Hag Night (39 page)

“Yes, it was.”

Bailey looked over Megga’s shoulder now and her eyes were filled with a blank hatred and there was no denying it.

You’ve got her,
Wenda thought to herself.
You’ve got her on the ropes, you’ve got the bitch cornered. She’s going to show her teeth. Get ready.

“Answer my question,” Wenda said, pressing her farther into that corner.

“Why don’t you leave me alone?” Bailey said and there was venom in her voice of the sort the
real
Bailey would have been incapable of under any circumstances.

Megga was sneering at Wenda. She was getting pissed and she was about to act. Only she never got the chance because something else intervened. Wenda heard a scratching sound and
a rat came scurrying across the floor. It was the biggest rat she had even seen: a swollen thing easily the size of a tomcat with greasy gray fur and glaring red eyes.

“What the hell?” Megga said.

Wenda heard Bailey giggle.

And then—

5

“AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!”

The scream came out of Megga’s mouth and it was purely involuntary. She did not know where it came from, only that it felt like something had reached down her throat and dragged it out. When she felt it coming, then heard it…she was momentarily shocked.
Fuck is this? What the fuck is this?
Then something seemed to snap in her head and it felt like her heart was going to pound its way right out of her chest. “AAAAAAHHHHH! YA-YA-
YAAAAHHHHHH—”

There was a rush of absolute pain through her body that felt amazingly like she was bound in ropes that were yanked tight and twisted with such force she was certain her ligaments would pop, her bones would break, and her guts would be forced from her mouth in a fleshy surge.

Then the pain was gone and with it, her free will. She tried desperately to get her mind to think properly and her body to obey her commands, but it was like it had been kicked to the curb or maybe right out of her skull. She was no longer at the helm. She was a passenger. Her body was a machine that was being remotely operated and she could do nothing about it.

Her anger at Wenda for doubting who and
what
Bailey was completely overwhelmed her. She jumped to her feet and went right at Wenda with black murder in her heart even while inside, she cried,
No, no, no, no, don’t do this you can’t do this what the hell are you doing?
But by then, she was in motion and Wenda—the new impervious, fearless Wenda—actually shrank back in terror at what she saw.

“BITCH! BITCH! DIRTY NO GOOD INTERFERRING CUNT!” Megga heard her voice cry out. “IT WILL NOT BE ALLOWED!
YOU
WILL NOT BE ALLOWED!”

Wenda stepped back a few more steps as Megga came on. “What the hell are you doing?
Megga! What the hell are you doing?”

But Megga could not have answered that question even if she had been able because she really didn’t know. Her body, her mind, her very being had been hijacked…she was a dancing puppet, a grinning marionette, a wind-up toy soldier, a deadly doll programmed to kill. She was trapped inside her own body with no control whatsoever. She could hear her heart pounding, the rush of blood in her veins, air being sucked into her lungs… but each time she tried to so much as influence a single finger, there was a neutral humming
and nothing more.

She dove at Wenda.

She wrapped her white-knuckled hands around her throat.

“MEGGA!” Wenda managed, but that was it before her windpipe was squeezed shut.

Megga had her. She had the bitch and she was going to kill her…but long before that happened, she would do the most awful things to her, violate her in the worst possible ways, squeeze the goodness and purity out of her, and leave her as an empty shell that would fill with a blackness that would rot her to her core.

The cunt would suffer.

She’d cut out her tongue.

She’d tear off her tits with hot pincers.

She’d shove a burning log between her legs and—

Crack.
Wenda fought back with pure venom. She slapped her in the face and punched her in the head. And when that didn’t work, she brought her knee up right between her legs with everything she had. Megga squealed and fell away and Wenda punched her in the face. Inside the mockery of her own body, Megga shrieked with pain.

But her body and the raging mind came right back for more.
“DIRTY RUTTING CUNT! SUFFER! SUFFER! SUFFER! HOW YOU WILL SUFFER!”
And before Wenda could fend her off with blows, Megga had a hold of her again. The two of them grappled as Rule tried to pull them apart and Morris moaned and Bailey giggled.

As the battle went on, Megga thought she knew who had hijacked her body.

Then she was certain of it.

Carrion.

A stink of carrion.

She could smell it inside her mind as if she were trapped in a rotting casket that was slowly sinking in graveyard earth. Griska. It was his smell: carrion,
embalming fluid, a noisome stench of rotting hides. His voice was speaking to her, an oily and reptilian hissing. He warned her that defiance would bring dire consequences. Her entrails would be yanked out and fed to mad dogs while she was still alive. Then, he would drain her dry, embalm her, bathe her in the blood of her friends…but she would not be dead. She would feel every last agony and indignity. He would shove dead mice up inside her while graveyard rats devoured her from the inside out. Her eye sockets would be nests of squirming maggots and swollen, juicy spider eggs would fill her mouth, each bursting forth like a white grape to fill her mouth with skittering, leggy horrors…only she would not be able to scream because her lips would be sewn shut with threads of her own gut.

Megga screamed soundlessly…as her body fought with Wenda.

They knocked over a chair and slammed into the wall, finally crashing together to the floor and taking one of the drapes with them. They fought and clawed and punched, rolling on the floor and tearing at each other. Megga tore out a clump of Wenda’s shiny red hair and Wenda nearly ripped an ear off her. Then Wenda had her. She forced Megga onto her belly and rode astride her back, one arm circled around her neck in a fierce headlock.

