Hag Night (14 page)

Jozsef did not want to know.

Somewhere, a woman sobbed and somewhere else a dog bayed mournfully. At the passage entrance—like the mouth of slag pit, heaped with mystery—Jozsef paused. Like the winery itself, it had been ravaged by bombs. He turned with a question on his lips, but Stanislav was gone. Like a cherished childhood memory, he had been blown away by time.

But a distant voice channeled through the wind: “Forgive me,” it said.
“Forgive me.”

Swallowing, breathing hard, trembling, his head filled with the dank smell of the river, Jozsef slipped down into the darkness, into the echoing void of eternal blackness.

4

The plague brought a silence to the city as rats scratched in the walls of empty houses and wild dog packs haunted gutters awash in corpse-debris. Deserted streets were crowded with the sepulchral monuments of houses and buildings.

If there wa
s a god who watched, then it was some malefic lord of charnel house and mausoleum harrow, its eye the bloated moon above, ghastly and sallow, staring down at the graveyard it had created, infinitely pleased, infinitely sated.

The plague raged
on and on.

Sometimes there we
re crystal-white days of almost unnatural, eerie silence broken only by the moaning cemetery winds sweeping around houses, rattling gutters and ice-slicked rainspouts.

And on other days—

People burst out of doors and climbed out of windows, screaming and beating at themselves in some weird manic blood-rage, tearing out clumps of hair with gnarled fingers and scratching themselves until their blood ran red and hot as the fever boiling in their veins. Shrieking and stumbling around in the snow, massing in some lunatic danse macabre, they were half-dressed, naked, or wearing filthy sweat-stained nightshirts and robes fouled by the black vomit that gushed from their mouths. Singly or clutching one another, arm in arm, mother and babe, father and daughter, they whirled and pirouetted to and fro in a hysterical dance of death, round and round until they fell gasping and gray-faced.

Limbs still twitching, they stare
d into the sky, lips slicked with bile.

Some we
re dragged by caring hands back into houses.

Most die
d where they lay, freezing to death or dropping into corpselike comas from which they would never awaken: teeth chattering and faces steaming with sweat, eyes catatonic and fixed, death hollowing their cheeks and cooling their breath to frost.

5

The wine cellar tunnels.

Haunted by a cloying, palpable damp, they pressed in close. Cold brick, a misting chill, and the stagnant smell of places too long closed-up. Jozsef could hear water dripping and things skittering in the walls. The frost-breath of subterranean worlds hugged him like a sheet stripped from a cadaver. He could hear other sounds, too. Like clawed feet on concrete, paws racing through puddles. From time to time, a baneful melody echoed from unknown depths. He was not alone and knew it. But whether his fellow night-stalkers were furred or pink-skinned, he could not guess.

Listen.

Ten minutes that were ten long, claustrophobic days, Jozsef listened, his ears and their auditory mechanisms perked now to preternatural sharpness. He could hear his blood filling rivers and streams. Air quietly inflating the balloons of his lungs. The steady, neutral hum of neural networks at full alert.

He finally heard a sound and his brain processed it and did not like it.

Breathing.

A shallow, congested breathing somewhere close by. But in that impenetrable, grainy blackness, he could not be sure whether it was in front of him or behind. Fuzz coated his mouth and throat. There was a constricting tightness behind his eyes. That soun
d…it had a hollow sucking timbre to it like someone breathing into a paper bag.

Keep going.

He could feel debris beneath his step. Rocks, crumbled brickwork, mortar, other things he could not guess. One hand pressed to the chill, sweating wall of the tunnel, he pushed on, refusing to listen, to hear, to acknowledge those sounds that played around him like ghosts—breathing, shuffling footfalls, echoing whispers.

Something like icy fingers brushed the back of his neck and he screamed, running again. Running and stumbling and pulling himself up and wishing to God he had not listened to Stanislav. He fell over a heap of bricks and came to rest in an ice-slicked puddle near some shattered wine casks. Cold, shivering, he did not move. He did not dare to.

