Hag Night (12 page)

Megga shook her head, trying to push that awful imagery from her mind, but like a leech it clung, it held on, it fed on the
darkness of her mind, bloating itself. Those villages…none were Cobton. These were in a far-away place where the crops had withered in the fields and the houses stood like leaning monoliths.

That woman looked like she was in agony, she looked…defiled.

Now it was invading Megga’s mind, the truth of what she had seen up there. The memory crowded in, filling her with unease. In that woman’s eyes she had seen the spectral darkness of alien lands laid empty by a creeping pestilence and she could hear the woman’s voice…a strange tongue, thick and guttural, Slavonic. She could not understand the words spoken, but the malevolence and spiritual decay behind them was all too evident.

Then Megga could remember herself standing there as that…that
woman
moved in at her and, no, she was not beautiful at all. Her face was
gray and fissured like an old root, the eyes a sullen sickly yellow, and the smile was not friendly but wolfish and starving, the teeth long and sharp. And that’s when the dread had engulfed her, locking her down in an icy embrace, an ebon fear sucking into her pores and filling her with an almost hysterical panic as she saw that grinning mouth whose smile was mocking and pale and poisonous. She looked into eyes that simmered with a black anti-human hatred, a hatred of the life in her and an almost carnal need to violate her and empty her veins.

That’s what she had
really
seen as those withered fingers had reached for her and that mouth had puckered into a shriveled gray blowhole to be pressed against her throat.

Megga lit another cigarette and tried to tell herself it wasn’t so, but it was true and she knew it. Maybe she’d always known that’s what those things would be like.

Leeches, nothing but leeches.

And if they offered you other things or gave you a glimpse of cold beauty or eroticism or whispered graveyard poetry in your ear, it was only a means to an end so they could feed upon you.

Yet…even knowing the truth of it and feeling the fear still kicking in her belly like a grim fetus…the hypnotic allure of the woman still clouded her mind and whitewashed her brain. Its influence was powerful. It lingered and haunted her skull like a ghost. And what frightened her most was that after Wenda had driven the crone away, Megga herself had become very much aware of how turned-on she was, how she’d wanted that woman to touch her and violate her and penetrate her with those long mottled teeth…and that, more than anything else, had made her go after Wenda, kiss her, tongue her.

She wanted her.

God, how she wanted her.

Her brain rioting with lewd, profane impulses, she would have done her right there on the cold floor. The woman offered death and death was the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Nothing burns so hot as death.

Nothing.

Feeling hot inside, Megga pulled off her cigarette and tried to calm herself. She looked over at Wenda who’d apparently been watching her the entire time.

She was still sharpening the stake and doing so almost reverently like it was a religious ex
perience for her. Megga was all too aware of the phallic shape of the thing. The heat was building up in her and she could barely contain it.

Morris poked at the fire with a stick. “I wonder when they’ll come for us,” he said.

Megga didn’t know but, God, she hoped it would be soon.

24

At first, Doc saw nothing when he opened the door. There was just the corridor leading to the foyer and nothing else. He saw shadows and a clutching darkness pushing out at him that was nearly suffocating. Then he smelled a dark and pungent odor of carrion. He heard a low moaning noise like wind blowing through a pipe. He lifted the lantern high, casting its light out into the corridor and,
instantly, panic tore loose inside him with an almost audible tearing sound.

A column of luminous white mist was rushing at him, swirling and fuming like some sort of ghost-fog. It was a seething and hissing helix of corpse gas, bone dust, and sluicing tissue that seemed to be fragmenting, boiling to steam, caught in the suctioning whirlwind of its own churning mass.

And it had a face. A lopsided, upside-down face of pale liquid wax that was melting off the screaming skull beneath…eyes blazing like coals and jaws yawning white like the maw of a shark.

He had time to utter, “Oh my Christ
,” and that was about it.

It passed right by him in a whitish blur of glacial wind before he could even move. Its flesh brushed against his own and it felt like cold rubber, but seemed to have no more density than smoke. He had an image of a skull-faced wraith rocketing past him like a fired arrow, white hair streaming and body like some loose collection of flapping rags.

The next thing he knew,
she
was standing near the sofa.

Burt had backpedaled and gone on his ass.

Reg was standing behind her with the poker like a knight with a lance.

She stood still as a statue, not even blinking. Doc found that he was rooted to the spot and could not move. It lasted maybe five seconds but to him it seemed like an eternity of suffering.

The woman was an emaciated thing with stick-thin limbs and a head of long, white, luxurious hair. Her flesh was so colorless it looked bleached. There were numerous old scars, ruts, and rough purplish contusions on her body. She had an emaciated, wasted appearance, ribs standing out like the rungs of a ladder, waist like a withered post, pelvic wings jutting obscenely from her hips…all of it covered in a skin that was tight, almost membranous. Her breasts were like plums shriveled in a drought, her hairless vulva like a ghost-white peach.

Doc looked at her, made to say something because in any situation the words just wanted to run out of him.

The woman cocked her head like a listening dog.

Doc closed his mouth.

Her face was sunken with starvation, cheeks hollow, skin seamed and rutted, lips shriveling away from pale gums which sprouted a pair of sharp incisors like the fangs of a viper. She looked at Doc with eyes that were a dun yellow-green, the pupils black specks.

Her mouth yawning open e
ven further, she hissed at him, gouts of drool running down her chin.

He was certain that she would leap on him at that moment, jump him and tear him open with those teeth, oil herself with his hot blood. But she did not want him. Her head revolved slowly on her neck and she fixed her gaze on Bailey who was trembling, trying to contain the whimpering in her throat. If anyone in that room was a victim, it was Bailey.
The vampire saw it, and being a predator by nature, recognized it immediately.

