Hag Night (23 page)

Then a voice:
“Wake up, Wenny.”

David.

She listened to the storm outside the house, blowing, moaning, sounding like what she imagined a banshee would sound like. She listened to the encroaching darkness around her. She could hear the wind whispering down the chimney. The old house was moving, it seemed, it was alive as old houses always are, groaning, creaking, echoing with the ancient sounds of the people who’d once lived there. The hollow thud of footsteps in the upstairs corridors. The creaking of a bed. Hands gliding down stair rails. Muffled laughter in a deserted room. Beams and boards strained against nail heads, windows rattled against casements, rafters that were old and tired with the weight of centuries sighed in the night. She heard all these things and something more that she at first could not identify: a skittering sort of sound. A sound of rats in midnight walls. A clawing, creeping, rustling sort of sound.

Then she knew.

As black fear filled her throat and sealed it shut, she knew very well just as she knew she had invited it into the house. She tried to steel herself for what had to be done, but it felt like she was made of old sticks and limp twine. She could not get her body moving, there was no lick in her limbs.

The skittering sound.

Closer.

Can I come in, Wenda?

She got to her feet and she could hear that voice calling out to her through the dark mists of her dreams. It was telling her she could sit back down and relax because the fire had burned low and it would come to her.

No, no, not that. Never that.

She tightened her fist on the knife and looked around. Megga was still sleeping. Morris had not moved. The candles she had lit were still guttering. She saw Megga’s penlight on the table by her chair. Silently, she went over there and grabbed it. She lowered herself to her knees very near Morris.

She made herself breathe.

She made herself ready even though it felt like her belly was filled with a warm, white pulp.

The fire had burned down to a few low flames and a bed of hot coals. The hearth was big. She moved closer to it, cocking an ear. The scratching sound was coming from up inside the chimney and she tried to tell herself it was a bird caught up there or a squirrel frightened by the smoke and heat, but
she knew better. What was coming down the chimney was what she had invited in.

The knife in one hand and the penlight in the other, she got her knees as close
to the fire as she dared, then craned her neck, leaned forward, and looked up the chimney. As she did so, she clicked on the penlight and it illuminated the black, smoke-stained brick and the pale, naked thing creeping down at her like a spider. She saw the grinning, gruesome oval of its boyish face, how that childhood innocence was corrupted by something vile and noxious. Its eyes were like misty moonlight, its grinning mouth set with sharp teeth that it licked with a black tongue.

Wouldn’t you like to float away, Wenda?

She jumped back and tossed two logs into the fire. They were cracked open with dryness; the coals were glowing orange. The logs caught instantly, flames rising up into bright yellow blades of flame that climbed higher and higher as she threw more wood on it.

And up in the chimney, the little boy who’d come out of the grave on this night of blowing wind and falling snow, screeched with an agonized, eerie cry that was part hatred and part angry denial at being cheated out of the blood it had come for. The cry rose up and echoed off into the night like the screech of an owl.

Morris slept on.

So did Megga.

Wenda figured it was all in her mind. Maybe it hadn’t happened. But that was wishful thinking and she knew better. She could still her that screaming in her brain—it was white-hot and cutting.

Megga sat up. “What are you doing?” she asked.

Wenda almost started to tell her, then she just shook her head. “Just throwing a few logs on the fire. That’s all.”

12

“She’s barely breathing now,” Doc said in an utterly defeated voice that came out dry and tasted bitter in his mouth. He had never felt so utterly helpless and hopeless in his life. This child was dying from loss of blood, from trauma…and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. She needed a hospital. She needed a transfusion and only in movies, he knew, did people even attempt such a thing with materials at hand.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Reg said. It wasn’t a question. It was a statement that was almost indifferent in its pain.

“No, nothing. Not a goddamn thing.”

Doc needed a drink. He’d never needed one as badly as he did at that moment, but even if he had a bottle…what was the point? It would only accelerate his guilt and self-loathing because Bailey was dying from his own incompetence. This is what he told himself. This is what he believed. If he only hadn’t waited around with Reg by the window when Burt had gone.

If, if, if…

He didn’t know how much blood was left in her, but it couldn’t have been much because she was white as the proverbial sheet. There was not so much as a hint of blush at her cheeks. Where before she had been hot and feverish, now she was just cold. So very cold. Her flesh felt like refrigerated latex.

“What are we going to do, Doc?” Reg asked then. “I mean, really, what the hell are we going to do?”

Doc didn’t even have the strength to drag his eyes over to him. Maybe he didn’t want to see Reg’s face and the desperation cut into it like knife scars. He brought his head down until his forehead rested on his fist and tried to think, tried to come up with something because, really, what
were
they going to do? But the thoughts wouldn’t come, the answers were nonexistent in his exhaustion and frustration. He only felt the simple animal need to strike out against something or someone. It made him think of the war, crawling through swamps of the Delta and humping it through the jungled hills of the Central Highlands. He had not understood any of it then. His young mind could not encapsulate the need for war. Maybe it made some kind of vague sense to those who planned it, but on the ground it was incomprehensible. But maybe he understood now. War was born of frustration. War was the result of failed diplomacy. War was what you did when there was nothing left to do: you stopped talking and you started hitting.

That’s how he felt now: in his anguish and aggravation he wanted to hit. He wanted to find some goddamn vampires and go Van Helsing on them and ram stakes through chests.
How does that feel, you fucking parasites? How does it feel to be helpless?
Reg, of course, was still looking at him the way the kid might have looked at his father when he was scared, hoping to elicit some sage wisdom and practical advice.

Doc almost started laughing.

