dream watchers’ faces. They hovered behind orange fog. But she could see the fat hand gripping her arm. Something was stuck in her flesh—more dream symbolism. It was a large hypodermic needle. As the fat hand worked it out of her arm, Lois felt no pain. Penetration/withdrawal. A big bead of blood welled at the puncture. Then a strange warm mouth sucked the blood off. Lois wished she could see. This was straight out of de Sade, the third work of Justine, where Prince Gernande drank blood from his wife’s veins to excite himself before intercourse. Those Libertines sure had class.

“Solubility tests will help us determine optimum doses.”

“She’ll be good and soft.”

—Oh, good!

The faces shrank back, their words merging. Lois couldn’t remember going to bed, and during some part of this dream, she recalled being tossed into a car trunk; she recalled a face peering down. And whatever happened to Zyro?

Zyro wasn’t exactly her boyfriend; he was too self disposed to share himself with anyone. He was the classic campus novelist—unpublished. He liked to walk around disgruntled, claiming that his “work” was “too aphoristic to be accepted by the capitalistic hierarchy. Nobody understands me.” He believed he would die young, and then his work would be heralded as the voice of his generation. He wrote “indictment of the times” fiction: deadbeat, fucked up in the head on drugs characters with no social utility or motivation, which was supposed to serve as an astute literary observation. Christ, these days all a person had to do was write a plotless book about homosexual cocaine addicted dropouts and it was an instant best seller. Anyway, Lois had arranged to meet Zyro at the Pickman Gallery. She remembered waiting for him, but that was all…

The voyeurs were gone. Lois’ eyes darted right. A thin black line pulsated on the wall. How did this play into the dream? The black line looked like an incision.

Then, from the incision, a figure emerged.

Was it Zyro? Lois’ paralysis only allowed her to raise her sight an inch. In a moment, though, a shadow wobbled into view.

It must be someone crippled, she thought. The shadow hobbled, like a limping man, and with it came an irregular ticking. A limping man? she wondered. What kind of dream was this?

A tingling spread like sparks, describing the intricacies of her ribs, her spine, even her skull. What’s more, her state of arousal crested to waves of hot, knifelike flashes through breast and loin. Her sex visibly thumped.

Before the dark light, the limping man bumbled forward. The sharp ticking drew close, and at last Lois was able to glimpse her new and mysterious suitor…

For shit’s sake! she thought.

One look and she’d had enough of this nightmare. The limping man was no man at all, but a preposterous parody. It appeared more insectoid than anything, a broad humped shell encircled by tiny clicking legs. It stood upright, however, on a pair of stout, jointed appendages with points. If it bore any semblance to humanity at all, that humanity was fanfare. This was no dream lover. It was a bug.

But it was a big bug, big as a man. Lois wondered what could be more disgusting than a man sized cockroach. It seemed to have a face, or facsimile thereof. Clusters of blinking ocelli gazed at her, above a beaked enclosure that could only be a mouth. Something akin to a tongue lolled within the aperture, to lick plated lips. The thing reminded Lois of the Kafka story, where a man named Gregor turned into a big beetle. Zyro had deftly described the piece as an “axiological allegory symbolizing the transmogrification of modern man within the continuum of corporate bureaucracies bent on the total alienation of individuality.” As far as Lois was concerned, it was nothing more than a story about a silly man named Gregor who turned into a bug. But who cared what the story meant? This was supposed to be a sex dream, not some Kafkaesque joke. Nevertheless, here was Gregor, hobbling to meet her.

And again the question came: What could be more disgusting than a man sized cockroach?

Answer: A man sized cockroach with a penis.

For shit’s sake! Lois thought again. I’m about to get fucked by a bug!

Gregor’s works bloomed, a steadily distending, meaty pink mound betwixt its walking joints. She could almost hear herself say: Hey, Gregor, is that twenty five pounds of hamburger in your pants or are you just happy to see me? Well, Gregor was happy indeed. The mound swelled forward, showing a puckered hole. Eventually something popped out and slapped to the floor—a slack pink tube with a fleshy nozzle. It drooped like loose hose.

Gregor crawled daintily over her, as if great care were utmost on its mind. But did this thing even have a mind? Vivificated breaths whistled through multiple spiracles along its shell, and she could see horny passion in its compound eyes. Dollops of green goo dropped from its irised mandibles onto her bare belly. Lois was revolted, yet her physical excitement, somehow, refused to wane. Gregor lay fully atop her now. The nozzled glans snuffled fanatically, and at last the pink cannula found her sex. Lois’ orgasms unwound in spastic quakes. The cannula throbbed, passing jets of warm bug-sperm into her cervical canal as Gregor muttered sweet insectoid nothings into her ear.

“For shit’s sake!” Lois was finally able to exclaim.

Gregor’s armored face inched up to hers. The mandibles opened to fullness, revealing soft lips and tongue, and more than a modest portion of the opaque green saliva, which dribbled liberally into Lois Hartley’s aghast mouth.

««—»»

In this business you were one of two things. You were either legit, or you were dirty. And if you were legit, you were also something else:

You were poor.

Czanek was dirty.

It wasn’t Czanek’s dirt; it was other people’s. He did not feel bad about uncovering the evil of others; he was just a cog in an inevitable machine. Bug planting was a good gig; he could pull in twenty large a year from bugs alone. Industrial espionage paid well too, and sabotage paid even better. Czanek had once taken ten grand for stealing a composite formula from a textile factory and fifteen more for burning the records room and production facilities. By the time they cleaned up the mess, the other company, Czanek’s client, had already patented the stolen formula and was in full production. These were examples of what the trade called “surreptitious entry” or “black bag.” It involved invading privacy, violating personal rights, and, of course, breaking the fuck out of the law. If you were good at black bag, you made lots of money. If you were bad, you lost your license and went to jail. Though Czanek was small time, he was good at black bag, perhaps very good. Its diversity challenged him, and it brought in the cash. Dean Saltenstall, for instance, paid five hundred dollars per hour for a job. Good work reaped good money.

