Hag Night (8 page)

He lit a cigarette. “It is said that war brings out the best in people and the worst. And our situation might be comparable to war. Having been in a war, I can say that it is. Now, we can stand together and support one another and make it through this or we can act childish and selfish and we can die. I don’t see much of a choice, do you?”

“Hell no,” Reg said.

Bailey said nothing.

Burt was chewing at his lower lip, his eyes directed at Doc. Doc was baiting him, pushing his buttons and he knew it. Finally, unable to intimidate him with his dark eyes and searing look, Burt turned away. He stared into the fire.

And Doc thought:
Feel free to commence hostilities at any time, you little chimp. You won’t be the last man standing.

“Well, there’s no way out until dawn so we just have to make the best of it,” Reg said.

Burt laughed low in his throat. “No way out for
you,
but maybe I’ve got other plans.”

“We’d love to hear them,” Doc said.

Burt ignored him.

Reg said, “But what are those things? I mean, like
vampires or werewolves or something? Shit, they gotta be something.”

“If they’re not, then they’re close enough, I’d say.” Doc pulled off his cigarette. “The question would be: why now? Why here? How could they be in the first place and what is their connection to this town? Questions we’ll probably never answer.”

Reg was checking over the woodpile. “We’ve got an axe,” he said, “and this thing.” He held up a fireplace poker that looked like something used to skewer hogs. It was wrought-iron silverplate, heavy, and lethal-looking. “Whatever it is.”

Doc nodded, checking the blade of the broadhead axe and seeing it was indeed sharp. “So we have a few weapons then. Now, my knowledge of the supernal is more literary than folkloric…but am I wrong in thinking that such creatures fear fire?”

“Yeah. I think so.”

“So, we have an arsenal at our disposal. That’s a plus.”

“You don’t know tit,” Burt said.

“Ah, jeers from the cheap seats,” Doc said. “Well, maybe not, but I do think fire will work to our advantage. Let’s gather every stick we can find in case of a siege. Does that sound reasonable to you, Burt?”

“I guess.”

“Good, then. Two of us will go, one stays with Bailey.”

“Me and Reg’ll do it,” Burt said.

As they went to the door, Doc said, “Remember something, Burt. It’s not just your life now, but all of ours. We survive by cooperating. We need each other. If we support and watch over each other, we’re going to survive. You may want to keep that in mind.”

He gave Reg a look and they understood each other.

Burt went out into the corridor with a kerosene lantern. “You’re just fucking full of yourself,” he muttered.

That I am,
Doc thought as he secured the door after them.

Seeing the despairing look on Bailey’s face, he sat down by her and said, “Did I ever tell you of my experiences in experimental nudist free-form theater in California? I didn’t? Well, imagine if you can: the lights going down, a full house packed with swinging penises and jiggling breasts. I step onto the stage, glistening and naked, as King Lear…”

16

“I’m just saying that asshole is full of his own shit,” Burt said to Reg as they climbed the stairs to the second floor to harvest more wood. “And I’m getting a little sick of it.”

“Man, just relax. You don’t have to love him or anything. All we have to do is make it until dawn. Now just quit worrying about that stuff.
Damn.”

Reg knew it was going to start soon as they left Doc and Bailey. He knew Burt was going to start with his shit, trying to splinter things, divide and conquer. That’s the kind of guy he was and Reg didn’t have a lot of patience for that shit on a good day—
it reminded him of all the assholes he’d went to school with, their cliques and divisions—let alone tonight. Things had happened that he couldn’t sufficiently wrap his brain around. It was all so unreal, so freaky and warped, he couldn’t even begin to make sense of it.
Vampires.
Shit. It was all too much. He kept expecting Morris to come through the front door, telling everyone it was a gag, hidden cameras and behind-the-scenes chiz for some Halloween episode of
Chamber of Horrors.
Some whacked-out
Blair Witch Project
kind of thing.

He kept waiting for it and hoping for it.

But he knew by that point it just wasn’t going to happen.

Mole was dead.
Fucking Mole.
They were like best friends and all. Reg kept telling himself not to think about it and what had gotten him or things were going to get ugly and he was going to have some real problems.

So he was fighting. Fighting to keep it together and not go to pieces and crawl into some shadowy corner within himself where it was calm, cool, and safe.

Burt led the way up the stairs, holding the lantern out in front of him.

Reg was a few steps behind with the fireplace poker.

He could hear the wind moaning out there and he hoped to God that’s all it was, just the wind and not
them
, not those things out there because he just wanted them to go away.

At the top of the stairs, Burt paused. He cocked his head. The lantern threw crazy shadows around
them, making everything that much worse.
No wonder people used to believe in ghosts,
Reg thought. He couldn’t imagine living like this…by firelight and lantern light. Just the idea of it was spooky.

“What is it?” he asked Burt.

“Thought I heard something.”

Reg licked his lips and gripped the poker. “Like what?”

“I don’t know. It was faint. Probably nothing.”

He stepped onto the landing and into the corridor. Reg made an effort to regulate his own breathing.
Probably nothing.
That’s what Burt said but, of course, he didn’t really mean it. That was the kind of shit scriptwriters threw in horror movies.
It was probably nothing.
One of those not-so subtle little hints to the audience that would get their imaginations rolling. He wondered if that’s what Burt was doing. Playing a game. Reg didn’t know much about Burt beyond the fact that he was pretty much a driver and a gopher around the studio. He’d never really talked with him outside of going on location shoots. He couldn’t say he’d heard anything bad about the guy, or good, for that matter.

