Hag Night, page 27
“So do it!” Megga challenged her. “Fucking stake me!”
But Wenda had already loosened her hold on the stake though she still gripped Megga’s throat. No, she wasn’t about to do it, but the absolutely insane thing was that the vibe she got off Megga was that she seemed to want to be staked…as ludicrous as that seemed. She was practically hungry for it and that in itself was as scary as anything Wenda had thus far encountered. Was it something suicidal and self-destructive in her or was it something more? A lot of writers liked to toy around with the pop psychology idea that the stake through the heart of a vampire was something more than impalement but a symbolic sexual penetration. All the Freudian overtones aside, Wenda nearly believed it at that moment because Megga wanted it.
“Please,” she said.
But Wenda got off her. There would be no penetration and Megga looked disappointed.
That’s when Morris, who seemed oblivious to everything but his primitive fascination with the fire, turned and said the most absurd thing: “Don’t hurt her, Vultura. She’s under contract the rest of the season.”
Megga didn’t seem to see the humor in it, but Wenda started laughing. It came rolling out of her and when it subsided, she said, “Okay, Morris. But when this season is through, fire the bitch. She can go back to working the drive-thru window at Wendy’s with rest of her Goth tribe.”
Which was spiteful, of course, but true.
Megga pulled herself from the floor and sat down in her chair, lighting a cigarette with a visibly trembling hand.
Wenda rubbed the welt on her cheekbone and tried to make sense of it all. Several times tonight, Megga had openly come on to her. Now she had attacked her, then was nearly reduced to tears when she wouldn’t shove the stake into her. She was acting like some pissed-off, jilted lover. How did you explain any of that? There was a weird sexual undertone to it. Megga was moody by nature. She was argumentative, confrontational, sarcastic, bitter, angry…and tonight she’d displayed all these things, as expected. But the eroticism was not something Wenda had seen coming. But it was there. It was still there. Even now as Megga sat brooding and smoking, she would look over at Wenda with her dark eyes and the seduction, the appetite in them, was there.
Maybe this is how she copes. Maybe this is her version of a nervous breakdown. Maybe the stress and terror and anxiety are finally forcing her out of the closet and she’s confronting feelings she always had about me.
But it was nothing that simple and Wenda knew it.
She’d never had any doubts in her mind that Megga swung both ways or that her almost obsessive devotion to Bailey was more than just sisterly, but she did not believe that Megga had been harboring the hots for her. It just didn’t wash. There was something there, something going on, but she had the intuitive feeling that it had more to do with the psychic influence of those things outside than with any hidden, deep-set yearnings.
The good thing was, it felt like Vultura was back.
And Vultura was not real happy with Megga the Graveyard Girl. She was filled with disdain and something quite near loathing for her. Not only was Megga not to be trusted, she had morphed into some crazy and nicely fucked-up bitch with highly questionable sexual desires…if wanting to be staked was any indication.
Wenda kept watching her and as she did so, a series of images began to pass through her head. None of them, she thought, were of her own making. She was channeling images from Megga’s mind and she knew it. She saw children taunting Megga as a child, calling her Creepy Meggy, because while other girls played with dolls or poured over issues of Tiger Beat, Megga walked around with books of macabre cartoons by Charles Addams, old well-thumbed horror comics like Tales from the Tomb and Witches’ Tales, and decorated her room with posters of cinematic ghouls like Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, and Reggie Nalder. In fact, her first true sexual experience had been auto-erotic as she masturbated at thirteen while watching a vampire flick called Subspecies. An attractive teenager, but disenfranchised, friendless, and antisocial, she snuck into cemeteries at night and masturbated while pressed up against headstones and vaults. Bailey represented something to her. Bailey was everything she was not. She was a purity that Megga needed to corrupt. When Bailey did not do what she was told, Megga would slap her again and again until she drew blood and then, overcome by the sight of it, she would lick it off her lips and seduce her.
Was that the nature of their relationship?
