Hag Night (15 page)

As he ran, his mind began to create new systems of classification in its terror. Those who roamed in gangs stealing food, they were the First Level. The Second Level was the dying spread over the walks like dirty laundry. And the Third Level, yes, they had starved to death, but in death, still hungered.

It was demented, but it rang brightly with an element of truth.

He pushed on.

Running, hiding, trapped in some charnel netherworld where the shadows were alive and hungry, where death puppets starved even after the grave, where ghosts prowled and wraiths called him by name, wanting what he had in his sack and the warmth in his body. The night was a blizzard of hollowed faces and predatory eyes. Human hyenas waited to move in on the first smell of a kill, the first heady taste of meat.

He saw things, images that remained even when he pressed his eyes shut. The gaunt, wasted forms…people, but
not
people…that crawled through the rubble, crept up the walls of buildings like spiders on threads. They howled from rooftops and drifted through the sky like threadbare clouds. They slithered from cisterns and fed on cadavers in black, vile slums. Yes, everywhere, stark, electric lunacy. And above it all, a full, bloated moon like a stripped desert skull and below, things with eyes suffused with a necrotic lunar glow.

A block from his home, Jozsef wandered into a shimmering delta of mist that coalesced into a form with a peeled face of papery flesh. He saw cold lamp eyes, a body like a skeletal cabinet, a grinning mouth of carrion. The form drifted above him, caught in a cremated storm of bone dust and bits of cemetery fungi, wrapped in blowing, billowing cerements withered to spiderweb lace.

“Jozsef, Jozsef,” said a voice of blank graveyard dimensions. “Jozsef…I hunger so…I starve…I starve, I’m so very hungry…”

Jozsef recognized the form of his mother, dead some seven months now.  She floated towards him, whistling and shrieking as the wind blew through jagged rents in her winding sheet, her pipestem body. She moved and hissed and swooshed with the dead whisper of casket satin, the rush of black silk. Her hair was a blowing tornado of meadow grasses, her fingernails the length of yardsticks, blackened and corkscrewed. She danced and drifted in cold ribbons of moonlight.

Jozsef ran off, thinking that even the dead were begging for a few crusts of bread in this empty, gray world of open mouths and growling bellies. By this point, he was caught in some grim neutrality between laughter and tears and he couldn’t seem to remember where he’d come from or what he’d seen and maybe, maybe part of him did not want to. He stumbled up the sidewalk, avoiding those with outstretched hands and moons for eyes. He slammed into a woman and spilled them both to the concrete.

He recognized her. “
Lydia?” She was Emil Stanislav’s wife. “I saw your husband tonight, I—”

“You saw nothing but a vapor,” she told him, crossing herself. “My husband has been dead these many weeks.”

She trotted away, wrapped tight in her black mourning clothes.

But Jozsef did not care. Wind and leaves in his face, the skull moon leering from above, he found his building, the worn doorway, felt the wood flake beneath his fingertips. Madness still buzzing in his brain, something warm and hopeful moved in him, brought him somewhere he needed to be. An island in the raging sea of insanity.

He looked back once and only once, seeing a tall, cadaverous man dressed in a long flapping coat of animal skins. His eyes were brilliant blood-cherries luminous with spectral light. Grinning, he opened his mouth and exhaled hot pestilence into the wind.

Shrink
ing inside, Jozsef slammed the door and the voracious beast was held at bay. At last, at last, he found a silence that was not deadly, that did not reach and claw and hunger. Here, the shadows had no teeth.

He moved up the narrow stairway, each creaking step was a childhood melody lost and rediscovered. Home. He was home. And he still had the food, the bulging potato sack of sausages, breads, flour—

The door to his flat.

Oh, old lonesome, time-scarred door with its tarnished knob fingered by too many dirty hands. Jozsef pressed the cup of one ear to the panel…inside there was a stillness of lonely fields and vacant lanes. His skin pebbled, a spider played at the base of his spine. The door was locked. Good…or bad?

He knocked lightly. Asleep, they surely must all be asleep.

“Jozsef?”
a voice said, a voice of dust devils and waiting, of time suspended, of yellowed glass and patience. “Jozsef? Is that you?”

It was Elena’s voice. Yes, weary. Yes, worried. Yes, fatigued, but surely never conquered. Not that. “Yes! Yes, open the door! Be quick!”

Hesitation. “Have…have you brought food?”

“A bag bursting with it!”

He could hear her coming now, a hissing rustle of shifts. The door was opened. Elena held a candle that flickered with yellow and orange shafts of brilliance. Knife-edged shadows rose up, a parade of magic lantern haunts. The glow consumed her face, threw hollows and worry ruts and sunken cheeks into pools of lampblack. “We have been starving, Jozsef. But that you are home is enough.”

And then he was swallowed into the drafty throat of the flat and Elena’s bony hands directed him into his chair. More candles were lit, the air smelling of tallow and age and dark spaces. The twins issued from a doorway, swam in shadow. Jolana—fair and blue of eye—and Janos—swarthy with eyes like chips of wet coal.

Along with their mother, they were emaciated, ribs jutting forth, cheekbones thrust from ashen complexions.

The children came to him and caressed him with thin, needle-fingers just as cold as icicles draped from January roofs. Their lips were flower petals pressed in mortuary books and their eyes, depthless catacombs.

Elena said, “Your friend came to see us, Jozsef. You’re friend Emil Stanislav.”

“Oh no…
nooooo
…”

T
he children drifted over him and through him like living, breathing mists from tombs. His wife moved in his direction, not walking, not stepping, but pushed along as if by some unseen current. Her skin was white and phosphorescent, her lips like withered roses, her eyes raging vortices of emerald light.

