Hag Night, page 5
“MOLE!” Wenda screamed. “MOLE!”
Then a torrent of snow blinded her and she could see nothing. The force of it knocked her into the doorway and her feet went out from under her. The storm was worsening, filled with wrath and anger, it seemed. Visibility was down to maybe ten feet by then. Wenda wiped snow from her face and she saw luminous yellow eyes watching from the blizzard.
And then Megga yanked her through the door.
That was when the impact of the situation really hit her: their little group had been separated, split into two parties.
She wondered if that was by accident or on purpose.
14
Megga got the door closed and searched around for a lock of some sort as Wenda searched around for a light switch. Morris was kneeling on the floor, breathing hard, trying to get his wind back and his mind working again.
“So fucking cold,” he said.
“We’re all cold,” Megga told him.
Though in a snowstorm it was never completely dark, not the way it was most nights, they needed light. The inside of the house was lit by that weird backlight common in a blizzard, but it was still dim and hard to see anything.
“Morris,” Wenda said. “Where’s the flashlight?”
“I had it,” he said.
Stripping off his gloves, he tried to work warmth back into his fingers. Slowly, very slowly, he began to search around for the flaps of his pockets. But it wasn’t fast enough for Wenda. She knelt by him, brushing his hands aside and started digging in the deep pockets of his leather coat.
“Nothing,” she said.
“I had it…I don’t know. Maybe I dropped it.”
“Good going,” Megga said.
“All right,” Wenda said, glaring at her in the dimness.
“Luckily I was a Girl Scout,” Megga said. “I’m always prepared.”
She dug a penlight from her pocket. It wasn’t much, but in the gloom it was like a searchlight. There was no lock on the door. There was only a bracket to either side of the frame. She searched around and found a plank. It was heavy and solid. She slid it into the bracket.
“Christ, like frontier days,” she said.
She looked for a light switch but there was none just like there were no fixtures on the ceiling that she could see. But why would there be? This town was supposed to be period in every way, a colonial village. If lights had been installed at some point they would have been taken out when the buildings were restored to their original state. And come to think of it, she had not seen any telephone poles or electrical lines on the drive in.
“You see a light switch?” she asked.
Wenda shook her head. “I rather doubt there will be one.”
“No,” Morris said. “There’s no juice out here. No lines within a mile or two of this place.” He breathed onto his hands to warm them. “The caretaker I spoke with said they have a generator in his shack behind the village, but that’s just to run cords so they can use lights and power tools in the buildings. This place is only open in the daytime and only in the summer. But…”
“But what?” Megga said.
“But the caretakers were supposed to have lights rigged for us. For the shoot.”
“Maybe something got to them before they could do it.”
Megga went up to one of the multi-paned windows and looked out into the night. She could see the eyes out there. They were closer than they were before. Whatever was out there was in no hurry; it—or more precisely, they—had all night and knew it.
“Well, we can’t sit around in the dark,” Wenda announced.
She was right and Megga began looking around. She took a door off to the left that led into a sitting room. Everything was period from the oval braided rugs to the wide plank floors, the Windsor chairs to the candlestick lamps. The good thing being that there was a fireplace and a nice stack of wood. If it wasn’t just for show, then they were in luck.
“In here,” she called to the others.
By the time they got there, Wenda pretty much towing Morris behind her, Megga had her penlight in her mouth and was setting up some kindling—strips of pine so dry they nearly broke apart in her hands. Tearing some pages out of a book on the shelf, she lit them with her cigarette lighter and the kindling caught almost immediately. When it was going good, she fed a few birch logs into the blaze. Everything was so dry it caught immediately. The warmth and glow of the fire was encouraging, but she knew they were a long way from easy street.
“That’s better,” Morris said. “It’s handy to have a Girl Scout around.”
“Are they still out there?” Megga asked.
Wenda nodded. “Closer.”
Morris warmed himself at the fire. He shook his head. “I…I don’t understand any of this. It’s all so crazy. That thing…that thing in the road…shapes flying around. I don’t get it. It’s not right.”
Megga sympathized with him on that point: it wasn’t right and it shouldn’t have been, but it was. And as she paused to think of it, and there hadn’t been much time up to that point to do much of that, it hit her with full force. She should have been terrified at the possibility of what was out there, what would want to come in after them…but she wasn’t. In some way, it was thrilling, in another it was vindication of her belief that somewhere, somehow, such creatures existed.
“What the hell are they?” Morris asked. He sounded desperate.
“Vampires,” Megga told him.
“Oh, come on! Vampires! I’m serious here.”
“So am I. Can you think of anything else they can be?” she put to him. “What else can become a wolf? What else can fly like a bat? There’s no doubt what they are and you better accept it whether you like it or not. If you don’t, you won’t make it through the night.”
He made a choking sound like he could barely breathe.
It was not easy for him. It would not be easy for any sane mind.
But reality was reality, regardless of how twisted.
Vampires, Megga thought. Freaking vampires. The undead. Sweet.
