Coven

by David Barnett

  More and more Penelope felt pleasantly drugged. There was only lethargy and the intense, primitive horniness that made no sense. The figure stood at her feet now. Penelope recognized it at once as the woman in the black cape and hood, yet now she seemed younger and thin, like a girl in puberty. The white, smiling face gazed down through onyx black sunglasses.

  —We wish we could be you.

  But why should she wear sunglasses indoors? And, yes, she was very young, for her cape fell open and revealed small, predeveloped breasts and a hairless pubis.

  Suddenly the girl seemed very sad.

  Penelope was not herself and never would be. Images of sex remained stuffed into her head, stupefyingly precise. How could such thoughts, once terrifying, once her worst fears, now delight her to madness? Penelope, a virgin, cringed to be fucked.

  —I have what you want right here. Our master’s gift.

  “What?” Penelope was finally able to speak.

  —YES, came the voice. But this voice was ragged and black. The single word concussed in her head.

  It was a man’s voice.

  Penelope moaned. She quivered in heat. The dim, silverish light seemed to smother her in lust.

  The girl set something down and backed away. —We wish we could be you, she said sadly. Then she left.

  Was someone breathing? Penelope heard a noise.

  Grunting, she propped herself on her elbows. She looked past her bare feet at what the girl had left.

  It was a bucket. It was just a bucket.

  She fixed her eyes on it. The sound grew louder. It reminded her of gurgling, of respiration. Then—

  Did something bulge over the bucket’s rim?

  The gurgling quickly rose to an excited, wet sputtering. The bucket began to rock back and forth, over and over—

  —until it tipped over.

  A large puddle of dark slop poured out of the pail. It seemed brown, shining; it shifted slightly. Clumps of gurgling bubbles escaped its amorphous center. The mass floundered; it seemed to be straining upward…

  Within the mass, a pair of lopsided white lumps emerged.

  They were eyes.

  It’s seeing me, Penelope slowly realized. Though merely blobs bereft of pupil and iris, these floating white lumps were seeing her.

  The thing was staring at her. Did it desire her? Did her raw, sweating nakedness excite this…this thing? She thought so, for next it strained upward again, with much more force. Streams of bubbles spurtled out below the two white lumps.

  Penelope giggled. She wished she could touch the atrocious mass. She wanted to put her feet in it and draw the bubbling slop between her legs, coddle the lumpy gelatin. The woman in black must be a witch, she thought, and giggled again, Witches. Devils. What else could explain the percolating thing before her? The woman in black must be a witch, and she’d conjured up this devil from Hell.

  But why?

  Now Penelope realized what the mass of glop was straining to do. It surged upward again. It held there, shaking. Then, something gave—

  —and it stood up.

  It stood before her like a man. In relief, it shivered. It had a lumplike head, stringy brown legs, and arms that sagged nearly to the floor.

  —YES, she heard.

  And the woman: —Yes!

  The thing’s erection stood out like a knotted post.

  Penelope sighed.

  The thing chuckled.

  In hitching, dripping slowness, it knelt sloppily between her legs and lay on her in a delicious, warm weight. Penelope cooed, already beginning to tremor in orgasm. Passions merged like intent plumes of flame; beauty and revulsion coalesced.

  Then the face of held together muck lowered, dripping, and gave Penelope a big wet hot lumpy kiss…

  —

  CHAPTER 10

  At the precise moment that a grossly maladjusted redhead named Penelope was, with much delight, losing her virginity to a man shaped cohesion of slop, an old joke prone conservative business major named Tom stepped into his dormitory room on the eighth floor of Clark Hall and witnessed what, within minutes, would describe the end of his life. What he saw, exactly, was an attractive woman sitting on his desk, wearing only a white blouse and high heeled shoes. That’s right—no skirt, no panties. And what this woman was doing, exactly, was masturbating. To say the least, this struck Tom as an oddity. When you walked into your dorm room well past 2 A.M., the very last thing you expected to see was an attractive woman sitting on your desk masturbating. No, you did not expect that at all. Especially when the woman was Winnifred Saltenstall, the wife of the dean of Exham College.

  ««—»»

  Earlier Tom had stopped at the campus police station to see if his friend Jervis Phillips had involuntarily checked in for the night. The night cop, a rather bulbous young man known as Porker, was applying Giant brand peanut butter to a row of English muffins. He was using an ice cream scoop instead of a spoon.

