Hag Night (19 page)

That’s what this man was, Burt knew: a mass-murderer.

A sadist and psychopath who unleashed a reign of terror in the mountain wastes of Hungary, putting thousands to their death. Until…until something came out of the night to claim him. He had walked in darkness since.

And he had a name. Burt could hear it reverberating in his skull:
Griska, Griska.

With his last reserves of strength, Burt opened the car door and there was another one—a little boy sitting there. His moon-white face was broken by an immense and toothy grin, his eyes soulless and blank. The tiny soot-black pupils speared into him.

Burt stumbled away and saw that there were more than a dozen of them ringed around him—mostly women and children, Griska’s extended family. Many were naked. Some dressed in cerements and shrouds, but all with those bright yellow eyes and mouths of gray hooked fangs.

He was in
a nest of them and he knew he wouldn’t escape.

Griska would never allow that.

He’s the Pied Piper who calls the flock of lambs to sate the hunger of the Old Mother,
a voice in Burt’s head told him.
He paves the way so that She might come into the world, refreshed and pure. Gather now, friends, gather in Her name. But do not speak that sacred name aloud, for to pronounce Her name is to summon her spirit.

Turning, Burt fell into the arms of the Death Angel.

At last, Burt…oh, at last.

She took hold of him, pulling him closer until he could
smell the stink coming off her like a morbid perfume: embalming fluid, corpse-slime, and rotting oblong boxes. That constant insectile buzzing was so loud now it was like having his ear up against a hive. She pulled back her hood so he could see her gray rutted face netted in a filigree of cobwebs and know how long she had waited to slake her thirst. Her luminous eyes sucked the light from his soul, the sclera threaded with tiny collapsed red veins.

Her saw her teeth.

The long canines like icicles.

Burt screamed as they sank into his throat and he heard her sucking away his blood with sickening slurping sounds.
A hollow opened inside him that would never be full again. And by then they were all on him, tapping him like a keg. Fangs sank into his arms and legs, his belly and groin.

And they drained him.

They bled him white.

Before the darkness took him into silken mortuary depths, he looked up and saw Griska standing there, boundlessly amused, his red eyes glowing like radium, his sharp canines, both upper and lower, interlocked in a grin of almost fatherly pride.

7

It was a half an hour later when Reg showed and from the blank look on his face it did not appear to Doc as if things had gone well for Burt’s breakout. Reg walked in, looked at Bailey, looked at Doc, then sat in a wingback chair by the fire, putting his face in his hands.

“I take it he never made it,” Doc said.

Reg just shrugged. He didn’t seem to have the energy for speech.

“Did you see it?”

Reg looked at him through the slats of his fingers. “I couldn’t see anything out there with that fucking snow.
But
…I don’t know…”

“What?”

Reg lifted up his head, staring into the fire. “I thought…I thought about ten minutes ago I heard him scream. Maybe I didn’t. The wind is making weird sounds. Maybe I imagined it…but it sounded like him screaming.”

“Don’t think about it.”

Reg shook his head. “How the hell am I supposed to do that?”

Doc wished he could tell him, but there was no way to wipe it from his mind. He supposed if they survived this entire ordeal Reg would be hearing the screams thirty years from now in his dreams.

He wondered if they were missed by now. It was past midnight. Somebody had to have been asking a few questions and ringing a few bells by this point. With a storm like that out there, though, it was unlikely that the police would make a special run way out here. There was a good chance the highways were closed by now and the secondary roads that brought them to this godawful place were probably drifted over.

If we can make it through the night, we have a chance,
he thought.
Even if we have to hike out tomorrow, we’re doing it. Another night in this place and we’ll loose what little remains of our minds.

He lit a cigarette as he watched over Bailey, listening to the storm rage, the house creak. This was their cage and there was no getting around that. They had these rooms and floors and not much else. Water, but no food unless you counted the expensive wax fruit in the dining room. The house was much, much larger than most prison cells, but ultimately it was just as confining and just as prone to drive them out of their collective skulls. He needed to sleep, but he did
n’t dare. It was only Reg and himself now, and it looked like Reg was drifting off so he had to stay awake.

If not to be wary of those outside, then to be wary of Bailey.

She didn’t have much time left. She’d simply lost too much blood and it was only a matter of time before she stopped breathing. Then…
then what exactly?
That was a good question. How long before she rose from the dead? An hour? Two? Six? Or did it take a day or two? Doc remembered that in
The Brides of Dracula
it took like seven days. He seemed to recall Peter Cushing saying something like that on
Chamber of Horrors.

But that was TV, movies.

What about in reality?

He had to suppress a cold, grim chuckle.
Reality? You call this reality? The walking dead?
But unfortunately it was and he had decided some hours ago he would not sit around trying to make sense of it all. That was for later. For now, he would ride it out.

Still…the question remained:
how long? How long did it take?

Looking down at Bailey he felt the sour bile of fear rise in his gullet and he had everything he could do not to whimper. He breathed in and out, clearing his head. He bunched his hands into fists and clenched his teeth until the fear went away and he could think rationally because never had that been so important.

His mind turned away from darker realms and to Bailey herself.

