Hag Night, page 23
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 seemed 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.
He bumped into Reg and seized him in his arms, as if he needed to feel another warm, breathing human being or his mind would deflate like a leaky balloon.
The girl rose up two feet off the ground, her taloned fingers tearing at the stake and succeeding in shearing her own white flesh. It burst open as if from some internal pressure, revealing a pulpy yellow meat that was livid against her bluing flesh. She screeched like an animal being skinned alive, blood blisters breaking open on her body and exploding like rotten grapes. Saliva and blood flew from her mouth in tangles, the pustular pits of her eyes bulging into huge black-red orbs and then falling into themselves with a gushing sluice of slime. The skin of her face became threadbare mesh and pulled off the skull beneath like spider’s silk. Contorting and thrashing, she fell backwards, her skeleton bursting free, steaming and breaking apart…but long before she hit the floor something inside her ignited and she erupted with flame and smoke and a cremating heat, crashing down into a heap of smoldering bones that continued to tremble, the jaws of her skull snapping again and again then crumbling away.
And Reg, who was barely on his feet by that point, fell into Doc and Doc grabbed him and shoved him towards the door. “RUN!” he shouted at him. “FOR GODSAKE, RUN!”
And Reg did without further urging.
Doc heard the door slam open and Reg’s feet running. The other vampires looked out at him with eyes that managed to be saddened and hateful at the same time. They did not follow Reg; there was no need. Their entertainment was here before them. Eyes wide and gleaming, lit yellow like electric bulbs screwed into their faces, slavering jaws opened, fangs sliding from pale gums, they closed in on him and he waited for it.
24
Reg burst from the door and, in the finest horror movie fashion, tripped over his own boots, hitting the floor like 170 pounds of dead weight. He scrambled to his feet and ran, ran right for the door in his mad flight and was reaching for the doorknob when a voice in his head said: What the fuck are you doing?
He withdrew his hand with a strangled yelping sound in his throat.
He couldn’t go out there.
They were out there, too, just waiting for him to pull some bonehead move like that. To them, he was prey and like any hunters they were using his own panic against him, hoping he would make a big fat mistake.
No, no, no!
He turned around, fully expecting to see a red mouth and gleaming fangs coming out of the darkness at him, but there was nothing but the emptiness of the old house and the shadows. He had to get somewhere. He had to get somewhere safe. But in his panic, he could not think of where that might be or how he might get there. In fact, he could barely think at all. His mind was clouded with fear. Tears were running from his eyes. His breath came out in a white expanding frost-mist. His heart was pounding so hard it felt like it might explode right out of his chest.
Do something, you fucking idiot…
So he started first this way, then that, approaching corridors and then turning back because he was too scared to go down them. He reached for doors and panicked at the idea of what might be waiting in the darkness behind them. All he succeeded in doing was to bring himself around in a crazy circle until he realized he was facing back towards the parlor. He heard Doc scream in there and he ran for the stairs, trying to jog up them, but tripping and banging his knees in his heavy boots. But he didn’t slow down: we went up them on his hands and knees like a hunted animal.
He paused at the top, laying across the landing and gasping for breath.
Outside the storm raged, clawing at the house to get in.
In his fright and manic flight, he had winded himself, expending about five times the amount of energy he might have used if he’d kept his head. Other than his rasping lungs and thudding heart, he was only aware of the sound of the house itself: an immense silence that was so very quiet it was thundering in his ears. They knew how to use such silence. It was how they cloaked themselves. They were coming for him and at any moment he would feel cold breath at his neck and colder lips at his throat. Then they would drain his blood with erotic glee.
He pulled himself up.
Other than the cellar or possibly the attic, he was in the darkest quarter of the house because there were no windows in that part of the upstairs corridor. This is where he had been with Burt earlier and, dear God, he wished Burt were here now. Burt was a selfish asshole, but Reg would have taken him, he would have jumped up and hugged him if only he wasn’t so unbearably alone.
Downstairs, Doc was screaming again.
You gonna let those things do that to him? You gonna let fucking Doc die like that? Doc would do anything for you! Doc told you to run because he was sacrificing himself so that you could live!
Reg turned, ready to bolt down the stairs and charge into the fray and save Doc or goddamn well die trying, but he saw a figure coming up the steps at him and his heart skipped a beat in his chest. At first it looked like just a shadow gliding up towards him, but now he could see it was a shape that was becoming a man. Reg blinked and he saw that it was Burt. His face an even bloodless white, his eyes huge and suffused with a dirty lunar glow, his teeth grown long and deadly.
“Hey, Reg,” he said in a voice that was screeching and scraping like the blade of a knife dragged over a windowpane. If it was intended to calm him, it had the opposite effect. Burt stopped half way up and just stood there. Reg thought he could almost see the staircase right through him. “Oh, Reg…do you know what they did to me out there? Do you know what it was like to die like that? Why did you let it happen? Why didn’t you help me?”
Reg let out a squealing sound and raced away down the upstairs corridor. He found a door and slammed it shut behind him, locking it. There was nothing in the room with him that he saw…but that didn’t mean one of them wasn’t under the bed or waiting in the closet.
Burt was at the door now.
He was knocking with a slow, almost mechanical sort of cadence.
“Reg, let me in,” he said. “I want to show you what they did to me.”
But Reg was not about to do that. He had no intention of doing anything but staying alive…the only problem was that he was now essentially in a cage, a box with no way out and if Burt found a way in, well, there could only be one outcome. But Reg refused to submit. He refused to be something that lay in darkness like a corpse during the day, rising up by night. No, no, no…
The doorknob jiggled. “We don’t need doors to come in,” Burt said.
