Covenant (18 page)

And the equally quick loss of her top left him marveling more, with less intellectual backing this time. When she slipped two long-nailed fingers in and coaxed down his gray Jockeys, Joe stopped marveling at the maturity of her lusts and began to help her meet them. With hands they guided each other, and with lips kissed appreciation.

And other things.

He was running down a long white hallway. A hospital. But one bereft of patients. Maybe it was the morgue. Cool white doors interrupted the flow of the otherwise expressionless wall on either side, but they were all closed. And he didn’t slow to try them, only ran on and on and on. Toward a window. At the end of the hall.

A window with the shadowy limbs of a tree slapping it softly:
shlphat, shlphat
.

He had to reach the window or Cindy would die. He knew that. But the faster he ran, the farther away the window seemed to get.

A door ahead of him opened, and there was Mrs. Canady, her bovine body a human roadblock of grinning mass and malevolence. One of her eyes glowed bloodred in the sulphuric light of the hall, a lighthouse of warning.
Do not come this
close
.

But he did. Her arms wrapped around him like crab claws, but Joe didn’t slow. Without thinking, he kneed her in the belly and slipped from her grasp, leaving her grunting and moaning on the floor.

He ran farther, and the other mothers stepped out from doors on both sides of the hall. They had baseball bats, and swung them with quiet menace back and forth, back and forth.

He did what any good little league graduate would.

He ran straight at them with all the bluff and bluster he
could, and then, at the last second as they swung for his head, he dropped to the ground and slid between their legs as the women swished empty air above.

“Strike one,” he called, and leapt to his feet again.

And then there was Angelica.

She wore only a gaudy silk robe, and it was not belted. Her sex was invitingly exposed as she stood, legs far apart, in the center of the hall, arms open to clutch him to her breasts. Which, even through the sheen of the robe, appeared eager to receive him.

As he prepared to do a slide between her legs as well, a scabbing, pus-covered green arm slid out from her vagina, its blackened fingernails sharp and pointed and snatching at the air in his direction.

Gulping with fear and disgust, Joe threw himself to the left and smashed against the hard concrete wall as he jumped over her bare left foot and then staggered back to the center of the hallway.

He could hear them now, behind him. The clicks of heels in flight, the slap of bare flesh on tile. The window seemed a little closer now, and through it, he could make out something near the tree—hanging from it? Something yellow. Something with blonde hair.

Cindy?

Joe threw himself forward, his stomach burning hot, his thighs screaming in unexercised complaint.

A nail scratched his thigh, and he willed himself not to turn around to see who was right on his ass. One turn and she’d have him, whoever it was.

But he had a suspicion that it was a decayed fetal arm. A baby still hidden in Angelica’s womb that would grip his testicles and wrench with glee until they came off.

A bell rang then. An alarm. Or a “class is out” warning. He wasn’t sure.

And then a hand did sink its fingers into his shoulder, and
as it shook him hard once, twice and then a third horrible time, he gave in to all of his fears and screamed….

Screamed out loud.

In his bed.

With Cindy’s wide eyes staring into his own in concern.

“The phone, Joe. The phone is ringing! Do you want me to get it?”

He shrugged away the shreds of dream and then shook his head.

“No, no, I got it.”

He slid out of bed and walked naked across the room to grab the ringing phone, only realizing his nudity and feeling a twinge of embarrassment once he put the phone to his ear and turned toward Cindy as he said, “Hello.”

A dangling feeling and Cindy’s own hand holding a sheet across her breast conspired to make Joe turn sideways.
Why
do people who have just fucked like rabbits feel modesty the morning
after?
he wondered, and then lost the thought as he listened to the voice on the other end of the line.

It was Brett, his friend from the Chicago welfare department. A simple hello and Joe had placed that gruff ‘n’ gravel voice immediately.

“I think I tracked her down last night, Joe,” Brett growled on the other end of the line. “Sorry it took me a couple days, but I had to wait till things were quiet around here to look this one up.”

“Yeah? What’ve you got?”

“Well, unlike whatcha said about her sending that kid far away, it doesn’t look like she went far at all. In fact, I almost ignored the listing,’ cuz you said she’d be outta state,” Brett said. He had a tendency to ramble on before getting to the point. That trait was especially noticeable after a couple bottles of Guinness.

“You did say the mother asked that she be adopted out of state, right?”

“Yeah, that’s what she said,” Joe agreed.

“Well, I found here an unnamed baby girl, belonging to a Rachel Napalona, given up to the adoption ward nineteen years ago. Doesn’t look as if they sent the baby out of state though.”

“Well, where did she go, Brett?”

“Looks as if she never left that little town you’re in.” Brett laughed. “The agency’ll do that sometimes, especially given a request like that. Contrary people, those adoption administrators can be.”

