Covenant (16 page)

“Hey, what’s this?” Rachel called. “Shine the light here.”

She was just a few feet away, and something sparkled at her feet in the yellow light from Rhonda’s bike light. Rhonda moved closer with the light, and then they all saw it. It glinted like treasure in the light.

A box just a little bigger than a cigar box. Bits of its lid glittered silver in the light of the flash, though most of it had corroded and darkened to turn black and green from the salt air.

“Open it,” Monica squealed.

“
No!
” Bernadette cried.

But Rachel did. There was no lock on the fastener. Ignoring Bernadette’s warning, she tried to pry the simple metal clasp off its peg. The lid wouldn’t budge at first, but then it did, lifting off with a pop that put Rachel off balance. She fell backward to land unceremoniously on her butt, and the contents of the box spilled out onto the ground.

It was a strange collection to have hidden away in a box.

There was an artist’s thin paintbrush, its wooden handle stained a variety of dark shades. And there was a jagged charcoal sketch pencil. A small leather-bound book. A necklace, with two horned, coupling figures. And the broken, yellowed key to a piano.

The girls all squealed with delight. They’d found it. After years of getting goose bumps and blue skin from diving and fruitlessly pulling up muck around the rocky beach, they’d found buried treasure at last! Well, a treasure chest with old junk, anyway.

“Look at this,” Rachel said, opening the pages of the book. “Whose do you suppose it was?”

“What does it say?” Melody asked. “Is it a diary?”

As they each grabbed and passed around the box’s bits of refuse, they all heard the voice that had sent Bernadette stumbling.

“
So glad you could come
,” it said.

This time, Bernadette didn’t scream. But the girls all looked at one another, eyes wide as if to say, “Did you hear that too?”

“
It’s been so long since I’ve had the pleasant company of young
women!
”
the voice enthused.
“
Please, don’t be afraid. Take what
you want from the box. Each piece will bring you something special
.”

It was Bernadette who’d voiced what they all were thinking.

“Are you…a…genie?” she’d whispered, her voice trembling as she looked around and around at the blank gray walls. Nobody else was in the room. Nothing moved.

“
In a manner of speaking
,” He’d replied. “
But I don’t give
wishes away for free
.”

Rachel absently hung the erotic necklace around her throat, fingering the horns on its figures’ heads. Karen toyed with the paintbrush, swishing long curved lines in the sand. Each of the girls found their hands drawn to one of the pieces from the box.

The voice began to laugh. “Yes,” he said. “
It has been a long
time
.”

Rachel felt warmth spread through her body, a tingling sensation that made the world seem fine, fine, fine. It was like being drunk. At first it felt good, after the hours they’d been in the water. But then it grew uncomfortably sunburn warm. Hot, sweating, but in a weird way. She felt excited. Dirty. She looked at the figures of the pendant at her chest and licked her lips in thirst. But not a thirst for water.

God. The head had slipped from her chest to her belly and then lower, and she reached down to scratch the skin along the laces of her bikini and suddenly knew what the heat really was. She wanted to
fuck!

“What…?” she began to say, and then, through blurred eyes, she could see that the others felt it too. They were all behaving strangely, their faces glazed as their hands knotted into fists and then sneaked across their bodies to scratch themselves, sneakily at first, and then without care for propriety. Rhonda’s tongue was licking her upper lip as her left hand disappeared into her bikini top, and Karen had sat down with her back to the wall, allowing her fingers to gouge red trails on the white flesh of her inner thighs.

Then Rhonda’s hand pulled away from her breasts, allowing one tit to hang free obscenely as she stepped out of her bikini bottoms to expose the curly black hair of her cunt. Quiet, shy Monica had even slipped her hand inside her bikini bottoms. Rachel watched as the girl’s fingers bunched and relaxed rhythmically against the taut material of her suit. She didn’t seem to care that her friends could clearly see her masturbating. They had always been close friends…but not
that
close.

“
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen women in action
,” the voice said. “
Show me what you’ve got, girls
.”

Rhonda moved like a zombie toward Bernadette, one hand lodged in the exposed thatch of dark hair between her legs, the other hand supporting her young but already heavy, fleshy left breast, fingers pinching an erect brown nipple. She moaned as she moved with obvious intent toward her friend. The smaller girl had backed against the wall and was looking wide-eyed at the rest as if they were aliens. She alone seemed unaffected by the strange erotic heat that had stolen the wills of her friends. She alone was not touching herself in some obscene way.