Doc moved.

If he had thought about it, considered the dangers involved, he wouldn’t have. But he did not think; he acted.

He got
between Bailey and the hag as if he were facing her down, placing himself not only in harm’s way, but in striking distance. As he did so, a voice in the back of his head said,
just what in the hell do you think you’re doing, old man?
And he wished to God he knew.

At the hag’s back, Reg bro
ught up the poker to strike. Burt advanced with the axe, maybe emboldened by both of them. If the woman was concerned about being outnumbered and outgunned, she did not show it. Her feral gaze was locked on Bailey who was wide-eyed and shaking, not only paralyzed with horror, but struck mad with it.

The woman put her eyes back on
Doc and he felt something shrink inside him.

He saw those teeth.

He could almost feel them impaling his throat, feel her draining him dry with a cold suction. The very idea of it made something like hot wires burn in his chest.

Then she moved.

She turned from Doc and went after Bailey and, again, Doc did not think. He heard Bailey’s pathetic moan and the vampire’s hissing lust, then he grabbed the hag from behind and pulled her away and back with an irresistible adrenalin-born strength. She twisted and writhed in his grip like a worm, her flesh icy, threadbare like living cobwebs. Her breath was foul and dark and hot. She threw him backwards with comparative ease, his fingers tearing out strips of tissue as he fell.

25

By then, Reg was in motion.

Before the hag could turn, he shouted and brought the poker down with everything he had. It punched between her shoulder blades and erupted from her abdomen. Not a drop of blood came out. The tip of it protruding from her belly was slicked with clear jelly like Vaseline.

Upon contact, upon initial impalement, he felt a surge of cold electricity feed from the woman and run up the shaft of the poker as if he had just speared a junction box and not this writhing horror.

The energy…oddly chill and arcing…drew the warmth from him as if the hag were sucking it right out of him. He smelled awful foul odors, which he knew was the stink coming from inside her. It was the rank smell of unburied corpses, of the rising undead, of darkness, and subterranean crypts.

As the stench blew out of her in gaseous waves, he heard her voice in his head. It was clear and cutting, filling his skull—subjectively anyway—with gushing blood.
RELEASE ME! TAKE IT OUT!
the voice screamed with a grinding, metallic sort of sound.
PULL IT OUT! PULL IT OUT!

These were the words he heard, or at least the ones his brain deciphered. There were others, all spoken in some thick, guttural foreign tongue, but their meaning was most explicit.

Reg did not pull it out.

He rammed it in further.

The hag let out a guttural, barking sound that was more rage than pain.

She turned around facing Reg who stumbled back, shaking his head.

She shrieked something at him, something garbled and unintelligible that had the tonal quality of screeching door hinges. Then, fangs bared, eyes blazing yellow and green, she gripped the tip of the poker and pulled it all the way through herself until it was free and in her hands. With a snarling, almost braying sort of sound, she threw it at Reg.

For the first time in his life, he was grateful for his natural clumsiness.

As she threw the poker, he backed into a chair and fell over it. The poker thudded into the wall. Not just striking it and chipping out a chunk of plaster, but
burying
itself in there like a fencepost into soft earth.

Doc pulled himself up, noticing that he saw no wound in the woman’s belly at all now as if it had closed like a pair of lips.

26

The hag went after Bailey and no one—save Burt—could have stopped her in time. She looked like a white, leggy spider seizing its prey. She leaped up on the sofa and hovered over Bailey. Then she was on her, her head darting into Bailey’s throat and Bailey made a sharp, squealing sound as the fangs dipped into an artery, the hag fastening her lips and making a liquid sucking sound.

Doc grabbed her hair and tore her away.

She screamed at him, twisting and clawing at his face and just missing his eyes with her gray talons. She took hold of him and she was unbelievably strong or, perhaps, he was unbelievably weak. The intensity of her shimmering yellow-green eyes tapped his strength. They punched into him like poison darts and he felt everything inside him run like hot tallow.

He heard an audible
hssssssst
sort of sound in his head that was the noise of his nerve endings shorting out as the electrical grid in his head was shut down by the hag’s feral gaze. He stumbled back a step, then two, knowing that he was no longer a sentient being but a breathing, mumbling, mindless machine struck dumb by the intensity of hate in those eyes. He could feel—from what seemed a great distance—his heart beating and his lungs sucking air, but very little else. The effect of the woman’s eyes upon him were like a thousand-thousand tiny stinging nettles penetrating his skin, dumping their toxins into him, making him feel numb and rubbery.

He didn’t know how long he was like that, microseconds probably, but his dreamlike fugue seemed to go on and on…then, gradually, very gradually, he felt consciousness and feeling returning. It was like a door that had been slammed shut in his head had swung back open…he came out of it with a muted cry, the wind rushing out of him. He breathed in and out, his brain working again after a brief period of oxygen starvation.

It lasted seconds.

And in those seconds, the hag had advanced on him
. She moved like a sinister, shadowy blur…a nightmare stick-woman of reaching claws and gnashing teeth and pure, deranged hatred. All he could see was her face rushing at him: the pallid, clownlike grin of fangs and the yellow eyes glowing like candle ends in the hollows of a pumpkin.

She would have had him.

She would have opened his throat and torn out his gullet in a bloody spray, but Reg intervened.

She heard him too late.

He brought the poker down in a two-fisted grip and it went between her shoulder blades again, but this time the aim had been corrected. It slid through her with amazing ease as if her flesh were made of something insubstantial like cheesecloth. The poker pierced her, a good four inches of it spearing through her chest and this time she did not grab it and pull it free. She went down to her knees, jerking and shaking. Her fumbling fingers played at the spike sticking out of her but seemingly without the strength to grip it.