Was it some sadomasochistic thing?
Wenda could not be sure. She was certain that the images of Megga’s childhood and teenage years were correct, but the Bailey-thing was murky and she could not tell whether it was true or some suppressed fantasy.
Finally, Wenda turned away because she began picking up images of herself. Of Megga licking blood from her. Of biting her in a place she would never care to be bitten.
But as she tried to shut it out, it was like maybe Megga herself had turned the volume up and she could hear her voice plain and clear: You don’t have to be afraid, Wenda. You never have to be afraid of us. All those stories and movies are all utter crap and there are no such things as vampires. It’s a silly word of Serbian origin. Meaningless. We prefer more descriptive terms like Vurderlak and Vulkodlak, Vorvolakas and Vurvolak. We exist between reality and dream, light and shadow, life and the grave. Take my hand and I’ll show you things you never knew existed. I’ll take you places undreamed and to worlds untenanted. I’ll take you beyond the pale of death and to the Other Side and back again. I’ll make you young and beautiful forever. Just let me touch you. Let me put my hands on you. Let me put my lips on you—
Wenda forced it out of her head because she knew then it was not Megga at all, but something using Megga like a sort of relay station. And as she realized this, she could still hear its voice calling out of the night, rising louder and omnipotent, a buzzing and hissing and thoroughly inhuman voice. It was growing angry and impatient. It did not like to be ignored. It could do things that would make her sorry and as it described them in detail its voice took on the whining petulance of an angry child, a rotten little brat that was not getting its way.
Then she knew.
Somehow, she knew.
Because underneath that awful voice there was something else, a stinging sort of pain born of fear because it could not corrupt her and this frightened it. She had something. Something it was afraid of…only she did not know what it was and if she hoped to live through the night as a living, breathing human being and not wake up tomorrow night as a slinking graveyard rat with a black and depthless hole where her soul had once been, she had better figure out what it was.
What made her special.
What made her different.
And, most importantly, what made them afraid of her.
“What is it?” she said aloud.
Megga looked at her, blinking.
“What is it? I have something they don’t like and you know what it is.”
“You’re losing it,” Megga said, sitting on her little secret golden egg of knowledge, refusing to lift her flanks so that Wenda might get a look at it. She would not tell and maybe that was because she was afraid to.
“Well?” Rule said, maybe sensing another confrontation and wanting to steer things clear. “What are we going to do?”
Wenda turned from Megga. “You think our best bet is to try and get out of here?”
He shrugged. “I suppose I do.”
“Okay. Let’s do it. Let’s go out there. Let’s see if we can get the drop on them.” She looked over at Megga. “You’re hot for this, so you can lead the way. There’s the door. Lead us out.”
Megga got up, keeping her distance from Wenda whom she clearly did not trust. Still looking back at her, she went over to the door and reached for the knob. And as she did so, there sounded a knocking from the other side.
2
When Reg got out onto the roof, he realized in his white-edged terror that he had nearly forgotten about the storm, the raw immensity of it, the glacial chill that blew like needles of ice straight from its whirling gut. But as soon as he stumbled out into the snow, it found him. It screamed in his face and sent frozen currents of air up his back. The wind seemed to hit him from every direction like it wanted to squash him flat. The snow was coming down heavy. It blew in his face and spun around him in white tempests. It was about two feet deep as he inched along on all fours so he could climb to the roof next door.
When he’d made it about ten feet from the broken window, he turned and looked back. The shadows and flying snow obliterated everything. He couldn’t even be sure where the window was now.
He trusted in his instincts and kept moving.
The pitch of the roof was low and the snow itself gave him good traction as he moved along. The blizzard raged around him, a primal and angry force. It moaned and howled and if somebody had shouted five feet from him, he doubted whether he would have heard them. He didn’t dare try and stand or even rise to his knees: if that wind got hold of him, it would toss him right off the roof and to the street far below. Better to stay down low where it couldn’t get a grip on him.
