Hag Night (20 page)

Accept it and die, or fight against it.

Yes. She sucked in a breath of cool air and opened the door. There was nothing out there and she didn’t really think there would be. Not yet. But soon. Once that energy in the house—or whatever it was—reached its peak, then she would see things. But not before. She went into the kitchen and dining room, gathering candles until she had an armload. She paid no attention to anything she saw out the windows, directing her vision to what was in front her. She ignored the shadows, the funny…
impulses
in her head that demanded she look at the windows and see what was looking in at her.

I will not. You cannot make me.

I will not look in your eyes.

It was working very well until she made to leave the dining room and abruptly dropped a candle. She could have left it, but candles meant light and flame and these things were life and death now. So she set her candles on the table and stooped down to pick up the one she had dropped. She found it quickly enough, but as she stood, her eyes looked over at the window and she saw what they wanted her to see:
what looked at first like a blowing sheet that filled her with a stark, childlike terror. But it was no sheet but a drifting wraith clawing at the glass in its blowing shroud, its white face hooked in a grin of defilement, its eyes like glowing moonstones. Whether it had been male or female in life, she could not tell. It was a vulpine ghost and no more.

But the eyes.

It was not easy to look away from them.

That cold electricity she had felt in the sitting room was directed by them. It moved through her veins and across the backs of her arms. It made her fingers and toes tingle. It flowed up into her skull and filled her head with a low buzzing that seemed to rise in pitch every time she tried to turn away from the face and the tapping ghost fingers at the window. There was an unspeakable dominion in those eyes that she did not dare look away from…they were drawing her in and she
knew
they were drawing her in. That was the worst part. They were taking apart her willpower block by block, unmaking it and creating a pocket of blackness in its place that was spreading inch by dark inch and when it was finished she knew there would be no more Wenda Keegan…just a mindless slave, a deadhead zombie that would stumble over to the window and open it.

Fight it…fight it…fight it…

But as those thoughts went through her mind, that awful droning rose up to blanket any defiance. And she knew, somewhere in the depths of her brain, that she either threw that dominance off now or faced defeat.

So she started talking. “What I’m going to do is bring these candles back to the room and I’m going to light it up in there and if one of those fucking things tries anything, I will stick my stake through its black heart.”

In her skull, she could hear something like a cheated screech.

Then she looked away, her hands going for the stake and the silver knife on her belt and there was strength in these objects. She could feel it flowing through her, opening her up and filling her with warmth, driving away the shadows in her mind until they had evaporated.

She hesitated no more.

“Where have you been?” Megga asked when she came back.

Wenda showed her the candles.

“You think that’s going to help?”

“Light always helps,” she told her. Then, almost ritualistically, she lit the candles one by one, dripping wax in puddles to hold them upright. She went around the room and lit five of them. The light was good and it would save on the lanterns which were getting down on fuel.

“We’re going to need more kerosene,” she said.

Megga grunted. “Fresh out.”

Wenda knew there was a maintenance shed or building somewhere outside the town. But there was no way of getting to it, of course. She wondered if there might be kerosene in the house, maybe in the cellar. They were going to need some. If it came to it, they would have to go down below and see.

“We’ll be dead by morning,” Megga said.

Wenda wanted to give her a good, hard slap across the face because she had it coming, but she didn’t. Looking into Megga’s eyes she saw something that she had never seen before: vulnerability and innocence. That stopped her. In fact, it deflated her. She had never seen it before and never would have expected it.

Is this the person that’s been hiding behind the mask all this time?
she wondered.
Is this the real Megga I’m seeing?

This Megga looked scared. This Megga did not look like the one she knew who courted morbidity, suffering, and angst. This Megga looked like she could be hurt. In fact, it looked like she was suffering right now, fathoms deep in personal pain.

She stood up and walked over to Wenda. Her arms were folded and she would not meet Wenda’s eyes. “Something’s going to happen, isn’t it?”

“I think so, yes.”

“All I want is to be is safe,” Megga said, her eyes wet. “That’s all. That’s all I want.”

Wenda was moved. She put a hand on Megga’s shoulder and gave it a little squeeze. “That’s what we all want.”

Megga came into her arms then, sobbing, and Wenda could do nothing but hold her. She pulled away slightly at first, but she couldn’t turn her back on her. Not now when Megga was finally exhibiting symptoms of being human. Megga held onto her tightly, her face buried in Wenda’s hair…then she looked up and kissed her. Wenda pulled back and Megga kissed her again, this time her tongue tracing a hot trail over her lips.

“Stop it!” Wenda told her, pushing her back.

“Why?”

“Because…because I don’t like that.”

Megga moved in again. “Yes, you do. I see the way you look at me. You want this. You’ve always wanted this.”

Wenda shook her head. “Stop it, Megga.”

But she wouldn’t stop. She took hold of Wenda and tried to kiss her again and Wenda shoved her back. When Megga fought to kiss her, Wenda slapped her across the face and Megga dropped to the floor.

So that’s what this was. Those outside were using Megga again. Probably as a distraction, Wenda figured, and she did not doubt that Megga was a willing participant. She crouched down by her and her eyes were open, staring up. “What happened?” Megga said. “Why am I on the floor?”

Sighing, Wenda helped her up. “I think you fainted.”

“I’ve never fainted in my life.”

“Well, you have now.”

