Hag Night, page 3
This can’t be, Wenda thought, as the light revealed a ladder of spinal vertebrae that had been broken and scattered like a child’s blocks. I can’t be seeing this…I can’t be.
She kept staring. Her eyes felt like they were painted on and she couldn’t have blinked if she wanted to.
The front quarters looked much like the rear—the same patchy silver fur, the white skin showing through—but the paws were absolutely hairless and they ended in very human fingers that clawed in the snow.
The rest of the carcass was not dog, it was human…it was a woman. It was a thing that had been severed at the waist, the anatomy tangled up with the kicking animal hindquarters farther back. Her flesh was perfectly white, tufts of fur greased with frozen blood standing up like clocksprings.
The left side of her ribcage was smashed flat, the right set with a small round breast with a jutting nipple.
Her shoulders were broad, almost athletic, the neckline sweeping almost elegantly to a head that was not completely human and not completely canine, but a combination of both.
The glassy silver-red eyes were human…or nearly…but the nose was a snout, the mouth hanging open and revealing a dentition of spike-like canine teeth and incisors that looked like they were designed to tear out throats and bring down prey.
Even the ears were pointed and laid back flat against the skull. Strands of silver-white hair fell over the blood-splattered face …
7
Megga felt her whole body go tense as a pain that was sharp and cutting seemed to slice through her brain. In a purely subjective sense, it felt like a steel wedge had split her skull open and some great hammer was driving it deeper and deeper into her gray matter.
She gasped.
Her knees went weak.
And up inside her head, in that ever-widening, ever-splitting fissure, she felt something cold and invasive like a slow-oozing, chill jelly seep into her mind. It was something dark, something horrible, living or semi-living, a monstrous other that sank its needle-like teeth right into the meat of her brain.
It had a voice: YOU, it said. YOU, WE RECOGNIZE YOU, WE KNOW YOU BECAUSE YOU ARE PART OF US.
She wanted to thrash her head violently side to side and tell that voice, that invading other, that no, no, no, she wasn’t part of whatever it was and whatever tenebrous, envenomed evil it represented. But her mouth would not speak and her mind would not think and that was because…because it was a lie, a great, stinking, bald-faced lie and she knew it. God, how she knew it. The thing crawling through her psyche was the mind of the wolf-woman. In its death throes, it was throwing out feelers, casting for scent, searching for safe harbor and it found it quite instinctively in Megga.
And that was because Megga had been suckling the swollen breast of the dark side since she was a schoolgirl.
But now that some creeping malevolence from the dark side had found her, called to her, recognized her as its own, and slithered into her head uninvited…all the morbid flirting and teasing and adolescent dark fantasy left a bitter taste in her mouth.
One that made her want to gag on the bile of her own soul.
No, no, no…leave me alone…please just go away…I don’t want this…
At that moment—bare seconds into it—it felt like something snapped in her brain. Like that thing had grabbed her free will and cracked it wide open like a walnut.
This is exactly what you wanted, you silly little twat. You’ve been begging for it your whole life and now you’re getting it. The bait has drawn US in and we’ll never, ever let you go now. Like calls to like.
No.
This could not be.
She would not accept the possibility.
Her mind was overburdened, stressed, pushed beyond all acceptable limits by what she had seen tonight. Couple that with a highly-excitable, highly-imaginative, downright neurotic personality poisoned by a mordant death obsession, and hallucinations of the worst order weren’t really too surprising.
Yet…even in her denial…she could feel that thing inside her head. It was weakening some because it was dying, but its intellect, its will was still dominant and quite possibly strong enough to squash her like a green-juiced insect.
YOU BELONG TO US, LITTLE GIRL.
No!
NO!
NO! NO! NO!
Get the fuck out of my head! Get out! Get out! Leave me be!
But it wasn’t going to leave her be. It had made contact, it had uplinked, it had planted its dark and festering seed deep in the shivering marrow of her brain and already that seed was bearing flower, bursting with midnight-black, coiling rootlets and petals of cemetery lace.