The potato sack forgotten, Jozsef fed his family, and out in the streets tenebrous shades in the form of men, women, and children blew through the lanes like disease germs.

But Jozsef did not know this. For he saw only the rising, glimmering full moons glowering from the red-rimmed sockets of his kin.

The moon in their eyes.

8

In the dim sunshine, the two men paused on the stairwell, both exhausted and worn thin by the things they had done and would yet do. The house smelled of age and misery and poverty. Rats scratched in the walls.

“Well?” said the first man, drawing off a pipe.

“The army has arrested a criminal. A slaver.”

“Yes?”

The second man nodded. “Yes. His name is Kosar. He is from Budapest. He was interrogated.” The man shivered. “He said that seven boxes of earth were loaded on a Bodrog freighter three days ago. They were bound overseas. England or America, he was not sure.”

“Then we are free of Griska and his brides.”

“Yes. God willing, they take the plague with them.” He shook his head. “It is that seventh box that concerns me. It was said to be as large as a piano crate. Much larger even.”

They just looked at each other, fearing to speculate.

The first man emptied his pipe and looked up the stairwell. “Let’s get this done then.” Taking four sharpened stakes of whitethorn from his bag, he led the way up to the flat of Jozsef Vajda.

PART TWO: GHOST TOWN

1

Wenda was thinking that although she was young and strong in body, inside her soul felt very old like some stained and yellowed—but precious—relic an old woman kept in a high cupboard to remind her of better days. She wanted to be brave and fearless in all things this night, but that old soul of hers was pessimistic with portent of all things bad and baneful. It sensed deathly things on the wind and in the forms of the mortiferous shapes striding through the storm.

Though that awful screeching/wailing had ceased outside, she was still hearing it echoing in her skull and she was scared. She could feel the fear bunching in her shoulders and straining her neck, creeping about at the edges of her thoughts and sliding through her belly like black grease. It was instinct, she knew. An ancient, uncivilized knowledge of evil afoot and the dire threat to not only herself but the members of her little flock.

There was a wolf in the fold and it was moving in closer, slavering jaws opening wider.

Although her body tensed with exhilaration, readying itself for battle, her mind felt old, weary, and wanted to sleep. Her eyelids wanted to shut and it seemed she was staving off exhaustion through sheer force of will and not much more.

But she thought:
You can’t sleep this night and you know it. You don’t dare close your eyes before sunrise because if you do you might never open them again. Maybe you’re tired and maybe those things out there are sending something at you that’s
making
you tired. That’s what they want. By nature, they’re cowards. All predators are. They want an easy kill. They do not want a fight. Why do you think bloodsuckers come in the dead of night? They prefer their victims weak, drugged with sleep, brains cloudy with dreams.

It makes it so much easier for them.

Fighting off drowsiness, she tossed another log in the fire and Morris jumped. Jumped, but still stared into the flames like some primitive savage who could trust nothing but the light and the heat and blazing coals, his personal anathema against evil spirits. She checked the lanterns and the kerosene in them was getting down. They would need more.

“I wish that screaming would stop,” Morris said.

“It has stopped,” Wenda told him. “Listen.”

“You’re right,” he said. “What time is it?”

“It’s a little after eleven.”

“Jesus Christ. Dawn’s a million miles away.”

An exaggeration, but from where they were sitting, essentially true.

Wenda kept thinking of weak links because she knew that Megga could not be trusted and Morris was a lost cause. He had folded up and he was like a little boy now. She wanted to hate him for that. For being weak when she needed him to be strong. She wanted to shout at him and slap him but that was only her own frustration and fear looking for an outlet and she knew it. Yet, she thought he was a fool. Childlike and absurd. A man in the studio and boardroom where the only real threats were to his wallet, but when it counted he was just a little boy. And because his mind had become simple
again, like it might have been when he was seven years old, she knew he was a weak link and those outside could easily trick him. His childlike mind would not recognize the threat. It could be easily swayed, seduced, and corrupted by a greater wickedness just like that of a child who is tempted into the backseat of a car or into a lonely wood by candy and the saccharine promises of a stranger.

In
her thinking, there was no greater fool than a man who refused to act like one.

You’re being harsh and judgmental,
she told herself.

But the truth of the matter was that she could not afford to be anything else. She had been a quiet, shy sort of girl once upon a time. A bumbling and clumsy child. Then, via genetics, she had blossomed into a beauty as a teenager. Something that made her feel even more uncomfortable in her skin as if people might see her and think,
yes, Wenda’s a very pretty girl on the outside, but inside she’s still a meek and mealy little mouse.
As if they would sense that she was pretending to be something she was not. Like a greasy little mechanic taking a rich man’s Jag for a drive, pretending to be a bigshot when everyone else knew differently.  Only as Vultura did her personality rise to be the equal of her body. But for all that, she was not conceited and narcissistic. She did not worship her own image and expect others to do the same. She’d had reams of sympathy for others. She was kind and caring.

But right now, that was gone.

She felt almost…pitiless.

Don’t be like that. Don’t become some soulless thing. If you do that you’re no better than those things outside. Morris can’t help it that he’s weak. Megga can’t help being attracted to the dark side.

Megga?

Wenda opened her eyes and realized that, at some point, she had sat down in a chair by the fire and was dozing off.

She looked around.

Morris was still at the fire and Megga…
shit.

“Get away from that window,” Wenda said.

Megga ignored her. She had the curtains parted and was staring forlornly out into the storm. Wenda charged over there. She was going to grab Megga and physically toss her away from the window. But when she got there, Megga said, “Look.”

From that vantage point,
when the snow quit blowing for a second or two, she could see the front of the federal house that Doc and the others had escaped into. It was surrounded by dozens of shadowy forms. They were all standing out there, just waiting.