Hag Night, page 17
That’s how he felt now: in his anguish and aggravation he wanted to hit. He wanted to find some goddamn vampires and go Van Helsing on them and ram stakes through chests. How does that feel, you fucking parasites? How does it feel to be helpless? Reg, of course, was still looking at him the way the kid might have looked at his father when he was scared, hoping to elicit some sage wisdom and practical advice.
Doc almost started laughing.
Didn’t he realize what an absolute oh-my-God pile of refuse his would-be savior indeed was? He was no one to look to for guidance. When he wasn’t playing make-believe as Doc Blood he was a worthless drunk. That was the reality of it. The monkey on his back was digging its claws into his throat and screeching in his ears in its need for a good belt of rye whiskey. It would have sold each and everyone of them down the road to get it. It would have handed them over to Count fucking Chocula for a six-dollar bottle of hootch.
But, in character, he said, “We’re going to survive, son. Right now, I see only the promise of the dawn and the new day. And we’re going to get there, one way or another.”
Reg’s eyes were wet. But he was believing.
God, Doc could see it.
He was believing completely. And Doc knew at that moment if he hadn’t before, that he had the gift, all right, the gift of bullshit. If he were an evangelist, he could have gotten Reg to empty his wallet and sign over his house to him. And it wasn’t so much that he himself had any special powers of persuasion, it was that he knew what the kid wanted to hear and he gave him the belief he so needed.
“What about…about Bailey?”
“Yes,” Doc said, “yes. Well, we’ll see what transpires. If worse comes to worse, we’ll have to put her out in the snow.”
He didn’t elaborate on that and didn’t need to, of course. Reg had seen the movies—Christ, he worked on Chamber of Horrors—he knew what happened to the victims of vampires. He knew very well what they became.
Sighing, Doc held Bailey’s cool hand and felt something inside him break open as he made contact. He shivered and shook. Hot beads of sweat ran down his spine, each one a droplet of venom. It was like some malarial fever born of pale green swamps had taken hold of him and he could not shake it. Except, it wasn’t that. It was guilt and self-recrimination, disappointment and anxiety. It’ll be over soon, my dear. Soon the big sleep will take you down into darkness. And even as he thought that, he dreaded the truth of it.
Yes, she would sink into darkness.
But she would not rest.
He remembered, as a child, long before his father had run off and his mother became an acid-eyed, venom-tongued shrew, that she had been a very good mother: caring, calm, loving. When he was sick she used to sit and hold his hand and sing to him. She had a beautiful voice. Maybe not the sort to sing an aria and stun a crowd, but a soft and wistful voice that made a body feel warm and tucked-in, curled-up and content. It was the sort of voice that could summon you from fevers and flus and put you back on your feet as it had him many times. He wanted to sing to Bailey then, to draw her out of a world of graveyards and starving shadows and back into the light.
But he couldn’t.
It would do no good.
Because even then, he could feel the dire influence of those outside, those who waited in the storm. He could hear their voices, sweet and singsong and profane. Many voices that were one. It came to him in low pulsations of evil, discordant and invasive. It echoed up from the depths of crypts and cellar-holds. It sounded like whispering satin and coffin-silk, graveyard rats scratching in oblong boxes and lost souls moaning in the dark watches of night. He shut the ghost-voices out and wished dearly that Bailey could do the same. But it was in her, the virus of tombs, the embryo of malignance. And it was growing, gaining vitality as she herself pined away into the grave.
Doc felt for her pulse and it was barely there: weak, irregular.
“She’s almost gone,” he said to Reg, blinking away the oceans that filled his eyes. “Come say good-bye to her.”
“I…I can’t. I’m afraid.”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of. Come over here. Please. I don’t want her to die alone.”
