Hag Night, page 22
And I didn’t.
I never saw this place again until I signed on as caretaker. The idea of coming here made me sick to my stomach, but I came back because I had to come back to this awful place where my childhood ended with a terrible screech. None of you may be able to understand that and I’m not sure I do completely myself, but I’ve been waiting here for things to start up again because I knew they would. Eventually, Griska and his cult would get thirsty. And now they have. And it’s only now that I understand why I had to come back…once, before I die, I want to see my brother again…even if he is only a mocking shell.
22
By the time Rule was done telling his story, Morris was curled up by the fire again like somebody’s faithful retriever…except, of course, Wenda knew there was nothing faithful about him. If he were a dog, then he was a slinking hyena that needed to be watched very, very closely.
“But you have to understand something,” Wenda said. “Your brother, if he’s still here, will kill you. He’ll kill us. He won’t be your brother or the brother to anything living.”
Rule nodded. “Yes, I know. But I ran last time and I’ve been guilty ever since.”
“There’s nothing to be guilty about. Andy sacrificed his life—and maybe even his soul—so that you could be free, that you could live. Coming back here and putting yourself at risk doesn’t give his death the meaning it should have.”
Wenda said that and was immediately struck by the incongruity of her lecturing her old lecturer. It seemed absurd. But a lot of things that used to seem absurd were no longer absurd, and a lot of things she never would have said before had wings now and they flew out of her mouth unfettered. There was something quite liberating about that and who she now was.
Megga, who’d sat uncharacteristically silent during Rule’s yarning, said, “If your brother comes, he’ll be a monster. He’ll get in your mind. He’ll make you do things. He’ll twist your thoughts and turn your own mind against you.” She said this like she had personal experience in the matter. “He could make you pick up a knife and slit my throat. You wouldn’t have a choice.”
Rule nodded. “I think it depends on the discipline of the mind in question.”
“You’re fucking stupid if you think that. If you think you’re smart enough to outwit them or hold out against what they can do.”
“Maybe, maybe.” He shrugged. “Understand…I did not come here to get bitten in the neck. I have no self-destructive or morbid urges. Perhaps I’m speaking metaphorically. Perhaps what I wanted all along was just to come back here and face my fears. Maybe that’s really what it was all about.”
“If your brother comes,” Wenda said, still clutching her stake and wanting to use it, “I’ll destroy him. I’ll have to.”
“Unless he gets you first,” Megga pointed out.
“And you’d hate that wouldn’t you?” Wenda said to her and she looked away. “Megga wants to be a vampire. She thinks it’s cool to be one of them.”
“Shut up,” Megga told her.
Rule sighed and looked into the fire. “The attraction is an old one and one of their greatest strengths. They can make you believe they’re something other than what they truly are. I know that, Megga, and I think you know it, too. What we’re dealing with here is more than parasites, more than just bloodsuckers,” he said, a funny sort of steely glare in his eyes. “They’re ghosts essentially, hungry ghosts. And there is nothing more dangerous than a hungry ghost. They exist by not only drawing off the life’s blood of their prey, but the life energy, I think. When they sink their teeth in your throat it’s more than a particularly gruesome and ritualistic mode of feeding, it’s penetration, a defilement and violation of your life force. It kills the good things in you and leaves behind a shell powered by basal urges and primitive drives of hunger satiation. You become an appetite, more or less, a cunning, obscene appetite that exists to drain, destroy, and multiply its malignance. That is the core of vampirism, I believe: the hunger, the defilement, the destruction.”
“And knowing that gets us where exactly?” Megga said.
He laughed. “Nowhere. You’ll excuse an old academic for flights of philosophic fancy.”
Wenda nodded. “We’ve got nearly four more hours until sunrise. If we can make it that long, if we can hold out…”
“They’re not going to let us,” Megga said.
“She’s right,” Rule said. “So we can either sit here and wait for it or we can take action of a sort.”
Wenda was interested in this. “What sort of action?”