She could not deny it.
It showed her the agony of refusal and defiance, igniting a neural firestorm of agony in her brain, a sizzling white-hot electrical discharge that made her nerve endings blaze with such heat and fury and dizzying pain that she not only wanted to scream, she needed to scream. As the agony thundered inside her, her voice shrieked with madness and despair, echoing through the hollows of her skull but never quite reaching her lips, which were pressed in a trembling pink line.
And for a moment there, just one terrifying, nightmarish moment, the world disappeared from view, blotted out by the rising, consuming blackness of the thing that had invaded her, the thing whose dominating, discarnate mind was like a black expanding thunder cloud throwing out white, jagged bolts of sheer kinetic energy.
GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HEAD!
And then…yes, Megga could see again. The world swam back into view and it was a harsh, cold, and unforgiving world of blowing snow, bone-deep chill, and an ever-circling darkness pressing in from all sides as she stared down at the freakshow wreckage of the wolf-woman spread over the snowy pavement. She saw it. She smelled it. It filled her head with a slaughterhouse musk, making her reel and shiver with a weird, hypnopompic vertigo inspired by the still-trembling roadkill smear right before her, an anatomical waste heap sinking into its own toxic red sludge.
The thing was dying, oh yes, to be certain it was.
But even as its lights winked out one by one, even though it was beyond the point now of regenerating its flesh, it still reached out to her, gripping her mind with tenacious fingers.
US.
PART OF US.
YOU BELONG TO US.
And then, just as surely as it had filled her head, it drained away and there was nothing but a cool white buzzing in her head. Megga blinked and then blinked again. It was delirium. It was stress and the onset of neurosis, that’s all it was. Good God, she’d been half out of her mind for years, a dark little fallen angel drowning in the whirlpool of her own angst and morbidity, feeding on the gravy train of pop culture horror…so was it really any surprise?
Was it really?
8
Snap out of it.
Wenda opened her eyes.
For a moment there, it was like her mind had been sucked into some surreal, completely subjective black hole, a blank and evil universe where there was only her and the hideous remains of the wolf-woman…or whatever in the Christ she was.
She had completely zoned and she had no idea why. Looking over at Megga, she had a pretty good idea she was not the only one.
There’s a power to this thing and you felt it.
As Morris put the light on it, it jerked, the jaws opening wide with a bloody froth of bile. It snapped its teeth, it glared at them with a black hatred that was vast and bottomless. It made growling and snapping sounds, fingers scraping in the snow with hooked black talons.
And Wenda thought: It looks like like like—
9
“A fucking werewolf,” Mole said.
Werewolf, werewolf, werewolf.
Megga heard the words and why, yes, of course, that’s what this thing was. A simple, positively medieval term that seemed to have very little place in the modern world…but oh how descriptive it was on this black and blowing night.
Werewolf. Fucking shapeshifter…skinwalker.
Megga was breathless, absolutely breathless. It was cold and the snow was blowing into her face, pinching her cheeks with very icy fingers. But that was nothing. That was fucking pedestrian compared to what she was feeling in the aftermath of her (hallucination) little mind-trip, for lack of a better word. She felt…well, airless inside like a deflated balloon or a can of Fix-A-Flat that had been emptied into a tire.
“Are you all right?” Wenda said to her, picking up on it as she always picked up on such things.
Megga ignored her because she simply had to. There was no way she could lie, so avoidance was the best strategy. “I always knew there were such things.”
“It would seem there is relevance in the tales of old wives,” Doc put in.
