Authors: Tim Curran
There was a smothering black wail of a newborn.
And the crone was free, summoned forth like all the others. And this was the thing they had seen watching them with yellow eyes from amongst the old graves and shattered crypts.
Wenda scrambled on all fours, searching for the knife, listening to her own heart
pounding. She heard Megga make a pathetic, moaning sound…then the rustling, straw-dry noise of the thing that reached out for her.
The knife.
Wenda gripped it and ran around the bed, the blade held out before her. The lantern was on the floor where Megga had dropped it. Thank God it still burned. The crone had Megga in its embrace, her head flopping limply on her neck, her throat exposed.
“NO!” Wenda shouted, going right at the ghost with her knife, slashing and hacking and succeeding only in fraying the shroud.
The thing turned to look at her.
Wenda saw a ruined face of seamed gray flesh that was threaded with c
obwebs, a waxen mask whose huge selenic eyes were cinerary urns glowing with ashes. What stood before her was more than a mere cadaverous husk, but a living mold-encrusted graveyard angel filled with hunger, need, and a cold appetite that was galvanic like electricity bleeding from the severed arteries of high-tension lines. Still gripping Megga, it reached out for her. It would sate itself on her, too, drain her dry.
And it would not be the first time tonight.
Again, Wenda saw the cemetery.
She saw the hunched, tenebrous form making its way amongst moss-covered slabs and leaning headstones, gliding through the blowing snow. It had been a woman before the ravages of interment, before the cold and flat dormancy of its sleep. But it was no longer a woman. It was an appetite. And this was its primary motivation, the candle that still burned and flickered in the hollowed mortuary of its flesh. It glowed with an even, hungry light like a black taper seen through a frosted window. And it was this hunger that would renew it, remake it, rekindle its pestilential spirit, transform it from a sculpture of mausoleum dust and drifting web into the semblance of a woman again.
An odorous and dry breath from a burial vault, it dragged itself forward amongst funerary crosses and ivy-covered sepulchers, seeking the grim shadow of the Cobton church steeple and the town itself. Its winding sheet flapped and frayed, becoming a tempest of confetti. Strands of it were drifting and blowing like deep-sea grasses as the thing moved down the hillside to feed.
But a voice: “You, you there,” it said. “You there…”
It stopped.
The apprehensive form of a caretaker, yanked from a greasy paperback world of frontiers and gunfights like a tooth plucked from sagging gums. He approached the scarecrow whirlwind, his fingers clutching the scepter of a long-barreled flashlight, dread waking in the pit of his belly with a nightmare shrieking.
And the crone was on him.
The caretaker screamed as snaking tentacles of shroud crept over him like graveworms. As his fingers pressed through the cerecloth and scratched over the dusty slats of rib and scapula, he felt the crawling, squirming things that nested within the folds of that winding sheet. And then those deadwood lips found his throat, kissing his life away, and he was emptied, leeched, dropped like a bundle of sticks to cool in the snow.
This is what it would do to Megga.
This is what it would do to Wenda, too, and she knew it.
The crone was a snake and they were the eggs she would suck dry and drop empty at her gray and flaking feet. Megga was beyond resistance; she was a sacrifice laid at the feet of horror. A greased pig made ready for the disemboweling.
But Wenda was not about to give in.
As those black thorny claws reached out for her, she let out a manic cry and vaulted forward with the knife, slashing the crone across the face with the blade. Her flesh bisected almost too easily, opening like a split seam, like gray lips parting and revealing something beneath that was not flesh and blood exactly but a fibrous yellow, seedy pulp like the guts of a pumpkin. It was practically luminous. The crone screamed with a howling sound of wind blown through low places. She became a squalling, gusting charnel storm of crematory ash, ossuary dust, and pulverized bone grit. A stuffed effigy fragmenting into a cyclone of spinning, churning debris.
It moved through the room with a whistling, sucking sound and Wenda was tossed to the floor, right on top of Megga. She covered her head as that blizzard of bones, leaves, dust, and wind-flowing cerements raged…and then, the hurricane subsided. It changed swiftly into a magnetic, oscillating stream of shimmering white ectoplasm upon which the crone’s howling ghost face was indelibly stamped. It dove at the window…and passed through it.
Wenda pulled herself up, panting and dizzy.
She wanted nothing better than to curl up into a ball and cry like a baby, but there wasn’t time for that. She stumbled over to the window and could see nothing out there but the blowing snowstorm. A single square pane was missing from the window. It was about the size of a small paperback book, but it did not look broken out so much as
melted.
The frame was burnt, the glass having oozed in streams and globs.
Wenda pulled Megga to her feet. “Are you all right?” she asked her.
Megga still had that vacant, dopy look on her face. She blinked, smiled, and then did something Wenda never saw coming: she reached out and took hold of her and kissed her hard on the mouth, sliding her tongue in past her lips. Wenda shoved her away and she stumbled drunkenly to the floor, giggling.
21
“You asked for my opinion and I’m giving it,” Doc said. “Going out there is foolish, suicidal, and reckless.”
Burt just glared at him. “Well, I’m willing to try. I’m willing to get our asses out of here or die trying. I’m not going to sit here and wait for it. Maybe that’s okay for you, but I have other plans.”
He was set on doing it and Doc knew he could not talk him out of it. Burt was trying very hard to make them think he was doing it for the benefit of the group but Doc knew better. Burt was selfish by nature. He didn’t give a damn about the rest of them and, chances were, if he indeed made it to the car out there and got it going, he would probably drive away and leave everyone else stranded. That’s the kind of guy he was.
“Okay, dude,” Reg said. “Suppose you make it to the car and there’s no keys in it?”
