Coven

“But knowing what it is isn’t good enough, not with something this old. I need to know where a person could get one.”

“Well, I’ve told you, there aren’t any museums in the vicinity. Exham is a remote town; who needs museums here?”

No museums, Lydia thought. No beam hewers.

“Except, of course,” Fredrick continued, “the artifacts owned by the college.”

Lydia stared. “You mean there’s a museum here? On campus?”

“No, but there are exhibits. The archaeology department sponsors several digs per year. Several battles of the Revolution were fought nearby, and early colony settlements were scattered all over Exham. We’ve got more musket barrels, bent bayonets, and crushed powder horns than you can shake a stick at.”

“Fine,” Lydia said. “But do you have any beam hewers?”

“Why, of course,” Fredrick answered.

Lydia wanted to shout the next question into his face, but she managed to calm herself. “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

“You specifically asked me about independent museums, not college archaeological properties.”

Lydia’s heart quickened. “Professor Fredrick, are you telling me that there are beam hewers on this campus right now?”

“Yes,” he said. “Several, as a matter of fact.”

“Where?”

“The main administration lobby. My department maintains a fine display of local artifacts there. It’s an impressive exhibit; I’m sure you’ve seen it. There are three or four hewers on display.”

Lydia’s scalp seemed to be tingling. Tensely she stood up and said, “Professor Fredrick, thank you very, very much.”

««—»»

Wade scrubbed toilets and mopped floors, oblivious. He smiled, whistling, and thought of his night with Lydia Prentiss.

It had been wonderful, which sounded corny, but it was true. He’d driven her home at 7 A.M. He could tell by the way she kissed him that this was more than a one night stand. The look in her eyes had finished him. This girl loves me, he thought in a crash of incredulity. She hadn’t said it, of course. But Wade knew, and that shock of knowledge was all it took to show him how significantly his life had changed literally overnight. His past’s romantic demons had fled like blown leaves; Lydia had exorcized them. No more macho rich kid in a Corvette. No more beaver patrol. No more reducing the society of women to physical tidbits for his indulgence. The burden of his sins was gone. Wade the Conqueror had been conquered. By Lydia.

I’m in love, he thought giddily. How do you like that?

What a stark, blazing realization. He felt glittering in the rush of love. Nothing could spoil the moment of this beautiful truth.

Or at least almost nothing—

Plunk.

He looked down and saw that he’d stepped in the mop bucket. It tipped over when he lifted his foot out. Then he slipped.

Splap!

Now he lay belly down in the puddle. His temper struggled. When he tried to rise, he slipped again and fell on his back. He got up, swore, and kicked the bucket. The bucket bounced off the wall, hit him in the head, and knocked him in the water again.

Splat!

Laughter cracked down the hall. Wade, wet and red faced, looked up. Chief White was standing in the doorway.

“I seen a lotta dumb ass hobnobbin’ in my day, but I ain’t never seen a grown man get his ass whupped by a bucket.”

“What do you want!” Wade yelled.

“Get in the car, St. John. We’se goin’ for a ride.”

««—»»

Wade sat in back, behind the screen, as White drove his souped Buick cruiser. Am I in trouble? he wondered. The mop water stank in his clothes. But the situation stank worse.

White had developed a nervous tic. He chewed a cigar butt and steered wringing his hands. Earlier, Lydia had made Wade and Jervis promise not to speak of the business at the Erblings’ dorm. She wanted to follow up on it herself, assemble more pieces before informing White. She’d implied that White had been covering things up lately, before Lydia could investigate them properly. Wade knew White was a crank, but maybe it was something more than that.

White spat out the chewed butt and parked at the campus substation. He shuffled Wade in and slammed him down in a chair.

“Why the Gestapo treatment, Chief? Is kicking a campus owned mop bucket a felony? What am I looking at, five to ten?”

White sat at his desk. “You’re a two bit pain in my ass, St. John. You know that?”

Two bit? What an insult. “What’s this all about, Chief?”

“It’s about your pal Tom McGuire, that’s what!”

Wade tried to show no reaction. Had Lydia changed her mind about informing White of the break in at the Erblings’?

“The goddamn punk robbed the Town Pump last night,” White spat. “The owner made his vehicle and got his plates, then picked his face out of random student photos. Positive ID.”

“Tom’s got plenty of money,” Wade said. “He doesn’t rob liquor stores. That’s ridiculous.”

Or was it? Jervis claimed he saw Tom breaking into the Erblings’, which was ridiculous too. Then there was always the Spaten cap Wade had found at the campus clinic.

“He beat up on the owner and stole two cases of beer.”

“Oh, yeah?” Wade challenged. “What type of beer.”

White grimaced at the police report. “Spaten Oktoberfest.”

Not good, Wade thought. “All right, even if he did rob the Pump, which he didn’t, why drag me down here?”

“’Cos you and him are buddies. You must know somethin’ about it.”

“Look, Chief,” Wade lied, “I haven’t seen him for days.”

“Bullshit! You were at the inn with him two nights ago!”

“That was the last time I saw him,” Wade lied. “I haven’t seen him since then. I haven’t even seen his car in the lot.”

White grimaced further. “Well, he ain’t gonna be hard to find, not in that mint white Camaro of his, and vanity plates. Got an APB out on him now. He tries to cross the line in that car, the state boys’ll be on him like bugs on flypaper. And what about this other motorhead friend of yours? Jervis Phillips.”

“Jervis isn’t a motorhead, Chief. He drives a Dodge Colt. And what about him?”

“He’s friends with McGuire too. Might know somethin’. But we can’t find him either. You know where he is?”

“Sorry, Chief,” Wade lied again. “Haven’t seen him.”

“Right, and if I was the devil I could stir my coffee with my dick. Holdin’ back knowledge of a crime, or harborin’ a criminal, can make you an accessory. Keep that in mind.” White pointed the cigar like a gun. “And another thing, boy, and I ain’t foolin’ around. I hear you been datin’ one of my officers.”

Wade looked ashamed. “It’s true, Chief. Porker and I have been seeing each other for months now. The wedding’s in September.”

“Don’t get funny with me. You stay away from Prentiss, or else next time I’ll be the one moppin’ the floor—with you.”

“I’ll never speak to her again,” Wade lied. God, it’s fun lying to police! “I won’t even look at her.”

“And next time you see that candy ass drunk Jervis Phillips” —White banged his fist on the desk— “tell him to come down here.”

“I will, Chief.”

White lit a cigar, pinch browed. He waved Wade away with the smoke. “Go on now, get your rich kid face out of my office.”

Wade faltered at the door. “Say, Chief, it’s going on ninety outside, and it’s a mile back to the center. How about a ride?”

“I ain’t a fuckin’ limo. Use your LPCs.”

“LPCs?”

White unreeled a sudden belt of laughter. “Yeah, boy, LPCs. That’s leather personnel carriers.”

White’s Deep South donkey laughter followed Wade out into the sultry day. The heat was bad, the humidity was worse. He was stuck in his own sweat in minutes. A cold Adams right now would go just fine, but he still had work to do at the center, more toilets, more floors…

Half hour later, Wade was back at the center, drenched. He stopped midstep when he entered the supply room.

Tom McGuire was sitting on a lab counter, drinking a beer.

“Wade, my man! I’ve been waiting for you.”

“I…” Wade said. Tom looked sick. His face was…gray. “Jesus, Tom. You look like shit.”

“I know,” Tom agreed, “but I feel great. Come on, let’s get out of here and throw back a few cold ones.”

“I can’t. I have to finish up here.”

“Nonsense,” Tom scoffed. “You’re only young once, believe me. You want to waste the day scrubbing toilets?”

“Well, no, but—”

Tom’s smile turned sad. Suddenly he was pointing a pistol at Wade. “Just do what I say, Wade. I’ll explain along the way.”

Holy shit, Wade thought slowly. Tom led him out to the loading dock, the gun barrel at Wade’s back.

“How do you like the new paint job?”

Wade dumbly approached the Camaro. Tom’s beautiful white lacquered car had been haphazardly painted black. “This is no paint job!” Wade exclaimed. “The run’s ruined! I could do better work than this with a can of spray paint.”

“That’s what I used,” Tom said. “Spray paint.”

Using ordinary spray paint on this Chevy masterpiece was like touching up The Creation of Adam with El Markos. But the reason came quickly to Wade. Camouflage, he thought. Tom’s “Eat Dust” vanity plates were gone too, replaced by normal plates.

Stolen plates, Wade realized.

“I made it look like shit on purpose,” Tom said. He threw Wade the keys. “Get in, you drive.”

Wade shifted out of the back lot. “You painted your white car black,” Wade stated. “You put on stolen tags. You know the police are looking for you.”

“Yep. The cops know my rod on sight, but they won’t give this a second glance. Pretty slick thinking, huh?”

“Yeah, slick,” Wade said. “So you did rob the liquor store.”

“Dumb move, but what can I say? I was thirsty.”

“You also stole a bunch of medical files from the clinic, mine included. And last night you murdered Dave Willet.”

Tom seemed mildly impressed. “You’re a smart boy, Wade. How’d you know about Do Horse?”

“Jervis saw the whole thing through a telescope. He also said he saw someone…eating the guy.”

“It’s true, partner, but it wasn’t me. It was one of the sisters. That bitch ate half the meat off Willet’s bones. I can’t figure out where they put it all; they eat like pigs. She even ate the guy’s cock” —Tom chuckled— “and that was one big meal, let me tell you. They didn’t call him Do Horse for nothing.”

Wade turned off campus, steering stiffly. Little point remained in asking for reasons. Wade was no psychiatrist, but he felt fairly certain that confessing to murder and holding your best friend at gun point in a camouflaged car with stolen tags was a pretty clear sign of some psychological problems. Tom was crazy—

And Wade was scared.

“You’ll understand it all once you’ve become part of the family, Wade. But I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I’ve gone nuts, that I’ve turned into some sort of psychotic criminal.” Tom pointed quickly to the exit. “Take Route 13 south.”

Wade did so, wondering. He assumed Tom planned to flee the state, but 13 south would take them away from the state line.

“I’m no criminal, Wade,” Tom went on. “And I’m no psycho.”

“What are you, then?”

Tom’s pallid grin reached its peak. “I’m a myrmidon—a holy gofer. I’m the shoeshine boy to the gods.”

No, you’re crazy, Wade thought.

“Let’s get off these grim topics,” Tom suggested. “We’re still friends, it’s just that the circumstances have changed a little.” He pulled a couple of beers from a cooler in back, a Spaten for himself and an Adams for Wade. He removed the non twist off caps with his fingers. “A toast,” he proposed, and raised his bottle. “To destiny!”

“Yeah, to destiny. Whatever you say, Tom.”

Their bottles clinked.

“Hey, Wade. You ready for an old one?”

“Sure, why not?”

“You know what they say about Liberace, don’t you? He was great on the piano, but he sucked on the organ.”

“Hilarious, Tom.”

“Aw, come on, buddy, cheer up,” Tom said, and chugged some of his Spaten. “You’ll feel different once you’re in.”

Wade drove on stoically. This whole thing was madness.

“Besser will be mighty pissed that the cops are onto me,” Tom said. “At first we had to be real careful, but I don’t think that matters now. We’ll be gone in a couple of days.”

Wade blinked. “What does Besser have to do with this?”

“He’s my supervisor. Winnie Saltenstall too. They’re called nativeemissarials. I’m just a productionvassal. And the sisters are like…project managers. We all work for the Supremate. It’s a family. And what’s best is you get to join the family too.”

Wade followed the wooded bends of the road. He still didn’t know where they were going, nor was he compelled to ask. Even if a cop passed, it wouldn’t matter. They were looking for a white Camaro, not a black one. The only vehicles to pass were periodic semi rigs, which dangerously used the Route as a shortcut to the interstate.

“Hogs of the road,” Tom remarked as one big rig blared past, blowing its horn. The truck roared by them. “Goddamn truckers think they own the Route. Be careful around these bends, man.”

“I have driven the Route before, Tom.”

“I know, just be careful. If I don’t get you to the labyrinth in good shape, my ass is grass.”

“The labyrinth? I’m not even going to ask.”

“Besser will tell you all about it. We’re going back behind the agro site, in case you’re wondering. That’s where the labyrinth is. I can show you our little graveyard back there.”

Off and on, Wade glanced over. Occasionally Tom rested back as if listening to something in his head. Probably instructions from God, Wade thought. Or Son of Sam’s dog. Tom’s hair seemed to be thinning—Wade could see a bump of some kind. Then there was always the upside down cross around his neck. Hadn’t Wade noticed Besser with an identical cross on his first day at work?

“What’s that thing around your neck?” he finally asked, and swerved through the next bend. “You in a satanic cult or something?”

Tom chuckled. “That’s a good one. Don’t worry about it.” He tossed his empty Spaten. “You ready for another?”

“Sure,” Wade said. Getting loaded seemed as good a way as any to deal with this. “Here’s an idea,” he offered. “Let’s turn around right now, check you into the hospital, and we can go to the labyrinth tomorrow. Sound good?”

“Sounds bad,” Tom said. “Just keep driving.”

Another semi roared by, horn blaring. Wade swerved.

“I’m serious, buddy,” Tom complained. “Be careful around these bends. If you got killed, I’d be neck deep in the Supremate’s shit.”

“I’m impressed by your concern for my well being.”

“Just be careful around these bends.”