Tonight, though, Czanek was working for free.

Saltenstall was his best client, period. But if the dean ever found out that one of his bugs was transmitting to someone else’s, Czanek would lose his professional credibility in less time than it took to wipe his ass. He may have been the best dirty P.I. in the state, but he wasn’t the only one. Other dicks would kill for a client like Saltenstall. Some literally.

He walked up to the third floor of the sciences center. He wore maintenance overalls and had a phony card identifying him as Peter Hertz, a campus a/c technician. The building was empty at this hour, and the security guard wouldn’t be making his rounds for another forty five minutes. Czanek used a 2mm tension wrench on Besser’s office lock, applying nominal downward pressure with his pinky. Each lock had its own feel; too much pressure seized up the pins, and too little wouldn’t hold them flush. Czanek stroked the pins twice with his #2 rake, and the cylinder opened. He was in the office and had the door locked behind him in four seconds.

He let his eyes adjust, then turned on a red filtered penlight. His gloved hands snooped a bit first, an unavoidable professional impulse. He memorized the exact position of everything on the desk and in the drawers. The bottom drawer, however, was locked.

It was an old Filex disc tumbler with an 18mm keyway. He used a wider tension wrench and a “doubleball.” The slide bar slipped open immediately.

What he saw first made little sense—a list of typed names: L. ERBLING, S. ERBLING, L. HARTLEY, I. PACKER, E. WHITECHAPEL. L. Hartley’s name had a line through it.

Beneath this lay a stack of folders stamped with the Exham seal. Medical files, Czanek noted. The top five matched the five names on the list. All the files belonged to female students. But next was another stack of files, males. A Qwik Note on the top folder read: Choose one holotype for Supremate. And the next line, in red: Wade St. John.

Holotype? Czanek thought. Supremate? And who’s Wade St. John?

At the back of the drawer was a gun.

Czanek was stumped. The piece was some offbeat .25 auto. It smelled of cordite. He wrote down the serial number and put it back.

He didn’t like any of this. Why would Besser have a gun? Czanek didn’t know what to make of the notes and lists, but the gun was something else—guns were of his world. Could Winnifred and Besser really be planning to kill the dean for his insurance?

At the back of the drawer he spotted another Qwik Note. Four notations in florid writing, like a woman’s:

1) Pick holotype. Wade seems best.

2) 2nd vassal in case Tom wears out. Jervis Phillips?

3) Have Tom bury Penelope and Sladder.

Czanek should’ve been alarmed, extremely alarmed. One note mentioned Jervis Phillips, Czanek’s own client. Another mentioned burying bodies. But none of that mattered to Czanek now. He could only stare unbelieving at the fourth and final notation:

4) Kill Czanek.

Czanek’s eyes jittered. They knew about him, but how? Had Jervis squealed? There was no reason, and there was no reason for the dean to turn on him either. Had Winnifred hired her own dick to watch her back? Had Czanek actually been made?

Then the thought toppled like rubble.

The bug.

Holy fucking shit! he thought. The bug!

His gloved hand ran under the inside lip of the desk front. The bug he’d come here to replace wasn’t there.

I am in some shit, he thought very slowly.

“Looking for this, Mr. Czanek?”

Czanek ducked, doused his light, and pulled the Charter snub from his ankle holster. The desk lamp flicked on. Some husky kid in a T shirt and jeans faced him from the desk. Between the kid’s fingers was Czanek’s tiny 49 MHz transmitter.

“I found the other ones too,” the kid said. His face was pale. He was smiling. “The ones in Besser’s house and Winnie’s office.”

“Don’t move,” Czanek said. “I gotta think.”

“What’s to think? You’re caught.”

Czanek cocked his piece. “Who the fuck are you?”

“The name’s Tom. I used to be a student, but now I’m a…guess you’d call me a myrmidon. Ever read Lovecraft?” Tom’s smile stretched to hideous thinness. “I’m a haunter of the dark.”

“You’re gonna be the haunter of the morgue if you don’t start talking. You’re a paid tail, like me. You work for the dean’s wife, don’t you?”

Tom laughed huskily. “That horny sleaze? No way. She doesn’t even like me—she calls me ‘the thing.’ I’ll bet she masturbates fifteen times a day. She’ll do it right in front of you, she doesn’t care. She can’t help herself. It’s the influence of the labyrinth.”

“Who do you work for!” Czanek demanded.

“I work for the Supremate.”

There was that word again. Supremate. Probably a gang leader. The kid must be burned out on dust; he was no P.I. “Who tipped you about the bugs I planted? Was it Jervis? The dean? Who?”

“It was the sisters,” Tom explained. “They work for the Supremate too. They’re his daughters, his children.”

The kid was flaked. What good would killing him do? These sisters, whoever they were, must know about Czanek too, along with Besser and Winnie. If I kill the kid, I gotta kill them all.

“You were in the wrong place at the wrong time, Mr. Czanek.”

Too much was going on at once; Czanek couldn’t think. Like how did the kid get into the office? It had been empty, Czanek was sure of that. And he was sure he’d locked the door behind him.