“Where’d she end up?”

“A family called Marshfield. Since the baby hadn’t been named ahead of time, the rec ords on my end show the Marsh-fields named her right off. Cynthia, they called her.”

There was an icicle in Joe’s belly. He struggled to keep from doubling over.

“Thanks, Brett. I owe ya.”

“Case a’ Guinness next time you’re in town?”

“You got it. Later, man.”

Joe hung up the phone, trying to shield the shocked expression on his face. How many surprises could there be in a town the size of Terrel?

He looked across the room at Cindy Marshfield.

Cynthia Marshfield. Missing daughter of Rachel/Angelica Napalona. Predestined cliff diver. Daughter of the woman who had fucked him while possessed by the devil of Terrel’s Peak. The young, energetic woman who he’d fucked on his own last night. The missing person in his bed let the sheet drop a bit as she freed her hand.

“Anything wrong, Joe?” she asked, stifling a yawn with one lithe, tanned arm. The bed sheet slipped some more, revealing the soft rosebud of a nipple as she stretched.

“No, nothing wrong. Just a friend from home.”

He padded back across the room, slid beneath the covers and took Cindy protectively into his arms. She was in deadly danger, and she didn’t know it.

And if the being in the cliff really could read people’s thoughts, she was now in the most peril from him.

Not for the first time in his romantic life, Joe realized how dangerous a little knowledge could be to a relationship.

Only this time the danger wasn’t trial or jail. This time it was life and death.

Cindy’s life.

And death.

Ken woke up with a pounding headache. His jaw felt like a bag of loose rocks. And there were various other not-so-fresh feelings here and there across his frame.

But as luck would have it, he’d somehow managed to avoid getting washed into a sinkhole or out to sea. As he carefully, slowly swiveled his eyes and neck to take in his surroundings, he saw that he’d come to rest on the bank of the river, rescued by the arm of the low-hanging rock in front of him, he guessed.

Gingerly, he pressed a hand to his face. It came away wet and sticky.

“Okay,” he murmured. “Systems check. Right leg?”

He kicked his leg without any shooting pains. Tried the left with similar success. He’d already tested his right arm by touching his face. “Left arm?”

Nothing happened.

Fuck.

Ken rolled to his back and felt his left arm from shoulder to wrist. Dimly, he could feel the pressure of his fingers kneading the flesh, but it was far away, as if he were experiencing it from a distance.

But he hadn’t felt any broken bones. Nor was there any—

And then the heat came. Pins and needles and fire-hot pokers shot through his flesh like skewers.

“Shit!” he cried, and sitting up, began to shake the arm, which responded by sending even more confused signals to his brain. For a second, he wondered if a broken bone could have been more painful. But at last the sleeping arm woke up, and Ken counted himself as lucky. Fully operational, and damn, damn lucky not to be drowned or completely incapacitated. Even his helmet light still worked, which meant he couldn’t have been unconscious for too long; the batteries wouldn’t have lasted more than a few hours.

He groaned his way to his feet and took note of his surroundings. The river ran to his left; the ceiling was only a foot or so above him, and tapered to near water level on the far side of the underground river. To his right, a broken shale path led into the darkness in both directions. Judging that the easiest course would be to follow the river to the ocean, he opted to follow the path in the direction of the water’s current.

He’d either get out that way or starve to death.

He had every intention of getting out.

“
Then you’d better not go this way
,” a voice spoke in his head.

Ken jerked around.

“
You can’t see me, Ken, so don’t bother looking
.”

Ken shook his head, trying to clear it. He must have really hit the bottom hard. Now he was truly hearing voices.

“
You’re head is fine, Ken. But it wouldn’t be if I hadn’t
helped you back there. I got you out of the river. You should be
thanking me
.”

The spelunker finally began to get scared. This didn’t feel like going crazy. This felt real. He remembered the guy who’d fallen into the river just a few days ago, and what he’d said when they pulled him out. That something down there had spoken to him.

“
That was me,”
the voice acknowledged.
“Everything you’ve
ever heard about this place is true
.”

“Oh, shit,” Ken muttered, backing against the wall of the corridor.

“
Don’t worry, Ken, I’m not going to make you jump off the cliff.
I’m here to help you get what you’ve always wanted. And you can
help me too. How about we make a Covenant, just you and me…?
”

“What if the tide fills that room when it comes in?” Monica whined, her voice like nails on a chalkboard to Karen.

Why were we ever friends
? Karen wondered, not for the first time. A vision of her friend naked, licking, covered in Bernadette’s blood passed before her eyes.

Since the Covenant had been made, they’d been tied together, whether they liked each other or not. And whether they’d ever indulged or admitted it, they all wanted each other in that way again. He had mainlined them cocaine, and they would never be free of its attraction.

