Hag Night (13 page)

Her heart was impaled.

Doc noticed something extraordinary at that moment: she was younger. The ingesting of Bailey’s blood had peeled countless years from her. Her white hair was raven black, shining with blue highlights, just barely streaked with gray. Many of the wrinkles and ruts had been pressed from her face. Her skin was still white, but it was smoother, a hint of color at her cheeks. Even her breasts were fuller, her lips red and swollen with blood.

It was absolutely amazing.

The blood she had drawn from Bailey had rejuvenated her and he could see it happening right before his eyes.

But they had her.

Her heart was split from the poker.

She let out a wild, agonal scream that was high and shrilling…and it was
answered.
From outside the house, dozens of wavering and eerie voices joined hers, rising up into an ear-splitting cacophony that put Reg on his ass and made Burt clutch his ears and drop next to him.

27

The staked hag was a mass of writhing flesh like there were a million vermiform shapes squirming just beneath
her skin. A contaminated-smelling steam rose from her…bile and stolen blood foamed from her mouth…her ghostface twisted into something like a Chinese ritual mask carved with upturning eyes, flaring nostrils, and a wide grinning/shrieking/agonized mouth of gnashing fangs. A putrescent slime began to ooze from her skin and she bloated up, swelling with some weird neoplasmic tumefaction until she became a shuddering fleshy barrel of saprogenic foulness that was melting like wax.

And still she screamed.

Though it felt like hot needles were sliding into his eardrums, Doc grabbed up the broadhead axe. Steadying himself, gathering strength even though his head was a drum of shrieking white noise, he swung the axe in both hands. It took off the hag’s head…and instantly the screaming died out. Her body collapsed to a wormy heap on the floor and her head rolled into the corner. Within seconds, it was a graying, mummified thing and then the face fell in. The body followed a similar dissolution until it looked like a collection of blackened rags, swirling dust, and pulverized bone. An acrid-smelling smoke issued from the carcass and then it was over.

Just that quick.

It was over.

And it was then that Doc realized Bailey had gone into convulsions.

1

Ordek, Hungary, 1827

The city was haunted.

It was a vast, grim cemetery and Jozsef Vajda picked his way from one bone pile to the next, the night wrapping around him and enshrouding him in its depths.

He stepped out of a slouching doorway framed by sooty brickwork and heard his shoes—so worn now—ring out over the damp cobblestones. He was unshaven, dressed in a shabby woolen coat, clutching a bulging flour sack to his breast, guarding it, watching
over it as if it were a precious infant. The sack contained food. And in this city and these dire, godless times, food was worth more than mere life.

He thought: 
If I can make it home to Elena and the twins, if I can only smuggle this food into our cramped little world and see their faces lighting like stars being born, then I could ask no more of God this night.

Carefully, he tucked the sack into the folds of his coat with covetous fingers.

He was alone.

Alone with the night which was
a black and predatory serpent that had been slumbering away the daylight hours in some nitrous cellar or foul-smelling drainage ditch and was now awake…awake, sentient and malevolently ravenous. It coiled about him, its spiraled length constricting city and country and world and maybe even the cold stars above.

Alone in the womb of breathing night, Jozsef shivered.

Any who watched and hungered—and there were so many in these days of starvation and disease—would know he concealed something of worth. They would smell it, taste its good hungry scent on the air, and take to his trail like hounds on a fox.

So Jozsef practiced stealth.

He moved as the wind would move: in short, quick gusts, gathering himself in darkened boulevards and the grim shadows of moonlight-limned buildings, then rushing forth again, aware and alive and secretive. His were eyes beady and watchful. His nose was filled with the damp night air, which was sharp and unpleasant around him. It smelled of spices and memories, of apples rotted to cider beneath autumn-dead trees, of leaves gathered in cold gutters.

The city was as weary as Jozsef himself.