13
Morris had been sleeping for an eternity of darkness and maybe he’d been conscious the entire time. The slumber was like a shroud he wore. One he hid under but could hide under no more. It had been stripped away from him and he had convoluted memories of Wenda and Megga speaking to him, saying things that hadn’t made much sense, of heat from the fire baking him, of wolves in a forest: red-eyed, slat-thin wolves hungry for his flesh. It seemed that he had heard and seen things without really understanding them or wanting to. But it had been there, everything that had happened, only he was removed from it like seeing sheets of rain through a window.
What brought him awake and as near to his senses as he’d been in some time was the ghost. The evil ghost with the red eyes.
He tried to tell himself it was a dream. But if it was a dream, then it was a dream of madness, blackness, and a shadowy world beyond the pale of death. No, he was not dreaming. It was the ghost who was dreaming. Dreaming of him, dreaming of drawing Morris down into narrow houses and trenches of dark earth where corpse-orchids grew, flowering and fetid-smelling and pulsing white with juices of pestilence.
Morris opened his eyes and saw Megga and Wenda, still on guard, still waiting out the night. His eyes moved warily in their sockets like those of a frightened vole. He had a strange memory of pain and he was almost afraid to move, afraid to do anything but wait there by the fire. He was made senseless and numb by his own fear.
But why the memory of pain?
The ghost. It was the ghost. He had tried to ignore the voice of the ghost and the pain increased; he had tried to completely shut it out and a headache like a hot, bubbling geyser tore through his brain.
That was the pain.
That was the memory of defiance.
He’s going to come for me and I know it. He’ll slaughter the women and make me watch. Then he’ll enslave me.
No, Morris couldn’t wait for that. He had to run into the night, into the open arms of the storm, for there he would find sanctuary. Wenda would not let him leave and he knew it. He could see her over there with a sharpened stake in one hand and huge gleaming butcher’s knife in the other. Those were her weapons that insured the politics of her office. She wasn’t afraid to use them. She was not afraid to kill. She wasn’t even afraid to use them on the things outside in the storm.
But he had to find a way out.
He knew what was out there. To them he was prey. They would hunt him down. In his mind he saw himself trying to break free of Cobton, the cold getting inside him, making his blood run like jelly. The white faces pushing in, the smiling mouths of teeth. And the hands. Pallid hands reaching out for him, trapping him, ensnaring him, as he tried to fight his way free. Those people out there would swarm and multiply and bury him alive in groping grave-cold fingers and sucking hot mouths—
No, no, no! I’ll get out. I’ll sneak out and Wenda won’t stop me and those ghouls won’t see me and I’ll be free, free, free.
Then he heard a mocking, lunatic cackling in the back of his skull. It was an inhuman, incessant, unearthly braying. It sounded like black tides lapping against dock pilings and the squealing cries of wild boars and the yammering bark of rabid dogs opening jaws slavered with white foam. It was the laughter of the evil ghost. Morris could feel its mind entering his own, a creeping shadow network. It infested his brain like writhing white worms that laid hot masses of eggs up and down his spinal ganglia and fouled his neurons with their oozing wastes.
He tried to cry out, but his voice did not exist. He tried to remember warm days and bright suns, things that would drive the ghost away, but it was no good. The evil ghost wanted him to see other things, it directed his thoughts, driving them into the gathering darkness like railroad spikes. My name. Remember my name and speak it aloud. Morris heard his voice say it and the ghost was pleased by that.
It was so pleased, it let him see what the others out in the storm knew.
It showed him a series of mountain villages that it had drained dry. The empty houses and overgrown yards, the leaf-blown streets where no feet walked by daylight. The villages which stood empty and thin as their churchyards filled and grew fat. It showed him how the blood had been leeched from these places. When they ran dry as desert washes, the ghost and its worshippers sought new environs where the blood was rich and abundant. They sought new fields to sow their seed and tend their crops of nightmare.
