Coven

COVEN

EDWARd lee

Necro Publications

Orlando

2010

—

Smashwords Edition

Also available in a signed trade paperback
edition.

ISBN: 978-1-889186-59-7

Coven © 1991 by Edward Lee

Cover art © 2005 by Erik Wilson

this digital edition March 2010 © Necro
Publications

Copy Editors:

Bob Strauss, Amanda Baird, Jeff Funk, C. Dennis
Moore

Cover, Book Design & Typesetting:

David G. Barnett

Fat Cat Graphic Design

http://www.fatcatgraphicdesign.com

Printing history:

Berkley/Diamond Edition: August, 1991

Limited Edition Hardcover © 2003 Necro
Publications

First Edition Trade Paperback © 2005 Necro
Publications

a Necro Publication

5139 Maxon Terrace • Sanford, FL 32771

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—

For Amy & Scott.

—

PROLOGUE

M
urder,
he thought.
Blood.

That’s all the student could think about,
all he could see in his mind—the blood. The afterimage burned
behind his eyes like red neon: the still corpse in the closet,
castrated, headless. And the blood. Had they actually painted the
walls with the man’s blood?

Alone now, the student lay
exhausted on the jail cot. The station’s murky light drained into
the cell; he felt submerged in dark. He tried to sleep, to forget
about the blood, but even worse images flushed in and out of his
head. He was standing in the moonlit dell, eyes peeled back like
skinned grapes. Around him, the woods dripped and shivered.
Carcasses, dozens of them, lay swollen to bursting beneath the
foot deep fog. The student wore the stench of rot. He breathed
it, tasted it. From the trees, and from beneath the fogtop, faces
of things peered at him and
shrieked. Not
animals. Not people…

Things.

Mother of God,
the student thought.

—
then jerked awake on the
jail cot.

Trying to sleep was
useless. He remembered too much, in too much detail: his mad sprint
out of the fog sodden dell, the sound of pulpous horrors
crunching
underfoot, and the monstrous
laughter, their chitinous witchlike
liquid
giggles…

Please let me be insane.

What a relief that would
be, to dismiss it all to insanity. But the student knew he could
not, he
knew
it
was real. Images continued to march through his head, and a parade
of morbid questions. What in God’s name were they doing back there?
How many people had they murdered? He’d seen their little graveyard
in the woods. How many bodies had they buried? And whose? How much
more blood had been spilled?

But amid the questions, one certainty
remained.

I’m next. They’re coming for me next.

In the half dark, the
student leaned forward and touched the jail’s cement
walls
. Yep, that’s cement, all right. Need
more than a French bread to bust through that.
His fingers ran down the frame of bars, jerked the locked
steel door hard against its mount.
Yep,
this is a jail. No doubt a fucking bout it.

Safe,
he thought.

Yes, he was safe; this was a secure cell.
For the time being at least, the student was safe from those
women…those hideous women in black.

—

CHAPTER
1

Exham College was, in a
sense, exclusive. It was the college of choice for those whose GPAs
and SATs wouldn’t get them into reform school, much less Harvard or
Yale. As for its exclusivity, you had to be rich.
Anyone
with money could
get into Exham.

The school occupied 160 odd acres of
the Deep South, at the very end of State Route 13. The nearest
towns were Crick City above and Luntville below, and that was it.
The college owned the nearby half town, also called Exham,
which was run by a small police department and a white washed
city council. After that, though, for thirty miles in any
direction, there was just tract upon tract of open farmland. In
other words, Exham was the Alcatraz of the college world.

Despite its primary devotion to the
upper class brain dead, the school ran very well, which
was no surprise considering the amounts of money being dumped into
its tills. There were two regular semesters between September and
May, and two summer sessions for students to retake the courses
they’d failed during the regular school year. The average Exham
student took six years to attain a four year degree. Actual
matriculation was about sixty percent, and the ratio of dropped
classes to classes registered for was the worst in the country.

In all, Exham proved the
paramount education institution for the black sheep of America’s
wealthiest families. Being a complete fuckup in this world scarcely
mattered as long as you were a
rich
fuckup. This might suggest a colossal indictment
that all men and women are clearly not created equal, and that
unmoderated wealth leads to a breeding ground of all manner of
abandon.

««—»»

The eighteen hour drive from New
Canaan, Connecticut, to Exham usually took Wade St. John about
fifteen hours. What he drove was a car called a Callaway Twin
Turbo, a $55,000 limited edition Corvette. Maintaining 120 mph
for vast stretches of 1 95 was a breeze with the Uniden radar
detector. The Vette was Wade’s sanctuary from reality, his cocoon.
He’d just sit back in the leather seat, crank up the Nak deck, and
put the pedal to the metal. Time stood still in the Vette. He was
ageless. He was invincible.

Yeah.

