Covenant

by John Everson

  God. The head had slipped from her chest to her belly and then lower, and she reached down to scratch the skin along the laces of her bikini and suddenly knew what the heat really was. She wanted to fuck!

  “What…?” she began to say, and then, through blurred eyes, she could see that the others felt it too. They were all behaving strangely, their faces glazed as their hands knotted into fists and then sneaked across their bodies to scratch themselves, sneakily at first, and then without care for propriety. Rhonda’s tongue was licking her upper lip as her left hand disappeared into her bikini top, and Karen had sat down with her back to the wall, allowing her fingers to gouge red trails on the white flesh of her inner thighs.

  Then Rhonda’s hand pulled away from her breasts, allowing one tit to hang free obscenely as she stepped out of her bikini bottoms to expose the curly black hair of her cunt. Quiet, shy Monica had even slipped her hand inside her bikini bottoms. Rachel watched as the girl’s fingers bunched and relaxed rhythmically against the taut material of her suit. She didn’t seem to care that her friends could clearly see her masturbating. They had always been close friends…but not that close.

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen women in action,” the voice said. “Show me what you’ve got, girls.”

  Rhonda moved like a zombie toward Bernadette, one hand lodged in the exposed thatch of dark hair between her legs, the other hand supporting her young but already heavy, fleshy left breast, fingers pinching an erect brown nipple. She moaned as she moved with obvious intent toward her friend. The smaller girl had backed against the wall and was looking wide-eyed at the rest as if they were aliens. She alone seemed unaffected by the strange erotic heat that had stolen the wills of her friends. She alone was not touching herself in some obscene way.

  “No!” she screamed as Rhonda’s lips pressed to her own.

  “No, no, no!” she cried, and threw herself from the room.

  “I didn’t say you could leave,” the voice said smoothly. They all heard him. But Bernadette continued to run down the path leading to the ocean.

  In a moment, there was a short scream from outside the cave, but the girls barely heard it. All of them were engrossed in the honey-sweet sensation that had blurred their minds. The sexy heat was coating their limbs, throbbing in their thighs, pouring like hot honey down their throats. They were swimming, drowning, engulfed in its musk. They abandoned themselves to it, lapping it up like mother’s milk. They felt starved for it, couldn’t get enough of it, couldn’t taste it fast enough. They touched themselves and longed to touch their friends. Their suits dropped in a jumble of colorful triangles on the cave floor and the five girls quickly stepped toward one another, eyes glazed and tongues searching. The cave floor soon became a tumble of sucking, rubbing flesh. There was no hesitation or shyness as they rolled around with one another, arms and legs outstretched. They kissed in blind abandon, mouth seeking mouth, hand slipping down and inside as one through the mud.

  They didn’t even stir when Bernadette returned from her frantic escape to stand in their midst. She was naked, her small breasts pale and beaded with seawater. A puddle of cold water formed around her feet as drops perspired down her slender thighs, beaded in the wiry tangle of her pubic hair and splattered to the rock floor, drip by drip by drip. The girls formed a circle, twining and moaning around her feet, a humid sultry breeze of sex pounding against the cool breeze of the surf that slid from Bernadette’s body. None of the girls seemed to care that Bernadette was also bleeding heavily from a deep gash that ran from her left eye to cross her forehead and disappear into the wet coils of her hair.

  Rachel would later remember sucking on that cut as Bernadette’s strangely unfocused eyes rolled in her head and deep laughter sprang from her girlish belly. Seawater sprayed from her mouth as she laughed, cooling the girls who moaned and writhed closer to Bernadette, thirsting for more of her cool wetness to assuage their strange heat, the ocean soothing the red blush on their skins and then burning away as the fire within their bones burned hotter again. Their thirst was unquenchable, and Rhonda licked the drops from Melody’s breasts, and then tickled Bernadette’s underarms, drawing a deeper, longer laugh, and a thicker, messier spray from the girl’s mouth. They didn’t care—Bernadette was their fountain. Sex was their sun.