And to prove that, he started coming in beneath the door like a spreading puddle of ectoplasm, more of him pouring in every second until that glowing white mass began to take on features and Reg saw the elongated mouth and the leering, eyes of morbid starvation.
Then Reg did the only thing he could do.
He picked up a chair and swung it at the window again and again until it shattered and the storm came in, frigid air and snow blowing in. What Burt did then he did not know, because he climbed out onto the roof.
25
As the dead came for him, Doc felt a wind like a glacial whirlpool whip through the room and the windows shattered inward. He saw a shadow rise up amongst the others…one that seemed to be composed of hundreds of bats madly beating their black wings…becoming a cycling vortex of black moths…melting into a skeletal mass that grew up from the floor like a gnarled pillar, a dead tree regenerating its limbs. There was a flapping sound as of a sheet on a line and a great cloak seemed to unfold and envelop the shadow. When it parted, a man was standing there, a tall and gaunt man wearing a flowing hide coat, the black fur of which was threadbare and ragged, standing out in spokes with frozen blood. His hands were amazingly pale, blue-veined, the fingers long and slender with tapering yellow nails that looked sharp as razors. Doc could imagine fingers like that—sure, practiced, surgical—poking through bowels and muscles and delicate tissues to remove malignancies.
But the man was no healer and those fingers did not take away pain, they inflicted it.
The other vampires were not moving now. In fact, they had frozen in place like graveyard statues. Only their eyes were alive, shining with diabolic hunger.
At that moment, Doc was beyond simple fear. His heart did not seem to beat and his lungs did not seem to draw breath. He stood shivering, nerve endings feeling plucked like the strings of a lyre, his blood settling low as if it feared to be drained.
The figure before him had not moved. The wind still rushed around it like a gust from a tomb. The walls shook. Bits of twinkling broken glass spun in dust-devils.
In Doc’s brain, there was something like music, like scratching violins and stringed instruments played with sawtoothed files. The sepulchral figure before him stared down at him with a frightening elemental wrath, his eyes a brilliant liquid red going to purple like wine stains. They looked into Doc, drilled into his skull, with absolute and irresistible dominance. He felt things breaking apart inside him, shattering and splintering, black universes opening up and swallowing him, retching him body and soul onto the barren faces of dead worlds where slithering shadows crawled into his head and ate him alive from the inside out.
Then the wind died and the walls stopped trembling and Doc heard a voice in his head. A ranting, enraged voice, one nearly deranged with anger. It at first sounded like German, then Latin, then a dozen dialects he had never heard before until becoming a flat, almost guttural Slavic tongue.
Doc did not know what kept him on his feet because it felt like all the blood had drained down into his knees and his head was spinning. He looked into the eyes of the figure before him and felt weak inside. The man had long, poker-straight black tresses spilled over his shoulders. Streaks of brilliant white came from each temple and feathered out into gray. His long drooping mustache was of the same color. His face was long and waxy, the chin sharp and the nose hawkish, the nostrils flaring. The skin was the sickly yellow-white of leprosy, stretched tight over the skull below. There were deep pockets of shadow beneath the high cheekbones, filling the hollows of the sunken cheeks themselves. The face was set with minute wrinkles and cracks like an old photograph. It seemed to have the texture of spun cobwebs. It was grotesquely corded as if there were roots growing under the skin.
Doc knew who he was: this was the boogeyman from the charnel pits and he would make the world into a graveyard. The boogeyman had a name and Doc knew it. It trembled on the tip of his tongue. “You…” he said. “You are Griska. You are a Magyar.”
In Doc’s head, Griska began to laugh with a hysterical cackling, breathing out clouds of soot that winged in the air and became death’s-head moths. A stink of wild fermentation blew out from him. His mouth split open like a knife cut, his teeth pearly white, the central incisors narrow, long, and hooked like those of a pit viper. In Doc’s head, there was more than laughter, but a choir of anguished children behind each syllable. Too many voices, too many dialects, but all of them lorded over by a screeching, hideous male voice: Behold, I stand at the door, and knock. Give unto me that which is mine. And give unto Her that which is hers.
Griska wanted some kind of offering, some sort of sacrifice…but one offered to him by the victim. That was the greatest depth of corruption and the greatest joy for a thing like him: to be given a life, to have it laid before him by the victim’s own hand.
But Doc refused.
He wanted to shout his defiance at that smug ghoul, but Griska seemed to know. He knew the flavor and the taste of defiance and did not care for it. In Doc’s head, his voice said, Martyr. A wind seemed to blow out from him and Doc felt it take hold of him with hurricane force, lifting him off his feet and driving him ten or twelve feet through the air until he impacted with the wall. His boots were three feet off the floor, but he did not fall. The force held him and that force was generated by Griska himself. Throughout the room, the walls were creaking and groaning and Doc soon saw why: nails were being ejected from them. No, not ejected but pulled free by the same force that held him, pressing him against the wall with such might he thought his guts would be forced out his mouth.
But that didn’t happen; the nails found him instead. His left arm was forced up and out until it was parallel with his shoulder. His right arm followed suit until he was held there in some grim parody of the crucifixion. Then the nails were flying.
The first one he felt more than the others. It made a sterile whiteness explode in his head.
It went in through his right wrist like a spike, through muscle and tendon and artery. It brought pain. Unreal, white-hot pain. The second nail filled his belly with needles, bringing a fevered numbness and a cold running sweat. The third nail brought a sweet and muddy revelation, a distorted sense of mystery, exaltation, and dark desire that ran from his wounds in a red, flowing sap.
Doc screamed until his throat was raw.
Hanging there, impaled by three nailsone in his right wrist, one in each of his anklesbleeding 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.
