Coven

by David Barnett

  “You’re right, Jerv. It sounds crazy. You been drinking?”

  “Of course. I guess I passed out at the end of it, because it happened around two A.M. He killed him.”

  “Slow down. Start at the beginning.”

  More hesitance. “I, uh, I was checking out the dorm with a telescope; I wanted to see what Sarah was doing with the German guy, but they never showed. Anyway, another window was lit up, the Erblings’ window, so I, you know, I—” Jervis spoke with caution, charting his words. “I saw a woman in black. She had a guy with her. The guy was Tom.”

  “Tom?”

  “Yeah. And then the Erbling girls popped up. That guy Dave Willet was with them, the guy everyone calls Do Horse—”

  Wade chuckled.

  “—and Tom killed him.”

  Wade stopped chuckling.

  “He killed him. Then he threw his body in the bathtub. Christ, there was blood everywhere. And then that woman came in, that woman in black. She…ate him.”

  “The woman in black ate Do Horse?”

  “That’s right. You should’ve seen it.”

  “And I guess she ate the Erblings too, huh?”

  “No, no, but she did something to them, knocked them out somehow. Something. Tom rolled them up in a rug and took them out.”

  Wade was chuckling again.

  “I know it sounds crazy. If you don’t believe me, let’s go over there and check it out. I know what I saw. It was Tom.”

  Now Wade seemed to be hesitating. He didn’t believe this nonsense, did he? “Tom’s car hasn’t been in the lot for two days,” Wade mentioned. “And last time I saw him, he gave me the slip.”

  “Wade, it’s true. I can prove it. Let’s go over there.”

  Silence.

  Then Wade came back in the room. “Did you—”

  “Yeah, I heard it,” Lydia smirked. “Your friend’s a peeper, a drunk, and a nut. That’s three strikes.”

  “I’ll admit he’s a little off track; his girlfriend just dumped him, he’s been drinking heavy. But he’s not the kind of guy to make something like this up. Plus, there’s something else…”

  “What?”

  “It’s better if I tell you later. Just trust me.”

  What was he talking about? Was he nuts too?

  “There’s no harm in looking into it, is there?” Wade persisted, and got dressed. Lydia said nothing, but she supposed he was right.

  ««—»»

  She felt like a complete ass, knocking on a student’s door at five thirty in the morning, but only for a second. Her first rap on room 208 edged the door open an inch. The doorknob was squashed, just like at the clinic. The latch bolt was mangled, the strike plate half dug out—

  “Just like the clinic,” Wade said.

  Score one for Jervis the Drunk, Lydia thought.

  The faintest ring of dust clung in a circle on the floor, as might be left by a hastily removed throw rug. Hmmm, she thought. The bed was sloppily made; guys made their beds like that, not girls. Hmmm, she thought again.

  The hamper was stuffed full of clothes. Among the garments was a pair of men’s jeans. The jeans contained a wallet. The wallet contained a driver’s license: David Ubel Willet.

  “Believe me now?” Jervis asked.

  Lydia was stumped. “I believe you may have witnessed a break in,” she replied. “I don’t, however, believe you witnessed anything more than that.”

  Jervis said three clipped words. “Bathtub. Blood. Everywhere.”

  The three of them squeezed into the bathroom. They all looked down at the tub.

  “Where’s the blood?” Wade asked.

  “Tom must’ve cleaned it up,” Jervis was quick to answer. “There was so much, though. It must’ve taken him an hour.”

  “Forget it, Jerv,” Wade said. “The tub’s clean.”

  Too clean, Lydia thought. She’d had Jervis tote along her field kit. From it she removed a tiny amber bottle with an eyedropper cap. “This is a detection compound called Malachite Reagent V; it reacts with protein components in hemoglobin. Blood contains free protein electrons which bind to almost any surface. You can wash off the blood, but you can’t wash off the electrons.”

  “So if someone got murdered in this tub,” Wade said, “the stuff in that bottle will prove it?”

  “Yep. It turns turquoise on contact.” Lydia let a tiny drop fall from the eyedropper into the middle of the tub.

