Hag Night (35 page)

She would not let them.

But that didn’t mean they could not send images into her head.

They showed her that this night they were bringing more than the plague of the Vurvolak to the village, but the plague of death, the Black Death. She saw things that would happen in the next days or weeks—the bodies of villagers set with bleeding red blisters, faces shriveling, bodies bursting with morbid infection, bile and yellow drainage running from open festering sores like hot tallow. She saw the villagers stricken and mad, dancing in the night as fevers shook their bodies and lunacy ripped their minds open. She saw them spread out in loose-limbed corpse heaps, rotting dead things being gnawed by plump graveyard rats and pecked by carrion crows.

She could stop it.

She could save them all.

She only had to sacrifice herself and invite them in.

But she would not, so they besieged the house, clawing at the shutters and scratching at the doors with fingernails grown sharp from pawing at the lids of coffins. They pounded at the door, screaming throughout the night. They shouted obscenities down the chimneys as they cavorted on the rooftop.

In the morning, they were gone.

Katya told her father where they went because she could see it in her mind…the ruined, war-scarred abbey in the mountains. He and the other village men rode to destroy them. But even then it was too late for the Vurvolak had blown their hot plague breath into the houses of the village all night long and the signs were everywhere: moths. Death’s-head moths, Sphinx moths…they gathered in the village by the thousands, clustering on the façades of houses and covering windows so that no sunlight could penetrate within. They darkened the sky in swarms. They were three inches thick on the ground. Everywhere, they fluttered their wings and crawled and crept, emitting their mournful and sibilant cry.

Mirajeta was beside herself, fully admitting that her charms and prayers and talismans were helpless against this incursion of death. These were plague moths, they were the harbingers of ruinous pestilence. Did such moths not gather in numbers in battlegrounds and killing fields? At gallows and gibbets and places of execution? Did not they not seek the charnel house and tomb? And when they gathered in a village, did not the plague soon follow? These were the questions she asked.

The family was moved that day to Ostrava where Katya’s aunt lived.

Within two weeks, Haidam was a sunwashed corpse with the dead sprawled in yards and streets, hanging from windows and lying in doorways. And by night, the Vurvolak walked.

4

“But first on earth, as Vampyre sent,

Thy corpse shall from its tomb be rent;

Then ghastly haunt thy native place,

And suck the blood of all thy race…”

“What is that Grandma?” Michael asked. “Was that a poem?”

“It means nothing, nothing,” Katya said. “I’m just an old woman jabbering on.”

But Michael did not believe
that any more than he believed that she was the confused old woman she pretended to be. She was old, yes, but wise. She knew many things, but liked to act (at least to Michael and the other two children) that she knew nothing. But he most of all saw through that. Being the oldest, she had told him much more than the others, things he knew his mother had no patience with.

They whiled away many a rainy afternoon
, Katya and he, with funny anecdotes, silly stories, and a wealth of Old World superstitions concerning the village she had grown up in. Katya, for example, would not allow a dog inside because it would scare off the angel that protected the house. She thought it bad luck to trim you fingernails after dark or look into a mirror after midnight (the mirror in her room was always carefully covered at sundown and uncovered at first light). She would cross the street if she saw a black cat and would spend the rest of her day moaning over her prayer beads. If someone went on a journey, nothing must be touched in their room until they returned or it invited disaster. Spilled salt meant conflict in the household. Whistling indoors invited poverty. Witches could not cross streams because the water washed away their charms. She was a great believer in spirits, both good and bad. A house must not be swept on Fridays for it would cast good spirits out. Water left uncovered overnight in a glass was a sure way to invite a spirit into a house and pouring hot water down drains would enrage the spirits living in the pipes and they would curse the household. She taught Michael that evil spirits lived in dirty, desolate places and that pebbles in a child’s eggshell rattle would drive them away. She believed completely in the evil eye and infants had to be covered amongst strangers so it would not be cast upon them.

Your mother thinks I’m an old woman wh
ose brain has gone soft as porridge with age,
Katya told him one afternoon while they dredged up a bucket of water from the old mossy-stoned well.
But listen to me, my child, and pretend that I am not your aged grandmamma, not some fool old woman with bleary eyes and a bad back. Pretend that I am your school chum and playmate telling you tales in the schoolyard wood. Things you must listen to and take to heart, yes? When I tell you there are unseen things in this world, you must believe me. When I say there are nameless horrors that creep in the shadows and foul abominations that crawl beneath the cloak of night, you must hear me and believe. I do not say it to frighten you, but to warn you. To keep you safe.

Most of her folk beliefs involved death.

If someone died in bed, the mattress must be burned. Mirrors must be covered for seven days after a funeral. And when you left the graveyard following a burial, you were never to look back over your shoulder at the grave or the ghost of the deceased will think you want it to follow you home.

Although Albanian by birth, Katya’s family had moved to Moravia
—in what was then part of the Habsburg Dynasty and would later be called Czechoslovakia—and settled into a tiny village called Haidam on the border of Hungary in the Carpathian Mountains. It was here, that her own Albanian folk beliefs were combined with Moravian and Hungarian traditions. She told Michael that in Haidam, when someone passed away, their body must be brought to the cemetery in a roundabout fashion so the ghost could not find its way home again. That in a house of death, the blinds must always be pulled and shutters closed for if a body lying in wake was struck by moonlight it would come to life for five days, standing in the corners, staring at its family and drooling. Death by consumption was particularly dangerous, she claimed, for if the body was not buried face-down and its coffin filled with garlands of wild roses, the consumption would wipe out the entire family, one by one. One needed to take special care with suicides as well. The corpses of such had to be washed in running water to cleanse them of evil influences and the graves of suspected witches had to be pierced with needles so they could not rise up to torment the living. And after someone died of a wasting illness, all children must sleep with a sprig of hawthorn on their headboards and must never look out windows after midnight or they would see the deceased begging to be let in.

