Coven.

Her shaded gaze shifted in on him; she moved gently forward. Her lips were red. Her face was l.u.s.trous, 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 G.o.dhead 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 "d.a.m.n it!" and began masturbating with another girl"s severed hand.

Charming, Wade thought. Man, this is some f.u.c.ked 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 p.r.i.c.ked 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 rea.s.semble. 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 rea.s.sembled-and probably very p.i.s.sed 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 b.i.t.c.h 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 s.e.x, right? "Right," one girl answered. She was pet.i.tely slender, ninety pounds if that, with little cupcake b.r.e.a.s.t.s. 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 ma.s.sive corpse past Wade, where it hit the water like a pallet full of mason blocks. The girls rejoiced in laughter. Wade p.i.s.sed his pants. No more need be said of the weaker s.e.x. The girls were all rea.s.sembled 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n cigar? The girls closed in on him now, stepping in time very slowly. The high breasted girl a.s.sumed the group"s speaking ch.o.r.es. "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 ent.i.ty 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 s.e.xist piece of s.h.i.t he was. This was the sentence he"d been waiting since p.u.b.erty 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 G.o.d, 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 t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es. 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 ent.i.ty 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.

CHAPTER 11.

Lydia Prentiss was staring at the single Marlboro 100. It beckoned her, like l.u.s.t. Rather symbolically, it stood on end.

"Sladder"s not the perp," she said. "I"ve told you ten times."

Chief White had put her up in an empty lab at the sciences center. Yesterday she"d made a breakdown of the agro site as fast as she could. Department of agriculture officers had swarmed in just as she finished. They"d sealed the site "pending investigation."

"You know what I think?" White said. "You"re grabbin" for s.h.i.t."

All Lydia wanted was her cigarette and some sleep. She didn"t want to argue. "Chief, just look at the plain facts."

"The plain facts are that Sladder was packin" an illegal gun!"

"Illegally carried, but legally owned. Wake up, Chief. Security guards are notorious for carrying pocket pieces like this."

"And I suppose you know exactly what kind of gun it was."

"Sure, a Raven Arms Model P25. Costs about eighty bucks. Don"t they teach your men anything in the academy? All I had to do was call State Handgun Records and ask. Sladder bought the piece, legally, in 1981 from a local gun shop. The guy"s got no rap sheet at all. He"s never even had a traffic ticket."

"Neither did the Boston f.u.c.kin" Strangler. He was still a nut."

"Sladder had forty years of steady employment; his only black marks were a few reprimands for booze. He won medals in World War II."

"I don"t give a s.h.i.t. He was a rummy who carried an illegal handgun. That"s good enough for me."

"Fine, Chief. Think what you want."

White rolled a King Edward cigar in his mouth. "Just give me your technical conclusions, Prentiss, not lip service."

The cigarette would be good now, real good. "My conclusions are as follows. Two or more perpetrators entered the agro site shortly after the power failure, about midnight. The girl, Penelope, was with him; several girls on the hall said she often visited the site at odd hours, to see the horses. In the horse stalls, she and Sladder stumbled onto one of the perps, the one with the ax. Here, Sladder sustained a serious injury to his right arm. I believe his arm was completely severed, judging by the trajectory of the bloodfall."

White was shaking his head. Lydia continued, "At this point, Sladder and the girl retreated to the stablemaster"s office. They managed to dress Sladder"s wound. He tried to call for help but the phone box had already been destroyed. Shortly thereafter, the perpetrator"s attack continued. Sladder responded by firing six shots from the .25 pistol. I recovered five bullets from the stable floor. The sixth bullet hit one of the perps at the far exit. There"s bloodfall of a different type to verify this."

White was rubbing his brow now, still shaking his head.

"At this point Sladder and the girl attempted to escape via the front exit. Less than ten feet from the door, Sladder was murdered. The amount of blood on the floor makes this obvious."

White could brew no longer. He...blew up. "Arms cut off! Murder! That"s the f.u.c.ked uppest bunch of s.h.i.t I ever heard! We don"t even know that the blood is Sladder"s! We don"t even know he was the one who fired the gun!"

"The large bleeds are all A positive, Sladder"s type according to his health insurance forms. As for who fired the gun, Sladder"s partials are all over the dead bra.s.s. I ID"d his prints from his print card from the security office, and I got comparison prints of the girl by dusting common areas of her dorm room. They both left prints on the fence that was cut down, on the utility shed door, on the flashlights. I got their prints on baseboards, Chief, and the lower edge of the stable door. These people were on the floor-they were hiding from something."

White tapped his cigar, trying to calm down. "Okay, Prentiss. If Sladder was murdered, where"s his body?"

"The perpetrators removed it."

"And the girl? I suppose she was murdered too."

"Maybe, but I don"t think so. There"s none of her blood on the site. My guess is she was abducted."

"Abducted," White repeated. "Umm hmm."

"It"s a setup, Chief. There"s no sign of their bodies. Their vehicles were removed from the property. The girl"s purse and Sladder"s wallet were left behind-deliberately."