Megga did not seem to believe her. She knocked aside Wenda’s helping hands and sat back in her chair. She looked suspicious like maybe Wenda was up to something and that was how Wenda knew that none of it had been voluntary. Maybe Megga wasn’t entirely innocent because she had opened herself up to those things out there, but she wasn’t totally guilty either.

Wenda turned.

She heard something. Maybe not with her ears exactly, but
with some other finely tuned sense.

Megga said, “What are—”

“Shut up,” Wenda told her, pressing a finger to her lips.

She was straining to hear something,
anything.
They were in the house and she knew it. Maybe they had been all along. Regardless, they were here now. The very fabric of the house had been disrupted by their presence. They were out there in the darkened corridors, moving around, gliding forward like midnight shadows, pressing in for attack. Maybe that had been their plan all along: get Megga to seduce her and then in they would come.

Maybe.

“Get over by the fire,” Wenda told Megga. “Wake up Morris.”

Megga, for once, did not argue. She went over to the hearth and shook Morris awake none too gently. She fed two logs into the fire and the flames greedily rose high, brightening the room but also filling it with countless moving shadows.

Wenda got in front of Megga and Morris with her stake and knife.

They were coming now. She could hear them slithering out there like snakes, silently sliding down floors and over walls and creeping over ceilings. That there were many of them she did not doubt. And at any moment now, the door would burst open and they would fill the room: forked-tongued serpents with massive, glossy midnight-blue bodies, the kind that could wrap up a human being in writhing coils and squeeze them until their guts came squirting out of their mouths.

But that was subjective and she knew it.

She did not really expect snakes. That was a simple phobia of hers. Whenever she was frightened of something, her brain converted the fright into slinking serpentine shapes; a childhood fear.

But these were not snakes gathering outside the door.

She did not know what they were exactly.

Only that they had claws because they were scratching to come in.

9

When the door burst open, Megga took h
old of Morris, who was like 175 pounds of rubber: tottering, weak, and pretty much worthless. The fire was hot at her back but she didn’t even feel it. Six streamlined shapes came running in, their claws clicking on the hardwood floor. They were wolves…or something much like wolves…but immense and shaggy, their eyes lit red and their bristling hides black and almost oily like they’d been greased with fat. Their jaws were wide, ribbons of saliva dripping from teeth that looked like they were designed specifically to tear out throats and open bellies.

They pushed in and formed a line directly opposite the hearth and the sad trio of defenders who waited there.

Megga shivered, her guts feeling loose. Her nerves were letting go inside her like snapping silken cords and she figured that at any moment she would begin to scream like a little girl. Then she would
actually
morph into that little girl who had been bitten by the neighbor’s dog.

She did not like wolves.

She embraced the dark side and the mythic creatures of the night that called it home, but she did not like canine things—dogs and wolves and were-beasts of any sort. Filthy, stinking, stupid animals. Already she could smell the wet-dog, blood-breathed fetor of them, the acrid secretions of their glands that made her blanch inside.

No, no, no,
she thought.
If I am to be taken then let it be something with human form. Let me know the hot breath of a lover and cold dead lips against my throat, the benediction of teeth slowly penetrating my carotid, the sucking of lips and the cunnilingual play of a tongue lapping up my blood which will burst free in an orgasmic red tide—

But it would not be like that.

For in her soul, in the erotic fantasies she’d held hotly in her mind since she was fourteen, vampires were graveyard poets, metaphorical darkly romantic representations of death-love perfumed with comic book Goth necrophilia…but wolves,
werewolves,
were simple beasts, biting and tearing and stuffing themselves with meat. They dwelled in the savage twilight world of human atavism: the primal need to return to the forest and the hunt.

She could not be claimed by these things.

She would throw herself in the fire or beat her brains out against the brick hearth, anything, anything but this.

In her mind, she could see them overpowering Wenda and then coming for her in a night-tide of drooling jaws and empty bellies. She could feel their fangs in her flesh, crunching through bones and licking marrow like cream. Feasting on brain and organ, shearing skin and gobbling throat-meat, chomping down on her groin and smashing her breasts like pale funeral lilies squashed within the pages of a heavy book.

It could not be allowed.

And in her manic terror, she thought:
It was not supposed to be this way…you promised me it would not be this way…you would come to me and take me but not like this, not like this…

She could feel their minds trying to commune with her own, but she shut them out. They wanted
her to snatch up a log and bash in Wenda’s head with it, cast that silver blade far away where it could not bisect flesh and form with its foulness.

But Megga did not li
sten, would not hear. She refused to be the pawn of doglike monsters.

Terrible childhood nightmares crowded into her skull and she saw herself buried alive in grease-furred, animal-smelling pelts. Bitten into and drooled upon as they fought over loops of her candy-red viscera, bubbles of blood bursting from her mouth in a red, sharp scream as a cold snout investigated between her legs. A rough tongue singling out the soft sweetmeats at her groin
…then the teeth spearing into them.

But the wolf-things
kept trying…trying to get inside her head.

They tried to fill her mind with smoke. Tried to make her see things as they wanted her to see them: not slobbering wolf-males and hot-loined she-wolves, but men and women and, yes, even children.
Pallid horrors running on all fours, corpse-things pretending to be wolves for the primeval terror of the wolfpack was so deliciously devastating to the human mind.

But she could not see that.

Her childhood terrors were rich and intoxicating, scarlet wine that filled her and overflowed her and all she could do was…scream.