Hag Night (29 page)

I didn’t want them thinking I was a little baby…but, you know what?
I was.
The night was filled with terrors and I had never wanted my mom and dad so badly as I did then. I kept thinking about the ghost stories we’d been spoon-fed by the older kids about Cobton and what lived there. I couldn’t get them out of my mind. I saw them in all their crawling, slinking glory and that only made the night much colder than it already was. The wind was low, but it was sharp and bitter. It pinched color into my cheeks, which were already beginning to feel thick and rubbery like the rest of me.

The tracks were clear of snow, of course. The NY Central used one of those massive wedge plows that came speeding down the tracks and threw snow hundreds of feet in the air to either side. What that did was create what looked like a snow tunnel with huge banks rising to either side. I figured if a train came we’d have been in a real spot trying to climb free.

But no train came.

What we had to fear that night had little to do with trains or anything quite so pedestrian.

We continued on and by then we were a good mile away from home and the night had gotten colder…and darker. The full moon was moving from one bank of clouds to the next. Down on the tracks, our snow tunnel was alive with mulling shadows and we were very much aware of it. In most situations, Andy and Bugs would have been talking nonstop like they usually did. Bugs would be throwing out one bad joke after the other as he usually did.
Hey, squirt, what did the potato chip say to the battery? If you’re Eveready, I’m Frito-Lay.
But they were both quiet and I could almost feel the tension coming from them. It was strung thick like webs. I was hearing sounds out in the woods like sticks snapping and branches rubbing together. I knew a winter forest is rarely silent, but I think it was the
quality
of the sounds that were getting to me.

They were almost
stealthy.

Like something was out there, something was following us, slipping through the tangle of iced boles and snow-drooping limbs, gliding through the shadows. And if I looked, I might see the moonlight shining off its teeth. But I didn’t look. I refused to. I was a toy soldier frozen into a perpetual forward stride. I would not give in to what I was praying was just my imagination.

That’s when Bugs stopped.

“What?” Andy said.

“I…I thought I saw something,” he said and I could tell by the tone of his voice which sounded as hollow as air through a straw that he wasn’t kidding. “I thought I saw someone up there…standing on top of the snowbank.”

“Ah, you’re full of it,” Andy told him.
“There’s nobody out here.”

Andy didn’t believe that at all. I
knew
I didn’t believe it because I thought for just the briefest of instants I saw someone, too…a dark elongated shape watching us. But there was nothing there now and maybe there never had been. Regardless, I was aware of something else: the night had gone unbearably quiet. It was like some drift of silence had fallen over the wood. No sticks cracked. No breeze in the treetops. There was absolutely nothing and it went right up my spine like cold fingers.

“There’s the bridge,” Andy said.

The trestle cut over Lost Creek and that meant we were almost close enough to Cobton to touch it. We moved on and as we crossed it, the supports and ancient tarred beams beneath us seemed to creak and contract and I had this awful image of it collapsing and us falling sixty or seventy feet to the ice below. But it held, of course. Still, we stopped and it had nothing to do with the bridge itself but what we could see far below in the moonlight. Lost Creek was about twenty feet across down there and even following the spring snow melt it was never more than three or four feet deep. It looked like a white ribbon below us winding away through those dark woods, glowing with moonlight. And there was
something
down there. Something that did not belong. We all saw it and moved as close to the edge of the trestle as we dared.

“What is that?” Bugs asked.

And I, being such a bastion of knowledge and common sense at that age, almost said,
Well, it’s just an old post or something.
But I didn’t say that because as I looked closer I could see that it was nothing so prosaic. It looked at first like some old, dead and limbless tree poking up out of the ice, kind of crooked and leaning. But as we got a better view of it, I think it occurred to all of us that it was no post, no dead tree, log or stump. It was unusual and weird. Looking down at it made the hairs at the back of my neck stand up. It looked like a man…
almost,
an effigy of one made from rough, knotty poles tied together in a T so that the upright was its body and the crossbar would have been the arms extending straight out like someone being crucified. I knew something like that could not be natural, not in the least, and as I kept staring at it, I got the terrible impression that it was made of bones, crooked meatless bones.

Then something happened and so quickly I would have missed it had I blinked. It was like the crossbar arms moved upward with a creaking sound of old wood until they were perfectly perpendicular with the upright, then they came down and as they did so some wind-blowing cloak fell into place with a rustling whooshing sort of noise and we were seeing the form a man down there. A man standing on the ice with some heavy cloak or coat blowing around him. He was tall and narrow and somehow unnatural. And he was staring up at us.

We should have run.

Wouldn’t that be your first instinct? Well, our instincts were dead carp thrown up on a toxic beach, each as lifeless and incapable of action as those fish. We stood there and watched that thing down there, knowing it was no man, knowing it was something malevolent and grotesque that had been waiting for the opportunity we now gave it. Even from way up there we could see its eyes shining red like blood-rubies and we knew this was the last thing kids saw when they got lost in the woods or strayed from the path; the haunter of the dark.

And as we watched, it was approaching the bridge. It was not walking, it was
gliding
forward, floating maybe a foot above the ice, its arms still spread out in some obscene mimicry of the crucifixion. I wanted to scream to snap myself out of it, but my muscles were flaccid, my mind like a marble forever circling a roulette wheel. It felt like everything inside me had gone to putty and I was only vaguely aware of the hot urine running down the inside of my leg.

The thing was rising now.

It was floating up above Lost Creek like a helium balloon and the closer it got, the more real it became and the more I could smell it: a hot, noxious odor of wild fermentation that reamed out my nose and made my eyes water. It was a dark smell like wine going to vinegar, sharp and acrid, with maybe a deadly undercurrent beneath that stank of black wormy soil and funeral lilies rotting to pulp.

That’s when I saw the thing really good.