Burt smiled and pulled a multitool from the inside of his coat. “I hotwire it. I did it plenty of times when I was a teenager. I used to be able to do it in three minutes or less.”
Ah,
Doc thought,
now the true face of Burt shows itself. A little criminal.
Reg nodded. “Sweet, but the steering wheel will still be locked.”
“There’s ways around that for a guy with imagination,” Burt told him.
Reg looked at Doc and all Doc could do was shrug.
“You realize you’re probably going to die out there,” he said. “If those creatures out there get to you, there’s nothing we can do to assist you. You realize that, of course.”
“I wouldn’t expect help from you.”
“You can’t expect help from any of us.”
Burt grunted as if it was no news to him.
Reg went over to the window. Doc joined him. The storm was blowing hard out there and visibility was down to a few feet. The snow was coming down in sheets, the wind turning it into a churning maelstrom of absolute elemental wrath. The house shook as it blasted into the walls, the glass rattling in the windows. The sound of the storm was a near-constant howling that sometimes rose into a whining shriek and then fell to a low and pained moaning. It was death out there and they both knew it. You could get lost in ten feet in a blow like that. Even if Burt went out there with a flashlight, it would do him little good. The light would be reflected off the flying snow, creating wild leaping shapes all around him, blurring distance and making him see things that weren’t there and hiding others that were. And some of those things would have long white fingers and grinning red mouths.
Doc felt a stab of yellow fear in his belly as he imagined himself lost in the howling white vortex, long-armed shapes moving in from all sides.
“At least be sensible,” he told Burt. “At least give it another twenty or thirty minutes, let the storm die down a bit.”
Burt looked out the window. “Okay. But no more. We can’t afford to wait much more than that.”
On that point, Doc had to agree.
Those things were still out
there, waiting. They had pulled back into the storm for the time being but he knew they were there. He could feel them as he felt the low and distant throb of his heart. They were just waiting for an opportunity to slake their thirst. He planned on doing everything in his power to deny them that opportunity. But as far as Burt went, there was nothing he could do to stop him. His mind was clearly set and he was going.
Doc went over and sat by Bailey.
He had tried just about every trick in his vast repertoire to draw her out of her shell but to no avail. It was just too much for her. He and the others were having trouble with the situation they were in, of course, all three of them dancing precariously close to the pit of madness, but they had not given in. Bailey, however, would not even put up a fight. She had sunk away to some place where she could escape it all. He held her hand. It was cool and limp. He wondered if she was in shock and figured she had every right to be.
Doc had refused to give those things out there a proper name until Reg and Burt came busting in with the wood, telling him what they had seen at the window upstairs. Now there was no getting around it. His mind kept trying to avoid the word, but it was there as it had been from the beginning:
vampires.
An old, shop-worn term that had little place in this world of laptops and cell phones and Skype, but it was real and being who and what he was, his mind searched through the old literature page by page. If they were anything like their fictional counterparts, then they would have wild talents, shapeshifting abilities—he could attest to that one—and hypnotic powers. They would be stealthy, drifting shades and patches of mist. You would never hear them coming for they would be silent as falling leaves or moon-shadows creeping across a summer lawn. They would have to be invited in and once invited, they could slide under locked doors and come in through keyholes and ooze through cracks in walls. Hungry ghosts with flesh like fog…yet, at other times, they would be as physically real as a living human being and, come sunrise, absolutely helpless.
That is, if the things he had read had any basis in fact.
He squeezed Bailey’s hand but there was no response. He might as well have been trying to illicit a response from the hand of a mannequin or a rubber glove.
I’m scared, too, my dear. Believe that. I’m scared to death because despite my bluster and blow and my stage persona, I’m old and I know it. I’m far too old to have my world turned on its head like this and reality crumble about me. I’m afraid I’m just not up to the challenge and that scares me to death.
He thought these things because he would never admit them aloud any more than most men would. So he held Bailey’s hand and listened to his voice tell her that it would be over at sunrise and the world would start spinning again, that they were merely trapped in some pocket of shadow that would dissipate in the warm light of day and the cold light of reason. This was a fever dream but it would pass as all things must pass.
But even as he said these things, he had to wonder.
He had to wonder if this was only a localized thing or an ancient pestilence the world had once known and forgotten about (save in the tales of old wives) and would now know again.
If these things started rising up everywhere
, then the world would have to cease their petty wars and jealousy and greed. The lovemaking, merrymaking, money-making, and life-taking would come to an end in the face of this new—thought quite old—enemy. Communally, there would be a new voice on the wind, one that was ancient and malignant calling out of the darkness. The voice of the hunt and mankind would be its prey. Nightfall would become a time of terror, a time when every last man, woman, and child would huddle like frightened rabbits in their warrens, fearing the hungry pestilent shadows of the night that would creep through the cities and towns…all of which would be mortuaries and graveyards, gutted tombs and bone-strewn cathedrals of rat-scrabbling survivors and the hollow-eyed undead which preyed upon them.
Doc shook his head, refusing to think anymore.
“I heard something,” Burt said. “Out there…I just fucking heard something.”
Lost in the tangles of his thoughts, mired in them, Doc hadn’t heard a thing, but it was obvious from the look on Reg’s face that he had heard it, too. Then it came again: a skittering sort of sound beyond the door, as if some immense and fleshy rat were scratching about out there.
Reg picked up the poker from the fire.
Burt grabbed the broadhead axe.
They were both pale and shaking as Doc rose to his feet. There were two ways to handle this. They could either ignore the sounds or face them. Facing them could be deadly, but ignoring them was only going to notch up imaginations and they were already running at a high, delusory pitch.