Hag Night (45 page)

He led them on, very aware that the vampires were closing in. No matter. If they wanted to attack, they would attack. They didn’t because they were afraid of Wenda and the power that arced inside her. They knew its strength and they feared it, feared it as all creatures of the night feared the first rays of golden, pure sunshine.

He led them around some shelves, an ancient wood boiler, and to the far wall of the cellar. The walls were fieldstone that had been quarried in the early days of the 18
th
century. Before them, a massive section was missing. This was the opening of the passage and it was like a black hell waiting for them. Behind them, the vampires were making themselves known with a low hissing that was their voices.

What if Megga’s right,
he thought as he stepped into the opening.
What if this is all a game? What if they’re herding us down here on purpose for the death blow?

But he refused to dwell on it. In his heart, despite his misgivings, he still thought this was the right thin
g to do. He honestly believed that.

Megga and Wenda joined him in the passage. It was large enough to walk upright in. As Rule’s light illuminated it, they could see that it canted downwards in the distance.

Wenda wrinkled her nose. There was a low, animal stink blowing up at them. It smelled hot and salty like curing hides.

Rule led the way
again. They had no time to consider whether this was really what they wanted to do or not. Their instincts had brought them here and they would have to carry them through. As they moved down the claustrophobic tunnel, the stink seemed to thicken in the air until it was nearly gagging. It wasn’t decay exactly, just age, advanced age combined with the stench of wet pelts, rotting straw, yellowing bones, and old blood, as well as something sharper, stronger. If contamination and defilement had an odor, this was it.

Maybe fifty feet into it, the smell seemed toxic like poison
gas. A dank, damp, cloying smell permeated the walls.

Keep going! Keep going! For godsake, don’t think! Just move!

Yes, that was the thing. He moved farther down the tunnel and it continued to cant ever downwards like they were heading into the lower regions of hell. And maybe they were. What struck Rule as being more than a little odd, was the fact that the air seemed
warmer.
It should have been at least as cool as that of the house, but the temperature most certainly had risen. Not warm enough to shed coats, but noticeable. It was like they were probing deeper and deeper into the evil body of Cobton, approaching the hot-blooded mass of its pumping black heart. At any moment, he expected dozens of glowing eyes to open before them.

As he tried not to think, he also tried not to listen.

Their shuffling footfalls were echoing all around them, amplified and resounding. Now and again, he thought he heard the reptilian hissing of undead voices or the squeaking of colonies of rats. It all amazed him, as they moved farther down beneath the town, that something like this could exist in the first place. Who had channeled it out?

Had it been the vampires? He couldn’t conceive of that. They didn’t strike him as being industrious beyond the getting of blood. Leeches did not dam rivers and vampires did not dig tunnels.

No, this had existed before. Perhaps part of it was artificial, though much of it was probably natural. Maybe it
had
been a smuggler’s den at one time. He didn’t suppose he’d ever really know. All he knew for sure was that they were going somewhere, getting closer to something. And whatever that was, he could almost feel it reaching out for them…the bigness of it, the starkness of it.

Megga stopped. “I heard giggling.”

“Just ignore it,” he told her.

“Giggling,” she said in a dreamlike voice. “Children giggling.”

They pushed on for what seemed at least another thirty minutes to the point where they were all beginning to doubt the sense of what they were doing, if they hadn’t before.

Rule thought:
A river. This is a dark and winding river like the Styx that will lead us to the land of the dead. We’re trapped in its running current and we couldn’t get out of it if we wanted to. Like corpuscles in narrow veins, we’re being carried towards the heart of this abomination. We will see things no one ever has and lived to tell the tale. Our deaths will be legendary in their suffering, but we will die with grim revelation in our eyes.

Then, as they began to seriously lose whatever sense of motivation they’d had, the tunnel opened up and they stepped into a huge cavern. There was no doubt in their minds that it was a naturally hollowed-out limestone cave. Rule figured they had come down easily seventy or eighty feet beneath the town. This was the secret, storied chamber where Griska and his followers hid while the high sheriff and his boys had destroyed the blood-slaked townspeople in the cemetery
above.

“Look,” Megga said. “Look where we are.”

As a historian and something of an antiquarian, he was fascinated. If it hadn’t been for the very obvious threat, he could have explored around down here for days. But if he was intrigued, Wenda was not. She was on a mission. She saw closure and this is the place where she would find it.

“Let’s go,” she said, leading them on with her lantern held high.

18

“We’re under the graveyard.”

The ceiling of the cavern was at least forty feet above them.
In the beam of Rule’s flashlight, they could see thick, tangled tree roots poking out and what looked to be caskets that must have settled deeper into the earth through the years. Some looked poised to fall and others already had. Apparently the subsidence had been going on for some time because there were dozens of shattered coffins around them that looked like they had exploded upon impact, casting bones, partial skeletons, and withered broken things in rotted cerements in every direction. They had to step around them, over mounds of earth strewn with femurs and jawless skulls, avoiding the shards of earthen boxes.

Given time, the entire cemetery above would come crashing down into this charnel pit.

Let’s just hope that’s not today,
Wenda thought.

In the light of the lantern,
she studied the faces of the others. Megga seemed to have shrunk inside her own skin. Her eyes were fixed and glassy. She didn’t look up to swatting a mosquito let alone fighting what they would have to fight. And Rule…his eyes were vacant, distant, the eyes of an old man that just wanted to close. He would fight, but he was already pretty torn up from the rats. This is what Wenda had to fight with. These two. She had to put them up against a merciless engine of wrath, something that took human lives almost casually. Something of immense power, immense hate, and immense evil.

Dawn is approaching and the undead know it. They’ll be more cunning and more desperate than ever. But maybe in their haste, I’ll find their weakness.

