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Coven at World's End
Eight
Thirty-year-old Jessica Montegarde, daughter of Delores Montegarde,
notched an arrow, drew her compound bow and brought her aim up to bear on
the doe that had paused to sniff the air a few hundred feet away. She
could feel its somber alertness in the sunlit afternoon of the forest. It
was vibrantly alive and she had no right to kill it.
Gordy shifted restlessly at her side, reminding her that she had to do
it. She had to do it now. She had to eat, and she had to please Gordy at
all costs. She sighed, double-checked her stance, took a breath, and
during the pause before exhaling, she loosened her arrow.
With a powerful boost of the released string, the arrow whistled on its
deadly arc through the summer afternoon. Gordy stepped forward in
anticipation of the kill.
Gordy never sensed the twitch in her body that was all that showed of
the explosion going off inside her head. She felt pain tear through the
body of the animal. She had allowed her rapport with the animal to fuse.
Now, she could not break away in time to avoid its death. She felt its
moment of panic, confusion, and its utter helplessness as it dropped to
its knees. It could not breath as blood filled its lungs. It raised its
head and had it been a human being, it would have cried out its panic and
its terror.
Shock set in moments later, allowing it to die in a fog of relative
calm. Contrary to what most people believed, death was not a darkness.
Death was a forgetting. As the brain died, chemically stored memories
evaporated into nothingness. The animal no longer remembered how to be
what it had been. With its death went pain, memory of pain, memory of
having ever lived and died.
Except that she would remember for it.
Always.
Gordy slapped her on the back. "Damned good shot."
Jessica's lips curled a bit into a wane smile. Pleasure seeped through
despite the stress of the kill. She needed to please Gordy at all costs.
The costs were high, but Gordy was a loner. He barely tolerated her
presence in his chosen isolation from society and other human beings.
Gordy was exactly what she needed. She need the isolation from
civilization he provided. She needed to keep her distance from the cities
for the same reason she should not have meshed with the deer. The pain of
sharing was too much, especially the pain of sharing with crowds of
people. A half breed, she had no way to block it as did others of her
kind in World's End. She needed to be fed, sheltered, and cared for,
because the constant thunder of minds in her head had made it impossible
for her to think clearly and learn how to take care of herself.
Gordy led the way to the deer. Jessica hurried in his footsteps,
panicking as he drew his hunting knife from its sheath on his belt. It
had been bad enough experiencing the deer's death. She did not want to
follow that horror with the desecration of its body. "Do we have to do
that now?" she called out after him.
He threw her a tolerant smile over his shoulder. "Hey, we only need to
take back what we're going to use. The rest is dead weight."
"But..."
Gordy brooked no buts. He dropped to one knee alongside the carcass
and reached out with the razor-edged blade to gut the animal.
And then something else happened. In the next instant of time, there
was no deer lying dead on the ground. Instead, Jessica saw her mother
lying at Gordy's side. Delores Montegarde's' eyes were wide with shock,
her mouth working, but filled with blood rather than sound. The front of
her purple dress had been torn away, and a massive wound gouged into the
cartridge of the sternum and extending deep into the body.
The pumping heart showed through spurting arterial blood. The pink
tissue of lungs that could no longer draw air peeked though the wound as
well. Delores Montegarde reached a trembling arm toward her. Blood dripped
from her fingertips. Jessica sucked air and shrieked. She convulsed violently and leaped
back, her hands flying to her face in a desperate effort to stave off the
horrible visage.
The vision ended as abruptly as it had begun. Gordy glanced up at her
with an expression of keen disappointment. "What the hell was that all
about?"
Jessica fought to regain her composure. Her heart had all but burst in
her chest. Her field of vision sparkled with blackness that warned of
imminent blackout. She turned away and paced in a five-foot circle and
forced a twisted smile. "It's nothing," she said breathlessly. "I
thought I saw it move."
Gordy shook his head in exasperation, then began scanning the perimeter
of the clearing in growing concern. "Damn, Jessica. We'll have half the
county on our ass now. I can go to jail for poaching deer at this
time of the year."
"I'm sorry..."
But neither would he brook an apology. He put the knife back in its
sheath and selected his small axe instead. With it, he rose to his feet
and cleaning twigs and leaves from two ten-foot branches from nearby
saplings. He cut them free and lay them side by side alongside the deer.
