Hag Night, page 30
But Bailey screamed.
Screamed because Morris was attacking her again. With that same burning log, he was beating her savagely about the head and when the beldam—because, dear God, it was a beldam again, embalmed face and lurid grinning mouth and glaring, beady rodent’s eyes—made to lay him open with her claws, he swung the log again and she slapped it out of his hands and took hold of him.
He might have cried out.
He might have screamed in abject terror.
But all Megga heard as the beldam’s jaws seized his throat was a sound like a tongue sliding into the juicy pulp of a plum.
Before she could be stopped, the beldam drained him. She lifted him off his feet and sucked at his throat with a wet, slobbering sound. Not just feeding on him, but gulping his blood, guzzling from his throat, slurping the red sap until it ran down her chin and pissed from every orifice and Morris, his bloodless face and glazed eyes staring up at the ceiling, seemed to shrivel in her death-grip, making a sound almost like an aluminum beer can crushed by a fist.
She tossed him aside.
And Megga…uplinked as she had been with Wenda…felt every second of his defilement.
She felt the vampire seize him as if it were seizing her.
She felt the iron grip of its clawlike hands. Then, and worse, she felt its cold face pressed up to his warm, pulsing throat like the muzzle of a wolf. The lips felt like raw meat. The vampire let loose with a growling, hungry sound, its saliva spraying against the side of his throat…and then the teeth went in. Like surgical steel scalpels they perforated the skin of his neck and punctured the jugular beneath. They slid in, then out, in, then out, assuring that the vein was open and would stay open so the mouth and tongue could do their work.
It was agonizing.
The impalement was explosive and resounding to his nerve endings, it made waves of white-hot agony rip through his head.
Then…nothing.
Maybe there was an anesthetic quality to the spit of the vampire and maybe he just sank into darkness from the sheer trauma. Like the suctioning mouth of a leech, the vampire’s lips fastened tightly to his throat in an unbreakable seal, gulping down the dark, rich flow of blood, filling itself, gorging itself until he was like a spring that ran dry and his veins collapsed and his heart fluttered in his chest and stopped cold and dead.
A dozen bloated rats twining her legs like hungry cats, the beldam turned on Megga. She had taken in too much blood and she was swollen with it, engorged like a leech. It ran in scarlet rivers from her mouth and nose, it filled her eyes until they looked like huge yolky blood-eggs. The front of her filthy, ragged burial dress was dyed red with it and it ran in a stream from between her legs and pooled on the floor. She stood there, an ensanguined human sponge.
But it wasn’t enough.
She would feed again.
She was gluttonous for it and she’d fill herself until she popped like a water balloon. As she came for Megga, she was bloated like a blood-fattened tick.
Her right foot left a bloody print on the floor. The blood-ova of her eyes were luminous like fissionable materials. Her voice made a hissing, gulping sort of sound as it tried to talk through the hemoglobin that gushed from her lips. One breast had worked itself free of her cerements and it expunged droplets of crimson milk.
Megga did not try to escape.
The rats were all over her, crowding on her body like maggots on carrion, not feeding, but encompassing her, enveloping her, burying her in their greasy, lice-hopping pelts and flabby, warm bodies.
The beldam came for her and there was nothing that could stop it.
12
A rat flew through the air like it had been shot from a gun and hit Wenda full in the chest. She almost went over, the air forced from her lungs with the impact. The rat that hit her hung on by its teeth, which were sunk into the front of her parka. She knocked it free by bringing her fist down with a strength that even amazed her because she distinctly heard and felt its spine snap.
It dropped writhing to the floor.
Another stormed in, sleek, glossy black, and about the size of a Rottweiler puppy, it seemed. As she kicked it, five or six others took its place. One of them climbed her leg and bit into her thigh. She grabbed it by its hairless tail, yanked it free, and swung it with everything she had towards the wall. It hit hard and fell to the floor, back legs kicking.
More of them bit into her legs, right through her snowpants.
One got on her back and bit her ear.
