Hag Night (26 page)

Wenda brought up the stake and cracked him alongside the head.

Once, twice, three times.

His grip sagged and she twisted, throwing him off. She brought up the stake to beat his brains out. And that’s when she heard the shuffling of footsteps.

A creaking noise.

And the cellar door swung open.

18

Once the fire was blazing high and the parlor was filled with warmth and a guttering yellow light, Doc looked down at Bailey’s corpse and announced, “We have to get her out of here, Reg. We can’t have her in the house. I don’t know how long it might take until she…we need to get her out of here.”

Reg looked at him and his eyes were just dull. The light had been stolen from them. “It’s dangerous to go outside.”

“I know, but we’ll have to chance it. Otherwise…”

But Doc didn’t need to complete that. They had both seen her eyes and her teeth, and they had already had a run-in with one of them—its remains were still in the corner—to know what it would be like if she woke up. She would tear out their throats and he didn’t honestly know if he had the strength to fight against Bailey as he had with the hag.

However they decided to do it, it had to be done immediately.

Because he was feeling something out there, something which had been
vague for some time but was now gaining substance in his thoughts. Out in the storm, he knew, there was one that was stronger than the others. He could feel it out there, feel it worrying around at the edges of his mind, spreading the seeds of anxiety. That it had power, he could not doubt for now and again its influence seemed to be getting stronger and when that happened, it felt like a gas jet inside of him was being turned lower and lower until it barely burned.

You’re woolgathering, that’s all your doing.

But he did not believe that. This was not imagination ruling him: it was something else, something out in the storm. Something waiting, forever waiting with an inhuman patience that chilled him to contemplate. Whatever that thing was, Bailey belonged to it now. And it would use her to get at them. He could feel it. She was the bait that would draw them to their own destruction.

“We’re going to take her to the front door. Bring the axe,” he said. “You open the door and I’ll set her in the snow. We’ll do it quick. We’ll do it real quick.”

Reg did not question what had to be done; he accepted. He grabbed up the axe and lantern. As he did so, Doc scooped up Bailey. Holding her dead weight in his arms made something jump in his belly. Although she hadn’t weighed more than 115 pounds in life and seemed to weigh considerably less in death, it was the
feel
of her that disturbed him. There was something wrong about it like she had been converted now into a mass of evil. She seemed light in his arms, too light, as if she were now made of some finer, ethereal material than mere flesh and blood.

He told himself not to think about
it as he stepped from the room, but not thinking about it was like not thinking about an especially large spider crawling up your leg in the dead of night.

Reg led the way down the corridor, casting fearful glances behind him at what was in Doc’s arms.

Doc figured they must have looked like a couple characters in a
Chamber of Horrors
flick: the lantern light throwing distorted shadows against the walls, the grim set to their faces, and the thing they were carrying out into the snow. Like a scene from some old Barbara Steele movie, one of those Gothic potboilers set in a cobwebby old castle. He might have found the image amusing at any other time, but now it was threatening to its core and black to its roots. Bailey’s arm was hanging loose and as he walked, it kept slapping him in the leg and that made a cold, sick sort of sweat pop at his brow. He was just waiting for her eyes to open and her teeth to slide into his throat.

As they closed in on the door, Doc could feel the magnetism of what was out in the moaning, hissing snowstorm. It knew what they were bringing and although maybe it found the idea of what they were laying at its feet amusing in some darkly regal fashion, it very much wanted them to keep it.
My gift to you.
Reg reached out to unlock the door and as he did so, Doc felt the strength in him draining away as if it were being tapped by that thing out there.

“You ready?” Reg asked.

“I guess.”

But he wasn’t ready. God, no. Being here at door was more than just standing at the threshold of shelter and raging storm, it was like standing at the borderland of some malefic black dimension, the intersection of hate and pain and insanity, the crossroads of the nameless and the unknown. It was as if, just beyond that door, lines of diabolic force were concentrated and once he stepped into their field, he would be emptied, discharged like a battery.

He refused to contemplate it.

Reg peered out the window one last time, looked to Doc, and reached for the doorknob. “I don’t see anything out there,” he said.

But Doc knew it would be nothing that obvious. They would not be clustered and waiting. It would not be that simple. What was out there would not want it to end so quickly for him; it wanted to amplify the pain he felt, generate the maximum amount of terror, suck every drop of despair from him before he knew death. That was part of the game: to make you destroy yourself.

Reg opened the door and
the storm came rushing in, the wind throwing snow in Doc’s face and sending frigid fingers of chill up his spine. His throat seemed to contract with terror. He was certain that Bailey had shifted in his arms. And he told himself: three, four steps and you can set her down. That’s all there is to it. Then you’re safe. So he walked out into the blizzard, the wind screaming around the house, the driving snow filled with moving shapes. And a voice in his brain said,
you’re never going to be safe again and you know it. He’s out here. The thing you fear. He’s watching you right now. And you can toss Bailey into a drift and run back inside, but you’re only putting it off. He’s going to come for you before dawn forces him back into some lair of darkness. You won’t be able to stop him. He’ll invade the house like a seam of shadow or a river of night. He’ll crawl through a crack or ooze down a pipe or flow through a keyhole, but he
will
come and there’s nothing you can do about that—

“Doc!” Reg called. “Just set her down, man!”

Yes, that’s all there was to it.

He took two or three more steps and even that close to the doorway, the storm was trying to pull him away and tuck him somewhere deep and cold where he would never be found. Reg was calling out to him again but his voice was lost in the wailing of the storm and Doc knew if he looked behind him, the house would be gone. The snowstorm would have shrouded it from view. He kneeled down and set Bailey in a drift of powder, then stood back up. And as he did so, he felt something build in him like gathering thunderheads. He felt a malign presence near him that filled him with a manic, biting terror. It was palpable and overwhelming. Where before his spine was literally tingling from the menace he felt coming out of the storm, now it was like a cat had sunk its claws between his shoulder blades and was drawing them down his backbone.