“All right,” Czanek said. “Here’s what we’re going to do. You and me are going to walk out that door, nice and easy like, and then we’re going for a little ride.”

“Wrong,” Tom said. Suddenly he had something huge in his hands. It looked like a long, wide bladed ax. “You’re gonna stand there like a good little boy while I put this through your head. Nice and easy like. Then I’m going to bury you.”

Now even Czanek spared a laugh. “Where were you when the brains were handed out? I’ve got a gun. See?”

“I don’t mind loud noises,” Tom said. “You can go hard or easy. Your choice, man.”

It had to be drugs, PCP or something. There was all kinds of shit on the street that made you stone crazy and fearless as a sewer rat. But Czanek couldn’t stand here all night. He had to make his move now. “I’m not fooling around here. If you don’t drop that ax, I’m going to have to kill you.”

“Oh, it’s not an ax,” Tom obliged. “It’s called a beam hewer. Colonial guys used them to cut rafters and shit. And it’ll do a job on a human head too. You should’ve seen Sladder.”

Jesus, Czanek realized. I’m gonna have to pop this guy.

The blade’s edge glittered. The pitch of Tom’s voice rumbled down. “Sorry, Mr. Czanek. I’m afraid your time is up.”

Czanek shouted “Don’t!” as Tom, the Achillean myrmidon, the haunter of the dark, raised the hewer high above his head.

Czanek emptied the Charter in five evenly spaced taps. The impact of the slugs mowed the kid down like a hinged duck in a shooting gallery.

Czanek stood in grainy, hot silence. Gun smoke stung his eyes. Unaffected, he stared down at the dead boy.

Then the dead boy got up.

Tom’s smile never wavered. His clean white T shirt bore no evidence of blood, just gritty black powder marks. The grouped slugs had punched a smoking hole in the middle of his chest. It was a deep hole.

“Don’t worry,” Tom said. “I won’t charge you for the shirt.”

Again, Czanek thought: I am in some shit.

The empty piece fell out of his hand when the girl entered the room. There was a strange, resonant hum, and a shrinking line of light that was black.

But the girl was just a child. She stood caped in black, a white face in the room’s dark. Her gentle aura filled Czanek’s head.

—Hurry up, Tom! We want to eat, please!

“Coming right up,” Tom said.

The massive hewer’s blade blurred down. The sister smiled. Tom’s new gift of strength made Besser’s job on Sladder look like child’s play: Czanek was shorn completely in half, from head to crotch. Between his feet, the blade struck the floor with such force that the entire building tremored.

Czanek’s body parted and fell in two cleanly cut pieces.

—

CHAPTER 18

Lydia remembered feeling afraid. She felt naive, puerile, inexperienced. She was an adult, a sexually mature woman, yet she felt like a child. The very next thing she knew, she was in the shower with him. That was the only word: afraid. But it wasn’t Wade she was afraid of, nor sex, nor closeness. It was herself.

The cool water rained down on her face. Wade stood behind her, sudsing her into a suit of slick lather. He did so very slowly. Lydia’s excitement began to unravel the instant his hands touched her skin. She’d forgotten what that felt like, to simply be touched…

Neither had said a word since they’d come into the shower. Lydia liked it that way—no talk, just the detailed hiss of the water and the sensation of his hands sudsing her body, beguiling her. This was a shocking luxury—being washed in the dreamy torrent, being so slowly and attentively felt. The contrast of warm lather and cool water made her nipples stand right up, right away. She was happy to feel, against her rump, that something of his was standing up too. Now his hands smoothed suds over her breasts. The slow, radiating pleasure was almost infuriating. He pressed her breasts together, offered them to the water. The suds sluiced off and left her flesh squeaky in his hands.

She felt the trail of suds course down her legs. More and more, Lydia felt thinly wired, like a rosined bowstring fit to snap. Wade’s hands slid up her hips; then the bar of soap glided brazenly into the cleft of her rump. The shock brought her up on her tiptoes.

Wade seemed to know that she could bear no more of this. He hugged her as he turned off the water, then he took her straight out. The room opened to them in cool darkness. They kissed belly to belly, dripping. The beads of water on her skin turned warm with her heat. Her open mouth sucked over his; their tongues frolicked. In the window she could see the moon, which seemed to watch like a distant face, or part of her past self.

Wade’s hands coaxed her buttocks apart and squeezed. His member (which she thought of unhesitantly as his cock) stood erect between their pressing bellies. Its hot underside throbbed. She longed to see its details, to witness its mysterious proof.

Next he straddled her on the bed. His strategy was agonizing: He kissed and licked every square inch of her body, from her lips to the tips of her toes—he dressed her in kisses. He traced her tan lines with his tongue. He sucked her nipples till they filled with a delicious ache. His mouth drew a wet line to her belly button, which he kissed, licked, and sucked with undue fascination.

Lydia felt stretched on an inquisitor’s rack when he began to kiss around the entirety of her sex; the sensation churned upward. Was she losing her mind from this? And what of him? She strained to grasp his cock, but it remained out of reach. For now she could only vow a dutiful reciprocation. Yes, she would tend to his cock as voraciously as he now tended to her. She would suck it till he came in her mouth, and that would only be the beginning.

These thoughts confounded her. Dirty girl, she thought. She wrapped her legs around his back. Yes, she would show him, once his cock was in reach. I don’t love this guy, do I? she dared to ask herself, but she could only think through chinks in the teasing frenzy. Then the wave began to rise. Oh, no. Oh—

Flexing spasms gathered and burst. A finger slipped in. She began to come at once when his mouth found the exposed nub of her clitoris. (She often thought that clitoris had to be the most ridiculous name devisable for the seat of feminine sexual pleasure.) The tongue licked up, bearing down. Moaning wasn’t Lydia’s style, yet she moaned just the same, writhing against the synchronicity of his tongue and mouth, which coaxed pulses of orgasms from her. Each beautiful release reminded her how long it had been since anything like this had happened to her. All she could do was lie there and come, give in to him. Yes, it had been a very long time indeed.

