Hag Night (31 page)

He sat there watching the fire and listening to the great old house creaking in the assault of the blizzard. The snow it threw against the windows sounded like granules of sand. He knew it was more important now than ever to keep awake, to keep his mind working. It was steel that must be kept sharpened like a blade on a wheel, because the moment he let his guard down, the moment he relaxed, that’s when it was going to happen. That’s when death would reach out for him.

It’s out there right now, that thing that created all the horror we know this night or will ever know. It’s thinking about me again, pushing its mind out at my own and I can’t let it get inside my head again or it’ll start draining my energy away. Each time I weaken, it draws in closer. Each time I hesitate in my resolve, it grows stronger. That is how they work.  That is the strength of the undead: by the time they actually come to feed on you, you’re too weak to fight. But I will not be too weak! I won’t! It’s circling me like a carrion crow right now, its buzzard-eyes drilling into me, drawing away my vitality. It’s just waiting for the final death rattle of my willpower so it can come crawling in and finish me.

Doc thought about the others—Wenda and Megga and Morris—and wondered if they were still even alive. He faced the unpleasant possibility that they were already dead and only Reg and he remained. But even that wouldn’t last. He could feel death creeping in closer and closer. In his mind, he kept seeing the storm out there and feeling the weight of
Bailey’s body in his arms, the blizzard taking the shape of a pale naked little girl who said,
There’s a place where we can lay together. A place where you can—

“No,” he said under his breath. “No.”

Reg looked up at him. “What is it, Doc?”

“Um…I was just thinking, son. Thinking out loud. Musing, as I tend to do,” he said, covering for his own helplessness. “Sooner or later, what’s out there will pay us another visit. According to my watch we’ve got nearly four hours until sunup and I’m just as exhausted as you are. I want nothing more than to close my eyes, but we can’t afford that now. We’ve got enough wood until dawn, but we might as well arm ourselves. That table over there…why don’t you chop the legs off? They’ll make for good stakes.”

“Yeah…okay. That’s an idea.”

The fire was burning high, but the kerosene in the remaining lantern was almost used up. Maybe it would burn another hour, but probably less. The
wind was howling out there, rising up into a single note of despair and desolation. Doc wondered if he would ever truly feel warm again and decided that he probably wouldn’t. He watched Reg chopping free the first leg. Although he was certain that his own life was played out now, Reg was still a boy in his mind. So young, so young. Whatever happened before dawn, he knew he had to somehow save the kid’s life. But would that even be possible?

He realized that his lips were moving as he watched Reg and he became aware that he was mouthing a prayer from childhood. Not that he expected God to listen to an old Agnostic like him, yet he prayed and hoped, and as he hoped, he feared. There had to be a way out of this, a way to spare the kid. But if such a way existed, he could not think of it.

He looked over towards the window, past the parted curtains, and saw white faces looking in. He gasped. The girl was out there, waiting for him. He turned away; he would not look in their eyes and, more appropriately,
her
eyes. Never in his life had he felt any stirrings for anything other than mature women, but out there in the storm that child had offered herself to him and he had been aroused by the idea. It disgusted him. More so, it disturbed him. It was a mind game, that’s all it was. Those things wanted to weaken him and the girl had been their weapon. She had tapped into some vein of animal need in his subconscious, perhaps, exploited it, perverted it, and in the process filled him with self-loathing. That was how they did it, he figured. They created a crack in your psyche and worked it until it widened, until that crack fanned out and you shattered inside. By the time that happened, they’d already weakened you to the point where you could do nothing but accept what they offered, the cool oblivion of eternity.

There’s a place—

No.

—
where we can—

I will not listen.

—
lay together.

Those words would not stop echoing in his head and he knew there was noth
ing remotely sensual about them. The tone was wooden and hollow like that of a ventriloquist’s dummy…
yet,
there was a seduction he could not deny. It sickened him, yet intrigued him.

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—

Sleep. God knew he wanted to sleep and even the idea of lying with that thing in the snow sounded peaceful. Just to close his eyes. And for one moment as he fought against himself and fought against the clutching shadows of his own mind that threatened to zip him shut in darkness, he could not understand why there was anything wrong with the idea of laying with the little nymph from hell.

But, then, as his mind came out of it, revolted by the idea, he cou
ld almost feel her next to him…her naked flesh like cold meat, a smell rising from her like gangrenous wounds and infected drainage. This is what she was at her core: filth and perversion, sickness and disease, bile and malignance. And this is what she wanted for the human race—a graveyard world hung in a decaying orbit like a dead fly in a spider’s web. A world swinging around a blackened, burned-out star. A world where the cities were mausoleums blown by blizzards of human ash, the towns were mortuaries washed by black rivers of coffin slime, and the only sound was the moaning wind and tombs doors creaking open to expel vampires in fetid, creeping vapors.

He knew in his heart that if these things were not crushed and contained here in Cobton, then they would spread their pestilence to the four winds. It was sheer ugly coincidence that brought him and the others here on this worst of all possible nights; but it was not coincidence that the vampires chose this night to rise from their dormancy. It had been planned that way. This was the beginning. Maybe other cells were waking in other lonely places as well, but, regardless, it was beginning here and now.

On this night.

This was the eve of destruction when the world became a graveyard. And knowing this, feeling it deep inside himself to be true, Doc felt like a small boy on that Iowa farm again listening to the wind blow through the cracks in the loft by night, certain they were ghosts. He wanted to crawl beneath the covers and suck his thumb. And maybe he would have retreated deep into himself, but the wind blowing through those cracks was not wind exactly…it sounded like respiration.

