Hag Night (27 page)

“You knew there were…were
vampires
here?” Wenda asked him.

He shrugged. “I knew the stories. I knew this place was supposed to be haunted. I knew people have disappeared out here. I knew it was a ghost town in more than name. And I knew what I saw out here when I was a kid.”

“Which is?”

He ignored that, returning to his original stream: “So, we were certainly against it. But the people that own Cobton, the ones that had it rebuilt and refitted it as a tourist trap some fifteen years ago…well, they’re not locals. Just history buffs with fat wallets.
They couldn’t understand why we didn’t want to come out here after dark and there was no point in trying to explain it to them. They would have thought we were crazy.”

He explained that since
Cobton was rebuilt, there had been no trouble and that was because it was only open during the daytime. The town was period in every way and that meant no electricity. There was no reason for anyone to be out there at night. It had worked out real well until tonight.

“So knowing what you knew, you still came out here?” Megga said.

“I have my reasons. For Bill…
oh Bill
…for Bill it was strictly a matter of economics, Miss.
Jobs is scarce,
as he often told me.” Rule smiled for a moment, but it was a wistful smile that faded quickly. “Regardless, we were the caretakers. We took care of this place. We always got out before sunset. We made sure others did, too. Even when this place was being put back together, we hustled the contractors out of here telling them that they couldn’t stay after dark because there were no lights and our insurance didn’t cover it. It worked. It always worked.” He shrugged, then cocked an ear like he was listening. “Besides, nothing had happened in years. A lot of years. But I knew it would. Sooner or later. And maybe that’s what I was waiting for.”

“You’re a real kook,” Megga told him.

Rule explained that it wasn’t his idea to stay out here after dark. That was something arranged between the historical society and Morris.

“
Yet, you and Bill agreed to come?” Wenda said. “Knowing what might be out here?”

“Yes, we did. Bill needed the money…I needed to see what haunted this place.”

“What a freak,” Megga said, but there was a certain admiration in her voice; she would have done the same.

Rule sighed. “Let’s just say that this place has a history of…evil. It was seeded here long ago and its roots run deep. I knew it would give flower again. It had to. Evil is not easily vanquished.”

Wenda smiled. She knew then. “Long time no see, Mr. Rule.”

“Oh, you remember me, do you?”

“Yes, I do.”

Megga looked at both of them, shrugging. “You two know each other?”

Wenda explained that Rule was Dennis Rule, a professor of humanities and English literature at her alma mater, Stony Brook U. She had barely squeaked by in Survey of British Literature II and the Neoclassic period had nearly killed her, Marlowe’s Elizabethan tragedies simultaneously confusing her and depressing her. It was only the Restoration Comedies that gave her hope, clearing the slate for Coleridge and Wordsworth.

“Now, now,” said Rule, “I thought you showed promise as a critic. You were quite outspoken concerning Raleigh’s pessimism.”

“I can’t believe you remember any of that,” Wenda said.

Megga sneered at them. “Well, let’s play old home week some other time, okay? We’re in enough of a fix here.”

Wenda once again had that mad desire to slap her across the face.
We’re in enough of a fix here.
That was true, but where did the
we
part of that come from? Megga had proven herself to be unreliable, selfish, and easily seduced by the monsters out in the storm. She was a weak link, a chink in the armor. Wenda firmly believed that she would sell them out the first chance she got and the only reason she hadn’t thus far was because Wenda herself hadn’t—and wouldn’t—allow that. Megga was not to be trusted. Her motives were questionable as were her ethics. She was someone to watch. Carefully.

So Wenda ignored her. “How did you go from teaching Brit Lit to being a caretaker in Cobton?” she asked Rule.