"Why? Why go to all that trouble?"

"To keep us off track. They want to convince you that Sladder was the perp instead of the victim, and it looks like they"re doing a pretty good job. Fortunately, though, the real perps were careless. They took the gun but not the empty bra.s.s. They didn"t cover their footprints very well. They left ridge smears on the wallet and purse, proving that those objects were touched, wiped down, and replaced."

White had inadvertently snapped his King Edward. "And you say Sladder"s arm was cut off? Where"d you come up with s.h.i.t like that?"

"The fall patterns in the stable are literally textbook perfect." She laid out snapshots of Sladder"s fall, then slid an opened book across the desk. The book was t.i.tled The Investigator"s Guide to Bloodfall: Drop Spread Pattern a.n.a.lysis. The picture she opened to (labeled "Ambulatory dismemberment: right arm") was almost identical to Lydia"s Polaroids. "See? Sladder"s fall is the same. His right prints are on the pitchfork in the tool stall; that"s what he was reaching for when the perp dropped the ax. He didn"t have time to get his piece out. You can even see the point angles exactly where he changed direction. And from this point on, Sladder stops leaving right hand prints."

"I"m supposed to believe a sixty five year old rummy tied off his own stump without going into shock?"

"Guys slap tourniquets on themselves all the time. Humans do amazing things in life threatening situations. The girl probably helped him. Besides, Sladder was a marine infantry medic in the war."

"So where"s the arm?" White asked.

"Probably buried in the woods, with the rest of him."

"And where"s the car?"

"Probably buried under brush twenty miles away. The girl"s ZX, too."

White let some time pa.s.s to cool off. He picked through her latent photos. "How the h.e.l.l"d you get prints this clean? Most of the stables are whitewashed or bare wood."

"Bare wood"s easy," she said, unenthused. "I fumed the logical areas with iodine sulfate. The tougher ones I jobbed with mercuric oxide. Then I photographed everything with a Kodak 1x1. Each print is labeled and marked." Actually this job had been easy. At D.C. she"d gotten admissible prints off of human b.r.e.a.s.t.s, crumpled paper bags, even chunks of crack. Once she"d sent a multiple rapo up for fifty years by getting his prints off a pair of a victim"s panties with a scanning electron microscope. The agro site had been cake. "This isn"t the stone age, you know," she finally got around to saying, White didn"t like that. He snorted smoke. "You show me a few pictures in some A hole textbook, some prints, and some blood types, and now you think you"ve got all the answers."

"I don"t have anything close to all the answers, Chief. But I reconstructed the steps of the crime, which is what you told me to do. Could your men do better? s.h.i.t, Chief, those rednecks don"t know the difference between a fingerprint and a floral print. They think bloodfall is a town in Alabama."

White didn"t like that either. His temper ticked. "You"re grabbin" for s.h.i.t, Prentiss. And if any of this winds up in the papers, you"re gonna be one sorry little girl."

Lydia was drooping now at the lab table. "I"m not your enemy, Chief. I work for you, remember? Anyhow, I don"t know what you"re getting all whipped up about. The whole case revolves around the one thing we don"t have access to-the agro animals. Until the state finds out what happened to them, we have to tinker with every detail we can. That"s what a police investigation is."

White toked a new cigar, smirking. "I don"t need you to tell me how to run a police investigation. Leave the concludin" to me and we"ll get along fine. Go home now, get some sleep."

It was a good idea; she"d been up twenty four hours now. White was going to believe what he wanted to believe. But there was still one thing... "I need your permission for something first. I want to try to get a line on the ax."

White squinted. "The ax? You can"t run a make on an ax, girl. Everybody"s got axes."

"I know, but this ax is different. The line of the blade is straight, and the left hone is planar. There was rust in the initial impactations."

"Prentiss, what the f.u.c.k are you talkin" about?"

"A rust deposit left by an edged weapon can be a.n.a.lyzed. Different grades of steel are used in different tools and weapons. In other words, by a.n.a.lyzing the rust, you can sometimes determine the ductility and grade of the steel and possibly locate the manufacturer. But I"d need a good crime lab-"

"No," Chief White said.

"Chief, this ax is so unique I might be able to match the steel grade to a manufacturer and locate the dealer who sold it."

"No," Chief White said. "You gotta be outta your mind. I"m not gonna authorize department time so you can run some silly test on a bunch of rust you found in a fence. It"s a dead end, Prentiss. It ain"t nothin" but a f.u.c.kin" ax."

"Come on, Chief. I"ve got a hunch-"

"Go home," White said. That was the final word. "Take tomorrow off. You been up so long you"re numb in the head." White walked out, drawing a sheen of cigar smoke with him.

Lydia rubbed her eyes. Go home? she thought. What for? All that waited for her at home was her own loneliness.

The rust, she thought desperately. Yesterday she"d coped out the major impactations. Under the Braun microscope, the rust shimmered up at her, actually metallic at 75x. Maybe White was right; maybe the rust was a dead end.