He heard Reg’s voice.

He turned to go back to the house, but his limbs weren’t responding. He felt clumsy and rubbery like he’d been shot up with narcotics. His skull was filled with t
he rising drone of buzzing insects. That’s when he saw the little girl standing not three feet away. The snow seemed not to be falling on her, but
through
her. She was naked, her flesh white as the snow around her. Her hair was a brilliant red that moved in the wind, flying around her head. Her eyes were huge, like glossy black blood blisters that were ready to pop. She reached down between her legs and touched her deathly-white immature vulva like she wanted him to touch her there, too. She reached out for his hand to make him do so. Her voice was pristine in his head:
There’s a place where we can lay together. A place where you can touch me. A place where we can sleep together like death—

And he would have touched her.

God help him, but he would have.

Then something grabbed him and yanked him back and he knew it was Reg, but he still fought because Reg was ruining the most beautiful thing that Doc had ever known. Couldn’t he see that?

Reg pulled him back and in his stupor, he could not fight. The girl leered at him, then opened her fanged mouth and made a screeching sound that was the pure stark and desolate wrath of the storm itself.

Then Reg threw him inside and slammed the door.

And once Doc could speak, he looked up and said, “Did…did I put Bailey out there?”

19

When the door swung open, Wenda figured the jig was up. Then a flashlight beam speared into her face and she squinted her eyes against it. She saw a man standing there. “You going to use that stake on him?” he said.

Realizing he was no vampire, Wenda sighed. Morris was just lying there, breathing. “No, I guess not.”

“Good. He doesn’t look like one of them.”

He helped her to her feet and she said, “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m Rule,” he told her. “One of the caretakers of this damn place. The only caretaker that’s still alive.” Before Wenda could introduce herself, he said, “You’re Vultura. I’d know you anywhere. I watch your show. It’s very funny.”

“Thanks,” she said, almost automatically. Then she turned to Morris. “Get up. You’re coming back with us.”

He climbed awkwardly to his feet. The fight was gone from him and he was much the same as he had been before the mania had gripped him: like some wind-up toy soldier with no will of his own. She led Morris back to the sitting room with Rule trailing behind. Megga was waiting there for them. She looked from Wenda to Morris to Rule and raised an eyebrow.

“This is the caretaker,” Wenda explained. “He’s been…
exactly
where have you been and what have you been doing?” She said this as if it had suddenly occurred to her. And it had. With everything going on, she hadn’t really thought to make him explain himself. But now she not only wanted that, but she was ready to demand it.

Rule looked at her, did something with his mouth that was almost a smile. Whether that was to reassure her or not, she couldn’t say. There was something very calm and non-threatening about him. He was white-haired, snow-bearded, pot-bellied, wore a set of insulated Carhartt overalls, heavy gloves, and a mossy oak flap cap. But what struck her most was that he was oddly…
familiar.
There was something in his voice, something in his eyes that she remembered.

“I suppose you’ve got the right to ask that,” he said, “and I suppose it would only be fair of me to an
swer it. See, when this happened, I was setting up the genny out back so you people could have lights for your shoot. Bill was in the car. He was supposed to be getting some cables out, but my guess is he was sitting in the car, probably finishing a chapter in one of his westerns. Bill wasn’t the motivated type. Now, of course, he’s dead.”

“Something came out of the cemetery up there and got him,” Wenda said.

“Yes. I heard him scream and I ran out into the square and…well, I’m not sure exactly, but something was dragging him off. Something not exactly human.” Rule took off his flap cap and wiped sweat from his face with it. “I was going to go after that thing…then I saw the…the
others
out in the storm. That’s when I came in here. I was cut off from the car. I had nowhere else to go.”

Megga listened, but looked suspicious. “How did you know it came out of the cemetery?” she asked Wenda. “That’s a little specific.”

“I saw it,” Wenda told her. “In my head.” She explained how, when the crone had Megga upstairs, she saw things in her head. She didn’t know what they were. Some kind of psychic ripples from the crone herself maybe, but she’d seen them.

“Burt saw it, too.”

Megga said, “Burt?”

“When we first pulled into Cobton. Remember? That thing standing in the cemetery. It was no statue of a graveyard angel. It was the real thing.”

Rule cleared his throat. “Anyway, I hid out down in the cellar. I figured I’d wait until dawn and get my ass out of here. It seemed the logical choice of action.”

“You must have heard us,” Megga said. “You must have known we were in the shit.”

“I didn’t know what was going on and I wasn’t about to mix up in it.”

“Very brave of you.”

He looked at her. “Miss, bravery has nothing to do with it. In a situation like this there are basically two things: death and survival. I was interested in the latter and if you have a brain in that pretty head of yours, I’m sure you’ll understand my motives.”

Wenda was becoming more and more intrigued by this guy. He was a caretaker of this ghost town, yet he seemed awfully well-spoken. Not that she thought caretakers were idiots or anything, but this guy seemed somewhat against type. And that voice…where did she know that voice from?

As she thought this over, he went on: “Understand that I was against this whole thing right from the start. It was too risky. Bill agreed with me, of course, as Bill was wont to do. I think a lot of the people that live in this vicinity would have agreed with me, too. And if you had grown up around here, you wouldn’t be so high-and-goddamn-mighty about it. You’d know the kind of place Cobton was after dark. You’d know the sort of things that have happened here.”