Hag Night (36 page)

Belic said before that hammer came down again, Kradjec’s face inflated like it was filled with gas and a strange sort of decay overtook it until most of the meat was clean eaten away. His flesh was a riot of popping sores that ran with black ooze like the juice squeezed from an inky cap mushroom. Within seconds, he split open like roasting meat and they could see the skeleton beneath which was horribly alive with some unnamable vitality. As he cracked open—Belic likened the process to a turd that has dried in the sun for a month—gouts of yellow fluid poured out of him once the blood was gone and that fluid was undulant with grave maggots. By that point he looked like a mud-and-straw scarecrow bursting its seams. His face had fallen into a central vault-like pit and his clawing hands hung with loops of skin that dangled like holiday ribbons. The fingers were gray and spongy as they gripped the sides of the coffin, exploding into mush.

“The stake was driven in the rest of the
way and Kradjec…he was just gone,” Belic said. “The clothes he wore just deflated and there was nothing but a few scraps of bone, blowing gray ash, some black ooze…and hundreds of carrion beetles filling the casket. God help us.”

Vidor wiped sweat from his face. “He…he told you when you would die?”

“He did.” Belic nodded. “And it will be soon.”

Endre, the elder of the Szarka
brothers, said he had heard—though not witnessed—such things in Hungary. A woman who had returned from death had fed on her own children. She was dug up and brought out into the forest. She was disemboweled and her head was cleaved free. Gouts of blood flowed from her. Even headless and gutless, her body fought and clawed for some time. According to local custom, her heart was removed, severed into four pieces and burnt separately.

Katya said, “There is one among us who has brought the plague of the Vurvolak.”

“Griska,” says Belic.

“That is what he is called: Griska.” Katya looked from Belic to the Szarka brothers. “He is said to be here. He is said to be up in the old mill. But who has seen him? Who has kn
own him that still walks in daylight?”

Endre stared at his own knotty hands. “Was there not a
Bela Griska of history? A Magyar who commanded a peasant army of 400, which held out against over 100,000 Ottoman Turks for many months? Is my memory correct?”

“It is,” Vidor told him. “
A fierce warrior to his enemies, a butcher to his own people. But it could not be the same Griska…not after these many centuries.”

Endre shrugged. “So what are we to do?” he asked.

“I think you know,” Belic said.

“We go to the grave of the Widow Varga,” Katya told them, knowing they were in agreement. “We open it and then…we see.”

It was hard work for old men, but Belic had spent his life as a carpenter and it was he who did most of the work. The coffin of the Widow Varga was opened as Katya prayed and a hot breeze of putrescence blew out at her. This was the only sign of earthly decomposition.

“Oh, Ivanka,” Katya despaired, looking down at the corpse. “It is true.”

The Widow Varga had been an old woman with threadbare white hair, a face seamed by wrinkles…now that face was smooth, unmarked and unblemished, her hair lustrous and dark. Blood was slobbered from her mouth and down her throat. Her teeth had grown long and sharp and her eyes, forever staring, were huge and dark like the depths of a pond.

“Don’t look away, my darling
,” she said with a voice that was like velvet caressing Katya’s brain. “Just look in my eyes, my dear Katya. You are wrong, so very wrong about it all. You know that I love you, my good friend. I would not lie to you. I want you to look deep in my eyes and remember what it was like to be a girl. A beautiful girl, long-limbed, round-hipped, and full-breasted. A girl men wanted and women admired. Reach out, Katya, reach out and touch me and I’ll give you your youth back. Then together we’ll crush these doddering old fools. Reach out, Katya…touch me…touch your old friend…”

Katya began to do just that, caught in the web of what lay in that box.

“NOOO!” Endre cried. “SZORKANY! VURDERLAK!”

