Hag Night (9 page)

Burt gripped the heavy curtain.

He let out a low, long breath.

He swallowed.

Then he pulled it open.

17

There was a woman outside the window.

She was hovering there like some great death’s-head moth, her hands up against the glass like white blossoms, fingers splayed, her body extending straight out into midair as if she were riding on a raft. She was naked, her pallid flesh blending in with the blowing snow, her face milk-white, her eyes venomous yellow and set with split red veins. She had no pupils. Just those luminous orbs like autumn moons. She was grinning, sharp teeth hanging over her juicy red lips.

Burt fell backward and hit the floor.

Her mouth opened and closed as if she were speaking…and Reg was almost sure that she was. He could hear her voice in his head. It was silver and sharp like a cutting blade, tinkling like expensive crystal, the hot breath of a lover and the cold voice from a buried box.

It was sweet.

It was foul.

It was beauty and depravity…a series of ethereal contradictions that confused and weakened him and finally owned him. He
only knew one thing: he wanted to lay with her in a silken box and sink into her.

“REG!” Burt cried. “REG!  JESUS CHRIST!”

There was no subtlety from Burt. When that goofy, dreamy look did not fade from Reg’s eyes, Burt slapped him across the face and dragged him from the room. The last thing he saw before Burt slammed the door was the woman’s black and glistening tongue licking the glass.

1
8

Bailey was at the point where she was afraid to keep her eyes open and afraid to close them. She did not want to see what was going to happen
next so she closed her eyes. But when she did, she saw Mole’s death and that made them open again.

Shut it out, close it down, block it, block it.

Oh so much easier said than done. The images were burned inside her mind and the video loop just kept playing and re-playing like she was on some kind of continual feed that could not be shut off.

I
t tormented her, it haunted her.

S
he saw Mole get taken by a titanic blur that hit him with slashing claws. They were surgical knives that peeled his scalp back in a bloody flap and then he was in the air, screaming and writhing, towed to fantastic glacial heights and then deposited, dumped, in the snow atop a gambrel roof. The thing that took him squatted over him, some human vulture, a winged night-hag spreading midnight-black plumage…but when he wiped the blood from his eyes with jerking fingers he saw it was no bird, no carrion-hag, but a rawboned woman. She was stick-limbed, crooked, and naked, a viscid steam rising from her pores. She said something to him in a language he had never heard before, her face like cracking white glass, her eyes swirling balls of hot blood-red gas that burned into his skull. Grinning like a dead snake, lips pulled back from rusting needle teeth, she took hold of him and shook him, at first playfully and then with rage. He heard a sound like cracking knuckles and realized it was his own bones dislocating.

When he started to scream again, she made a squealing sound and enveloped his mouth with her own which was like the maw of a lamprey. He could feel the terrible suction macerating
his lips and popping fillings from his molars and tearing teeth loose by the roots. When she pulled her mouth away, she spit a bloody phlegm at him and he felt his own teeth speckle his face.

By the time she battened her lips to his neck and began to feed, his mind was long gone. When she was finished, she removed his head with
a quick twisting motion like pulling the cork from a wine bottle, and tossed it off into space. Then she leapt up into the night, no longer a woman but something like a million tiny shards of twinkling glass that drew themselves into a whirlwind that spun across the rooftops and was no more.

This i
s what Bailey kept seeing.

This i
s what she could not shut out.

And this i
s what she knew waited for all of them in the darkness.

But it’s not real. It can’t be real. You can’t know how he died. You weren’t there.

True, true, and true. Yet…she did not doubt what she saw. The images were far too vivid. This was not sheer imagination, it was something beyond imagination. She had somehow channeled his death, tapped into some psychic video feed of his last moments. She had seen him die. She had witnessed the horror of it and felt the pain of the claws, the sucking mouth, and the teeth in his throat. She did not know how this could be, but it was and she knew it.

They would all die like Mole.

One by one.

And there wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it.

19

The sounds came again and Wenda felt tense to her core.

The first time she heard them after they left the sitting room, both Megga and she stopped dead in their tracks. It sounded like someone was walking around above them, moving slowly and deliberately across the floor. Except
she thought it was not some
one
but some
thing.

The sounds were coming from upstairs and as much as she wanted to turn back and hide in the sitting room with Morris,
she knew she couldn’t. The wood they needed was up there. They had to have it. There really was no choice in the matter and she knew it.

Still,
standing at the bottom of the stairs with Megga, she hesitated.

“Well?” Megga said. “Do we investigate, Vultura?”

“I suppose we don’t have a choice.”

“No, we don’t.”

In the glow of the lantern, Megga’s eyes were huge and wet-looking. Wenda thought she looked excited. More so, she looked turned on like she was very close to an orgasm, which was absolutely absurd under the circumstances, but with Megga you just never knew. There were things with that girl that were downright scary.

Wenda had a knife from the kitchen with her: a
huge antique thing with a white bone handle and a shiny silver blade. A carving knife that looked like it was made for gutting and hacking. She gripped it tightly, staring at her companion. “You don’t need to act so eager about it,” she said. “What’s up there might kill us.”

“I know,” Megga breathed.

There was no doubt then: Megga
was
excited.

“Maybe now would be a good time to quit living your life like you were trapped in a Poe story.”

Megga shrugged. “If there’s one of them up there, I want to see it.”

“Why?”

“Because I
have
to. I have to see it.”

“You’re crazy.”

Megga smiled at that. It was a Graveyard Girl smile—seductive, cruel, hungry. She got in so close that Wenda thought she was going to kiss her on the mouth. But a few inches away, she said, “If I’m crazy, so are you. Because you’re coming with me.” Her breath smelled dark and sweet and something about it made Wenda’s face flush.