  “Excuse me, Officer Porker,” Tom said. “Anyone booked tonight?”

  “No,” Officer Porker replied. He seemed addled by this intrusion. “You want to be the first?”

  “Not really. Say, I saw in the Sears ad that they’re having a sale this week on backyard sheds.”

  “So?”

  “Thought you might want to know, in case you’re in the market for a new lunch box.”

  Porker stopped clicking the scoop. “My patience is getting thin.”

  “Yeah, but the rest of you sure isn’t.”

  “You’ve got about a second to get out of here, McGuire.”

  “A second? It’d take you that long just to get out of the chair.”

  “That’s it.” Porker began to get up.

  “All right, I’m leaving.” But Tom paused at the door. He could not resist. “Hey, Porker, here’s an old one. How do you get your mother into an industrial freight elevator?”

  “How?” Porker asked.

  “You grease the doorway and throw in a Twinkie!”

  Tom roared laughter. Porker grabbed his nightstick, yelling, “McGuire, I’m gonna kick your motherfucking—”

  Tom boogied, revved the Camaro, and split. What else am I going to do with all these jokes? he rationalized.

  But cruising down Campus Drive, his levity waned. The night seemed creepily dry of life. Hollowness followed him back to the dorm like a tailgater, and soon odd thoughts probed his mind, thoughts that seemed like someone else’s, a mad person’s, perhaps. Rhythms of words whose meanings made no sense creaked back and forth in his brain. He heard colors and saw screams. Then he saw something else, much more clearly: a murky shape in spattered moonlight—a man. The man’s face was blacked out. He held a shovel in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other.

  Tom’s stomach shimmied. He cringed at the image, almost veered off Pickman Way. One too many Spatens, he dismissed.

  This, of course, all tracked spoor back to the last significant event of Tom’s evening. He rode the elevator up to 8. When he walked into his dorm room, what he heard was:

  —He’s here.

  What he saw was:

  Winnifred Saltenstall masturbating on his desk.

  And what he said, after an appreciable pause, was:

  “What the hell are you doing!”

  Mrs. Saltenstall’s face was flushed and lightly asweat. She’d been caught, not with her pants down, as the saying goes, but with them off. Her pose lost its tension, and she sat upright. “What’s it look like I’m doing?” she answered huffily. “I’m masturbating.”

  Tom could only stare in disbelief. This situation required some consideration. When he finally spoke, the strain of forethought made the next sentence seem guillotined. “Why—is Dean Saltenstall’s wife—masturbating—uh—on my—desk?”

  “I hate just sitting around, Tom.” She tossed her head, brushed back her hair. “I had to find something to do while we were waiting.”

  “Waiting for what!”

  “For you,” she said, and gr
inned.

  Tom’s head seemed to tick. He stalled again. Waiting?

  “We knew you’d get here eventually. So we waited.”

  Waited. Get here. Waiting. “Then it was you in town. In Besser’s De Ville.”

  “Uh huh,” she admitted. “We were driving around—scouting, you might say. We were looking for a suitable enlistee.”

  “Why do you keep saying we? You mean you and Besser?”

  “No, Dudley’s busy right now.” Winnifred’s grin spread as wide as her legs had been. “He’s helping our master.”

  Madness, Tom thought.

  “We,” she went on, “as in myself, and…her,” Winnifred Saltenstall pointed into the dark. “Your new sister, Tom.”

  A shadow stood in the corner. Tom turned on the overhead. What stood there looking at him was a freakish hooded woman in a long black cloak and sunglasses. She grinned…hideously.

  Fluid giggles floated up, like kindergarten kids laughing.

  Madness, Tom thought again.

  “We need you, Tom,” Winnifred said.

  —You’ll be happy with us. Our master will be very happy.

  Both women stepped forward. Winnifred continued, “We’re inviting you to take part in a miracle, Tom. We need you.”

  The woman in black kept giggling in abrupt, wet bursts. On and off, on and off, the giggling went, like the sped up cackle of a band of witches. The sound made Tom want to puke.