Not truly alive or dead, emaciated by gnawing emptiness, it stood alone in the enclosing blackness, buffeted by winds, fatigued by struggle, denuded by famine, but still standing, by God, still standing. A dead moon in a graveyard cosmos. Many of its buildings were shells gutted by bombs and never rebuilt. The rawboned corpses of homes, factories, and businesses lie in tenebrous ruin, fleshed out by rubble and described by polluted mists that blew in from the icy river like lost souls. It was a hunting ground of the wicked and the desperate, the hungry and the insane. Here, they were as plentiful as graveworms in moist, corrupted caskets.

But there were worse things and Jozsef knew it.

There were demons on the wind and he could feel them getting closer.

And closer.

2

Beneath noxious membranes of crematory ash, the factories of death ran endlessly into the night, plague machinery rumbling happily, gears lubricated with blood and cogs greased by human fat, rendering the dead into corpse-meal and bone-ash.

The fertile crops of pandemic ga
ve up their graveyard harvest of stiff-limbed forms, and the dead arrived in bales and bundles and ghost-trains. Piled in cadaveric hills, there was no shortage of raw materials: grisly mounds of cold clutching limbs and sightless snow-dusted faces. Supply far exceeded demand.

Men with eyes like blank slate
heaped corpses in untidy stacks in the backs of plague wagons until they were crowded with the unburied. Day by grim day in silent funeral processions, the wagons rolled from neighborhood to neighborhood, house to house, collecting the dead for the furnaces of the burning pits, human cordwood pyres that burned bright far into the night. The air exhaled an oily stench of cremation as gray human ash drifted down over the city like December’s first snow.  The wind smelled of blackness, grit, and vomit.

This was the city of the dead.

3

Wait.

Listen.

Like a rabbit in a wide killing field, Jozsef could feel the talons of the hawk approaching. The crowd smelled what he had and their bellies ached for it and their throats thirsted for his demise, all motivated by diseased brains. Yes, feet running, pounding—men, women, children. They ringed around him like flames, hemmed him in, held him, pawed him, tore at him. Their faces were cardboard skulls pasted with flesh, their stomachs cavernous. Jozsef held tight to his bag of treats as if it were his heart they wished to yank free. He formed his body into a barrier of steel and cement. It was like being in a pen of blood-maddened fighting cocks. Squeals. Grunts. Wicked laughter. Chattering teeth. A sandstorm of famished humanity, blowing and shrieking. Beaten to the ground, never realizing he lay on a bounty of food, the crowd moved on, chased a slat-thin dog into the bony framework of a factory.

Safe now, Jozsef ran off into the night, hid in the sinister shadows of a ruined church, waiting, tensing, wondering in what form invasion would show itself next.

Sucking in a low, sibilant breath, he started off again.

“Good evening, my friend.”

Jozsef felt a scream shatter in his throat. His eyes darted about madly, seeing nothing but night and rubble. A wind picked up, making the bare trees rattle like dice in a cup, birthing long, jagged shadows that jumped and played like split-hoofed devils dancing on rooftops. Then he saw a figure—tall, thin, windblown—standing beneath the overhang of a boarded-up distillery. A man, yes, a man, his coat flapping in the breeze like a flap atop a high pole. But there was something strange about him. His form…it angled too much or perhaps not enough, seemed to sway like a narrow dead tree in a sucking mire.

Jozsef looked, his flesh swept by lantern eyes.

“Who…who is there?”

The figure seemed phantasmal, spectral like dark mist that would disperse at any moment.

The figure stepped forward, solid at last. “Jozsef? Surely, I haven’t frightened you! Do you not remember your old friend Emil Stanislav?”

Jozsef felt his heart encased in crystals of January ice. Ice that held tight, clung to nerve and tissue like fungi to marble slabs. His breath was s
hallow in his throat, frosting from his lips. For one impossible, demented moment he thought he could see the gutter ruin of the distillery through his old friend’s body. But no, he was solid enough. “Emil?
Emil?
But…no, it can’t be you…can it? They said…they said you died…that you wasted away in the state hospital…”

Stanislav laughed and there was something oddly unsettling about that laughter. Like the strangled, retching bark of a sick dog as heard in the small hours of an October night. “Dead? Now, do I look dead? Perhaps my soul has fallen to blight, but this body still moves.”

