Coven

by David Barnett

  “What kind of files were they?”

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

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

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

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

  Tom.

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

  ««—»»

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I don’t know,” Czanek admitted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Jervis lit still another cigarette.

  This kid smokes more than a coal furnace.

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

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

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

  ««—»»

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

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

  A sergeant showed them in and left.

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

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

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

  “What have you got?”

  “Oxidized residuum, two eight inch counterabrasions.”

  “Depth?”

  “About .23 mils.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Do you think it’s indexed?”

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

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

  Great, Wade thought. A miniature Three Mile Island.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I don’t get it,” Lydia said.

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

  —

  CHAPTER 17

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

  Tom stared. The sister was showing him things.

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

  Ingenious, unspeakable, the monarch stared back.

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

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

  —Tom, what’s that?

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

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

  “You know, an animal, a pet.”

  —What’s a pet?

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

  —Tom! What’s that?

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

  “It’s a hitchhiker,” Tom said.

  —What’s a hitchhiker?

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

  —Oh, replied the sister.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  —What’s beer?

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

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

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

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

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

  “Oh, yeah? What’s that?”

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

  “Oh, but I’m not paying,” Tom said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  To the labyrinth.

  ««—»»

  All Lydia knew was that she liked him.

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