“Nice place you’ve got here,” Jervis complimented. “Elegant.”
The sister began her wet, clicking giggles.
Whimpering, the dean backed into the walk in closet. Thousand dollar Italian suits surrounded him like a conspiracy of accusers. The jury was in. “Please,” Dean Saltenstall shivered and begged. “I’ve done nothing to deserve this.”
“I know,” Jervis acknowledged. “That’s why we’re doing it.”
Be creative, he reminded himself. He spun the dean’s head off in one graceful motion, a sharp twist and a jerk. The dean’s lips sputtered a nifty, musical sound, like a kazoo. “Thar she blows!” Jervis celebrated as the stump gushed rich red blood onto the walls, the suits, the ceiling. For a moment the dean seemed to dance headless. It was magnificent.
The spouting figure collapsed. “All yours,” Jervis said. The invitation made the sister giggle. At once she knelt betwixt the dead legs, tearing open the pajama bottoms.
—
CHAPTER 27
It all fit well with the course of the day: a dream that made no sense. Was it premonitory? Wade dreamed he was paralyzed, his jaw locked open by pegs. The women in black were stuffing slabs of putrid meat into his mouth. The meat was black and full of parasites. —This is what we eat at home, Wade. Isn’t it good? It was not good. Each helping crawled down his throat, warmly alive, and every time he thought the dream was over, another dainty white hand appeared to push still more of the squirming meat into his forced open mouth…
When he awoke, he felt empty headed. He sat up in bed and felt for Lydia, but she wasn’t there.
Wade,
I borrowed your car, hope you don’t mind. I got this idea about the sunlight stuff, and I have to check it out on my own.
Stay here till I get back.
Lydia
Wade crumpled up the note. He had two choices. He could sit here naked and do nothing, or he could act. He couldn’t imagine what her “idea about the sunlight stuff” could be, but where else could it lead but back to the groves?
He dressed, checked out, and left. It was just past 3 A.M. If he walked fast and cut across campus, he might make it to the groves in an hour.
The warm night seemed to welcome him in his solitude; the moon gave him light. Damn it, Lydia, he thought, and stepped up his pace. Where the hell are you?
««—»»
“You’re in the labyrinth,” Winnie said. “Our master’s palace.”
“The Supremate,” Lydia muttered.
“That’s correct.”
“Who is he?”
“He’s…God, I think.
Great. I knew I never should’ve stopped going to church. Lydia could see very little within the temphold, which seemed vaguely lit by some bizarre blackish light. This is a jail, she realized. A black rod in the ceiling gave the impression that she was being watched. She’d already tried, and given up on, simply walking out. The hold’s barrier, though invisible, couldn’t be passed. Beyond it she could see nothing.
Except Winnifred, who stood on the other side. She was nude, her flesh like mist in the labyrinth’s static blackness. “You can’t feel it in there,” the woman said, “but out here, the Supremate’s breath is on me. It’s the psilight, it’s his influence. The Supremate is a god of great passion, and he breathes his passion on all of us.” Her hand then ran over her pubis.
Lydia recalled the events that brought her here—the student shop, Jervis, and the solid cinder block wall. Instead of killing her, they’d…
“Why am I here? What do you want me for?”
“We don’t want you,” Winnifred said, stroking herself. “Wade’s the one we want. And when he finds out we have you, he’ll come.”
Would he? “What do you want Wade for?”
“It’s all part of the master plan.” Winnie lapsed back into her muse, touching deeper. She masturbated unabashed.
“What’s that thing around your neck?” Lydia asked.
Winnifred fingered the amulet between her breasts. “An extromission key. You just put it in and walk through. There are extromitters all over the labyrinth. We even installed some at the college and in the woods. Jervis brought you in through one.”
Doorways, Lydia realized. “You think Wade’s going to come here? He doesn’t even know where I am.”
“Jervis left a message for him,” Winnifred said, stroking, stroking, eyes slitted. “He’ll come. Love always follows its heart.”
Lydia wondered.
“And afterward, we have a surprise for you.”
“What?” Lydia asked.
“That.” Winnifred pointed, her face aglow, grinning.
It had been there the whole time in the next temphold, just not close enough to see. Lydia felt very sick very quickly.
It stood up as if on command, pressed the fingerless pads of its hand against the barrier. A stout, flexing holotype with spotted gray skin like a slug’s. It stood on four bent legs, between which hung testicles the size of grapefruits. It grinned from its prognathous face, drooling for her. The thing’s erection, with pulsing blue veins like hoses, was as long and thick as a leg of lamb. The bulbed glans, too, drooled with enthusiasm.
Oh, shit, Lydia thought.
««—»»
Nina McCulloch was just about to leave the bathroom when her world exploded. She heard the front door being broken down. She heard screams like sirens, and dark satanic laughs. When she gapped the bathroom door and peeked out, she saw…hell.
She saw a hooded girl in black and a dead man with an ax.
Elizabeth and her drug friends cowered, still screaming. Kara tried to run, but not fast enough for the huge luciferian ax. It blurred effortlessly like a great sail and sliced her into two pieces, from right shoulder to left hip. Her top slid off her bottom, and innards unfurled. Then Stacy tried to bolt, but she slipped and fell—screaming—on those same innards. The dead man placed his foot on Stacy’s head and crushed it.
Poor Elizabeth was next. Her corkscrew screams blazed away as the dead man dragged her out from behind the couch. He lifted her off her feet, by her ear. Nina was surprised that the ear did not come off. Then the girl in the black cloak approached, and from her mouth shot a long pink cord with a needle at the end. Elizabeth fell silent when the needle punched into her throat.
I’m sorry for my sins, Nina thought.
Now the dead man was yanking up the carpet—he was rolling them up in it! But then he paused, as if perturbed. “I’m gonna take a look around,” he remarked to his hooded companion. “Make sure no one else is here.”
—Hurry, Jervis! the evil abbess replied. She knelt down and began to lick blood off Kara’s legs, giggling.
Jervis, Nina pondered. She recognized him now. The dead man was Jervis Phillips, a boy who’d been in some of her classes. Her eye froze in the gap. Jervis searched Elizabeth’s room, then Nina’s. He stopped to light a cigarette, still perturbed. He was staring straight at the bathroom door.
Nina backed against the wall.
The door pushed open. Jervis stuck his head in, looked around.
Jesus save me, Nina prayed.