Hag Night, page 34
Andy stepped lightly in his direction, the flashlight making his face glow like the mantle of a deep-sea squid. His eyes were huge and yellow, the color of drainage leaking from an infected wound. His lips were threadbare, split by seasons of cold, the teeth discolored, fangs mottled. He reached out with a hand much like the crooked roots that grow from the bases of ancient oaks. The fingers were spidery and limp.
That’s it, Andy. Scare him to death. Scare that little fucking pimple to death.
Rule tried to lick his lips but they felt like burlap. This was not Andy; this was a dead thing from a grave. Andy had been wonderful and amazing, kind and sweet and bigger than life. But this…this shell was an animate doll, a living mannequin, a mocking puppet carved from coffin pine. There was nothing inside it but a vast, black, whirpooling nothingness.
Let me have him, Andy. Little fucker left us here to die. Let me show him what that was like.
The real Andy would have—and had—fought like ten tigers to protect his kid brother back in the dim days of the 1950’s. He would never have let anyone harm slight, bookish Denny Rule. Now, however, he sacrificed him easily, willingly, and with a cold, inhuman mirth.
Go ahead, Bugs. Show him your stuff.
Bugs was more than ready. What happened then was shocking and weirdly hallucinatory, but it seemed that somehow Bugs unzipped himself like a garment bag…and inside he was empty save for the furry, oily bodies of rats. What seemed dozens of plump rats pressed together to keep warm. They came out of him in a flood, pouring, creeping, surging, and Rule was drowning in them as their teeth bit into him and their claws laid his flesh open. The rodent waters rose higher and higher and he was going under, he was going to suffocate on filthy, flea-hopping rodent pelts.
Andy, Andy, no please Andy don’t let him—
He opened his mouth to scream and a rat wedged itself between his lips.
23
Wenda stopped.
This was the place.
This is where they wanted her to go and where she knew she had to go.
This was their lair.
There were coffins all around her…crude plank boxes and oblong packing crates jutting from the earth, lids sprung open in trenches in the ground, others scattered on the low hills of dirt around her. In the lantern light, she could see the bloody handprints and smeared red-brown fingerprints on the insides of the lids from being pushed open by the leeches when they arose for midnight feedings. But they all looked old, impossibly old, stains decades old. Rule was right: they had come out of dormancy this night. The very night that Morris arranged for the shoot. If that was karma, then it was karma of the fuck-you-and-yours variety.
Breathing hard, trying to keep the fear in her guts at a manageable level, she set the lantern down and pulled out one of her stakes. She waited with the knife and stake for what came next. She did everything in her power to appear bored, unconcerned, unimpressed…as if facing hordes of the undead was something she did monthly like menstruation, whether she needed it or not.
It was a ruse and she knew she was failing at it, but she did her best to put that out, doing it as Vultura and not Wenda. Now more than ever, she needed that mask to hide behind. The truth of the matter was that the fear she felt was huge and crushing. It ran cold fingers up her spine, slid slivers of ice into her heart, and filled her throat with sour-tasting bile. The fear was palpable and it owned her. And it was only magnified by the atmosphere of the catacombs, which was one of depravity and foulness.
Still, she waited.
She did not call out to the others; she figured they were dead so her mind refused to consider them. She could hear something like a distant wind, a faint dripping, little else but the throbbing of her own heart. She was aware of the fact that not only was the atmosphere becoming more virulent, but the stink was rising, a vile combination of dankness, age, and rot.
The rats were steadily gathering around her. They came in waves, bringing their sewer-smell with them. At first they hid in the shadows, their beady eyes appraising her with simple animal apprehension, but the more that arrived, the bolder they became. Now they were Roman citizens filling the Coliseum, squeaking and boisterous, shifting and hissing, rows upon rows of them on the ground, ranks crowded atop the mill wreckage, clustering on timbers like magpies on telephone lines.
They had not come alone.
Up above where tree roots dangled like spidery fingers and sections of the mill hung from the earth precariously, bats roosted, stretching their wings and making chittering sounds, shitting down upon the rats beneath them.