Footsteps.

Yes, coming his way now.
Clop, clop, clop.
They came on and brought a freezing stink like that of defrosting meat. When they were but a few feet away, they paused. Jozsef could hear ragged, whistling respiration, something like teeth grinding together. There was a dull shine in the darkness as of two eyes scanning the murk. With a smell now of powdery wrappings, dust, and worm-eaten coffin-linings, the footsteps moved off. Not forward or back, but off to the side. There must’ve been a passage there.

Fifteen minutes. Twenty.

Jozsef still had not moved. He waited. The footfalls had long since vanished into silence. He stood up, approached the wall, searching for the passage for reasons even he wasn’t sure of. His fingers caressed bricks, the seams between, sheared through a netting of cobwebs. He had to know; he had to. Licking his lips with a tongue too large for his mouth, he struck a match, cupped its brilliance. Lurid, darting shadows jumped and lurked: his own. In the flickering orange light, he could see the scattered rubble. The body of a dead rat nearby. Pooled water, slime, filth, and wine barrels. But directly before him, there was no passage.

Who or whatever had passed this way, they had departed through a solid wall.

The match fell from his fingers, ended its life with a hiss at his feet.

He thought:
Some sort of auditory illusion, Jozsef. No solid thing can walk through walls and you do not believe in ghosts.

He moved on, something in him trembling now, pressed tight into a corner.

Ahead…yes, he was certain of it now, a light, a yellowed illumination.

He approached it warily, soon enough realizing that it was only the moonlight streaming in through a ventilation grating. Its luminescence was gossamer, the color of white lace. He walked into it, his face latticed from the grating overhead. He could smell the streets, a stink of distant thunder and rain. The scant moonlight revealed other things he did not wish to see. To each side, the tunnel was crowded with human shapes. People sitting, backs against the walls. Long dead, they sat there, their hollow, cadaverous faces coveting the glow of the moon. They held skeletal hands, an emaciated lot that had starved en masse down here in the whispering shadows. Men, women,
and children: mummies from a catacomb with black holes for eyes. A man in a rotted suit clutched a prayer book. A woman whose eyeless face was flaking away like the dry skin of an onion held a baby whose bones had thrust through its flesh. It grinned up at him, a tiny puckered skull.

Jozsef ran off, staying in the center of the tunnel, needing to be away from that lunatic embalming parlor, away from those staring, ruined faces.

A good distance away, he paused.

Behind him, a clutch of shadows entered the moonlight. Hunched, twisted forms, but small like children. They poured forth, dozens of them, insects from the mouth of a hive. And the sounds they made—high, reedy chatterings and shrill, echoing cries. Their distorted shadows washed through the tunnels in a black tide. Jozsef ran off again. He kept running until there was no breath in his lungs, until his chest ached and his heart strained. On his hands and knees, in that subterranean
Golgotha, he wept and begged of God for deliverance. And maybe he got his wish, for the sounds of those pursuing goblins vanished now. Like a polluted river, they sluiced into a different branch, a different passage.

Safety for the flesh, but what of the mind?

Would his sanity ever be a strong and vital thing again? Or would it forever be altered, breached, reduced to some boneless thing that quivered in a carnival jar?

Jozsef rose to his tired feet.

A voice said:
“Thank God, I thought I was alone.”

He went white with fear, gray with dread. “Who is there?”

“My name is Bora,” the voice said, that of a teenage girl. She was whimpering now, crying. “I’m lost…can you lead me out of here?”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

Her hand slid into his and he wondered how she could find it so easily when he was entirely blind in the gloom. He could see a vague shape, feel a cold, frail hand in his own. The flesh was damp, icy like the belly of a deep-sea fish.

“Come,” he said. “We must go.”

They walked together for maybe fifteen minutes while she sobbed. Her scent was of dead flowers and rain on concrete. The smell of desperation, of despair, of hopelessness.

