Hag Night (38 page)

For the longest time he did not want to move.

He didn’t
dare
move.

He could see his skid-marks in a perfect unbroken trail above him and he thought if it hadn’t been such a fucking tragedy, it might have been funny.

He just wanted to lay there and be safe. But the snow up his legs and back was unbelievably cold and his limbs were going as numb as his fingers. It was getting so he couldn’t even feel his face. Fatigue was on him and the urge to close his eyes and just sleep was almost overwhelming. But he remembered from high school Health class that this was one of the signs of hypothermia. He needed to get out of that goddamn wind and warm himself, or before long he would start thinking crazy things and begin making irrational choices.

Like roof-crawling in the winter isn’t evidence of that.

He started climbing again, moving very slowly, worming his way up the face of the roof to the ridgeline above. If he could get up there, then the crossing would be a lot easier. It took him at least fifteen minutes to do it, pushing himself up carefully until he could get his hands on the ridgeline and then on something else, maybe an old lightning rod. He pulled himself up until he was sitting on the ridgeline, legs to either side, gripping the lightning rod—because that’s what it indeed was—and hanging on for dear life as the wind tried to strip him free. He felt like a sailor in a storm-tossed ocean, each gust of wind like a wave crashing into him.

Now and again, the blizzard would lift momentarily like a veil and he would see all those rising rooftops around him, some higher, some lower, most of them sharp and jagged like black volcanic rock reaching up into the maelstrom of the snowstorm. Then the veil would drop and he was a man alone again. An explorer who’d sunk his flag at the South Pole and was done in as he gripped it in the wrath of the polar night.

He knew he had to keep going.

The idea of just waiting and freezing to death wasn’t an option. Not after what he’d already been through. Everything, as he saw it, was now about survival.

Still gripping the lightning rod, he pulled himself around it and sat on the other side. So far, so good. Now it was time to let go and shimmy down the ridgeline to the next roof. Although the idea wasn’t exactly intriguing by that point, it was the only option available, so he let go, crouching down, and started moving.

He hadn’t gone very far when he smelled something hot on the wind.

Something that stank of death.

It didn’t belong out there and he knew it. Out in the subzero depths of the blizzard, the world was pristine and white and odorless. Still, the smell came out of the storm at him like a channel of putrescence.

He held onto the ridgeline, in absolute denial that he had smelled anything at all. It was an olfactory hallucination, he knew. That’s what Doc would have called it.
You see, my boy,
he could hear Doc saying,
that odor cannot exist, for in plummeting temperatures like these when the mercury is hanging well beneath freezepoint, there can be no bacterial action and with no bacterial action, the smell of death cannot exist.
Oh God, how Reg wished Doc were there to put things into perspective for him. He’d know what to do. He’d know how to handle this. But Doc was dead and…and…
I let him die, Jesus Christ, but I let him die…
Reg was on his own and no one could help him. No one at all. So he clung to the ridgeline, shaking, teeth chattering, his blood seeming to cool in his veins like the waters of a creek going filthy and dark with silt.

He was not alone.

At the very edge of the roof, he saw something like a black and gnarled tree that looked very much like a woman. He could almost feel its roots sliding into him and feeding on the hot vein of his mad, swooning terror. As he watched, blinking away flakes of snow, it spread black wings, throwing out limbs, and a gray shroud that flapped in the wind.

Although he could not see beneath the shroud, he knew it was a woman and he wondered if it was the one Burt and he had seen outside the window earlier.

She stood there like she was made of something ethereal that the wind simply passed right through without touching. There was a crust of snow atop the ridgeline about four or five inches deep. She should have sunk right through it, but she stood atop it like a ghost.

And she was moving.

Not walking, but
drifting
in his direction and he wanted to scream. But when he tried, all that came out was a soundless breath of forced air. He was numb all over, his limbs thick and his fingers like sausages. He felt watery and weak inside like his guts were melting. And still she came on, drifting forward, her shroud blowing around her, that smell coming with her. The shroud blew aside and he saw part of a face like a gray leather mask and a frozen grin of teeth. She reached out for him, rustling like silk, her fingernails long and sharp like rapiers. She was a corrupted thing that would eat his soul and slit his throat and lap up the hot red life that ran out. The closer she got, the more of her face he saw until it was fully revealed like a skullish puzzlebox opening. It was seamed tombstone gray, bloodred eyes like exploding stars. Her flesh seemed to glow like a lantern, her mouth filled with hooked, overlapping fangs like those of a shark.

“Please,”
Reg heard his own voice say, cracking in the cold.

But there was no mercy to be found here. Inside his head, he could feel her already taking him. A channel had been opened and he could see into
her mind, which was a seething nest of primal appetite, a scorching black desert void of well-picked bones and blowing sand. Beneath the shroud, he saw her body and it was made of dozens of voracious, slat-thin graveyard rats that would bury him in teeth and scraping yellow claws.

When he did manage to scream, it was far too late because she hovered above him, her winding sheet flying around her in all directions and showing him sights he did not wish to see.

But before she fed on him, before physical violation, there was psychic desecration as what was in her skull filled his own like dozens of dark and screeching mandrake roots crowding out his own thoughts and reducing them to abstractions. She was feeding on his soul, biting into it and tearing out great bleeding chunks of it. The pain was not physical, but a spiritual defilement that was beyond agony.

He fought against her…or something in him did.