It was absolutely insane, but she figured in many ways she was better suited to deal with the reality of it than the others. The shock of it would hold them back. Their own disbelief would trip them up, make them vulnerable. Their rational twenty-first century minds would not be able to accept it. Vampires. Silly shit from movies, from books, from old wives tales. But with her, belief came easily. Maybe too easily.
But isn’t this what it has always been about? The obsession with the macabre and the morbid? The black candles and skulls and shelves crowded with Poe and Lovecraft? Isn’t this what you’ve been waiting for your entire life? To see these things? To know they exist despite what enlightened science might say to the contrary? That there are dark spaces and dark holes in the world, cracks in the floor of reality where nightmare things can crawl free?
She had the fire going good so she looked over at Wenda who had not said a damn thing. “Well, Vultura?” she said, falling into her Graveyard Girl persona. “What sayeth thee?”
Wenda sighed. “I’d say it’s bullshit…but something’s out there. Something was on that road, half-woman and half-wolf. And something took Mole. Something grabbed him and yanked him into the sky.” She touched the bloodstains on her parka. They were real enough. “And something is gathering outside this house right now. If they’re not vampires, then they’re close enough. The question is: what do we do about it?”
“Yeah, what are we going to do about it?” Morris said.
Hmm. Megga was sensing a lot of things at that moment as she studied both Morris and Wenda in the flickering orange light of the fire. Morris was losing his grip on reality. He was a get-it-done kind of guy, ambitious, domineering, relentless in his pursuit of the almighty buck. A force of nature to be reckoned with. Megga had never known him to be anything less than dynamic and in charge…but now he was limp as a noodle. Empty. And Wenda? Well, that was interesting, too. Wenda only came out of her shell when she was Vultura and then she was completely confident, so confident sometimes that the shift of personalities was almost frightening. But something had changed there, too. She didn’t seem so mousy and confused and indecisive as she normally was.
“Do?” Megga said. “What we’re going to do is survive until dawn. If they’re traditional vampires, they’ll have to crawl back into their graves then.”
She gave them a quick primer on the undead, though it was hardly necessary. Both Morris and Wenda had screened the movies they played on Chamber of Horrors. At least, Wenda had. Megga knew that for sure. Wenda not only screened them but she took extensive notes on them. She was studious by nature. She took notes and she studied them before the crew went to conventions so that if a fanboy asked who was a better Dracula, Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee, she’d have some kind of opinion and if they started assailing her with questions about Max Shreck’s ratlike persona in Nosferatu or Barbara Steele’s performance in Black Sunday, she would be informed and not an outsider, a nub.
Regardless, Megga went over it. “They can become bats or bat-like things. They might be able to become patches of mist. They might fear holy objects, but that might depend on their religious orientation when they were alive. If they were an atheist in life, the cross will mean nothing to them. What most people know about vampires comes from movies and most movies draw from a single source: Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But not everything in there is in keeping with the folklore of the vampire. We need to remember that,” she explained to them. “Some of it was dramatic invention. The erotic, sensual thing is hardly ever referred to in the old folktales. Stoker might have made that stuff up, basing it on early tales like Le Fanu’s Carmilla. I guess what I’m saying is those things out there are monsters. I kind of doubt we’ll see Robert Pattinson among them. But they’ll use any means to get at our blood. Nothing should surprise us. If the old tales are true, they must be invited in.”
Morris was staring into the fire. “Then we don’t invite them in.”
But Megga shook her head. “You don’t get it. We don’t know what their association is with Cobton. Have they been here before? Were they lying dormant until recently? Did they turn this place into a ghost town in the first place? For all we know, they may have been invited into every fucking house in this village.”
“Oh, Christ,” he said.
Wenda had been listening, but she had no comment. “Let’s not worry about that shit. Let’s go and make sure all the doors are bolted, the windows locked. This house is a Colonial Saltbox. That means it has a central chimney. There’s bound to be another fireplace in the kitchen, on the other side of this room, and a couple more upstairs. My bet is that there’s wood laid out for them so they look nice and authentic. Let’s get it all in here. Then we lock ourselves in and wait it out.”
The new take-charge Wenda was as dynamic, it seemed, as Morris had been once upon a time. Interesting, Megga thought.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s start with that. You coming, Morris?”
“I’m not leaving this fire. No way.”
There was a kerosene lamp on the mantle. Megga picked it up. It was full of fuel. “What are the chances this works?” She pulled off the glass chimney and lit the wick. It caught and held the flame. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
Leaving Morris at the fire, they went back towards the front door. Together, they looked out the window and did not like what they saw. There were dozens of people standing out in the blowing snow. They couldn’t see them very well, only their lupine eyes staring at the house.
15
“It might be a good idea to keep away from the windows,” Doc suggested. “No sense enticing what’s out there.”
Reg was trying to get some video on the things and not having much luck. Thus far, they were hanging back in the squall of snow. Even when it cleared and he focused in on them, they almost appeared misty as if they were breaking apart like the snow blowing around them.
