Hag Night (49 page)

The Mother’s sheets were still open and it looked like somebody had taken a drill to her, bored holes through her face and neck and chest. But that wasn’t it at all. She was
honeycombed like a beehive, or maybe a hornet hive in this case…her body tunneled with little waxen-looking chambers from which a seeking storm of yellowjackets now flew. Dozens and dozens of them, legs hanging limp under those yellow- and black-striped bodies, stingers juiced with venom. Wild and surging, they filled the air in a droning cloud, descending on Wenda who met them, slashing at them with her knife. They stung her face, her hands, they got up the sleeves of her coat and down the back.

But she would not relent.

Crying out, she charged through them and saw the Death Hag reaching out for her with thorny claws. She jabbed with the knife, slicing and slitting, laying the hag open, piercing several of her breasts that popped with an inky, sewer-smelling discharge.

The Death Angel
made a squealing sound and came at Wenda.

A sickly yellow pallor emanated from her, the color of disease and infection unchecked. She towered over Wenda, an undead, inhuman atrocity. The hood had blown free of her head and she had trailing black-and-gray locks greased with human fat. Hornets crawled in her scalp and lit from her mouth. Her eyes were huge and glossy black, the pupils a leering, burning red. Her face was that of a
witch with jutting chin and hooked-nose, but it was not truly a face as such…just a nest of buzzing hornets
pretending
to be a face. She rose up in a maelstrom of flapping rags and tawdry robes that glistened like oiled hides. Her fingers were reaching sticks, hornets freely passed through great gaping holes in her hands and wrists.

Wenda stood her ground, terrified but unflinching, smelling the mortuary perfume of the Queen of the Dead which was a stink of embalming fluid, suppurating wounds, the rancid blood of swine, and funeral lilies rotted to a soft white pulp.

When the hag raised her long, skeletal arms, her robes and rags parted and hanging beneath were dangling bones and tanned limbs, a blossom of curled hands and…
chains.
Dozens and dozens of rattling chains. They all ended in hooks. Many of them had the impaled bodies of butchered infants skewered on them. From her yellow, braided, tumescent flesh, spikes emerged like the thorns of rose stems.

She looked like a living Iron Maiden ready for sacrifice.

Hornets peppering her face, Wenda hacked at her with the knife, she cut deep, the blade scraping against fungal bone. The hag shrieked and laughed and screeched. The meat and bone that had been carved free were caught in her whirling vortex and reabsorbed.

Wenda felt her mind splinter like deadwood, felt all that she was shatter like fine crystal as the Death Angel pulled her in, vacuuming her into that cyclone of thrashing ropes and rags and bones and spikes that was the Queen of the Sacred Rot.

Hornets stinging her, webs encasing her, Wenda felt her strength ebbing. She cut and hacked…but it was no good, just no good. She could not fight against this thing. No living person could.

Fight, you have to fight. You have to find her weakness and exploit it. You must. You must. You must. Think of Doc and Bailey, Reg and Morris and even Megga in all her insipient weakness. Think of the legions this fucking monster has sucked dry. Think of the babies she strangled in cribs, the children she defiled by moonlight—

Wenda fought with a primal scream ripping from her throat. She stabbed with the knife and clawed at the hag with her fingers into flesh which was like a nest of crawling worms. She fought with strength and agility she did not know she possessed. The Death Angel’s red pupils swam in a gummy soup of ebon mud, sucking Wenda’s mind from its housing, turning her brain to sauce. A raging furnace-heat blew off of her, carrying a stink of ash pits and funeral pyres. She was a hood of infection, a throbbing pink waste, a river of polluted slime and casket-ooze, something that might have been shoveled from a slaughterhouse floor. Piercing needles and dry rot, stinging hornets and exhaled carapaces.

Wenda felt the spikes press into her skin, felt the hag’s arms enfold her, felt all those dead babies and mummy hands come alive, clutching and pulling at her, little mouths biting and trying to suckle her.

But mostly she saw the face of the Death Hag.

It was like the fissured bark of dead trees, the flesh hanging in bulging, blowing strips like cured hide. The lips were black and cracked open, the mouth opening and open
ing and opening, gnarled yellow-and-gray teeth long as fingers. They moved in to shear her face from the skull beneath, to tear her throat open.

And then—

Then the Death Angel mutated, shifting into a pulsating mass of threadbare gray fur, a bat thing with a long and slithering serpentine tail, perfectly hairless, that wound her up like a hangman’s noose, constricting her tighter and tighter. Its swollen teats were pressed against her. It spread immense, leathery, membranous wings pulsing with arteries as big around as Wenda’s own thumb. Its head was bullet-shaped, the brow backward sloping, the skull exaggerated, translucent red eyes set in craggy draws, the face noseless and streamlined, the jaws set with teeth like knitting needles.

Wenda was done and she knew it.

She went limp in its fearsome grip as claws like ice-tongs held her securely. The Death Hag was following the swarm now, retreating with them. They had left earlier and now she would scent them on the wind and fly to the lair where Wenda’s death would be slow and hellish. The Death Angel flew through the catacombs, dipping and diving, and finally rising up, up, and up through the shaft beneath the mill that Rule had spoken of. It would lead into the world above.

The
Death Hag soared upwards with incredible speed.

As Wenda teetered on the edge of consciousness, something clicked in her brain. She knew the Mother’s we
akness. It was all-too obvious: a
rrogance.
She was too arrogant to believe in her own death or to think for one shivering moment that the weak little virgin she carried like an owl carried a mouse had completely out-thought her, out-maneuvered her, and turned her colossal, ancient ego against her.

