Hag Night (34 page)

It was the silence of the grave.

There had only been one wagon out and the pounding hooves of its team had been like thunder booming. The wagon was piled with the dead. They were taking them up to the burial ground to be interred before the ground was locked hard with frost. They would not listen. Katya had tried again and again, but they would not listen to common sense because she was a crazy old woman.

She had seen rats in the village.

Great voracious swarms of rats that poured down into the streets from the old mill on the hilltop that no one would visit now. They claimed it was too much of a climb in the snow, but there were other reasons only they would not speak of them. Yet, it was curious how when the sun began to set and the long shadow of the mill was cast over the town like that of a cemetery monument, the villagers went out of their way not to be caught in that shadow as if its touch meant death.

When people began to die of the wasting sickness with no discernable cause and the rats ran free in the streets, it could mean only one thing, the very thing Katya had lived in terror of most of her life: the coming of the Vurvolak. The rats were not too active in the daytime, but at night they were bold, sweeping over the town in a hungry, dirty horde, eating anything they could find. Even dogs and stray sheep had gone missing now. Their lair was up in the old mill. It should have been burned to the ground, but no one was brave enough to go up there to root out the source of the pestilence. So the rats bred and their numbers swelled which was
bad enough in and of itself, Katya knew, but up there, in the dark bowels of the mill, she feared what slept with the rats and came out only at night.

“When will Mama be back?” Michael asked.

“Soon, very soon now, my child,” Katya lied. “You will see.”

But, oh, your mother is my daughter and I love her, but I do not think I want her to come back now. I do not want her to bring into this house the thing she has found out there.
Katya crossed herself again. The children were hungry and the pot of barley soup on the stovetop was making their stomachs growl. But they could not eat. It was an old Albanian custom that food must not be touched when a priest is expected, not until he himself sits and sups. To break with custom was to invite dire catastrophe, Katya knew. If custom had been followed in Cobton as it should have been, the village would not be a corpse in search of a grave now.

“Can we eat soon?” Anna asked.

“Oh yes, very soon now. Very soon.”

Tonight, she would make preparations. She would not sleep. She would hang a bag of salt around the throat of each child and recite a psalm for protection against evil. She would anoint the doors and windows with holy water and keep the fire burning high. She would keep the door barred and nothing would enter, not unless it was invited.

And I will never invite them! Never!

Oh, but maybe you won’t have a choice, old woman. You have spent your entire life believing in the unbelievable, fearing the unknown, and embracing the impossible, thinking you could guard against these things with your superstitions and old customs and folk magic. But maybe what you failed to take into consideration is that the Vurvolak have their own sort of magic and it is a cunning and diabolic magic. A magic that is black where yours is white. They are of an ancient seed and possessed of dark abilities you cannot guess at. Once they feared you in their own way, but that was when you were young, pure of mind and pure of body, but now that restless stream of strange blood within you has dried up.

You cannot hope to withstand them.

They want the children as they always want the children. It’s where they always begin their cycle of contagion. They will feed on the children. Your grandchildren. They will empty them of blood and life and soul and turn them into walking shells, predatory ghosts that exist only to spread the seed of evil—

Katya shut it out of her brain. She would not think such things. She would not let herself walk down that path for it led into the black heart of a forest she would never, ever escape from once its black spiking branches enclosed her. No, she
could
fight them and she
would
fight them.

And as she thought this, she heard a momentary
peal of braying laughter that was strident and absolutely inhuman.
Stupid old crone, silly cauldron-stirring old fishwife…did you think we had forgotten you? Did you think by leaving the old lands that you would not see us again? That we would not come for you in the end and profane all that you hold sacred? That we would not turn this village into a cemetery as we have done with so many others? Your son-in-law searched for us and we welcomed him. He stands at our side now. Your daughter went to look for the priest and she found him…or perhaps, he found her, drinking deep of her sacramental wine until it flowed in hot coppery rivers down his chin. And we’ll have the children. Each, in turn, shall be milked. Then you, old woman, then you. You shall sleep with the rats. For tonight the Vurvolak comes…

Shivering, Katya went over and warmed herself by the fire with the children. Its heat could not dispel the chill deep inside her marrow. David began to fuss in his sleep, so she rocked his
bassinet gently. These were her riches and her precious jewels: the children. She would fight to keep them safe and free of the ghosts of the night.

“Papa’s not coming home, is he?” Anna said, her eyes misting.

“Oh yes, child, he’ll be coming and your mother, too.”

Michael’s lower lip was trembling. “They’re dead.”

“No, no!” Katya said to them, hugging them close to her.

“Stephen said the dead are coming back and—”

Katya clutched them both tighter. She would not listen to such things, she would not let their innocent mouths be tainted by such awfulness. She could not allow it. She held them there before the fire, repeating an old saying from her childhood village: “Ssshhh, my children, for tonight the Vurvolak comes. It comes for your daughter, then for your son…”

3

And sixty years before…

Thump…thump…thump.

The soldiers were working down in the churchyard below Katya’s window, doing their grisly task that all knew but must never be spoken of. It was the sound of hammers upon stakes.

There were other sounds, too, but she shut her ears against them.

The plague was spreading and the elders of Haidam were worried, adults living in terror for their families. Two villages not far away had become ghost towns now and the elders would not allow it to happen to a third. They called in the army and the business of exorcism, overseen by the village priest and a military surgeon, went on most of the day.

Katya’s father assisted them.

