Hag Night (24 page)

No, no, no! I’ll get out. I’ll sneak out and Wenda won’t stop me and those ghouls won’t see me and I’ll be free, free, free.

Then he heard a mocking, lunatic cackling in the back of his skull. It was an inhuman, incessant, unearthly braying. It sounded like black tides lapping against dock pilings and the squealing cries of wild boars and the yammering bark of rabid dogs opening jaws slavered with white foam. It was the laughter of the evil ghost. Morris could feel its mind entering his own, a creeping shadow network. It infested his brain like writhing white worms that laid hot masses of eggs up and down his spinal ganglia and fouled his neurons with their oozing wastes.

He tried to cry out, but his voice did not exist. He tried to remember warm days and bright suns, things that would drive the ghost away, but it was no good.  The evil ghost wanted him to see other things, it directed his thoughts, driving them into the gathering darkness like railroad spikes.
My name. Remember my name and speak it aloud.
Morris heard his voice say it and the ghost was pleased by that.

It was so pleased, it let him see what the others out in the storm knew.

It showed him a series of mountain villages that it had drained dry. The empty houses and overgrown yards, the leaf-blown streets where no feet walked by daylight. The villages which stood empty and thin as their churchyards filled and grew fat. It showed him how the blood had been leeched from these places. When they ran dry as desert washes, the ghost and its worshippers sought new environs where the blood was rich and abundant. They sought new fields to sow their seed and tend their crops of nightmare.

Morris saw a ship at sea, a ghost ship crossing the Atlantic, its sails fluttering rags, its cabin blown with mist…the warped, salt-bleached decks and the shadows that oozed out of holds and casks and crates as the sun sank low. He saw the ghost finding land and leading its followers to Cobton for here was a village with blood running hot and thick in its veins. At night, they fastened themselves to the arteries of the town like leeches and sipped them dry. Soon, the fields lay fallow and the walks unswept, the high houses were silent and the shutters creaked in the wind. Cobton became a deserted village, a ghost town in the literal sense…a tomb of shadows and scratching rats that no sane men visited.

Then Morris saw men, not necessarily sane but dedicated in their grim task. They opened graves and disinterred blood-bloated corpses with staring eyes and florid faces. They drove stakes through the restless dead, pretending they did not see the blood fountaining from chests or hear the screams that came from the lips of corpses. They burned the remains. But they did not find the ghost nor its select community that hid in hollows of night and seams of darkness unknown.

Cobton was shunned and left to rot.

This is what the evil ghost showed him.

It was near to him now and he could feel it.

Like a dog, his hackles raised as its smell, which was that of embalmed things and grinning cadavers puffed with death.

He could see the ghost now: a tall, manlike shape that was more shadow than substance, skeletal and narrow, a blackness blowing out from it like hell itself. Its face was a mask of ashen, carved leather lit by two huge eyes like luminous necrotic moons. It was a cruel face, a merciless face, a cadaverous face of shadow-sucking hollows and bony ridges framed by a drooping mustache, sharp nose, and gleaming bone-yellow flesh. The thin lips pulled up into a rictal grin of violation and a voice like wind blown through a skull said,
My name. Speak it aloud.

Morris squirmed, fought, but it did him no good.

He would do what he was told.

14

Wenda’s voice was so confident and sure of itself it was like a steel blade cutting deep:
“Get away from that window. Do you hear me? Get away from it right now.”

Megga turned, ready to snarl at her…but at the last moment, she acquiesced. She did not like anyone bossing her or dominating her, but there were times to fight and times to do what was asked of you. She turned from the window and looked over at Wenda and wanted to hate her, but found that she couldn’t. Wenda had saved her several times now and though she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to be saved, Wenda’s concern was touching in its own way. Their safety was a priority with her.

She was ready to fight.

And those outside knew that.

Megga thought they even
feared
it.

“I wasn’t doing anything,” she said.

“Doesn’t matter,” Wenda told her. “The way things stand, those things will do anything to get to us. I’m not going to have them using you. I can’t allow it.”

Megga wanted to look
her in the eye and tell her that it didn’t much matter
what
she wanted. There was no choice in the matter. The vampires would take them when they decided it was time and she would not be able to fight against it. She had already angered them and Megga could feel it. When the time came, it was going to be very ugly for her.

“If they use me, it’s out of my hands.”

Wenda’s eyes went narrow and dark. “You always have a choice. You can fold up like Morris or fight like me…or you can continue to do what you have been doing: bending over for what’s out there.”

Megga sat down slowly like she was brittle and might break. “It can be romance or it can be rape when they take you. That’s the only choice there is, Wenda. Because they’ll get me and they’ll get you.”

“They won’t get me.”

Megga laughed. “Yes, they will.”

“Is that what they’ve told you?”

Megga did not say anything.

“Is it?” Wenda said. “I feel them out there same as you do. They try to get in your head. I know that. The difference between you and me is that I won’t let them.”

Megga laughed again, but inside she was not laughing at all. Her blood was running hot and her ire was up and she wanted to slap Wenda right across the face because, again, Wenda did not have a clue. She wanted to take hold of her and shake her, shout into her face:
YOU won’t let them? YOU won’t let them? That’s because they haven’t directed it at you! When they do your brain doesn’t work anymore and your emotions short-circuit and you’re not sure who you are or what you are and what’s right and what’s wrong! You stupid, stupid silly little bitch!
But, of course, she didn’t do that because Wenda would have hit her. And it wasn’t that she was afraid of being hit or hitting, it just seemed like a terrible drain on her energy and she was weakening by the moment. Maybe they hadn’t gotten their teeth into her throat yet, but there were other ways to drain someone, other ways to squeeze them out like a sponge. They could drain you psychically until you didn’t have anything left to fight with.