  Mostly what Rachel remembered of that afternoon was bliss. A tangle of hair and arms and breasts and musky, thirsty, unquenchable sex. A dirty, evil, wonderful hour of touching and sucking and playing lover and loved with one another. They were mindless. There were no boundaries. It was ecstasy.

  And then, as quickly as it had begun, the strange, distorted orgy was over.

  The honey taste dripped away from their lips to leave a bitter residue of iron and salt. Their vision cleared.

  Rachel lifted her mouth from the hard nipples of Monica’s firm eighteen-year-old chest and met her friend’s look of horror with equal disgust.

  Karen rolled from between Melody and Rhonda and spit the taste of their orgasms from her lips, grabbing and holding her discarded suit ineptly across her well-explored privates. Her eyes looked wild with fright and incomprehension at what had just happened.

  And Bernadette stood in the middle of them and smiled crazily, congealed blood smeared across her breasts and the tiny pit of her belly button and the light, short hair of her pubes. The same blood that coated all of the girls’ bodies.

  Melody wiped a hand across her face and stared at the blood that came away on her fingers for many seconds before her lips began to tremble. A low, horrible, frightened sound came from her lips.

  “That was fun,” Bernadette said.

  But it wasn’t Bernadette’s voice that said it. It sounded deeper, littered with razors and gravel. And her eyes looked wrong. Vacant. Like shiny black marbles rolling back in her skull.

  “We’ll have to do that again sometime.”

  Karen was frantically shimmying her bony legs into her suit bottoms. But she stopped and screamed when she saw the smears of blood on her calves, staining the edge of her suit. She started to push the suit bottoms back off, and saw the blood speckled on her feet. With a moan, she slid to the floor, suit bunched at her knees, eyes filled with tears and paralyzing fear.

  “Right now,” the Bernadette voice continued, “I’m sure you all want to go home.”

  Somebody else started to cry. Rachel thought it was Rhonda.

  “But first I’ll tell you about your gifts.”

  Bernadette’s hand pointed at Karen. Its fish-white fingers were streaked with blood.

  “The paintbrush will allow you to paint the most realistic artworks you can imagine. That brush has kissed the lips of saints and copulated with the diseased cunts of hell. Once it belonged to a man who brought the light of heaven to the walls and ceilings of churches. His name was celebrated throughout the halls of Europe, and written of by priests and artists alike in honor and awe. He was a saint on earth, until he found a succubus mistress who turned his praises to lust. The sacrilege of her breasts and thighs, used by men and women alike, became the new worship of his art, rather than the sterile purity of angels. His paintings were banned, and he fled with his mistress to a forgotten isle, where they painted each other’s bodies in piss and blood and slept with the bones of savages. I knew him well, and before he died, smothered in the decay of her flesh, he gave me this brush. Use it well.”

  Bernadette next pointed at Rachel. “Long ago, I received this necklace from an Etruscan prostitute. Night after night, she begged for the means to leave this world, but her master kept her bound and helpless until a customer was at the ready. One night, as she writhed and cried beneath the robes of a dealer in antiquities, one of her steady customers, the man was touched by pity for the woman. He asked what was the matter, and she told him. Now this dealer had just come into a huge treasure, stolen from the tomb of an ancient king. He was feeling generous, and reached into a satchel at his waist to pull free this necklace, placing it around her neck. ‘Us
e this well,’ he warned, and stood to take his leave of her. ‘It is said that it once adorned the neck of the most powerful high priestess in Egypt. Legend says it will show you whatever you wish to see. You may stare into the future to see your death, if you so wish, or use it to see your way to a new life.’ The prostitute did not understand his words at first, and he probably did not understand the power that he had bestowed. But eventually, the prostitute realized that she did not want to die. She used the sight of these gems to help plot her escape from her master, and eventually used it to become one of the most celebrated fortune-tellers in Italy. She died very rich. You may do the same. Touch someone’s hand with it around your neck and you will see their future. An easy talent. But let them inside you, and its vision deepens. You may tell them of the dark secrets their offspring will hold in the heaviest pits of their hearts.”