Then Katya blinked her eyes and what she was looking down at was not the youthful, beguiling figure of Ivanka Varga but a tomb-hag. It looked like some worm-eaten crow in ragged skirts, something made of scraps and rags and yellow rungs of bone, its face scabbed, leprosy-yellow, and set with cavernous black eye sockets and
a mouth like a mantrap with gnashing teeth. As she breathed, moths winged from her throat and a stench blew from her like green carrion.

Katya’s heart had stopped and when it began beating again, she thought the casket was filled with immense spiders that were shiny black and leggy, hundreds of them tangled together, jaws dripping venom and eyes like glossy
red pearls. At any moment, she knew, they would explode free and engulf her.

Belic swung his axe and the Widow Varga burst like a seed pod as it cleaved her chest open. Blood that was bright and dark cherry-red gushed up and she sank away in it for a second before emerging, a haggard red effigy looking like a woman turned inside out and being birthed from herself.

Katya saw no more; she passed out.

When she came to, Ivanka Varga was on a pyre of sticks and hay. The flames engulfed her and she writhed and made a moaning sound but that was it. Blackened and smoldering, she split open with plumes of oily smoke…and a dozen flaming rats tried to escape the pyre but were killed by the old men. The smoke became a swarm of corpse
flies that blazed to ash, then a rising cloud of death’s-head moths. None escaped the flames. Every bit of her burned until there was only a charred mass flaking away.

“It is done,” Belic said.

The surprising thing was that throughout the entire process, no one down in the village of Cobton came to investigate.

But Katya did not find that
surprising at all.

6

Vurvolak, do not knock this night. You cannot come in. You are barred from entry, Vurvolak.

These were the words that Katya heard in her head again and again as she waited before the fire with the children, holding them tight and waiting for her daughter to return…which was the thing she now feared the most.

She knew there was a pot of barley soup on the stove and the children were so very hungry, but still she waited for the priest. There was beef in the soup, a rich hot stock that would warm them all. She could smell it and feel it sliding down her throat as she spooned it into her mouth. But she could not eat. One was not supposed to eat until the priest showed. It was disrespectful to do otherwise and a serious breach of tradition…but the children, the poor hungry children. They needed to eat.

Thump…thump…thump.

That was the sound from the Haidam churchyard when she was a child: the sound of stakes being pounded into the chests of the undead. Why did it echo in her head after all these years? Why would it not leave her alone? It was so long ago and she had been so young like a flower just spreading its petals; now she was old and tired and worn, withered to the stalk.

The Vurvolak will come for you, old woman. You were there when Belic and the Szarka brothers destroyed the Widow Varga. That was a crime against the Vurvolak. They will now destroy you. Just as they wanted to destroy your father for helping the soldiers in the Haidam churchyard so very long ago.

You must stay awake.

You must be forever on guard this night.

But it was not so easy when you were old and your blood ran slow and cold like molasses and you had spent so many, many years on guard, watching the shadows for what might lurk there. Nearly eighty years now. That was a long time. How many others had died from one calamity and one pox after the other, but still Katya lived and breathed in her old, pain-addled body. How many winters she had shivered through, how many bright spring mornings she had seen and how many starry July nights. There was a weight that came with the years and she could feel each pound pressing down on her, straining her over-labored skeleton. She was fighting to stay awake but she feared she had already slipped into dream.

Thump…thump…thump.

Katya realized her eyes were closed, but as she tried to open them there was pain in her skull. It was like her eyelids had been tacked shut and she had to tear them open to see, but the pain, the godawful pain…it was in her head like red-hot needles piercing her brain. The more she tried to wake, the more the pain increased. But if she surrendered to it, the pain lessened and it was easy and soft like falling into a feather bed before a roaring fire.

Thump…thump…thump.

Why do I hear it again and again?
This is what she wondered and although the rational part of her brain told her that there was a very good reason for it, she did not want to know. It was so much easier drifting off. She wanted rest and quiet with no more pain, no more suffering. Yet…she knew she must wake up. It had never been as important as it was now.

Thump…thump…thump.