««—»»

The Supremate hummed, as if to set a score to its intricate web of thoughts. Soulless behind the shocking countenance, it knew everything. It watched and listened. And hummed.

—WHO AM I? The Supremate thought.

In a manner, it did know everything, and enjoyed the luxury of being in many places at once. Some would define God by these criteria. —AM I GOD? it wondered. —I AM OMNISCIENT. I AM OMNIPRESENT. I AM WORSHIPED. MAYBE I’M GOD.

Deep in the labyrinth, the daughters were at work, happy in mindlessness. They were pawns, but the Supremate loved them.

—I LOVE.

More God. Wasn’t love, too, a necessary criteria?

—WORK HARD. MY PRECIOUS DAUGHTERS. FOR I LOVE YOU.

—We know! came their reply. —We love you too!

But the Supremate idled. Surely there must be more to God than this. There had to be. —GOD? it thought.

Their holy—yes, holy—burdens here would soon be ended. Then they would move on to new fertile gardens, new pastures from which to reap. But how many more times? And how much longer?

The Supremate didn’t know.

—I’M NOT GOD, it realized. —I’M JUST… ME.

The Supremate’s head roared with ancient laughter. It laughed and laughed. And hummed.

««—»»

Stella Erbling arched forward, painting her toenails. She was painting them black. Her sister, Liddy, lounged back on the couch with her feet up, bored as she scrutinized the TV guide.

“What’s on cable?” Stella asked, painting daintily.

“Just horror movies on cable,” Liddy replied, bored.

“What ones?”

Liddy was a year older but a year behind. Their father had arranged for them to room together, believing that a familial proximity might encourage academic motivation. This, in truth, effected the opposite. Stella was proud that her 1.2 grade point average was one tenth of a percent higher than Liddy’s.

“Let’s see,” Liddy said, scanning the TV cable guide. “I Eat Your Skin, Bloodsucking Freaks, Three on a Meat Hook, and Citizen Kane.”

Stella laughed. “Citizen Kane isn’t a horror movie, you mushhead. It’s porno.”

“Oh,” Liddy peeped. Stella knew everything, damn her.

Stella capped the polish bottle. “Forget TV. I got a better idea.”

Liddy’s face shined in glee, “Do Horse?”

“Do Horse,” Stella authorized. “Call that human pile-driver right now. We’ll raise his Kane, all right.”

The sheer delight of this conspiracy merged into their laughter. Liddy’s denim mini slipped up and showed her pantyless bottom as she bent for the phone. They couldn’t wait for Do Horse to come calling. So what if he had less charisma than a package of lunch meat? He was like the flag at the White House—always up.

And they would do well to have their fun quickly, for sometimes the night brings many callers, not all of whom are welcome.

««—»»

Such callers, in this case, would be Tom, in a clean T shirt, and one of the middle sisters. Several hours had passed since David “Do Horse” Willet had arrived at the Erblings’ for what would be his last so called roll in the hay. Tom and the sister took the fire stairs up, to avoid notice by the lobby guard. Up, up they went, for another small straw of destiny.

Lois Hartley had acclimated well and was now brewing nicely in the gestation catalyzer. The Supremate was pleased. Vaguely Tom wondered what manner of grossness would emerge from Lois’ radiophaseshifttriionized womb. Too vividly he remembered the stillborn sack of flesh that the stasisfield defected Penelope had birthed. Ugh, he thought. No cigars from that daddy.

The cloaked sister stood behind him, grinning stupidly. They advanced with discretion, and passed room 202, Sarah’s room. Tom wondered if Jervis was still ravaged by the destruction of the romance. He also wondered if he’d ever see his Kirin guzzling friend again, before the promised all expense paid trip to eternity. Despite what Tom had become, he missed his friends.

Next came room 206, Penelope’s room, or at least it had been until her address was changed to underground. The poor airhead was probably still blubbering away down there.

Next came room 208, the Erblings’.

—Remember, said the sister. —Don’t make a mess this time.

Tom twisted the doorknob and pushed. Metal crunched as the bolt ground out. The door opened to a brightly lit room: three astonished faces jerked up from a rather elaborate ménage à trois. Suddenly naked bodies blurred, dashing madly. Stella yelled, “Who—”

“—the fuck are they!” Liddy finished, gleaming breasts abob. But the dude, David “Do Horse” Willet, stepped forward, confident in spite of total nakedness, and totally unafraid.

“Who the fuck are you?” Do Horse asked.

“Ted Kennedy,” Tom said. “Wanna buy a Delta 88 cheap?”

Do Horse, who was at no loss for muscle, rammed his big, knuckly fist at Tom’s face. The guy must be a Democrat, Tom surmised. He held up a palm, into which Do Horse’s fist collided. Tom’s palm didn’t budge. The bones in Do Horse’s hand shattered.

—Get them! the sister ordered. —They’re getting away!

The Erblings, screaming, flew by on either side. Tom snatched each by the hair, and that was the end of the great escape. By fistfuls of scalp he held the two girls off their feet, as a fisherman might hold up two trout. The sister’s grinning face beamed within the recess of the black hood. Her sunglassed eyes drank up the sight of the girls’ nude bodies as they lurched screaming beneath Tom’s fists. Next the sister was touching them, feeling their breasts, cupping their pubes as if in awe.

