Authors: Tim Curran
She knew it was Rule.
The rats had been sent to destroy him—and they were doing it, all right—but there was more fight in his ornery old body than Griska and his ghouls had counted on. The will to survive at his core was a flame that could not easily be blown out, like one of those trick birthday candles.
He pushed through the ranks of rats.
Some parted, some scurried, others attacked him.
But they certainly couldn’t stop him. He still clutched his flashlight in one raw, red fist and the rodents that had bitten his skin away had not been able to make him let go of it.
Dear God, he was swarmed with them. They were in his hair. They were hanging from his face by their teeth. Small ones had worked their way up the legs of his Carhartt overalls and down the back. They were gnawing at him, scratching and tearing at him. What she could see of his face was a bloody ruin. Between two bloated rat bodies, she could see one eye peering out as if from the depths of a shaggy cave. He reached up and tore one rat from his face and then another. He coughed out a blob of blood.
“GET AWAY FROM HER, YOU FUCKING LEECH!” he shouted. “GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM HER!”
Wenda knew then that, somehow, he had sensed the fix she was in and nothing, neither vampires, rats nor witch-winds, were going to stop him from reaching her side and lending assistance, even if that meant forfeiting his own life, which she was certain he had pretty much done.
He fought
to his knees, then his feet and it was the utmost physical battle to do so. Rats fell from him and he peeled more free with his left hand, hammering at them with the butt of his flashlight. But for those that fell, others climbed him like a tree. He put his light on Griska and Wenda noticed that the beam partly illuminated the ghoul and partly shined right through him like he was made of some transparent material like cellophane.
Rule
took two, then three faltering steps backwards, fighting the rats that were quite literally eating him alive. Wenda could hear their jaws working, teeth scraping against bone, as they glutted themselves with his flesh. Yet…he staggered forward, his voice cycling out of his throat in a screeching tirade: “YOU’RE ALL DONE! YOU’RE ALL FUCKING DONE! THE SUN WILL RISE SOON…AND…AND YOU’LL FRY IN IT…EVERYONE OF YOU FUCKING BLOODSUCKERS…”
Wenda wanted to go to him, but she knew it was pointless. The fact that he had made it even this far was practically supernatural. He dropped to one knee as the feeding frenzy continued, falling face-forward, his body writhing and shuddering with awful contortions. Gradually, it stopped moving. The grim silence was broken only by the feeding sounds of the voracious graveyard rats. They bit and chewed and tore. Even their savage appetites could not breech the material of his Carhartt overalls, but they still got at him and soon he was no longer visible, mounded by the rank, squirming hides of the rats themselves that dipped their blood-dripping snouts into him again and again.
Maybe Griska had let Rule get that far to immobilize Wenda completely, but, again, he had underestimated the hate that raged inside her. So when she jumped to her feet and rushed him, he was scarcely ready for her or the blade in her hand that came streaking in a silver blur at his face. He ducked back, holding up a hand to shield himself. The blade easily severed three fingers off his left hand that fell into the dirt and writhed like waxy, white earthworms.
He let out a bellowing roar that was more wolf than human.
An inky blood dripped from the finger stumps. He clawed out at Wenda, but by then the blade was coming again and this time it pierced him just left of the sternum and again he roared, but with such volume and manic fury that rats went squealing away and bats filled the air in panicked flight. The ground seemed to shake. Clods of earth fell from the roof overhead.
Wenda was amazed how very easily the blade went in.
It was not like she was jabbing it into meat and flesh, but into something far more insubstantial like perhaps a heap of threadbare linen. But her aim was off and she completely missed his heart, though the pain she caused him was not only evident, but considerable. The handle of the knife, upon entering the cage of his chest, grew burning hot in her hand and the blade seemed to shine. She smelled something like burning hair and meat. His rodentine face and scabrous flesh drew back from the screaming fanged pit of his mouth.
Then…Griska exploded.
There is no other word to describe what happened at that moment. He literally erupted. He seemed to blow apart into a thousand black, winging fragments that became a swirling, rushing, maddened swarm of bats that flew right into Wenda’s face and covered her body, tangling in her hair, biting and nipping as she fell backwards to the ground.
“Gah!”
she cried out, quite involuntarily.
“Oh God, get em offa me, get em offa me!”
She slashed at them with the silver blade and each bat it bisected blazed up with orange fire, dropping away into a melted, black rubbery ball. Her other hand tore at wings and snapped little bones and twisted little heads free.
But they were everywhere.
She couldn’t seem to fight her way free of the
m. There had to be easily thousands as she first thought. She twisted this way and that, trying to throw her way free but it seemed like more pushed in all the time. She knew in her fright that they were not trying to bite her to death. Such a thing was impossible. No, they were going to bury her alive and when she screamed out for breath, they would fill her mouth with their plump, furry bodies and lodge themselves in her throat until she could not draw a single breath.
She stumbled about, some insane and surreal bat sculpture, still fighting, still pulling them free, still smashing their little bodies and slashing them into flaming bat debris as they engulfed her in
a squeaking, pulsating black cloud of beating wings and nipping teeth.
I won’t! I
will not submit to you, Griska! I will not give in and you will not stomp me under! I will fight and fight and fight—
And fi
ght, she did.
They hit her from every conceivable direction, battering her and punching into her, thumping and nipping and cutting. They roosted in her hair and covered her body and went at her eyes. Still, she smashed them and cut them and with each little death, the swarm weakened. Blood was running down her face, steaming in the air. It was her blood
and
the blood of broken bats. Her body was an envelope of pain and the constant beating of those wings pushed her mind closer and closer to complete collapse.
She slashed one last time deep, very deep, into the heart of the swarm…and they withdrew. They abandoned her in a whirring cyclone, flying off in a twisting column that disappeared into the shadows.