You won’t win, you dirty crawly little bastards! I won’t let you! I will not allow it! she thought as she waged war on them, plucking them free, tearing them free, crushing and stomping and smashing them as more poured forward to fill the gap. Don’t think I don’t know what this is about! Don’t think I don’t recognize this as the diversion it’s supposed to be! But it won’t do any good!
She fought with horror and repulsion and rage. The rats climbed her legs and jumped on her back and tangled their claws in her hair, yet still she fought. She tore them free and kicked them aside, smashing them beneath her boots and laying them open with the silver butcher’s knife. They kept coming, crowding forward in ranks but she was not about to go down beneath them and she knew they weren’t strong enough to take her, not unless her own fear overcame her.
The knife.
They feared the silver blade.
When she hacked one with it, a dozen more skittered away in terror. She knew very well what was going on with Megga and Morris, but the rats kept her from doing anything about it and she supposed that was why they had been sent.
As one bit into her cheek, she ripped it free and snapped another’s neck as it nuzzled into her throat. She killed a dozen and still they came, but when she swung the knife they scattered like wheat chaff before a scythe. And this became her strategy, though she hardly had the time to recognize it as such. She kept the others at bay by swinging her knife in arcs. And while she did so, she tore the other ones free, punting and stomping at them. She ripped a final one from the back of her parka and charged forward, the rats retreating in waves.
Splattered with ratblood and ratmeat, she reached Morris just as the beldam finished with him and bore down upon Megga.
Except the beldam was no beldam…soaked in blood and stinking of it, she was younger. Her face was smooth and unlined, her eyes bright, her hair a luscious shade of red. Coils of it were plastered to her face with sticky venous fluid.
She did not see Wenda coming.
Not until it was too late.
Megga was dazed and out of it, barely on her feet by that point, probably in shock from what she had just seen and what was about to happen. While Rule fought the rats with a poker from the fireplace, eight or ten of them hanging off of him and more leaping at him all the time, Wenda went after the beldam.
Outside the house, at that very moment, there rose a howling discord of dozens of disembodied voices screeching into the night. It was a cacophony of anguish and fury and incarnate hysteria.
Wenda brought the knife back in both hands like a sword. She swung it. The beldam caught wind of it. She turned, whirling around, blood spraying from her. Droplets of it spattered against Wenda’s face.
The beldam snarled.
She screamed in wrath.
And the blade came around with irresistible force, every ounce of strength and weight Wenda had bringing it to bear. It entered the hag’s throat just beneath the jawline and split her neck like black oak, cleaving her head free which spun end over end, landing in the hearth, right in the blazing heart of the fire, casting flaming sticks and glowing coals over the floor.
Decapitated or not, as the flames engulfed it, the head did not scream in agony, it laughed. Ablaze and filling the room with a most appalling stench, it laughed with a high, shrieking sort of sound, breathing out clouds of gray ash. “I SHED MY SKIN, DID I NOT? I WORE THE BODY AND FACE OF THE TENDER ONE, DID I NOT? SHE IS THE LIAR! THE LIAR! WENDA KEEGAN, THE UNTRIED ONE! HER BUD HAS NOT BEEN BURST AND HER ROSE IS UNPLUCKED AND HER MAIDENHEAD NOT YET SEEDED! SHE SHE SHE—”
The voice raged on and on, a crusty and deranged shriek that rose to a high treble until the words no longer made sense and then the head, blackened and blistering, screamed. The mouth opened like the sooty throat of a chimney and the scream was that of a chainsaw ripping into a dead tree. The sound was loud, deafening, and everyone covered their ears. But it was not just in the room, but in their heads, grating and rending and shrilling like saws biting into steel plating. A wind rushed through the room, lashing and blowing and it stank of fetid meat and burning hair.
And through it all, the headless body did not fall.