Wade tried to concentrate on his driving. Once they got to the agro site, he presumed Tom, in his delusions, would kill him. He’d mentioned a graveyard, hadn’t he? Wade needed a plan, and fast. His only chance seemed to be wrecking the car—drive into a ravine or spin out, and hope to escape in the confusion.

But one second later, fate provided its own plan.

What seemed to transpire over minutes actually took place in a few heartbeats. Wade pulled through the next bend. Tom shouted: “Careful around these—look out!” An oncoming car was suddenly in their lane, a black Fiero with two obviously shit faced occupants. “We’re gonna wreck!” Tom shouted. Wade swerved, lost control as he jerked the wheel. The Camaro shuddered off the road and plowed into a good sized tree. Wade, on impact, shot forward and snapped back. He was wearing his seat belt. Tom, however, was not.

Tom’s head burst through the windshield; inertia pulled his body down, and Wade saw something bounce across the road.

Tom’s body fell back in the seat, headless.

Holy holy holy shit. Wade hauled himself out, jarred, dizzy. The Camaro was totaled, and so was Tom.

The Fiero had skidded to a halt, its driver looking back.

“You fuckhead drunk motherfucker!” Wade bellowed.

“Tough luck,” the driver muttered. The Fiero sped away.

Jesus Jesus Jesus, Wade thought, and blundered across the road. I just got Tom killed. Jesus Jesus Jesus.

He looked forlornly down at Tom’s head, which lay face-up in weeds. If Wade had been more careful, none of this would’ve happened. He might’ve talked Tom out of his madness, gotten him to a shrink, gotten him fixed up. Instead, he’d gotten him killed.

Jesus Jesus Jesus. Look what I’ve done.

Wade glanced up. He thought he’d heard a sound. A car door?

He peered across to the smashed Camaro. Tom’s body was getting out of the car—without the benefit of a head.

Wade stood limp, staring.

The headless corpse stood upright, even closed the door behind it. One of its hands still gripped a Spaten Oktoberfest. It faced Wade, or would be if it had a face. Wade’s bladder voided then, as the headless corpse of Tom McGuire began to confidently cross the road.

A horn shrieked, along with tremors and a roar like thunder. Instantly a log loaded eighteen wheeled Peterbilt barreled through the bend with no chance of stopping for the perplexed thing that stood in the middle of the road. The massive front grille mowed Tom’s body down with an ear splitting whap!, then fed the crumpled corpse into its axles. The body tumbled like a doll in a dryer and eventually became lodged by its legs in the truck’s spare tire rack, trapped. Wade noticed Vermont plates on the rig’s loaded trailer. Tom’s body was going for a long ride. As quickly as the truck had appeared, it was gone.

Wade remained limp at the shoulder, half in shock and easily doubting his own sanity.

He looked down again at Tom’s head.

Its eyes flew open, and its lips spoke: “Goddamn it, Wade! I told you to be careful around those bends!”

Wade screamed, kicked the head into the woods, and ran.

—

CHAPTER 21

White’s office was locked, which worked out for the best. Lydia was determined to tell him nothing until she’d acquired enough evidence on her own to make a case, and not just this business with the hewer, but the break in at the clinic and the Erblings’ dorm. Something was seriously wrong around here. Lydia didn’t trust White. She didn’t trust anyone.

She’d passed the exhibits many times, never taking any notice. Colonial relics weren’t exactly a turn on for her. But it was a large, impressive display, she saw now. She remembered glancing at it yesterday. Now she roved the glass cases. Of course, she hardly expected to find a hewer’s display space vacant. No one was that lucky. Musket barrels, bent bayonets, and squashed powder horns—here they all were, as Fredrick had promised. Tools and edged weapons occupied the latter cases. Lots of trade axes, froes, and scythes. There were bog scoops from Massachusetts Bay and glass pincers from Williamsburg. Big deal, Lydia thought. Lots of swords too, and an entire case of Conoy arrowheads and tomahawks. The last cast displayed some hewers, but none looked as large as the kind she sought.

One label read: “Hand hewer, Roanoke Island, circa 1587.” But it was puny, like a Cub Scout hatchet.

Next: “Pole hewer, Jamestown, circa 1610.” Much bigger, but the plane of the blade was concaved, not straight.

Here it is, she thought. “Beam hewer, St. Clement’s Island, circa 1635.” But the hewer’s display space was… vacant.

Lydia’s expression drooped. No one was this lucky?

In seconds, she was in White’s office, dialing the phone. Her excitement rushed her words. “Professor Fredrick, this is Lydia Prentiss again. Who has access to the archaeology exhibits?”

“What?” Fredrick asked. “Access? You mean keys?”

“Yes, sir, I mean keys. Who has the keys?”

“Well, I do, of course. It’s my department.”

“Who else has keys to the display cases? Janitors? Security?”

“No,” Fredrick said. “I’m afraid the only other person on campus with keys is the college public relations executive.”

“Who’s that?”

“Winnifred Saltenstall.”

Lydia gripped the phone so hard her knuckles whitened. “What legitimate reason would she have for taking an artifact?”

“Well, I don’t know. If she’d donated it to a museum, she certainly would’ve notified me first. She may have loaned it to a historical society, or perhaps to an archaeology journal. Why don’t you ask her yourself?”

Good idea. “Thank you, Professor.”

Lydia hurried out to the cruiser. She blew down Campus Drive and screeched around the Circle. Besser’s Cadillac De Ville was parked in the lot at the sciences center, and so was Winnie’s Maserati 425. Lydia took the staircase up, thinking, She’s probably not here, but when she knocked, a voice invited her in.

Mrs. Saltenstall sat behind an expensive but jumbled desk, a double window at her back. No one else was with her. One hand came from her lap to the blotter, sporting a black ring, like onyx, while an unbecoming black amulet hung about her neck. The amulet reminded Lydia of an inverted crucifix.

“Pardon the interruption, ma’am. I’d like to ask you…”

Was the woman stoned? Her eyes looked funny. The ringed hand remained on the blotter, while the other she kept below the desk. “Oh,” Winnie said in a sleepy drone. Was she hiding her right hand deliberately? “You must be the new police officer.”

“Yes, ma’am. Lydia Prentiss.”

She smiled blearily. “How can I help you, Lydia Prentiss?”

See what twenty years of pot smoking will do to you? Lydia thought. Adult retardation. “I have evidence that a serious crime was committed with an implement on display in the college archaeology exhibit.”

“Implement?”

“Yes, a colonial tool called a beam hewer.”

“Beam hewer?”

“One appears to be missing from the exhibit. It’s clear that the hewer was removed by someone with a key.”

“Key?”

What is this? Fucking Benny Hill? “Professor Fredrick directed me to you. Other than him, you’re the only person on campus with a key.”

Winnifred weirdly touched her amulet. “Oh, a key to the exhibit?”

No, asshole, a key to the city. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Have a seat. Make yourself comfortable.”

Lydia did, hard pressed not to frown.

“You’re a very attractive woman,” Winnifred said inexplicably. She leaned back, parting her feet. “Are you married?”

“No. But back to the exhibit keys—”

“Are you bi? I mean, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Did she just say what I think she said? Lydia reflected. The arm of the woman’s hidden hand seemed to be moving lightly.

“Please don’t be offended, but I find you very desirable. It’s not healthy to suppress our natural urges. If you’re into it—”

This is too much! I came in here asking about a fucking beam hewer, and she wants to make out with me. “I’m not into it,” Lydia said. “I only want to know who took the—” But then she saw something under the desk: a pair of frilled panties.

It was now obvious what Winnifred was doing with her hidden hand. Lydia got up to leave, incredulous.

“Don’t go yet,” Winnie moaned. “I’ll tell you in a minute…”

She placed her feet on the desk edge and brought the ringed hand to her breast. The other hand remained buried beneath her dress.

Agape now, Lydia could only stand and stare.

“I’m coming now,” Winnifred breathed. Her body tensed in the big chair, and she released a long, whining moan, flush-faced.

I have seen everything now, Lydia concluded.

Winnifred’s body went lax. She smiled lazily and put her feet back down. “That was nice,” she said.

“I’m sure it was.”

“You want to know about the hewer.”

“Lady, after what I just saw, I don’t give a flying fuck about the hewer. You ought to see a psychiatrist.”

Winnifred licked her fingers. “I took the hewer,” she said.

“What?”

“You’re very efficient. Who would think something that old could be traced? How did you do it?”

Lydia stalled. “Are you about to confess to murder?”

“Oh, no. But I did take the hewer.”

“Winnie, you idiot!” a man’s voice interrupted. “Can’t you ever control yourself? The Supremate will be furious!”

Professor Dudley Besser was standing at the far wall. But how could he have entered without Lydia seeing? It was impossible.

“Look at the trouble you’ve caused,” he went on.

“She knew about the hewer, Dudley. She traced it to me.”

Besser turned to Lydia directly. “You’ve made quite a problem for yourself, I’m afraid. Why couldn’t you leave us alone?”

Lydia decided it was time to yell. “You’re both out of your minds! What are you talking about? This is crazy!”

“I can see how it would seem so,” Besser said. “It’s too complex for you to understand… Yes, Winnifred took the hewer, but she wasn’t the one who killed Mr. Sladder.”

Lydia’s eyes widened.

“It was me,” Besser said.

Winnifred smiled. Lydia blinked. Suddenly Besser had somehow produced the very weapon Lydia sought.

“The beam hewer,” she whispered.

He held it shoulder to hip. It was huge, a five foot plus handle, and a weirdly shaped blade. The straight twelve inch cutting edge gleamed like a sliver of sun.

Lydia had no time to draw her gun. Besser heaved forward—

She jerked and fell. The descending hewer demolished the chair. Lydia half crawled, half jumped into the hall.

“Great going, you fat ass!” Winnie’s voice complained.

“Everybody calls me fat! I’m not fat!”

“You’re a blimp, Dudley. A fat, cumbersome blimp!”

Now Lydia was ready. Down on one knee, she aimed her revolver at the open door. She breathed thinly, waiting for Besser to emerge with the hewer.

Come on, you fat bastard. Come to Lydia.

She waited like that for quite some time.

Only silence now from the office. Did they plan to wait in there forever? If they would not come to her, Lydia would go to them.

She three pointed through the doorway, gun in lead. Besser and Winnifred Saltenstall were gone. So was the hewer.

Impossible.

Where could they have gone? There was no exit.

Window, she thought. They took the ledge to the next office.

She approached the window but soon lowered her gun with a slow curse on her lips. The window was secured by brass latches: locked from the inside.

««—»»

Wade drove the Vette zombie eyed to the dorm, after walking all the way back to the sciences center. If he reported the wreck to White, what would he say? Tom’s head got cut off, and his body got out of the car? That probably wouldn’t wash. White would have him committed. And calling Dad would be worse.

But he had to tell someone.

He ran down the hall to his room. He would call Lydia, tell her everything. If he couldn’t tell her, who could he tell? But when he bulled into the room, Lydia jumped up. “Where have you been, goddamn it? You weren’t at work! I’ve been waiting hours!”

“I’ve had a bad day,” he said.

“You’ve had a bad day! Shit!” An ashtray clogged with butts sat on the bed, next to three pistols and a box of bullets.

Next, inexplicably, she was hugging him as tightly as she could. “Oh, Wade, something crazy happened to me today!”

He sat her down on the bed, got himself an Adams, and said, “You tell your crazy story first. Then I’ll tell mine.”

««—»»

Wade didn’t know what to make of her frantic recital. It was crazy, but he believed her. As for his own crazy story, the only thing he could do was show her. This time he drove around the bends more carefully, on the advice of a dead friend. Lydia’s lap was full of guns. “And I can’t tell White,” she was saying. “He’d never believe two high faculty members tried to kill me with a beam hewer. He’d have me committed.”

“I came to similar conclusions,” Wade said. “But tell me more about what Besser and Winnie said.”

Lydia lit another cigarette. “Weird stuff, crazy. He used some funky word—supremate, I think.”

Wade’s innards twitched. “Tom used the same word. Supremate. It’s someone he works for, and he said Besser and Winnie work for him too, along with sisters. He said one of these sisters ate Dave Willet. Same as what Jervis said. A woman in black.”

The bend was coming up. Wade slowed through the turn. There’s the tree. He stopped on the shoulder. “This is it,” he said.

Lydia scanned the bend. “I don’t see any wrecked Camaro.”

Wade jumped out and ran up and down the road. Lydia got out more slowly, watching his antics.

“The car’s gone!” he yelled. He jabbed his finger at the tree. “It was here, I swear! Right fucking here!”

“Well, it’s not right fucking here now.”

“Somebody cleaned it up,” he declared. “Somebody came out here, cleaned up the glass, and towed the car.”

Lydia’s mouth twisted into a smile.

“Thanks a lot, baby!” he shouted., “I believed your crazy ridiculous story! The least you could do is believe mine!”

“Here’s what must’ve happened, Wade. You drove the car into the tree. Tom got knocked out, but you thought he was dead. You left, he woke up, and he drove the car away.”

“What, Tom’s head drove the car away? His body got run down by a fucking semi rig! And the car was totaled!”

“Calm down. There’s a logical explanation.”

“No, there’s not!” Wade screamed. “Tom’s head got cut off, and his body got out of the car and walked around!”

But—wait a minute, he thought. The—

He dashed into the woods. “It’s got to be here somewhere!”

“What?” Lydia said.

“The head! I kicked it in the woods after it started talking!”

Lydia began to laugh slightly.

It figured. Women only stood behind their men when it suited them. He’d show her, by God. He’d hold Tom’s head right up to her face and shake it at her…

He crawled through brambles for fifteen minutes. No head.

