This is an excerpt from the new hardcover release
of Ed Lee's COVEN
from Necro Publications:
• • • • •
Murder, he thought. Blood.
That's all the student could think about, all he could see in his mind--the
blood. The afterimage burned behind his eyes like red neon: the still
corpse in the closet, castrated, headless. And the blood. Had they actually
painted the walls with the man's blood?
Alone now, the student lay exhausted on the jail cot. The station's
murky light drained into the cell; he felt submerged in dark. He tried
to sleep, to forget about the blood, but even worse images flushed in
and out of his head. He was standing in the moonlit dell, eyes peeled
back like skinned grapes. Around him, the woods dripped and shivered.
Carcasses, dozens of them, lay swollen to bursting beneath the foot-deep
fog. The student wore the stench of rot. He breathed it, tasted it.
From the trees, and from beneath the fogtop, faces of things peered
at him and shrieked. Not animals. Not people...
Things.
Mother of God, the student thought.
--then jerked awake on the jail cot.
Trying to sleep was useless. He remembered too much, in too much detail:
his mad sprint out of the fog-sodden dell, the sound of pulpous horrors
crunching underfoot, and the monstrous laughter, their chitinous witchlike
liquid giggles...
Please let me be insane.
What a relief that would be, to dismiss it all to insanity. But the
student knew he could not, he knew it was real. Images continued to
march through his head, and a parade of morbid questions. What in God's
name were they doing back there? How many people had they murdered?
He'd seen their little graveyard in the woods. How many bodies had they
buried? And whose? How much more blood had been spilled?
But amid the questions, one certainty remained.
I'm next. They're coming for me next.
In the half-dark, the student leaned forward and touched the jail's
cement walls. Yep, that's cement, all right. Need more than a French
bread to bust through that. His fingers ran down the frame of bars,
jerked the locked steel door hard against its mount. Yep, this is a
jail. No doubt a-fucking-bout it.
Safe, he thought.
Yes, he was safe; this was a secure cell. For the time being at least,
the student was safe from those women...those hideous women in black.
• • • • •
Old Exham Road unwound like a lay-by through a corrupt dimension. Nighted
swamps and forests soon gave way to open flat fields and a crystal sky.
All the way back to campus, Jervis' despair seemed to sit beside him
like a hitchhiker. He chain-smoked Carltons and drank more beer. Soon
he came in range of campus reception; WHPL sizzled in like rain, Brian
Ferry crooning about the same old blues and brides stripped bare. Skeletal
stalks of fields of corn stretched on forever. The crescent moon looked
like a reaper's scythe-soon it would swoop down and cut him in half.
Lying underwater in a foot of black muck, lying in pieces next to the
little ring.
At last the endless ride began to end. The lights of the campus glittered
beyond. He sped up Campus Drive, passed the Circle, and turned at Frat
Row. The giant Crawford T. Sciences Center stood completely black, like
an intricate carved mesa. Distant music floated down the Hill, pipe
sounds like druid flutes.
He idled past Lillian Hall, the largest of the female dorms. In the
long lot he saw only a red 300ZX, which belonged to that weird redhead
who ran the horse stables out at the agro site. But then the massed
shadow lapsed. Two more vehicles were parked in the lot: Sarah's white
Berlinetta and the customized white van.
He stopped to stare at the van. It belonged to the German guy, the guy
who'd stolen Sarah from him. He fucks her in that, came the simple thought.
She gives him head in it. But sight of both vehicles assured what he'd
feared. She was back. She would be taking classes this summer too, and
her dorm was right across from his. He'd probably see her every day,
her averted eyes and tight-squeezed smile, and he'd probably see a lot
of the German guy too. Jervis would be reminded of his loss every single
day.
He got out of his Dodge Colt and trudged drunk up toward his own dorm.
The moon slice had turned sour yellow. In the center court, his own
heartbreak made him look back once more at Lillian Hall.
The faintest orange light flickered in the end window, second floor--Sarah's
window. They were up there right now. They were together in bed, asleep
in candlelight, asleep in love.