He was trying desperately not to think of Doc.
Trying desperately not to remind himself that he had abandoned Doc.
Later. There would be time for guilt later.
He sidled up to the edge of the roof and it was just as he’d seen it out the window earlier with Burt: these houses were all packed in tight and getting from one roof to the next would be easy enough, though not without danger.
He knew he was only two houses away from where Wenda and the others had gone. If he could cross the next roof he’d be there and then he could kick a window open and get inside.
Brushing snow from his face with fingers that were already numb inside his gloves, Reg moved precious inches closer to the edge of the roof. The house next door was a different type and it had a steeply-pitched roof. Not only that but it was about five feet lower. The gap between them was maybe two feet, which wasn’t much in good weather…but tonight, in this goddamned storm, it was like jumping from one icefall to the next on Mount Everest. This is what held him back.
You got a choice to make, man. You can go back and face those things or you can sit here and freeze to death. In an hour you’ll be like a frozen steak. Or, you can jump to the next roof and pray you don’t roll right off it.
“Fuck it,” he said under his breath.
He got up in a crouch, kicking the snow away from him so he had himself a good launching platform. He counted to three, sucked in a breath, and then sprang like a cat. He didn’t fly like he would have without all the heavy winter gear on, but he spanned the roofs easily and landed in the snow of the one next door and what was utterly amazing to him was that when he landed, despite the pitch, he landed solid and sure.
That wasn’t so bad.
But that thought had barely passed through his mind when the snow beneath him gave way and he felt his boots skidding over iced shingles and he was sliding with no way to slow his descent. He let out a cry that was lost in the storm. He kept sliding, picking up speed, his boots dislodging columns of snow that swept up and over him, much of it going up his pant legs and up the back his parka. Then he struck something solid that groaned, but held. A rainspout, a gutter…he didn’t know what it was but it was all that saved him.
For the longest time he did not want to move.
He didn’t dare move.
He could see his skid-marks in a perfect unbroken trail above him and he thought if it hadn’t been such a fucking tragedy, it might have been funny.
He just wanted to lay there and be safe. But the snow up his legs and back was unbelievably cold and his limbs were going as numb as his fingers. It was getting so he couldn’t even feel his face. Fatigue was on him and the urge to close his eyes and just sleep was almost overwhelming. But he remembered from high school Health class that this was one of the signs of hypothermia. He needed to get out of that goddamn wind and warm himself, or before long he would start thinking crazy things and begin making irrational choices.
Like roof-crawling in the winter isn’t evidence of that.
He started climbing again, moving very slowly, worming his way up the face of the roof to the ridgeline above. If he could get up there, then the crossing would be a lot easier. It took him at least fifteen minutes to do it, pushing himself up carefully until he could get his hands on the ridgeline and then on something else, maybe an old lightning rod. He pulled himself up until he was sitting on the ridgeline, legs to either side, gripping the lightning rod—because that’s what it indeed was—and hanging on for dear life as the wind tried to strip him free. He felt like a sailor in a storm-tossed ocean, each gust of wind like a wave crashing into him.
Now and again, the blizzard would lift momentarily like a veil and he would see all those rising rooftops around him, some higher, some lower, most of them sharp and jagged like black volcanic rock reaching up into the maelstrom of the snowstorm. Then the veil would drop and he was a man alone again. An explorer who’d sunk his flag at the South Pole and was done in as he gripped it in the wrath of the polar night.
He knew he had to keep going.
The idea of just waiting and freezing to death wasn’t an option. Not after what he’d already been through. Everything, as he saw it, was now about survival.
Still gripping the lightning rod, he pulled himself around it and sat on the other side. So far, so good. Now it was time to let go and shimmy down the ridgeline to the next roof. Although the idea wasn’t exactly intriguing by that point, it was the only option available, so he let go, crouching down, and started moving.
He hadn’t gone very far when he smelled something hot on the wind.
Something that stank of death.
