Hag Night (40 page)

She cried out.

She screamed…but nobody heard it. She was under attack but it was
of a very intimate, private nature. She felt her herself being drawn back into the shadows and she knew without a doubt that Griska was responsible.

She saw lips.

Lips smeared red with blood.

T
hey were at her mouth, licking, sucking, then moving down to her throat, nipping at her jugular. But it wasn’t her blood that they wanted, it was something more, something of far greater importance. The lips moved down. She could feel the needle-like teeth behind them dragged over her breasts, the mouth drawing in her nipples like it wanted to suck them free.

The icy tongue left a cold, beslimed trail as it sought
lower regions. Across her belly, licking at her navel, then at her thighs, moving between them. A darting tongue stabbing inside her. There was no pleasure. It was abrasive like the tongue of a cat, long, thickening, seeming to swell inside her as it lapped her pussy like a bowl of water. The teeth teased and nipped before biting into her vulva and making the blood run like sweet wine. Her entire vagina was seized in the mouth, the teeth and tongue alternately biting and suckling. It was like she was being devoured.

She screamed at the violation.

Cold laughter echoed around her.

And the voice, rasping
and foul-breathed in her face: “Now you are ruined, virgin. Now you are despoiled and made weak. Now you walk in darkness.”

Wenda fought because
he
took hold of her.
He
had raped her with his mouth, laid her raw and made her bleed, and now he would complete the act, consummate it, fill her with his cold, dead seed.

Screaming, she fought with everything she had. He was a wolf-thing and a dog-thing, snarling
and biting, the blood-oiled fur of his rancid-smelling hide coat rippling with vermin, with crawling and worming things. His face was September mist and his eyes were cold yellow marrow grease. His breath smelled like plundered tombs.

But he was too powerful to fight.

His jaws darted in and snakelike fangs impaled her throat, going in deep, piercing her jugular while the tongue lapped up the blood and awful sucking sounds filled her ears. She could feel that ravening mouth working her neck like a suction pump, drawing her blood out, draining her, emptying her, the teeth worrying at the soft red pulp of her throat.

Then she belonged to him.

A slinking, parasitic whore that draped her bleached body over his sarcophagus by day and waited only for night when the lid would open and he would look upon her, piercing her with the glistening bloodstones of his eyes.

But she was no friend or lover.

Not even a worshipper.

She was sacrifice. He gutted her and pulled her apart, yanking out organs in meaty masses and entrails in bluing
coils, his long delicate, perfectly white fingers shining with globs of yellow fat and bone grease which he deftly licked off his fingers. The jewels he plucked from her gut he stuffed unceremoniously in canopic jars. The hollows within her were filled with spices and chemically-scented desert sand, oils and dark fluids and exotic embalming jellies.

She was a mummified thing, stuffed and mounted.

And when he needed something to torment, he put her back together so he could violate her once again.

Wenda came out of it, gasping.

Mind games, nothing but mind games. Horrifying and even devastating, but ultimately only games. The cruel pranks of a mischievous child. Griska knew he had to break her in order to break the others.

You won’t break me. Maybe I fear you, but when I find you, I’ll tear your heart out with my bare hands, leech.

The rats were pushing in.

Her breath catching in her throat,
she waited for them, knowing there were hundreds of truly appalling ways to die and her death would be in the top ten. It was as she realized this and the rats made ready for the slaughter, that she saw Bailey make her move.

9

When the rats went after Rule and then Wenda, Megga was struck not only speechless but motionless. She sat there by the fire with her mouth open and tried to think of something to do and could not come up with a thing.

“Stay by the fire!” she told Bailey and Morris.

She tossed a few logs into the blaze and the fire burned higher and brighter. Then she grabbed a blazing log and made to get to her feet. But what stopped her was
Bailey. Even over Rule and Wenda’s shouting, she heard Bailey giggling with a sadistic sort of amusement like a young serial killer who had just eviscerated a puppy, discovering the sheer primal joy of death for the first time.

She looked over at her.
“Bailey?”
she said.

Bailey was grinning at her, her eyes huge and pale yellow like twin dead moons rising over the airless void of a lifeless world, her mouth pulled into a red-lipped and predatory grin of spike-like fangs. A stink that was cold and harsh like the meaty smell of
an unwashed corpse came off her.

Megga realized it was her breath.

“Pretty Megga,”
she said with the rasping, raw voice of an old hag,
“let me kiss you.”

Megga screamed.

Bailey had never been Bailey and somehow she had known that, but refused to believe. Denial was so much easier. What lived inside of Bailey’s skin was coming out now, breaking free like some hideous reptile coming out of an egg. She reached for Megga with a hand that ruptured open as if from internal stress and another hand came out, one that was a pale blue-gray, the nails long, yellow, and dirty, graveyard earth packed up beneath them.

The Bailey-thing smiled.

Its grinning mouth was an atrocity. It was not remotely human. It was the grin of a child-eating ogre, a primeval monster, a night hunter and soul-eater. Bailey’s lips inflated like balloons, going black and flaking, pulling back to reveal a horrible, crooked dentition of discolored teeth stained from numerous feedings, black grit packed between them. There were so many teeth and so gnarled and overlapping were they, the mouth could not close…they filled it like roots will fill a buried water pipe. They were all sharp, but the canines were especially long and especially sharp, like glistening ice-picks.

Megga tried to back away from her.

A horror, a monster hiding under her skin the whole time. I held that thing in my arms. I embraced it. I protected it. I let…dear God…I let it nuzzle its face up against my throat.