The
Death Hag never guessed this until the sheer velocity of her flight carried up the shaft and above the ruins of the mill…right into the blinding rays of the rising sun. It was only then she roared with hate, with pain, with a maniacal wrath that soon became a weak, tortured mewling. The storm had blown itself out and the sunbeams were like red-hot pokers spearing through her, impaling her, bisecting her, bursting her open with flames and smoke and sizzling rot.

She let forth a freight-train howl that was deafening. It made the world tremble. She began to quiver, roll, tremble, wriggling and squirming like a bag of snakes as she fell earthward, leaving a churning contrail of smoke in her wake. As Wenda fought free of the incinerating mass, the Mother’s body became a sculpture of wicker and cane and clawing sticks crackling apart and then nothing but searing rags and blazing ropes, wings unraveling like dirty yarn…all of it caught in her own foul blasting wind. A skein flaking and fragmenting and unwinding until she was a vile pocket of smoking, sucking air, a storm of refuse, ash, dust, bone fragments, and chattering teeth. A single red and bleeding eye looked out with a cheated, glaring hatred as it orbited her monsoon of charnel refuse and howling slag like a dead moon.

By the time her remains crashed back to the floor of catacombs and Wenda was thrown free, singed and hurting but alive…there was nothing but a smoking, popping wreckage of splintered bones and broken wings, the flesh melting off the convulsing blackened skeleton below like hot rubber.

The burning skull broke free.

It cracked
open like a chestnut from the heat.

The face flaked off.

The jaws snapped open one last time.

T
he remaining eye burst from its orbit as flaming ejecta.

O
ne gnarled claw hand reached up…then clattered to the ground, breaking apart.

The
Death Hag’s shell collapsed into itself and went to fragments, then powder and blowing dust.

Dissolution was complete.

Wenda gagged at the smells that blew past her: putrescence, burning hair, cremated bones, moldering hides.

Then nothing but a ghost-odor of immense age rising from the litter of the hag.

Then…silence.

Except for a voice in her head, singing:
Ding dong, the witch is dead, the wicked witch is dead…

EPILOUGE: PURIFICATION

1

You’re the last one.

They’re all dead: Mole and Reg, Megga and Bailey, Morris and Burt…all fucking dead. What do you think about
that? What do you honestly feel about all that?

In the catacombs, Wenda sat there by the lantern, looking at the bones and makeshift coffins spread over the hills and mounds of earth, some having slid down into trenches and hollows. She felt numb. She felt as if she had taken so much abuse—physical, psychological, and spiritual—in the past twelve hours that she would never be able to feel again. She was dead inside and unfeeling outside.

“What now, Wenna?” she whispered. “What now?”

She
didn’t bother answering that one because she fully well knew what came now, what was next on her agenda. The job was not done. Somewhere down here, Megga and Bailey were sleeping in boxes waiting for sunset. Maybe some of the others, too. They would have to be destroyed. If not, they would keep coming for her. She didn’t believe for a minute that she could put enough distance between herself and them to stop it. Maybe it would take weeks, months, maybe years, but one night they’d come knocking at the door, thirsting for her.

It won’t be just your friends either. There’s another one here. A bringer of pestilence like the
Death Hag. You must find him. You must stake him.

She thought about the vampire swarm.

After the Mother had siphoned off some of their blood, they had left. They had escaped. The Death Angel had seen to that. She sent them off to seed their evil in the world at large.
Off, my children. The virgin is mine and I claim her. Afterwards, I’ll join you.
Maybe it wasn’t anything quite like that, but some message must have been passed. Now they were gone and the Death Angel would never join them. But where had they gone? Their boxes were still here, filled with black earth…wouldn’t they need them? Much of the old legends were true and Wenda saw no reason why this part of it wouldn’t be, too. After all, why shovel dirt into them in the first place?

Still the question remained: Where had they gone?

There was no doubt that they had come out of dormancy this night after many decades of sleep. They had risen up as part of some plan forged long, long ago. It stood to reason that they had a secondary location set up somewhere, maybe an old barn, a disused building, a sewer system or an abandoned warehouse. Chances were, they had a caretaker, too, who was part of the plan. He or she must have found a new hide for them. And it also stood to reason that they probably had many hides. She would have to find them. Somehow.

But that would be for later.

Thinking it over, she was surprised that they hadn’t had a caretaker here, some blind and obedient muscle to deal with intruders. Or maybe they were just too arrogant for that.

Chamber of Horrors
was extinct now.

The entire crew had been wiped out. There would be many, many questions. If Wenda went back to what remained of her old life, she would have to answer them. Unless she didn’t go back. Unless she lived on the lam and hunted them down, staking
vampires in cellars and attics, dragging them out into the sunshine in lonely places.

Bailey.

Megga.

“Oh dear Christ,” she said under her breath, tears breaking hot against her cheeks.

She gathered up her stakes and began.

2

Bailey was easy to find.

She had made no real effort to hide. She was in a simple trench cut from the earth. She still wore her snow gear. One pale hand rested against the side of her grave, the other was curled at her side. She was lovely even in death, even with the pallor of the tomb on her face. Wenda stood there, looking down at her, her guts crawling with a slow and uneasy nausea. Staking a stranger was one thing, but this was something else.

Suck it up. This is for Bailey. This is the least you can do. Look at her. She’ll make a pathetic vampire. She’ll be no good at it.

That was true. Wenda knew it was true.

Some would have natural cunning and animal instinct that would survive death. Some were probably already black at their core. And some would be efficient simply because they were efficient in all things. But not Bailey. She would make a mess of things because whatever slight tendrils of humanity remained in her w
ould be revolted at what she had become.

Looking down at her, Wenda was sure of this.

The process of vampirism destroyed the warmth and poetry in their souls, replacing it with animal appetites and drives, leaving a great hollow within them. But she could see the self-revulsion, the self-loathing imprinted on Bailey’s face. That’s what had survived: the shame of what she now was.