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Coven at World's End
Twelve
Something was happening in the forest. Sarah went outside at nightfall
to observe the line of trees on the horizon glowing from within in an
unearthly light, a haze made up of discrete bits of light that swirled
like mist caught in a spiraling breeze. She had never seen so many
fairies in her life. They illuminated the depths of the forest as far as
the eye could see. Undulating tendrils of sparkling light ventured into
the open and danced like stardust caught in a vortex, all so mysterious,
and all so beautiful.
Neither had she ever seen the human presence in World's End behave so
strangely. An ominous veil of unrest had settled over the town. She
could feel them standing in dark corners of their homes, mulling over the
constant barrage of emotion stirred to life by the parasite that dwelled
within them. They could hold the petty irritations and anger at bay
within themselves, but only at the cost of their ability to help each
other. Some of the younger women were having a greater problem dealing
with the stirrings of sexual feelings, feelings of such intensity that
even Sarah's breath caught in her throat from time to time.
A few months ago, such feelings would have been alien to her. At
sixteen, she was just beginning to understand how they fit into the scheme
of things. She had felt the same urges and desires in Leo's presence.
Her mother had warned her about their ultimately irresistible nature.
Planning ahead to heed their call was making sound sense at long last.
Someday, she would have a boy of her own, except that she could not
imagine who he might be, or where she might find him.
World's End was so terribly isolated in that fashion. If the men
of the ordinary world were not suitable fathers, then who and where were
they? Had every birth in World's End originated in a secret tryst in
the forest with strange men from beyond hidden gateways? Her
mother's story was romantic and tragic, but typical of every birth that
had ever taken place in World's End. Nobody, not even her own
mother, could block their shame and their guilt for succumbing so easily
to what had to have been an orchestrated breeding program.
Sarah smiled faintly. Hardly anyone suspected, or even imagined,
that the fairies were responsible.
"Sarah, what are you doing?"
The displeasure in her mother's tone of voice voice startled her. She
had wandered out behind the house dressed in nothing but a dark blue pair
of bikini underwear. "There's nobody to
see," she tossed over her shoulder in self-defense
Beth drew alongside of her and scanned the face of the trees. "Do you
know what's happening?"
"I can't imagine."
"Were you going to go to them?"
She sighed. Maybe she would have. Their calls were so deep and subtle
that often she was not consciously aware of them, although on this strange
night, their call was so strong that she was very much conscious of it.
"Sarah?"
"I've never seen so many before."
"Sarah, you must think about what you are doing."
"I know."
"Come back into the house and put some clothes on."
Sarah turned away. So strong was the urge to wander out into the dark
fields that it took an effort of will to do so.
Beth followed her back inside the house. "Are you ready for bed?"
"No, way. I could never sleep. Nobody in all of World's End is
sleeping right now. Not one single person."
Beth took a seat at the kitchen table and waited until Sarah joined her
before speaking. "Miriam and I agree that we need an observer in Oak
Grove to keep tabs on the progression of the infestation."
"We have people living in Oak Grove who can do that, Mom."
"The infestation is distracting, Sarah. We have no one free of the
virus except you. And we need somebody to check on
Jessica Montegarde. Delores protected her, and now her mother’s dead."
She had forgotten about that. She gave her mother's suggestion careful
consideration regardless. "You're just trying to get rid of me," she
said, quickly picking up on the worry among her mother's thoughts.
"I think you would be safer in Oak Grove, but we still need you
there. Will you go?"
Sarah didn't think it would be safer at all, not if the virus had
escaped among ordinary people who would not understand what was happening
to them. But she gave a nod of agreement knowing she should have a
look for herself at what was happening in the ordinary world. "I'll
go, at least for the night."
"You must be very careful."
"I know. I will."
Beth followed her upstairs. Sarah dressed in denims and a cotton
blouse and threw on a denim jacket to boot. The night was a bit cool and
it would be a long and lonely haul until morning. "I'll take my bicycle.
It's not all that far to town from the gateway."
"You've grown up so fast," Beth said. "I worry about you as I would a
child, and then I sense what you are thinking, or feeling, and you startle
me. You’ve lost your innocence, and I don’t think I appreciate the world
having done that to you."