It stumbled about, clawing out with its hands, seeking flesh to rend and lives to take. From that of a curvaceous, rejuvenated woman, it had expanded with the blood it leeched, bloating until the buttons of its rotting burial gown popped free one by one. It was like the living trunk was filled with helium. It became a flabby and vile puppet that bounced and contorted, convulsed and writhed like a marionette. But as the head broke apart in the heat like an eggshell, the trunk grew rigid and trembling, mottling with purple spots of fungi, then splitting open and oozing a milk of blood and a foul gray necrotic slime as it began to first fragment and then putrefy, becoming an especially grotesque and ambulant corpse that finally stiffened and went still, tipping over like a felled tree and smashing into a stew of gut-waste, organ-matter, and powdering bones on the floor.
By that point, Wenda was down on one knee, physically ill with the smells that burst from the thing in rapid succession: a green and maggoty putrescence followed by stink of rotting fruit and mildewed linen, then a desiccated and dusty smell of attics and planks splitting apart with dryrot. There was a final enveloping smell of great age like wormy books flaking on shelves…then nothing.
The head in the hearth snapped and popped, but it was a sterile thing by that point like a melon whose juice and pulp had been boiled from it, leaving only a burnt, splitting husk behind.
The rats were nearly nonexistent.
Most had fled back to wherever they had come from, vanishing like ghosts at dawn. What few remained were injured and Rule, bitten and clawed, his overalls scathed with scratches, was hunting them down and smashing their heads open with the fireplace poker. He seemed barely aware that there was anything else in the room but himself and the rodents.
13
Wenda stood slowly, looking around.
Morris’ leeched corpse was curled up like a road-struck dog and it would have to be attended to, she knew, before it woke up and started causing trouble. Because it would. Sliding the knife back in her belt, she stepped around the remains of the beldam and helped Megga to her feet. She looked like she was in shock. Wenda took her over to the fire and tossed in the last few birch logs they had. Next, they’d burn the furniture if they had to. The flames burned high and bright and warm. Wenda could feel the fatigue in her limbs, but the night was hardly over with.
Megga just stared into the hearth, the blaze reflected in her dark and glassy eyes. Wenda dug in one of her pockets for her cigarettes, found the remains of her pack, lit one up and shoved it between her lips. She had no idea whether it was the proper thing to do or not, but it was all she could think of. It was the first thing they did in old movies.
Rule sat in the chair behind them. He was breathing hard. “That’s only the beginning,” he said after a few minutes. “They won’t let us live to tell the tale. They can’t. Their survival depends on us becoming like them so we can’t bring people to burn this place in broad daylight or hunt them down.”
Wenda made a grunting sound, but had little energy for anything else.
Megga seemed to realize there was a cigarette in her mouth and her addiction took charge. She blinked a few times and then began dragging off it, blowing out clouds of smoke. “She gave up the secret.”
Wenda just looked at her.
“She gave up the secret,” Megga said again. “Before the head stopped moving…it gave up the secret.”
“What secret?” Rule said.
“The secret of Wenda.”
Wenda said nothing; there was nothing she could say. What Megga said or, rather, the importance of what she said was not lost on her. She could still hear that awful voice in her head. Her bud has not been burst and her rose is unplucked and her maidenhead not yet seeded. Those were the words and Megga had known it all along because those things had been in her head right from the start. It was true, of course. Wenda was a virgin but it was not something she went around admitting to or shouting from the rooftops. It was simply a personal choice. One that was possibly archaic by today’s standards, but one that had always seemed right for her…particularly in light of certain events in her life.
“So that’s the secret?” she finally said. “They’re afraid of me because I keep my legs crossed?”
There was a bitter sarcasm there, but she couldn’t help it. Somehow she’d been hoping for a little bit more. Some secret strength she never knew she had. She wanted to be able to shout SHAZAM! and go on her merry way kicking undead ass. But virginity? That was it?
“It’s ridiculous,” she said.
And it was.
It was the craziest goddamn thing she’d ever, ever heard.
Because she hadn’t wanted to be a virgin. God no, she hadn’t really wanted that, but…but…but…but David died. He died and I miss him and I’m still in love with him and I can’t help myself.