“What if Rachel drowns and it’s all our fault?” Monica kept it up from the backseat.

“Then that’s it, I guess,” Rhonda barked, not looking away from the wheel, but never one to miss an opportunity for brusqueness.

And why did I ever listen to her?
Karen thought, looking at their de facto chauffeur, and seeing through the matronly blouse to the thick fall of her breasts beneath. She peered into the backseat with a sad smile, taking in both her friends. The haunted look on Monica’s emaciated old-lady frame. The thrill of sadism in Rhonda’s beady near-black eyes.

What has become of us
? Karen thought.
What has He done to
us? What might our lives have been if we had thrown those gifts in the
ocean? If we had found the strength to run from the caves, instead of
dropping our swimsuits on the cold rock floor? He killed Bernadette
for that, but…if we had all done it…could He, would He, have
killed us all?

But she had
what if
ed too many times. She shook the thoughts away. They were
here
, it was
now
, and they had left the bargain shirker in the place she belonged. This was a private little battle, an all-or-nothing pact, and nobody outside the circle would ever understand the stakes, the winners or the losers.

“Just forget about it for now,” Karen’s weary voice told the other two. “Let’s just go home. Tomorrow night we’ll come back, and we’ll see if this thing can finally be over.”

In her heart, she had the feeling that it wouldn’t be over though. No matter what Rachel decided. He had always wanted more from them. When He had spoken with Bernadette’s voice, He had tried to steer them to the debauchery of de Sade. To the sick promises of group pleasure—and pain. He had begged them as He’d handed out His evil gifts to invite Him, in some fashion, to their beds. He’d suckled them with honey on a carrion finger, and expected them to come back for more. In the night, He had come to each of them after that evil day and plied them with visions of their pleasure in the cave, of the erotic ecstasy they had achieved with one another, under His command.

He had offered them the vision over and over again. They had all whispered of it to one another, if they were too shy to talk of its details or to admit that they secretly wondered if they could recapture that rapture in the privacy of their bedrooms with one another. They were all seduced by, if resistant, to its promise.

At nineteen, at twenty, at twenty-one and beyond, lying in her nightshirt—and sometimes not—in the bedroom above her parents, Karen had been visited by Him in the darkest, heaviest humidity of summer. He begged her to shed her inhibitions and dance naked and sweating in the road with Him. In the brilliant white light of morning in the winter, He had invoked her to stoke the fire and suckle the sagging
organs of her parents. “Bring them the love you can,” He whispered. “You are young. You can make them so happy.”

His visions were alternately despicable and enticing in her ear, and again and again He had shown her the tight, naked bodies of her friends, coupling at eighteen. At first she was repulsed.
Lesbian!
her mind had spit. Never! But He would remind her body with the spasms of orgasm she had known at the fingers and tongues of her friends in the cave and then cut off the sensations as He laughed at her.

“
Lesbian?
” He would say. “
Don’t spit with such enmity on
what you have enjoyed so well
.”

He had interrupted her private finger play in the quiet hours (she couldn’t help it, she had to have
something
) with visions of Rhonda’s thick red lips sucking leechlike on her tits. He had teased her with the sight of Melody’s blue-painted fingernails stroking her moistest and neediest places as Rachel leaned in, copper breasts swaying over Karen’s forehead to kiss her wetly on the lips.

Years later, in bed lying next to her husband, fallen asleep sweat-slicked and snoring after Karen had fulfilled his pedestrian lusts, He had entered her mind and shown her tricks and twists. He had teased her with twisted secrets of the flesh that would make her man come even harder, after staying harder, longer. She had refused to act on most of that knowledge, knowing that her husband would wonder at the degradations she had enacted. Wondering where she had learned such defilement. Would think her a whore as he moaned and enjoyed the orgasm, regardless. These visions made her legs drip with need and her hands clench with helplessness. And He had also shown her the tangled skeins that could be woven with her friends astride her man, and herself, the lot of them sharing and fucking in one twisted, sweat-stained bed. He had shown her all this, and more, and no doubt had shown her friends the same things, perhaps indulging Rhonda’s sadistic side with visions of whips and corsets and humiliated men, and Melody with rows
of effeminate but attentive men who would take her in every hole and leave her with flowers rimmed around her dehydrated body.

Karen shook away the erotic thoughts that she had steeled herself from indulging in all her life. Rhonda was a fool if she believed that this game with Rachel/Angelica was going to close the book. He relished the games He played with them. He relished the way He could make their nipples hard with visions. He laughed at the need He awakened in their cunts.

In her heart, Karen had the feeling that the book was not nearly over, that they had all just begun a brand-new chapter.