They’re gathering for the show.
Wenda did not believe for one mad moment that they were intelligent enough to know what any of this was about. They were under the dominion of Griska and he brought them here in numbers to increase her unease. She did not doubt the sheer power, the inflexible authority of a mind that could do such things, but at the same time she saw weakness in it. Though the vermin offended her, she knew it was all drama, stagecraft, an attempt to undermine not only her drive and willpower, but to terrify her.
And she wasn’t about to say it wasn’t working.
In fact—
The temperature of the air dropped suddenly as something began to take shape around her. Except, it never really did take shape properly…it was a smoke ghost, a monster of the mist, something insubstantial like cold fog and hot wind that spun around her in a graveyard whirlwind. She saw white, white hands reaching out for her, a severe Slavic face that seemed to be dissolving to steam, two lurid red eyes…but all of it was constantly moving, constantly reshaping itself, constantly seeming pass through the four states of matter, gas to solid to liquid and, possibly, even plasma. It seemed to throw a field of energy around her that was burning hot then freezing cold. It was Griska, an ectoplasmic monstrosity, and she was caught in his tempest.
She could not get away.
She couldn’t even fall to the ground.
He spun her around, dragging her inside of himself and spitting her out, lifting her and dropping her as her head spun with vertigo.
Let me
Let me
Let me in.
She wanted to scream and cry out, but she had no voice. He was peeling away the Vultura mask so she was simple, trembling, terrified Wenda Keegan, defenseless and hopeless. He was in her mind, circling around the edges, tormenting her, telling her how she was weak and he was strong, how if she did not submit her death was going to be ugly and of long duration. He would take her apart bit by bit, slit her open and let the rats feed on her internals while she screamed her sanity away.
The smoke gained substance and she saw something like a massive, membranous wing strike her, sending her plummeting into the dirt.
She tried to get her limbs working again as she crawled away from Griska’s vortex, but he pulled her up again and spun her around and around. She could feel something cold and wet licking her throat. It must have been his tongue. Then lips brushing her throat…repulsive, flabby lips like two blood-swollen leeches mating.
His mouth battened to her own and sucked the air out of her lungs.
Now it felt like a dozen lips were on her, tasting and teasing, gently sucking. As she wavered at the edge of reason, she knew if she did not fight and fight right now, all was lost. He would break what was left of her will and then drain her dry.
She could feel the knife in her hand.
Miraculously, she had not dropped it.
The stake was gone, but right now it was the knife that mattered and she knew it. It was an extension of what was inside her. With a silent cry breaking from her lips, she slashed and hacked at what held her. The blade slit it open, shredding it like cheesecloth, tearing it free from her like sticky cobwebs.
Griska instantly weakened.
She reached out and tore at his mass, gripping ribbons of snaking tissue in her hands that tried to go gaseous as she tore at them. She ripped. She tugged. And as she did so, she slashed. Her left hand, the hand that tore at him, was pierced by what felt like dozens of cold needles that made her fingers go numb. It went right up her arm, but the attack worked. He stopped spinning her. He ejected her from his mass and she heard a wailing, enraged scream that was his pain venting itself.
The stakes.
On her knees in the dirt, her head still reeling, she fumbled for them in her belt, but there was barely any sensation in her hand. She dropped one, then another. By then, Griska had her again. He lifted her into the air and tossed her. She struck a moldering, warped casket, but she did not drop the knife. She made to slash at him and he threw her twenty feet like a dog worrying a chew-toy. She hit the ground, the wind knocked out of her.
Don’t let him, don’t let him, don’t let him…win.
But he was winning and she knew it. Her defiance had surprised him, maybe even shocked him, but he had dealt with many like her during the long, gray procession of the centuries. He knew how to break her and he would. As she made to slash him, it felt like a hundred hornet stingers punched into her, each piercing her and delivering its injection of venom. He tossed her and she rolled through the dirt. Her entire body felt numb now, frostbitten and senseless. The Griska-thing hovered over her, blowing around her, readying itself for what surely would be the death-blow.