“I retired,” he said. “I grew up quite near here so I returned. They needed a caretaker and I have a love of the Colonial Period. Besides, it was something to do with my time. There are other reasons, of course. But in order for you to understand them, you’ll probably need to know what happened in this town. How it became a ghost town in the first place. It’s a story for a dark night and I guess this one will do…”

20

Let me start out by saying
that Cobton was a living, breathing town at one time, Rule began. It was nothing like this museum piece you might have noticed on your way in tonight. There were about 600 people living here as of 1815 with probably a hundred or more scattered about in the surrounding farms. It was an agricultural area that bordered the wild wastes of the Catskills and its fields produced abundant crops of cabbage, pumpkins, sweet corn, onions, apples, wheat and oats. Most of the town was owned by a land baron named Gerrit VanderHoofen who had a huge plantation just south of Cobton. He owned the fields, the forests, the orchards. It may interest you—and amuse you—to know that descendants of this VanderHoofen
still
own these lands. VanderHoofen brought in immigrants as tenant farmers and leased the land to them. From what I’ve heard, VanderHoofen was a shrewd businessman who would have been rich even by today’s standards.

That’s your history lesson for the day.

What we’re really interested in began happening in 1826, if contemporary sources are correct. This would be the first seed of evil as far as I can tell. Up above Cobton, the land of the Catskills was high, wild country, green and growing and rich. Land cut by deep misting ravines and shrouded in black, impenetrable hemlock forests. Though much of it is second- and third-growth now, you can still get a sense of its mystery and primal fear. The early Dutch and German settlers considered the woods up there haunted and there were superstitions that it was the lair of the Devil, which is probably something they borrowed from the lore of the local Mohicans who avoided the mountains because they were the home of the Manitou and various evil spirits.

I tell you this so you can get a good idea of the people we are talking about: clannish, superstitious, but being an agrarian society probably quite practical by nature. Which brings us to Karl Jorva.

According to an account collected by folklorist Robert Bale in 1897, Karl Jorva was an Austrian immigrant who operated a farm just outside Cobton in the 1820s. Karl and his brother Hugo, along with their wives and children, were among many European immigrants who came to farm the fertile lands as tenant farmers and sharecroppers for the VanderHoofen family. From Cornwall and Germany and Eastern Europe, the immigrants came in waves. But unlike the majority of them, Karl and Hugo raised enough capital to buy their adjoining lands. A rare thing at the time and one that shows that the VanderHoofens were quite progressive in their own way.

Now
, both Karl and his brother Hugo were devout Lutherans who read the bible nightly for inspiration and comfort. With a great deal of back-breaking work, Karl and his family cleared the land, raising abundant crops of oats, rye, corn and wheat. Then tragedy struck. His wife, Mara, was stricken with yellow fever and died. Karl was left alone with two growing boys and a teenage daughter. Farm life was a hardscrabble existence in those days and near impossible without a wife. Karl decided to advertise for a mail order bride and was surprised when he received a letter from a young lady in Hungry, Ilsa Stroivecka, who wished to become his wife.

When Ilsa arrived, Karl—being a very practical sort—was not duly impressed. She claimed to be a farmer’s daughter, yet to look upon her she was far too frail and thin for the hardship and labor of the agricultural life. Tall, tawny-haired, fine-boned with huge dark eyes and an ivory complexion, she was very beautiful but not the stout, rugged woman he had envisioned who could keep house and children and work the fields as well as any hand.

His misgivings proved correct: Ilsa knew nothing of farming. After the wedding this became all too apparent. Ilsa was quiet and retiring, often preferring to stay in the bedroom where she maintained she was vexed by one illness after another. All expected tragedy, for Karl Jorva was old school. He believed a man’s wife was his property to be used and abused as he saw fit. Ilsa could not possibly last. But she did. And soon enough, it was not
she
who bent to Karl’s iron will but quite the reverse. Horribly smitten with his “handsome China doll,” Karl was soon completely under her thumb and submitted to her every will and want. Even the business of the farm and money were her domain.

Meanwhile, as Karl fell deeper in love, his children—John, Joachim, and Elsje—became increasingly suspicious. They found Ilsa domineering and cruel. She threatened them, often physically abusing them over the slightest infraction of her rules. When ten-year old Joachim fell to his death in a dry well, his brother and sister were certain that Ilsa had pushed him. Apparently, Karl’s brother Hugo and his family were also suspicious of this coldly beautiful woman with her stark predatory eyes. And when Elsje turned up missing, questions were asked. There was something decidedly off about Ilsa. It was discovered that she often went alone on midnight walks in the forest, that she not only took the strap to the children but whipped the horses for amusement, and, worse, was seen by the children on many occasions to be eating raw meat or sucking the juices from it.

