Hag Night (32 page)

He
bumped into Reg and seized him in his arms, as if he needed to feel another warm, breathing human being or his mind would deflate like a leaky balloon.

The girl rose up two feet off the ground, her taloned fingers tearing at the stake and succeeding in shearing her own white flesh. It burst open as if from some internal pressure, revealing a pulpy yellow meat that was livid against her bluing flesh.
She screeched like an animal being skinned alive, blood blisters breaking open on her body and exploding like rotten grapes. Saliva and blood flew from her mouth in tangles, the pustular pits of her eyes bulging into huge black-red orbs and then falling into themselves with a gushing sluice of slime. The skin of her face became threadbare mesh and pulled off the skull beneath like spider’s silk. Contorting and thrashing, she fell backwards, her skeleton bursting free, steaming and breaking apart…but long before she hit the floor something inside her ignited and she erupted with flame and smoke and a cremating heat, crashing down into a heap of smoldering bones that continued to tremble, the jaws of her skull snapping again and again then crumbling away.

And Reg, who was barely on his feet by that point, fell into Doc and Doc grabbed him and shoved him towards the door. “RUN!” he shouted at him. “FOR GODSAKE, RUN!”

And Reg did without further urging.

Doc heard the door slam open and Reg’s feet running. The other vampires looked out at him with eyes that managed to be saddened and hateful at the same time. They did not follow Reg; there was no need. Their entertainment was here before them. Eyes wide and gleaming, lit yellow like electric bulbs screwed into their faces, slavering jaws opened, fangs sliding from pale gums, they closed in on him and he waited for it.

24

Reg burst from the door and, in the finest horror movie fashion, tripped over his own boots, hitting the floor like 170 pounds of dead weight. He scrambled to his feet and ran, ran right for the door in his mad flight and was reaching for the doorknob when a voice in his head said:
What the fuck are you doing?

He withdrew his hand with a strangled yelping sound in his throat.

He couldn’t go out there.

They
were out there, too, just waiting for him to pull some bonehead move like that. To them, he was prey and like any hunters they were using his own panic against him, hoping he would make a big fat mistake.

No, no, no!

He turned around, fully expecting to see a red mouth and gleaming fangs coming out of the darkness at him, but there was nothing but the emptiness of the old house and the shadows. He had to get somewhere. He had to get somewhere safe. But in his panic, he could not think of where that might be or how he might get there. In fact, he could barely think at all. His mind was clouded with fear. Tears were running from his eyes. His breath came out in a white expanding frost-mist. His heart was pounding so hard it felt like it might explode right out of his chest.

Do something, you fucking idiot…

So he started first this way, then that, approaching corridors and then turning back because he was too scared to go down them. He reached for doors and panicked at the idea of what might be waiting in the darkness behind them. All he succeeded in doing was to bring himself around in a crazy circle until he realized he was facing back towards the parlor. He heard Doc scream in there and he ran for the stairs, trying to jog up them, but tripping and banging his knees in his heavy boots. But he didn’t slow down: we went up them on his hands and knees like a hunted animal.

He paused at the top, laying across the landing and gasping for breath.

Outside the storm raged, clawing at the house to get in.

In his fright and manic flight, he had winded himself, expending about five times the amount of energy he might
have used if he’d kept his head. Other than his rasping lungs and thudding heart, he was only aware of the sound of the house itself: an immense silence that was so very quiet it was thundering in his ears.
They
knew how to use such silence. It was how
they
cloaked themselves.
They
were coming for him and at any moment he would feel cold breath at his neck and colder lips at his throat. Then they would drain his blood with erotic glee.

He pulled himself up.

Other than the cellar or possibly the attic, he was in the darkest quarter of the house because there were no windows in that part of the upstairs corridor. This is where he had been with Burt earlier and, dear God, he wished Burt were here now. Burt was a selfish asshole, but Reg would have taken him, he would have jumped up and hugged him if only he wasn’t so unbearably alone.

Downstairs, Doc was screaming again.

You gonna let those things do that to him? You gonna let fucking Doc die like that? Doc would do anything for you! Doc told you to run because he was sacrificing himself so that you could live!

Reg turned, ready to bolt down the stairs and charge into the fray and save Doc or goddamn well die trying, bu
t he saw a figure coming up the steps at him and his heart skipped a beat in his chest. At first it looked like just a shadow gliding up towards him, but now he could see it was a shape that was becoming a man. Reg blinked and he saw that it was Burt. His face an even bloodless white, his eyes huge and suffused with a dirty lunar glow, his teeth grown long and deadly.

“Hey, Reg,”
he said in a voice that was screeching and scraping like the blade of a knife dragged over a windowpane. If it was intended to calm him, it had the opposite effect. Burt stopped half way up and just stood there. Reg thought he could almost see the staircase right through him.
“Oh, Reg…do you know what they did to me out there? Do you know what it was like to die like that? Why did you let it happen? Why didn’t you help me?”

Reg let out a squealing sound and raced away down the upstairs corridor. He found a door and slammed it shut behind him, locking it. There was nothing in the room with him that he saw…but that didn’t mean one of them wasn’t under the bed or waiting in the closet.

Burt was at the door now.

He was knocking with a slow, almost mechanical sort of cadence.

“Reg, let me in,”
he said.
“I want to show you what they did to me.”

But Reg was not about to do that. He had no intention of doing anything but staying alive…the only problem was that he was now essentially in a cage, a box with no way out and if Burt found a way in, well, there could only be one
outcome. But Reg refused to submit. He refused to be something that lay in darkness like a corpse during the day, rising up by night. No, no, no…

The doorknob jiggled.
“We don’t need doors to come in,”
Burt said.