Sarah paused at her window and looked again out over the forest. Life
had been so much more fun as a little girl. The forest had been so
fascinating and mysterious. But she looked around and smiled at her
mother. "You’re thinking that I can at least take care of myself."
Beth gave an absent nod of agreement. "Miriam will want to question
you in the morning. She'll want to know about the contagion, how fast its
spreading, how the ordinary world is holding up to it. It will not be a
pleasant experience. I wouldn’t expose you to it, but there's
nowhere to hide. We have to find a way to stop this from spreading."
"It's not so pleasant here either," she reminded her mother.
"Everybody is thinking such awful thoughts."
"I know. It taints the atmosphere."
"Can we stop it?"
"Rebecca says we can hold it at bay. It alone won’t defeat us.
She says it emanates from a single source. We can stop it as soon as
we've identified it."
Beth carefully held back closely associative thoughts and memories. "If the virus isn't all
that dangerous," Sarah said, "what happened to grandmother and the others of the
Coven?"
Beth gave a reluctant nod of acknowledgement. "Yes. Something more
may happen. Maybe I should drive you into town. You can take
the bike with for a way back. Where will you stay?"
"I have friends," she said, although she planned to wing it during the
hours of darkness. It wasn't likely that anyone in Oak Grove could harm
her. She wasn't at all defenseless, and her mother knew it.
Beth led the way out to the car, helped her load the bike on the rack,
and drove through the night to the gateway in the tree-filled ravine in
grim silence. Sarah glanced at her mother's dark silhouette outline in the glow
from the dash lights. "Does Rebecca know what’s going to happen next?
She usually does."
"No, and it bothers me. It's like we're being blocked, except I can't
image a mind powerful enough to affect so many people. It can't be a
human mind."
"Carlotta can't handle it," Sarah said with a grim smile.
"Carlotta and her cronies wear blinders. They have no imagination.
They'll never be prepared for trouble."
Sarah nodded agreement. She could read minds, but the minds in World's
End were often far more complex than her own and filled with more
knowledge and subtleties of emotion than she understood outright.
The minds of ordinary people were far easier to deal with. And the
petty minds of women like Carlotta and her friends.
"If anything bad happens," Beth said, "don't panic. Think through
every move you make very carefully. The children of the Coven survived,
and the Coven itself defeated whatever it was that attacked it. We'll do
at least as well. Forewarned as we have been, I hope we can do better."
Sarah sighed nervously. The car approached the hollow, then dipped
down into the cavern of canopies of the giant oaks. The headlights
speared the darkness in bright white light.
Coming up the other side felt like emerging into a firestorm of
unfettered emotion. Even Beth's breath caught in her throat. "Oh, my
God…"
Churning anger, animal lust, seething envy. And fear. Oak Grove was
ablaze with primal emotion. Beth pulled to the side of the road on the
outskirts of town ten minutes later. To the naked eye, everything looked
normal. There were few people about. Traffic was light, except that it
seemed to be going too fast. People were short-tempered and acting funny.
"Sarah, are you sure you can handle this?"
"Mother, I know you want me to show more respect for these people, but
sometimes I get so exasperated with them. I can handle it, and I won't
let anyone close enough to hurt me."
"There could be drive-by shootings…"
But people intent on doing harm concentrated all the harder on what
they were doing. She would be able to see them coming.
Beth sighed. "Miriam's going to post guards on either side of the
gateway to serve as a communications relay to World's End. If you need
help, you should be able to get through to us."
"I'll be okay."
"Out with you, then."
Sarah left the car and slammed the door shut behind her. She leaned in
through the window. "Mom, I'm more worried about you than you are about
me."
"Probably you should be, but World’s End needs me."
"That's because you're the best they've got," she said with a
smile.
Beth reached for her hand and gave it a squeeze. Sarah went around
back and took her bike from the rack. She rolled it to the shoulder and
watched her mother swung the car around in a U-turn and headed back into
the dark countryside.