Jervis wanted to bay at the moon. The images dropped into his head like
stones. How could he live knowing she loved someone else? A crimson
flash sparked through his vertigo. Was it premonitory, these jerking,
unbidden mental sights? Again, he pictured himself cut in half. He pictured
holes in the ground, graves. He felt that the image might be symbolic:
seeing himself cut in half. Could that symbolize a separation of mind
and body? Or did it mean something entirely different? Symbols, he thought.
The more he looked at the candlelit window, the more he saw himself
butchered.
This sensory ghost seemed to linger as he approached the opposing male
dorm. He felt dead as he shuffled up the court. Wait. Dead? Was that
how he felt? Yes, a corpse walking, dead but walking. Three quarters
to rot and no life left inside but walking still.
Then the image, or the symbol, magnified--
--perforated dead arms slick to the elbow with blood--
(Whose blood? My blood?)
--and gaps rotted through the hands which held the bouquet of long-stemmed
roses--
I still love you, Sarah, he thought, his tears running.
But in this ghastly and third inscrutable image, why was his shredded
green-gray face set in a grin?
"Symbols," he muttered.
His hands felt wet.
• • • • •
SOMETHING--a word. Suuuuuuu--
Errant rhythms somehow like pictures showed black like onyx. He saw
sounds and heard colors-red, pumping. Red running over faces, flesh.
Tongues licking red.
Yes. A word. Supremate.
Madness was a sound, images-pressure in his head. The word was a name.
Someone was trying to tell him something. I am like a promise in the
wind. Give me service and I give you power. You will have power untold.
Madness, the sound, floated up from the abyss. The sound was screams.
Orgies? Or meals? Both.
Underneath, deep in black, the great face smiled at him.
Red lips sighed and parted. Bare breasts glistened in steam. The lips
stretched slowly back, showing mouths full of needle teeth.
• • • • •
Power, Besser thought. Power untold.
He awoke in the dark of his office. Sweat drenched his clothes, grew
chill on his face. He nearly screamed.
The red lips, the hungry mouths full of teeth, left his mind. The trances
always left the light raw in his eyes, and any other sense perception
irritating, like nails across slate. The second hand sounded like someone
hitting a garbage can with a hammer. Once he'd heard an ant walk across
the floor. Anything but the faintest of light hurt his eyes for at least
an hour.
The trances had started weeks ago. But were they really trances? That
was the only way they'd agreed to describe them. At first he and Winnifred
had feared their own sanity. "Debris stimulated scotopic maladaptation
compounded by symptomal endophasic perceptual-induction," she'd
first declared. "Inproportional catecholamic production causated
by reactive deviations of cerebral synaptic-response."
Whatever would he do with her? She jumped to conclusions almost as quickly
as she jumped into bed. But Besser knew by now that this "trance"
phenomenon was not relative to any psychiatric disorder. It wasn't lucid
dreaming or unsystematized hypnagogia, and it couldn't be scotopic because
it wasn't visual. In the trances, they saw without seeing. They were
simply shown.
"Power," he said aloud to the beautiful strange-edged dark.
The trances left no detail unclear. Each night they came stronger into
his head, and emphasized his importance.
(Yes! Importance.)
--and the power, the promised power.
He went to the window. The night outside looked unreal. Colors seemed
crisper, blazing, but darker. Lights glazed. Beyond, the campus looked
compressed to a scary, opalescent clarity, etched in brilliant darkness.
Darkness, Besser mused. Hadn't the face--the submerged face in their
dreams--implied that darkness was now their light?
Behind him, Winnifred stirred, murmuring like troubled sleep. If the
dean only knew, Besser thought. Winnifred Saltenstall was beautiful
by anyone's standards; Besser--fourteen years older than her thirty-five--weighed
over three hundred pounds. What else but the trances could explain her
sudden, constant lust for him? He'd seen her past lovers: well-built,
handsome young men, reminders of what Besser would never be. So the
trances were a bond. Mental. Sexual.