He flopped the limp carcass across the branches and bound it to the poles
with twine cut from a roll in his backpack.
Jessica knew the routine. She took her end. Dragging their make-shift
skid and its cargo behind them, she had to trot to keep pace with Gordy's
long strides. When they reached the station wagon, Gordy threw the deer
inside the back and pulled a tarp over it.
"Let's get out of here," Gordy murmured, and turned away.
Gordy climbed behind the wheel. Jessica slipped in at his side. Gordy
backed through the underbrush to the dirt lane, then hurried back to the
highway and started toward his farm on the outskirts of Oak Grove.
"You okay?" A frown still furrowed his brow.
She swallowed hard. "I guess I'm still squeamish."
"It was a good shot, a clean kill. We got meat for the month, don't
have to buy that hormone-fortified, cancer-ridden beef carcass sold at the
stores."
Jessica was near panic again. Her mother was dead. Agnes, her own
twin sister had murdered her. She had felt Delores last few stray
thoughts before she died. Something had gone wrong. It had something to
do with the Ouija board. They had been attacked.
"If you want to live off the land, woman, I'll teach you," Gordy was
saying. "When you're ready, if I think you're up to it, we'll head
north. British Columbia. I'll show you a real wilderness."
She had to go to her mother. There was nothing she could do to stop
what had already been done, but she had to see for herself. Somehow, she
would have to get away and find World's End. It had been ages since she
had last made the attempt. She had not succeeded in recent years.
"Just work out for me," Gordy begged of her. "We'll have it made, you
and I."
Jessica couldn't stop shaking. Gordon couldn't help but notice.
When they reached the farm, Gordy drove around back to the shed and
silently unloaded the carcass from beneath the tarp. Jessica circled the
car and climbed behind the wheel.
Gordy looked around casually. "Where you headed?"
"We're out of sugar. I want to get to the store before it closes."
"Do you want me to show you how to field dress this animal?"
She forced herself to make eye contact and feign a casual smile.
"Don't start until I get back."
"Do you think you can do it?"
"I can do it."
"Can I hold you to that?" He sounded doubtfully.
"You can hold me to it."
"Get me a couple packs of smokes while you're at it."
"Sure." She forced a smile. "No problem."
"You going to go like that?"
She looked down at baggy, dirt-stained fatigues. He knew she'd never
go to town dressed in her hunting clothing. There was nothing to do now
but bluff her way through. "It'll just take a few minutes. . ."
He watched her drive away thinking his usual cold and suspicious
thoughts. Jessica tried to block the ugliness of his paranoia. She
failed. He was thinking she'd never work out. She was weak-stomached,
weak-willed, stupid and as eager for a pat on the head as a useless
bloodhound without a sense of smell.
She had another man in town to boot, he was thinking. The kill had
gotten her all hot and bothered like it had himself, and she wanted a man
who could keep it up longer than he could. He was wondering if she sensed
how aroused he got by the sight of blood and guts.
Jessica had. More than once. And it sickened her. She drove away
feeling nauseated by the thought of watching the animal's insides drop
from its slit belly. It had to be done a certain way to avoid tainting
the meat, Gordy had told her.
Images of the dead animal mingled with images of her dying mother. She
had never thought she'd see Delores again. She had assumed the mother she
never saw face to face would outlive her. She had never dared
entertain the thought of living without Delores' quiet emotional support
operating in the background of her life.
Delores had blocked the internal dialogue of humanity while she slept.
It had been a bond between them. Without eight hours of blissful silence,
how could she ever hope to survive?
Delores had reached out to her in her final
moment. Born of a rape in the ordinary world that had resulted in an
unwanted pregnancy, Agnes had forced her to abandon the child, assuming
she had no paranormal abilities, oblivious to those that existed,
including the bond between mother and child. She'd have gone mad
without it. Agnes had always stood between them, but not in that final moment of her
life. Delores had been free of her sister's tyranny at long last, if only
briefly.
She didn't know who to blame for her plight. Her dastardly rapist
father maybe, whoever he had been. Unable to
concentrate, school had pegged her as mildly retarded and suffering an
attention deficit disorder to boot. Uneducated, unable to think
clearly and hardly even able to write her own name, she was driving
Gordy's car without a license. She was fit for no man, not even a
simple laborer and paranoidal recluse like Gordy. She satisfied his
crude and childlike sexual urges, but he thought her scatter-brained
clumsiness threatening. He feared she'd attract the attention of the
authorities, and Gordy feared no power in the universe greater than the
arbitrary injustice of a police officer or the court system.
