Hag Night, page 32
They found the Georgian within minutes.
It was tall and somber, its multi-paned windows filled with darkness. But the worse part was that the front door was wide open. That did not bode well. Wenda smelled an almost sweet, unnatural sort of odor coming out at her. She knew what they would see and what they would find would not be good.
They all knew it.
Regardless, no one suggested that they turn back.
Wenda led them in. She carried her sliver-bladed knife in one hand and a kerosene lantern in the other, lighting the way. Megga was behind her with empty hands and a hollow heart. Rule came last. He carried his flashlight, but he didn’t waste any batteries shining it around. The lantern would do. Wenda led them towards a doorway that was open. They could see the low flickering of a fire beyond it.
Rule felt something pull up inside him as they reached the doorway.
He knew whatever was in there would be horrible and it was what the undead wanted them to see. He followed Wenda in there, practically dragging Megga behind him. He thought she might be in shock. When she’d first found them in the storm, she wouldn’t stop blabbering out her torment. Now, she wouldn’t say a word. But as he pulled her into the room with him, he could feel how she drew back. She knew there was something in there that she didn’t want to see.
It was a parlor.
The fire in the hearth had nearly died out. Wenda raised her lantern, casting light around and he turned on his flashlight, panning the room and soon wishing that he hadn’t. There was a body tacked to the wall, crucified with nails, and it was an absolute obscenity. Not only was it swollen and puffed purple-blue like every bone within had been broken, but it looked like it had nearly been turned inside out, bowel and organ and gut pushed out of the rent body cavity, dripping and seamed with yellow fat. But despite the carnage, there was barely a drop of blood to be had. Rule could imagine why. In his mind, he could see the vampires crowded up to the dying man, suckling him like piglets at the milk-swollen teats of their mother.
Megga made a slight squealing sound in her throat, but she continued to stare. Sickened, Rule clicked off his flashlight and turned her away from the atrocity.
“Its Doc,” Wenda said, her voice edged with defeat. “It’s Doc.”
Rule sighed. “If he’s…like this, then I doubt the others survived.”
“Burt, Reg, Bailey…oh Christ.”
Megga pulled her hand away from his own and dropped her weight into a chair. Rule knew she had given up. If Wenda gave up too, they were done. He could fight to the death and it would do no good. His death would be an amusement for Griska and his legions. Nothing more than amusement.
“We have to get down to that tunnel,” he said. “There’s no time to waste. Dawn is getting close and they’re going to get very desperate.”
Wenda was staring at Megga. She looked forlorn. Empty.
“Wenda…we don’t have time,” he emphasized.
She nodded. There were a couple stakes on the floor. No doubt they had been manufactured by Doc and the others. She took them, slid them through her belt with the others.
And Megga screamed.
They looked over at her. Both were still having trouble getting the image of Doc out of their heads. Wenda opened her mouth to ask Megga what in God’s name she was screaming about, but the words never came out.
Rule saw what she was staring at.
It was something that did not look especially threatening…cobwebs. At least, what he assumed were cobwebs. White crepe-like tendrils dangling in the air, several of which seemed to be dropping over Megga. They looked, absurdly enough, almost like Silly String. Megga brushed them away from her face. In a frantic rush to get away, she hit the floor on her knees and Wenda pulled her away.
Cobwebs?
No, they weren’t cobwebs and he knew it. He expected only the worst and he was not disappointed. In the time it took him to realize there was something seriously fucked up and Wenda pulled Megga to her feet, the extraordinary was occurring: much like Silly String, the cobwebs were filling the air. A network of them was coming from the direction of the ceiling, it seemed, attached to the chair Megga had been sitting on by several thick white cords like the anchor strands that held a spider’s web in place. It happened very quickly.
Rule backed away with the others. In his mind, the stuff looked like ectoplasm.
“We better get out of here,” Wenda said, her voice sounding dry like it was blown with sand.
The cords came together with a sliding and whipping sound, breaking apart into threads and filaments, interweaving and crisscrossing until it looked like there was a great living net in the room. But that quickly thickened as the ghostly white threads knotted together, taking on a ropy near-human form as the rootlike growths had in the other house. They fleshed out in seconds and there was a featureless female shape drifting above them, still connected by myriad white fibers. The woman looked like she was made of pale phlegm, roiling yellow gas, and tresses of coiling bloody tissue. A grinning face emerged. A set of swollen breasts. A mounded pregnant belly as if she had died in childbirth. Rule could see the faces of unborn children trying to push through her skin which was like gray lace.