Lydia was back in the Vette, smoking. When Wade got in, she asked, “Did you find the head?”

“Does it look like I found the fucking head?” he smirked.

“Forget the head, Wade. You said Tom held a gun on you?”

“Yeah. I suppose you don’t believe that either.”

Lydia held up a small .25 automatic.

“That’s it!” Wade exclaimed. “That’s the gun he had!”

“I found it on the shoulder. And look what else I found.” She raised a necklace with a black amulet on it.

“Tom was wearing that thing around his neck,” Wade said. “I asked him what it was but he wouldn’t say.”

Lydia looked at it. “Yeah? Well, Besser and Winnifred were wearing these things too.”

««—»»

—SOON WE WILL BE ON OUR WAY TO GLORY ETERNAL. TOGETHER, AS ONE. BUT MY BIDDINGS MUST NOT FAIL. I HAVE NEVER FAILED.

“I know, my lord.”

—MY POWERS ARE YOURS. DO WHAT YOU MUST AND SPARE NOTHING.

“It will be done, my lord. We have authorities here who are contrary to us. But through your grace we can avoid them.”

—OUR TIME PERIOD IS VITAL. IT MUST NOT BE VIOLATED.

“I swear on my life.”

—DO NOT COME BACK TO ME UNTIL YOU HAVE SUCCEEDED.

The Supremate’s face blended away. Besser and Winnifred retreated from the shrine and extromitted to the servicepass.

“He’s pissed,” Winnie said.

“Thanks to you, yes,” Besser acknowledged. “I can’t believe you masturbated in front of a police officer.”

“I couldn’t help it! You know what the psilight does to me. Anyway, I told you she was onto us. I was trying to distract her.”

You called me fat, was all Besser could think. “Don’t worry, White won’t believe her, and even if he does, the sisters can repulse any amount of adversity.”

“I hope you’re right, Dudley. I want to be a god too.”

Don’t count on it, Besser thought. There was only room for one god between them. He’d already discussed the matter with the Supremate, and it was settled. But not yet, he thought.

The gorgeous image of murdering her hardened his penis at once. Nevertheless, he lied: “We will be gods, my love. In some bright and future eon, we will rule this world together.”

Winnifred kissed his fat face, extruded her plump breasts from her dress, and rubbed them against his mammoth chest. “Oh, Dudley, I love you! I can’t wait to be a god!” Several sisters watched and giggled. “Not here, darling,” he whispered, though he was truly tempted in the furious psilight. It would be sweet, wouldn’t it, to just drag that dress off her skinny body and fuck her to death right there on the floorwall? So he was fat, was he? He would smother her with his fat. He would plug his cock into every orifice, and perhaps form some of his own. Yes, he would fuck her to death and crush every bone in her skinny body as he came. The sisters would love it.

“Not now,” he repeated in a whispered pant. “We need a new productionvassal, and we better get that tow truck back to the garage.”

—

CHAPTER 22

“I love you,” Wilhelm said. “Mein Liebchen.”

“Oh, Willy!” Sarah squealed. “I love you too! Forever!”

In the telescope’s eye, they embraced and kissed.

Jervis watched it all—again. He watched them do everything, like last time, right there on the couch. Their passion glowed in their eyes, on their skin, shimmered through every gesture in radiant waves.

Jervis could’ve puked.

He pushed away the telescope, dropped Czanek’s bug receiver. In the middle of the day, even. They must do it round the clock. He finished another Kirin, smoked more cigarettes, and stared at the wall.

Jervis cried in silence for a long time.

The rap on the door sounded like a dream. Lost now, and insane, he answered it. Professor Besser and Winnifred Saltenstall faced him in the doorway, smiling as brightly as messiahs.

“Jervis,” Besser’s dark voice fluttered.

“Jervis!” Winnifred greeted.

“We’ve come for you,” Besser whispered.

Jervis faltered back as they entered. “What do you want?”

Besser: “We want you, Jervis.”

Winnie: “We love you, Jervis!”

“Nobody loves me,” Jervis replied, thinking of Sarah.

“That’s not true,” Besser assured him. “There’s so much love waiting for you. But to have it, you must accept our gift.”

“What gift?”

Besser’s bulbous smile deepened. “Destiny,” he answered.

Jervis stepped back. Winnifred kissed him, licked the tears off his cheeks. “Trust us!” she whispered. “Come with us!”

“I want to be free!” Jervis cried.

“Then bow your head,” Besser said.

Jervis bowed his head.

Winnifred positioned the transceptionrod.

Besser raised the hammer.

««—»»

Nightfall.

“Tom said Besser wanted me for something,” Wade told her. They’d been driving for hours, off town through twisting backwoods roads. “He said something about bringing me in.”

“The agro site, you mean,” Lydia said.

“I guess so. Whatever’s going on, it seems to point there. Actually he said behind the agro site. In the woods.”

“The smart thing to do, then, is check it out.”

Wade nearly coughed up his Coke. “No, Lydia, that’s the dumb thing to do. The smart thing to do is tell the state cops.”

Lydia frowned. “You do the driving, Wade. I’ll do the thinking.”

“Fine. You want to get us both killed—fine.”

Lydia held up her polished Colt Trooper Mark III. “We won’t get killed as long as my good friend Colonel Colt is with us. He specializes in ass kicking.”

That’s all I need, Wade thought. Dirty Harry with boobs.

««—»»

The old road behind the agro site proceeded as a humped gully. Wade couldn’t believe he was driving a limited edition Corvette over this root routed excuse for a road. The deeper they traveled, the thicker the forest grew, but eventually a clearing appeared, choked with weeds and refuse. Garbage lay in piles, rusted car parts, and dozens of tires flaked with dry rot. “Looks like we found the local trash dump,” Wade commented.

“Somebody’s been dumping more than trash. Look.”

Near the tree line, several mounds showed in the Vette’s headlights. A shovel leaned against a tree.

Graveyard, Wade remembered. I can show you our little graveyard back there, Tom had said. “Probably just piles of dirt,” Wade tried to convince himself. Yellow moonlight streamed into the grove. Lydia got out with her fully charged state of the art SL 35 flashlight. Wade got out with his cheap piece of shit dying Peoples Drug Store flashlight.

“This place stinks!” Lydia whispered.

That it did. Wade gasped in the open, stagnant air. A stench hung, like raw meat in the sun. “What is it?” he asked.

“Death,” she said.

They approached the mounds, pointing their lights down. Fresh earth, newly turned. Empty Spaten bottles lay about the shovel.

They both scouted around. Wade was disgusted by the stench; it was everywhere. He kicked over a pile of tires and almost shouted: a fat hognose snake lay there with a dead field rat in its maw. But the snake was dead too. Had it died halfway into its meal? Under more tires, he found more dead snakes.

“Look at this,” Lydia said, waving him over with her SL.

Just past the mounds was a deep hole. Not a grave, though—it looked like a grease sump. At the bottom lay a thick puddle of some congealed whitish effluence.

Wade stuck a branch in it. “It’s wet,” he observed.

“Looks like plaster, or lard. I wonder what it is?”

“I don’t particularly care, Lydia. I can’t take too much more of this stink. Let’s get out of here.”

“In a minute. I want to look around a little more.” She handed him her spare gun, an old Colt O.P. “Go check out the other side of the clearing.”

“Where’s the safety on this thing?”

“It’s a revolver, stooge. Revolvers don’t have safeties.”

“Can I help it if I’m not Gun Digest? Jesus.”

“Just point it and squeeze the trigger. You’ve got six shots.”

She really pisses me off, he thought. Too bad I’m in love with her. But what a place to even think such a thing: a makeshift graveyard full of garbage and dead snakes. He moved off to the other side of the grove. The stench clung to him. Then his foot sank in something crunchy and soft. He nearly retched when he saw what he’d stepped in: a big dead maggot plump possum.

A footpath opened against the tree line. Wade took two steps in, walked on another dead possum, and stopped, aghast. Dead animals clogged the path, their heads all pointing in a straight line away from him. What the hell is all this? Possums, coons, skunks, foxes—multiple dozens—all lay dead in the flashlight beam. But what had killed them? It looked as though they’d been drawn into the trail. But drawn by what?

Follow the yellow brick road, he thought. He stepped between the carcasses, proceeding into the path. Frequently he misstepped and another carcass would collapse under foot. Each wet crunch sent a shiver through his guts.

The trail of carcasses led to another, higher clearing. The low moon afforded him every detail of what lay beyond.

Wade stood agape, as if rooted in place.

The grove was a nightmare chasm. He could not be seeing what he saw: a sliver of his world turned perverted, natural orders upheaved by compounded impossibilities, as though he’d stepped from his world into some obscene, mocking other. An eldritch knowledge had crept into this place and molested it. Wade was standing at the foot of the untenable.

Mother of God, he thought.

The moon swept grove stood like an alien lake. Greenish fog lay flat, motionless, and beneath its surface lay hundreds more swollen carcasses. Trees in the wood line had grown fat and twisted, limbs tipped heavy by weird brush. From the woods came an incessant dripping, unearthly foliage sweating mucoid moisture. Lobes of leaves exuded slowly depending cords of fluids; flower stamens glistened, pistils disgorging further lines on slime.

The grove had mutated, had changed into something it couldn’t be. Wade stepped forward. The pale fog, a foot deep, dissipated along his course. Things were growing from the carcasses. Buds sprouted, boring roots into putrifying meat. Things worse than maggots burrowed through dead animal flesh—white grublike things with ringed mouths, pulsing. Wade backstepped against a tree; its warm bark felt like an old person’s skin. Clinging bagworms showed faceless from hairy sheaths, some as large as loaves of bread. All this teeming life could not possibly be of Wade’s world. Scarlet slugs chewed bark from shuddering trunks. Gilled snakes coursed about beneath the fog. Even more unnerving were the shining snotlike threads webbed between low branches—spiderwebs. Some of the spiders were as big as apples, but covered with moist hair and squashed, twitching faces.

What have I walked into? he thought.

—Wade! You’re here with us!

Wade’s heart could’ve exploded in his chest. Betwixt a pair of oozing trees, a young girl stood. Her bright white face grinned from within a drooping hood. Her mouth looked wet. She wore sunglasses and was dressed completely in black.

Wade found he could make no sound at all.

—We want to eat, please! the young girl exclaimed.

««—»»

Where the hell did he go? Lydia thought. It was time to leave. She’d seen too many things which defied explanation. All these dead animals, their heads all pointing south. She remembered her first trip to the agro site. The animals’ heads all faced the same direction, even the few cows in the field.

But the mounds were what interested her most. Should she dig them up now? And what the hell was that sump?

But she had to find Wade. This expedition was over. When the keepers of this place returned, Lydia did not want to be around.

She marched back across the dell. If she stepped on one more dead animal, she would scream. He went this way, didn’t he? Toward that path. She passed the sump again, and the mounds. She knew Sladder was under there, and probably that Penelope chick too. She stopped midstride and stared. Was the second mound moving?

She aimed the SL, stooping. Suddenly an arm, or something like an arm, pushed out of the mounded dirt.

“Jesus Christ!” she shrieked.

In the hole, a misshapen face appeared. Its jawless mouth blubbered, the flaccid arm reaching out.

“H h helup helup help me!” the stretched face blabbered through spittle. Lopsided eyes like hard boiled eggs beseeched her from the sagging sack of flesh that was a face. The big rubbery mouth chewed on words: “They ate my baby! They took out my b b bones!”

—

CHAPTER 23

Jervis awoke in graven dark. He struggled to his feet, head tingling. In slabs of sound and image, he remembered:

Besser. Winnifred. And the hammer.

Jervis stood up straight. It all came back to him like a rushing tide. He’d been changed—for the Supremate.

—JERVIS. MY NEW SON. WELCOME.

At once, Jervis knew…everything. He knew what he was now, and what he was to do.

—WHAT YOU WANT MORE THAN ANYTHING YOU SHALL HAVE VERY SOON.

“Revenge!” He glanced frantically to the window, where he’d seen his love rubbed in his face like shit. Yes! Revenge!

He could sense his new master’s smile, the trust of the promise, and the truth. That’s all he’d ever wanted anyway. The truth.

And now he had it. The Supremate had made him a veritable reaper of truth. And, oh, how I will reap, he thought.

He rushed to the bathroom, flicked on the light. Despite the new gift of knowledge and power, there were still a few things he wasn’t clear on. His mirror image looked…well, pale. Dark bruises showed under his eyes. Around his neck hung his amulet, and his transceptionrod could be seen just past his hairline. What? he slowly thought. What am…

He touched his throat. It felt cold. He pressed a finger under his jaw. Nothing. Then his wrist…

Nothing, he thought. No heat. No pulse.

Jervis stared. What faced him in the mirror was a corpse.

“Holy shit,” he muttered. “I’m dead.”

««—»»

—But we’re not going to eat you, Wade. You’re special!

“Who are you?” Wade half gasped.

—I’m your new sister, and…look! She pointed into the perverted grove. A bare hillock rose from the fog, and upon it sat a black oblong box, like a coffin on end.

—Your new home, Wade! the girl in black said.

“My home’s Connecticut, kid, and that’s where I’m heading right now.”

Concern toned down the brightness of the girl’s face. —Oh, but you can’t leave. The Supremate needs you. We have to take you to him.

Now Wade saw what the little freak meant by we. Three more figures surrounded him. They all looked the same, in the same black capes and hoods, grinning identical grins from identical bright white faces. Their only difference was size. The young one stood less than five feet, the second five five, the third perhaps five eleven. The fourth one stood well over six feet tall.

