Free Hag Night by Tim Curran

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.
    Burt gripped the heavy curtain.
    He let out a low, long breath.
    He swallowed.
    Then he pulled it open.
     
    17
    There was a woman outside the window.
    She was hovering there like some great death’s-head moth, her hands up against the glass like white blossoms, fingers splayed, her body extending