Morris saw a ship at sea, a ghost ship crossing the Atlantic, its sails fluttering rags, its cabin blown with mist…the warped, salt-bleached decks and the shadows that oozed out of holds and casks and crates as the sun sank low. He saw the ghost finding land and leading its followers to Cobton for here was a village with blood running hot and thick in its veins. At night, they fastened themselves to the arteries of the town like leeches and sipped them dry. Soon, the fields lay fallow and the walks unswept, the high houses were silent and the shutters creaked in the wind. Cobton became a deserted village, a ghost town in the literal sense…a tomb of shadows and scratching rats that no sane men visited.
Then Morris saw men, not necessarily sane but dedicated in their grim task. They opened graves and disinterred blood-bloated corpses with staring eyes and florid faces. They drove stakes through the restless dead, pretending they did not see the blood fountaining from chests or hear the screams that came from the lips of corpses. They burned the remains. But they did not find the ghost nor its select community that hid in hollows of night and seams of darkness unknown.
Cobton was shunned and left to rot.
This is what the evil ghost showed him.
It was near to him now and he could feel it.
Like a dog, his hackles raised as its smell, which was that of embalmed things and grinning cadavers puffed with death.
He could see the ghost now: a tall, manlike shape that was more shadow than substance, skeletal and narrow, a blackness blowing out from it like hell itself. Its face was a mask of ashen, carved leather lit by two huge eyes like luminous necrotic moons. It was a cruel face, a merciless face, a cadaverous face of shadow-sucking hollows and bony ridges framed by a drooping mustache, sharp nose, and gleaming bone-yellow flesh. The thin lips pulled up into a rictal grin of violation and a voice like wind blown through a skull said, My name. Speak it aloud.
Morris squirmed, fought, but it did him no good.
He would do what he was told.
14
Wenda’s voice was so confident and sure of itself it was like a steel blade cutting deep: “Get away from that window. Do you hear me? Get away from it right now.”
Megga turned, ready to snarl at her…but at the last moment, she acquiesced. She did not like anyone bossing her or dominating her, but there were times to fight and times to do what was asked of you. She turned from the window and looked over at Wenda and wanted to hate her, but found that she couldn’t. Wenda had saved her several times now and though she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to be saved, Wenda’s concern was touching in its own way. Their safety was a priority with her.
She was ready to fight.
And those outside knew that.
Megga thought they even feared it.
“I wasn’t doing anything,” she said.
“Doesn’t matter,” Wenda told her. “The way things stand, those things will do anything to get to us. I’m not going to have them using you. I can’t allow it.”
Megga wanted to look her in the eye and tell her that it didn’t much matter what she wanted. There was no choice in the matter. The vampires would take them when they decided it was time and she would not be able to fight against it. She had already angered them and Megga could feel it. When the time came, it was going to be very ugly for her.
“If they use me, it’s out of my hands.”
Wenda’s eyes went narrow and dark. “You always have a choice. You can fold up like Morris or fight like me…or you can continue to do what you have been doing: bending over for what’s out there.”
Megga sat down slowly like she was brittle and might break. “It can be romance or it can be rape when they take you. That’s the only choice there is, Wenda. Because they’ll get me and they’ll get you.”
“They won’t get me.”
Megga laughed. “Yes, they will.”
“Is that what they’ve told you?”
Megga did not say anything.
“Is it?” Wenda said. “I feel them out there same as you do. They try to get in your head. I know that. The difference between you and me is that I won’t let them.”
Megga laughed again, but inside she was not laughing at all. Her blood was running hot and her ire was up and she wanted to slap Wenda right across the face because, again, Wenda did not have a clue. She wanted to take hold of her and shake her, shout into her face: YOU won’t let them? YOU won’t let them? That’s because they haven’t directed it at you! When they do your brain doesn’t work anymore and your emotions short-circuit and you’re not sure who you are or what you are and what’s right and what’s wrong! You stupid, stupid silly little bitch! But, of course, she didn’t do that because Wenda would have hit her. And it wasn’t that she was afraid of being hit or hitting, it just seemed like a terrible drain on her energy and she was weakening by the moment. Maybe they hadn’t gotten their teeth into her throat yet, but there were other ways to drain someone, other ways to squeeze them out like a sponge. They could drain you psychically until you didn’t have anything left to fight with.