From one of the snotlike webs, the little girl plucked an unruly, moist spider about the size of a golf ball.

“Aw, Jesus, kid,” Wade implored. “Don’t do that—”

The girl popped the spider into her mouth and ate it. It crunched like pretzels. Another was biting into a twitching gourd, sucking black mush and seeds from its case. The tallest woman fished one of the gilled snakes from the fog and swallowed it whole.

Wade threw up. Then he bolted.

The sisters bolted after him. They giggled like demented whores. Things whinnied and crunched as Wade dashed through the lake of fog. He sprinted into the perverted woods, slimy webs spreading across his face. Small monstrosities tittered at him from clustered nests amid the leaves. The giggling of the four cloaked women rose and fell, and followed him through the woods. What would happen when they caught him?

Wade tripped and fell. His hand landed in a big, swollen mushroom with a face, which spat at him. Moist beetles crawled up his shirt, leaving syrupy trails.

“Liiiiiiiideeeeaahhhhhhhhhh!” he screamed.

The six footer had outrun the others. Her grinning face loomed over him, big and bright as a headlamp. Her cloak had come apart, showing perfectly formed yet nippleless breasts. Blue chalklike veins traced faintly beneath her white abdomen.

—I caught you! she celebrated.

Wade fired Lydia’s O.P. six times at the freak woman’s face. She flinched, waving her hand. Nothing happened.

—I wish we could make love, she told him.

“I sure as shit don’t!” he answered, crawling back against a stout, sweating tree. The white pillars of her legs strode over him, and the hooded face leaned closer.

—I’m going to kiss you now, Wade.

Wade jerked aside. Something blurred past his ear, and a wailing whistled up. What had happened? He dragged himself away through forest muck and shined his flashlight back.

A long, pink positor stretched from the woman’s mouth. The needled bulb at its end was stuck in the bark of the flexing tree. She pulled, trying to disengage it, as the whistling wail continued. But it wasn’t the girl who wailed. It was the tree.

Out of here, Wade thought. He ran deeper into the woods.

—He’s getting away! a tiny voice protested behind him.

—There he is! shrieked another.

Wade realized they saw his light. He dropped it and continued through the smothering darkness. Only remnants of instinct propelled him back to the first clearing.

He ran straight into Lydia, toppling them both.

“We gotta get out of here!” he bellowed. He picked her up and dragged her toward the Vette. “They’re right behind me!”

“Who?” Lydia yelled.

He shoved her in the car, gunned the engine, and snapped on the headlights. “That’s who!” he bellowed, pointing.

The four figures stared at them from the edge of the woods. They were all grinning, their mouths full of crystalline fangs.

—Don’t leave, Wade! We can give you everything!

Wade floored the Vette and didn’t look back.

—

CHAPTER 24

The Erblings had drained well. Jervis tapped them as they hung from the lividityharnesses, punching an eductionlance into each of their feet. The bone sludge oozed out thickly as frozen custard. He milked each soft foot like a big teat.

This had been his first assignment in the labyrinth. He lit a Carlton and looked up at the now deboned fissionizationvessels. The Erblings had been two of the prettiest girls on campus. Now they were just quivering flesh sacks. Too bad, Jervis thought.

Transfection was positive; new life was already swelling in their radiophaseshifttriionized wombs. Jervis appraised Stella’s shiny bloated belly. Logarithmic-dissolvedoxygencarbonsourceoptimization effected full gestation in less than twenty four hours. That’s some serious baby making, Jervis considered, impressed.

He took them down and packed them neatly into their incubreedcatalyzationcapsules, then activated the final exponentialcellularfissionsequence on the functionplate. Easy as pi. Next he grabbed the sludge jugs and extromitted from the germinationwarren. He left through pointaccessmain#l.

The Dodge Colt was waiting. He drove away from the labyrinth through the green, settled fog. Unseen things crunched as he drove over them. Veined plants with bulbs large as human heads collapsed under the bumper, and filmy eyes viewed him from ripples in the fog. The entire grove teemed in low moonlight. When he pulled into the secreted graveyard, Roxy’s version of “In the Midnight Hour” came on the radio. What a great song to dig graves to!

Humming, he emptied the sludge jugs into the sump. Then he spied the second mound. Well, I’ll be! Penelope’s arms and flabby head had emerged. The rubber limbs flapped vainly against the dirt. Jervis jammed the shovel handle into her face and shoved her back down the hole. She mewled in protest. “Oh, don’t be such a baby,” he quipped Monty Python. He filled in the little tunnel she’d dug, then stomped on it. The woods shuddered. He could hear her howling underneath.

He dug two more graves, smiling to himself. Digging graves in the middle of the night had a certain charm. He dragged the two big garbage bags from the car. The first contained David “Do-Horse” Willet, or what was left of him. Mostly sinewy bones, an emptied skull, and intestines. Jervis buried the bag in the first grave.

The second bag contained—

“Mr. Czanek!” Jervis exclaimed. “I never forget a face, not even a split one! How’s business, buddy?”

Czanek lay in two clean pieces, bifurcated. Tom had done an impressive job with the hewer—right down the middle, perfect.

He buried Czanek in the second grave. Four mounds now stood in the silent clearing. He wondered how many more there would be when they left.

Jervis, who was more self aware than the average reanimated corpse, paused for reflection. My Existenz has found me, he pondered. I’m the right hand of destiny. Pure selfhood for a higher meaning. I am the ultimate existential man.

He wiped off his hands and got back in the Dodge. Now that the dirty work was done, the real fun could begin.

««—»»

The Supremate smiled over them all, his children.

He watched from dozens of different places at once, heard, saw and felt all that his children did. The one called Besser was drawing up the departure assignments, which were vital to the Supremate. The stasisfield grew low; soon the labyrinth would become vulnerable. According to the dataprobe that had been sent long ago, the ruling classes here might now have the technological capabilities to break the labyrinth during a weakened charge. Such calamities were rare, but they’d happened. One labyrinth, several thousand years ago, had never made it off its targetobjective. The natives had not been friendly: The duty supremate had been executed, its daughters slaughtered. Fissionizationvessels had been raped en masse, and holotypes had been burned as fuel or dissected for research.

—DISGRACE, the Supremate thought.

The one called Winnifred was with Besser, too. She sat masturbating in a chair. Sometimes a nativeemissarial would not remain serviceable after the exordipathicsignaltrances, exposure to the psilight, and the Supremate’s overall influence. But she had helped in minor ways and had shown great faith. Too bad she would have to die. And Besser, the rotund one, too.

The Supremate continued its overseeing. Two sisters were inspecting the Erbling subjects in the activeport. The Hartley subject had already birthed her first metisunit, which now squalled healthily in the biomaintenancecarbonsourcehypersaturationvault. Many more sisters worked throughout the labyrinth, happy and close to mindless in the discharge of their duties. The sisters were all integrated into the Supremate—prime, living examples of the master plan’s capabilities.

—SO WHAT IF I CAN’T BE GOD, the Supremate mused. —COULD GOD DO ALL OF THIS?

««—»»

Shauna Applegate stared into her ENG 291 text, bored shitless. Her roommate, Inez Packer, sat in the next room, doing much the same. They were both in academic hot water. They were reading about how F. Scott Fitzgerald had died in disgrace, wholly despised by the literary community of the times, even though he was a better writer than any of his contemporaries. But of course, Shauna and Inez couldn’t’ve shit cared less. They’d rather be partying.

Just as Shauna thought she’d die of boredom, someone knocked on the door. “Who is it?” she asked.

“Sushi Express.”

Sushi? Yuck! “Inez! Did you order any carry out sushi?”

“Yuck!” Inez responded. “No way!”

“You must have the wrong—” But when Shauna looked in the peephole, she gasped. A dead man’s face grinned back at her.

“Go away!” she shouted, checking the lock. “I’ll call the cops!”

“All right,” said the voice. “I’m going away.”

The hewer cut the door down in one strike. Shauna screamed as Jervis let himself in. A sister drifted in behind him.

“Are you Inez Packer?” he politely inquired.

“N no, she’s in the—”

Jervis brought the hewer down spectacularly—wooosh!—and sheared Shauna Applegate in half, from head to crotch. Shauna’s two halves twitched on the carpet. At least she wouldn’t have to worry about that goddamn English class anymore.

Inez had seen it all from her room (your roommate being cut in half by a dead man with a beam hewer was a hard thing to miss). She screamed steadily and threw books. The Great Gatsby hit Jervis in the head. The Beautiful and the Damned popped him in the groin. When she slammed her door closed, Jervis hewed it down. “Miss Packer?” he announced. “Your limo is waiting.” He lifted Inez up by the hair. The sister’s spicule darted out in a pink blur.

Inez turned limp, bewildered and paralyzed. Jervis carried her out to the Dodge as the sister knelt at Shauna’s halves, to eat.

“Hey! What the hell are you doing there?” a skinny security guard demanded on the exit stairs.

“I’m abducting a healthy female college student for bifertilization with alien holotypes,” Jervis answered, and palmed the guard hard enough in the face to drive bone shards into his brain. With his free hand then, Jervis dragged the guard out by the eye sockets, kind of like carrying a bowling ball, and loaded them both into the Dodge Colt. Thank heaven for hatchbacks!

Back upstairs, the kneeling sister seemed disappointed. This was the same sister who had eaten David “Do Horse” Willet’s penis the night before.

—Jervis? How come there’s no…

Didn’t these crossmultibredintegratedhybrid airheads know anything? “She’s a girl, pinhead,” Jervis apprised. “Girls don’t have dicks.”

—Oh, the sister said. —Poo!

««—»»

They sat opposed, staring into each other’s face. Wade had told Lydia what he’d seen at the grove. Lydia had told Wade what she’d seen at the second mound. Neither doubted the other.

“Can two people go nuts at the same time?” Wade asked. “Maybe campus utilities is pumping LSD into the water fountains.”

“We have to face it,” Lydia said. “What we saw was real.”

“We can’t just sit around. We’ve got to do something.”

“Sure, but what?”

Wade sneered. “You’re the one doing the thinking, remember?”

They both jumped when the phone rang.

Who could it be this late? “Uh, hello?” Wade answered.

“Wade! It’s me, Jervis! How’s it going?”

Wade instantly relaxed. “Fine, Jerv. Where’re you at?”

“I’m at the student car shop. Couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d get started on a little body work.”

Body work? At night? “Listen, Jerv, a whole bunch of unbelievable shit has happened. You’ve got to get over here and help.”

“Sit tight. I’ll be right there.”

“Oh, and Jerv…” Wade’s voice thickened. “Tom’s dead.”

“Yeah, I know. I…” Jervis paused. “I mean I—”

But Wade was pausing too. The obvious conclusion beat into his head. There was only one way Jervis could know about Tom…

“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” Wade grimly asked.

“Hang up!” Lydia yelled.

Jervis dispensed with the act. “The Supremate wants you, Wade. It’s for something miraculous. Let me bring you in.”

Tom had said the same thing. Whatever they’d done to Tom, they’d now done to Jervis. Holy Jesus, Wade thought.

“There’s someone here who wants to talk to you. He can explain better than me.” Jervis’ voice was replaced by another, darker voice. Besser’s. “Wade, my boy! How are you?”

“You diabolical fat psychopath!” Wade returned the greeting. “You’re the one who’s responsible for all this, aren’t you?”

“No, no, I’m just a consultant. And Jervis is a laborer, like Tom before his unfortunate mishap… You want answers, rightly so. But it’s not something easily rendered into words—you’ll have to open your mind. It’s a master plan, my boy, wiser than the sum of all human knowledge. Call it a new societal mechanic.” Besser’s voice softened. “Call it destiny.”

“Shit on societal mechanics!” Wade yelled. “Bugger destiny! I want answers! Like who were those nutty looking girls in the black capes and sunglasses?”

“Sisters,” Besser answered. “They’re technicians, in a sense—engineers of the new beau monde. But they come from the dark; they wear cloaks and sunglasses because sunlight debilitates them.”

“This was nighttime!” Wade blurted. “The sun’s not out at night!”

“No, but the moon is. Moonlight is merely sunlight reflected off the moon. Without protection, even trace amounts cause cellular dissolution. It’s their environment, my boy. The dark.”

Like vampires, Wade thought.

Jervis was back on the line. “Is that better?”

“No,” Wade said.

“Just give it time, Wade, and give it up. One way or another, I’m gonna get’cha. So let’s make a little deal.”

“No deals,” Wade told him. “I’m hanging up.”

“Just listen a second,” Jervis insisted. “You give me a break and come in willingly, and I’ll guarantee that nothing happens to your new girlfriend. But if you try and give me the slip, I’ll hand her over to the sisters. You know what that means?”

“What?” Wade dared.

“They’ll eat her,” Jervis said. “And what they’ll do to her first is even worse. So be smart, Wade. Do we have a deal?”

Wade hung up. His head was spinning.

“He knows where we are, and you can bet he’ll be coming for us,” Lydia said. “Where was he calling from?”

“The student shop.”

“That’s a good mile away. We’ve still got time to get off campus. Come on.”

They rushed out of Wade’s room, but footsteps greeted them not two strides out the door. They both stopped. Stood. Stared.

Jervis was marching lackadaisically down the hall. He was smiling. He was holding the hewer.

“How the fuck!” Wade yelled. “You said you were at the student shop!