Sarah scanned the face of the trees. She
couldn't see a fairy anywhere. The ordinary world was far too ordinary
for her tastes. She straddled the bike and rode at a casual pace, at
peace with herself in the night and not at all eager to enter the lights
of town. If the storm of emotion coming from Oak Grove had been expressed
as physical voices, it would have sounded like a prison riot.
"Somebody help me!"
The silent cry jolted through her like the charge of a stun gun. It came from
the special mind of someone from World's End, and there was only one such
mind in Oak Grove.
Jessica Montegarde.
Sarah peddled harder.
"Somebody, please!"
Sarah tried to locate the cry for help in space and time. The effort
was especially difficult filtered through the static generated by
fifteen hundred infested minds in Oak Grove. On the other side of town
somewhere. By the incipient panic she could feel in the cry for help,
she’d never get there on time no matter how fast she peddled. Jessica
Montegarde was about to die.
Sarah rolled the bike into the ditch. She turned to face two cars
approaching Oak Grove from the distance, their headlights rising into view
and dropping out of sight among the rolling hills.
By the time she could hear the sound of their motors, she had scanned
the minds of drivers and passengers. The first car was filled with
teenagers out looking for trouble. They passed without noticing her
standing in the dark. Sarah then stepped into view and flagged down
the second oncoming vehicle. The driver saw her as a woman alone on
a dark road. His wife seated at his side entertained a split menu of
possibilities. She was a whore on the prowl for unfaithful men like
her husband, but maybe a rape or abuse victim forced from a car in the
middle of nowhere. She made no effort to stop her husband as he
pulled to the side of the road to indulge his curiosity.
Sarah pointed vaguely back down the highway. "I hit a little deer and
ran my car into the ditch. Please, can I have a ride to town?"
Neither had the heart to turn her away despite their nervousness. Both
chatted up a storm during the drive, neither mind as yet infected. Sarah
kept the focus of her attention on the dim rapport she had established
with Jessica Montegarde.
"Oh, God! Gordy, please don’t!"
"Here!" Sarah cried out along an empty stretch of road. "Thank you
very much! I don't know what I would have done without you!"
The man pulled the car to the shoulder of a blacktop. The woman was
delighted to have helped her, and the man eyed the driveway and the house
deeply recessed on a wooded lot, thinking maybe he could stop or phone on
the pretext of checking on her welfare at a later date.
Sarah left the car and flew down the driveway as fast as her legs could
carry her. Whatever was happening was happening now. She had run out of
time.
"No!" she screamed into the night. "Stop!"
Sarah ignored a dark house standing to one side of the driveway. She
turned instead to a shed with an overhang built on one side and a low
wattage bulb illuminating a scene of utter horror. A man with a hunting
knife clutched in his right fist turned and looked around at her in utter
surprise. He saw her at first as a girl who had stumbled into his private
corner of the world by accident, but in an instant he could tell that she
was no ordinary girl. The fact that she advanced on him despite the knife
clutched in his hand sparked a surge of terrible guilt for what he had
been caught doing.
Two in one night. Neither in heaven nor hell could such fantasies
be fulfilled. Only here in this foul, fucked-up world of ignorant
and stupid men and worthless women. He fell absolutely still to
allow the girl in the night to draw closer. Like a fly approaching
the web of a spider, she'd belonged to him body and soul. His lust
was like a fire, planning a thousand ways to satisfy it at her expense.
"Don't even think about it, Gordy," Sarah murmured as she drew closer.
The sound of his name being spoken by a stranger startled him. He had
been found out. If she knew, then the police couldn't be far behind her.
He turned and fled in a panic. Within seconds, he had plunged into a
wall of trees and disappeared. Sarah felt him plunge on blindly, groping
his way through the underbrush toward town.
Sarah spied a collection of stained knives nearby, cut Jessica
Montegarde's bindings and helped her from the rack. Jessica snatched a
nearby plastic tarp with which to hide her nakedness. Sickened by the incident,
Sarah turned to the house. She went on ahead, turning on lights in the
kitchen, and then the dining and living rooms. She paced restlessly,
aware that she had underestimated how awful it was going to be in Oak
Grove. Terrible demons had been set free in the souls of ordinary men and
women alike, passions and hungers that had been buried from the light of
civilization for centuries before the coming of the virus.