Then again, maybe it wasn"t.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n!" Wade shouted.

He stood frozen in his shorts. This morning"s Exham Sentinel shook in his hand. The headline read: "Wade Burned Again."

The front page picture showed Wade shamefacedly signing tickets, while Officer Lydia Prentiss smiled aside.

Famed campus womanizer, scofflaw, and B.S. artist Wade St. John, above, learns the hard way that Exham police mean business with their new crackdown against drinking and speeding on campus roads. Chief H. C. White told reporters, "A college like Exham, kids tend to take things for granted. Responsible driving habits are part of being an adult, and if students ain"t gonna act like adults, then, by golly, they"re gonna pay. As for Wade St. John, we want to make an example of him whenever we can, since he represents the exact opposite of adult behavior." Wade, now in his sixth year at Exham but with only a junior standing, averages ten traffic citations per semester, a campus record. It is rumored that Wade was forced by his father to take summer cla.s.ses as punishment for low marks. A reliable yet undisclosed source stated that an additional punishment was initiated-that Wade has been forced to do something as yet unheard-of in his life: work a job.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n!" Wade shouted again. This had to be illegal. Everyone on campus would read this!

Wade is reportedly working as part of the maintenance staff at Exham"s Crawford T. Sciences Center. Sentinel reporters set out to verify this rumor, at the office of Dean C. F. Saltenstall himself, where he was more than happy to address the question of the day. "Oh, it"s quite true. Wade is indeed working at the sciences center, cleaning toilets for minimum wage."

Wade threw the paper out the window and cursed. The clock only compounded his humiliation; it was time for work.

He felt idiotic in his smock and rubber gloves. It took him two hours to clean the toilets on the first floor. His head ached, his throat was parched. Two hours was enough; he needed a break.

He staggered into the dark hall. There was a c.o.ke machine around here somewhere. He tried to get his mind off the newspaper article but couldn"t. His reputation was ruined now, for good. But as he mused upon his anger, images of Officer Prentiss kept popping up. Don"t be a s.h.i.thead, he thought. Why bother thinking of her? To her, he was a symbol of ant.i.thesis. Perhaps that explained his attraction to her; Wade liked a challenge. He"d had plenty of challenges in his life, and he"d melted a lot of feminine ice in his time. Yes, Wade the Conqueror.

Ooops. There he went again, violating the warning of last night"s dream. The pier girls would haunt him for a long time. Was it in his genes to view women as objects, as trophies for his social and s.e.xual hunting board?

Behind him a door pulled open. Wade turned. A figure advanced from the doorway and nearly walked into him.

"Jesus!" they both said. The figure was Officer Prentiss.

"I was just thinking about you," Wade enthused. "Just now."

Lydia Prentiss winced. "You again," she muttered. She slipped past him down the hall. Wade scampered to follow.

"What are you doing here?" he jabbered, keeping up.

"Police business, which means none of yours."

Police business? In the sciences center? She walked on, ignoring him. Wade couldn"t fix a good look at her. She was about to drop money in the c.o.ke machine, then she turned. "Please don"t stand so close, Mr. St. John. You smell like mop water."

This p.r.i.c.ked him. "You would, too, if you"d just cleaned as many toilets as I have. Oh, and thanks for spreading my personal business all over the front page of the paper." His eyes scanned down her back. Long legs, trim waist. Her beautiful bright blond hair hung unbound to her neckline. But her face remained unseen.

I"ve...got to see her face, Wade reflected.

"I was just giving you the tickets you rightfully deserved," she said. "It"s not my fault the Sentinel was around." Then she took her Diet c.o.ke from the machine"s mouth and went back down the hall.

Wade followed her, like a puppy. She was working in one of the 400 level bio labs, at a counter full of books, snapshots, and unidentifiable kits, containing brushes, and bottles. Something like a tensor lamp with a carrying handle arched up on its stem. An odd blue light bulb filled its head. What was all this stuff?

She turned and frowned. "You"re still here?"

And that"s when Wade got his look at her face. Officer Prentiss" beauty glared at him like a bright light, and it was not in any way akin to the brainwashing, socio high fashion beauty that he, as well as the rest of the Western world, had been taught to glorify. This was far more complex than high cheekbones, eye makeup, and vulpine sneers. Too many elements poured into its enigma. Stark yet deeply fluid. Hard yet soft. Cool blue yet fringed with sweetness, which hid searing heat. She was a car crash of contradiction rea.s.sembled-like the women in the dream? Her eyes were fine etched, liquid gray.

She thumped down on a stool, paying him no mind. She seemed tired before the spread of notepads, diagrams, and clutter.

"Hey, what"s this?" Wade asked, and picked up a tiny bottle.

"It"s osmium tetroxide, and it"s poisonous. Don"t touch it."

He picked up the thing that looked like a tensor lamp. "What"s this thing?"

"An ultraviolet spotter. Don"t touch it."

He picked up a fat book. "This the new Clancy?"

"Not quite. Put it down. And please leave."

Next he picked up some Polaroids. "What"re... Hey-"