“I extromitted. Saves a lot of time.” Jervis stopped for a moment, cocked his head. He was looking at Lydia. “You know, Wade, that’s a mighty sweet looking girlfriend you got there. It’d be a shame to let the sisters have her. Before they eat her, they’ll let some holotypes fuck her for a couple of days, the ones with the biggest cocks. Then they’d core her ass like an apple. You ever see a human chick get gang-banged in the ass by holotypes?”

Wade’s mouth fell open to say something, but he could summon no words.

“It wouldn’t be pretty, I can tell you that. They’d Bukake the bitch, Wade. You want your girl to go through that? You want the love of your life to have to drink a gallon of holotype jizz while another gallon’s leaking out her asshole?”

A lot of Jervis’ terms weren’t jiving with Wade, but he got the picture. I can’t let anything happen to her, he thought. He knew he’d sacrifice himself in a heartbeat...

“So do we have a deal?” Jervis asked.

“Here’s a deal for you,” Lydia said. Wade shouted “No!” too late. The gunshots cracked down the hall. Lydia pumped two .357 semi wads square into Jervis’ sternum. Jervis went down.

Wade yelled, “What did you—”

“Shut up and come on!” Lydia yelled back.

They fled down eight flights of stairs. It stood to reason that if Jervis could get here that quickly, those girls in black probably could too. But Wade was still shouting through his shock— “You killed him!” —as they stumbled from the outside exit.

“What did you think he was going to do to us?” Lydia hotly reasoned. “Kiss us? Wake up!”

“But he was my friend! You didn’t have to kill him!”

The high, echoic voice boomed like thunder through a mountain valley.

“She didn’t, Wade.”

Halfway to the Vette, Wade and Lydia froze in their tracks. In dreadful slowness, their eyes roved up the front of the eight story dorm.

Leaning out Wade’s window was Jervis, his face agrin in moonlight.

“Judas J. Priest,” Lydia whispered. “I put two slugs in his chest…”

Jervis smiled down. “Like the old saying goes, Wade,” the dead man’s voice echoed. “You can run, but you can’t hide.”

—

CHAPTER 25

They checked into Gilman’s Motel. Lydia had made Wade park down the street in a used car lot, so as not to give their location away to anyone who might be hunting them. The motel stood quiet in darkness. Lydia turned out all the lights.

They said very little. What were words worth now? Lydia stripped and went to the shower, to wash away the stench of the grove. She must’ve smelled like death. But no sooner had she turned the spray to her face, Wade was with her. They washed each other in silence; it was like getting new skin. Afterward, they coupled brutally on the bed, not in passion this time, but in desperation. Lydia didn’t need to be made love to, she needed to be fucked, primitively and without endearments. They gave their bodies to the other for use—to release the steeped horrors of the last day. They did it repeatedly, fucking and coming, coming and forgetting, venting the mad energy of their fear. The complete inappropriateness of sex—after all they’d seen—made it completely appropriate. They used each other’s bodies to purge their minds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They had fangs,” Lydia remembered.

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

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

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

««—»»

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

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

Lydia drove to the shop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She jerked, turned.

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

Lydia drew her Trooper, aimed, and—

Jervis slapped it out of her hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know,” Lydia said.

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

“Yes, Jervis. Lots of times.”

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

“I’m sorry to hear that, Jervis.”

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

Truth? she thought. I must accede. Even if she told where Wade was, Jervis would kill her anyway. So what could she say?

“Blow yourself,” she said.

Her feet were off the floor in an instant. Jervis had her throat in his right hand and something else in his left. Gagging, her gaze flicked down to see what it was.

What he held was a Craftsman auto body sander. You used them to sand down putty on fenders, though Lydia seriously suspected that Jervis planned a slight variation of this utility. The disc was loaded with fifteen grit synthetic sandpaper.

An inch from her nose, he turned it on. Its motor shrieked. The grinding disc spun before her eyes at 4,000 rpm’s.

“Tell me where Wade is,” Jervis said, “or I’ll sand your face off.”

In the chokehold, Lydia barely managed to gasp, “Eat my poop.”

“So much for Mr. Nice Guy.” He would do her real slow, would stretch her death out like pizza cheese. The motor’s screams played foreshadow to her own. Just as the grinding disc would strike pay dirt—her face—the motor died.

“Jervis, Jervis,” Professor Besser’s voice came from behind. He’d pulled the sander’s cord out. “If you kill her, we may never find Wade.”

“She lied to me!” Jervis spat. “She affronted my Existenz!”

“Forgive her, my boy. Didn’t Sartre also say that one must forgive his universal counterparts for the sake of the ultimate existential ideal?”

Jervis’ flat eyes thinned in rumination. “No!” he shouted. “Sartre never said anything even close to that!”

“Bring her to the labyrinth,” Besser commanded. “We’ll put her in one of the holds.”

Seething, Jervis let her down and gave her a smack on the back of the head. The blow laid her out—she nearly lost consciousness. “You’re fucked, bitch,” Jervis promised her in a fierce whisper. “I’m gonna do a job on you that would make Charles Manson puke. Just you wait.”

He began dragging her along by the collar, but not toward the shop door, she dizzily realized.

He was dragging her toward the wall—

—then into the wall—

—then through it.

—

CHAPTER 26

Nina McCulloch prayed for forgiveness for her sins. She could hear the others in Elizabeth’s room, but her prayers blocked their voices out. Nina believed that Jesus had died on the cross for her, expurgating any sin she might ever commit. To pay Jesus back, she followed the Commandments, offered thanks and praise, and fully accepted him as her savior.

“Amen,” she whispered.

Now she lay in bed, restless. She could hear them in the next bedroom: Elizabeth, and Kara and Stacy, two girls from down the hall.

Nina knew what they were doing.

“What a rush!” Elizabeth could be heard through the wall.

“Class A shit, Liz,” Kara observed.

“Cut me another rail,” Stacy requested.

Nina, of course, never joined them. They always offered, claiming: “You only get addicted if you do it every day”; “It’s harmless in moderation”; and “Nina, all that antidrug stuff on TV is just propaganda. Come on, try some.”

But Nina’s reply was always the same: “No. It’s a sin.”

The body was a temple of the Lord; it said so in the Bible. If you put bad things into your body, you were defacing that temple. A tract she’d read once said that if you used drugs, alcohol, tobacco, or even ate junk food, that was the same as throwing garbage in a church. Nina believed this fervently. She also believed that even responsible drug users were actively participating in the denigration of society. The money that Liz and her friends so harmlessly spent on a little cocaine went to the same people who supplied crack to elementary school kids. Every penny helped fuel the giant drug machine which ruined people’s lives. It helped make the weak weaker, and the helpless more lost. Drugs were the soldiers of Satan’s army.

Nina got up and sneaked to the bathroom. She hoped they didn’t hear her. They might laugh at her and persecute her for her beliefs. Nina, of course, would forgive them, but that was beside the point.

Tinkling, she heard their uproar. They were talking about sex now, and how much better drugs made it. “His cock was hard all night!” Stacy exclaimed. “Shit, I musta come ten times!”

Babylon, Nina thought, perched upon the toilet. But she mustn’t judge them; only God could judge. She couldn’t escape the thought, however, as their reverie rose: The wages for sin are death.

««—»»

Jervis fumed as Besser handed him the parcel.

“Drop this off, then meet the sister at the sciences center.”

“Yes, sir,” Jervis tensely replied. “Anything you say.”

Besser stood at the servicepoint of the detentionwarren. “And there’s one other thing the Supremate would like you to do.”

“What?”

“Kill Dean Saltenstall.”

Jervis’ brow knit. The dean was harmless. “Why?” he asked.

“He runs the college. He’s an authority figure,” Besser explained, “and authority figures offend the Supremate’s superiority; they blemish his grace. To the Supremate, the dean is a graven image. So kill him.”

Graven image? What an ego. “Right. Kill the dean.”

Besser seemed to sense Jervis’ upset. He peered at Lydia beyond the repulsion screen. “Ah, you’re angry about her. You feel I’ve injured your existential self by denying you her death.”

“Something like that,” Jervis restrained himself.

“For now we need her intact, as a lure for Wade. But afterward, Jervis, I promise you’ll have her.”

“Thank you…sir.”

“Good. Go now. Serve well for our master.”

Jervis extromitted back to his room. They’d barriered Lydia Prentiss into one of the tempholds. He’d just have to have his revenge later, and it would be sweet. He would put some holotypes in there with her and see how she liked that. Some of those holotypes had been locked up in the deep holds for years, going mad with lust in the psilight. Some had knobbed tentacles for cocks, or things that looked like big plungers wide as coffee cans. There were even a few that had multiple penises…

He walked down the hall into Wade’s room. Be creative, he thought. Creativity is the key to existential awareness. It was only a matter of time before Wade returned to his room. Jervis left the parcel where Wade was sure to see it.

Minutes later he was driving down Randolph Carter Street, past the Circle. The sister’s grinning white face beamed in the headlights. He picked her up in front of the sciences center, as instructed. —Hi, Jervis! she greeted.

Jervis nodded, gulping. The sisters gave him the willies—their monstrous kiddie grins, perpetually shaded eyes, and the unearthly giggling. How could you trust someone who giggled like that?

—Ready?

“Yeah. Where to?”

She gave him Besser’s Qwik Note, which read: “Elizabeth Whitechapel, Duke of Clarence Hall, Room 688.”

—She’s the last one. Then all we need is the holotype and we can leave.

“Leave to where, if you don’t mind my asking?”

—New kingdoms, Jervis. New pigs.

“And I get to go with you, right? Immortal?”

—Of course! We’re all immortal in the glory of the Supremate!

Jervis drove on. Something was fishy about this whole business. Why hadn’t he seen any other productionvassals around, from past procurements? There was only him. Jervis knew shit when he smelled it. Just because he was dead didn’t mean he was stupid.

—The Erblings have just given birth to two beautiful baby mutants. And Inez Packer’s insemination couldn’t have gone better.

“Glad to hear it,” Jervis muttered. If they could make their own vassals, what would they need him for in an eternal future? Am I getting screwed? “We have to stop at the dean’s first. Besser told me to kill him.”

—Oh, Good! the sister rejoiced. —I’m so hungry!

“There’s plenty of eats in back.”

The sister looked at Inez Packer’s roommate and the dead security guard. She made a face. —But I want a FRESH pig, Jervis. I want a FRESH man thing.

Wonderful. I’m stuck with the pecker eater again. Except for their size, the sisters had no distinguishing features. They were clones. He wondered how many years it had taken to hybridize them. How many crossed genes from how many planets.

A long drive lined with hundred year old oaks led to the dean’s mansion. Acres of mown, open land gave the estate a rich Dixie plantation appearance. Jervis parked next to the dean’s Rolls. The moon hung low behind wisps of clouds.

They walked casually up the pillared front steps. Jervis hocked a lunger into the topiary. An old brass door knocker stared at them, an oval bereft of features save for two wide, empty eyes. Jervis raised his hand to knock, then paused. What am I doing? Murderers don’t knock.

He bumped the heavy door face with both palms. The door jumped out of its frame and thudded to the floor. They were halfway up the winding stairs when the hall light came on.

“Winnie? Is that you?”

Jervis chuckled. “Not quite.”

The dean froze two steps out of his bedroom. He wore a maroon robe and pink pajamas. Doubt of reality drew slits into the lined, tanned face. “What the—” he stammered. “Who the—”

—Hi, Dean! the sister announced. —I’m going to eat your man thing!

Jervis smiled.

The dean fled screaming back into the bedroom. Jervis promptly knocked down the door. The clean white room lay in total contradiction to what was taking place. The bed, the furniture, and the lambent white walls coalesced into a pattern of normalcy that Jervis and the sister violated merely by entering.

“Nice place you’ve got here,” Jervis complimented. “Elegant.”

The sister began her wet, clicking giggles.

Whimpering, the dean backed into the walk in closet. Thousand dollar Italian suits surrounded him like a conspiracy of accusers. The jury was in. “Please,” Dean Saltenstall shivered and begged. “I’ve done nothing to deserve this.”

“I know,” Jervis acknowledged. “That’s why we’re doing it.”

Be creative, he reminded himself. He spun the dean’s head off in one graceful motion, a sharp twist and a jerk. The dean’s lips sputtered a nifty, musical sound, like a kazoo. “Thar she blows!” Jervis celebrated as the stump gushed rich red blood onto the walls, the suits, the ceiling. For a moment the dean seemed to dance headless. It was magnificent.

The spouting figure collapsed. “All yours,” Jervis said. The invitation made the sister giggle. At once she knelt betwixt the dead legs, tearing open the pajama bottoms.

—

CHAPTER 27

It all fit well with the course of the day: a dream that made no sense. Was it premonitory? Wade dreamed he was paralyzed, his jaw locked open by pegs. The women in black were stuffing slabs of putrid meat into his mouth. The meat was black and full of parasites. —This is what we eat at home, Wade. Isn’t it good? It was not good. Each helping crawled down his throat, warmly alive, and every time he thought the dream was over, another dainty white hand appeared to push still more of the squirming meat into his forced open mouth…

When he awoke, he felt empty headed. He sat up in bed and felt for Lydia, but she wasn’t there.

Wade,

I borrowed your car, hope you don’t mind. I got this idea about the sunlight stuff, and I have to check it out on my own.

Stay here till I get back.

Lydia

Wade crumpled up the note. He had two choices. He could sit here naked and do nothing, or he could act. He couldn’t imagine what her “idea about the sunlight stuff” could be, but where else could it lead but back to the groves?