And that’s when she saw something extraordinary and disgusting beyond description.
Griska was gone now.
He had flown off
as
the swarm to lick his wounds. The other vampires were in the air, wraiths that winged and drifted about. But they had no interest in her, they had another objective.
And i
t was standing not too far away.
At the very edge of the light, she saw it.
The Death Angel.
That’s what it looked like and that’s what it had to be. A tall, gaunt form covered in ragged, graying, mold-speckled
cerements that seemed to hang in ribbons and tatters and discolored bolts. It wore a hooded shroud and she could not see its face. But she could see its mouth…red-lipped, filled with long, gnarled teeth set in black gums. So many jutting teeth they were like stalactites.
The Death Angel.
The Death Hag.
One by one, the vampires
became corporeal and offered their throats to her. She put her puckered lips against them, drawing off a taste of the blood they had taken in. She was a great glutted leech, but she always wanted more and they always gave her more.
Well-fed, her mouth red with blood, the Death
Angel advanced on Wenda.
The vampires moved off, drifting, then breaking apart like ash on the wind, becoming a black-winged swarm that flew off and away.
The Death Angel was a graveyard statue, unmoving and silent. But each time Wenda blinked her eyes, she was closer and then closer still, raising up gnarled hands, extending thorny black talons that were like those of a barn owl.
Wenda had a knife and a stake, but they hardly seemed enough against this thing. Just about anything would have seemed inadequate. Her mind was caught in a web of primal dread, circling back and forth, back and forth, but finding no way out.
A cold wind blew off the Death Angel. It was the terrible, unnatural cold of tombs and graveyard barrows. Forget the undead, forget Griska, Wenda knew, this was the real one, the ancient and undying one, the Mother of shadows and the Mistress of Plagues. A ravening, lewd pestilence given form and intent.
Then, in the sullen depths of Wenda’s mind, the Death
Hag spoke with a ragged, grating sound like a wind from low places and hollows blown up through a drainpipe clogged with sediment.
Bow down before me,
the voice demanded.
Give unto me that which is mine. Make an offering of it, virgin. I want to see the blood run. From your throat. From your eyes, your mouth, the hole between your legs. Give it unto me.
Wenda shook with terror. The flesh at the back of her neck had gone rigid. The makeshift weapons in her hands were clutched tightly, knuckles white. She was feeling raw, superstitious terror. That most basal and ancient of emotions. The thing coming for her leeched the strength from her body, filling her with despair, death-phobia, and a bleak paranoia. She blinked and the Mother of Hags was closer, bringing a thick mephitic stench that was equal parts decay, dust, excrement and vomit.
The Death Angel was seven feet tall if she was an inch, sheathed with ice. Ice that was cracking apart, shattering like safety glass. Beneath it, she was a thing of rotting shrouds and threadbare cerements, a ghoul wrapped in a winding sheet that was tattered and blowing, the fragments crawling around her like swollen graveyard worms seeking flesh to despoil. The hood slid back inch by inch and Wenda saw an amnion of undulant, threading cobwebs that tore open like fine mesh to reveal a face that was oblong and narrow, seamed and split like pine bark, the mold-speckled flesh so very gray it seemed blue. The teeth were gnarled yellow ivory tusks. One eye was hidden by the webs, the other a bulging egg-sac the color of sour buttermilk that sheared open as if covered in a thin membrane, revealing a juicy, blood-engorged orb like a gelid pupa giving forth larva.
Wenda screamed with atavistic terror.
25
She tried to backpedal away, but her legs got all wobbly and she went down on her ass, her stomach roiling in hot waves, cold sweat poring down her face. Her insides had gone to liquid rubber and dry heaves rolled through her.
The Death
Hag was right on top of her.
She heard a snarling, guttural noise that was not even remotely human and then
beaded and rat-skinned hands took hold of her and tossed her with ease. She thudded against a casket with a sprung lid. As she turned to face the Mother, teeth nipped at her, claws tore rents in her parka. She was seized and shaken and slammed back down on the coffin, the air whooshing out of her.
She tried to crawl away and she slipped, falling inside the rank dirt of the box and the Death
Angel hovered over her.
Wenda
let out a scream as she waited for those claws to open her throat and disembowel her…but that didn’t happen. The winding sheets fluttered, pulling back, exposing an emaciated body that was pocked with blotches of fungus, bloodstained and meat-spattered. A row of distended, pendulous tits ran from breast to abdomen. There was a great ulcerous hole between the legs that dripped bile. The body began to split open between the breasts, yawning like a black mouth, revealing cone-shaped shafts of cobwebs that seemed to be in motion, threads and fine hairs leaping from their openings. They looked much like the funnelwebs of spiders.
Wenda cried out as the webs blew out at her, coming from the funnels and from the gaping mouth of the
Death Hag herself. They covered, netting her, winding her up in fibers of sticky lacework that felt like strands of undulant phlegm. It poured out of the Mother, gradually cocooning Wenda until she could barely move and barely breathe.
At the edge of sanity, she remember
ed the silver knife in her fist.
She slashed at the webs, severing them, slitting them open until she could fight free. The hag screeched with a cheated, angry rage. But still Wenda cut and hacked like an explorer in the jungle with a machete. She stabbed blindly out at the Mother and felt the blade pierce flesh that was much like webwork itself. The Death
Angel screamed again and this time it was an agonized, wailing sound.
Wenda knew she had hurt her and she would hurt her again.
The Hag Mother circled around her slowly, slowly, no more pretense of cemetery marble. She was flesh and blood, grotesque and incarnate, filled with wrath and blind hatred. Images flooded into Wenda’s mind: the bloated spider-witch smacking her lips as she lapped the blood from her torn throat; the hag gutting her and wearing her bloody skin, dyed red with stolen life.