Hag Night, page 13
Doc was not right.
And neither was that punk Reg.
They were wrong. They were the real cowards because they were afraid to try what he was trying.
Just a few more feet now. With every lumbering footstep, his boots broke through the crust of snow with volume. It sounded like breaking glass to him. The good thing was the wind was so damn loud with its moaning and howling, he doubted whether anyone or anything could hear him.
A few more plodding steps and he made it to the fence, gripping its iced uprights in both gloved fists.
There. The first leg complete.
He sank into the snow on his knees and it came up above his belly. How easy it would have been to wait right there, to sink down in the snow and wait for morning. Let the drift pile up over him like a thick woolen blanket and just close his eyes and wait for the sun. How easy. How perfectly easy. And when morning came he’d get up, brush himself clean, then start that damn Suburu Outback, pull her around front and knock on the door. They’d all be startled, of course. Thought you were lost out in it, they’d say. Driven under or maybe those things pulled you down into their tombs. He’d laugh at the folly of it all—in fact, he could hear himself laughing right now with a loud, booming sound—and he’d look them in the eye. Especially that bag of wind Doc and his sidekick, that mama’s boy Reg. He’d look them monkeyskulls right in the face and say, Me? Old Burt? Hell, that wasn’t nothing but a flurry last night. I just waited it out, caught a couple Zs. He could just about see the hangdog look on their faces. He could see Miss Fancytits, Wenda Keegan, and that raven-haired Megga standing there. Both looking hungry on account they’d finally found a real man. Maybe he’d have them both at the same time—
Burt cleared his head.
Christ, what was this? A mind movie? A daydream?
He had to keep his shit together here. People died in storms like this. He had to remember that. The snow was moving around him in curtains of white, shutting him out from the world, pulling him down and keeping him here in this pocket of subzero night. He peeked behind him in the dimness and could see his own footprints, but they were filling in fast and losing definition. In ten more minutes they’d be gone, gone, gone.
Snowstorm like this, man, it reminded him of boy’s camp when he was a kid. It was up in the Catskills and they had winters up there. Bad winters. They called it Winter Camp and it was a place to ski, snowshoe, skate, and get to know the real outdoors. They sent kids like him there from Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens. At night, the winds would scream around the lodge and the older kids would say it was ghosts, snow-ghosts, the spirits of people who’d been lost in blizzards that were always looking for kids they could invite into the storm and bury in the snow. That shit scared Burt. It really did. But what scared him worse was when they said that the caretaker up there, an old needle-nosed Yankee named Orlen Benz, had himself a taste for young boys. Sometimes he took them out to his shed by the creek and they weren’t ever seen again. That’s what the older boys said. Burt believed it. He thought old Orlen stole the boys away and ate them like an ogre living in a cave. But that’s not what the boys meant. Orlen had a different sort of taste and maybe one that was even worse. World was full of trash, though, and you had to be careful. Burt’s old man had always said that and he knew because he tailgunned on a garbage truck, making the route through Flatbush six days a week. New York, New York, he always said. The town so nice they named it twice. Full of rats and full of lice. Yeah, that was his old man. One time they’d found a human skull in a garbage can and that was a story for Halloween night. It all started when—
Fuck are you doing, dipshit? Sitting here in the snow gripping the uprights of the fence like a little brat that wants to get out of his crib. Just dreaming away…
Burt’s whole body was feeling numb and it was just too easy to want to go to sleep or dream it all away because the snow was like a weave of gray-white, a dream-blanket that wanted to cover you and put you to sleep.
He forced himself to his feet and his knees didn’t care for it much at all. His breath came out in billowing white clouds that blew right back into his face along with the snow and wind and what felt like a scrim of loose ice. Jesus. What a night. The fence was one of those old-fashioned types, he saw. Black wrought-iron with lots of fancy metal scrollwork and filigree, sharp ornamental spikes up on top. He had actually toyed with the idea of climbing up and over…but those spikes…sort of thing that could spear a testicle. What a sight that would be.
He pushed through drifts, falling and panting, only staying on his feet because he gripped the fence. He followed it over to the gate. His hands were numb. So were his feet. His whole body was getting stiff from the cold. He needed to get out of these drifts and out onto the road where his legs could do some pumping that would get his blood flowing again.
He looked behind him.
For a moment he saw the looming federal house like some vague gray shape, but then it was gone in the snowfall. The wind kept trying to strip him free of the fence. It was punching into him, slapping him in the face and making him wince. The snow was falling heavier now, thick and encompassing, the flakes caught in a mad whirl around him like a million-billion pissed-off hornets buzzing and circling.
The gate.
There.
He got hold of it and would not let it go. It was mired in the snow, part way open a few feet which would work well. He’d just scoot around it and then climb over the snowbank and the road would be right there in front of him, the car waiting. Easy as pie. He caught occasional, quick glances of the town rising around him whenever the storm allowed it. The buildings and houses were all tall and leaning, dark shadows that were monolithic and crouching like they were waiting to spring on him.
He blinked his eyes. Something moved out there.
He looked again and the snow obscured it.