He dressed, checked out, and left. It was just past 3 A.M. If he walked fast and cut across campus, he might make it to the groves in an hour.

The warm night seemed to welcome him in his solitude; the moon gave him light. Damn it, Lydia, he thought, and stepped up his pace. Where the hell are you?

««—»»

“You’re in the labyrinth,” Winnie said. “Our master’s palace.”

“The Supremate,” Lydia muttered.

“That’s correct.”

“Who is he?”

“He’s…God, I think.

Great. I knew I never should’ve stopped going to church. Lydia could see very little within the temphold, which seemed vaguely lit by some bizarre blackish light. This is a jail, she realized. A black rod in the ceiling gave the impression that she was being watched. She’d already tried, and given up on, simply walking out. The hold’s barrier, though invisible, couldn’t be passed. Beyond it she could see nothing.

Except Winnifred, who stood on the other side. She was nude, her flesh like mist in the labyrinth’s static blackness. “You can’t feel it in there,” the woman said, “but out here, the Supremate’s breath is on me. It’s the psilight, it’s his influence. The Supremate is a god of great passion, and he breathes his passion on all of us.” Her hand then ran over her pubis.

Lydia recalled the events that brought her here—the student shop, Jervis, and the solid cinder block wall. Instead of killing her, they’d…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lydia wondered.

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

“What?” Lydia asked.

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

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

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

Oh, shit, Lydia thought.

««—»»

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

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

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

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

I’m sorry for my sins, Nina thought.

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

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

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

Nina backed against the wall.

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

Jesus save me, Nina prayed.

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

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

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

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

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

««—»»

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

But when he rounded Tillinghast Hall, he saw headlights.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

CHAPTER 28

Murder, he thought. Blood.

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

Through the dead, empty night, he drifted more than walked. The campus lay silent behind him, strangely still and very black. Insentient, he made his way along trails once familiar but now forgotten, past buildings and halls dark and blank as gravestones.

The sky seemed depthless, a slate void. Phantom reefs of clouds roved past a darkled moon. Far and away, the chapel bell tolled, signaling 4 A.M. The monotonous, dull peals incited him, chipped cracks into his shock. Then he saw the lighted sign: “Campus Police.”

Wade stepped in unnoticed. Leaving the hot night and its murder behind him was like stepping into paradise…

Porker was eating microwaved cheese dogs at the booking desk. He was eating them with his fingers, without rolls. Sergeant Peerce sat at his own desk, intent on a magazine called Babes with Big Boobs.

“The dean is dead,” Wade announced.

Porker’s immense face floated up. Babes with Big Boobs lowered to the desk, unveiling Peerce’s typical hillbilly smirk.

“You heard me,” Wade said. “The dean’s dead. Murdered.”

“Probably dumped his fancy car in a ditch,” Porker surmised, “and wants us to tow it out for him.”

“Just another daddy rich smart ass,” Peerce added.

Wade could not believe this response to his announcement. “Are you guys deaf? I just got done telling you the dean is dead!”

“You mean Dean Saltenstall?” Porker inquired.

Wade slumped. “No, Dean Dick. Is there any other dean on this campus, you fat jughead? He’s been murdered.”

Peerce and Porker stood up at the same time. They looked at each other. Then they looked at Wade.

“Just like that, huh?” Peerce asked. “The dean’s been murdered?”

“Yes! You understand English! Praise God!”

“And just how did he come to be murdered, boy?”

“Well, I don’t actually know,” Wade admitted. “But—”

“Ya hear that, Porker? He don’t really know.”

“What difference does it make, you brickhead? I saw him in the closet! and I saw the…I saw the…blood.”

Peerce and Porker chuckled. “St. John,” Peerce said. “This is just another one of your practical jokes.”

“You must think we’re pretty dumb,” Porker added.

Dumb? Wade thought. Naw.

“We been bustin’ our tails all night. We got one missing security guard and two dormitory break ins. We ain’t got time for your practical jokes.”

“Look,” Wade said. “All that stuff you just said—missing persons, break ins—it’s all part of this. A lot of crazy shit has gone on tonight, and it all starts in the dean’s closet.”

Chewing cheese dogs, Porker inquired, “What would the dean be doing in a closet at four in the morning?”

“Getting murdered,” Wade answered. “Don’t believe me? Go check.”

Peerce made a contemplating face. He got the dean’s number out of White’s directory. He paused. Then he dialed the number.

“You’re wasting your time,” Wade declared. “He won’t answer.”

Peerce listened and waited, tapping his foot. He waited some more and hung up. “He didn’t answer.”

“Of course he didn’t answer, you crawfish for brains Cajun moron! How can a dead man answer a fucking telephone?”

Then Porker said, “It can’t hurt to take a look, Sarge.”

“Shee-it,” Peerce agreed. “All right, punk. Lead the way.”

Wade felt a shimmy of panic. “Not me, fellas. You guys go, I’ll wait here. But before you go, you have to lock me up,” He pointed to the station’s jail cell. “In there.”

“Why?”

“For my protection.”

“Protection from what?”

Wade gulped. “From them.”

Peerce squinted. “Who’s them?”

“Look, Sarge, just pacify me, okay? Lock me up and go check.”

“We can’t lock you up,” Porker informed him. “There’s no probable cause to believe you’re in danger.”

“But I’m telling you I am!”

“We cain’t lock you up unless you commit a crime,” Peerce said. “And unfortunately, bein’ an asshole is not a crime.”

Wade was getting desperate. “In other words, you won’t lock me up in that cell unless I commit a crime?”

“That’s right, boy.”

Crime, Wade contemplated. Okay. With impressive reflexes, he kicked Porker square in the belly as hard as he could. Porker bent over, howling like a gelded walrus.

“There,” Wade said. “Is that crime enough?”

Peerce, snarling, jammed the butt of a nineteen ounce blackjack into Wade’s solar plexus. Wade folded up, bug eyed. He was then thrown into the cell. For good measure, Peerce rapped Wade another one—between the legs, this time—and locked the cell door.

“Thank you, Sarge. And my future children thank you too.”

Peerce’s eyes blazed through the bars. “This is the end for you, St. John. We’re gonna check out this harebrained story of yours, and then we’re gonna come back here and kick your ass so bad you’ll shit shoe polish for a week. Assaultin’ a police officer will get you kicked off this here campus forever.”

“I hear you, Sarge. Just go to the dean’s. Check it out.”

Peerce called White and told him to meet them at the dean’s mansion. Then he left, followed by Porker, who limped along cradling his elephantine belly.

In spite of his pain, Wade smiled.

Go ahead, super cops. Check it out.

««—»»

A half hour later keys rattled in the station door. Peerce, Porker, and Chief White tottered in, their faces drained.

Wade leapt up. “Well?”

“The dean is dead,” Peerce iterated.

“I told you so.”

Sweat glazed Porker’s pasty white face. “The closet,” he mumbled. “The dean—” Then he staggered to the john, to vomit. “Poor bastard never could stand the sight of blood,” Peerce said.

The memory blared back. Blood, Wade thought. So much blood.

Chief White’s beshocked eyes looked like big flat coins. “It was pulled off,” he said.

“What?” Wade asked.

“The dean’s head. It was pulled off.” White steadied himself, flinching. “Not cut off or chopped off. Not sawed or blowed off. I mean somebody grabbed onto that man’s head and pulled on it till it came off.”

“They’re a rough bunch, Chief.” But that was only the tip of the iceberg; there was much more to tell, but Wade dared not. These hayseeds would only swallow so much at a time.

Peerce stared cross eyed straight ahead. “Took his wagger off too.”

“His what?”

“His wagger. You know, his meat, his homeboy.”

Wade frowned. “You mean his dick?”

“Pulled it clean off, just like his head. Who the hell would wanna run off with a man’s head an’ homeboy?”

“Psychopaths, that’s who,” Wade said, to put it mildly. “Now that you’ve seen the goods, let’s get out of here.”

“Think again,” Chief White said. He sat down and looked at him. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere till we have some answers.”

Panic rose in Wade’s guts like bubbles. “We’ve got to get off this campus right now, Chief! They’re coming for me! They’ll come here and pull our homeboys off!”

Peerce popped a chaw of Red Man. “He knows plenty more than he’s tellin’, Chief. That’s for damn sure.”

I’m a had daddy, Wade realized. The safety of the cell now condemned him. Porker was still vomiting in the john, cutting loose deep, tubalike eeerps. Peerce edgily spat brown juice into a paper cup. Chief White just stared, arms crossed.

“What were you doin’ at the dean’s at this hour, boy?”

“I—” Shit, Wade thought. “I saw the murderer leaving the scene.”

“Oh, you saw the murderer? You mind enlightenin’ us?”

Wade swallowed, thinking of the blood. “It was Jervis Phillips.”

White and Peerce joined in low laughter. “Jervis Phillips ain’t nothin’ but an egg suck drunk. You spect us to believe he pulled the dean’s head off and painted the fuckin’ closet with his blood? Jervis Phillips?”

“I don’t care what you believe. I saw him driving out of that area,” Wade unconvincingly explained.

White was rubbing his hands together. He was losing control of his town, and he was desperate. He needed a candidate for scapegoat, and Wade could guess the nominee.

“I can’t tell you everything, Chief,” Wade admitted. “If I told you everything, you’d think I was crazy.”

“We already think you’re crazy.” Peerce said.

“A crazy murderer,” White added.

But if they saw the grove, the mutated woods, and the women… Wade could think of no other way to convince them. “Take me to the grove,” he said, “and I’ll show you the rest.”

“What grove?” Porker asked, finally emerging from the john. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Trust me. I’ll take you there right now.”

White was still glaring at him. “Bring him out.”

Now we’re getting somewhere, Wade thought, but only until Peerce released him from the cell and hand-cuffed him to White’s chair.

“This is what we call interrogation,” Chief White said.

“I’ve got a better name for it,” Wade told them. “Deprivation of constitutional rights.”

From a locker, White retrieved an eighteen inch Nova shock baton. It could deliver several one second 50,000 volt bursts, which disrupted the victim’s muscle impulses and caused temporary paralysis. It also caused great temporary pain. Shock batons were illegal now, but Wade could see that this judicial fact would do him little good. They were going to torture him.

“Would it be too much trouble to ask for a lawyer?”

White, Peerce, and Porker all laughed out loud.

The baton hummed when White turned it on. “Now, this thing will shock you right through your clothes. A couple of hits and you’ll think you stepped on the third rail of the subway. Are you gonna talk, or do I go to work on ya?”

“This is America!” Wade shouted. “You can’t torture people!”

White, Peerce, and Porker laughed out loud again, harder.

“I don’t want to hear no shit about Jervis Phillips, and I don’t want to hear about no groves. Tell me the truth, St. John. Why did you murder Dean Saltenstall?”

“I didn’t murder the fucking dean!” Wade bellowed. “It was Jervis Phillips and those women in black!”

White pushed the baton into the soft of Wade’s crotch. The discharge head fit nice and snug. White’s finger wavered over the button, then began to lower.

“Excuse me,” a frail voice rose behind them.

White, Peerce, and Porker jerked upright and turned. White hid the baton behind his back.

A sheepish, long haired girl in a nightgown stood wanly in the doorway. “My name is Nina McCulloch,” she said in a voice almost too soft to be heard.

“So what!” White snapped.

“I just saw my roommate and her friends get murdered.”

Silence unfurled. The three cops stared. Wade sighed.

“Murdered?” White blabbed.

“Yes,” Nina McCulloch whispered. “And I recognized the killer.”

“Who was it?”

“It was Jervis Phillips, and he was with a woman in black.”

—

CHAPTER 29

“It’s a cult of some kind, I think,” Wade speculated from the backseat of White’s cruiser. Porker sat heavily beside him. White drove, and Peerce rode shotgun. They sped down Route 13, toward the agro site.

“A cult?” White questioned.

“Yeah. It must be like one of those satanic gangs. Ritual murder, black mass, cannibalism, that sort of shit. All the members wear upside down crosses. And whoever their leader is, they call him the Supremate. I figure there’re seven of them, not including this Supremate guy. Four of them are girls, and I mean the freakiest looking girls you’ve ever seen. They wear black capes, and they all have” —Should I really say this?— “fangs.”

Peerce swore. White smacked the wheel and glared at Wade. “I suppose you’re gonna tell me they’re vampires, right?”

“You said it, I didn’t. But there’s this thing out at the grove that looks like a coffin on end. And Besser told me that these girls—sisters, he called them—can’t live in sunlight.”

Peerce had a frown baked into his face. “He’s pullin’ our dicks, Chief. There ain’t no grove or no cults. He’s lyin’.”

“Besser?” White backtracked. “Besser told you this?”

“That’s right. He’s part of it, and so are Jervis and Winnifred Saltenstall. They’re all members of the cult.”

“I don’t know what kind of drugs you been smokin’, St. John, but you gotta be crazy to think I’ll believe two respected faculty members belong to some satanic cult. I don’t believe in vampires, and I don’t believe in the fuckin’ devil, so just shut yer yap.”

“If you think I’m nuts, how come you’re going to the grove?”

“’Cause I got two eyewitnesses that link Jervis Phillips to several murders, and you say he might be at this goddamn grove of yours, so that’s where we’re goin’!”

Fine, Wade thought. In a few more minutes, they were there. White groaned as his loaded cruiser rolled through the logging track, branches scraping the paint. He parked in the junk heaped clearing. “Check your heat,” he ordered. White checked his fourteen shot Browning. Porker checked his AMT .45. Peerce checked his giant Ruger Blackhawk. Then they checked their backup pieces.