  Winnifred was giggling too. Her sparse trim of pubic hair showed unabashed, glistening from self excitation. A black pendant lay between her big, bloused breasts. It looked like an upside down cross. On her left hand was a square black ring. In her right hand she held—Tom’s eyes bulged—a hammer.

  The woman in black was holding something too. It looked small, slender, sharp. It looked like a nail.

  A nail? A hammer?

  Her shaded gaze shifted in on him; she moved gently forward. Her lips were red. Her face was lustrous, perfect white.

  Something glistened, and all at once Tom collapsed. Suddenly his neck hurt. He lay on the floor, paralyzed. Shadows stepped around him. Winnifred’s face smiled down like a godhead in the sky.

  Did someone say “Destiny”?

  The cloaked woman giggled some more. Tom felt numb. The black pendant swayed as Winnifred, girlishly uncoordinated, knelt very daintily and placed the nail in the center of Tom’s head.

  ««—»»

  And at precisely the same time that Tom McGuire was being introduced to “destiny” in a most bizarre manner, Wade St. John was having a nightmare. In this nightmare, Professor Dudley Besser, as an inbred, cannibalistic creek person wearing size 54 overalls, was dragging screaming halter topped blondes onto a nighted swamp pier, stripping them and chopping them up neat as a butcher. Like a machine, the heavy cleaver chunked through flesh, bone, and wood. As he chopped, a pendant swung back and forth about his fat, dirt lined neck. Professor Besser’s eyes were dim silver, and when he opened his mouth, dim silver light came out, and a silver moon cast dim silver light onto the dead water. Professor Besser was chopping away like a regular one man slaughterhouse. Chunk, chunk, chunk, the cleaver went, all night long. Wade was sitting in a lawn chair at the end of the pier. He was reading a book and drinking a bottle of Samuel Adams lager. He knew this was a dream and was therefore unconcerned that his biology professor was dismembering naked blondes mere yards away. Wade supposed he would help the girls if this weren’t a dream, but it was, so he didn’t. A casual glance upward showed him that Besser had kicked his psychotic chicanery up a notch. The overalls had come down and now he was copulating with one of the torsoed blondes...or at least trying. His obesity prevented any effective intercourse and eventually he just said “Damn it!” and began masturbating with another girl’s severed hand.

  Charming, Wade thought. Man, this is some fucked up dream.