Didn’t he realize what an absolute oh-my-God pile of refuse his would-be savior indeed was? He was no one to look to for guidance. When he wasn’t playing make-believe as Doc Blood he was a worthless drunk. That was the reality of it. The monkey on his back was digging its claws into his throat and screeching in his ears in its need for a good belt of rye whiskey. It would have sold each and everyone of them down the road to get it. It would have handed them over to Count fucking Chocula for a six-dollar bottle of hootch.

But, in character,
he said, “We’re going to survive, son. Right now, I see only the promise of the dawn and the new day. And we’re going to get there, one way or another.”

Reg’s eyes were wet. But he was
believing.

God, Doc could see it.

He was believing completely. And Doc knew at that moment if he hadn’t before, that he had the gift, all right, the gift of bullshit. If he were an evangelist, he could have gotten Reg to empty his wallet and sign over his house to him. And it wasn’t so much that he himself had any special powers of persuasion, it was that he knew what the kid wanted to hear and he gave him the belief he so needed.

“What about…about Bailey?”

“Yes,” Doc said, “yes. Well, we’ll see what transpires. If worse comes to worse, we’ll have to put her out in the snow.”

He didn’t elaborate on that and didn’t need to, of course. Reg had seen the movies—Christ, he worked on
Chamber of Horrors—
he knew what happened to the victims of vampires. He knew very well what they became.

Sighing, Doc held Bailey’s cool hand and felt something inside him break open as he made contact. He shivered and shook. Hot beads of sweat ran down his spine, each one a droplet of venom. It was like some malarial fever born of pale green swamps had taken hold of him and he could not shake it. Except, it wasn’t that. It was guilt and self-recrimination, disappointment and anxiety.
It’ll be over soon, my dear. Soon the big sleep will take you down into darkness.
And even as he thought that, he dreaded the truth of it.

Yes, she would sink into darkness.

But she would not rest.

He
remembered, as a child, long before his father had run off and his mother became an acid-eyed, venom-tongued shrew, that she had been a very good mother: caring, calm, loving. When he was sick she used to sit and hold his hand and sing to him. She had a beautiful voice. Maybe not the sort to sing an aria and stun a crowd, but a soft and wistful voice that made a body feel warm and tucked-in, curled-up and content. It was the sort of voice that could summon you from fevers and flus and put you back on your feet as it had him many times. He wanted to sing to Bailey then, to draw her out of a world of graveyards and starving shadows and back into the light.

But he couldn’t.

It would do no good.

Because even then, he could feel the dire influence of those outside, those who waited in the storm. He could hear their voice
s, sweet and singsong and profane. Many voices that were one. It came to him in low pulsations of evil, discordant and invasive. It echoed up from the depths of crypts and cellar-holds. It sounded like whispering satin and coffin-silk, graveyard rats scratching in oblong boxes and lost souls moaning in the dark watches of night. He shut the ghost-voices out and wished dearly that Bailey could do the same. But it was in her, the virus of tombs, the embryo of malignance. And it was growing, gaining vitality as she herself pined away into the grave.

Doc felt for her pulse and it was barely there: weak, irregular.

“She’s almost gone,” he said to Reg, blinking away the oceans that filled his eyes. “Come say good-bye to her.”

“I…I can’t. I’m afraid.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of. Come over here.
Please.
I don’t want her to die alone.”

13

Morris had been sleeping for an eternity of darkness and maybe he’d been conscious the entire time. The slumber
was like a shroud he wore. One he hid under but could hide under no more. It had been stripped away from him and he had convoluted memories of Wenda and Megga speaking to him, saying things that hadn’t made much sense, of heat from the fire baking him, of wolves in a forest: red-eyed, slat-thin wolves hungry for his flesh. It seemed that he had heard and seen things without really understanding them or wanting to. But it had been there, everything that had happened, only he was removed from it like seeing sheets of rain through a window.

What brought him awake and as near to his senses as he’d been in some time was the ghost.
The evil ghost with the red eyes.

He tried to tell himself it was a dream. But if it was a dream, then it was a dream of madness, blackness, and a shadowy world beyond the pale of death. No, he was not dreaming. It was the ghost who was dreaming. Dreaming of
him,
dreaming of drawing Morris down into narrow houses and trenches of dark earth where corpse-orchids grew, flowering and fetid-smelling and pulsing white with juices of pestilence.

Morris opened his eyes and saw Megga and Wenda, still on guard, still waiting out the night. His eyes moved warily in their sockets like those of a frightened vole. He had a strange memory of pain and he was almost afraid to move, afraid to do anything but wait there by the fire. He was made senseless and numb by his own fear.

But why the memory of pain?

The ghost.
It was the ghost. He had tried to ignore the voice of the ghost and the pain increased; he had tried to completely shut it out and a headache like a hot, bubbling geyser tore through his brain.

That was the pain.

That was the memory of defiance.

He’s going to come for me and I know it. He’ll slaughter the women and make me watch. Then he’ll enslave me.

No, Morris couldn’t wait for that. He had to run into the night, into the open arms of the storm, for there he would find sanctuary. Wenda would not let him leave and he knew it. He could see her over there with a sharpened stake in one hand and huge gleaming butcher’s knife in the other. Those were her weapons that insured the politics of her office. She wasn’t afraid to use them. She was not afraid to kill. She wasn’t even afraid to use them on the things outside in the storm.

But he had to find a way out.

He knew what was out there. To them he was prey. They would hunt him down. In his mind he saw himself trying to break free of Cobton, the cold getting inside him, making his blood run like jelly.  The white faces pushing in, the smiling mouths of teeth. And the hands. Pallid hands reaching out for him, trapping him, ensnaring him, as he tried to fight his way free. Those people out there would swarm and multiply and bury him alive in groping grave-cold fingers and sucking hot mouths—