“Hey, fellas,” Wade asked. “Don’t I get a gun?”

“Don’t make me laugh,” White answered. “Peerce, bring the gasser too. If Phillips is hidin’ in these here woods, we’ll gas him out.”

Peerce loaded a 37mm CM 55 tear gas gun. Then Porker doled out flashlights and they all got out. “Christ!” Peerce complained. “Damn place smells worse than a Georgia hoghouse!”

You ought to know, Wade thought. “Take a look over here.”

“Graves,” Porker muttered.

Wade grazed his light over the mounds. “Someone’s been here in the last few hours. There were only two graves earlier.”

“Now there’s four.” Peerce demonstrated the ability to count.

“And look—” Wade shined his light over by the shovel. “Empty Kirin bottles. Jervis drinks Kirin.”

“Porker, you see that shovel?” White said.

“Yeah.”

“Get to work.”

Porker whitened. “Aw, Chief, come on. I don’t wanna—”

“Dig them up later,” Wade interrupted. “First we have to—”

“St. John” —now it was White’s turn to interrupt— “so far all I see is a couple of piles of dirt and some beer bottles. I don’t see no cult, and I don’t see no vampires.”

Peerce slapped the back of Wade’s head. “And what about the coffin, St. John? You said there’s a coffin out here.” Next he gave Wade’s ear a twist. Wade yelped.

Hands on hips, White asked, “Where’s Jervis Phillips?”

“Look, I only said he might be here,” Wade protested. “But I’m telling you, once you see the grove yourselves—”

“You mean this ain’t it?”

Wade smiled darkly. “I mean the other grove.”

White bit into a cigar. “All right. Lead the way.”

Wade led the way, with pleasure, past the tires and junk, to the trail. “Watch your step, boys. This isn’t exactly the red carpet treatment.”

Porker moaned.

Peerce yelled “Christ!” repeatedly, as they all began to crunch over the rot soft possums.

“They’re all over the place!” White complained.

“This is nothing, Chief. Wait’ll you see the rest.”

They grimly followed the trail of carcasses. Porker asked “If Phillips is out here, what do we do?”

“What’choo think we do?” Peerce contributed.

“We kill him,” White said. “He’s a killer so we kill him.”

“Killing Jervis isn’t going to be easy,” Wade pointed out.

“Why?”

Wade smiled. “Because he’s already dead.”

“Goddamn it, St. John!” White flared. “I knew this was a crock of shit! Now you’re tellin’ us Phillips is dead?”

“Well, yeah, sort of. Dead as in…the walking dead.”

Peerce slammed Wade against a tree, his ham fist hovering. “I’m beggin’ ya, Chief! Lemme pop him! He’s makin’ damn fools of all of us.”

Then Porker screamed.

He’d strayed to the end of the trail. White and Peerce rushed to see what he was screaming about. Wade, of course, already knew.

The grove’s perversions had thickened, even in the few hours since he and Lydia had been here. Agape, the three cops clung to each other as they stared into the impossible morass. The green fog was darker now, a milky stew. Dense, unearthly foliage glimmered in the low moonlight. Every branch, every swollen leaf, pod, and flower hung thickly with ropes of slime. Things like cattails sprouted tall from the lake of fog, bowed by the weight of strange fruit and pulsating seed sacks. In the middle of the clearing, atop the risen hillock, stood the bizarre oblong box.

“You hayseed motherfuckers believe me now?” Wade asked.

The slack jawed police made no response. Everything was shifting, growing in minute increments, joints of weeds and eldritch tree limbs lengthening in crunching movements as if in pain. Fist sized bugs crawled up sweating tree trunks, scoring the fleshlike bark. Clusters of faced mushrooms shuddered, breathing, and lumps of fungus glowed in the dark.

“P Porker,” White ordered.

“Yuh yuh yeah, Chief?”

“Get out there. Check it out.”

“Yuh yuh you gotta be crazy, Chief.”

“Get out there, you big creamcake!” White kicked Porker in his tremendous rump. “Check it out!”

“I wouldn’t send anyone out there,” Wade advised.

“Shut up! Peerce, get out there! This fat baby’s got no balls. Let’s see if you do!”

Peerce stood unsteadily, looking at the green fog, then back to White. He took a breath and stepped out.

“There’s things in that fog,” Wade warned.

“Things?” Peerce queried, looking back. He waded out. It was like a green swamp; the fog had risen to midthigh now. Black cane stalks swayed to and fro, acrawl with noxious bugs. From some of the plants hung fattened seedpods with drooling—and distressingly human—lips. “Things,” Peerce muttered again. Now he was ten yards out. “I think I can see ’em.”

Yes, they all could. The grove’s wildlife, no doubt, had taken note of them. Wade spotted ghost shapes of things roving beneath the surface—fog vermin. Scuttling parasites feasted on dead possum bellies, and waddling things like groundhogs, lacking heads, scampered about, raising trails of mist. But worst of all were the gilled snake things, which seemed to swim vigorously beneath the fogtop.

“Bring him back, you idiot,” Wade said. “Those things bite.”

White smirked, then yelped as one of the fat pinch faced spiders lowered itself on a line of snot. It tried to bite White on the nose. Wade batted it away, laughing.

Then Peerce began to howl.

He was jumping, struggling. One of the fog snakes had affixed its flat sucker mouth to Peerce’s crotch. He tore it off, along with his zipper, and then another snake latched onto his ass.

“Help me!” he pleaded.

“Porker! Get out there and help Peerce!”

“Fuh fuh fuck you, Chief,” Porker stammered.

“St. John! Get out there!”

“Eat my shorts, Chief. He’s your man, you get out there.”

Peerce tore off another eel, then tried to run back. Suddenly he tripped and sank completely beneath the fog, screaming.

Jesus Christ. Wade dashed out. Glimpses of things approached, and he kicked them as best he could, or stepped on them. One of the fog snakes swam near, a big one, but Wade stepped on its head just in time. Then something like a fanged toad, the size of a softball, hopped forward. Wade stomped down hard. The toad burst under his shoe like a Baggie full of pudding.

Wade saw the fog churning. A hand surfaced. He grabbed it, pulled, and hauled Peerce back to the trail.

Green mist blew from Peerce’s nostrils. “Chief, those things were tryin’ to eat me!” White gave him a look that said, Better you than me. They spent the next five minutes picking slugs and horned insects off of Peerce. His clothes hung in tatters.

“What is this place, St. John?” White asked grimly.

“I don’t know,” Wade said.

Porker pointed shakily. “And what’s that black box?”

Before Wade could hazard a guess, they heard a car.

“Turn your lights out!” Wade instructed. They huddled down. Across the dell, a car entered the morass. The submerged headlights projected luminous green plumes. It was a Dodge Colt.

“It’s Phillips,” White whispered. The cops drew their guns.

The car faltered through the grove, knocking down tall stalks of perverted plants. The fog came up to the Colt’s windows. Unseen monstrosities howled as Jervis drove over them.

Then the car rose out of the fog, parked on the hillock. Jervis got out and lit a cigarette. Then he hoisted something out of the trunk. Even at this distance they could see that it was a girl, unconscious or dead. Jervis, the body over his shoulder, stood before the black box and…disappeared.

He’d disappeared into it.

Then another, smaller figure emerged from the car, a black, hooded figure. It knelt daintily before the hideous, bulbed plant.

“That’s one of the sisters,” Wade whispered.

Now the sister was plucking things from the plant.

“What the fuck’s she doin’?’ White asked, squinting.

“Eating bugs. Those bitches eat anything.”

“We gotta find out what’s goin’ on here.”

“Chief,” Wade implored. “I can’t put it any more eloquently than this: We have to get our swingin’ dicks the fuck out of this gore hole before those walking meat grinders realize we’re here.”

“Not yet,” White said. “I want Phillips’ ass.”

Wade rolled his eyes. “Hey, cement head. I just got done telling you he’s already dead. You can’t kill him.”

“Shut up, St. John. Go get the binocs out of the cruiser.”

Wade crunched back to the first clearing. He found the binoculars in the console and smiled when he noticed the key in the ignition. Even I’m not big enough a prick to leave them here.

Or was he?

It didn’t matter. A burst of yelling blared from the grove, then gunshots.

Then: “St. John! Start the car! We’re comin’ out!”

The shit’s flying now. Wade turned the engine over and popped open the doors. He scoped down the trail with the binoculars.

Holy, holy shit, he thought.

At least a dozen sisters had converged on the police. Flashes popped, guns were firing right and left. It looked like Custer’s last stand—only Custer, in this case, was White, and he and his men were faring about as well. They emptied their guns as fast as they could fire them, reloaded and fired some more, all for nothing. Hooded sisters fell on them from all angles. Vicious, liquid giggles rose like surf within the grove.

—New pigs!

—Fat, juicy pigs!

Two sisters held Porker up, while another eviscerated him in place. Pale hands delved like cleavers into the tremendous stomach, parting slabs of fat to expose the succulent organs.

—He’s so big!

—Lots to eat!

It happened so fast that the poor jerk just stood there a moment, looking at his opened belly. Fat people were often taken advantage of, but never like this. Blood and fist sized wads of fat flew as the sisters helped themselves. Porker provided a veritable all you can eat feast. The sisters’ hands rummaged and plowed, until nothing remained of the choice merchandise of Porker’s abdominal vault. The sisters fed well. They slaked their appetites and rejoiced, flinging organ scraps in macabre celebration.

That’s what I call losing a hundred pounds the hard way, Wade mused.

Peerce was trying to aim, backing up, with White firing behind him. Peerce’s big .44 Blackhawk jumped in his hand, but each slug was either brushed away or plucked from its trajectory.

Wade did indeed consider leaving. I don’t owe these guys anything, do I? But just because they were assholes didn’t mean he should abandon them. Shit! he concluded. Damn it, shit!

Now Peerce was overrun, flailing amid the besieging sisters. White threw his empty guns at the girls, as Peerce screamed in perfect Deep South terror. —What’s this? one of the big ones asked, and held up the CM tear gas gun. Their giggles pitched as she shoved the barrel down Peerce’s throat and pulled the trigger. There was a damped bang!—the proximity fuse burned out—another bang!—and then Peerce began to expand, quite like a parade float, growing, growing, buttons popping, until he was huge. The sisters marveled at this spectacle. Eventually Peerce burst. Offal flew like spaghetti and sauce—then all was obscured by tear gas.

Wade grabbed the Sentry flaregun in White’s console. He got out and aimed. “Come on, Chief! Run your ass off!”

The brew of sisters didn’t like the CS agent. They staggered, gagging. Chief White clambered up the carcass ridden trail. Behind him, though, a sister emerged from the smoke.

“Duck!” Wade shouted.

White hit the dirt. Without much confidence, Wade discharged the flare gun and watched the projectile burn a line down the trail. Mystified, the sister caught it, looked at it as it hissed out its propellant. The canister exploded, splattering her with ignited magnesium. It stuck to her face, cloak, and sunglasses, bubbling intense neon red. The sister wailed.

Wade jumped back behind the wheel as White lunged in. The car whipped a reckless circle, Wade’s teeth clenched as he steered.

“Goddamn you, St. John, you goddamn bastard!” White blubbered. “You said there were only four of ’em!”

The car shuddered down the logging road. White threw up his hands and screamed. Wade screamed, too, when he saw what White was screaming about.

At least a dozen more sisters blocked the road.

Where the hell did they come from!

“RUN ‘EM DOWN!” White bellowed.

Wade proceeded to do just that. He gripped the wheel hard and trounced the gas. They stood like bowling pins. Wade plowed into them with such impact that the lead sisters exploded jets of black blood from their mouths, inundating the windshield. Wade turned on the wipers and kept plowing. He watched each rank collapse under the bumper, and saw now that they numbered more than a dozen, much more. They were using themselves as barricades—they didn’t care. They just stood there, grinning, as Wade mowed them down. The bodies thumped under the cruiser’s wheels; there were so many of them it was like driving over hay bales.

In the rearview, the sisters, though crushed, were getting back up to run after them. It figures, Wade thought. And in front, the grinning white faces loomed and fell, only to be replaced by more. Then the passenger window shattered.

I have had better days, Wade considered.

Several sisters hung onto the car, snatching at White. White screamed honorably, gouging at their hideous, giggling faces. It’s me they want, Wade realized, not White. But White was in the way, and that was his hard luck. The sisters struggled further to get to Wade, clawing through White. White just screamed and screamed.

At last the car had run over the last of the cloaked women. Wade whipped out onto the Route, but he still had two sisters hanging onto the passenger door. Wade expertly sideswiped a fat oak tree and skimmed them off.

He drove for miles before daring to stop. The grille was pounded in, the fenders crumpled, the hood aglaze in shiny black blood. But White, Wade noted, had come out of this worse than the car. The sisters had pulled his face and scalp off, pulled his arms off, pulled his throat out. What now rode as passenger bore no likeness whatsoever to good old shucking and jiving Chief White. He’d written his last traffic ticket, that was for sure.

Wade idled up to a ravine. “Rest in peace, Chief,” he muttered.

He rolled White’s remains out of the car and took off back toward campus.

—

CHAPTER 30

Jervis grinned. “How about some entertainment, Lydia?”

Lydia moaned.

On the germinationwarren’s floorwall, Elizabeth Whitechapel lay nude, twitching. Orangish, swirling light hovered within the warren as Jervis led in an exceptionally grotesque holotype. Four shoulders composed its arched back, housing four sets of arms. A fifth set of arms served as legs, joined by a muscled buttocks. The beast’s sinuous skin shined blood-red in sweat. Puffy vertical slits formed its eyes, nose, and mouth.