When it was barely fifteen feet below us—rising on its column of fetid air, pushing out a wave of rank heat before it that was hot one moment and glacially cold the next, making our breath come out in great rolling white clouds like cartoon balloons—I really saw it.

Its face was white like that of a circus clown, maybe more gray. A long, narrow face with prominent high cheekbones and a severe Roman nose. The flesh was pitted a
nd pulled tight, like old Papier-mâché that had dried out and split open, fanning out with a multitude of tiny cracks like those you see in old vases. Its hair was long, pulled back in something like a braid, lustrously black, streaked with gray, as was the mustache that hung below the jawline like spikes. It was a Slavic face, unbearably cruel and almost deranged with hatred. But what I saw most as it kept rising was its grinning mouth which split the face like a knife cut, interlocking yellow teeth sharp as fishbones jutting from gums that were black and withered. It was the grin of skull, the rictal grin of a cadaver, the grin of something that lured children into dark woods and sucked the souls out of them like pimentos from olives. And it’s eyes…that’s what held us, that’s what froze us with terror…juicy red eyes that were not elliptically-shaped like human eyes, but huge and perfectly round like those of an owl. They were unblinking, fixing us with a cataleptic stare from tiny black pupils.

That thing which I knew then and I know now was Griska, the bringer of plague, would have had us. He/it would have drained us dry.

But that’s when Andy shouted: “RUN! FOR GODSAKE RUN!”

And when I didn’t, he grabbed me by the arm and pulled me away and maybe he had seen something we hadn’t: there were a dozen of them on the bridge with us, the vampires. They were cadaverous things with bright yellow eyes and smiling mouths of fangs. I saw a few men, bust mostly women and children, many of which were naked. They must have formed some profane family for Griska, his cult of the undead.

Just as Andy pulled me away, Griska had been reaching out for me with long white fingers tipped with black talons like those of a hawk. They looked sharp enough to open arteries. I heard his voice. It scraped and creaked in my brain like rusting iron:
Take my hand, boy. I am the Maker of Shrouds and the Father of Pestilence. I am He that liveth four centuries past, and was dead; and, behold, I am born for evermore. I am He that holdeth the keys of hell and of death. Blessed are those that would die in the body of the Father. 
That’s what I heard, a corruption of the Book of Revelation, an ugly and cold violation echoing in my skull. Then Andy pulled me away and Griska snarled at me.

That was also when I saw a little girl standing not four feet from me. She was a pallid thing with flesh the color of tombstones, black braids hanging over her naked skin. I thought for one insane moment that she was such a beautiful, lost child…then I saw the hunger in her
glaring eyes and the loops of drool hanging from her chin and I recognized her as what she truly was: an abomination. Her mouth was like a puckered, suckering hole, her entire face seamed and almost corrugated from its appetite.

I saw she was not standing on the trestle, but floating two or three feet beyond its edge like some little death puppet.

Then we were running and as we ran I expected to feel cold dead fingers seize me and fangs like icicles driven into my throat. But that didn’t happen. We ran and ran and ran and just above us, on a hillside, was the old mill like a great black monolith, leaning and weathered and creaking in the wind. The town was just below us and it was not the rebuilt Cobton of today but a series of shattered foundations with gnarled trees growing up through them, heaps of broken rubble, roofless structures and bowed walls, a few chimneys like skeletal fingers breaking the loam of a grave. All of it jagged and rising and crowded, ruins frosted by moonlight and drifted with snow.

Then we were climbing up to the old mill, scrambling up the snow-covered hillside like monkeys, knowing we had to get inside. And we did. The mill was barely standing by that point and now it is long fallen, but it still stood
then and we forced our way through a rotting plank door and pulled it closed behind us. There were trees growing in there, roots pushing up through the crumbling stone floor. There were great rents in the roof high above and we saw the moon staring down at us, white and bloated like the eye of a corpse.

Andy had his flashlight out and we saw that the center of the floor was gone. Just a collapsed hole that led down into a yawning black pit. I was still half out of my head. I couldn’t make sense of much. Andy had pretty much dragged me along behind him. I don’t know if it was delayed shock or what, but I couldn’t get my brain working. M
aybe it was the lingering after-effects of being invaded by Griska…I could still feel his influence just beneath my thoughts like the dragging belly of a reptile. And then, at the door and the walls…scratching. The sounds of paws scratching, trying to find their way in. The sound of teeth chewing at boards, sniffing noses, growls and barks and yapping sounds like there were dozens of wild dogs out there anxious to get at us.

Then it just stopped like somebody flipped a switch.

But it wasn’t over. I knew it. We all knew it. The three of us had become connected, wired together, fused in some common circuit of electrical potentiality like we had been plugged into a 220 line. I’ve never felt anything like that before or since. My own senses were heightened, of course. Fear does that. But this was beyond simple animal fear. It was something else, it was practically arcing and galvanic and it owned me. I shouldn’t have been able to see in the dark, but I could. Not just the moonlight spilling in through numerous cracks and crevices of the old mill, but the grain of the wood itself, how certain boards were warped, others splintered, still others coming apart with dry rot. I could even see the ancient square nailheads winking at me like rusty eyes. I shouldn’t have been able to see these things so minutely, but I could. And it wasn’t only just that, you understand. My hearing was acute, almost painfully so. I could hear not only the triphammer pumping of my own heart, but the hearts of the others, too. They sounded weird like fists punching into soft pillows. That’s as close as I can get to a description. I could hear the air in their lungs. Each time they breathed—and they were both, like me, breathing very quietly—it was like the sucking whoosh of bellows. I swear I could hear snowflakes striking the outside of the mill and clouds scudding in the sky. If a moth had flapped its wings, it would have been thunder. Angels dancing on the head of a pin would have shattered my eardrums.