Hag Night (33 page)

Doc screamed until his throat was raw.

Hanging there, impaled by three nail
s
one in his right wrist, one in each of his ankle
s
bleeding and gasping and half out of his mind, he felt a fourth impale his left wrist and the crucifixion of the martyr was complete, he knew.

But he was wrong.

It had only just begun.

The other vampires parted and the wall behind them was suddenly not webbed with shadow, it was vibrant, gleaming, and
he could see
beyond
the woodwork. He could see the lathing beneath it and each individual brick as if the entire wall were energized by some sort of radiant energy. It was bright and getting brighter, the mortar between the bricks glowing now as if it were infused with atomic radiation. A blurry, white form was coming through, a roping and snaking mass like a nightmare squid or jellyfish, something ethereal and transparent pushing itself into human form.

The luminous form solidified, became female, a specter in ragged, graying robes that flowed and drifted in unseen currents. But what Doc saw most were eyes that were silver and red, imploding star-fire and flickering carnival lamps. Their light was cold and
pulsating and he withered in it.

No, no, no…not this one…please, not this one…

The shrouded figure approached him and he heard a buzzing like a storm of hornets coming at him. It was inside his head, a constant almost feverish droning that seemed to turn his mind inside out. He could hear Griska speaking to him. The words were beyond him, but the voice eternal and undying as he hung there, crucified, a martyr being washed clean in the florid bounty of his own blood. It was hot and wet, smelling of dirty pennies and black covetous sin. And, oh dear God, the beauty that was the pain that was the beauty, all the poisons and toxins finally running from him in hurtful, cabalistic rivers. This was the time of the draining, the emptying, wherein his soul was finally and ultimately purified in a flux of bubbling red venom.

The Death Hag.

The buzzing was louder now and then louder still.

Shivering and bleeding, his ears ringing with that constant
buzzing, Doc shouted: “PLEASE PLEASE ANYTHING ANYTHING…”

Griska was cruel, vicious evil given form and he was puppet
master to the others; but this thing, this hag, she was their prophet, Doc knew, as she came for him, his mouth dry and his throat constricted like there were a pair of hands squeezing his windpipe shut. The world went out-of-focus, teetering madly this way and that like something reflected in a funhouse mirror. He blinked his eyes, tried to shake that dizziness out of his brain…and the Death Angel reached for him.

A low, bestia
l growl sounded from her throat as she gnashed her teeth. She was so thin, she was practically diaphanous. There was a veil of membranous cobweb-skin over her face like the caul of an infant and he could clearly see the contours of the skull beneath. The caul sheared and the face beneath looked mummified and ancient like straw-dry wicker, spread out with hundreds of wrinkles and diverging lines. The lips were seamed and the teeth gray and pitted, overlapping fangs. They were vulpine, dog-like, but the sound coming out of her throat was the squealing of pigs.

Doc looked into
her eyes. They were yellow bleeding into red into pink into red until there was no iris or pupil, just those two moist red orbs, each swelling from their sockets, wet and glistening like fresh blood.

He waited in frozen silence as a burning, stagnant heat swept from her, a torpid, gagging heat of malarial swamps and raging viral fevers. Something like inky bile was running from her mouth, her nostrils, dripping to the floor from orifices hidden by her shroud. She arched her back and vomited a stream of buzzing hornets at him. They lit in the air like drifting motes. A thousand of them drilled into him with their stingers and he screamed out a red mist of blood…

And inside his head, there were white, searing shockwaves of pain. It was like a thousand separate red-hot pokers were spearing into his brain, each one burning its way deeper and deeper, setting off pinpoint eruptions of agony that came together in a rending, blinding white explosion that tossed him screaming into the blackness. His nervous system had been overloaded, overdosed, pushed far beyond acceptable levels where consciousness could hope to be maintained. This was the cumulative effect of countless stingers punching into him and injecting their toxins into his tissues. It caused immediate systemic crash.

When Doc felt
himself returning to the land of the living, bare seconds later, he was immobilized. It had very little to do with the nails piercing him, fixing him to the wall and everything to do with the absolute terror thrumming through his system.

He could not speak.

He could not feel.

He could not see.

He could not hear.

For a few moments, his neural slate was blanked and he just hung there from the nails, bloody and damaged, then he opened his eyes.

Baptismal.

Yes, that’s what this was. Others were inducted into her obscene cult via the bite, but not him. He would be baptized and made an example of.

She would accept nothing less.

The other vampires swarmed in now, lapping up the blood that drained from him, suckling his wounds and creating new ones as they bit into him.

Griska stood there, watching, grinning like something that devoured children in a dark wood. In Doc’s head, he said,
Now, here comes the Mother to put you to bed…Martyr.

Doc was dizzy from the loss of blood, from pain and trauma, his eyesight was blurring. But he could feel, he could sense, he could know what was coming now. He could
smell
her
bouquet, the smell of mass graves. He could feel
her
touch which was that of crawling, maggoty things. Her voice was scraping darkness, screeching metal, and the screams of eviscerated children, cooing at him.

The Death Angel opened her shroud and gouged out a strip of gray rib meat with one black nail.

Doc would not look,
could
not look. He was too weak to fight. He could only accept that which was offered, the putrescent meat and bile that were pushed into his mouth. He screamed himself into darkness as his tongue licked and his teeth chewed and his throat swallowed, his soul rotting to carrion.

For this was Her Body and Her Blood.

This was communion of the damned.