Just lay here, she thought. Lay cool and easy. Play dead. Get it? Like when you were a kid, play…dead.
When she saw Griska’s cruel face pushing out of the noxious mist just inches from her own, she brought the knife around in a savage arc, slitting it from forehead to chin. It parted like cool jelly. She slashed and hacked at it. “HERE!” she screamed at his melting face. “HOW ABOUT THAT? AND THAT? AND THAT? HOW DO YOU FUCKING LIKE THAT, YOU GODDAMN PARASITE!”
Griska shrieked, folding in on himself and then mushrooming back out. Trying, it seemed, to control his shape, but having trouble as Wenda kept stabbing him, bisecting him with that damnable silver blade. He howled with agony and wrath. He had underestimated his opponent and now he was paying for it. And though he was still not strictly a corporeal being—part mist, part flesh, part boiling steam—he was wounded.
He was gored.
A foul smelling vapor hissed from his mass, a rain of watery brown-red blood going to the blackness of India ink. He still tried to attack Wenda with dozens of sucking mouths and jabbing needles, but it was half-hearted and almost pathetic, like a wounded dog trying to bite. Feeble, weakened.
Wenda got to her feet and slashed at the bleeding ghost, gutting it and tearing it open. Her onslaught was fierce, but so was his retaliation. Something like a fist was driven into her temple and she was pitched to the ground. Shaking it off, she sat back up and something hot and acrid-smelling struck her full in the face, blinding her, sending her reeling with its foul odor. She brushed it from her face and it came again, a hot stream of…blood.
He was pissing on her.
He was pissing blood onto her.
When he stopped and she cleared the burning liquid from her eyes, he was standing not five feet from her. In his shaggy black hide coat, he looked like a human buzzard standing there and he smelled like one, too. The putrescence that filled her nostrils was not his odor—that was dry, dusty, and aged like a worm-holed book rotting on a shelf—but the stink of his breath, which was that of something that had been chewing on carrion.
But he was damaged.
She saw that much.
The other vampires had gathered now with the rats and they were all moaning with a high, eerie sibilance as if they could feel his pain and his…shame. He stood hunched over, enhancing his buzzard-like appearance, and Wenda knew she had damaged him with the knife. His face had indeed been slit open, the gash, perfectly bloodless, ran from the crown of his skull to his chin, perfectly splitting his hawkish nose. In fact, one side of his pallid, scarred face had slid down perhaps an inch, giving him the look of a reflection in a broken mirror and making him all that much more grotesque. His visage was narrow, bony, and rodent-like, spattered with blood, clumps of hair missing from his head, his flesh almost scaly, the teeth jutting from his mouth sharp and hooked like those of a pit viper. One eye was destroyed, gashed and popped like a blood-cherry, oozing a red-black juice down his craggy, graying complexion.
He brought up one hand and touched his face.
The fingers were remarkable white, remarkable long and oddly delicate, the nails ragged, yellow, and filthy.
With a thick accent, he said, “You dare…you dare…you dare touch me?”
Wenda wanted to tell him that, yes, she had dared and she would now dare to destroy him completely because time was on her side and dawn was approaching fast now. But he fixed her with his remaining leering red eye and held her like a bug on a pin.
As she trembled, he came for her.
24
Wenda heard the vampires begin to wail again with that unearthly, eerie sound of mourning. And it was not because Griska was coming to fix her, to empty her like an upended jug. No, it was because something else had shown up on the scene…a bunched, crawling thing that seemed to be primarily composed of rats, crawling, squeaking rats.
She knew it was Rule.
The rats had been sent to destroy him—and they were doing it, all right—but there was more fight in his ornery old body than Griska and his ghouls had counted on. The will to survive at his core was a flame that could not easily be blown out, like one of those trick birthday candles.
He pushed through the ranks of rats.
Some parted, some scurried, others attacked him.
But they certainly couldn’t stop him. He still clutched his flashlight in one raw, red fist and the rodents that had bitten his skin away had not been able to make him let go of it.