  Bernadette raised her voice like a carnival barker. “Amaze your friends and family. Seduce them, lie in your incestuous bed and whisper in their guilty ears of the whores their children will take. Kiss them and slip your tongue in their ears as you speak in whispers of when and how they will die.” She laughed grotesquely. “Your bed could be an addiction, an affliction!”

  Monica was staring in fear at the broken charcoal pencil. She held it away from her lap, yet couldn’t seem to drop it to the ground.

  Bernadette stooped to stroke her outstretched hand. When Monica pulled the pencil and hand away, her wrist was sticky.

  “That pencil once belonged to a mistress of the Marquis de Sade,” Bernadette said. “Do any of you girls know of the Marquis?” Bernadette’s empty gaze slid over the girls, stopping to stare and smile at Rhonda’s big breasts. The girl had covered her most private bits with an arm, but Bernadette stepped closer, slid her hand beneath Rhonda’s forearm and held the nipple hidden there between cold fingers. Rhonda shivered.

  “No, I don’t suppose any of you ladies have been bad enough to learn about the loves and lusts of the Marquis just yet. Remember the name—he would have loved the game we played here today.”

  Bernadette pinched harder until Rhonda screamed out loud. The creature who was once their friend only laughed harder, grabbed a lock of Rhonda’s hair and forced her face to look upward. Then Bernadette’s free hand came down to slap Rhonda’s cheek with a force that made all the girls shudder.

  “We have played a little game today,” Bernadette said. “Just a taste of what we could enjoy together. And you each enjoyed it, did you not?”

  She stepped back to Monica.

  “The Marquis’ mistress could not get enough of these sorts of games. She licked and sucked whatever he would entreat her to. And when she went home, bruised and sore and bleeding in all of her hidden places, she would draw the most ghastly visions. Beautiful bits of hell. I give you her gift. Her spirit still moves in this pencil, and it will help you see the depths to which we could plumb together.”

  Bernadette nodded back at Rhonda, who held the piano key.

  “Yours is a simpler gift. Play whatever instrument you wish, and people will listen. You will hold them in your sway. You will be the Pied Piper of Terrel. They will do as you bid. And if you play for me, I will come to you and dance in your bed all night and all day. We will take your lovers apart, bone by bone. We will cover ourselves in their blood to complete our own sweet love. For I do love you girls, do you know that?”

  Bernadette’s body leaned in to kiss Rhonda on the lips, and left bloody mouth prints on each of the other girls in turn.

  “These are gifts from me, your genie, your devil.” Bernadette laughed. “Enjoy their fruits. Use them well, for you will pay me for them with your lives. I loan your lives back to you. But I warn you: Ignore my gifts, ignore me, and I will suck your shells as dry as I did this one. Ahh, she was sweet while she lasted.”

  With that, Bernadette’s body crumpled to the floor.

  “Let’s make a little Covenant,” the voice continued, without a mouth once again.

  And moments later, the fate of five women was sealed.

  Angelica shook tears from her face as she remembered the last time she’d been trapped in this room. When the Covenant had been struck. She’d never meant to keep it. And she knew the others hadn’t either. They’d thought as soon as they’d gotten clear of the cliff that it would all fade away.

  But He’d never let them go.

  “The interest on your loan is due,” a voice chuckled deep inside her head.

  Angelica let the tears flow fast and free.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  One benefit of working for a big-city daily is that you make contacts. In lots of strange places. And Joe happened to have a couple friends in the adoption industry.

  And it was an industry. There was money exchanged in unconscious irony beneath strip-joint tables, and a black market of babies traveling along a pipeline paved with both good intentions and greed. He’d done a whole series on the issue for the Tribune, and had managed to make a couple friends in the process, along with the predictable enemies.

  The friends were actually an unusual benefit to this particular story. The enemies were natural enough. Nobody liked to be exposed for graft.