There was something in the room that was breathing and it was neither Reg nor he, but some insidious
other.

Beads of fear-sweat popping on his brow, he looked around and there was nothing, nothing at all. He could not even hear the breathing now, but he knew that it had been there. Whatever had caused it, was now holding its breath and probably to create the very effect it had indeed created.

“Something, Doc?” Reg said. “You hear something?”

“No…you?”

“Thought I did. I guess not.” He came over with a sharpened chair leg. It was oak, about sixteen inches long and sharp enough to draw blood. He handed it to Doc with a bright, expectant look in his eyes like a puppy that had just fetched a slipper and wanted to be rewarded. “How about that?” he said.

“Nice,” Doc said, hefting it in his fist. “Very, very nice.”

Pleased, Reg went over and started chopping at another chair leg. The noise was reassuring to Doc. It was the sound of life and activity as opposed to the sound of death and silence, which were the music of the tomb.

Doc held the stake in both hands.

He had to be ready now because even despite Reg’s chopping, he could hear that breathing again. Maybe it was just inside head, but he did not think so. It was there, all right, and it took more than one set of lungs to produce what he was hearing.

They were gathering.

They were inside the house.

They were making ready and he had to be ready for them.
Hurry with that stake, son. Dear God, hurry with it.
They were getting closer. They were shadows in the corners and behind the curtains, ghosting along the wainscoting and hiding in the patterns of the wallpaper, pooling under chairs. They were here. The things that would soon crawl out of the woodwork.

“Temp must be dropping out there,” Reg said, pausing with his axe. “Feels colder than ever in here. You feeling it?”

Yes, oh God yes, my boy, I am certainly feeling it.

“Yes,” was all
Doc managed to say and it satisfied Reg. He went back at it with his axe. He had turned out another stake and was sharpening the end into a point.

The breathing was louder.

The shadows seemed to be bunching in the room, almost flexing like muscles. Doc was aware of a subtle sound that was quite like the slithering of snakes and another that sounded like fingernails dragged over the walls.

“I thought I heard something,” Reg said, his eyes bovine and calm.

“Hurry with that stake,” Doc told him, trying to control his breathing. “I think…I think we’re going to need it soon, very soon.”

Reg went at it faster, his eyes darting around in his head now, looking, searching. Doc watched him as chills went up his back and settled along the nape of his neck. The air seem
ed heavy, galvanic, as if it were charged with static electricity, and thick…almost like dark liquid as it moved around them.

“Hurry,” Doc said.

Then Reg was done and he was standing near the chair that Doc sat in. The lantern was still glowing and the fire was still blazing. Light was thrown in brilliant yellow-orange arcs against the walls, but over near the window there were shadows that it could not dispel. Shadows like black, oozing oil that seemed to come out of the corners and exude from the walls as if the house were a sponge that was being squeezed out.

There were eyes in those shadows like wormholes filling with dusky light.

They pooled and flowed and then rose up until they were not shadows but figures: a few men, but mostly women and children, wasted and starving things like corpses from a medieval plague pit. Some were dressed in rotting, filthy cerements of the grave that barely concealed jutting rungs of rib, others were starkly naked and bled white. A few wore winding shrouds feathered with grave mold and beneath those hoods he saw gray faces threaded with cobwebs. One woman had rats crawling in the moldering shifts of her burial gown. Her grin was that of maggoty fish upon a beach. They looked out at him with eyes that were black and shining like the shells of beetles or luminous and yellow set into faces like pallid moons. A stench of the unburied dead came off of them in a sickening pestilential bloom of the grave.

“DOC—” Reg began, but Doc could not hear him.

He could only see the girl.

Her hair was the most brilliant and luscious red that Doc had ever seen. Her body was immature and undeveloped, but she offered its marble whiteness to him with a blatant sexuality that was ravenous like the hunger of wolves. He could almost feel her teeth sinking into him and scraping against bone while
a voice of sugar, dark and sweet sugar said:
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—

But he would not allow it.

Even though something inside him ran like yellow yolks, he would not allow it for she was the most foul thing he had ever seen and he had only one overriding passion: her destruction. She jumped at him and Reg cried out, but she did not leap, she
drifted
. Like a blown, ghastly ribbon of corpse-white fog, she drifted through the air at him, morphing from that loathsome little cadaver-girl into a woman who was rounded-out and full, voluptuous, sensuous, a fluid muscular grace of hunger, long-limbed, red-mouthed, eyes blazing with carnal appetite.

“DOC!” Reg cried out.
“DOC, GODDAMMIT, LOOK OUT!”

Doc held his ground, powered by something that even he couldn’t really understand. Maybe it had to do with the repulsion he felt for the thing coming to drain him dry, the thing that wanted the world to be a graveyard of bird-picked bones. It was that and maybe an overwhelming need to stand and fight, to destroy the ghoulish infection and if for no other reason than for the memory of the girl herself, what she had been and the horror she now was.

When she got close enough that he could see the searing red jewels of her eyes, he brought the stake down with all his strength and weight behind it. It punched into her like she was made of steam. She screamed, the others screamed, the walls shook and the windows rattled with the cacophonous wailing of the pack.

But it was too late.

She was impaled, speared like a fish, and what he saw then was the same foul little thing from a grave, hissing and writhing, her mouth splitting open as her fangs sheared through her lips. As Doc stumbled back—his hands deadened from some weird jolting electrical discharge that had grounded-out through the stake and into his fingers when it pierced her—he watched her die, he watched her quite literally go to pieces.