Coven (2 page)

“
You’ll be working several
nights a week at the sciences center.”

Doesn’t sound too
bad.
But— “What will I be
doing?”

“
Nothing too taxing, just a
few hours a day. It’s a fine job, son.”

“
Yeah, Dad. A fine job. But
how about answering the question? Like what…exactly…will I be
doing?”

Dad hesitated and very nearly smiled.
“Cleaning toilets.”

Wade was beside himself…with horror.

“
Along with assorted other
janitorial duties. It’s time you learned to do a little honest
work. That’s what made America, son.”

“
Cleaning college
shithouses is
not
what made America!”

“
It’s honest work for
honest pay.”

“
Yeah? Exactly how much
honest pay are we talking about?”

“
Why, minimum wage, of
course.”

By now, Wade could barely
stand. He knew his flaws, sure. He was a nut-chase, a loaf, and a
bullshitter. He used his looks, his car and his father’s money to
skate through life. He could even admit that punishment for his
ways was in order. Punishment, yes. But
this
was too much.

And with that thought, something very
dangerous happened. Wade St. John, for one split moment, cast his
good judgment aside.

“
I’m not going.”

“
What did you
say?”

“
I’m not going. I’m not
doing any of it. I’m not going to summer school, I’m not giving up
my credit cards, and I’m not going to clean toilets for minimum
wage. How do you like that, Dad?”

And Dad had smiled a great
big warm fatherly smile as he grabbed Wade by the collar and raised
him a full foot in the air. Like a fish eye lens
nightmare larger than life, Dad’s lips were huge in Wade’s face.
“You will go to summer school. You will complete your assignments,
you will study every night, and you will clean as many toilets as
they tell you to clean. And you will
raise
your GPA to 2.5 by next December. Because if you don’t, you’re on
the street. You lose the stocks, you lose the trust fund, you lose
the car. You’ll be out of this house, out of this family, and out
of my will. Now, how do you like
that,
son?”

Wade made the sheepiest of grins. “Gosh,
Dad. Can’t you take a joke? Classes start in a week. I guess I
better start packing, huh?”

—

CHAPTER
2

Penelope wished she could be a horse. She
knew, of course, that wanting to be a horse was not exactly
normal—it circumscribed the growth of her socialization. The
psychiatrists called it reclusionary concept  image fantasy,
and they were always harping about “socialization,” whatever that
was. “To actualize your individuality, you must develop a
collective affirmation, Penelope. A sense of positive function in
your interpersonal dynamics. That’s socialization.” And horses?
They didn’t like horses. “Your fantasy to be a horse is merely an
emotional reaction to your introversion.” Right. It was all poop to
her. Daddy was paying $250 per hour for this, so she didn’t care.
“Your fermented preoccupation with horses,” the shrinks said, “is
actually the result of a malnourished, unidentified sexuality.” It
astounded her how intensely Freud’s bullshit dominated modern
psychology. It was all about sex.

Penelope was a virgin, and her virginity was
something she could somehow never conceal from the psychiatrists.
It was the “base” of the “indisposition,” they’d tell her. “It” was
the cause of her “problem.”

“
A problem of this nature,
Penelope, is a commonplace emotional by product of a
restrained sexualization.”

“
What is?”

“
The aberrational
equestrian fantasy.”

“
Huh?”

“
Your wanting to be a
horse. And no doubt a further derivational root to your overall
amotivational symptoms, your unfocused state of esteem, and your
failure in general to be socialized.”

The assholes. It all sounded like horseshit
to her, Freudian pun not intended. Were they trying to tell her
that she’d lose her interest in horses once she got laid?

Penelope felt comfortable
with her virginity, and she couldn’t imagine what all the fuss was
about anyway. How could anyone
want
to be penetrated by something that looked like an
uncooked half smoke? The idea appalled her. Once she’d watched
one of Daddy’s X rateds on the VCR.
Little Oral Annie,
it was called.
Penelope could’ve screamed: one delving, spurting monster after the
next, and Little Annie had earned her middle name with startling
expertise. One man had put his penis—which was the size of a summer
squash—all the way into Annie’s rectum, while another spurted gouts
of viscid goo all over her breasts. What a gross out! If this
was sex, Penelope was quite happy to want no part of it.

It all got back to what the psychiatrists
called the “anomalic base,” or the “illusion of reference”—her
“problem” of wanting to be a horse. But what was wrong with that?
Horses were free of the injustices of the human world. To these
grand beasts, there were no such things as subjugation of
womanhood, unequal opportunity, couch casting, prostitution,
pornography, and the like. Horses lived in beauty and in peace.
They knew only simple desire and simple love.

What a wonderful way to exist.

Weren’t fantasies symbols of our selves?
Penelope’s fantasies proved her purity and her innocence. And this
was the most outrageous part of all, because it was always the
harmless people who wound up as the world’s worst victims. So it
was best she didn’t know.

Her fantasies would not wait for her. Nor
would her innocence, nor her life. All that waited was an end via
her worst fear.

««—»»

The truss bridge was half a century old, and
it looked it. Stained cement supports held up pale green girders.
Warped planks stretched fifty feet across the sluggish creek.

Jervis Phillips stood precisely over the
middle span, leaning over the rail. He stared down into the thick
creek, a black mirror to his black thoughts. The sickle moon and
starlight reflected nothing.

He wasn’t going to jump; he hadn’t come here
for that. Besides, this creek wasn’t deep enough. He’d only get wet
and be further humiliated. The little ring in his hand was why he’d
come.

He was drunk. He stood unstable as the cruel
world twitched and jagged around him. He’d drunk eleven bottles of
Japanese beer—Kirin—to numb the pain in his black heart, but the
relief was bogus. The alcohol only made it hurt worse.

Graffiti crawled over the
rust patched girders, spray paint hearts and
coiled
4 evers—
a
testament of love. It made him sick.
Howard loves Sonja, Lee loves Betsey, Mary loves Jaz.
Even
Cathy loves
Lisa.
There was so much, so much
love.

Jervis’ heart was a knot of
pain.
He’s probably fucking her right
now.
The thought cut through his stupor,
like dried corpseskin crinkling. The little ring was ice in his
palm.
Yeah, he’s fucking her brains out
right now. How does it feel, Jervis?

Feel? He had no more feelings. Only the
image of Sarah wriggling beneath someone else. It was some rich
German guy, some foreign developer’s kid. That’s all Jervis knew,
and all he needed to know. Tears trickled down his cheeks like hot
insects.

Now he understood the tragic logic of
suicide. He understood how people could jump off buildings or slit
their wrists when love abandoned them. His spectral thoughts were
right. Without Sarah, he had nothing.

His tears fell into the
water and made little
plips.

Love stalks like a
killer,
he recited the Byers poem.
See how freely it wields the ax.

But why should he think of killers and
axes?

He opened his fist and looked at the ring.
It was to verify their engagement, a diamond on a little gold band,
size 4. Sarah had dumped him before he had the chance to give it to
her.

When he dropped the ring into the water, he
imagined not the ring but his heart sinking slowly to the bottom of
the enslimed, black creek.

««—»»

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.

—

CHAPTER
3

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 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.