She drove at a reckless pace through town, growing increasingly anxious
by the moment. She had two special problems to solve. She feared she'd
not be able to deal with either.
The first problem was the most devastating.
What was she going to do when darkness fell? Her mother had shielded
her during her sleep for her entire life. Without her mother's
sheltering, she'd never be able to sleep again. There would be no
peace in her life now no matter how far she fled from civilization.
She didn't have the necessary skills to defend herself.
Jessica reached the turn-off to World's End to face her second major
problem. She drove to the hollow with gritted teeth and dipped down into
the gloom concentrating hard on old memories of golden sunlight and squat
oaks. But she emerged into the same smelly world of rural farms just
outside Eagle Gove and cried out her anguish and rage.
Whipping the car around in the middle of the road, she went back
through the hollow, turned around and tried again. Two times, three, a
half dozen. On the final attempt, the first thought of suicide crept into
her storm of anger and desperation. She held one final nostalgic memory
of the old gnarled oaks of her childhood in her mind's eye and passed down
through the cool darkness with her eyes closed.
The noise in her head fell deafeningly still. Her ears rang with the
emptiness. She gasped and pulled to the side of the road to clutch her
head with both hands. She felt herself shrinking, dwindling to
nothingness. Without the noise roaring inside her, there was nothing.
She had become nothing. She amounted to nothing.
She sat with closed eyes, feeling the strangeness of her own stray
thoughts. She didn't know how to organize any of them. They were chaos,
as bad as the static, but far fewer in number.
She drove on before the witches of World's End sensed her presence and
intervened. She drove to the old mansion, dreading a confrontation with
the horrid Agnes. If it hadn't been for Agnes, she would
never have been exiled to Oak Grove. Agnes' cold-hearted selfishness and
Delores' weak-willed passivity were two sides of a coin.
She parked the car and ran to the tree-sheltered Victorian mansion.
Fear and anger of past and present spun around in her head.
The inside of the house was a rotting tomb. The Ouija board was upset
in the sitting room, evidence in itself of lethal violence. Neither of
the sisters would have allowed the board to be dashed to the floor and the
planchette crushed beneath their feet, not their sacred icon upon its
altar.
The basement door hung open. She had no choice but to go down and see
what had happened. The cliché of the moth drawn to the flame could not
have fit her predicament better. The moment she stepped onto the
dirt-covered concrete at the base of the stairs, she saw her mother's
gaunt, pale body lying against a far wall in a stray glimmer of light.
She broke into a wail of anguish, a cry torn from the very bowels of
her soul. Just as she had seen it in her mind's eye, the body had
been butchered and broken to pieces. Bone thin arms and legs were
twisted out of shape. The chest was caved in and the neck broken. The weapon of her destruction lay at her side, a long-handled axe with
a rusted head.
"Agnes! You murderer! You old witch! Where are you!"
Jessica reached for the bloodied axe and turned to face the darkness
with it held before her. She scanned the gloom, thinking she could
probably see better than her aunt in the dim light. She began a
systematic search of dark corners. She could feel another presence nearby
no matter how hard Agnes blocked. Family could not hide from family.
"You ugly old woman! I'll kill you!"
Agnes came shrieking from behind the brick chimney swinging a garden
scythe. Jessica leaped aside, and the point buried itself harmlessly in a
wooden post. Agnes and Delores had been hard to tell apart, even in their
advanced years, but Jessica had never feared confusing this vile creature
with her gentle mother. She saw icy hatred in Agnes' rheumy eyes and
murderous intent set in the line of her toothless jaw.
Agnes relinquished her weapon and tried to rake her eyes with her clawed hands. Jessica reared
back out of reach, but was bowled over backwards when Agnes changed her
mind and went for her throat instead.
She fell with the old woman atop her. Horrified by Agnes' savagery,
she pried Agnes' fingers one by one from her throat. One by one, they
snapped.
Agnes' threw her head back. Her scream was like that of a dying
animal, her mouth agape, her eyes glazed with anguish and terror. She
would not release her death grip, but she began to convulse. Rigid with
shock, she keeled over sideways and struck the cold floor like a slab of
meat.