Dear God, he was swarmed with them. They were in his hair. They were hanging from his face by their teeth. Small ones had worked their way up the legs of his Carhartt overalls and down the back. They were gnawing at him, scratching and tearing at him. What she could see of his face was a bloody ruin. Between two bloated rat bodies, she could see one eye peering out as if from the depths of a shaggy cave. He reached up and tore one rat from his face and then another. He coughed out a blob of blood.
“GET AWAY FROM HER, YOU FUCKING LEECH!” he shouted. “GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM HER!”
Wenda knew then that, somehow, he had sensed the fix she was in and nothing, neither vampires, rats nor witch-winds, were going to stop him from reaching her side and lending assistance, even if that meant forfeiting his own life, which she was certain he had pretty much done.
He fought to his knees, then his feet and it was the utmost physical battle to do so. Rats fell from him and he peeled more free with his left hand, hammering at them with the butt of his flashlight. But for those that fell, others climbed him like a tree. He put his light on Griska and Wenda noticed that the beam partly illuminated the ghoul and partly shined right through him like he was made of some transparent material like cellophane.
Rule took two, then three faltering steps backwards, fighting the rats that were quite literally eating him alive. Wenda could hear their jaws working, teeth scraping against bone, as they glutted themselves with his flesh. Yet…he staggered forward, his voice cycling out of his throat in a screeching tirade: “YOU’RE ALL DONE! YOU’RE ALL FUCKING DONE! THE SUN WILL RISE SOON…AND…AND YOU’LL FRY IN IT…EVERYONE OF YOU FUCKING BLOODSUCKERS…”
Wenda wanted to go to him, but she knew it was pointless. The fact that he had made it even this far was practically supernatural. He dropped to one knee as the feeding frenzy continued, falling face-forward, his body writhing and shuddering with awful contortions. Gradually, it stopped moving. The grim silence was broken only by the feeding sounds of the voracious graveyard rats. They bit and chewed and tore. Even their savage appetites could not breech the material of his Carhartt overalls, but they still got at him and soon he was no longer visible, mounded by the rank, squirming hides of the rats themselves that dipped their blood-dripping snouts into him again and again.
Maybe Griska had let Rule get that far to immobilize Wenda completely, but, again, he had underestimated the hate that raged inside her. So when she jumped to her feet and rushed him, he was scarcely ready for her or the blade in her hand that came streaking in a silver blur at his face. He ducked back, holding up a hand to shield himself. The blade easily severed three fingers off his left hand that fell into the dirt and writhed like waxy, white earthworms.
He let out a bellowing roar that was more wolf than human.
An inky blood dripped from the finger stumps. He clawed out at Wenda, but by then the blade was coming again and this time it pierced him just left of the sternum and again he roared, but with such volume and manic fury that rats went squealing away and bats filled the air in panicked flight. The ground seemed to shake. Clods of earth fell from the roof overhead.
Wenda was amazed how very easily the blade went in.
It was not like she was jabbing it into meat and flesh, but into something far more insubstantial like perhaps a heap of threadbare linen. But her aim was off and she completely missed his heart, though the pain she caused him was not only evident, but considerable. The handle of the knife, upon entering the cage of his chest, grew burning hot in her hand and the blade seemed to shine. She smelled something like burning hair and meat. His rodentine face and scabrous flesh drew back from the screaming fanged pit of his mouth.
Then…Griska exploded.
There is no other word to describe what happened at that moment. He literally erupted. He seemed to blow apart into a thousand black, winging fragments that became a swirling, rushing, maddened swarm of bats that flew right into Wenda’s face and covered her body, tangling in her hair, biting and nipping as she fell backwards to the ground.
“Gah!” she cried out, quite involuntarily. “Oh God, get em offa me, get em offa me!”
She slashed at them with the silver blade and each bat it bisected blazed up with orange fire, dropping away into a melted, black rubbery ball. Her other hand tore at wings and snapped little bones and twisted little heads free.
