Hag Night (21 page)

Scream as they charged forward, padding over the floor to where Wenda waited for them with the gleaming blade of the silver butcher’s knife. They had come to feed on her, to strip her to bone and bloody husk, to rip out her womb and savage her breasts and roll happily in her pooling remains
—

Megga came to herself, screeching:
“NO! NO! NO! NO! NOOOOOO! GET AWAY FROM ME! GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME YOU MANGY FUCKING MUTT!”

Despite Megga’s hysteria,
Wenda did not flinch.

She did wither.

She waited for them, the blade ready.

The first one launched itself at her, perhaps as a distraction, while two others pressed in from either flank. Its hackles up,
its body a rocket of supernal muscular grace, it came at her. Its eyes glowed a vibrant red, its jaws splitting to reveal the sheath of gnashing fangs…and Wenda met it. She slashed at it quickly with two powerful strokes that laid open its snout and slit one eye into a gummy crimson soup.

The beast roared and stumbled back, steam hissing from its wounds.

At the very second it withdrew, the others came from either side. Wenda put her arm up to block the one on the left and it seized her arm in its jaws. The one on the right tasted the steel of her knife. It slit its tongue open and gashed its mouth. It yelped and fell, the blade scraping over its ribs as it turned to avoid it. The other beast was crushing her arm, but its teeth had not penetrated the sleeve of her thick leather coat. As it saw the blade coming, it tried to retreat but one of its fangs got hung up on the sleeve and Wenda buried the knife into its side again and again and again, crying out with bloodlust as she did so.

The other wolves scattered out the door.

The wounded beast tried to join them, but fell, its legs giving way. It was bleeding and gored, a pink saliva foaming from its jaws. In a final act of defiance, it rose up on its rear legs in a near-human shape, bloody mouth filled with razored teeth…and then it changed back into its vampiric form: a naked woman who had been maybe twenty-five or thirty at the time of her death. Except…it did not
change
exactly or transform like the werewolves on the old flicks they showed on
Chamber of Horrors.
The wolf shell split open like an egg, shearing off into two sections and the woman burst free.

Her phosphorescent white flesh trembled, shivered with a rippling motion, steam rolling from the gaping wounds in her side. The air was pungent with a stink of burning flesh. She made gagging, coughing sounds, stumbling backwards, hands clawing at the air, her vicious canines chomping through her lower lips, eyes white and blank and almost gelid-looking.

She let out a wracking scream of pure agony.

Her eyes fell in and her face sunk into itself like a
sun-dried prune.

She crashed to the floor and as she did so, she broke apart into dozens of sizzling fragments that popped like coals in a brazier, throwing off a nauseating yellow smoke as they were reduced to ash. Then there was just a skeleton on the floor, disarticulated and jerking. The jaws of the skull sprang open and she was gone, a wind carrying the ashes across the room, powdering the far wall gray with them.

After that, there was stunned silence for a moment, bits of ash drifting in the glow of the candles like specks of dust. Megga felt stunned and speechless. All her life she’d read about things like that and seen them in movies, but the reality was sickening.

“Oh God,” she said. “Oh my God.”

Wenda was breathing hard. “Now,” she said, “now they know that I’ll kill every one of them.”

10

As Doc spoke, Reg listened. He was apologetic as hell, pained even, his voice breaking with emotion at his request: “It’s more than I should ask yet I must ask it of you. I don’t dare leave Bailey alone and if you’re not comfortable being here with her, then I surely can’t go…”

“I’ll do it,” Reg said. “No big deal. I can’t stand this fucking waiting anyway.”

“It could be very dangerous.”

“I know.”

“They might come for you.”

Reg shrugged. “I’ll take that chance.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

Doc patted him on the shoulder. “I’d be more than happy to attempt it myself…”

“No, no. Sorry. But I’m not sitting in here alone with…with Bailey. I don’t like how she looks at me when her eyes open.”

“Understood.”

Reg stuck his trusty poker through a belt loop in his pants, grabbed a lantern off the mantle and went to the door. “It might take me a little while, so don’t freak if I’m not back right away.”

Doc nodded.

Reg opened the door and looked back once to see him sitting
there next to Bailey’s outstretched form on the sofa. She was still breathing, but it wouldn’t be long, he knew. It wouldn’t be long at all and he did not want to be here when that happened. Of course, like Doc himself he really didn’t know
when
it would happen or even how it could be, but he knew that it was and it would be. There was nothing scientific to this; it was pure instinct and sixth sense.

He made himself stop thinking about it.

He was on a mission. Doc was trusting him to get this done and he’d do it. They were running low on kerosene for the lanterns. There was only one place it could be stored in the house: the cellar. And that’s where he was going.

Swallowing down the fear in his throat, he moved up the corridor past doors that were open—hosting a darkness that was almost organic and brooding—and past others that were sensibly shut. And his mind, wired to his fear like a detonator wired to a lethal charge of TNT, asked him,
what if one of these doors was to swing open and something was to come out at you in a slithering mass of shadows? Something with a face like ivory and lips full and red?

But he dismissed that right away because if he started thinking things like that he was done for, completely done for.

He passed through the kitchen and paused there in the darkness, feeling the throb of his heart in his chest.

The lantern threw shadows around him and each one, he thought, was going to go for his throat. But it wasn’t the shadows that were bothering him. It was something else. Something that sounded almost like footsteps behind him.

His hand went reflexively to the poker on his belt.

He listened. There was nothing.

Then he thought he heard it again: like the slapping of bare feet coming down the corridor.