She heard the stories he told mother by the chimney corner at night when he thought the children were sleeping. Katya crouched on the stairs and listened. Having already cleaned out the burial yards of the other cursed villages, the soldiers knew exactly what to look for. They searched amongst the graves for tiny holes that the Vu
rvolak used when leaving at night, issuing forth as ghostly mists before becoming corporeal for the seeking of blood. They found twenty-five graves that were suspicious. Upon opening them, they discovered that while seven of the cadavers were sufficiently decayed, eighteen were in a most unnatural state. “There are tests to be made,” father said to mother. No one wished to defile the dead unnecessarily. They looked first for livid puncture marks upon the throat or wrists. Once these were found, a cursory examination was begun. The fingernails of the Vurvolak often grew long and sharp, as did the canines or central incisors. The surgeon checked for this. Other telltale signs were the staring, cataleptic eyes, cheeks ruddy with life, or a bloated overfed appearance to the corpse itself. The Vurvolak often chewed at their shrouds in the grave or scratched at the lids of their coffins. These things must be differentiated from those of premature burial, father says. Some of the corpses were floating in coffins filled with blood and there was no mistaking what they were. Others required more than a general physical examination: the surgeon, using long needles, pierced suspicious bodies. If blood ran in combination to the above symptoms, then the cadaver in question was most certainly a Vurvolak.

But there was only one sure way to know.

And Katya had seen proof of that, peering through the shutters of her window at what was happening far below.

She was told to keep her shutters closed. Everyone in the village not employed in the work in the churchyard was told to do the same. This was not a spectacle to be watched, but a most dire and grim affair and the army would arrest any who thought otherwise.

Thump…thump…thump.

But Katya had to see. She opened the shutters only after she heard a most awful scream. She looked down into the churchyard below and saw dozens of exhumed graves with great piles of black earth next to them. Two soldiers wrestled a coffin from the ground and brushed soil from it. The lid was pried open and even from her vantage point, Katya could see the corpse in the box…it was bloated like a barrel and shining red with blood, a distended human spider fattened from its feedings. The surgeon and the priest examined it and, shaking their heads, stepped back, and two soldiers step forward. One had a stake and the other a heavy mallet.

Katya knew she must not watch.

She must not see this.

But she was unable to look away and she begged God for forgiveness for her iniquity. The mallet was swung and the stake struck. There was a moist, meaty sort of sound as it impaled the body. A fountain of glistening red blood shot up into the air in a gushing spout, splattering the soldiers. The effect was instantaneous: the body writhed and thrashed. She saw its ensanguined hands clawing at the air, flailing and fighting. The mouth opened with a horrid, rending scream that echoed off amongst the graves.

Thump…thump…thump.

The stake was driven clean through and the corpse no longer moved. One of the bloodied soldiers took an axe and chopped the head free. The surgeon stuffed something in its mouth and then the head was returned to the box. The priest made a blessing over the coffin as it was filled with wild roses and nailed shut.

Another coffin was unearthed and opened.

The examination was made and a stake was placed against the breast of a woman who had once been Katya’s schoolteacher. The stake was hit once and the corpse nearly leaped from the box. It seized the hand of the soldier holding the stake and as he cried out in horror, the corpse bit into his hand. Three soldiers took hold of it as the stake was pounded through. The scream of the dead woman echoed in Katya’s brain for many days.

She closed the shutters.

Trembling, dizzy, a hot-cold sweat running down her face, she dropped to her knees on the floor. Every fear she had known as a child came back to haunt her now. They bunched in her head, cackling in her ears. She had seen them now. The Vurvolak. The stories were true. They were not just ghost stories to be told by firelight. Mother always laughed about the Vurvolak when Katya told her the wild tales she had heard…most of them from Grandma Mirajeta…but maybe, just maybe, mother only laughed so she did not scream.

And perhaps, mother did not know everything after all.

Mirajeta was much older and wiser than mother and knew many things. It was she who covered all the mirrors in the house when she learned that the graves were to be opened. Mother did not stop her and chide her for being superstitious. She just looked away. Mirajeta said the mirrors had to be covered for those lying in the churchyard would try to contaminate the living through them. When they saw their destruction coming, they would seek the reflections of any living person in a mirror and make them a Vurvolak.

The night of the exorcism was a bad one.

Mirajeta told Katya that the Vurvolak would seek retribution for the destruction of their brethren and that she, Katya, would be in the most danger of all. Katya was thirteen. Her menses had begun. A menstruating virgin had a power that could shake the world, Mirajeta said, if only it could be directed. Was it not true that a virgin in menses could turn wine into vinegar or make horses miscarry or blight the harvest? Or that a girl in such a state could wither flowers and curdle milk within the cow? And as they could do such things, so could they be devastating to the Vurvolak, Mirajeta explained. A virgin in menses would know the locations where the Vurvolak hid during the daytime and who their leader was. They would not be able to control the mind of such a girl. With a stake in her hand, she was deadly to them. And they knew it. They would want to kill Katya, to make her like them, as punishment for her father helping the soldiers and because of her power, which was derived from the fact that she was ripe but uncorrupt.

So that night, the shutters were locked and the windows bolted. Fires burned high in hearths. Mirajeta placed a linen bag of salt around Katya’s throat and drew another circle of salt around her bed. A wax cross that had been blessed on Ascension Day was hung above Katya’s head. White roses and hawthorn branches were strung up in the corners. Mirajeta sat in a rocking chair and prayed in a wavering, eerie voice throughout the night.

Nothing would silence her.

Not even when, just after midnight, the Vurvolak gathered outside the house in numbers, drawn from every crypt and moldering secret grave for miles to stand there beneath the pale light of the thin-edged moon, sending their minds out to those in the house, compelling them to open doors and windows and, more importantly, to invite them in. Katya, shivering and sobbing in her bed as Mirajeta recited a curious combination of Christian psalms and apotropaic folk charms, felt their minds reaching out for hers, scratching at the walls of her psyche like dogs trying to get in.