And to prove that, he started coming in
beneath
the door like a spreading puddle of ectoplasm, more of him pouring in every second until that glowing white mass began to take on features and Reg saw the elongated mouth and the leering, eyes of morbid starvation.

Then Reg did the only thing he could do.

He picked up a chair and swung it at the window again and again until it shattered and the storm came in, frigid air and snow blowing in. What Burt did then he did not know, because he climbed out onto the roof.

25

As the dead came for him, Doc felt a wind like a glacial whirlpool whip through the room and the windows shattered inward. He saw a shadow rise up amongst the others…one that seemed to be composed of hundreds of bats madly beating their black wings…becoming a cycling vortex of black moths…melting into a skeletal mass that grew up from the floor like a gnarled pillar, a dead tree regenerating its limbs. There was a flapping sound as of a sheet on a line and a great cloak seemed to unfold and envelop the shadow. When it parted, a man was standing there, a tall and gaunt man wearing a flowing hide coat, the black fur of which was threadbare and ragged, standing out in spokes with frozen blood. His hands were amazingly pale, blue-veined, the fingers long and slender with tapering yellow nails that looked sharp as razors. Doc could imagine fingers like that—sure, practiced, surgical—poking through bowels and muscles and delicate tissues to remove malignancies.

But the man was no healer and those fingers did not take away pain, they inflicted it.

The other vampires were not moving now. In fact, they had frozen in place like graveyard statues. Only their eyes were alive, shining with diabolic hunger.

At that moment, Doc was beyond simple fear. His heart did not seem to beat and his lungs did no
t seem to draw breath. He stood shivering, nerve endings feeling plucked like the strings of a lyre, his blood settling low as if it feared to be drained.

The figure before him had not moved. The wind still rushed aroun
d it like a gust from a tomb. The walls shook. Bits of twinkling broken glass spun in dust-devils.

In Doc’s brain, there was something like music, like scratching violins and stringed instruments played with sawtoothed files. The sepulchral figure before him stared down at him with a frightening elemental wrath, his eyes a brilliant liquid red going to purple like wine stains. They looked into Doc, drilled into his skull, with absolute and irresistible dominance.  He
felt things breaking apart inside him, shattering and splintering, black universes opening up and swallowing him, retching him body and soul onto the barren faces of dead worlds where slithering shadows crawled into his head and ate him alive from the inside out.

Then the wind died and the walls stopped trembling and Doc heard a voice in his head. A ranting, enraged voice, one nearly deranged with anger. It at first sounded like German, then Latin, then a dozen dialects he had never heard before until becoming a flat, almost guttural Slavic tongue.

Doc did not know what kept him on his feet because it felt like all the blood had drained down into his knees and his head was spinning. He looked into the eyes of the figure before him and felt weak inside. The man had long, poker-straight black tresses spilled over his shoulders. Streaks of brilliant white came from each temple and feathered out into gray. His long drooping mustache was of the same color. His face was long and waxy, the chin sharp and the nose hawkish, the nostrils flaring. The skin was the sickly yellow-white of leprosy, stretched tight over the skull below. There were deep pockets of shadow beneath the high cheekbones, filling the hollows of the sunken cheeks themselves. The face was set with minute wrinkles and cracks like an old photograph. It seemed to have the texture of spun cobwebs. It was grotesquely corded as if there were roots growing under the skin.

Doc knew who he was: this was the boogeyman from the charnel pits and he would make the world into a graveyard. The boogeyman had a name and Doc knew it. It trembled on the tip of his tongue.
“You…” he said. “You are Griska. You are a Magyar.”

In Doc’s head, Griska began to laugh with a hysterical cackling, breathing out clouds of soot that winged in the air and became
death’s-head moths. A stink of wild fermentation blew out from him. His mouth split open like a knife cut, his teeth pearly white, the central incisors narrow, long, and hooked like those of a pit viper. In Doc’s head, there was more than laughter, but a choir of anguished children behind each syllable. Too many voices, too many dialects, but all of them lorded over by a screeching, hideous male voice:
Behold, I stand at the door, and knock. Give unto me that which is mine. And give unto Her that which is hers.

Griska wanted some kind of offering, some sort of sacrifice…but one offered to him
by
the victim. That was the greatest depth of corruption and the greatest joy for a thing like him: to be given a life, to have it laid before him by the victim’s own hand.

But Doc refused.

He wanted to shout his defiance at that smug ghoul, but Griska seemed to know. He knew the flavor and the taste of defiance and did not care for it. In Doc’s head, his voice said,
Martyr.
A wind seemed to blow out from him and Doc felt it take hold of him with hurricane force, lifting him off his feet and driving him ten or twelve feet through the air until he impacted with the wall. His boots were three feet off the floor, but he did not fall. The force held him and that force was generated by Griska himself. Throughout the room, the walls were creaking and groaning and Doc soon saw why: nails were being ejected from them. No, not ejected but
pulled
free by the same force that held him, pressing him against the wall with such might he thought his guts would be forced out his mouth.

But that didn’t happen; the nails found him instead. His left arm was forced up and out until it was parallel with his shoulder. His right arm followed suit until he was held there in some grim parody of the crucifixion. Then the nails were flying.

The first one he felt more than the others. It made a sterile whiteness explode in his head.

It went in through his right wrist like a spike, through muscle and tendon and artery. It brought pain. Unreal, white-hot pain. The second nail filled his belly with needles, bringing a fevered numbness and a cold running sweat. The third nail brought a sweet and muddy revelation, a distorted sense of mystery, exaltation, and dark desire that ran from his wounds in a red, flowing sap.