“NO! NO! NO! NO!”
Megga screeched as she raged and gasped, her body thrashing.
“YOU MUST BE PUNISHED MUST BE BROKEN MUST BE SEEDED WITH FILTH HE SAYS SO IT IS HIS WILL—”

Then, incredibly, Megga went limp as a rag beneath her, going out cold. Her head thumped against the floor and she did not move.

“You…you killed her,” Morris said.

“No…I didn’t,” Wenda breathed.

Still panting, she turned Megga over. Megga’s eyes were open, but they were rolled back white in her head. There was a jumping tic in the corner of her mouth. Her entire body was trembling.

“Looks like she had a seizure,” Rule said.

And Megga supposed she would have thought so, too, yes. She linked up with her mind and her body responded. She blinked her eyes. Licked her lips. She was sore everywhere. Laying there on the floor, hair hanging in her face, blood seeping from one nostril, she said, “Sorry, Wenda…it wasn’t my choice…”

Wenda just scowled at her. There were red scratches like warpaint over her left cheek, blood on her mouth. “What are you talking about?”

Megga only wished she could explain.

6

“Shit
,” Rule said, trying to back away as a rat lunged for him.

Wenda tried to aim a kick at it as it passed her and missed.

The rat stayed on target and when it was inches from him, he caught it with his boot and sent it spinning end over end with an enraged squeaking. It rolled over and came back up, coming at him again.

Rule tried to get out of its way and tripped over his own heavy boots and went down.

Wenda tried to kick it again, her boot glancing off its flanks, and only succeeding in propelling it right at Rule.

“GYAH!”
he cried out as it scrambled up his leg.

He flipped over and the rat hung onto his overalls by its claws, which were pawing furiously like it was trying to dig its way through them. He got to his knees, then climbed unsteadily to his feet and the rat still hung on. Not only did
it hang on, but it climbed him like a cat up a tree. And it was only his forearm that kept it from his face. It bit into the sleeve of his overalls and hung tenaciously there by its teeth. He swung his arm back and forth, trying to throw it.

At first, Wenda wasn’t sure what to do because she’d coveted an unnatural fear of rodents her entire life.

Then she moved.

She reached out and grabbed at the rat, feeling her fingers sliding through its oily pelt and then her fist gripping its hairless, snakelike tail. Inside, she cringed with revulsion…just the feel of that tail. It was like a writhing muscular cord, worming against her hand.

Then another rat showed.

And another.

Both were easily as big as the first and both went right after Wenda.

She let out a scream and released the tail of the first rodent. She kicked one of them aside and the second scrambled up the leg of her snowpants, its teeth nipping at her knee, trying desperately to break through the heavy nylon.

But by then, Wenda cringed no more.

She seemed to remember that she had the knife in her hand. She slashed it against the rat
’s spine. It squealed and hit the floor, its backbone laid open. As blood sprayed out of it in a mist of droplets, its head swung back and forth in one direction and its hindquarters in another.

Then the other rat closed in.

Still dazed from the kick she’d given it, it came on with little grace. It went right for her ankle and she kicked it again. It rolled over, then sat up on its haunches, hissing at her. Its eyes were shiny red and absolutely unearthly. She was reminded of the juicy cores of squashed cherries.

“WELL, COME ON!” she shouted at it. “COME AND GET SOME!”

It needed no further urging.

It shot through the air with amazing speed, looking like a flying squirrel as it fired itself at her. What she did
then she did with pure instinct. She saw it coming and swung the knife in a vicious arc that split the rat in half. It let out a weird, trilling sort of squeal, each section hitting the floor, the legs of both still trying to run, to scramble, to do anything they could to get at her.

Somewhere during the process, Rule had shed his rat right at the wall and when it tried to rise up, he smashed its head to red goo with his boot, bringing it down half a dozen times. He now did the same with the upper quarters of the bisected rat.

Wenda turned, gasping, and Rule did the same.

They saw it at the same moment and it stamped its indelible impression of stark horror on their faces simultaneously: rats, more rats. The room was filling with them like a spigot had been turned on or a pipe had burst. They filled the room in scratching, red-eyed hordes.
They hung from the curtains and crawled along the baseboards and tumbled down from the walls. They swarmed up over the furniture and scrabbled right over the top of one another. They brought a horrid, deathly stink of submerged coffins and cemetery ooze, dripping and dark places where yellowed bones were wrapped in moldering shrouds, spiders spun their webs in silent dusty corners, and corpse-fungi grew in moist white sheets up stone walls set with the brass nameplates of the sleeping dead.

They not only filled the room, they overflowed it.

7

Although Morris seemed oblivious to just about everything, he was not oblivious to rats. They were three feet deep on the floor, a surging, squealing, squeaking ocean of them. It was like they had abandoned a sinking ship and he were an island. They swarmed over him in a dark wave, clawing and nipping, driven into some primal rage, needing to bury him alive.

He could have attempted escape.

But he didn’t.

He squatted down as they ran over him, fighting for space atop him, allowing himself to be submerged in the stinky, swollen, lice-hopping sea of vermin. One moment he was there, the next jump a dark hump buried by rats.

8

“Jesus Christ,” Rule said.

Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ.

His voice echoed around inside Wenda’s head like it was an empty metal drum and the disturbing, downright frightening thing was that the words themselves made absolutely no sense. It was the good old King’s English, as they said, but it might as well have been Low Latin or Sanskrit for that matter; her brain could not process it. It felt as if she were being sucked into a black hole at the back of her head.

What the heck is going on here?
What’s happening to me—

The thought was left uncompleted as knives of agony slashed through her mind, scissoring her thoughts, making her brain feel like it was dropped into a pan of boiling oil.