Doc…God, but Megga loved Doc. How he put things and the way his voice sounded…she admired how his mouth and brain always seemed to be so perfectly wired together in a dynamic fusion. Always so cool. Cool? No, man, that dude is fucking ice, baby, ice, ice, ice. He just had a way about him. She stared at him and had a perfectly crazy idea that she loved him. Oh, she’d always had a thing for older men, especially intellectual sages. Guys her own age bored her with their whining, angst, and narrow world views and if there was going to be any whining, angst, or narrowness in a relationship then it was going to be coming from her end, thank you very much. She loved Doc’s voice. It was the voice she would have liked to hear reading her a bedtime story when she was a little girl—The Witches by Roald Dahl was her favorite—or whispering hot-blooded desires into her ear as a woman. She saw him by candlelight and she was on top of him, riding him hard, devouring him with the heat between her legs and—
Holy shit, what was that about?
Her mind was flying in all directions at the same time. She wasn’t even making sense to herself. That hallucination—she was telling herself it had been nothing more—was still weirding her out, all kinds of things crawling out of her subconscious.
One of them was this:
She was nine-years old and the mad dog was after her.
For years, the memory haunted her, a cruel incursion into her dreams, and now she was living it again…the horror, the pain, the sheer terror of it all. The dog came out of the vacant lot, a big hulking black lab whose shaggy coat was threadbare, patches of open flesh set with scars and pustulant wounds. Its eyes were pink and runny, its left ear torn off, its jaws foaming and fanged.
Megga backed away from it.
Had she just kept going, it might have ignored her in its suffering which was immense and total. Instead, she stopped right there on the sidewalk where the thorny weeds thrust up through the cracks. She froze up in a dizzying moment of paralytic fear…and screamed.
It came from the terrified core of her being: sharp, shrill, and godawful LOUD.
The tone of it pierced the lab’s ears, slicing through its diseased brain and echoing endlessly with volume, bouncing around in its skull with painful reverberations that at first made it whimper then howl with absolute, atavistic rage…a sound that was eerie, hurting, and nightmarish.
What happened then was a given.
Before Megga could hope to flee, the beast—for it surely was that, not a dog but a diabolical hell-hound with glowing eyes and white-slavering jaws—came charging out at her with almost hallucinogenic speed, a primeval blur, a savage missile of bunching muscle, bared fangs, and bad attitude driven by a raging, cutting agony in its dying brain.
At the last moment, just before the beast hit her, she hoped beyond hope that it would run right past her, but it did not. Its movements were clumsy and confused, but it located the sound of the shrilling noise and hit it. Megga went down. The convulsive weight of the beast pinned her to the sidewalk as its wild, flaying claws tore at her, its teeth snapping at her, foul ropes of saliva spraying in her face.
She fought against the beast, pounding and pummeling it with her fists, clawing at its oily hide with her nails.
But this only enraged it.
It seized her right calf in its bloody jaws.
Nine-year old Megga was screaming and fighting, kicking out with her left leg while pain threaded through her right in hot waves. The dog just wasn’t biting her…it was chewing, tearing, rending. Her pantleg was shredded, her calf muscle punctured as those teeth came down again and again and again.
Then running feet and a voice booming: “GET OFF MY DAUGHTER, YOU MANGY FUCKING MUTT!”
The lab released her calf and turned on this latest intruder, who screamed and shouted, driving burning blades of pain deeper and deeper into the dog’s brain. It had no choice: it attacked. The man who came at it had no fear. A dog was a dog was a dog and he would fucking kick it to death for touching his daughter, he’d shoot its guts out. But then…yes, he saw the foaming jaws, the slimy snot-ribbons of contaminated saliva swinging back and forth as it charged and he called out: “MAD DOG! MAD DOG! MAD GODDAMN DOG!”
The beast got within striking distance and leaped.
As it did, the man brought up his gun, a 12-gauge pump, and fired. The sound of it was like thunder and to the dog it was an axe that split its head open…which wasn’t too far from the truth because the buckshot hit it straight on, macerating its muzzle and blowing its head apart into a red-gray-pink shrapnel of bone matter, spinning teeth, and splashing brain jelly.
The beast was literally dead before its carcass thumped to the sidewalk.