She led Rule and Megga on through the cemetery, waiting for death to come on night wings. Her head was fuzzy. She felt a curious mixture of dread, exhilaration, and disorientation. Her time-sense was completely askew. Had all this only happened tonight? Was it really only a matter of hours since the bus crash or was that something that happened days or weeks ago? Her own life before Cobton had lost focus.
Chamber of Horrors,
Vultura, the Graveyard Girls, Doc Blood, the cobwebbed sets, the weekly routines, the tired old movies…it all seemed like it was part of someone else’s life now. A story in a book. A documentary she’d seen years ago. It was gone now. There was only the knife in her hand and the stakes in her belt.

This was all that remained…o
ther than the concentrated night-smell of the undead which was the stink of death and dissolution, the spiced, unpleasant odor of a bricked-up root cellar where onions rotted to mummified peels and tomatoes boiled down to a black slime of putrescence. That’s what she was smelling. A dark, vomitous odor of disease and pestilence, succulent human fruits rotted to cobs and vinegar-stinking drainage.

The odors filled her, revolted her, yet steeling her to what must come next: not killing, not extermination, not even something so sterile as eradication, but a process of cleansing and decontamination.

She studied the shifting shadows ahead, her flesh prickling with a chill that was beyond simple air temperature. Though there was abject silence ahead, a great soundless lagoon of it, she sensed motion, a delicate shifting of the ether very, very close to her. She swallowed, pushing forward, almost daring it to show itself.

And then it did.

Rule gasped.

Megga moaned.

Wenda took one faltering step backwards, then met it head on.

A woman rocketed forward out of the darkness, her face twisted in a wolflike mask, eyes a dun yellow, fangs jutting from her mouth like sewing needles. She reached out with hands that were like the claws of an owl.
 

Wenda slashed at her with the knife.

She cut the air before her with fierce side-to-side strokes, feeling the blade tearing into the mass of the woman,
cutting through ghost-mesh that seemed to have no more solidity than wood smoke. The result was instantaneous: the woman screamed, her voice booming like thunder, and it cycled through the tombyard, echoing and echoing as the vampire seemed to collapse into a funneling column of phosphorescent corpse-gas that was sucked away into the darkness.

Breathing hard, Wenda said, “Come on. We keep going. Nothing stops us now.”

She walked forward, upright, proud, and almost arrogant in her defiance. She would not stop. Her stride was sure, her way was set. She would cut deeper and deeper into this nightmare until she found the black beating heart of it and then she would smash it to jelly. She was tired. She knew she was tired. Quite possibly, she was not thinking right…yet, the energy inside her that forced her forward was so very, very sure of itself. It was like a plug seeking an outlet so the electrical circuit could be complete, one with itself.

Behind her, bunched together, she could feel Rule and Megga, the tenseness that was now part and parcel of who and what they were. She could feel it right up her spine. The vampires were gathering around them now in the darkness, flocking like moths around streetlights. The others were aware of it. They were terrified. Even Megga. The fear crawled beneath her skin in sickening waves. Wenda pushed forward, ever forward, stepping lightly and surely amongst the ancient tombstones and shattered crypts. They were like a trio of flies tr
ying to sneak through the lair of a funnelweb spider.

Hesitate and they’ll drain you dry.

The fact that they hadn’t yet spoke volumes. They would in an instant if Griska gave the word, but he would not sacrifice his family unnecessarily. What was inside Wenda concerned him. He felt its power, recognized its threat. He would do nothing, not until the time was right, not until the odds were stacked in his favor and Wenda had every intention of never letting that happen.

She sensed a low, warm wind beginning to blow from somewhere directly ahead of them. What she sought would be there and Griska would try everything he could to see that she did not reach it.

It was then that the vampires showed themselves.

19

Megga felt her mind returning a bit at a time. It seemed
as if it had been locked away in cold storage, but now it was thawing. She became aware of how sore she was, how tired, how absolutely beaten. Yet, Wenda pushed them on and on in some personal, suicidal quest that she herself did not completely understand.

She has to be stopped.

Megga flinched.

It was Griska’s voice.

He was in her head as he had been in her head most of the night. There was some tenuous thread strung between their minds now and she did not have the strength to sever it. He wanted her to stop Wenda. No, he
needed
her to stop Wenda in any way she could. He showed her the delights that would be hers if she cooperated, how she would
walk the night for eternity as some dark maiden, a consort of the damned.

But he showed her what refusal would bring as well.

He showed her an image of herself laying on a blood-soaked mattress as dozens and dozens of vampires traumatically impaled her, sinking their fangs into her legs and arms, her throat and face, her breasts and belly, her thighs, her vagina, spiking her again and again until her blood leaked out from literally hundreds of punctures.

Cooperate. Kill the virgin. Strike her dead.

And she wanted to tell him that she was not strong enough, that even if she attacked Wenda, Rule would stop her. Stop her long enough for Wenda to punish her for her transgression.

But Griska didn’t care about that.

His voice, his consciousness, rose up into a shrill, insectile buzzing noise that made her feel weak and nauseous, blind with stupidity where she could not gather a single thought.

Why not Rule? Why not him? That’s what she wondered when it passed. Why didn’t Griska make Rule do what he wanted? Why was she the one that had to initiate this?

Because you’re dark at your core and your soul is corrupt,
she heard a voice say in her head. It was not Griska’s voice; it was her own. Somehow, that made it all that much worse.
The undead didn’t channel into Wenda’s head or Rule’s. They knew who their kin was. They instinctively recognized you as one of their own. This is what you wanted, isn’t it? All along, haven’t you wanted this? Well, here’s your chance. Make your move. Betray your friends and you can live forever.