But
he was remembering some of those cliques in school.

If they couldn’t get you one way, they’d try another.

Was that what Burt was doing? Doc had his number and he knew it and he couldn’t get Reg to come around to his way of thinking and turn on Doc, so he was trying something else. Maybe trying to put a scare into him. Was he that low? Would he do something like that?

“I don’t hear a damn thing,” Reg said, moving into the corridor.

“Like I said, kid, it was probably nothing.”

They found the master bedroom and its attendant brick
fireplace, which looked big enough to step into. There was a log rack and a nice pile of birch there. Reg hauled the logs out into the corridor while Burt looked around.

“You gonna help?” Reg asked him.

“You’re doing just fine, kid.”

“Shit.”

Once he had the logs out in the hallway they went into the bedroom next door, which faced on the other side chimney, and got the wood from its rack. Reg figured it would take two or three trips to get downstairs with it all and if Burt thought he was doing that by himself, too, then he was—

“I heard it again,” Burt said.

Reg felt tense inside. If this guy was messing with him, playing some game, then he was going to get his ass kicked because there was absolutely nothing funny about this.

Reg set his logs out in the hallway. “What did you hear?”

“Not sure…sort of like a tapping.”

Reg listened now, too, forgetting that maybe he was being played. In the darkness with nothing but the lantern light flickering and the shadows coiling thick in the corners of the room, the snow whispering at the windows…it was all too easy to believe in unknown sounds and maybe even the hungry shades gathering outside the old house. The situation reduced him to a childlike state of fear where every shadow was a threat that adu
lt logic could not dispel. It grew inside him in a swelling black mass of pure rising terror and he felt sick with it, physically sick.

Burt made his way over to the window.

He set the lantern on the nightstand, then carefully pulled open the heavy curtains. Reg was right next to him. There was nothing out there looking back in at them, just the ever-present storm circling the house, throwing snow at the window and whistling around the eaves. The old house creaked and groaned in the onslaught. Reg peered closer to the glass. It was dark out, but backlit by that weird pink illumination of blizzards. He could see the road below, a few of the other buildings of Cobton, but nothing else. The lights of the bus had gone out.

“I don’t see them out there,” he said.

“Me either.”

It was weird how they put together old towns like this, Reg got to thinking. Everything so crowded, wedged together in an unbroken mass like animals pressing together to keep warm…or huddled out of fear. The roof overhang of one house intruding above the one next door, some of them touching and overlapping, spires and crooked chimneys pushing up to fill any available space. It was like the town was designed to accentuate shadow rather than light. He fig
ured you could tour the entire village from up there, leapfrogging from one roof to the next.

“Wait a minute,” he said, his face
pressed to the multi-paned glass so he could get a look at the saltbox house where Wenda and the others were hiding out.

“What?”

The storm rose up again and blotted it out, but he knew he had seen it. Then the snow thinned momentarily and he saw it again:
a shape crawling up the wall over there. A human shape…or something quite like one moving straight up the side of the house like some white mutant ape. But it was no ape. It was a woman. He was sure of it. A woman going up the side of the house like a climbing beetle.

Burt finally shoved him out of the way so he could see but the snow was too heavy.

“Well?” he finally said.

Reg told him.

“You’re imagining shit, kid.”

They went out into the hallway and, instead of going down the stairs with the wood, Burt went on down the corridor to look around.

“We better get back,” Reg told him.

“Keep your shirt on.”

Burt was holding the lantern up, finding first a broom closet, then a staircase leading to the attic, then another room at the end. He went in there and over to the windows past the ornate canopy bed. They looked out of the back of the house. He pulled the curtains aside quickly and Reg jumped. Maybe it was done for effect and maybe not.

They looked out the window and could see more of Cobton whenever the snow eased up and quit blowing in sheets: a crowded intersecting maze of colonial houses cut by crooked, narrow streets no wider than alleys; steep-pitched gabled roofs white with snow rising up sharp against the sky, jutting dormers and stacked chimneys, vanes and steeples and ridgepoles high above like reaching skeletal digits. You could almost feel the antiquity of Cobton rising on black, malefic wings…an antiquity of evil.

The town formed sort of a quadrangle, they saw, with a village square in the middle. And parked down there in great contrast to the town itself, was a station wagon: a Subaru Outback.

“Must belong to the caretakers,” Burt said. “Four-wheel drive. It could get us out of here.”

“If you don’t die getting to it.”

“Worth the chance.”

But Reg wasn’t so sure. He wanted nothing more than to get out of Cobton…but a blind run out into the storm and darkness with those things out there…it seemed too risky. Only an absolute suicidal idiot would even contemplate making it to the car.

“I’m going to make a try for it,” Burt announced. “When we get back downstairs, I’m going to try it. The back of this house butts the square. I’ll slip through a window or something and pull up in front. You guys get in, we all get out.”

“Maybe,” Reg said.

Burt was going to argue it, but he stopped. His mouth hung open. “I hear that sound again,” he whispered.

This time, Reg heard it, too:
tap, tap, tap-tap-tap.

Burt led him from the room.

The sound did not fade this time; it increased. They went into the room at the far end of the corridor, which was much smaller than the others and looked to be some kind of nursery with antique dolls and wooden blocks, a wicker basinet. The tapping was coming from the window. Burt handed the lantern to Reg and approached it soundlessly. Reg waited there, his heart thudding in his chest, his stomach squeezed up tight his throat. It felt like every nerve ending was standing taut inside him like electric wires.