It didn’t belong out there and he knew it. Out in the subzero depths of the blizzard, the world was pristine and white and odorless. Still, the smell came out of the storm at him like a channel of putrescence.
He held onto the ridgeline, in absolute denial that he had smelled anything at all. It was an olfactory hallucination, he knew. That’s what Doc would have called it. You see, my boy, he could hear Doc saying, that odor cannot exist, for in plummeting temperatures like these when the mercury is hanging well beneath freezepoint, there can be no bacterial action and with no bacterial action, the smell of death cannot exist. Oh God, how Reg wished Doc were there to put things into perspective for him. He’d know what to do. He’d know how to handle this. But Doc was dead and…and…I let him die, Jesus Christ, but I let him die…Reg was on his own and no one could help him. No one at all. So he clung to the ridgeline, shaking, teeth chattering, his blood seeming to cool in his veins like the waters of a creek going filthy and dark with silt.
He was not alone.
At the very edge of the roof, he saw something like a black and gnarled tree that looked very much like a woman. He could almost feel its roots sliding into him and feeding on the hot vein of his mad, swooning terror. As he watched, blinking away flakes of snow, it spread black wings, throwing out limbs, and a gray shroud that flapped in the wind.
Although he could not see beneath the shroud, he knew it was a woman and he wondered if it was the one Burt and he had seen outside the window earlier.
She stood there like she was made of something ethereal that the wind simply passed right through without touching. There was a crust of snow atop the ridgeline about four or five inches deep. She should have sunk right through it, but she stood atop it like a ghost.
And she was moving.
Not walking, but drifting in his direction and he wanted to scream. But when he tried, all that came out was a soundless breath of forced air. He was numb all over, his limbs thick and his fingers like sausages. He felt watery and weak inside like his guts were melting. And still she came on, drifting forward, her shroud blowing around her, that smell coming with her. The shroud blew aside and he saw part of a face like a gray leather mask and a frozen grin of teeth. She reached out for him, rustling like silk, her fingernails long and sharp like rapiers. She was a corrupted thing that would eat his soul and slit his throat and lap up the hot red life that ran out. The closer she got, the more of her face he saw until it was fully revealed like a skullish puzzlebox opening. It was seamed tombstone gray, bloodred eyes like exploding stars. Her flesh seemed to glow like a lantern, her mouth filled with hooked, overlapping fangs like those of a shark.
“Please,” Reg heard his own voice say, cracking in the cold.
But there was no mercy to be found here. Inside his head, he could feel her already taking him. A channel had been opened and he could see into her mind, which was a seething nest of primal appetite, a scorching black desert void of well-picked bones and blowing sand. Beneath the shroud, he saw her body and it was made of dozens of voracious, slat-thin graveyard rats that would bury him in teeth and scraping yellow claws.
When he did manage to scream, it was far too late because she hovered above him, her winding sheet flying around her in all directions and showing him sights he did not wish to see.
But before she fed on him, before physical violation, there was psychic desecration as what was in her skull filled his own like dozens of dark and screeching mandrake roots crowding out his own thoughts and reducing them to abstractions. She was feeding on his soul, biting into it and tearing out great bleeding chunks of it. The pain was not physical, but a spiritual defilement that was beyond agony.
He fought against her…or something in him did.
His fists struck out and his fingers clawed at her, but she seemed to be no more substantial than a fogbank. His hands found flesh that gave way, bones like polished marble, furry things that clawed and bit and drew blood. She grabbed hold of his hair and yanked his head back, burying first her face in his throat, then her teeth…which were like icicles sliding into his carotid.
3
Megga heard them cry out to her not to open the door, but she threw the lock and gripped the knob and not even Wenda was fast enough to stop her. Her original impulse when the knocking began was that finally, at last, they had come for her to slake their thirst and satisfy the bone-deep hunger within her. At last, at last. But what made her throw the door open with excitement was not that but a voice that said, “Please let me in…hurry.” And that voice belonged to Bailey.