Perhaps a week after Elsje’s death, her corpse was uncovered in a shallow grave in the forest bordering the Jorva farm by Hugo’s Alsatian. The condition of the body more than anything worried Hugo, for it appeared to have been partially eaten. Scavengers would do such a thing, Hugo knew, but they did not re-bury the body when they were done. Extremely concerned, Hugo did not report finding the body but covered it and that night, by full moon, secreted himself in the brush along with his eldest son and another farmer. Their moonlight vigil was long and arduous after a long day in the fields, but it did not go unrewarded. Soon enough, a figure came through the trees and began to paw at Elsje’s grave. They recognized it as Ilsa right away. She removed the body and to their absolute horror, began to feed upon it, chewing at the breasts and throat.

At this point, Hugo and his company charged from their covert and ordered Ilsa to stop defiling the corpse. According to what the old timers told Robert Bale, Ilsa shrieked and hissed at them, gore dropping from her mouth. When she ran, Hugo raised his long rifle and shot her dead.

There were no charges pressed once the details were made known to the local high sheriff. Such things were best hushed up and forgotten.

But the tale was hardly at an end.

In the coming weeks after his Hungarian bride was buried, Karl—in absolute remorse and denial—began to grow thin and pale. It got so he could barely get himself out of bed at cock-crow and soon the fields were untended, weeds growing up and taking over the rye. Corn rotted on the husk. The wheat went un-scythed. Karl’s surviving son, John, began to complain to his Uncle Hugo that he heard the most awful sounds about the farm at night and on more than one occasion he heard a peal of cold evil laughter from his father’s room that sounded very much like Ilsa’s laughter.

At this time also, children of the local farmers began to complain of terrible nightmares wherein a large white wolf with burning red eyes would come into their rooms at night and lick their throats. When the children were found with puncture marks in their necks, long dismissed superstitions were kindled anew and whispers of the
vulkodlak
and
vlkoslak
began to circulate amongst the immigrant populations, particularly those of Serbian and Czech persuasions.

When Karl Jorva died, having pined away for no apparent reason, and another child died in the same manner, the locals led by Hugo Jorva took matters into their own hands and applied the traditional folk remedies to stop the scourge. The grave of Isla Jorva-Stroivecka was opened and she was found to be “ruddy with life.” Although an unpleasant smell likened to rotting fruit emanated from her crypt,
she was uncorrupted with no signs of decay. Though pale of limb, her cheeks were rosy, lips plump and “juicy red as if they had been smeared with berries,” and her eyes were wide open and staring—“glistening with abnormal vitality”, it was said. Those gathered needed no further urging. An iron stake was plunged through Ilsa’s chest in the old way to secure her to the grave. Copious amounts of fresh red blood bubbled from the wound and the corpse cried out in a screeching, agonized voice before falling still. The coffin was filled with wild roses, hawthorn, and monkshood—again, traditional remedies to stay the undead—then nailed shut and reburied.

According to Bale, the same was done with Karl Jorva and the child who had been “milked of life.” Monkshood, it may interest you to know, is another name for
wolfsbane.

Now
, I call this episode the first seed of evil because after it, things just never seemed right in Cobton. It was like the entire village had gone bad and was slipping closer to the grave day by day.

Things get sketchy at this point, but we do know that the next few years following the Jorva business were bad ones for Cobton. Apparently
, blight wiped out the crops and brought about a famine that went on for several years. There are tales of the emaciated corpses of children being stacked in the snow like cordwood. Although the imagery is quite striking, it may just be an old wive’s tale. Anyway, as tragedy follows tragedy, there was an outbreak of infectious disease that killed dozens of people. It was then that a farmer named DerGroot got a crazy idea spawned by his fundamentalist religious beliefs and Old Testament fervor. He firmly believed that expiation needed to be offered to the Lord above. The Old Testament is full of blood offerings and ritual sacrifice…some of it involves animals and some of it, humans.