  “Nothing,” Wade observed.

  “Wait.”

  In a second, the drop turned turquoise.

  Lydia sprinkled more drops around, all over the inside of the tub, the ledge, the tiled back wall. They all turned turquoise.

  Jervis looked unsurprised. Wade looked ill.

  This guy’s not bullshitting, Lydia thought, and it was a ghastly thought indeed. There’d been blood all over this tub.

  Blood. Everywhere.

  ««—»»

  “I instructed you to be careful!” Professor Dudley Besser bellowed within the cove of pointaccessmain #1. “I told you!”

  “I know, sir,” Tom mumbled.

  “You left their wallets! Their keys! Everything!”

  “It slipped my mind, sir. We had to get out of there. It took me a long time to clean up the mess the sister made. I mean, Christ, can’t they eat here?”

  Besser recessed back into the strangely etched darkness. Inaudibly the labyrinth hummed, a vibration more than a sound. The sisters had told Tom that it was the Supremate thinking, but Tom had begun to doubt that, along with many other things. Sometimes he wondered if there even was a Supremate. The huge loving voice that sometimes filled his head seemed phony, an overdone charade.

  Besser’s disapproval drew crevices into his bulging moonface. “This better not break before we leave. Who knows what the Supremate will do?”

  The premise was not a pleasant one. Tom remembered the chasms he’d seen. He remembered the squat factories whose winding winze belts hauled slabs of black meat.

  “I don’t want any problems with your next task,” Besser said. “The Supremate needs a holotype. Winnie and I have agreed; it shall be Wade St. John. This should please you.”

  “It does, sir.” You ain’t kidding it does!

  “We only have a few more days; I want Wade secured in the unit hold well beforehand. He works at the sciences center at nine A.M. Bring him in today.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And let me emphasize that the quality of your future within the family may depend on the success of your remaining procurements.”

  “I understand that, sir. You can count on me.”

  Besser dismissed him, the moonface disappearing into the egress. Tom followed the dimensionless servicepass to the acclimationprepchamber. He didn’t need directions; the labyrinth had its own sort of telepathic directory called mindsigns. Ahead, one such sign read EMWGUIDANCETRACKINGPOINT. Besser had explained it wasn’t really a power plant but just a simple stabilization mechanism, like a keel on a sailboat. The Supremate controlled it, along with everything else, by instinct.

  The next mindsign glowed in nonexistence: GERMINATIONWARREN. Tom used the key around his neck and prolapsed through the egress. This was some security system they had here; no one without a key could escape the labyrinth’s solid walls, nor could entry be gained by any outsider. The labyrinth was, fully and ultimately, impenetrable.

  Within the acclimationprepchamber, the Erblings lay stretched on the levitationslats. Before antirejectorybifertilization could be initiated, certain biological changes had to be made. Tom knew the Erblings were conscious despite complete paralysis. He grabbed two infusers containing optimized doses of calciumdecimationliquefactor. All fissionizationvessels needed proper softening before they could safely disbirth their interspecielmetis units. Tom had wandered around the biomaintenancegrowthaccelerationvaults once or twice, and some of the things he’d seen down there were as big as sunfish! The Erblings both jerked once when he activated the infusers agains
t their throats. The injection attacked only fossilized CaCo compounds. Besser and Winnifred had taken blood samples from Lois Hartley and Penelope, to ascertain the most effective serum absorbability levels for humans. The Erblings would be pudding in an hour.

  Liddy’s fingers and toes twitched, and Stella was blinking. The sister’s neurohemolyticpyrrolizicvenom was wearing off. Tom pushed the levslats through the next extromitter. Besser had told him that the slats had an unlimited load capacity. Theoretically you could push an aircraft carrier around on one of these things. You could push worlds.

  But no worlds today. Just a pair of naked coeds. Tom could feel the warmth of the sensorpost behind him. They were everywhere in one way or another—hybridized into the sisters’ eyes, in the sensor rings that Besser and Winnie wore, even in Tom’s transceptionrod. Through such sensor circuits, the Supremate saw and heard everything. The sensorpost was merely a black rod above the keypass. It reminded Tom of the Orwell novel.