Like Wenda’s group, Doc and the others had quickly built a fire and taken advantage of the numerous kerosene lamps, most of which were in working order. They had sequestered themselves in what might have been a parlor. There was a large flagstone fireplace that was now blazing away, chasing off the chill of the night…or as much of it as possible. The room was period from the slate-gray walls hung with grapevine wreaths and samplers to the spinning wheel, wing chairs, and camelback sofa.
Yes, authentic in every way, Doc thought. So authentic that it’s all too easy to believe that there is no longer such a thing as the current century. That we have been tossed back in time to the 17th or 18th century when belief in those things outside was probably commonplace in much of the world. To a time before the age of reason and good, hard science had proven such things could not be. A time of ghosts, spirits, and witches.
He was trying not to think about it.
He was trying to remain rational about it all because through rationality there was strength. But even as he tried, primitive superstitious terror flitted about in the dark corners of his mind, weakening his resolve. As Doc Blood—or Sawbones McCord or any of his previous theatrical incarnations—he had cultivated the same character, that of a somewhat uppity, elitist, pretentious magician. Through the years, he became so good at playing the role that eventually there was very little differentiation between himself and the character. Doc Blood was a sage. He was calm and philosophic and generally annoying to those in his company. For the others—Megga excepted—their characters were just characters. They shed them like they shed their costumes.
But not so with Doc Blood.
The character was everything. If he let go of that and became himself—Leonard Creese—he would be nothing but a temperamental drunk that was of little use to anyone, including himself. No, he maintained the character for without it, he was nothing. And there was no earthly way old Leo Creese—Jim Beam in the morning, Jim Beam in the evening, Jim Beam at suppertime—could handle this situation. Only Doc Blood could. And these people needed someone with a head on their shoulders to guide them.
Burt was pacing back and forth like an angry old bear that wanted out of its cage. Doc figured that was apropos, for there was something very dark and almost threatening brewing in their bus driver. This was a time of tension and anxiety and fear, obviously, and things suppressed in the human psyche had a way of externalizing themselves when the pressure was on. He’d seen it himself in the war: stress made the biggest, meanest grunts imaginable become docile and harmless, while the reserved, bookish types became kill-happy monsters. Things would happen this night, he was certain, and not all of them would be because of what waited outside.
Reg was trying to get Bailey to talk, but she would not even look at him.
A frightened little colt, Doc thought. Without Megga to lead her and tell her how to think and how to feel and respond, she’s entirely directionless.
She was sitting on the sofa, still wearing her parka, hat, and gloves. Her legs were drawn up, arms encircling them, chin resting in the V of her knees. Her blue eyes were wide and wet, her lips pulled in a straight line. A lock of blonde hair had fallen over her face and she did not bother to brush it aside.
Doc sighed. “Bailey…listen to me. Nothing’s going to happen to you. I won’t allow it. We won’t allow it. We’re safe in here and we’re going to stay safe in here. In the morning we’ll get out. In a matter of hours, the State Police will be looking for us. So try to keep your chin up. All is not lost.”
Her eyes blinked a few times and she looked over at him. She smiled slightly.
“There, that’s better.”
“Sure, dude,” Reg said. “We just gotta wait for sunrise and shit. Then we’ll be outta this chiz. That’s all.”
“Sure, that’s all,” Burt said with about as much sarcasm as he could muster.
“That’ll do,” Doc told him.
Burt turned towards him and it was obvious he was going to say something unpleasant, but at the last moment he simply closed his mouth. Which was probably a wise move, Doc decided, because he was not about to put up with that sort of thing. He would have been the last person to threaten anyone with violence, but if it came down to it…well, he’d pulled two tours in the jungle as a paratrooper and had seen things that would have made guys like Burt piss their pants. Maybe all that was forty years ago, but Doc figured he still had a few moves left and he would use them if it came to it. God yes, he would.
He lit a cigarette. “It is said that war brings out the best in people and the worst. And our situation might be comparable to war. Having been in a war, I can say that it is. Now, we can stand together and support one another and make it through this or we can act childish and selfish and we can die. I don’t see much of a choice, do you?”
“Hell no,” Reg said.
Bailey said nothing.
Burt was chewing at his lower lip, his eyes directed at Doc. Doc was baiting him, pushing his buttons and he knew it. Finally, unable to intimidate him with his dark eyes and searing look, Burt turned away. He stared into the fire.
And Doc thought: Feel free to commence hostilities at any time, you little chimp. You won’t be the last man standing.
“Well, there’s no way out until dawn so we just have to make the best of it,” Reg said.
Burt laughed low in his throat. “No way out for you, but maybe I’ve got other plans.”
“We’d love to hear them,” Doc said.
Burt ignored him.
Reg said, “But what are those things? I mean, like vampires or werewolves or something? Shit, they gotta be something.”
“If they’re not, then they’re close enough, I’d say.” Doc pulled off his cigarette. “The question would be: why now? Why here? How could they be in the first place and what is their connection to this town? Questions we’ll probably never answer.”
Reg was checking over the woodpile. “We’ve got an axe,” he said, “and this thing.” He held up a fireplace poker that looked like something used to skewer hogs. It was wrought-iron silverplate, heavy, and lethal-looking. “Whatever it is.”
