Hag Night, page 24
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, bestial 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.
INTERLUDE #2: THE VURVOLAK
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 died 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 1st. 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.
It was the silence of the grave.
There had only been one wagon out and the pounding hooves of its team had been like thunder booming. The wagon was piled with the dead. They were taking them up to the burial ground to be interred before the ground was locked hard with frost. They would not listen. Katya had tried again and again, but they would not listen to common sense because she was a crazy old woman.
She had seen rats in the village.
Great voracious swarms of rats that poured down into the streets from the old mill on the hilltop that no one would visit now. They claimed it was too much of a climb in the snow, but there were other reasons only they would not speak of them. Yet, it was curious how when the sun began to set and the long shadow of the mill was cast over the town like that of a cemetery monument, the villagers went out of their way not to be caught in that shadow as if its touch meant death.
When people began to die of the wasting sickness with no discernable cause and the rats ran free in the streets, it could mean only one thing, the very thing Katya had lived in terror of most of her life: the coming of the Vurvolak. The rats were not too active in the daytime, but at night they were bold, sweeping over the town in a hungry, dirty horde, eating anything they could find. Even dogs and stray sheep had gone missing now. Their lair was up in the old mill. It should have been burned to the ground, but no one was brave enough to go up there to root out the source of the pestilence. So the rats bred and their numbers swelled which was bad enough in and of itself, Katya knew, but up there, in the dark bowels of the mill, she feared what slept with the rats and came out only at night.
“When will Mama be back?” Michael asked.
“Soon, very soon now, my child,” Katya lied. “You will see.”
But, oh, your mother is my daughter and I love her, but I do not think I want her to come back now. I do not want her to bring into this house the thing she has found out there. Katya crossed herself again. The children were hungry and the pot of barley soup on the stovetop was making their stomachs growl. But they could not eat. It was an old Albanian custom that food must not be touched when a priest is expected, not until he himself sits and sups. To break with custom was to invite dire catastrophe, Katya knew. If custom had been followed in Cobton as it should have been, the village would not be a corpse in search of a grave now.
“Can we eat soon?” Anna asked.
“Oh yes, very soon now. Very soon.”
Tonight, she would make preparations. She would not sleep. She would hang a bag of salt around the throat of each child and recite a psalm for protection against evil. She would anoint the doors and windows with holy water and keep the fire burning high. She would keep the door barred and nothing would enter, not unless it was invited.
And I will never invite them! Never!
Oh, but maybe you won’t have a choice, old woman. You have spent your entire life believing in the unbelievable, fearing the unknown, and embracing the impossible, thinking you could guard against these things with your superstitions and old customs and folk magic. But maybe what you failed to take into consideration is that the Vurvolak have their own sort of magic and it is a cunning and diabolic magic. A magic that is black where yours is white. They are of an ancient seed and possessed of dark abilities you cannot guess at. Once they feared you in their own way, but that was when you were young, pure of mind and pure of body, but now that restless stream of strange blood within you has dried up.
You cannot hope to withstand them.
They want the children as they always want the children. It’s where they always begin their cycle of contagion. They will feed on the children. Your grandchildren. They will empty them of blood and life and soul and turn them into walking shells, predatory ghosts that exist only to spread the seed of evil—
Katya shut it out of her brain. She would not think such things. She would not let herself walk down that path for it led into the black heart of a forest she would never, ever escape from once its black spiking branches enclosed her. No, she could fight them and she would fight them.
And as she thought this, she heard a momentary peal of braying laughter that was strident and absolutely inhuman. Stupid old crone, silly cauldron-stirring old fishwife…did you think we had forgotten you? Did you think by leaving the old lands that you would not see us again? That we would not come for you in the end and profane all that you hold sacred? That we would not turn this village into a cemetery as we have done with so many others? Your son-in-law searched for us and we welcomed him. He stands at our side now. Your daughter went to look for the priest and she found him…or perhaps, he found her, drinking deep of her sacramental wine until it flowed in hot coppery rivers down his chin. And we’ll have the children. Each, in turn, shall be milked. Then you, old woman, then you. You shall sleep with the rats. For tonight the Vurvolak comes…
Shivering, Katya went over and warmed herself by the fire with the children. Its heat could not dispel the chill deep inside her marrow. David began to fuss in his sleep, so she rocked his bassinet gently. These were her riches and her precious jewels: the children. She would fight to keep them safe and free of the ghosts of the night.
“Papa’s not coming home, is he?” Anna said, her eyes misting.
“Oh yes, child, he’ll be coming and your mother, too.”
Michael’s lower lip was trembling. “They’re dead.”
“No, no!” Katya said to them, hugging them close to her.
“Stephen said the dead are coming back and—”
Katya clutched them both tighter. She would not listen to such things, she would not let their innocent mouths be tainted by such awfulness. She could not allow it. She held them there before the fire, repeating an old saying from her childhood village: “Ssshhh, my children, for tonight the Vurvolak comes. It comes for your daughter, then for your son…”