“No!” she screamed as Rhonda’s lips pressed to her own.

“No, no, no!” she cried, and threw herself from the room.

“
I didn’t say you could leave
,” the voice said smoothly. They all heard him. But Bernadette continued to run down the path leading to the ocean.

In a moment, there was a short scream from outside the
cave, but the girls barely heard it. All of them were engrossed in the honey-sweet sensation that had blurred their minds. The sexy heat was coating their limbs, throbbing in their thighs, pouring like hot honey down their throats. They were swimming, drowning, engulfed in its musk. They abandoned themselves to it, lapping it up like mother’s milk. They felt starved for it, couldn’t get enough of it, couldn’t taste it fast enough. They touched themselves and longed to touch their friends. Their suits dropped in a jumble of colorful triangles on the cave floor and the five girls quickly stepped toward one another, eyes glazed and tongues searching. The cave floor soon became a tumble of sucking, rubbing flesh. There was no hesitation or shyness as they rolled around with one another, arms and legs outstretched. They kissed in blind abandon, mouth seeking mouth, hand slipping down and inside as one through the mud.

They didn’t even stir when Bernadette returned from her frantic escape to stand in their midst. She was naked, her small breasts pale and beaded with seawater. A puddle of cold water formed around her feet as drops perspired down her slender thighs, beaded in the wiry tangle of her pubic hair and splattered to the rock floor, drip by drip by drip. The girls formed a circle, twining and moaning around her feet, a humid sultry breeze of sex pounding against the cool breeze of the surf that slid from Bernadette’s body. None of the girls seemed to care that Bernadette was also bleeding heavily from a deep gash that ran from her left eye to cross her forehead and disappear into the wet coils of her hair.

Rachel would later remember sucking on that cut as Bernadette’s strangely unfocused eyes rolled in her head and deep laughter sprang from her girlish belly. Seawater sprayed from her mouth as she laughed, cooling the girls who moaned and writhed closer to Bernadette, thirsting for more of her cool wetness to assuage their strange heat, the ocean soothing the red blush on their skins and then burning away as the fire within their bones burned hotter again. Their thirst was unquenchable,
and Rhonda licked the drops from Melody’s breasts, and then tickled Bernadette’s underarms, drawing a deeper, longer laugh, and a thicker, messier spray from the girl’s mouth. They didn’t care—Bernadette was their fountain. Sex was their sun.

Mostly what Rachel remembered of that afternoon was bliss. A tangle of hair and arms and breasts and musky, thirsty, unquenchable sex. A dirty, evil, wonderful hour of touching and sucking and playing lover and loved with one another. They were mindless. There were no boundaries. It was ecstasy.

And then, as quickly as it had begun, the strange, distorted orgy was over.

The honey taste dripped away from their lips to leave a bitter residue of iron and salt. Their vision cleared.

Rachel lifted her mouth from the hard nipples of Monica’s firm eighteen-year-old chest and met her friend’s look of horror with equal disgust.

Karen rolled from between Melody and Rhonda and spit the taste of their orgasms from her lips, grabbing and holding her discarded suit ineptly across her well-explored privates. Her eyes looked wild with fright and incomprehension at what had just happened.

And Bernadette stood in the middle of them and smiled crazily, congealed blood smeared across her breasts and the tiny pit of her belly button and the light, short hair of her pubes. The same blood that coated all of the girls’ bodies.

Melody wiped a hand across her face and stared at the blood that came away on her fingers for many seconds before her lips began to tremble. A low, horrible, frightened sound came from her lips.

“That was fun,” Bernadette said.

But it wasn’t Bernadette’s voice that said it. It sounded deeper, littered with razors and gravel. And her eyes looked wrong. Vacant. Like shiny black marbles rolling back in her skull.

“We’ll have to do that again sometime.”

Karen was frantically shimmying her bony legs into her suit bottoms. But she stopped and screamed when she saw the smears of blood on her calves, staining the edge of her suit. She started to push the suit bottoms back off, and saw the blood speckled on her feet. With a moan, she slid to the floor, suit bunched at her knees, eyes filled with tears and paralyzing fear.

