Hag Night (16 page)

Wenda felt a chill run through her that only increased when she saw two children outside the window before her: a boy and a girl. Their eyes were huge and dark like bullet holes in pale vellum.
Their pallid faces seemed to glow like moonflowers. They were both grinning, their teeth long and sharp.

“Go away,” she said under her breath. “Just go away.”

She still had the stake in her hand, so she raised it so they could see it and they both flinched, it seemed, momentarily, understanding exactly what she was going to do with it when the time came. They pulled back into the storm and right before Wenda closed the curtains she saw them standing to either side of a tall, gaunt figure that looked to be dressed in a long ragged fur coat. She saw his face for just a second—white and hollow-cheeked with prominent cheekbones and a hawkish Slavic nose, a trailing gray mustache. And eyes…red eyes burning with a hatred and malevolent wrath that made her feel weak in the knees.

Then the storm buried them and the curtain was closed.

“You saw him didn’t you?” Megga said.

Wenda swallowed. “Stay away from the window. You’re weak. You’re too easily…
swayed
by those things.”

Megga sneered at her and sat on the sofa. “If they want to come in, they’ll come in.”

“If they could, they would. They’re looking for an opening and you’re not going to be it,” Wenda promised her. And when she saw Megga glaring her, she smiled thinly and said, “Don’t fuck with me.”

Megga looked away.

Wenda couldn’t help thinking that once she’d really liked Megga. They’d laughed and had fun together both on and off the set of
Chamber of Horrors.
Now she hated her. She saw her as the weakest link of all and she detested her for it. The only difference between Megga and those things outside was that she didn’t have fangs. But that was coming, oh yes, that was coming.

“Man, I gotta pee,” Morris said.

Oh great,
Wenda thought.
What next?

2

They had Bailey on the couch now. She’d had some kind of seizure, Doc said, and to whether that was from losing so much blood to
the hag or because of shock or both he could not say. She was pale, her throat still dark with dried blood, and when she did open her eyes, the pupils were dilated and unfocused.  She was caught in the sleepy post-seizure netherworld of the epileptic.

It would pass, Doc assured them. It would pass.

He doesn’t believe that at all,
Reg thought.

He had all the faith in the world in Doc. He loved the guy. He was like the cool uncle he never had or the solid, introspective, stone-cool father he never knew. Reg would have crawled naked through a fire ant mound with honey on his ass for him. But, right then, he could hear it on Doc’s voice:
doubt.
What Doc was saying he was saying for the purposes of general morale, to keep spirits maybe not flying, but at least from dragging their chins on the ground. He’d been a combat medic in ‘Nam. He knew his shit. So when Reg heard the doubt in his voice he knew Bailey was in real trouble.

Doc had bandaged her neck, but they lacked disinfectant. She needed medical care badly.
And maybe a priest,
Reg was thinking.

“She looks pretty pale,” Burt said. “How much blood you figure she lost?”

Doc sighed. “Quite a bit, I’m guessing.”

“But that…that fucking
thing
was only on her for maybe ten seconds at most.”

Doc just shrugged.

Reg was trying hard to disguise the hate he was feeling for Burt right then but it was burning hot through him like shrapnel. When the shit had come down—and man had it come down—Burt hadn’t done a damn thing. He’d dropped to his ass with a dumb/confused/helpless sort of look like a little boy who’d heard a voice from his closet and was going to piss his pants and suck his thumb. Even when Reg had rammed the poker through that fucking witch for the second time—
and, man, was that some weird-ass shit or what? Poker went through her real easy like she wasn’t even flesh and blood but maybe stuffed with straw
—and they had her, it had been Doc that had picked up the axe and chopped her head off.

Burt had done nothing. M
aybe if he had acted like a man that witch wouldn’t have gotten her teeth into Bailey in the first place.

“How could that thing suck that much blood out of her that fast?” Burt said.

But Doc just shrugged again.

“Maybe if you’d have helped us, dude, she wouldn’t have gotten
any,”
Reg heard himself say before he could stop.

Burt got that wild look in his eyes again. “Meaning what exactly, kid?”

“Meaning you folded up on us. We needed you,
Bailey
needed you, and all you could fucking do was crawl into the corner and hide.”

“You better watch your fucking mouth,” Burt told him.

But Reg was on a roll and he wasn’t about to watch anything. This had to be said, in his way of thinking. “Don’t waste your time with that tough-ass shit, Burt. I know what you are. We
all
know what you are now. You’re a fucking coward. You’re a fucking pussy. You’re not even a man.”

Burt made a beeline for him and Reg waited, wanting nothing better than to slap him up and beat him down, but Doc got in the way. “Enough,” he said. “We have enough problems without in-fighting. What happened, happened. Let’s leave it at that.”

Burt looked from Reg and then to Doc. “It happened so fast. I didn’t have time…I just didn’t have time.” He waited for acknowledgment of the same from Doc, but Doc would not even look at him. “Wasn’t time,” he said again, sounding almost wounded.

“We found the time,” Reg said.

Burt shook a finger at him and Reg just laughed down in his throat. “Don’t bother threatening, man. I know a coward when I see one. I know a little fucking girl.”

“ENOUGH!” Doc said. “I WON’T HAVE THIS!”

That took the starch out of both of them; at least temporarily. Doc was mellow as milk, but when he got his back up, you didn’t want to be on the receiving end of his temper. Reg had only seen him lose it once on the
Chamber of Horrors
set…but it sent people scurrying under desks.

Bailey opened her eyes. She did not look so good. There were dark circles under her baby blues and she was pale like somebody had pancaked the color from her cheeks. “I’m thirsty,” she said. “I’m so thirsty.”