“First, let me espouse another local legend which you might find interesting.”
He told them that, according to local folklore, the reason that Griska and his familiars were not located and staked by the sheriff and his raiding party in the spring of 1829 was because they were hidden in a secret vault or catacombs. The location of which was thought to be beneath the old burying ground. Legend also had it that there was a tunnel or tunnels connecting it to Cobton.
“Now, the high sheriff and his men looked for a tunnel that day but couldn’t find any,” Rule told them. “When I took up as caretaker here I looked, too, and found nothing. I spoke with one of the contractors that rebuilt Cobton. He had heard the stories of the tunnels as well—being from New Hampshire, he referred to them as ‘smugglers’ tunnels’—but found nothing of the sort.”
“What’s the point?” Megga asked.
“The point, my dear, is that there is a tunnel and I found it tonight. You see, after I saw that thing dragging off Bill, I ran into a house down the way to hide. I went down into the cellar. There’s a tunnel down there and it appears that the opening is recent…as if maybe it had been closed a great many years and I imagine it was. That house is two doors down from here.” He described the house to them briefly. “It maybe our way out.”
“But that’s the house where Doc and Bailey and Reg are,” Megga said.
Wenda shook her head. “You want us to run over there, risk getting slaughtered, just so we can go into some tunnel that leads to a catacomb? Leads to the very lair of the vampires?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Better than sitting here and waiting for it,” Megga said.
But she was too anxious and Wenda did not like that. Maybe on the surface she was pretending to be with them and maybe she even believed it, but underneath there was still that fascination with the undead and this made her weak and vulnerable.
“Wait now,” Rule said. “Hear me out. First off, if we get to that other house and join up with your friends there’ll be more of us. Numbers are important. The vampires like to pick their victims off one by one. It’ll give us strength. Secondly, my car isn’t parked too far from that house. We could jog over there in five minutes. And thirdly, the legend also says that not only is this vault or catacomb connected to the town, but there’s a passage that leads up into one of the old VanderHoofen tombs. If we could make it through the catacomb and up into the tomb and out into the burial ground…we might have a chance.”
“In a cemetery?” Wenda said.
“If we make it down to the road,” Rule explained, “there’s a County Road Commission garage less than a mile through the woods on the other side. It’s manned day and night.”
“It’s suicide.”
“Suicide is better than what awaits us here, my dear Vultura,” he said.
“Well?” Megga said.
“I’ll think it over.”
Nobody had really put Wenda in charge, she just took the reigns because they were lying limp. But now that she had, she knew the decision was up to her. As far as she was concerned, she was responsible for their lives. Was she willing to throw them away so easily? The car was one thing…but a tunnel leading God knows where? Maybe into the very lair of the undead? That was insane. Hide in plain sight, a voice in her head kept saying, but she didn’t care much for the idea of hiding in a secret burial crypt. Sooner or later, Griska and the others would return to it and when that happened, things would get very ugly. She had a pretty good feeling he wanted to kill her in the worst possible way. She had seen him through the window, she had felt the hatred directed at her. He would make her suffer for killing the wolf-woman.
So maybe the catacomb is the best idea if you want to destroy him. Think of the ages of suffering he has brought forth. Think of the joy of plunging your stake into his chest. He hasn’t been human in many centuries. He was probably ancient in 1828. Do what Rule wants and kill that sonofabitch. What do you got to lose?
But that’s what stayed her.
She wasn’t sure whether she believed in the human soul or not, but whatever was inside her that made her Wenda Keegan, Griska would tear it out by the roots.
23
Rabbits and rodents, Doc thought as the delirium tried to eclipse his thoughts once again. In the end that’s all we are and maybe in the beginning not much more. Scurrying, frightened creatures fearing death that circled high above on wings of midnight plumage, each revolution bringing it closer and closer until its claws were in your back or tearing into your throat. That’s what death was. That’s what it felt like, he decided.
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 nothing 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 could 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.