His fists struck out and his fingers clawed at her, but she seemed to be no more substantial than a fogbank. His hands found flesh that gave way, bones like polished marble, furry things that clawed and bit and drew blood. She grabbed hold of his hair and yanked his head back, burying first her face in his throat, then her teeth…which were like icicles sliding into his carotid.

3

Megga heard them cry out to her not to open the door, but she threw the lock and gripped the knob and not even Wenda
was fast enough to stop her. Her original impulse when the knocking began was that finally, at last, they had come for her to slake their thirst and satisfy the bone-deep hunger within her.
At last, at last.
But what made her throw the door open with excitement was not that but a voice that said,
“Please let me in…hurry.”
And that voice belonged to Bailey.

Then the door was open and Bailey was standing there and for one moment that came and went too fast for her mind to properly analyze, she saw an image of another woman with yearning eyes and a vapid grin…but then that was gone and it was just Bailey.

By then, of course, Wenda had grabbed her, but Megga fought free.
“Let me go! You fucking let me go!”
she cried out.

Then she had Bailey and towed her into the room. Bailey gasped, her breathing fast and her words almost garbled:
“They got Burt…they got Doc…they took him…we ran…I think they got Reg, too…”

Megga led her over to the fire and Bailey went down on her knees, holding out her smooth white hands towards the heat as she shook and whimpered and Megga held her.

“I’m so cold,” she said. “I’m so cold.”

Rule and Wenda just stood there. Megga could feel the suspicion coming from them in dark waves, but Bailey was back and she didn’t care what they thought. Fuck them and their suspicion.

After she had warmed herself for maybe five minutes, Wenda approached her cautiously. “Tell me again what happened.”

So Bailey did, staring into the fire and sobbing out her
story which was neither better nor worse than anyone expected.

“You’re okay. You’re with us now,” Megga told her, holding onto her and feeling
a chill coming off her that was almost unnatural.

Rule got the door closed and said, “Maybe we ought to put off our plans for awhile until we see…see what this is all about.”

Megga glared at him. “What it’s about, you idiot, is that Bailey’s back and she’s the last of our friends that are still alive. What else
would
it be about?”

Rule just shook his head.

Wenda, as always, kept watch.

Morris was sitting by the fire, too, but he edged away from Bailey little by little as if he did not want to get too close to her.

“You’re sure no one else is alive?” Wenda asked.

“No. I don’t think so. Oh God, why is this happening?” She buried her face in Megga’s shoulder and cried. “Why?”

Megga held her, noticing with rising ire that Wenda and Rule kept giving each other little looks that were apprehensive and skeptical. They did not believe that Bailey
was
Bailey and if they didn’t knock it off, Megga decided, she was going to grab that stake from Wenda and beat them both silly with it. Point being, she herself was not naïve. She knew any number of things might have happened to Bailey out there and if somebody had asked her to place a bet on who might have survived from Doc’s party, her money wouldn’t have been on Bailey.

But she was here and she seemed unharmed. And that was enough.

That had to be enough.

4

The feeling Wenda was getting off of Bailey was sheer poison and it was coming in through her pores, making her sick deep inside. She did not, of course, believe for one moment that what was sitting by the fire was Bailey. Everything was wrong about her. It wasn’t just the idea that she had survived a run, alone, through the storm and to this house, and had somehow gotten through the front door which Wenda knew for a fact was locked. It was more than that. Just as she had with Megga, Wenda was picking up vibes from her.
  It was not contact with her mind exactly—when Wenda tried to make that happen as it had with Megga all she saw was a whirlpooling, hollow blackness—but something else that made her shrink inside, a sort of spiritual depravity that blew off Bailey in rank, sickening waves. And the more she tried to get a sense of it, the worse it became until she was smelling, in her mind alone, a stench of tombs and charnel vaults, places where great age and decay slept together cheek-to-cheek.

But, for all of that, Bailey was acting much
like
Bailey.

She was weak and submissive, crawling under Megga’s wing like a baby bird in need of succor as she always did. And Megga responded in kind by becoming increasingly protective of her. If she were animal, Wenda knew, Megga would have been displaying a clear threat posturing:
Don’t you dare touch what is mine, don’t you think about hurting her or I’ll scratch your fucking eyes out.
If Bailey was what Wenda thought she was (and she was nearly convinced of
that)
, then this was a card she was going to play. This was a wedge she would drive firmly between Megga and Wenda herself, like they needed anything more to separate them. She would play on Megga’s sympathies and if Wenda tried anything, anything at all, she’d have more than a very cunning bloodsucker to deal with.

This had to be approached carefully.

They had all been through so much now. Wenda knew that Megga could not really be blamed for her protectiveness of Bailey. Bailey had always represented a normality, a clean and easy purity that she herself lacked. So she was clinging to her and even more so than usual because having Bailey back gave her something to fight for, something to believe in, and a reason to want to survive this nightmare. And, in essence, that was good to see, except that it was horribly warped considering that what was among them was not Bailey but an absolute monster.

Rule was standing at Wenda’s side, but even he was confused about the turn of events. He was suspicious and he certainly wasn’t going to turn his back on Bailey or her mother protector, but he was clearly confused.

While Megga rocked Bailey in her arms like a sick child, Wenda circled around behind them. She had the stake in her belt and the silver carving knife with its immense blade in one white-knuckled fist.

“Bailey,” she finally said. “The front door was locked…how did you get in?”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Knock it off, Wenda,” Megga said. “For God’s sake.”

“It wasn’t locked,” Bailey said, speaking into Megga’s shoulder. Her voice was innocent and cooing like that of a little girl.