Winnifred Saltenstall was married to Dean Saltenstall. The dean was
powerful, important, and very rich. He was also very gay. He'd merely
married Winnifred to verify respectability. They had a deal which worked
out quite well: they would pursue their own sexual interests as they
pleased, discreetly of course, and serve one another's domestic needs
as necessary. "It's easy to be married to someone who buys you
a new Maserati every year," she'd once said, "and doesn't
care who you fuck on the side."
"Gods," Winnifred muttered now. "God and goddess."
Her eyes fluttered open. She breathed deep in her chair, rousing from
the trance. Besser was staring at her breasts.
"Oh, Dudley," she whispered. "It was so strong."
"I know. The trances get stronger every night."
Her pose relaxed. Her knees parted. "Are you sure we're not crazy?
Maybe it's hallucinotic."
Professor Besser promptly frowned. "Delusional behavior and hallucinations
are not shared."
"Folie à deux, Dudley. It can happen--it's documented."
"Yes, I know," he scoffed. "Multiple-hysterical viewpoints,
di-exocathesis, and such. These are psychopathic labels, Winnie. We
clearly are not psychopathic. This is real."
"I suppose it is," she conceded. "But it scares me. The
trances scare me to death."
Besser wasn't listening anymore; he was staring. Her breasts showed
through her opened blouse, heavy in the lace bra.
"Ghosts," she said.
"What?"
"The trances must be ghosts."
For pity's sake, he thought. This was not the first time she'd suggested
the supernatural. "That's ridiculous. Ghosts? Demons?"
"'Paramental entities' is the proper term." She ran a finger
across her bare stomach. "The face in the trances, the voices--it's
all evil."
"For pity's sake," Besser said.
Her hand rested on her thigh. Moved up. Squeezed.
"Evil," she repeated, and smiled.
Here was the sharpest aftereffect of the trances: raw, pathological
lust. They both trembled with it. The trances accelerated their sex
drives, forced them to fuck. How many times had they done it already
today? Eight times? A dozen?
The great face in the trance called it his love.
Ghosts? Besser thought.
Winnifred slipped off her dampened panties and began to masturbate.
She did this quite a bit now, anytime it suited her. "I'm so horny,
Dudley. The trances make me so horny."
Teasing bitch, he thought. She always liked to tease him first. She
unsnapped her bra, releasing the large, beautiful breasts. She caressed
them, plucked out the nipples. Her ass squirmed in the chair, and she
licked her lips.
Besser had been teased all his life by people like her. But he was powerless
in his lust now. He unbuckled his size 54 belt, lowered his trousers
to relieve the throbbing. He hated her for this, but he remembered--what?
Promises? Yes, and power.
Then he remembered the faces behind the face. Who were these forlorn
creatures? He felt them watching this very moment, phantasmal voyeurs.
Their lips were so red, their teeth like slivers of glass. Could they
really be ghosts?
Winnifred spread her vulva with her fingers, showing it to him. "Isn't
it pretty, Dudley?"
"Yes," Professor Besser said.
"Do you like it?"
"Yes."
"Do you want to fuck it?"
Besser groaned. His knees were buckling. Teasing, teasing bitch! It
wasn't fair that she should be able to control him only because he was
fat. Her lust propped him up like a dummy, a clown.
"Come over here and fuck it."
He didn't like to think of himself as a clown animated by the beauty
of women. Yet he obeyed her lewd command, helpless. He would have his
revenge later, when better things had come...
Power, he thought, crawling to his nymph. Power untold.
--YES, promised the voice in his head.
"I love you, Dudley," she sighed. She spread her legs, offering
the slit of her sex like a prize. Its pinkened wet glimmer lured him,
and seemed to say, Be a good clown.
He dragged her to the carpet and kissed the prize. Squirming, she grabbed
his head, rubbed his face in it.
I love you too, he thought. Till death do us part.
--YES, the great face repeated. --OH, YES.
• • • • •
Red pumping over orgies and food.
--We wish we could be you.
Chaos wed to perfection. The perfection was a labyrinth and madness
was a sound. Were these memories? Taste: warm copper, salt, meat. Sight:
swollen breasts bared, loins inflamed.
Sound: screams.
Lips parted over needle teeth. Something--a word. Supremate. Sleek,
white throats gulped gouts of blood.
• • • • •
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