“WE HAVE TO GET OUT OF HERE!” Wenda shouted. “NOW!”
Rule realized then that he had been seduced by the impossibility of what he was seeing: a living cobweb woman. He hadn’t been able to look away from it. He would have waited there, he knew, until she came for him, until she buried him alive in her webby, seeking mass and drained him dry drop by drop. Even then, threads of web were snaking through the air in his direction.
“Come on!” Wenda shouted.
Rule led the way out. He slammed the door shut, leaning on it, breathing heavily, realizing how close he’d been to sacrificing them all. But it wouldn’t happen again. He would not allow it.
At least, that’s what he kept telling himself.
16
It was cold and dark in the house. Now that she had been away from the fire for a time, Wenda felt numb inside. She wondered if she’d ever feel warm again.
Rule led them on down corridors that probably made perfect sense by day, but at night were a complete maze. But he knew the way. Despite the horror that was behind them in the parlor, he moved them slowly and efficiently, scanning the way ahead carefully with his flashlight.
“It’s a game,” Megga said.
She hadn’t spoken in some time, so both Wenda and Rule stopped and looked at her. Her eyes blinked rapidly in the darkness. “It’s a game,” she said again. “That’s what it is. We don’t stand a fucking chance. They’re toying with us, letting us think there’s hope. At the last moment, they’ll snatch it away from us when they’re done letting us run the maze like rats.”
“There’s always a chance,” Rule said.
Megga laughed at him. “They’re destroying us even now, planting seeds of fear and indecision in us. They’re ancient and cunning. We’re hopeless and week. They are the children of the night, the—”
“Just shut up,” Wenda told her. “We don’t have time for your uber-Goth drama.”
Megga just shook her head. “You don’t understand. They already own us. They can claim us anytime they want.”
“They own you. That’s all they’ve ever owned. And they’ve used you to cause trouble again and again. Quit being so fucking weak. We don’t have the time for it.”
Rule led them on again and Wenda found herself wishing that Megga had not found them, that she’d stayed back in the other house with her own kind. She would have been a happy, morose little vampire by now. Wenda didn’t like thinking things like that. It wasn’t in her nature…or it hadn’t been before tonight. The last thing she wanted to do was to sacrifice one of them to the walking dead, but her patience with Megga was simply bone-dry.
“Okay,” Rule said. “The door is just around the bend.”
When they got there, he did not open it. He considered it carefully. He looked over at Wenda as if to say, ready? She nodded. He grasped the knob and threw the door open. He explored the darkness beyond with his light. He saw nothing move on the stairwell.
Wenda felt the tension drain from her. Nothing had leaped out at them. That was a plus. Even so, the adrenaline surging through her system would not completely release its grip on her.
“Let’s go,” she said, feeling the press of shadows behind them. “I think they’re coming.”
Rule swallowed and led them down the stairs, his breath puffing out in the flashlight beam in white clouds. There was death below and he could feel it.
17
By the time they reached the cellar floor, the vampires were coming down the stairs.
Rule picked them out in the beam of his flashlight: seven or eight ragged figures that seemed to be as much mist and smoke as they were flesh and blood. One moment, they seemed perfectly corporeal. The next, they lost solidity and the light seemed to shine right through them, illuminating the stairwell and little else.
He needed little more inspiration.
Moving sure and quick, he grasped Megga’s hand and towed her away deeper into the cellar, Wenda at their side. Despite the winter chill, the darkness felt damp. It seemed to crawl around them. Sounds bounced and echoed and it was hard to know if they had made them or if it was the vampires.
Rule did not believe it was the undead: they were unbearably silent. They made no more sound than patches of moonlight traveling across a midnight lawn.
The cellar was used for storage and it was crowded with dark shapes and menacing shadows. Boxes and crates, stacked lumber, old apple baskets and stone jars, nail kegs and aluminum milk jugs.
He found two more kerosene lanterns that he had filled not a week before. He gave one to each of the girls and Wenda abandoned her nearly empty one.
He knew his way through the maze because he’d been down in the cellar dozens of times in his job as caretaker. Much of the assorted junk down there, he had brought down himself. As he led them through it all, quickly as he could, he thought: You won’t get these girls because I will not allow it. Maybe I’m old and I’m weak and I’m approaching the end of my years, but, by God, I’ll fight. You know I’ll fight. We all will. Dawn’s coming now and if you don’t get us all, if you fail and leave just one of us alive, that one will hunt you all down and stake every goddamn one of you. You know it’s true.
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 18th 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 thing 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…other 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.