It was at that moment that Morris sat up, his eyes looking varnished and shiny. “Griska,” he said. “Griska.”
For Megga, those words were like arrows punching into her, their barbs sinking deep and holding. She sat up, coughing, then gagging, then simply trying to breathe so she did not blackout and hit the floor. Those words. That name. He’s not supposed to say that name. He’s not supposed to! Megga knew the name, she’d heard it in her dreams, but she would never say it. Part of that was the idea of incurring the wrath of its owner and part was a superstitious notion that to pronounce the name of the dead was to summon them.
Wenda was staring at her.
Megga said, “I’m all right.”
But she was not all right. That name was still echoing through her skull and stirring things up in there, making a boiling darkness begin to take shape. She squeezed her eyes shut, hoping it would go away but it continued to build and build.
“That name,” Wenda said. “Tell me that name. I want to hear it.”
Morris just looked at her dumbly. His eyes were glazed, bovine, like he just wanted to chew his cud and be left in peace. “What name?”
“The name you just said.”
“I don’t know. I was half-awake. I must’ve been dreaming.”
Wenda sat forward now. “Don’t give me that shit. Say the name.”
Morris was trapped. He looked from Wenda to Megga hopelessly. Megga wanted to jump in, to throw some interference in his direction but she could not seem to do anything but sit there as the darkness moved in her head and her nerves curled like burnt-out wires.
“Say it,” Wenda said.
“He didn’t say anything,” Megga managed. “Just…just gibberish.”
Morris would not meet Wenda’s eyes and Wenda was fully aware of the fact. She had him and she knew she had him.
Megga felt herself going hot and cold with fever sweat. Morris had spoken the name and that was like calling old ghosts from their graves, only this ghost he had conjured was malefic, cunning, and ancient and she could see its face taking form in her brain: a face white going to gray, skullish and red-eyed, with a thin-lipped, crimson-stained mouth that was smiling and hungry. And she could hear its voice speak, telling her that Morris was weak and he would be broken in the ancient way: disemboweled whilst still breathing, his entrails fed to the dogs, his trunk impaled on a stake. And she would watch, she would be compelled to watch.
Wenda was staring at her now. “You know the name, too, don’t you?”
“No, no, I…no, I never heard that name.”
“They’ve gotten to both of you,” Wenda said. “Then both of you listen: Griska, Griska.”
Morris made a whimpering sound and Megga tried not to shake, but she was trembling almost spasmodically by that point. Do not say the name. Do not speak of it or think of it.
“It’s a Slavic name. He must be the leader of our friends outside,” Wenda said, not truly knowing, Megga figured, but intuiting it and having absolute faith in not only her instinct, but what she was reading in their faces. “He must be old, very old. He’s the one I’ll find. He’s the one I’ll ram this stake through.”
“It won’t be enough,” Megga said before she could stop herself.
“What?” Wenda asked. “What did you say?”
Megga thought she would throw up. Morris was sobbing, openly sobbing like a child that had gotten a good whacking. And maybe he had at that. But why wasn’t Griska reaching out for Wenda? Why didn’t he bring her under control and smash her, dominate her, make her into a mindless slave like he had with so many others?
There’s a reason, a voice in Megga’s head said through the fog. There’s a very good reason. What do you think that might be?
But she didn’t dare think. He was probing her mind. He would know it if she thought things she was not supposed to think. No, no, no, she had to block it out, block it out, block it out, imagine a brick wall like George Sanders did in The Village of the Damned—they’d shown that one on Chamber of Horrors along with its less impressive sequel—and keep the bad thoughts out or he would read them and make her suffer for her defiance because if there was one thing he detested, hated—and possibly feared—it was a free mind. No, no, no, she would not think it. She dared not think of what was different about Wenda.