Megga turned and started up the steps. “C’mon,” she said in that same salacious tone, her words nearly dripping with lewd innuendo. “I can’t do this without you. It takes two.”

Wenda wasn’t sure at that moment what she was more afraid of: what might be upstairs or what Megga might want to
do
upstairs. She followed her up there and the scariest thing, she thought, was that Megga was enjoying this. She was probably scared, too, but mostly she was living out her dark fantasies. This was a movie or a story to her. She was going to meet some hideous thing from beyond and she was thrilled by the idea.

It’s an act
. It’s gotta be an act. Maybe this smooth, urbane, Goth thing ala the Graveyard Girls is the only thing that’s keeping her together. She’s different and you know it. She’s macabre by nature. A morbid sort. Didn’t Doc once say during one of his impromptu analysis sessions with Megga that morbid personalities often mask an absolute fear of death and dying? Necrophobia?

She knew one thing for sure: she
was going to be on her guard because she fully expected Megga to do something stupid to validate her own morbidity. And maybe, in the twisted labyrinth of her mind, she might not really even have a choice.

Wenda followed her up
the stairs much as Reg followed Burt and, like him, expecting trouble. At the top, they waited but heard no sounds.

“Maybe it was just the house,” Wenda said, listening to it creak and settle in the wind. “Maybe that’s all it was.”

Megga smiled at her. “Do you really think so?”

They moved down the corridor and into the first bedroom they saw. There was some wood at the hearth. Wenda quickly bundled it in her arms. There. They had wood.

“Let’s check that other room and then we’re out of here,” she said. “There should be wood in there, too.”

But Megga was already heading towards it, drawn to it like a needle pointing to magnetic north. Wenda was feeling something
bad inside her like an icy wind around her heart, forever circling. As she approached the door she could sense something in the atmosphere souring like milk. It grew heavy and ominous, almost suffocating, hostile. It was like the charge of the air itself had gone negative and she could feel it at her spine and along the back of her neck. The shadows seemed to be crawling around them, bunching as if they were getting ready to spring.

“Here goes,” Megga whispered.

She went to the plank door and grabbed the handle, pushing it inwards. It opened without so much as a squeak. She pushed it in slowly, maybe to heighten the effect. Wenda felt her heart drop in her chest, the atmosphere not just soured now but spiritually rancid. Then the door was open and a smell of dry and noxious corruption blew out at them.

Megga held up the lantern.

The room beyond was like a lagoon of perfect blackness and the lantern light cast nary a ripple over its surface. Megga stepped in there with Wenda right behind her. It seemed colder inside, their breath coming out in great rolling clouds. Gaunt shadows slid around them, the darkness impossibly thick and impenetrable. It was nearly palpable, a heavy weave that tried to push them back. The air was like an envelope of venom.

Megga gasped.

Someone was on the bed.

20

There was a sheeted form lying there, unmo
ving, and the malignancy in the room was issuing from it, practically dripping from it.

Wenda was very much aware at that moment that the only weapon they really had was the knife she carried and it felt positively weak, impotent in her fist. She had the weirdest sense of anxiety and utter defeat. Something inside her wanted to curl up and play dead, make a blood offering of itself to whatever was under the sheet.

There was a noise like congested breathing.

The sheet rustled.

A crackling sound like dry leaves.

The form sat up and they both saw it crane its neck and look at them with its blank, sheeted face. Wenda took one, then two faltering steps back, the room seeming huge and cavernous around her like physical reality had suddenly been distorted. A stark terror flooded over her and she did not feel cold with it, but hot. A moist prickly heat enveloped her and she felt woozy, like she might go right over. Her scalp was greasy with sweat.

The sheeted form rose up, not so much standing but rising like a wind had taken hold of it, inflating it, making it flap like a blanket on a clothesline. And then whatever that thing was, it drifted off the bed and came down again mere feet from Megga who stood absolutely still, her mouth hanging open and her eyes glazed like dusty windows in a deserted house.

“Megga!” Wenda heard her own voice say.
“Get back! Get away from it!”

But Megga just stood there, still as the death that was coming for her.

“GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM IT!”

The shrouded thing raised its sheeted
arms like a Halloween ghost and—it seemed—made to strike. The hot sweat covering Wenda went cold and she charged in, raising the knife to strike. And a single gray hand snaked free of the shroud and seized her by the throat. Its touch was like thawing meat. It lifted her off her feet and tossed her. She landed on the bed, heard the knife strike the wall, and then she fell to the floor. She lay there, dazed, her breath locked in her throat as she tried to get some air into her lungs.

As she used the bed to pull herself up, she saw images in her mind that did not or could not belong.

She saw the cemetery.

The Cobton c
emetery they’d seen on the way in.

For the thing under the sheet, that’s where it had begun.

Beneath the churchyard…that’s where it had come from and she could see it in her mind. From nighted catacombs and secret tombs beneath those ancient, twisted oaks and the marble forest of tombstones, there came a thrusting and panting from deep within the frozen black earth.
The wind that blew was turned in upon itself and was sucked down into that subterraneous frozen soil, filling one nitrous oblong box with morbid, straining life. There was an agonized, uneasy thudding. A heartbeat, a papery rustling like rats nesting in a bone pile. Down below in that noisome narrow house, that midnight womb, the labor pains gathered volume and urgency. Graveyard dirt was parted and forking roots split asunder as the birth canal widened and pressed and propelled its progeny up through rank depths. Up, up, up, until woodrot fingers broke the membrane of yellowed grasses and clawed through October leaves, breaking the crust of snow above.