Hurry up, Tom thought like a groan.

The sister’s fanged mouth stretched wide. The pink needled tether shot out too quickly to be seen and rammed its stinger into one throat, then the other. The Erblings fell limp.

Tom dropped them on the carpet. Meanwhile, Do Horse had sprung back up, bringing a Mitsubishi VCR down on Tom’s head with a heavy metallic bang.

Tom turned. “Don’t waste your time, pal.”

Do Horse grabbed a large wall mirror and broke that, too, over Tom’s head. Tom winced slightly as the mirror burst. Do Horse stared, incredulous that Tom was still standing.

“Here’s an old one,” Tom offered. “You know what a Chernobyl hooker’s specialty is? Glow jobs.”

“That’s terrible,” Do Horse couldn’t help but comment.

“Yeah, I know.”

Tom grabbed Do Horse’s throat and crushed it.

He calmly dragged the slowly strangling young man into the bathroom and dropped him in the tub. The body slapped like raw meat hitting slate. Tom ripped open the boy’s rib cage and abdominal wall, exposing the warm delicacies within.

“Soup’s on,” he said.

—Oh, good! The sister scurried in, knelt, and began to eat.

Tom rolled the two paralyzed girls up in the oval carpet, then carried them out to the car. The sister was still eating when he returned to the dorm room.

—It’s so good! she exclaimed. Tom saw with some distaste that the body part for which David Willet was nicknamed had already been eaten. The sister was now clunkily prying apart the boy’s skull and scooping out big squiggles of brains.

—Want some? she asked, offering a handful.

“No thanks,” Tom said. “I’m trying to cut down.” He cleaned up the broken mirror, faintly unnerved at the glimpses of his own graying face in the pieces. He set the VCR back, made the bed, and packed the strewn clothing into the hamper. Then he checked the fridge for beer but grimly discovered only cans of Bud. Forget it, he thought.

At last the sister emerged, her little mouth smudged red. —I’m done, Tom. I’ll wait in the car while you clean up the rest.

Tom glanced at the offal in the tub. “Thanks a lot,” he said.

««—»»

And just as the night has its share of callers, so, too, does it have its share of watchers. One such watcher was Jervis Phillips.

He’d set up an hour ago with the telescope and Czanek’s receiver, expecting Sarah and the German to repeat last night’s performance. But they’d never arrived. The only activity to be seen in Sarah’s window was Frid, the cat, which milled disinterested about the dorm room. Jervis could hear it purring over the receiver. Every so often its bottomless eyes seemed to gaze directly into the telescope, as if it knew Jervis was watching. God, I hate that cat, he thought.

But then he spotted motion in another window. It only took a moment for him to realize it was the Erblings’ room.

Jervis pulled his azimuth to the left and focused in.

Then he froze.

Jeeeeeeeesus Christ.

Insanity. That’s what smiled back at him through the telescope. This was not a voyeur’s cheap thrill. This was insanity.

The unwatchable things he watched consumed only minutes. The Erbling girls, naked, lay limp on the floor. A naked guy, who looked just like Do Horse Willet, was fighting another guy who looked just like Tom.

“It is Tom,” Jervis muttered, eye pressed to the barlow.

But why was Tom’s face gray and sunk eyed? Furthermore, what was that lunatic scene? Most bizarre of all was the woman who presided over this, a woman in a black cape and sunglasses.

Now Tom was dragging Do Horse to the bathtub. And the woman…

She’s eating him, Jervis realized.

Jervis took his eye away from the telescope, away from the crimson frenzy. Illusion, he thought. That’s all. He finished a Kirin and rationalized. Too much drinking, too little eating, and the mind plays tricks on you.

He calmed his terrors with reason, convinced himself that when he looked back in the telescope, he would see none of the rampant madness he thought he’d seen. He would see no murder, no cloaked woman, no blood. He would see normality.

He looked back into the telescope—

Jeeeeeeeesus Christ!

—and saw Tom stuffing handfuls of innards into a plastic garbage bag as the black cloaked woman pushed a final clump of human brains into her red smeared mouth.

—

CHAPTER 19

What time was it? The faintest dawn gathered in the window. Birds chirped. It must be five or five thirty.

Lydia slid carefully out of bed, slipped on her panties, and padded about the dark room. It occurred to her that she could put her clothes on and slip out right now, leave a tawdry note like “Thanks for the good time, see you around.” How would Wade react to that? It was too hard nowadays to judge the nature of emotions—a litmus test would be so much easier. Her cutoffs lay on the floor, her loaded derringer on the desk. Did she, a rather dedicated police officer, want to get involved with Wade, a rather undedicated student?

How could they be compatible? They were opposite in so many ways. The physical thing had been good; was she letting that fog her focus? This seemed different, though. The sex aside, her heart deciphered itself: she did want to be involved with him. Even better, maybe she already was.

She heard footsteps in the hall. They sounded stealthy.

Abruptly then, the doorknob jiggled.

But surely Wade had locked the door. Only idiots leave their doors unlocked, she thought.

Then the door opened.

Lydia grabbed her gun and hid behind the desk. A figure entered cautiously and took time to close the door without making noise. Lydia made no details of the shape. It crossed the room in silence and stopped at the foot of Wade’s bed.

Was the figure deliberating? It stood still a moment. Then, quickly, it began to reach for Wade.

Lydia snapped on the light and pointed the .22 at the 5x zone of the trespasser’s torso. “Don’t move,” she ordered.