Her heart had failed. The horror should have ended in that moment. Instead, it only
intensified. She should have known that even petulant old Agnes could not
have manifested evil of this magnitude. Evil emanated from within her,
but it had not been native to her.
Squat black shapes like insects the size of a human hand crawled forth
from the body. Jessica staggered back in horror, sensing that what she
was seeing was a psychic rather than physical manifestation. With a low
moan of pure dread, she turned and ran.
The stairs were too far away. She took refuge in the old coal cellar,
hoping she could not be seen in the pitch blackness. But the creatures
were blacker still. Even in the total absence of light, she would have
been able to see them, blacker than darkness and darker than death. They
swarmed over her. Where their claws touched, her skin felt the cold
between the stars.
They did not tear her skin. They penetrated it. Even as she writhed
in horror, she could feel them squirming inside her, fitting themselves
and making themselves at home. They nestled themselves in empty spaces in
the psychic void of her mind.
Nauseated, Jessica scrambled to her feet. She stood panting,
monitoring herself for symptoms of the invasion of her body. It surprised
her that she was still free to move about. But then, Agnes had not been
slowed down by the infestation, at least not physically.
She had, though, been driven mad by it.
Dread flooded her mind like the ice water of melting snow seeping into
a coffin. The parasites had driven Agnes insane. They had destroyed her
mind. How could she hope to fare any better?
Isolated individuals of World's End sensed her presence. They called
to her. Jessica ran back upstairs and out to her car. If they caught her
now, they would sense the things that had gotten inside her. They would
confine her, and she would go mad. More than anything else, she needed to
be able to move in the midst of her panic. She needed to be able to run
and never to stop running.
She drove through World's End without slowing. Only as the car dropped
down into the hollow at high speed did she reconsider the wisdom of trying
to flee. The ordinary would would fill her with noise. And she'd not be
able to tell anyone what had happened. Gordy would never believe her
story.
And she was carrying an infection with her. It would escape and run
rampant among the citizens of the ordinary world.
She jammed on her brakes. It was too late. The background static of the psychic void thundered in her head.
She drove back up into bright yellow sunlight disoriented, the car wandered into the opposing lane of traffic. Coming
down its own lane toward her, a motorcycle loomed in her field of view.
Jessica hit her brakes again. Both vehicles were sliding when
they collided.
Impact rocked the car. It lurched to a stop and stalled. With her
mind hobbled by the return of the static in her head, she clambered out of
her car and went searching blindly for the boy she had struck.
The bike had been shattered. The boy had been catapulted up and over
the car entirely. He had spun up and out of sight. She had seen his
shoes fly off his feet.
He could not have possibly survived.
He lay on a patch of grass behind the car. She ran to him and dropped
to her knees, certain that he was dead. But he writhed, semi-conscious,
looking about with eyes open wide and pupils dilated.
Jessica opened her mouth to plea forgiveness. Instead of words,
parasites issued forth, inky blackness belching forth like vomit onto the
hapless youth. The parasites sank into the flesh of his chest and face.
The boy seemed not to notice.
Jessica rose to her feet and backed away, confused and consumed by
horror. She swung around in a blind panic and staggered toward the
car. She drove away on screaming tires to escape the madness she had
witnessed.
Somehow, she found her way home. She slid into Gordy's drive on the
far side of Oak Grove and drove around back without slowing. The front
bumper struck a corner post of an overhang Gordy had built onto one side
of the shed, sending the entire structure rocking. Gordy came running out
into the open.
Jessica reached for the door latch and twisted. The door gave way
unexpectedly, dumping her onto the ground outside.
Gordy rushed to her side murmuring a string of profanities. He dragged
her to her feet. "Are you hurt?" He roughly tilted her chin back. "You
been drinking?"
"Gordy, I'm sick." She choked on the words. Even with her eyes
closed, she saw the inky black creatures gush forth and knew with a
terrible certainty that she had infected Gordy as she had the boy.
The insects were mere hallucination. It was the deep telepathic
rapport all human beings shared that allowed the creatures a psychic
bridge to others.
"Let's go to the house," Gordy said, oblivious to what was happening.
He turned her about. Her foot caught on something. Looking down, the
brown eye of the dead deer at her feet reflected a fish-eye image of
herself. It was an empty eye, though, devoid of conscious life, and she
envied the creature for the peace it had found. If only her own death
would be as swift and merciful.