  He flipped the Erblings off their slats onto the carbonized floorwall. “If you think Do Horse was hot stuff,” he joked, “wait’ll you see what’s waiting for you in the next room. You’ll be the only gals in town with boyfriends from another planet!” Tom laughed. “I’ll be right back, and in the meantime, you’ll be trying on some new genes, and I don’t mean Levi’s.”

  He extromitted to the pointaccess of the xyholotypehold. The exposed unit read #1003WADEST.JOHN. The hold was empty, but not for long. In sisterspeak the hold was called a carbonmassrepulsiondiodedeflectiveenergybarriersecuritynodule. In Tomspeak, it was called a fuckin’ jail. It reminded him of the brig on Star Trek. Nothing could penetrate its repulsion screen. A TOW missile wouldn’t dent it. A sixteen inch naval shell would bounce off its transparent face like a tennis ball.

  Tom touched the scrollmode on the revolutionactivator, thinking of the proper stockcodes #765NRLDYL and #6500: .::. . Instantly the first appeared, something reminiscent of a giant gray chicken gizzard, which rose joint by joint on segmented legs. “Come on, Valentino,” Tom said. “Time to make some bacon.” Nrldyl had haired antennae in place of eyes and ears, and at the end of its single arm was not a hand but a rubberish shovel like thing. Tom understood that this particular genus had intercourse by means of manual seminal congestion: It took its semen out of itself with the scoop and stuffed it into its mate. True passion, Tom thought.

  #6500: .::. . appeared next. “Ah, Blob Man,” Tom commented, noticing the bucket. It was nice to know that earth was not the only sphere in the universe that used buckets. He carried it down the pass, as Nrldyl dumbly followed. Tom didn’t have to worry about the holotypes getting rowdy; the ganglionstaticreflexpulsemodificationdischargenodes implanted into their nervous systems would zap them a nutcracker at the faintest negative thought. That way they couldn’t rough up the female surrogates.

  Tom decayed the radiophaseshifttriionizer, which paved the way for successful antirejectorybifertilization. He took the two holotypes into the warren. “Girls!” he announced. “I’m back! With your new dream dates!”

  Stella began to visibly jerk. Liddy managed a muffled whine from deep in her chest.

  “Go to it, fellas.” Tom set the bucket between Liddy’s feet and nudged Nrldyl toward Stella. “If you guys need a godfather, let me know. I could be available.”

  Nrldyl was hopping up and down in pure alien excitement. Clumps of its semen were already visible within the slit of its spermonic duct. The grotesque thing then knelt between Stella’s legs and began to tenderly transfer the globs of its off-blue semen, via the scoop hand, into Stella’s vaginal vault. The scoop packed it in nice and tight, leaving poor Stella bloated like a blueberry turnover with too much filling. What a way to fuck, Tom thought. Nrldyl chortled. Stella vomited a yard into the air while at the same time convulsing in multiple orgasms.

  Meanwhile the thing in the bucket had already dumped itself out. The brown blob spurtled, groaning, surging upward as if against tremendous gravity. After several strenuous attempts, it managed to stand upright, sporting a dripping, long erection that looked sort of like a giant chewed Tootsie Roll. Liddy screamed through her paralysis when the thing climbed between her legs.

  Tom plugged his key into the extromitter. But before he left, he turned and offered a final commiseration. “Have no fear, girls. You’ll live forever. You’ll be cosmic mothers of miracles—forever.”

  But where did that leave him? As he fed the thought “Student Shop” into the extromitter, he wondered. They said he would live forever too. But how could that be, when already shreds of his own flesh were beginning to peel off?

  —

  CHAPTER 20

  “Museums? No,” Professor Fredrick said. “None within hundreds of miles, I’m afraid.”

  Lydia had come to Fredrick at 9 A.M. sharp. Fredrick was Exham’s chairman of the archaeology department. She’d wanted to know where a three hundred year old cutting tool could be found near the campus. And he’d told her. Nowhere.