She sat on the edge of the couch in the living room and followed
Gordy's progress in her mind's eye until the man exhausted himself and
collided with a tree. He fell panting to the ground, wailing his anguish
to the darkness. Jessica Montegarde fled up the stairs to the bedrooms.
She paced wildly, battling her panic and the thunder of Oak Grove
penetrating her unprotected consciousness. In time, she showered and
dressed and thought that she wanted to die as soon as possible. It
would have been better for her had Gordy killed her. If only he had
meant to kill her quickly and with compassion, but he would not have done
so. She sat huddled in an
upstairs corner in the dark, feral and unrelentingly panicky.
Sarah finally went to the woman and sat on the edge of a bed in the
room. She extended
her own protective block to shield the woman from the surrounding psychic
cacophony. Jessica gave a shuddering sigh of relief. "Where is he?" she said
after a time.
"Out in the trees somewhere. He won't be back, at least for tonight."
Jessica jammed her eyes closed and basked in the ringing silence.
"Do you understand what's happening?" Sarah asked.
"Agnes started it. She had something inside her. It's in me now. I
gave it to Gordy. I hit a boy on a motorcycle near the gateway. I must
have given it to him, too."
Sarah gathered the information from Jessica's surface thoughts. "That
was Leo. He must have went back looking for me."
Jessica looked up hopefully. "Can they stop it? The
Council can do something
about it, can’t they?"
"They don’t know what it is yet. It's spread really fast."
"Gordy would never have behaved like that.
Not for real."
"Probably not," Sarah said doubtfully, "but you're going to have to go
to World's End if you want to be safe. I don't know what else you can do
with your mother gone. I don't see how you can live like this."
"I can go to the police and tell them what has happened."
Sarah was grimly amused. "Nobody will believe you."
"Would it help if they did?"
Sarah gave the notion a moment's consideration. "It would help if
people knew they were being attacked, if they knew it was coming from
outside of themselves."
"I should try. I'm responsible."
Jessica wasn't thinking clearly, but Sarah had no alternative course of
action to suggest, and no way to force the woman to do her bidding. Maybe
it would help if she had some goal to achieve. She'd have to take
refuge at World's End sooner or later. She'd not survive for long in
the ordinary world."
"My mother was ashamed me," Jessica said, breaking down in
tears. "Even when she was dying. She felt so bad about me."
"Do you blame yourself for the circumstances of your birth?"
Jessica looked up from the darkness in surprise. "Did they send you to
help me? You're just a kid."
"They sent me to keep an eye on things."
"Just you?"
"Yep, just little 'ol me."
Jessica bowed her head and sighed in misery.
"There's going to be someone at the gateway until this thing is over,"
Sarah said. "They'll help you through, if you change your mind. If you
call for help, we'll hear you."
"They'd let me in with that horrible thing still inside me?"
"World's End is infected, too."
Jessica was beginning to think that maybe World's End couldn't help
itself. A single lingering fear kept coming back to haunt her. "Gordy
won't come back, will he?"
"Gordy's thinks the police are chasing him. Maybe he'll just keep
running."
Jessica climbed to her feet thinking that the police would definitely
help her, and protect her from Gordy. In any case, she couldn't remain
still. The thing inside her generated far too much nervous tension to
just sit and try to wait it out.
Sarah monitored the woman as she went down the stairs and out into the
night. The pain ordinary people tolerated appalled her. Nobody in
World's End had ever suffered anything near the swamp of dark emotion
settling over Oak Grove. She could not imagine how people could suffer so
terribly and still looked forward to another day. And yet they were all
trying to tell themselves that nothing was wrong, that the morrow's
sunlight would spell an end to the terrible thoughts erupting from the
unsettled night and goading them to acts of rape, murder, and desecration.
Sarah let Jessica Montegarde go her own way. She opened herself to the
psychic void and registered all she could of events transpiring in Oak
Grove. Maybe somewhere among them lurked clues that Miriam and
the Council at World's End could use to stop the virus. Unchecked,
the infestation promised to turn the world into a living hell.