1

Cobton, 1828

Hysterical and raving, the infected trooped out into the snow of the village square in ghastly death-trains. They danced and shuddered with idiot splendor, their dead-white faces split by mortuary grins and welded into grisly rictuses. They tore at themselves with knotted fingers, their blood steaming into the snow in mindless sacrificial offerings to the sepulchral gods of boneyards. Their voices screeched and shrilled into the night, echoing off the barren, idiot face of the dead moon above. Others, a great many others, lay chalk-white in beds, pining away as death leeched the life from their very veins.

They die
d in numbers.

But they did not stay dead.

2

It was a night of howling black wind and breath turned to frost, so they stayed close to the fire. Katya would not allow them to leave it. She told them that in warmth and light there was safety. Against what? But those were the things Katya did not like to talk about so she cleaned the kitchen, sweeping and mopping the flagstone floor, knowing that evil spirits lived in dirty places and she would allow no such spirits here. Not in the home of her daughter and her precious grandchildren. Pausing with her broom, Katya watched the children closely—Michael, Anna, and the infant, David, sleeping so soundly in his bassinet—and crossed herself, knowing that children were always the first, always the first.

“Mashalla,”
she said under her breath in her native Albanian tongue:
As God wishes.

“What did you say, Grandma?” Michael asked her.

“Just talking to myself, child. Muttering, muttering.” She looked at him there by the fire and thought he was the image of his father. The poor thing. “Old ladies talk to themselves and young men must pretend they do not hear.”

Michael smiled and turned back to the fire.

The children were afraid and she knew it. Their father had left with the other men before nightfall yesterday to track the evil to its source and none had returned. And they would not return…not as men. Now her daughter had gone out to fetch the priest so he would come and bless the house again. It was a reasonable act, Katya knew, given that her husband had not returned, but to go out on a night like this. The wise course would have been to stay so they could guard the children together.

That’s foolishness, Mama,
Etonya had said to her before she left.
I do not believe in such things. Those are old stories. Cobton is ill…but not with that. You must forget the old superstitions.

They have served us well thus far,
Katya told her.

Mama…please. Don’t say those things before the children. You will give them nightmares. They are worried about their father and I am worried about my husband.

Katya nodded.
You
should
worry about your husband. He has not come back. He may return tonight and when he does, he’ll go for the children. They always go for the children and you know it. They kill the thing they love best. The plague is upon this village. You have seen the signs. You know what is happening. We are all in danger, terrible danger. The Vurvolak—

I won’t listen to that! I do not believe in such things!

Then why do you go for the priest?

Enough, Mama!

But for Katya it was not enough. She knew things. She had seen things that others had not. She had seen the plague of the Vurvolak before. And it was here now.
They say three old men are missing. You know whom I speak of, child. The three who gather in the summer outside the town hall, telling their stories of the old country. They were wise—they knew the Vurvolak was among us. I was with them when they opened its grave on the hill. I was there when it cried out—

Enough!

Etonya would hear no more of it. This was a new country and a new life and the old ways needed to be left in the old country. Katya could not talk sense to her. Yes, this was a new country and its ways were simple and naïve. What better place for evil to take root than in a place where no one would believe in it? Etonya refused to admit these things, but Katya could see the fear in her eyes. She knew her daughter believed and was afraid for her children. Why else go out at night into the storm to fetch the priest? She was terrified that her husband would come back and terrified of what he would bring with him. She had been gone nearly two hours now. The church was only twenty minutes away. Etonya should have been back long ago and it was Katya’s fear that she would never be back, that out there in the cold depths of the storm she had found her husband or
he
had found her.

Katya crossed herself and began sweeping again.

The wind was moaning outside, rising up in what seemed a dozen shrieking voices filled with hate and torment and death. She would not listen because if you listened, she knew, sometimes you would hear your voice being called. She swept faster, chasing away every last speck of dust even though it was hard to see properly with only the firelight and the glow of the oil lamp. She did not trust herself to be inactive. She was old and she was tired. If she sat down, she might fall asleep. That’s when they would come. That’s when they always came…in the dark watches of night.

Katya heard the children whispering.

“What is this about?” she said. “Are we telling secrets?”

Anna giggled.

“She’s telling crazy stories,” Michael said.

Katya was interested now. “What sort of crazy stories?”

Anna said that her schoolmate, Stephen, claimed that his sister stood outside of his window at night. But she had been dead a week and it could not be.

“Those are awful stories,” Katya warned her, shivering, “and we will not listen.”

She knew the family Anna spoke of. They had not been heard from in days. People said the plague had claimed them and Katya knew it was true, only that the plague was of a far different variety than people thought…or would admit. Cobton would be a graveyard soon. If the plague was not rooted out by traditional means, there would be no one left before long. The signs were everywhere. The men came with wagons during the long white afternoons and carted off the dead. Sometimes entire families were put into the grave, but no one would listen to Katya when she told them the bodies must be burned to ash. She was a crazy old foreign woman and what did she know with her old wive’s tales?

But she knew because she had seen it before.

Today in Cobton there had been very few in the streets. Doors were bolted, shutters were closed. It was December 1
st
. Snow fell and blew up the lanes, tree limbs creaked in the wind. Even in winter, the village was a busy place. Children played in the streets and wagons came and went, women gossiped in doorways and men drank at the inn. But today it had been noticeably silent. The only voice of the village was that of the wind as it moaned down empty avenues and narrow alleyways, skirted the snow-heaped rooftops.