A wearied face stared at her. Wade leaned up from bed, squinting.

“I don’t believe it,” the trespasser said. “I’m being held at gunpoint by a topless blonde.”

“A topless police officer,” Lydia corrected, but then she thought: Oh my God, it’s true! I’m practically nude!

Wade laughed. “Put away your heat, Annie Oakley. He’s a friend of mine.”

“Goddamn it!” she shouted. Embarrassment flooded her. “Get him out of here! And quit laughing!”

“In the hall,” Wade said to Jervis Phillips, who quickly scooted out. Lydia couldn’t remember ever being this pissed off. “Sorry,” Wade apologized, and put on his robe. “These things happen.”

“Shit!” she yelled at him.

Wade went out to the hall. Lydia quickly put on her cutoffs and top. The conversation was easy to overhear.

Jervis sounded hesitant. “I saw something. I know it sounds crazy, but I think I witnessed a murder. Over at the girls’ dorm.”

“You’re right, Jerv. It sounds crazy. You been drinking?”

“Of course. I guess I passed out at the end of it, because it happened around two A.M. He killed him.”

“Slow down. Start at the beginning.”

More hesitance. “I, uh, I was checking out the dorm with a telescope; I wanted to see what Sarah was doing with the German guy, but they never showed. Anyway, another window was lit up, the Erblings’ window, so I, you know, I—” Jervis spoke with caution, charting his words. “I saw a woman in black. She had a guy with her. The guy was Tom.”

“Tom?”

“Yeah. And then the Erbling girls popped up. That guy Dave Willet was with them, the guy everyone calls Do Horse—”

Wade chuckled.

“—and Tom killed him.”

Wade stopped chuckling.

“He killed him. Then he threw his body in the bathtub. Christ, there was blood everywhere. And then that woman came in, that woman in black. She…ate him.”

“The woman in black ate Do Horse?”

“That’s right. You should’ve seen it.”

“And I guess she ate the Erblings too, huh?”

“No, no, but she did something to them, knocked them out somehow. Something. Tom rolled them up in a rug and took them out.”

Wade was chuckling again.

“I know it sounds crazy. If you don’t believe me, let’s go over there and check it out. I know what I saw. It was Tom.”

Now Wade seemed to be hesitating. He didn’t believe this nonsense, did he? “Tom’s car hasn’t been in the lot for two days,” Wade mentioned. “And last time I saw him, he gave me the slip.”

“Wade, it’s true. I can prove it. Let’s go over there.”

Silence.

Then Wade came back in the room. “Did you—”

“Yeah, I heard it,” Lydia smirked. “Your friend’s a peeper, a drunk, and a nut. That’s three strikes.”

“I’ll admit he’s a little off track; his girlfriend just dumped him, he’s been drinking heavy. But he’s not the kind of guy to make something like this up. Plus, there’s something else…”

“What?”

“It’s better if I tell you later. Just trust me.”

What was he talking about? Was he nuts too?

“There’s no harm in looking into it, is there?” Wade persisted, and got dressed. Lydia said nothing, but she supposed he was right.

««—»»

She felt like a complete ass, knocking on a student’s door at five thirty in the morning, but only for a second. Her first rap on room 208 edged the door open an inch. The doorknob was squashed, just like at the clinic. The latch bolt was mangled, the strike plate half dug out—

“Just like the clinic,” Wade said.

Score one for Jervis the Drunk, Lydia thought.

The faintest ring of dust clung in a circle on the floor, as might be left by a hastily removed throw rug. Hmmm, she thought. The bed was sloppily made; guys made their beds like that, not girls. Hmmm, she thought again.

The hamper was stuffed full of clothes. Among the garments was a pair of men’s jeans. The jeans contained a wallet. The wallet contained a driver’s license: David Ubel Willet.

“Believe me now?” Jervis asked.

Lydia was stumped. “I believe you may have witnessed a break in,” she replied. “I don’t, however, believe you witnessed anything more than that.”

Jervis said three clipped words. “Bathtub. Blood. Everywhere.”

The three of them squeezed into the bathroom. They all looked down at the tub.

“Where’s the blood?” Wade asked.

“Tom must’ve cleaned it up,” Jervis was quick to answer. “There was so much, though. It must’ve taken him an hour.”

“Forget it, Jerv,” Wade said. “The tub’s clean.”

Too clean, Lydia thought. She’d had Jervis tote along her field kit. From it she removed a tiny amber bottle with an eyedropper cap. “This is a detection compound called Malachite Reagent V; it reacts with protein components in hemoglobin. Blood contains free protein electrons which bind to almost any surface. You can wash off the blood, but you can’t wash off the electrons.”

“So if someone got murdered in this tub,” Wade said, “the stuff in that bottle will prove it?”

“Yep. It turns turquoise on contact.” Lydia let a tiny drop fall from the eyedropper into the middle of the tub.

“Nothing,” Wade observed.

“Wait.”

In a second, the drop turned turquoise.

Lydia sprinkled more drops around, all over the inside of the tub, the ledge, the tiled back wall. They all turned turquoise.

Jervis looked unsurprised. Wade looked ill.

This guy’s not bullshitting, Lydia thought, and it was a ghastly thought indeed. There’d been blood all over this tub.

Blood. Everywhere.

««—»»

“I instructed you to be careful!” Professor Dudley Besser bellowed within the cove of pointaccessmain #1. “I told you!”

“I know, sir,” Tom mumbled.

“You left their wallets! Their keys! Everything!”

“It slipped my mind, sir. We had to get out of there. It took me a long time to clean up the mess the sister made. I mean, Christ, can’t they eat here?”