Later…was it that day or the next?...Megga was barely conscious, lying in a hospital bed, hearing a doctor’s cool, calm voice saying, “I’m sorry, honey, but the dog was rabid. We don’t want you getting like that, now do we?” And as a nurse and her father held her down, the first of many needles was inserted into her belly.
Rabies vaccine.
The cure is worse than the curse, they say.
The needles felt red-hot as they pierced her stomach lining…
Megga came out it, trembling minutely and muttering under her breath.
The wolf-woman snarled as Reg videoed her, teeth gnashing from blackened gums as a speckled and very dog-like tongue licked away the blood and discharge that came bubbling up its throat. It growled at him, making guttural noises that were not exactly bestial but more like a wolf attempting speech. Its eyes locked with Burt’s and it growled out a string of garbled, phlegmy-sounding utterances.
“She said my name,” Burt said, nearly out of his mind with it. He began to back away. “She said my fucking name.”
By this point, everyone but Reg and his camera had backed well away from the thing.
“It can’t speak,” Morris told him. “It’s a…it’s a…it ain’t fucking human.”
Megga could have disagreed, but she didn’t.
She didn’t have the heart to.
Maybe what came out of the thing’s mouth was choked and garbled with the fluids filling its throat, but she had heard words, too. She was nearly certain of it. Burt, it had said. Burt, Burt…BUUUUURRRRT. If she needed more reason to come apart there it was.
The wolf-woman looked at her again.
And there was no denying it this time around: her mind, however briefly, brushed against Megga’s own and the pain was gigantic and terrible…it was not so much psychic invasion this time as a seam of pure, almost electric agony drilling right into her head. It felt like a cat had entrenched its claws in her brain and drawn them over the surface of her dura mater. The pain was beyond anything she had ever known or imagined could exist.
This time she did scream.
Involuntarily, her mouth sprang open and a shrill, piercing cry came out and by the time it did, it was simply too late to stop it. The others momentarily forgot about Burt’s panic attack and the horror in the snow and turned their attention to her.
“Dude…take it easy,” Reg said.
Wenda and Doc were holding onto her.
“It’s okay,” Wenda said. “Really.”
What a consummate bullshit artist. Okay? Okay?
“There are things in this world and those out of it,” Doc said as he gripped her firmly. “We have seen the latter. We might consider ourselves fortunate this night to see something very few have ever seen.”
Oh, that voice. That golden voice. Whatever weird psychic trip she’d gone on this time evaporated as Doc spoke. She felt immediately better, stronger, her legs sturdy beneath her. She shrugged off Wenda, but not Doc.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Really…I don’t know…I freaked out or something.”
The wolf-woman flattened her ears against her skull and let go with a shriek of her own that was nearly hysterical in tone…not a human scream exactly, but more like that of a cat heard squealing in the dead of night. Megga knew it was directed at her. The thing was mocking her. It stared at her with lunatic hatred, its eyes huge and glistening.
Burt was standing there, swaying from side to side.
He had stuffed a fist into his mouth so maybe he, too, would not scream. The wolf-woman reached out a semi-human hand in his direction as if she wanted to sink her claws into him and tear him apart like an especially juicy slab of liver. He took two steps backward, tottering and weak. A gagging sound came from his throat that was thick and suffocating in tone. He looked, if anything, like a little boy paralyzed with fright. His fist fell away from his mouth and he looked at everyone there with glazed, tear-filled eyes.
Then he broke free and ran off in the direction of the bus.
The creature was chewing on its own tongue in its death throes by that point, the head whipping from side to side and spraying gouts of pink saliva and blood into the air.
She’s dying and you felt her pain, Megga thought.
Burt was shouting as he stumbled away.
Nobody tried to stop him. They had nearly forgotten about him. They simply, almost casually, backed away from the thing. The snow was coming down heavier by then and visibility was down to fifteen feet at most and the creature faded into the storm, letting loose with a pained howling as they abandoned it. The wind was blowing so hard that they were bunched together now. Maybe fear had a little something to do with it. Maybe the stark desolation fused them together.