She clawed her way to semi-wakefulness and that’s when the pounding stopped and she heard a voice that was sweet and pure as she had once been sweet and pure. It was an almost cooing sound and it said, “Yes, come in.”

Katya came fully awake. “NOOOO!” she screamed. “DON’T LET THEM IN…”

But it was too late because they filled the room like wraiths, vaporous things made of black swirling mist coalescing into shadowy eldritch forms with clown-white gloating faces, red lips, and hollow eyes. Michael screamed as three or four hags took hold of him, their mouths going for his throat and his wrists. Katya screamed again as she saw the priest standing there with his pallid, bloodstained face. He was holding Anna’s hand. Anna’s father was in the doorway. His eyes were red ice, his face smooth white wax. Katya grabbed a burning stick from the fire and advanced on the one she knew was Griska, tall and vulture-like with the narrow face of a starving rat. He did not back away. He stood there in his long animal fur coat, his face merciless and sadistic in its pleasure. His skin was sickly sallow yellow, his eyes huge and staring and liquid red.

He grinned like an exhumed skull, his teeth long and sharp jutting from pale, puckered gums.
“You are meat,”
he said in a voice which was more like the snarl of a rabid wolf than the voice of a man.
“Meat for the dogs and meat for the rats.”

He reached out to her with a long-fingered hand whose nails were ragged and sharp, grave-earth packed beneath them. He began to cackle and as he did so, his tomb-breath blowing hot and putrescent in her face, Katya felt her heart in her chest:
thump…thump…thump…

She swung the burning stick at him as he reached out and gripped her heart symbolically, yet so very literally that there was an eruption of pain in her chest like she had been kicked.

Meat,
he had said and
meat
she most surely was.

The burning stick never even got close to him.

He fixed those black-hot burning devil’s eyes upon her and Katya was crushed, shattered, and split apart by hatchet-like blows of invisible force. After a dozen of them, she was bleeding and raw and broken…but Griska kept at it with a manic lunatic glee until she seemed to implode in a storm of luminous gore. She came flying apart…head nearly spinning off her shoulders, limbs dropping away, viscera corkscrewing from her rent abdomen like pink, fleshy worms unwinding in manic, seeking flight…and then her dismembered husk and its attendant tissues and appendages and organs did not fall to the floor but were held aloft in a spinning meat-colored, whirlwind of blood-mist.

And though her sensory network was ravaged beyond repair, Katya heard it once again:
thump…thump…THUUUUMMMMP.

It was the sound
of her heart exploding to red pulp.

Before her sight was gone, she saw Etonya, her own daughter, lift the infant David from his bassinet. The child was squirming and crying as his dead mother peeled his swaddling bla
nkets free like a wrapper. Etonya held the plump infant high for all to see and then sank her fangs into his soft white throat.

PART THREE
: THE CATACOMBS

1

They’re waiting for me to make some kind of decision,
Wenda thought as she stared at the kerosene lantern, knowing that soon it would be empty of fuel and they would be down to Rule’s flashlight and Megga’s penlight.
I have no hold over any of them, yet they’re empowering me with the decision. Do we take our chances here in this room and hope for the best or do we do the very thing the vampires would not expect and make a try for that other house?

“The longer you sit there woolgathering,” Megga said, “the less our chances of survival are. You need to make a decision already. Are we going or are we going to sit here and wait for it?”

Megga, of course, was baiting her and expecting some sort of reaction so Wenda gave her none. She just watched the lantern and tried to sort it out in her own mind, ignoring Megga as if she hadn’t spoken at all. Mostly, what she was trying to do was to get a grip on her own conflicting emotions. They were rioting in every possible direction and until she got them under control, she was going to be no good. She needed to get back in the zone, the Vultura zone, where she was confident and cool and always did the right thing at the right time. Unfortunately, at the moment, she was feeling too much like plain old indecisive, panicky Wenda Keegan and not enough like her alter ego.