Besser recessed back into the strangely etched darkness. Inaudibly the labyrinth hummed, a vibration more than a sound. The sisters had told Tom that it was the Supremate thinking, but Tom had begun to doubt that, along with many other things. Sometimes he wondered if there even was a Supremate. The huge loving voice that sometimes filled his head seemed phony, an overdone charade.

Besser’s disapproval drew crevices into his bulging moonface. “This better not break before we leave. Who knows what the Supremate will do?”

The premise was not a pleasant one. Tom remembered the chasms he’d seen. He remembered the squat factories whose winding winze belts hauled slabs of black meat.

“I don’t want any problems with your next task,” Besser said. “The Supremate needs a holotype. Winnie and I have agreed; it shall be Wade St. John. This should please you.”

“It does, sir.” You ain’t kidding it does!

“We only have a few more days; I want Wade secured in the unit hold well beforehand. He works at the sciences center at nine A.M. Bring him in today.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And let me emphasize that the quality of your future within the family may depend on the success of your remaining procurements.”

“I understand that, sir. You can count on me.”

Besser dismissed him, the moonface disappearing into the egress. Tom followed the dimensionless servicepass to the acclimationprepchamber. He didn’t need directions; the labyrinth had its own sort of telepathic directory called mindsigns. Ahead, one such sign read EMWGUIDANCETRACKINGPOINT. Besser had explained it wasn’t really a power plant but just a simple stabilization mechanism, like a keel on a sailboat. The Supremate controlled it, along with everything else, by instinct.

The next mindsign glowed in nonexistence: GERMINATIONWARREN. Tom used the key around his neck and prolapsed through the egress. This was some security system they had here; no one without a key could escape the labyrinth’s solid walls, nor could entry be gained by any outsider. The labyrinth was, fully and ultimately, impenetrable.

Within the acclimationprepchamber, the Erblings lay stretched on the levitationslats. Before antirejectorybifertilization could be initiated, certain biological changes had to be made. Tom knew the Erblings were conscious despite complete paralysis. He grabbed two infusers containing optimized doses of calciumdecimationliquefactor. All fissionizationvessels needed proper softening before they could safely disbirth their interspecielmetis units. Tom had wandered around the biomaintenancegrowthaccelerationvaults once or twice, and some of the things he’d seen down there were as big as sunfish! The Erblings both jerked once when he activated the infusers against their throats. The injection attacked only fossilized CaCo compounds. Besser and Winnifred had taken blood samples from Lois Hartley and Penelope, to ascertain the most effective serum absorbability levels for humans. The Erblings would be pudding in an hour.

Liddy’s fingers and toes twitched, and Stella was blinking. The sister’s neurohemolyticpyrrolizicvenom was wearing off. Tom pushed the levslats through the next extromitter. Besser had told him that the slats had an unlimited load capacity. Theoretically you could push an aircraft carrier around on one of these things. You could push worlds.

But no worlds today. Just a pair of naked coeds. Tom could feel the warmth of the sensorpost behind him. They were everywhere in one way or another—hybridized into the sisters’ eyes, in the sensor rings that Besser and Winnie wore, even in Tom’s transceptionrod. Through such sensor circuits, the Supremate saw and heard everything. The sensorpost was merely a black rod above the keypass. It reminded Tom of the Orwell novel.

He flipped the Erblings off their slats onto the carbonized floorwall. “If you think Do Horse was hot stuff,” he joked, “wait’ll you see what’s waiting for you in the next room. You’ll be the only gals in town with boyfriends from another planet!” Tom laughed. “I’ll be right back, and in the meantime, you’ll be trying on some new genes, and I don’t mean Levi’s.”

He extromitted to the pointaccess of the xyholotypehold. The exposed unit read #1003WADEST.JOHN. The hold was empty, but not for long. In sisterspeak the hold was called a carbonmassrepulsiondiodedeflectiveenergybarriersecuritynodule. In Tomspeak, it was called a fuckin’ jail. It reminded him of the brig on Star Trek. Nothing could penetrate its repulsion screen. A TOW missile wouldn’t dent it. A sixteen inch naval shell would bounce off its transparent face like a tennis ball.

Tom touched the scrollmode on the revolutionactivator, thinking of the proper stockcodes #765NRLDYL and #6500: .::. . Instantly the first appeared, something reminiscent of a giant gray chicken gizzard, which rose joint by joint on segmented legs. “Come on, Valentino,” Tom said. “Time to make some bacon.” Nrldyl had haired antennae in place of eyes and ears, and at the end of its single arm was not a hand but a rubberish shovel like thing. Tom understood that this particular genus had intercourse by means of manual seminal congestion: It took its semen out of itself with the scoop and stuffed it into its mate. True passion, Tom thought.

#6500: .::. . appeared next. “Ah, Blob Man,” Tom commented, noticing the bucket. It was nice to know that earth was not the only sphere in the universe that used buckets. He carried it down the pass, as Nrldyl dumbly followed. Tom didn’t have to worry about the holotypes getting rowdy; the ganglionstaticreflexpulsemodificationdischargenodes implanted into their nervous systems would zap them a nutcracker at the faintest negative thought. That way they couldn’t rough up the female surrogates.

Tom decayed the radiophaseshifttriionizer, which paved the way for successful antirejectorybifertilization. He took the two holotypes into the warren. “Girls!” he announced. “I’m back! With your new dream dates!”

Stella began to visibly jerk. Liddy managed a muffled whine from deep in her chest.