He thought for sure he’d seen a form out there pulling off into the shadows. He dismissed it. Just the moving membrane of the snow, the weird half-light of the blizzard, lots of leaping shadows created by the blizzard winds and snow.
Yet, knowing these things, a blade of fear still entered his heart. It was not a rational fear where there’s an obvious threat or anxiety. This was different. It was bleak and irrational. He could feel it all around him now and it was the same sort of fear he’d felt at Winter Camp when the snow-ghosts cried out at night and made him shiver in his bed. His teeth were chattering. He thought he heard something like a rustling sound moving out there but there was no way he would have heard it in the storm. Yet, he did hear it and now he heard it again.
As he began to move around the gate, he stopped, listening.
Listening like an animal.
He could feel it right up his spine and down low in his belly: he was not only being watched, he was being stalked. Something was following him…only it was the sort of thing that made no sound as it moved over the crust of snow. It was silent like river mist and smoke and midnight damp: it came and it went but you never saw it.
Burt was at the point where he was beginning to truly doubt the wisdom of what he was doing. Hell, maybe he should’ve listened to Doc. Maybe, maybe, maybe. But he couldn’t go back now because what was stalking him was right behind him and if he retreated now he’d run face-to-face into it…only it wouldn’t have a face, of course. Nothing but cold, cruel bone grinning at him, empty eye sockets filled with boiling darkness staring out at him.
What a thing to meet in the middle of a blizzard—
Stop it. Get to that car!
Yes, that was the voice of reason and it should have canceled out the dark ruminations of his imagination and that building superstitious fear within him but it did not. The fear clung to the underside of his psyche like a black spider suckling his soul, growing fat on his terror and the night-juice of his dread.
He got around the gate, refusing to listen any longer.
The wind could do things to your imagination.
The snow was thrown in his face, moving in great shifting blankets of white, the wind pummeling him mercilessly. It was screaming from the throat of the storm in a wailing banshee voice that sounded like dozens of children crying out in abject terror. Yes, that and more: not just the sound of terror, but of agony and death and the formless blackness that waits beyond the pale, beyond the rim of the grave itself.
Panicking, Burt tried to run through the snow and he slipped and went into a drift. He came up swearing at his own clumsiness, brushing the snow free. But swearing silently because he did not want to be heard by what was behind him. He started moving again. The snowbank was right in front of him. It was more than six feet in height, probably well over seven. Morris—or his sponsors—had paid to get the town plowed clean. Burt started climbing up it but it was heard to get a foothold in the powder and he kept slipping back down. God, it had been so easy when he was a kid to scramble up and down snowbanks.
He started up again and slid back down just as quick.
And behind him, a rustling sound.
He turned and saw a figure there at the perimeter of the wind-driven snow, just inside the fence. It was tall and lean, wrapped in a graying shroud. A graveyard angel. It had a hood but no face that he could see…just a hollow that led into blackness. It stood still as a statue. The wind made its shroud flap like a bedsheet on a clothesline, but what was beneath did not stir even an inch.
It did not speak, but a sound came from it: buzzing, as of insects.
He went white with panic. It was the thing that had called out to him in the storm. It was back. It was coming for him.
With a cry, he started climbing again.
The Angel of Death. Dear God, it’s the Angel of Death.
He slid down a foot or more and looked back, horror rising in him like bile. The shrouded figure was closer now. It was standing outside the gate. It did not speak. It did not move…yet, it was getting closer. If it caught him, it would enfold him in those arms and bury him in that worm-eaten shroud.
Climb!
The terror unraveling him strand by strand, his eyes bright with lucid fright, he climbed and reached the top. And it was then his boots slipped again on the powder and he began to slide. With a manic cry he reached out for purchase. Boulders of snow broke apart in his hands. Snow was forced up his pants and sleeves. His left boot found something solid and up he went.
The buzzing was louder.
I’m closer now, Burt…so much closer.
He looked behind him.
The Death Angel was at the bottom of the snowbank reaching out to him with hands that were as gray as the shroud it wore. They looked to be flecked with winter-dead lichen. The fingers were threaded with cobwebs as if it had only recently left some ancient tomb. Its cerements flapped, ragged ribbons of cloth or tissue blowing in the wind. He could see its mouth now, its jaws. The graying seamed flesh speckled with mold, the red lips pulled back from yellow teeth and sharp canines. The bloodstained chin from its previous feeding.
Again, it did not move.
It offered its tombstone gray hands, the fingers of which were long and slender, definitely female…its yawning mouth. Like it was caught in freeze-frame, it waited motionless, something carven from marble.
That’s when he knew. All those dreams he’d had of escape, of running from something—this is what he had been running from.
Her.
She was death hunting him.
I’m almost there, Burt.
He screamed and threw himself over the top of the snowbank, rolling down the other side into the blowing snow, finding his feet, pulling himself up into the wind that shrieked his name. The road was badly drifted, but he ran forward, tripping, sliding, but refusing to go down. The storm squalled and pushed him back, but he fought on, seeing the car now.
He would make it.
He had to make it.