It was at that moment that Morris sat up, his eyes loo
king varnished and shiny. “Griska,” he said.
“Griska.”

For Megga, those words were like arrows punching into her, their barbs sinking deep and holding. She sat up, coughing, then gagging, then simply trying to breathe so she did not blackout and hit the floor. Those words. That name.
He’s not supposed to say that name. He’s not supposed to!
Megga knew the name, she’d heard it in her dreams, but she would never say it. Part of that was the idea of incurring the wrath of its owner and part was a superstitious notion that to pronounce the name of the dead was to summon them.

Wenda was staring at her.

Megga said, “I’m all right.”

But she was not all right. That name was still echoing through her skull and stirring things up in there, making a boiling darkness begin to take shape. She squeezed her eyes shut, hoping it would go away but it continued to build and build.

“That name,” Wenda said. “Tell me that name. I want to hear it.”

Morris just looked at her dumbly. His eyes were glazed, bovine, like he just wanted to chew his cud and be left in peace. “What name?”

“The name you just said.”

“I don’t know. I was half-awake. I must’ve been dreaming.”

Wenda sat forward now. “Don’t give me that shit. Say the name.”

Morris was trapped. He looked from Wenda to Megga hopelessly. Megga wanted to jump in, to throw some interference in his direction but she could not seem to do anything but sit there as the darkness moved in her head and her nerves curled like burnt-out wires.

“Say it,”
Wenda said.

“He didn’t say anything,” Megga managed. “Just…just gibberish.”

Morris would not meet Wenda’s eyes and Wenda was fully aware of the fact. She had him and she knew she had him.

Megga felt herself going hot and cold with fever sweat. Morris had spoke
n the name and that was like calling old ghosts from their graves, only this ghost he had conjured was malefic, cunning, and ancient and she could see its face taking form in her brain: a face white going to gray, skullish and red-eyed, with a thin-lipped, crimson-stained mouth that was smiling and hungry. And she could hear its voice speak, telling her that Morris was weak and he would be broken in the ancient way: disemboweled whilst still breathing, his entrails fed to the dogs, his trunk impaled on a stake. And she would watch, she would be
compelled
to watch.

Wenda was staring at her now. “You know the name, too, don’t you?”

“No, no, I…no, I never heard that name.”

“They’ve gotten to both of you,” Wenda said. “Then both of you listen:
Griska, Griska.
”

Morris made a whimpering sound and Megga tried not to shake, but she was trembling almost spasmodically by that point.
Do not say the name. Do not speak of it or think of it.

“It’s a Slavic name. He must be the leader of our friends outside,” Wenda said, not truly knowing, Megga figured, but intuiting it and having absolute faith in not only her
instinct, but what she was reading in their faces. “He must be old, very old. He’s the one I’ll find. He’s the one I’ll ram this stake through.”

“It won’t be enough,” Megga said before she could stop herself.

“What?” Wenda asked.
“What did you say?”

Megga thought she would throw up. Morris was sobbing, openly sobbing like a child that had gotten a good whacking. And maybe he had at that. But why wasn’t Griska reaching out for Wenda? Why didn’t he bring her under control and smash her, d
ominate her, make her into a mindless slave like he had with so many others?

There’s a reason,
a voice in Megga’s head said through the fog.
There’s a very good reason. What do you think that might be?

But she didn’t dare think.
He
was probing her mind.
He
would know it if she thought things she was not supposed to think. No, no, no, she had to block it out, block it out, block it out, imagine a brick wall like George Sanders did in
The Village of the Damned
—they’d shown that one on
Chamber of Horrors
along with its less impressive sequel—and keep the bad thoughts out or he would read them and make her suffer for her defiance because if there was one thing he detested, hated—and possibly
feared
—it was a free mind. No, no, no, she would not think it. She
dared
not think of what was different about Wenda.

“Say the name, Morris,” Wenda said, feeding on the power of her discovery.

“No!” Morris said through his tears.
“He won’t let me!”

Megga felt a burning white-hot jolt of agony drill into the base of her skull and continue burning right through her brain until she cried out and that voice, that crazy disobedient voice, in her head spoke loud and clear. It told her what was different about Wenda. Wenda was pure. And in her purity, she fed off the light and shunned the dark, refused its attraction. Vultura was just a job to her, a role, there was nothing intimate involved with it. There was not so much as a seam of darkness in her that Griska could crawl
into. Morris was easy. He was essentially weak. He was also greedy, self-indulgent, and egotistical. And Megga herself was morose, macabre, and pessimistic. Minds like that were primal and dark and easily mastered. But not Wenda…because…
because
it wasn’t just her mind that was pure but her body. She was twenty-seven years old and drop-dead gorgeous but…
but she was a fucking virgin. She had never been touched.
She’d never given in to her animal needs, never connected with the dark side of her primal nature.

This is what Megga knew as she fell out of her chair and hit the floor, eyes rolling in her head. Griska could toy with Wenda, tease her and invade her dreams, but he could never master her unless he sank his teeth into her neck and this not only disturbed him, it frightened him. Wenda was a worthy adversary and he did not like that.

And that’s why I tried to seduce her. They wanted me to corrupt her
for
them. They still want me to. And, yes, I want that more than anything. I want to suck her tongue into my mouth and slide my fingers into her. I want to taste what’s between her legs. I want to bite it and suck the sweet juice that runs out.