Doc looked over at Burt. “Go into the kitchen and see if that hand pump works. Fill a pitcher and bring some cups.”

“Out there?” Burt said. “Shit, Doc, you know what happened the last time we opened that door.”

“Sure, you lost your nuts,” Reg said.

“Fuck you.”

“I’ll go with you, Burt. I’ll even hold your hand, man.”

Burt was ready to go at it again but Doc silenced him with a look. “I’ll do it. You two watch over our patient and, please, try to act civilized.”

Then he was out the door without a moment’s hesitation and Reg hoped that yellow prick Burt saw that. Saw how a real man handled himself.

Bailey was looking up at him and
through
him like he wasn’t even there. As if he were a sheet of glass, a window, and she was seeing something far more interesting beyond him. Her eyes were huge and glassy, he noticed, and they rarely blinked. He didn’t like it at all. He was holding her hand and it was cool to the touch, but there was a dew of fever sweat on her forehead.

“How you feeling?” he asked her.

She attempted a smile that came out looking more like a grimace. “Dreams, weird dreams.”

“Tell me,” he said.

Maybe she heard him and maybe she didn’t, but she went off on her own tangent, mixing up yesterday with today and last week with last month. She was talking about the shoots they’d been on like they were still happening and saying she better call her mom because she hadn’t in awhile and she had to get some food for her cat and she was so weak she must have the flu and who was that woman in her dream?

“What woman?” Reg asked.

Bailey moved her lips like she was trying to form a name. “She has the weird eyes. The big weird eyes…she says she can’t get younger without me. She wanted to kiss me. On the neck.”

Reg heard Burt make a choking sort of sound and retreat.

Then Doc came back with the water. He filled a blue-speckled cup half-way and handed it to Reg. Reg lifted up Bailey’s head and brought the cup to her lips. She got a couple sips off it and then her head began to thrash from side to side, her body jerking with convulsions like she’d just swallowed rat poison and not well water. She vomited out most of it, then she settled down, going limp as a noodle, listless and tapped-out.

“It’s all right, it’s all right,” Reg kept saying.
“It’s all gonna be okay. You’ll see. Everything’ll be fine.”

Her hand was loose now in his, but while she’d had the convulsion she’d nearly crushed it with a strength that was shocking.

“You sure that water’s okay?” Burt said.

“It’s fine. I drank some myself,” Doc told him.

“Then…?”

But Doc would not meet his eyes. “She’s got something going on…and I’d rather not put a name to it.”

3

Half-dozing in her chair, Wenda thought of David.

She hadn’t consciously thought of him in a long time.

She hadn’t
allowed
herself to.

David Sellers had been her only true love. A thin, funny man who produced jazz records in New York City
. He was the one. She would have spent her life with him. David was manic depressive. When he was low, he could have crawled under a curb. But when he was high…well, look out, he was a world-beater: charming, self-confidant, passionate, boundlessly enthusiastic. About the time they would have fallen into bed together to consummate their relationship, she stopped by his apartment in Albany unannounced.

He hadn’t called in two days.

That meant he was bottoming out.

When she went in with her own key, there was a strange odor in the air. Not death exactly, but almost something that wanted to
become
death, if that meant any sense. Which it did later to Wenda, but not so much at the time.

She found him in his rocking chair.

It was turned away from the TV so he could face a blank, white wall. He had laid both of his wrists open and he was painted red with his own blood. Panicking, of course, because Wenda Keegan would not have been Wenda Keegan without some good old hysterics, she started this way, then that, sobbing and moaning and completely out of her element.

There were things you did in situations like this, but she could not remember what they were.

Finally, she called 911.

They told her to get some pressure on his wrists, tie a tourniquet on his arms if at all possible.

She wrapped his wrists in towels very tightly but the blood kept flowing. It soaked through them and her tourniquets—two of David’s belts—weren’t working so good.

What she remembered most was the blood, all that damn blood, and David opening his eyes once during it all and giving her a look that seemed to
say,
Boy, did I ever fuck up things this time.
And Wenda had had a mad desire to tell him,
Yes, yes, you did. You’ve just fucked up things for both of us and I fear what I’ll become if they don’t get that fucking ambulance here right now and save your life.
But she hadn’t, of course. Her mind was filled with many crazy thoughts but none of them got past the whimpering coming out of her mouth.

As David slipped further and further into the darkness, she clutched him tighter and tighter, trying to hold up his wrists above heart level like they said while squeezing the wounds tightly in the towels.

NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO, DAVID!
she heard her own voice screaming in her head.
DON’T YOU DARE DIE ON ME! GODDAMMIT, DAVID! STAY WITH ME! STAY WITH ME!

His eyes half-opened as if he could hear her tho
ughts, then his head slumped to the side and she knew he was dying. That the beauty and goodness of this man had all but run out with his blood.

“DAVID! DAVID! OH DEAR GOD DAVID! DON’T DO THIS! DON’T DIE!”

But he was dying and she knew it as she sobbed and screamed as the paramedics arrived. As they took him away and her with them, she hoped beyond hope and prayed.

David, David…dear God.

He’d crashed several weeks before. He had hooked up with Public TV in Manhattan to co-produce a documentary on Charlie Parker and the Beat Generation. He was flying high. Then, after sixteen weeks of work, using up every available minute of time, the funding was cut and the doc was canceled. David was inconsolable. He was dragging bottom. Wenda had slowly, patiently brought him back up and he was doing pretty good. Maybe not flying as high as old Charlie “Bird” Parker, but there was hope. He was going ahead with the doc. He was too invested in it to stop by then. He would raise the money himself and sell it to the Discovery Channel or some similar venue.