By now, Lydia was catching on. The word spaceship didn’t sit well with her, but what else could this be? She’d picked up bits of conversation: they kept talking about leaving, leaving tomorrow night. As in…taking off? They’d also mentioned recharge, which could refer to a power supply of some kind. Other words, weirder words, had reached her ears, too. Stasisfield. Psilight. Interspecielmetis. The word alien didn’t sit well with her either, but if the labyrinth’s tenants weren’t aliens, what were they? She’d noticed many of the cloaked women. Many pranced about naked, their sleek white bodies faintly veined, their breasts nippleless, their pubes bare. They were clones.

Invaders, Lydia thought.

Movement caught her eye. The holotype, whose genitals looked like a cluster of spoiled grapes, hobbled a circle around the naked girl. The girl seemed paralyzed. Nevertheless, there was wantonness in her eyes. Somehow they’d induced a positive sexual response when the girl should be screaming bloody murder. The girl wanted this multilimbed thing. She wanted it to mate with her.

Oh my God, Lydia thought. With all eight of its webbed hands, the holotype kneaded its clustered genitals, which soon swelled to a budded red pole. The pole was then inserted into the girl’s mouth. This oral foreplay did not last long, however, before the thing’s member grew too large for the confines of the girl’s mouth. It was withdrawn, pulsing. Lydia’s stomach churned.

Jervis appeared at the static barrier, “How do you like the entertainment so far? Beats Seinfeld any day, huh?”

Behind him, shrieks of pleasure erupted, unearthly grunts, and a vigorous slapping sound. Thank God Jervis blocked Lydia’s view. “Why?” she croaked.

“The master plan,” Jervis encrypted.

Elizabeth Whitechapel screamed in staccato bursts. The wet slapping speeded up to a blur.

“He’s one of the bigger ones,” Jervis noted, “and I don’t mean shoe size. But we soften the girls up first so they can take it.”

Lydia grew dizzy. Her head spun with the screams.

“And if you think that fucker’s big, take a look at Pretty Boy over there.” Jervis pointed to the adjoining hold. “You haven’t forgotten about him, have you?”

No, as a matter of fact she hadn’t. The holotype they’d reserved for Lydia was thumping the repulsion screen with its fingerless hands. Its raw meat face surged forward, red lust in its gelatin eyes.

“You’re gonna get every inch,” Jervis promised. “Right up the ass.”

It beat its massive erection against the screen and mewled.

Jervis laughed out loud. Lydia fainted.

««—»»

Wade awoke just past noon, glare on his face. Sunlight, he thought. Oh, bliss. He’d hidden the cruiser behind the town theater and had dozed off. He’d slept as if dead.

By now the cops would be going apeshit looking for White, Peerce, and Porker. And there was still the question of Lydia; she was the only one Wade trusted enough to tell, but where was she?

He left the cruiser, electing to return to campus on foot. He’d have a hard time explaining to the gate guard how he came to be driving Chief White’s cruiser without the company of Chief White. He crossed campus stealthily, mindful of police. Something deep in his gut told him not to return to the dorm, but this he dismissed as nerves. It was daytime now. He had nothing to fear in the daytime, did he?

He trotted down the bike path which paralleled the student shop. He stopped in his tracks and nearly shouted with joy.

His Corvette sat shining in the shop lot.

Wade ran. “Lydia! It’s me!”

No reply. But she must be close by—the keys were still in the Vette, and on the console lay Tom’s pendant that she found on the Route, and the little pistol. There was something else too, something that looked like a portable tensor lamp. Hadn’t he seen it before, at the sciences center?

“Lydia!”

Pieces of padlock lay on the pavement. The shop door stood ajar. Wade knew something was…fucked up. Inside, he peeped, “Lydia?” First he noted the untarped cars, then the jugs. Then he found Lydia’s Colt Trooper Mark III on the floor.

Then he heard voices.

The wall? he thought.

The voices were coming from the wall. Like walking in a dream, Wade moved closer. What is that? He noticed a black dot on the wall. But when he put a finger to it, he discovered it wasn’t a dot at all, but a hole.

Hole, he thought moronically. In the wall. Voices… Hole. Wade put his eye to the hole and looked in.

Jervis was hanging a naked girl on a harness. Behind him, a wall glowed orange around racks of big circles, like kegs. Steam rose amid distant machine sounds.

As if in supervision, Professor Dudley Besser looked on.

“You know, Prof, five girls doesn’t seem like much.”

“It’s exponential, Jervis,” Besser said. “The fissionizationvessels are needed only to provide basic metis prototypes. From there, after computer calculated transfections, the desired metis types are mass produced exponentially.”

“Oh,” Jervis remarked. “Like a production line.”

“In a sense, Jervis, yes.”

Wade’s eye seemed sewn open to the hole.

Jervis was kneeling now, punching some kind of nozzles into the bottom of the hanging girl’s feet.

“We still leaving tonight?”

“Yes, we have to. The stasisfield is draining.”

Jervis glanced up in a sudden concern. “What about Wade?”

“Leave Wade to me,” Besser said.

Was it Wade’s imagination, or was the nude girl in the harness…stretching?

Now Jervis was milking white sludge out of her feet. The sludge oozed from the nozzles into big jugs—identical to the jugs Wade had just seen in the shop. The gelatinous white glop reminded him of the stuff he’d seen in that sump at the clearing.

Wade, as usual of late, was doubting his sanity. This was a reasonable surmise when you were seeing and hearing people through a hole in a cinder block wall, the other side of which was a fucking parking lot, and even more reasonable when the people you were seeing and hearing through that hole were passively milking white sludge out of a naked girl in a harness. And Wade was right; the girl was indeed stretching. Her body now sagged fully to the floor. She looked boneless. Jervis took her down then and very calmly—Jesus, gag me! Wade thought—stuffed her into a big can. The girl’s head flapped like a rubber bag, her limbs as slack and pasty as baker’s dough. Jervis packed her in tight and lidded the container.

“I’ve still got some bodies to bury. Then can I—”

“Yes, Jervis, but be sure to tend to this first.” Besser handed Jervis something, a black cube of some kind, the size of one of those Rubik things. “It’s programmed to detonate at one minute after midnight. Make sure you’re back before recharge.”

“When’s that?”

“Eleven fifty five, exactly.”

A bomb, Wade concluded. They’re talking about a bomb.

Was Besser smiling? “And now I have a little business to tend to myself. I’ll trust you to see that there are no problems.”

“Right, Prof. Later.”

Then both figures left the glowing orange room or corridor or whatever it was. Wade took his eye from the hole, aghast.

He had no idea what he’d just seen or heard, nor did he try to explain it to himself. All he knew was this:

They had a bomb, and it was going to go off at one minute past midnight.

Tonight.

—

CHAPTER 31

Winnifred sauntered naked through the low warrens. Heaven down here, she mused. She was out of control in her ecstasy. The psilight bathed her flesh as stark as bone as she wandered amid the humming, tinged dark. She was probably insane by now.

Soon they’d be gone, to greater miracles ahead. The joy of being part of it stunned her. Me. Goddess Winnifred. Excited blood pumped through her breasts and sex, and there she went again, touching herself, plying herself with her fingers.

The psilight hummed. Orange mist glowed within the productionholds, relative influx of the catalyticexchangers, which ran constantly. These low warrens seemed to extend infinitely. Just how deep did they go?

A factory! she thought in rushing pulses. A factory of love!

The sisters paid her no mind. They were perfect in their duplicity. Most were naked, as Winnifred herself, unflawed bodies moist in the orange tint. She recessed into the emwguidancetrackingpoint, a simple processor which countered magnetic quadrupole activity, generating negative kinetic charge momentum. The chamber was just a black honeycombed wall laced with fine threads. She sat down. Here, in the labyrinth’s heart, she would finish her orgasm.

Murmuring, she closed her eyes. The psilight licked her nerves, sucked heat into her body. She filled her mind with the most base sexual images: she was a cave woman being gang-raped in the woods. One dirty Neanderthal after the next stuck a penis that had never been washed into her mouth. Some came right there, sending globs of sperm down her throat, or pulling out to spatter her enraptured face. Other used the oral act as a primer after which they rammed their excited cocks into her sex, humped her hard in the dirt—one after another—until she was filled with semen, overflowing...

Winnifred’s legs tensed as the images grew more vile. She was being choked, sodomized, spat on and pissed upon, yet each demonstration only inflamed her more. Then she lay sopped and filthy; above her the cavemen stood round, all chuckling, as they masturbated in unison for a final climax. By the time they were all done coming on her, Winnifred felt covered with a hot, pale rue, and then—

Her fingers worked furiously, and there it went, like a bomb burst in her loins.

Lovely, lovely...

When she opened her eyes, a shadow stood over her.

“Dudley?” She squinted; it was him. “What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you,” answered the dark voice.

What could he want? He was supposed to be bringing in the holotype. She got up, taming her disdain. What did they need him for anyway? He was fat and arrogant. He sickened her.

Immediately, his fat arms were about her; he was kissing her, caressing her. “I love you,” he whispered, and urged her back into the servicepass. Here the psilight shined more keenly, replenishing her desires. His fat fingers fiddled at her sex. She could feel the puny erection through his size 54 trousers.

Lips like a fish groveled to hers. His tongue went into her mouth, his hand squeezed her buttocks.

Winnifred giggled. “Oh, Dudley, you’re impossible.”

His trousers fell. He pushed her to her knees.

So that’s what he wants. She gave it her best, pushing up, but—

“I’m sorry, Dudley, but you’re so fat I can’t get to it!”

Besser looked down. “Maybe you can get to this, then.”

Winnifred screamed. Besser jammed infusers into her neck, one in each hand, then discharged a third into her navel. The overdose of calciumdecimationliquetactor flooded her bloodstream. Winnifred’s bones dissolved at once, and she flopped on the floor.

Besser stepped on her stomach. Winnifred spouted vomit.

“How fat am I now, bitch?”

He stepped on her head, which squashed.

“How’s this for fat, hmmm?”

Then, chuckling, he walked all over her, like someone trodding grapes to mash. She looked ridiculous now, an inchoate, squirming mass. He picked her up and slopped her down on a levslat. Winnifred could only blubber in defense. He was trying to rape her on the slat, his little bone prodding her spread flesh, seeking entrance.

Chubby hands kneaded her around like a wet towel, but soon the attempts faltered. Any orifice he sought to invade proved too slack for coital purchase. Instead, he panted, laughing, and masturbated. Winnifred could only slog upon the slat.

Besser squeezed her head again. Her eyeballs popped out, suspended by nerves. “Here’s some fat for you,” he announced. He ejaculated massively into her squashed face.

Winnifred’s dreams of godhood pulsed away as quickly. Besser dragged her down the pass, opened a hatch, and then was stuffing her into one of the dropchutes. Winnifred wailed in blubbering squeals. She flopped in resistance but to no use, oozing into the chutehatch like warm porridge.

“Goodbye, Winnie.” Besser smiled and pulled the releaserod. Immediately, she fell. Just minutes ago she’d wondered how deep the labyrinth was—now she was finding out. She tumbled sloppily straight down. For minutes? Hours? She didn’t know. Through the labyrinth’s bowels she descended, down and down…

The dropchute emptied into a slime walled hold. Winnifred dumped out onto the floorwall, landing in a pile of excrement. She churned. Ten stout holotypes surrounded her, flexing upward on corded limbs. Plump tongues fell out of slatted mouths, and their erections, long as human arms, were more proof than she’d ever need of their arousal. Here, finally, were the cavemen of her fantasies. She floundered in the midst of them—a relief package from the gods—as they hurried to line up for this obvious and ultimate outrage: an alien gang bang.

When they were finished, they ate her.

««—»»

From the basement utility room, Jervis sent the elevator to the sixth floor. Then he shorted the terminals and bypassed the control relay. Now the elevator was stranded.

I’m being creative, he thought. He walked up to the fourth floor, carrying under one arm five county manhole covers. They weighed eighty pounds apiece. On four, he forced open the elevator door and looked down. Then he smiled.

He was grateful Czanek had gotten the address. Here it is. He dropped the manhole covers all at once. The floor shuddered.

He rang the doorbell.

“Vas? Sarah?”

“Meter man,” Jervis said.

“Zählerableser?” The door opened a crack. “Zerr ist no meter.”

Jervis grinned. “Hi, Wilhelm.”

Wilhelm’s handsome face pinched. “Vas ist…? You!”

Jervis smacked the door open. Enraged, Wilhelm stepped back. He wore a black robe with a Das Reich emblem on the breast.

“Vut do you vahnt?”

“Revenge—no, cosmogenic justice,” Jervis corrected.

Wilhelm laughed. “You vahnt to fight me, Arschkipf?”

“You took what was mine. Let’s just say that compensation is in order.”

“Ich pisse dir gleich ans Bein.” Wilhelm produced a pistol. A Luger, Jervis noted. Why am I not surprised? Did the guy carry guns around in his robe? Wilhelm cocked the parabellum slide. “Get out or I vill blow you guts up all over zah valls. Out! Schnell!”

Was he bluffing? Perhaps a little provocation would tell. “Say, your father surrendered to the Russians, didn’t he?”

“Schwein! Mein fah zer vas unt war hero! He vun zah Knight’s Cross mitt oak leaf clusters at Sevastopol!”