“Have you any food, mister?” she finally asked.

“I…no, only my few meager belongings.”

He could hear her teeth chattering. “I’m so cold…so hungry. I don’t remember the last time I ate anything. It seems months. Could it be that long?”

“No,” he assured her, his tone fatherly. “If you hadn’t eaten in months, you would be—”

“But it has been so long, so very long. My father…we had a farm, a big farm. I can remember the vegetables in steaming pots of butter. The juicy racks of lamb, smoked hams and fire-roasted joints of beef. The smell and feel of a kitchen that was well-stocked…”

She went on and Jozsef was quite sure she was drooling.

They came to a gigantic heap of rubble that sealed the passage. But off in a side-burrow, light came from the streets above. Hand in hand, they ran together. An exit. Up the damp, leaf covered steps and into the dank, secret night.

“Thank you, mister,” Bora said.

And then Jozsef got a good look at her and he yanked his hand away, shielding his eyes from looking upon that deathmask
face.

H
e saw very well what he’d been holding hands with.

6

As the body count multiplied and staring cadavers we
re coveted in nearly every house, hideous rumors made their rounds as they always have in the time of plague. People were hanging themselves, slitting their wrists, jumping through windows, sliding the barrels of guns into their mouths, anything to avoid the death that came cloven-hoofed and red-eyed in the night. A seeping viral pestilence. The rumors said people did not just kill themselves, but each other. Mothers strangled infants in cribs and fathers stacked the sightless, blue-eyed corpses of their children in the snow, anything to spare them the distemper of the hungry plague. For death of the pestilence was a horror, but there were worse things. Things beyond death heard whispering on the wind in the dead of night, fantastic forms seen dancing through the snow looking for warmth and scratching at windows for entrance.

But those
were stories, old wive’s tales and evil fantasies creeping unfettered from the Dark Ages, reborn mouth to ear out of desperation, fear, and communal dread.

But it
could not be denied that every day fewer doors were opened to greet the world and fewer shades were drawn to the thin winter sunlight. Like plundered caskets, neighborhoods stood empty. Where once there were the sound of footsteps and life, now there was only the creaking of gates and the scratching of tree limbs on rooftops. And it was not just in the city, but in the farming towns and villages that dotted the mountains: they stood deserted, wind-blown, and monolithic.

The sleep of death was unbroken. It lay
over the world of men in a dirty yellow half-light by day, enshrouding it in a silken web of funeral crepe by night. And it was here, in the suffocating stillborn darkness, that shadows crawled and lurked, terrifying shapes ghosting through the night, white-faced, hungry-eyed, cackling a cold evil laughter of resurrection.

7

Pressed tightly against ravaged storefronts and empty plate glass windows soaped with grime, Jozsef saw bodies in the streets, starved things wrapped in rags. But he would not look upon them, would not see. He kept moving, refusing to remember who and what had held his hand in the tunnel. He was weak, he was tired. Surely none of it had happened. He paused at a dress shop, startled when he saw the figures in the windows staring at him and then laughing silently as he realized they were but mannequins. Their dresses were long since purloined. They were angular, dark forms, gaunt as anything that walked the streets this night.

He swallowed.

He realized he was insane now, for as he moved, slinked away, they turned and watched him, pushing lifeless wooden faces against the grimy glass, waxen fingertips tapping, tapping, tapping. Even wood and wax hungered this night.

Jozsef ran through neighborhoods of fallen buildings, empty houses, and weed-choked yards of sprawled corpses. He came around a corner and a crowd waited for him. Small, hunched, evil, they clawed out with tiny white fingers and funereal clown-white faces of graveyard landscape. Human insects, buzzing and needing. He could feel their tomb-cold spread out, filling him with icebergs and snowstorms. And their eyes, dear God, their eyes. Phosphorescent globes of frozen, autumnal moonlight.