  That thought brought to mind Ann, his former girlfriend.

  Or girlfiend, as one particular smartass at the paper had dubbed her.

  She’d been well intentioned, if totally unethical in her little graft connection to the alderman who held a lucrative waste management contract over several people’s heads. In trying to take the alderman down, Joe had sent his own lover over the waterfall as well.

  The resulting sick feeling hadn’t gone away in an hour or a day or even a week. The scenario had played over and over in his head when he’d been forced to break the story. As it had on almost every day since. But there was some iron within him that didn’t bend. He did not regret his decision to run the story. To expose her in the tale of corruption. She had made her bed. But he still awoke on his own sometimes to the sound of her accusing cries.

  “Joe, they’re going to send me to prison! To prison, Joe!”

  She’d looked at him incredulously after reading the page-three story in that day’s Tribune. The worst part about it was that she hadn’t come flying at him with fists raised, voice screaming. Instead, she’d simply deflated, as if the article that connected her and the alderman and a handful of other city officials with the graft scam was a giant pin, and she a balloon. She had sunk to the wooden floor of her apartment, legs crossed over each other, head hanging almost low enough to kiss her own toes.

  Joe had left her that way, crying in her oversize Chicago Cubs nightshirt, not knowing how to answer for his honesty. Not knowing how to face the fact that his job’s habit—no, duty—of exposing people’s darker activities had finally come home to roost. It had swooped down on his private life in a way that didn’t allow him to maintain his distance from the subjects of his story. This time, he’d fucked up his own life while exposing corruption that was ruining the lives of others.

  He hadn’t tried to fix it. That would have made him as corrupt as those he’d exposed. He tried to go back to the newsroom, to take joy in an exposé over the Illinois Tollway Authority. But it felt hollow then. The “story” had ceased to matter to him. In losing the independent spirit of Ann to the truth of the story, he’d killed a part of himself. After a few weeks of staring at his reflection in the newsroom VDT monitors and seeing only empty, half-felt words take shape on their screens, he’d finally walked away. He didn’t even clean out his desk. He’d simply run.

  All the way to Terrel.

  And now the thirst and drive of “the story,” the thing that had driven him to journalism in the first place, had returned. He’d come out of hibernation, come out of the mind-numbing morass of library renovation and summer festival “coverage” to find himself thirsting after the truth again. And in doing so, he found himself, again, screwing up the lives of others who had secrets they wished to keep. In his latest story, he
was messing with the lives of five women. They would be hurt by his research. But he couldn’t stop. That was why he was waiting for Angie Harkenride to take his call. That was why he was putting up with ten minutes of Kenny G on-hold music on a long distance call. Ultimately, he had always believed in the importance of being a reporter, even if he’d shrunk inside himself and hidden for a while from its consequence.

  Kenny G suddenly was replaced by a click and a warm, feminine “Hello, Joe?” that instantly heated his blood. There were some things…and some people, that he missed in Chicago.

  “Angie,” he said. “I need you to talk to Brett. I need a little favor.”

  As soon as he hung up the phone, Joe found himself wondering how long it would take Angie to get in touch with Brett, and for him to actually search through the records. He hated having to trust his research to someone else’s schedule. He paced the apartment a couple times, knowing that it would probably take hours—or a couple days—before he’d hear back from Brett. Then he realized that there was some research that he could be doing himself.

  In the rat race of the day, and his rush to get to the registrar’s office to try to narrow down the date of Angelica’s child’s birth and adoption, Joe had almost forgotten his conversation with George in the morning.

  He retrieved his backpack from where he’d dropped it by the front door, and pulled out the copy of Witchcraft, Demonology, and Possession, setting it on the table next to his recliner. After fixing himself a Jack and Coke, he sat back in the comfortable chair and pulled the lever to raise his feet.

  The copyright in the book read 1956, but he’d never heard of the publisher, Necrorium Press. The contents listed a dozen topics of occult interest, from “Keeping Familiars” and “Calling a Demon” to “Possession” and “Sacrifice.”