Despite the chill, sweat ran from every pore on his body. It was steaming in the cold air. The terror was like lightning branching in his belly and spreading through his chest. He told himself there was nothing, nothing at all, that his imagination was getting out of hand, but he couldn’t make himself believe it.

He held the lantern up, illuminating the way he had come so that if there was someone behind him, he would see them. But he saw nothing. Nothing at all.

You gotta man up here already. Just do the job and get it done and quit freaking all the time. The more you freak, the harder this is going to be.

True. He could not argue with that. It was sensible.

He found a
connecting passageway. This is where Doc thought the cellar would be. Here. Just off the kitchen. Okay. The passage was short and dead-ended. There were two doors. He tried the first one…something letting loose in his chest as he pulled it open. He expected to see fanged night-shapes rushing out at him. But it was just a broom closet with attendant mops and buckets and cleaners. It smelled like Pine-Sol in there. He squatted down and grabbed a metal bucket. If there was kerosene, he’d need something to carry it in.

As he did so, he heard the sound again.

Scampering bare feet like the footsteps of a naughty child sneaking past him.

His heart banging in his chest and his scalp feeling too tight for his skull, he stood up. He was breathing fast as he held up the
lantern. But there was nothing. He listened for a minute, then two, as the panic in him rose like mercury.

Stop this shit. You have to stop this shit.

The other door. It was at the end of the passage. Weren’t they always at the end of the passage or at the top of the stairs? He’d seen enough horror movies to know that was true. Okay. He moved down there and if he heard sounds he did not listen to them because as afraid as he was he was also starting to get a little angry at his own rioting imagination. If there was something, fine. But if not…then he was ashamed of himself.

He set the bucket down and it clanged in the silence.

He reached out for the doorknob and, sucking in a breath, opened the door. Again, that feeling in his chest…though not as bad this time. Before him was a well-worn set of wooden steps leading down into the cellar which was like some immense pit of blackness. It seemed like the light of the lantern would barely even touch it. Steeling himself, he picked up his bucket and started down, moving slowly and carefully so he didn’t trip and tumble down. A broken leg wouldn’t do at all. Not in this place. The stairs creaked under his weight and, like the bucket, that creaking was loud enough to wake the—

Don’t think that.

Of all the stupid things. He moved down the steps and the light showed him the way. His breath frosted from his lips in the cold. He had the sudden chilling, irrational feeling that somebody was standing right behind him, reaching out to touch him. He felt gooseflesh rise on the back of his neck. If he hadn’t known it before, he knew it now: this whole town was haunted and this house particularly. The cellar was a bad place, a very bad place. Being down there, he was that much closer to the black, beating heart of Cobton itself. The knowledge of this was absolute. He could feel it deep inside, in his very marrow—a precognition, prescience, maybe something that man had never really named—telling him that the zero hour had dawned. And that terrified him, made his guts compress into silvery clocksprings.

He stood there, fighting against himself.

The rational man inside him told him to keep going, get it done; the superstitious primitive told him to
run, run, run.

But he wasn’t going to run because if he did that he could never face Doc and he could certainly never face himself. Yet, he was indecisive. In the light of the lantern, he could see his breath rolling out in white clouds.

Behind him…a creaking.

There could have been many explanations for it, the house being so damned old. Old houses tended to make noises. But, at that moment, he wasn’t believing it. The old fears were upon him and he could not shake the idea that he was not alone. That he had been followed from the moment he left the
parlor. That whoever was trailing him was here with him now.

Only…he could not see them because they did not
want
to be seen.

He opened his mouth with some absurd urge to call out to them
, but all that came out was an airless rasping just as dry as needles on aluminum. He took another step down, then another, his heart beating with heavy, muffled strokes as if it couldn’t suck up blood fast enough. Maybe that was because his red stuff was thick as tar at that particular moment.

He stopped three steps from the bottom or maybe
he
was
stopped.

H
e could smell it now.

H
e could smell the thing that had followed him. It carried a dirty, yellow stink.

His breath fracturing in his
lungs like crockery, he went down those last three steps to the cellar floor and felt the darkness swim out at him, flood him with its hot corrupt odor, trying to drown him in a rising tide of filth. He held the lantern up. The cellar was huge. Some of the floor was made of flagstones, but much of it was just old packed dirt. Dark dirt like grave earth. The intrusion of light made the shadows pull back, cluster, lurk at the periphery of his vision.

The smell was worse now.

What’s bringing that stink in here?

It was a
rotting envelope of heat, misery, and something like corpse gas. It smelled the way he thought tombyards, ossuaries, and violated caskets must smell…time and dust and old rot lying cheek-to-jowl in the dank earth. The stench closed his throat to a pinhole and each breath was a knife blade in his chest. It made no sense. Nothing could smell like that in the cold. Things did not rot in the cold, they did not stink; everything was neutral. Yet…he was smelling it. It got so thick in the air bile slid up the back of his throat and he had a mad urge to vomit.

Then it was gone.

As if it had never been.

There was no way it was his imagination. Nothing could convince him of that. Haunted, that’s what. Whole goddamn place was fucking haunted. And because it was so, he had to move. He had to get this done before things got worse because they
would
get worse. First, it was the sounds. Then, that smell. Next, he would see it and, worse, it would see him and want to touch him and he knew it, God how he knew it.

The cellar was mostly empty save for some stacked boxes and a few old nail kegs, some shelves stacked with finished lumber, trim, rolls of wallpaper wrapped in plastic, the assorted odds and ends of maintaining a house that had to have been over 300 years old if it was a day.
Guys who lived here originally probably wore powdered wigs, buckle shoes, and short pants,
Reg thought, trying to divert his mind, badly
needing
to divert it any way he could.