Jozsef let out a long, controlled sigh. “Thank God you’re well, Emil.”

“What chance brings us together this night, Jozsef?”

“I was…I have been working in the fields outside the city. I have not been home in six days. That is where I go now. To my wife, my children.”

“And in that bag you carry?”

Jozsef did not want to admit to it; what he carried was life to his family. “Oh, my belongings.”

“You carry food, Jozsef.”

“Yes.”

Stanislav clutched Jozsef’s wrist with hands that were cold as a gravedigger’s shovel. But they were good hands, Jozsef thought, callused by a life of honest work. Hands that were strong, sure. Hands that had held babies and caressed lovers. The hands of a saint and a friend.

Stanislav’s eyes were dark now like the pathless wastes between dead stars. “I would not take food from the bellies of your loved ones. You know that. Blessed are the ones who can feed their kin in these dark days.”

Jozsef looked in his old friend’s face, saw how moonlight gathered in hollows and pockets, glowed like swamp gas in draws and runs. He was very thin, wasted even. But the eyes…yes, the eyes were filled with a rapture of life, a semblance of summer days. And in those eyes Jozsef could see memories. The farm on the River Bodrog. Two boys who ran and played and shouted and jumped, always smelling of fresh-cut hay, barley, and crisp cornhusks, their bodies lean with the sinew of muscle and youth, their faces warm and welcome like an August sunset.

“These are not good times for us,” Stanislav told him, his voice ringing out like yellow metal on a forge. “Once we were full and fat and happy…and now? Like grapes on a vine, we wither in the name of the Republic, lean and hungry. You…you have no doubt heard stories? Tales? Whispers of strange things?”

Jozsef had. But like fairies sprinkling stardust and witches stirring cauldrons, he paid them no mind. Bad and noisome odors, they persisted, pervaded, were given breath and walked now. Stories of industrial body farms and gray stone rendering plants where the dead were drained of fat and ground-up for bone meal. Of the great, unknown plague creeping forth from some medieval hell that was sweeping the tired, hungry, and destitute into the grave. The great burning pits where their contaminated bodies were reduced to ash. Whispered tales of night-haunters, the undead, and those who had never been born.

One of the stories concerned a tall man who had been seen just after sunset. Dressed in a long patchwork coat of animal skins, his face pallid like moonlight, his eyes blazing red, he stood on desolate street corners with his mouth open, blowing plague onto the wind.

“Superstition,” he said. “When life is uncertain, cursed by disease and hunger and sudden death…people blame misfortune on spirits and bogeys.”

“How wise you are, my friend.”

Uneasy, Jozsef said, “I must get home.” He swallowed back deserts and arid vistas. “But Emil…friend, you would walk with me?”

Stanislav was consumed in shadow, his mouth a jagged pumpkin grin, his eyes sterile lunar wastes. “No, I cannot, dear friend. But it is dangerous to cross the city at night. Shrunken bellies and barren minds have created monsters in our mists. Ghouls that would prey on their brethren. You would walk carefully.”

“Yes.”

“Do you recall the tunnel…?”

“The cellar tunnel?”

“Yes.”

Jozsef could remember it. Years ago, there had been an industrial winery where the sweet grapes of the mountains were squeezed into bottles and fermented. The wine cellar beneath was a tunnel that ran some six city blocks, the remains of a medieval smuggler’s den, now abandoned.

Stanislav said, “Walk with me, Jozsef. I will lead you to the passage. Then beneath the streets you will go. Follow the tunnel across the city. Proceed to the end and avoid unknown chambers.”

So Jozsef walked on and Stanislav accompanied him, two paces back, his footfalls silent as they trod over
the crumbling cobblestone lane and its abundant carpet of rain-plastered leaves. Stanislav spoke in a fractured, sibilant voice of things long gone and hopes buried in dark graves. And why was it that his voice reminded Jozsef of shadow-riven country churchyards and disturbed crypts? Of skeletal trees scratching at morose cloud-scummed skies? Of empty cradles and morbid dirges and creaking wrought-iron vault doors? And his eyes. Now, in the raining darkness, they shined with eerie effulgence.