Rats ra
n over her, but she was impervious to the revulsion that might have once caused. Now there was just the thing before her pulling itself out of Bailey’s skin, revealing itself. Its face broke free of Bailey’s own and it was a pallid mask set with wrinkles and ruts, huge hollows beneath the cheekbones, the eyesockets like black vaults. And the eyes themselves…they were a bleary, diseased yellow threaded with pulsating red veins swollen like engorged bloodworms.

“My pretty Megga,” said the evil beldam, leering at her,
the teeth jutting from her mouth dripping with foul secretions. “I could just eat you up…in fact, I
will
eat you up. I’ll kiss you the way you want Wenda to kiss you and in the place you like best. The place you used to kiss Bailey. I’ll kiss you and kiss you and suck you up until you’re dry…
”

Megga was not sure if she
had actually said any of that or if it was just some horrid imagery in her mind that her brain had translated into words. Regardless, the paralysis that held her there at the beldam’s mercy broke with a nearly audible
snap
…and she pulled away.

The beldam laughed with a shrill, grinding sound.

She was a cadaverous hag with a face like the crumbling, powdery linen of a mummy that hung in flaps. Her reaching fingers were poisoned roots. The rats swarmed up and over her. They crawled through her silver-white hair and through the ragged crow-black shifts she wore. One of them hung from her cheekbone by a flap of face meat and a dozen hairless, fetal rats, squirming with placental slime, hung from her throat, suckering with their flabby pink rodent’s mouths. The beldam plucked one bloated sewer rat free of her breast and shoved it in her mouth. She did not chew or taste…she sucked it down her throat with a gulping, gobbling sound, the scaly tail flickering over her lips before disappearing entirely.

“Now, pretty Megga,” she said, her voice cloying and sweet. “As I sucked in the rat, now I’ll suck in you…”

10

“GET AWAY FROM HER!” Wenda called out, kicking at the rats that pushed forward in greasy, flaccid ranks. “GET THE HELL AWAY FROM HER!”

Her voice was barely even audible above the squealing and squeaking of the rats themselves. Yet, her voice
was
heard. Megga looked over at her and the beldam snarled at her and Wenda could almost hear her voice: a dry, scraping, semi-human version of a rat squeal.
Stay out of this, you pretty cunt! This one is mine! This one is promised to me!
And the thing was, Wenda knew she would never get to Megga in time. The rats were gathering, bristling, ravenous and blood-hungry. They would never let her reach the beldam before it was too late.

But if I don’t, Megga will be little more than a graveyard rat herself…something sleeping in a narrow, dirty box full o
f crawling vermin.

The rats seemed to sense her intentions. A cresting wave of them pushed in her direction and she saw then that these were no ordinary rats…they were
monstrous abominations, mutations that could only have come to term in bone-strewn, sunless subterranean graveyard passages. They were fungous and flabby, mold-caked things with pelts bristled like those of wild hogs. Their snouted, slavering mouths were hung with narrow yellow teeth, eyes rabid and fixed…but almost human.

They would tear her apart and she knew it.

But she did not back down.

As they came, she made ready to do battle.

The beldam looked over at her with eyes like the eggs of blowflies.

Too late, too late, too late, pretty cunt. She has been claimed.

The beldam seemed to be growing more grotesque by the second…her face corrugated and ancient like the trunk of a centuried oak, set with hollows and seams so deep they looked like they had been carved with a knife. Her eyes were wide and yellow and bulbous like they were trying to push free of the pink, flayed sockets that held them. Tiny black pupils darted about.

And her mouth.

That crooked, grinning mouth of fangs.

She was going to tear out Megga’s throat and there was no way to stop her.

11

Megga tried to throw herself back but she fell into Morris who let out a perfectly bovine sort of
“Ooomph”
sound and then the beldam had her. She seized her by the arms in a grip so powerful, Megga knew she could have snapped her forearms like dry twigs had she chosen. Even through the sleeves of her parka, Megga could feel the invasive grave cold of the beldam’s hands that didn’t even look like hands by that point…but gnarled blue-gray claws, the knuckles of the fingers like the twisted knots of old hemlock trees and the fingernails like the black claws of a bird of prey.

The beldam
pulled her forward.

Megga screamed.

A tongue that was narrow, glistening and black like that of a giraffe licking at soft fruit came out and slicked across her lips. It was cold like thawing meat. Megga had expected many things from the vampires. In her mind and hot-blooded Goth fantasies, she had been seduced by them countless times. But never had she imagined it would be like this…so absolutely devoid of heat, of desire, of eroticism. That was the stuff of women’s romance novels; the reality was ugly and cold: she was being licked like a dog licks a shank of meat before he bites into it. She was being
tasted.

Megga screamed again.

At the sight of the thing that held her…its smell…its feel. At what it was about to do to her which had very little to do with romance and very much to do with rape. Grinning, the beldam’s jaws opened wide so Megga could see just how long those teeth were that would soon sink into her throat.

“NOOOO!” she cried out. “I WON’T LET YOU! I’LL TELL HER! I’LL TELL HER WHY YOU’RE AFRAID OF HER! I’LL SHOUT IT OUT EVEN IF YOU RIP OUT MY FUCKING THROAT!”

The words came out in a flurry and they actually stopped the vampire woman. For a few fleeting moments she looked confused, maybe even fearful if such a thing were possible with a face like a leathery fright mask. But it didn’t last. They were all afraid of Wenda because she was incorruptible and Griska most of all because he knew the threat she posed. But it didn’t stop the beldam for long because she was basically just a hungry animal with no true sense of self-awareness of who she was or what she
had
been before this horror overtook her.

So she raged.

She snarled.

She
hissed like a snake.