  “May I see those photographs?” Professor Fredrick asked. The shots were microphotos she’d taken of the impactations at the stables.

  Fredrick lit a pipe with a face on it. “There’s no scale here,” he remarked. “How long would you say this strike mark is?”

  “A little over ten inches.”

  “That’s a long blade for an ax. It’s perfectly flat too. But the angle width of the cutting bezel interests me more.”

  “Sir?”

  Fredrick pointed to the grainy shot with his pipe end. “I mean the angle at which this tool was honed” —he squinted— “you can see that the left side of the blade is a flat plane, while the right bears the honing surface.”

  Lydia had already noted this.

  “And your police scientist told you—”

  “It was an estimation,” she clarified. “There were no exact classifications in the indexes. This ax is definitely iron, and definitely forged over three hundred years ago. That’s all we know.”

  “This isn’t an ax,” Fredrick said.

  “What?”

  “It’s plain to see. It’s not an ax. It’s not a mattock, an adze, or a froe either.”

  “Then what is it?”

  Fredrick’s brow rose over his aging face. He tapped his pipe into a glazed Babylonian bloodtap turned ashtray. “The tool you’re looking for is a beam hewer. It’s the only tool within your estimated time period that had this kind of cutting edge.”

  Lydia frowned. “What the hell is a beam hewer?”

  “A tool used by colonists to turn round logs into square beams. There were many different types of hewers, mind you, but only the beam hewer possessed a planed left blade side, so the scores of the dogged log could be sliced off evenly.”

  Scores of the dogged log, Lydia thought. “I’m not exactly an expert on beam hewers, Professor.”

  Fredrick laughed, for the first time displaying a comprehension of humor. “Beam carpenters were the most vital tradesmen of the early colonial period. The procedure involved the following steps. One, a tree was cut down. Two, the felled tree was held to the ground by a dogging clamp. Three, the dogged tree was scored with axlike tools called adzes. Four, the scored tree was hewn—four flat planes were cut along the scores. The beam hewer had the appearance of an oddly shaped ax. The cutting edges were commonly a foot long, to clear each score.”

  Lydia tried to picture an ax with a foot long cutting edge. “They were huge, you mean.”

  “Yes, and heavy—twenty to thirty pounds. The left blade sides were perfectly level, or ‘basilled,’ so as to cut the scores off flat. A good beam carpenter could turn a thirty foot tree into an evenly sided beam in about an hour.”

  Fredrick rose to take down some books. Lydia understood that he’d been on digs all over the world. Years of blazing sun had cragged his face, toughened his skin to leather. He slid aside a small statue of Chinnamasta, the Bengalian goddess of decapitation, and presented to Lydia an old book opened to a block of pictures.

/>   “That,” he said, pointing to one, “is a typical beam hewer.”

  Lydia nearly shit her police pants.

  “And that,” he paused to add, “is me.”

  The ghostly field photograph was dated March 19, 1938. “New Excavations at Kent Island,” it read, and the text: “Sophomore F. Fredrick displays one of dozens of newly disinterred artifacts found at Maryland University’s latest Kent Island dig, a beam hewer probably forged by William Claiborne’s blacksmiths in 1632. Note the hewer’s extraordinary size.”

  In the picture, a young and dusty Professor Fredrick smiled as he held up the hewer for the camera. Its handle was nearly as long as Fredrick was tall, and its cutting edge easily cleared a foot. The bizarre blade was configured like an upside down, L. Lydia had never imagined a cutting tool so large.

  “The hewer’s impractical size was necessary. Too small and they would not be able to cut each score in a single swipe. Needless to say, next to flintlocks, the beam hewer was the weapon of choice during Indian attacks.”

  “I can see why,” Lydia commented. The look of the thing was terrifying enough, but worse was the rest. This was the same sort of instrument that had been used on Sladder.

  Fredrick puffed smoke. “May I ask the nature of your inquiry?”

  “Sure,” Lydia said. “The weapon that made these strike-marks murdered a man.”

  “Oh, dear,” Fredrick said.

  “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.”