Katya told him that on St. George’s Eve, all doors were locked in Haidam
at sunset for it was a terrible time when witches, warlocks, werewolves, vampires, and other malignants walked the earth freely in search of prey. Houses were
garlanded with wild flowers, garlic, and thistles. Wild roses were hung over thresholds and crosses of tar painted on doors. Only the village priest and the church bellringer were allowed out at night. The latter to ring the church bell until dawn and the former to bless the village and tend to a great bonfire called a Need-Fire, which drove away the foul things that stalked by night.

These were the things Michael’s grandmother told him and believed in absolutely.

Just as she believed in the Vurvolak.

5

When she discovered that the old men were wise with their years, Katya told them her suspicions about the strangers who lived up in the old mill above Cobton. Belic, the Serbian, was not surprised nor were the two Szarka brothers, Vidor and Endre. Their suspicions were the same as Katya’s. She had often sat talking with the three of them, sharing memories of the old country. The Widow Varga was with her usually, but now the Widow Varga had died…only a week after the death of her nephew, bearing the signs of the old sickness.

“She is as those up in the mill,” Katya told the three old men. “She comes for her family at night and then she will come for me. Then she will come for you.”

And as she said this, Katya wondered if what they said was true: that for the Vurvolak, the blood was the life. That as they drank it, the blush of youth returned to their cheeks and a woman of, say, eighty, might walk again as a girl of twenty. Was that possible? Twenty…twenty. She imagined herself as a Vurvolak, filling herself with the sweet blood of children she lured off into the woods, enriching herself and sipping their vitality away like a spider with a web of juicy flies. First, she was a bent-backed, scarf-headed old woman, her mouth trembling and gnarled hands reaching out…but soon enough she walked tall and straight, her eyes blue and clear as the mountain streams she bathed in as a child. Her hair flowed around her, her skin smooth, white, and unblemished, her lips a succulent blood-red.

And, oh, there was the seduction: to walk as a girl of twenty again, to feel the bloom of youth as you bask in the heat of your own blood.

But Katya knew better. The Vurvolak were not pretty, they were not handsome: they were grotesque and obscene, rotting to blackness within. They were like dolls or puppets—empty inside. They were crafty and sly. They might appear beautiful and flaunt carnal invitations, but they were wolves; forever hungry, forever circling their human livestock. They would give you what you wanted most. They could be your lover or friend or protector, they could even wear the face of the one you longed for most, but they were dead things that came alive as the cool moonlight played over their graves. And it always ended the same way: with the puncture marks in the throat and the sound of sucking mouths. 

“One night soon,” Katya said to the old men, “you will hear the wind at your window, but this wind will scratch at the shutters and ask to be invited in.”

While the Szarka brothers crossed themselves at the impact of her words, Belic related an incident that happened many years before when he was a boy. There was a peasant named Kradjec who had fought in the war then returned from the front to his family’s farm outside Vrsac. It was said he was ill and fatigued from battle, carrying a pox he had picked up in Silesia. A week after returning, Kradjec died in the night. He was buried without the holy Sacraments in a pauper’s grave because the priest was a coward whose family had perished of cholera and feared the same. Two days later, Belic told them, the ghost of Kradjec was seen walking through Vrsac. The peasant farmers said that he appeared to them in the form of a large black wolf with red eyes. It would look in their windows at night. It had ravished a teenage girl and carried off a boy into the forest after sunset. They found the boy’s body later…it was twenty feet up in a gigantic black oak, a limb speared right through the chest like the lance of a knight.

“But that’s not what had killed him,” Belic enlightened them. “It was something else, you see. He was, quite literally, BITTEN to death. Oh yes. They found the teeth marks and punctures in him…dozens and dozens of them. Something had slowly bitten him to death as cat kills a mouse. Kradjec
also killed several sheep by tearing out their throats and sucking their blood. Within a week after his return from the grave, his family had all died after complaining that he visited them at night. The illness made them weak with fevers and night-sweats, an uncontrollable trembling of the limbs.”

“I have heard such stories,” Vidor said.

“The elders claimed Kradjec was a Vulkodlak,” Belic said. “It was decided he must be destroyed.”

Since he was strong and large for his age, Belic was one of the locals that went to the grave of Kradjec and
exhumed his coffin. He said Kradjec was not corrupted in the usual manner. His eyes were sunken and his nose had fallen in, giving him a most horrid skull-like appearance, but other than that he was quite robust for a man who had lain in his grave for some two weeks. The corpse, in fact, was bloated, the cheeks florid, the lips swollen and juicy. There was blood on his mouth and hands. A stake of whitethorn was driven through his chest and at that point, Kradjec rose up, screaming, bright red blood gushing from the wound. It spurted from his eyes and nose. He vomited a great volume of it from his mouth. As he screamed, a cold draft rose from him that was dank and clammy like air that blows out from a tomb long sealed.

“It was the draft of death,” Belic said. “I saw birds drop from the sky, dead. A dozen sheep were said to have keeled over. That night there was a caul over the face of the moon. I smelled death that day…not decomposition, mind you…but the true blackness that is death.”

The others watched him as he gathered himself. He packed his clay pipe and a put a match to it, puffing out clouds of smoke.

“Before the stake was driven all the way through,” he told them, “Kradjec cried out in a voice that was not his own, telling us things he could not have known in life. Dirty secrets and half-lies…terrible things about friends and lovers, families. I will not repeat the filth he spewed, but he told me when I would die and how I would die.”