“Right now,” the Bernadette voice continued, “I’m sure you all want to go home.”

Somebody else started to cry. Rachel thought it was Rhonda.

“But first I’ll tell you about your gifts.”

Bernadette’s hand pointed at Karen. Its fish-white fingers were streaked with blood.

“The paintbrush will allow you to paint the most realistic artworks you can imagine. That brush has kissed the lips of saints and copulated with the diseased cunts of hell. Once it belonged to a man who brought the light of heaven to the walls and ceilings of churches. His name was celebrated throughout the halls of Europe, and written of by priests and artists alike in honor and awe. He was a saint on earth, until he found a succubus mistress who turned his praises to lust. The sacrilege of her breasts and thighs, used by men and women alike, became the new worship of his art, rather than the sterile purity of angels. His paintings were banned, and he fled with his mistress to a forgotten isle, where they painted each other’s bodies in piss and blood and slept with the bones of savages. I knew him well, and before he died, smothered in the decay of her flesh, he gave me this brush. Use it well.”

Bernadette next pointed at Rachel. “Long ago, I received this necklace from an Etruscan prostitute. Night after night, she begged for the means to leave this world, but her master kept her bound and helpless until a customer was at the ready. One night, as she writhed and cried beneath the robes of a
dealer in antiquities, one of her steady customers, the man was touched by pity for the woman. He asked what was the matter, and she told him. Now this dealer had just come into a huge treasure, stolen from the tomb of an ancient king. He was feeling generous, and reached into a satchel at his waist to pull free this necklace, placing it around her neck. ‘Use this well,’ he warned, and stood to take his leave of her. ‘It is said that it once adorned the neck of the most powerful high priestess in Egypt. Legend says it will show you whatever you wish to see. You may stare into the future to see your death, if you so wish, or use it to see your way to a new life.’ The prostitute did not understand his words at first, and he probably did not understand the power that he had bestowed. But eventually, the prostitute realized that she did not want to die. She used the sight of these gems to help plot her escape from her master, and eventually used it to become one of the most celebrated fortune-tellers in Italy. She died very rich. You may do the same. Touch someone’s hand with it around your neck and you will see their future. An easy talent. But let them inside you, and its vision deepens. You may tell them of the dark secrets their offspring will hold in the heaviest pits of their hearts.”

Bernadette raised her voice like a carnival barker. “Amaze your friends and family. Seduce them, lie in your incestuous bed and whisper in their guilty ears of the whores their children will take. Kiss them and slip your tongue in their ears as you speak in whispers of when and how they will die.” She laughed grotesquely. “Your bed could be an addiction, an affliction!”

Monica was staring in fear at the broken charcoal pencil. She held it away from her lap, yet couldn’t seem to drop it to the ground.

Bernadette stooped to stroke her outstretched hand. When Monica pulled the pencil and hand away, her wrist was sticky.

“That pencil once belonged to a mistress of the Marquis de
Sade,” Bernadette said. “Do any of you girls know of the Marquis?” Bernadette’s empty gaze slid over the girls, stopping to stare and smile at Rhonda’s big breasts. The girl had covered her most private bits with an arm, but Bernadette stepped closer, slid her hand beneath Rhonda’s forearm and held the nipple hidden there between cold fingers. Rhonda shivered.

“No, I don’t suppose any of you ladies have been bad enough to learn about the loves and lusts of the Marquis just yet. Remember the name—he would have loved the game we played here today.”

Bernadette pinched harder until Rhonda screamed out loud. The creature who was once their friend only laughed harder, grabbed a lock of Rhonda’s hair and forced her face to look upward. Then Bernadette’s free hand came down to slap Rhonda’s cheek with a force that made all the girls shudder.

“We have played a little game today,” Bernadette said. “Just a taste of what we could enjoy together. And you each enjoyed it, did you not?”

She stepped back to Monica.

“The Marquis’ mistress could not get enough of these sorts of games. She licked and sucked whatever he would entreat her to. And when she went home, bruised and sore and bleeding in all of her hidden places, she would draw the most ghastly visions. Beautiful bits of hell. I give you her gift. Her spirit still moves in this pencil, and it will help you see the depths to which we could plumb together.”