When Morris had first brought him on board
Chamber of Horrors
and he had met Wenda, he had been amazed at how striking she was. He remembered thinking,
this show will be a hit because of her looks if for no other reason.
When she was just Wenda Keegan she seemed uncomfortable and aloof, but as Vultura she embodied the fantasies of every teenage boy. He met Megga next. She had dark good looks and an almost sinister feline undercurrent that was scary and exciting at the same time.
My God, look at that black hair and that pale skin, those huge intense eyes…like a Goth pinup. The boys’ll love her and the girls will want to be her.
Then he met Bailey and, had he been much younger, he would have been smitten. With the blonde hair and blue eyes and flawless skin, she was like central casting’s idea of a Nordic prom queen. She was diametrically opposed to Megga in looks and personality. But somehow, someway, they complimented each other: the dark side and the light side, bad and good, moonlight and sunshine. Which was why Morris took to calling them Jekyll and Hyde.

And now, seeing Bailey lying there, so close to death…he hoped when she returned she would not victimize Reg. He hoped she would only go after him because he felt he had let her down and deserved her kiss of death as punishment.

Maybe, subconsciously, you old fool, it’s more than that. Maybe you want her to kiss you first and maybe you’ve always wanted that.

He did not entirely dismiss the idea because the subconscious mind was such a tar pit of base desires and impulses. It was where the animal drives were housed, where the greed and lust and hungers waited sharpening their teeth. It was also where the conscious mind threw all its baggage and repressions that it could not face nor acce
pt. Maybe down there in the basement,
yes,
he wanted her to kiss him. But up in the light where his thinking mind, morals, and ethics ruled the roost, he was only concerned with Bailey’s welfare and how he had let her down.

Though he was not aware of it in his physical and emotional exhaustion, his eyes had closed and he was remembering, as a child, the cold farmhouse in Iowa where he grew up. How, each night, his mother insisted that he pray for thirty minutes before bed. To disobey her was to incur her wrath. And to incur her wrath was to get the switch. Sometimes just on the ass when you’d did something bad like the time he and his sister Fran had lit Shaky Papineau’s outhouse on fire as a Halloween prank. Their asses had been tenderized red and hurting over that one. But if ma caught you cutting your prayers short, you would know the switch on your back because, according to his mother, you needed to be flogged as Jesus was flogged by Pilate so you would know the suffering of the heretic. Which, even then, Doc knew made no sense but he wasn’t about to debate biblical interpretation with his foul-tongued mother. Once she had been sweet like apple cider, then his father left with another woman and that cider had gone to vinegar and its taste had been forever burning and bitter. So, Doc prayed for thirty minutes each night and it was his mother’s soul he asked forgiveness for. She who abused his sisters and tormented him because he was the image of his father. His mother had shown cruelties to children which were God’s lambs and he figured she would burn in hell for it.

When he left home and went to war, he and religion parted ways. But now, in the midst of this nightmare, he was child again behind his closed eyes and he could hear the voice of a ten-year old Iowa farm boy asking the Lord to deliver them from this horrible place, from this nest of vipers where pale abominations had crawled forth from hell to claim the Earth as their own. And as he prayed, he thought of his flat in Albany, the fine brass bed that he would often fall into, more often drunk than not. The fire flickering, the hoarfrost on the windows. It was like none of this had ever happened. He was home and he was safe and in safety his mind fell back in time to the farmhouse and his mother and his sister, long hot summers of planting and chill autumns of harvest, watching Shaky Papineau stagger from his stillhouse up the hill to his bed after a solid day of drinking, his nerves burnt out like old fuses from corn liquor. He felt peaceful. He was in his bed up in the loft and the fire down in the hearth would throw crazy shapes over the plank ceiling and sometimes he would think they were ghosts come in the night to suck his blood and—

Wake up!

The child inside him jumped out of bed and then the old man he now was opened his eyes, sweating and shivering, and, dear God, he’d been asleep.
Asleep.
That was when
they
came: when you were harmless and dreaming. That’s when they crawled in your window and sipped from your throat. Doc rubbed the slumber from his eyes. Bailey was still out, trembling slightly like a dog in a dream. The fire was burning low and Reg was snoozing in the chair and…and what was that smell? That awful smell like dead things washed up to spoil on toxic beaches?

A shadow. Two shadows…

Children.

Two children, the firelight reflective in their eyes like silver coins, shining off their teeth. They had wanted him asleep. They had
compelled
him to sleep so they could do what their kind always did. Doc saw them, a bright white terror exploding in his chest, and he tried to move but it was like he was drugged. He fell from the chair and the sound of it brought Reg awake and he saw them, too. He made a gasping/whimpering sound. The children were gone…
no,
they were crawling up the walls and moving across the ceiling like shadows thrown by the fire. Their shadows crept down the door and disappeared in the vicinity of the keyhole.

Gone.

Disturbed at their play and frightened off.

Bailey chattered her teeth in her stupor.

Doc got to his feet and tuned up the kerosene lanterns until the room was bright with even yellow light and the shadows had been pushed into the corners and under the furniture where they belonged.

You’re not welcome here. Go away, just go away…

“They were here, Doc,” Reg said, still loopy from it all. “I dreamed…I dreamed there were two kids lost in the storm and they were calling out to me. I found them and held their hands and they were so cold, so damn cold…and…”

“Just a dream,” Doc told him, checking his neck and wrists for signs of the bite. He found nothing. “We got lucky. But we won’t get lucky twice.”

Bailey’s teeth continued to chatter.

8

As the tension inside her increased, Wenda felt herself growing rigid. She took one of the lanterns and went to the door. Morris was curled up on the floor by the fire, Megga had fallen asleep in
a chair. Now was the time to do things. But she would have to be quick before something happened because something was going to and she could feel it building around her. Whatever it was, it froze her with fear. It seemed to be self-generating and almost electrical. It felt like static rising in the air around her, a negative charge of voltage that was going right up her spine and making the hairs on her arms stand up. It was a cold sort of energy, cold like auroras flickering above ice caps.