  The cold beer was great in the dank hanging midnight heat of the swamp, but the book he was reading was not so great. It had a girl on the cover, who was beautiful in a way that could not be described. Each page of the book was blood-red. There was writing on them but the writing was in some indecipherable language that was somehow mocking. Dream knowledge informed Wade that only women could read the weird glyphs; men could not. A great fear rose in him, and he threw the book into the swamp. The chunk, chunk, chunk of Besser’s chopping had ceased. Then a scream burst forth loud as a trumpet. Terror pricked up Wade’s back, plucked his skin. Murmurs drifted vaguely in front of him. What were they? When Wade gazed down the pier, he shrieked. Professor Besser lay belly down by a rotted piling. He was no longer dressed in creekman’s overalls but in the usual slacks, shirt, and tie. He lay very still. Oh, and one other thing: his head was gone. Wade wondered where it was. He thought: People don’t take heads. They take exams, they take vitamins, but they don’t take heads! This seemed a very workable social rule; you could generally count on it. But soon the whereabouts of Professor Besser’s head became immaterial. A far more pressing matter arose. The pieces of the girls Besser had chopped up began to reassemble. Pretty, severed legs hopped about, awaiting reclamation. Arms waited to be reconnected to proper shoulders, while torsos bellied through the pile of twitching limbs. One girl with high, pointed breasts twisted an arm off another girl’s shoulder. “That’s not your arm! It’s mine!” Another girl with a broad rump clumped footless through the pile. “Where’re my feet?” she asked. “Has anyone seen my feet?” Slowly but surely the group of butchered girls pulled themselves back together. Wade wasn’t too keen on confronting a bunch of reassembled—and probably very pissed off—women. But the only way off the pier was through them, unless…unless… Wade looked into the swamp water. It was black, mirror still, and it smelled nice, like perfume. I wonder if this bitch is deep, he asked himself. “Of course it’s deep,” chided the girl with the rump. But what was that rasping noise? Wade’s eyes nearly popped out of his head; the girl was sharpening her teeth with a crosscut file. Not good, Wade reasoned. The high breasted girl said, “It’s more than deep, Wade. It’s bottomless.” Wade opted not to jump in the water. He would just have to fight the girls, and was that so bad? It should be easy; women were the weaker sex, right? “Right,” one girl answered. She was petitely slender, ninety pounds if that, with little cupcake breasts. She picked up Professor Besser’s headless, three hundred pound body as if it were a bag of packing peanuts. “See how weak I am?” she said, smiling. She heaved the massive corpse past Wade, where it hit the water like a pallet full of mason blocks. The girls rejoiced in laughter. Wade pissed his pants. No more need be said of the weaker sex. The girls were all reassembled now—perfectly—with no signs of Besser’s methodical butchery. “Does my hair look all right?” one girl fussed. “Oooo, that fat guy broke one of my nails!” complained another. “Girls, girls,” reminded a third. “We have work to do.” “Woman’s work,” came the low chorus. Their eyes all focused on Wade, but were they eyes or dim silver gleams? Wade didn’t know. That was the problem with dreams—you never knew what was what. Was a cigar a phallic symbol, or just a goddamn cigar? The girls closed in on him now, stepping in time very slowly. The high breasted girl assumed the group’s speaking chores. “Wade St. John, it’s time for your sentence.” “Huh?” Wade intoned. “You are an affront to womankind,” she said. “You treat women as objects for your own pleasure.” “Not true!” Wade yelled back. “I have great respect for the female mind.” The girls on the pier laughed, and their laughter was a song of truth. Wade faltered. How many girls had he taken for granted, used, discarded? Dozens? he thought. The girls on the pier laughed. Probably more like a hundred. How many had he deceived for the mindless entity in his pants, lied to, cheated on, hurt? For the first time in his life—and in a dream, no less—he realized what a despicable sexist piece of shit he was. This was the sentence he’d been waiting since puberty to pay. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.” “Tell that to all the girls you treated like garbage, all the girls you used.” “I�
��ll repent!” he exclaimed. The girls on the pier laughed. But he would, by God, if only they’d give him the chance. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he muttered, then heard an absolutely bloodcurdling scream. A shadow moved away. Wade sat spread legged in the lawn chair, his jeans down. The women watched, their eyes full of dim silver light. But what were they watching, and who had screamed? Then Wade knew: his appeal had been revoked. The spokeswoman was saying, “…and your sentence shall hereby be executed at once.” It didn’t take Wade long to figure this one out. The girl who’d been filing her teeth stood before them all, chewing something with vigor. Wade finally recognized the scream—his own—and he looked down in horror to see that he no longer possessed a pair of testicles. Wade screamed again, long and hard, and the girls rejoiced at his horror. The girl with filed teeth grinned as her jaws worked enthusiastically on their new fruit. “They’re kind of crunchy!” she exclaimed. She rubbed her stomach and swallowed. Wade threw up. Then someone shouted, “The Mother’s coming!” “She’s coming back!” the leader rejoiced. “She’s accepting another sacrifice!” Wade was mortified; he gestured at his crotch. “Haven’t I sacrificed enough?” “Your balls go to us,” the leader said. “The rest of you goes to the Mother.” Wade was lifted up and held over the pier’s edge. Behind him something rose from the water, an entity vast, black and immense. Wade could no more describe it than describe the notion of how the universe was made. It was the Mother. That’s all he knew, and all he needed to know. Now he would learn exactly what had happened to Professor Besser’s head. Wade screamed as his own head was completely encased by a huge, wet, black mouth. The girls fell to their knees in worship. “The Mother,” they chanted. “The Mother.” Wade’s head was bitten off. It was swallowed whole down a silken esophagus and eventually landed in a cavern, atop a mountain of heads. There were thousands, or even millions, of heads here, deep in the Mother’s belly. Soon the heads began to be digested in the squirming black stomach. Wade whooped as his consciousness dissolved, feminine enzymes reverting his psyche to wet pulp, then granules, then ash. The ashes of Wade St. John mixed with the ashes of the other men, and over time the ashes were spewed from some tight, miles high orifice, sifting out in a trail over sunlit fields and sweet smelling landscapes of new plowed soil. Moist, pretty things grew from that soil, the loveliest things, through the ashes of Wade’s soul. In other words, Wade was fertilizer.