He turned and the Death Angel was just behind him, reaching out, her teeth on display. They were poised to puncture his throat and she was poised to empty him like an upturned flask. She would drain him and make sure he felt every depraved, grisly moment of his violation.
That steady, droning buzz was even louder, filling his head with tiny wings.
The car.
He saw two forms go running behind it. They looked like children…almost. That stopped him, the snow funneling at him and making him cry out with the cold. It was tapping him. He didn’t have much time left.He felt an icy breath at the back of his neck.
He looked back, slipping, and fell. The shrouded woman was inches away, the nails of her bloodless hands nearly scraping across his eyes. His mind filled with a white noise, he crawled on hands and knees through the snow, punching through drifts as the car got closer and closer. He got to his feet and saw huge, shaggy forms perched atop the snowbanks, watching. They were wolves with shaggy pelts, red leering eyes and slavering jaws.
He stumbled away to the car, whimpering now, broken by despair and fear. A seam of yellow madness opened up in his mind that would tear him right open. He reached for the door handle and saw a man standing in front of the car. Oh, no, not that, not that. He was tall, almost regal, like a silhouette snipped from the night itself. He wore a ragged fur coat that trailed to the ground. Flakes of snow had collected on it like ash. Malevolence and loathsome evil seeped from him like oil. It was like a palpable curtain of eldritch horror and spectral, primeval terror that shattered the mind like wheat before a scythe. His face was pallid, cadaverous, narrow like a crescent moon, the flesh pitted and scarred as if from ancient battle, the nose prominent and Roman, the ends of his mustache trailing beneath his hard jawline.
There was something unbearably cruel about that face as if it had seen infants thrown into boiling pots and children being skinned, men broken on the wheel and impaled on stakes, woman torn apart by wild dogs and burned alive on pyres. It knew no mercy. It gave no quarter.
Burt stared into it and it felt like he was filled with hot, blowing sand.
The perfectly oval, owl-like, sullen blood-red eyes held him and would not let him go. He could feel the degenerate, diseased blackness flowing from that brain into his own and showing him scenes of carnage and slaughter that were nearly unimaginable…burning cities scattered with rat-picked corpses… lanes flanked with crucified children and adults impaled on stakes and set aflame…maidens violated with fence posts and disemboweled with steel hooks…men quartered by horses and women peeled with knives…the heads of children adorning city gates…the sounds of hooves and clashing steel…streets awash in blood and offal…the air hot and acrid with the nauseating stench of cremated flesh, punctuated by the cries of the damned.
That’s what this man was, Burt knew: a mass-murderer.
A sadist and psychopath who unleashed a reign of terror in the mountain wastes of Hungary, putting thousands to their death. Until…until something came out of the night to claim him. He had walked in darkness since.
And he had a name. Burt could hear it reverberating in his skull: Griska, Griska.
With his last reserves of strength, Burt opened the car door and there was another one—a little boy sitting there. His moon-white face was broken by an immense and toothy grin, his eyes soulless and blank. The tiny soot-black pupils speared into him.
Burt stumbled away and saw that there were more than a dozen of them ringed around him—mostly women and children, Griska’s extended family. Many were naked. Some dressed in cerements and shrouds, but all with those bright yellow eyes and mouths of gray hooked fangs.
He was in a nest of them and he knew he wouldn’t escape.
Griska would never allow that.
He’s the Pied Piper who calls the flock of lambs to sate the hunger of the Old Mother, a voice in Burt’s head told him. He paves the way so that She might come into the world, refreshed and pure. Gather now, friends, gather in Her name. But do not speak that sacred name aloud, for to pronounce Her name is to summon her spirit.
Turning, Burt fell into the arms of the Death Angel.
At last, Burt…oh, at last.
She took hold of him, pulling him closer until he could smell the stink coming off her like a morbid perfume: embalming fluid, corpse-slime, and rotting oblong boxes. That constant insectile buzzing was so loud now it was like having his ear up against a hive. She pulled back her hood so he could see her gray rutted face netted in a filigree of cobwebs and know how long she had waited to slake her thirst. Her luminous eyes sucked the light from his soul, the sclera threaded with tiny collapsed red veins.
Her saw her teeth.
The long canines like icicles.
Burt screamed as they sank into his throat and he heard her sucking away his blood with sickening slurping sounds. A hollow opened inside him that would never be full again. And by then they were all on him, tapping him like a keg. Fangs sank into his arms and legs, his belly and groin.
And they drained him.
They bled him white.
Before the darkness took him into silken mortuary depths, he looked up and saw Griska standing there, boundlessly amused, his red eyes glowing like radium, his sharp canines, both upper and lower, interlocked in a grin of almost fatherly pride.
7
It was a half an hour later when Reg showed and from the blank look on his face it did not appear to Doc as if things had gone well for Burt’s breakout. Reg walked in, looked at Bailey, looked at Doc, then sat in a wingback chair by the fire, putting his face in his hands.
“I take it he never made it,” Doc said.
Reg just shrugged. He didn’t seem to have the energy for speech.
“Did you see it?”
Reg looked at him through the slats of his fingers. “I couldn’t see anything out there with that fucking snow. But…I don’t know…”