Exham College entailed a series of
circumstances he’d just as soon forget. Summer was for fun, not
college. But goddamn Dad had put a damper on that faster than
greased shit through a city pigeon. Wade could’ve killed the
mailman; the way he’d felt waiting for his report card was probably
close to the way those guys at the Alamo had felt waiting for the
Mexican Army.

Dad’s voice needed no
exclamation points: “Goddamn it, Wade. Two C’s, two D’s, and you
failed history. Again. God in goddamned heaven. How could you fail
history
twice?”

“
Be real, Dad. Does the
Battle of Hastings really have any bearing on my life? Will I be
made a better person knowing that Peter the Great put a tax
on
beards?
What’s
the big deal?”

“
The big
deal,
son, is your brain,
and you’re wasting it. These grades are beyond goddamned
belief.”

“
But, Dad,” Wade asserted,
“I’ve done my best.”

“
You haven’t done dick
since the day I enrolled you at Exham. A chimpanzee could make
better grades than these. You’re twenty four goddamned years
old and you don’t even have enough good credits for a two year
degree. Your marks don’t get better, they get worse.”

“
I’m working on it,
Dad.”

“
Working on it? My God,
son. Your grade point average is 1.4. That’s absolutely
fucking outrageous.”

Uh oh. Fucking. That
was a bad sign. Dad would say
goddamn
a lot, and
occasionally
shit, dick,
and
bullshit.
But when he started modifying those adjectives and
nouns with
fucking…that
meant trouble.

««—»»

The trouble had come the next day, with such
devastation that Wade felt like someone had just dropped a
thousand pound safe on his head.

“
It’s ultimatum time, son,”
Dad had announced.

“
Pardon me,
Dad?”

“
The bullshit ends here. I
will not permit my only child to devolve into the biggest failure
in the history of higher education. I’ll give you till next
December to raise your GPA to 2.5.”

“
Say again, Dad? That’s a
mathematical impossibility. I couldn’t pull a 2.5 even if I got
straight A’s in the fall semester.”

“
I realize that, Wade. So
to give you a fair shot, you’ll be attending both
summer
semesters.”

Wade had laughed. “You’re joking,
right?”

“
Do I look like I’m
joking?”

Dad
never
looked like he was joking.
But…Wade smiled. “Tough luck, Dad. The registration deadline has
passed.”
Whew!

“
I called the dean this
morning,” Dad informed him. “An exception has been made. Classes
begin in a week; your schedule is waiting for you. Dean Saltenstall
took care of it all.”

Oooo, that motherfucking
suckface gay bar loitering dean!
“Come—on, Dad! That’s not fair!—Everybody knows you have the
dean in your pocket!”

“
You’re goddamn right, and
I will take advantage of that fact every chance I get. You will
attend the summer semesters.”

This was serious. “Look,
Dad, I
can’t
go to
summer school. It’s, like, against my principles. What would my
friends think?”

“
Your friends are shiftless
idiots not fit to pick the pebbles out of my tires. I don’t care
what they goddamn think.”

“
But I have a reputation to
maintain! I’d never live it down. Summer is for partying, the
beach, girls, that sort of thing.”

“
There is no excuse for
you, son. You’ve been in college six
years
and you’re scarcely closer to
getting a degree than the day you stumbled drunk out of high
school. All you do is drink beer, drive fast, and carouse with
women of questionable morality. You’re smearing the family
name,
my
name, and
I won’t have it.”

This wasn’t going well at
all. If Wade had to go to summer school, he’d be the
laughingstock.
Time for a little of the
old B.S.,
he concluded. “Okay, Dad. Let’s
make a deal. You let me have the summer off and I’ll give you my
word, as a true St. John, that I’ll hit the books like you’ve never
seen. I’ll become a virtual dynamo of diligence, discipline, and
scholastic vision. My GPA will be up in no time, and there’ll be no
more D’s and F’s, you can bank on it. That’s my promise, Dad, and I
mean it with all my heart.”

Dad’s poker face remained as unchanging as a
bust of Genghis Khan. “Son, you’re so full of shit you need a
toilet brush to clean your ears. The matter is settled. You will
attend the summer sessions. Period. And to add further incentive,
I’m canceling your credit cards and terminating your
$500 per week allowance.”

Wade’s mouth locked open. He was going to be
sick.

“
It’s for your own good,
son. No money from me till those grades come up. From here on,
you’ll
earn
your
money. You’ll work a part time campus job.”

Wade was mortified.
“A
job? Me?”

“
Yes, Wade, a job. You. I
realize you’ve never worked in your life, but it’s time you
started. The dean has made all the arrangements, as a personal
favor to me.”

Wade ground fist into
palm.
So help me God I’ll bury that
motherfucking dean up to his neck and SHIT ON HIS HEAD!
“What is this, Dad? A conspiracy? National Let’s
Screw Wade Week?”

“
It’s for your own good,
son. One day you’ll see that.”

Wade closed his eyes, tried to simmer down.
“Okay, okay. I can understand. So what’s the job? I know you’d
never stick me with some shitty bottom of the barrel
job, right?”