“Go to it, fellas.” Tom set the bucket between Liddy’s feet and nudged Nrldyl toward Stella. “If you guys need a godfather, let me know. I could be available.”

Nrldyl was hopping up and down in pure alien excitement. Clumps of its semen were already visible within the slit of its spermonic duct. The grotesque thing then knelt between Stella’s legs and began to tenderly transfer the globs of its off-blue semen, via the scoop hand, into Stella’s vaginal vault. The scoop packed it in nice and tight, leaving poor Stella bloated like a blueberry turnover with too much filling. What a way to fuck, Tom thought. Nrldyl chortled. Stella vomited a yard into the air while at the same time convulsing in multiple orgasms.

Meanwhile the thing in the bucket had already dumped itself out. The brown blob spurtled, groaning, surging upward as if against tremendous gravity. After several strenuous attempts, it managed to stand upright, sporting a dripping, long erection that looked sort of like a giant chewed Tootsie Roll. Liddy screamed through her paralysis when the thing climbed between her legs.

Tom plugged his key into the extromitter. But before he left, he turned and offered a final commiseration. “Have no fear, girls. You’ll live forever. You’ll be cosmic mothers of miracles—forever.”

But where did that leave him? As he fed the thought “Student Shop” into the extromitter, he wondered. They said he would live forever too. But how could that be, when already shreds of his own flesh were beginning to peel off?

—

CHAPTER 20

“Museums? No,” Professor Fredrick said. “None within hundreds of miles, I’m afraid.”

Lydia had come to Fredrick at 9 A.M. sharp. Fredrick was Exham’s chairman of the archaeology department. She’d wanted to know where a three hundred year old cutting tool could be found near the campus. And he’d told her. Nowhere.

“May I see those photographs?” Professor Fredrick asked. The shots were microphotos she’d taken of the impactations at the stables.

Fredrick lit a pipe with a face on it. “There’s no scale here,” he remarked. “How long would you say this strike mark is?”

“A little over ten inches.”

“That’s a long blade for an ax. It’s perfectly flat too. But the angle width of the cutting bezel interests me more.”

“Sir?”

Fredrick pointed to the grainy shot with his pipe end. “I mean the angle at which this tool was honed” —he squinted— “you can see that the left side of the blade is a flat plane, while the right bears the honing surface.”

Lydia had already noted this.

“And your police scientist told you—”

“It was an estimation,” she clarified. “There were no exact classifications in the indexes. This ax is definitely iron, and definitely forged over three hundred years ago. That’s all we know.”

“This isn’t an ax,” Fredrick said.

“What?”

“It’s plain to see. It’s not an ax. It’s not a mattock, an adze, or a froe either.”

“Then what is it?”

Fredrick’s brow rose over his aging face. He tapped his pipe into a glazed Babylonian bloodtap turned ashtray. “The tool you’re looking for is a beam hewer. It’s the only tool within your estimated time period that had this kind of cutting edge.”

Lydia frowned. “What the hell is a beam hewer?”

“A tool used by colonists to turn round logs into square beams. There were many different types of hewers, mind you, but only the beam hewer possessed a planed left blade side, so the scores of the dogged log could be sliced off evenly.”

Scores of the dogged log, Lydia thought. “I’m not exactly an expert on beam hewers, Professor.”

Fredrick laughed, for the first time displaying a comprehension of humor. “Beam carpenters were the most vital tradesmen of the early colonial period. The procedure involved the following steps. One, a tree was cut down. Two, the felled tree was held to the ground by a dogging clamp. Three, the dogged tree was scored with axlike tools called adzes. Four, the scored tree was hewn—four flat planes were cut along the scores. The beam hewer had the appearance of an oddly shaped ax. The cutting edges were commonly a foot long, to clear each score.”

Lydia tried to picture an ax with a foot long cutting edge. “They were huge, you mean.”

“Yes, and heavy—twenty to thirty pounds. The left blade sides were perfectly level, or ‘basilled,’ so as to cut the scores off flat. A good beam carpenter could turn a thirty foot tree into an evenly sided beam in about an hour.”

Fredrick rose to take down some books. Lydia understood that he’d been on digs all over the world. Years of blazing sun had cragged his face, toughened his skin to leather. He slid aside a small statue of Chinnamasta, the Bengalian goddess of decapitation, and presented to Lydia an old book opened to a block of pictures.

“That,” he said, pointing to one, “is a typical beam hewer.”

Lydia nearly shit her police pants.

“And that,” he paused to add, “is me.”

The ghostly field photograph was dated March 19, 1938. “New Excavations at Kent Island,” it read, and the text: “Sophomore F. Fredrick displays one of dozens of newly disinterred artifacts found at Maryland University’s latest Kent Island dig, a beam hewer probably forged by William Claiborne’s blacksmiths in 1632. Note the hewer’s extraordinary size.”

In the picture, a young and dusty Professor Fredrick smiled as he held up the hewer for the camera. Its handle was nearly as long as Fredrick was tall, and its cutting edge easily cleared a foot. The bizarre blade was configured like an upside down, L. Lydia had never imagined a cutting tool so large.

“The hewer’s impractical size was necessary. Too small and they would not be able to cut each score in a single swipe. Needless to say, next to flintlocks, the beam hewer was the weapon of choice during Indian attacks.”

“I can see why,” Lydia commented. The look of the thing was terrifying enough, but worse was the rest. This was the same sort of instrument that had been used on Sladder.

Fredrick puffed smoke. “May I ask the nature of your inquiry?”

“Sure,” Lydia said. “The weapon that made these strike-marks murdered a man.”

“Oh, dear,” Fredrick said.