“You’re incorruptible,” Megga told her. “Don’t you see the power of that? Of purity? Of goodness? There’s more to becoming a vampire than just getting bit in the neck. That’s only the physical part. The spiritual and psychological part is offering yourself and taking part in your own destruction.”
“Excellent,” Rule said, very much approving. “Wenda is our own Athena, our warrior maiden. Her strength is her virginity. It’s the wellspring of her power and its virtue cannot be sullied. As Athena defeated Ares, the god of warfare and bloodshed, so shall our Wenda defeat Griska, the lord of the dead.”
“You two are getting a little mystical for me,” Wenda admitted.
“It’s not something you need to think about,” Rule said. “If it’s true—”
“Oh, it’s true, all right,” Megga said.
“—then it’s something that exists whether you believe in it or not. It does not require your cooperation or your belief. It simply is.”
Wenda didn’t bother responding to that because, realistically, how could she? It was a completely irrational idea. Maybe Megga was right—it seemed possible in some crazy way—but it was contrary to everything Wenda had always believed in, honored, and practiced in her somewhat narrow view of reality. She wanted to debate the very idea, but debating it was like debating the existence of a superior being. Faith was faith and belief was belief. They were states of mind and no matter how much empirical evidence you threw against it, the faithful remained faithful and she knew she’d never convince Megga that it was pure fantasy.
And particularly since she wasn’t sure that it was fantasy at all.
There was something within her, something inside her, some well of strength that she’d never tapped into before this night. And who are you by this point to be clinging to worn-out tenets of what’s real and what’s not? What’s possible and what can never be? Maybe yesterday you could get away with rationalizing, but not now. Not after what you’ve seen this night. There are dark things in this world, horrible things that skulk and hide in the sunless corners and now you have seen some of them. You have seen true evil…is it that hard to believe that maybe in you there is true goodness? But, yes, it was. Just because she’d never had sex? The very idea seemed ludicrous…then again, so did this entire visit to Cobton.
Wenda slumped forward, letting her face fill her hands. God knew there had been many times when she viewed her virginity as a weight around her neck and many occasions when she could have gotten rid of that weight. But she hadn’t. It wasn’t always a conscious choice either. Fate and circumstance constantly got in the way. She’d had relationships with men…and every one of them dissolved into a comedy of errors. They’d each devolved into chaos long before the bedroom was reached.
Like David, for example.
She blanched at the memory.
But was all that purely a matter of stupid, annoying coincidence…or was it the hand of something beyond herself constantly intervening, saving her for this night, keeping her blade sharp and her virtue intact so she could do its bidding?
“I wish it had been me,” Megga said, pulling furiously off her cigarette. “I just wish I had been the one. God, all my life I wanted to be special. I wanted to stand out. I wanted to be one of the few and not one of the fucking many. Maybe if I’d have known I might have kept my virginity past my sixteenth year. But you know what? I doubt it. I’m not like you, Wenda. There’s always been kind of a…a seam of darkness in me. I fall too easily. I give in to temptation and vice. It’s like second nature to me to be self-indulgent and weak. I’m not strong. Not inside where it counts. Not like you.”
“I’ve never been strong either,” Wenda admitted.
“Before tonight.”
She sighed. “Yes, before tonight.”
“If Doc was here, he could explain this to you and it would make sense,” Megga said. “You know it would make sense.”
“Doc?” Rule said.
Megga explained who he was and, more importantly, what he was. “He’s really a fascinating guy,” she went on. “He’s one of these people that have immense talent and intelligence, you know? But for some reason, nothing ever really comes of it. He should have had his own show in Vegas or been a movie star or a bestselling author or something. He’s special. But he ended up working on a midnight horror show with us. Why? That’s what I always wondered: why? You see all these talentless bums in life that become rich and famous through pure hype and groveling self-promotion and then there’s guys like Doc that truly deserve it, but fate turns a blind eye towards them. Why is that?”
