Free Hag Night by Tim Curran Page A

straight out into midair as if she were riding on a raft. She was naked, her pallid flesh blending in with the blowing snow, her face milk-white, her eyes venomous yellow and set with split red veins. She had no pupils. Just those luminous orbs like autumn moons. She was grinning, sharp teeth hanging over her juicy red lips.
    Burt fell backward and hit the floor.
    Her mouth opened and closed as if she were speaking…and Reg was almost sure that she was. He could hear her voice in his head. It was silver and sharp like a cutting blade, tinkling like expensive crystal, the hot breath of a lover and the cold voice from a buried box.
    It was sweet.
    It was foul.
    It was beauty and depravity…a series of ethereal contradictions that confused and weakened him and finally owned him. He only knew one thing: he wanted to lay with her in a silken box and sink into her.
    “REG!” Burt cried. “REG!  JESUS CHRIST!”
    There was no subtlety from Burt. When that goofy, dreamy look did not fade from Reg’s eyes, Burt slapped him across the face and dragged him from the room. The last thing he saw before Burt slammed the door was the woman’s black and glistening tongue licking the glass.
     
    1 8
    Bailey was at the point where she was afraid to keep her eyes open and afraid to close them. She did not want to see what was going to happen next so she closed her eyes. But when she did, she saw Mole’s death and that made them open again.
    Shut it out, close it down, block it, block it.
    Oh so much easier said than done. The images were burned inside her mind and the video loop just kept playing and re-playing like she was on some kind of continual feed that could not be shut off.
    I t tormented her, it haunted her.
    S he saw Mole get taken by a titanic blur that hit him with slashing claws. They were surgical knives that peeled his scalp back in a bloody flap and then he was in the air, screaming and writhing, towed to fantastic glacial heights and then deposited, dumped, in the snow atop a gambrel roof. The thing that took him squatted over him, some human vulture, a winged night-hag spreading midnight-black plumage…but when he wiped the blood from his eyes with jerking fingers he saw it was no bird, no carrion-hag, but a rawboned woman. She was stick-limbed, crooked, and naked, a viscid steam rising from her pores. She said something to him in a language he had never heard before, her face like cracking white glass, her eyes swirling balls of hot blood-red gas that burned into his skull. Grinning like a dead snake, lips pulled back from rusting needle teeth, she took hold of him and shook him, at first playfully and then with rage. He heard a sound like cracking knuckles and realized it was his own bones dislocating.
    When he started to scream again, she made a squealing sound and enveloped his mouth with her own which was like the maw of a lamprey. He could feel the terrible suction macerating his lips and popping fillings from his molars and tearing teeth loose by the roots. When she pulled her mouth away, she spit a bloody phlegm at him and he felt his own teeth speckle his face.
    By the time she battened her lips to his neck and began to feed, his mind was long gone. When she was finished, she removed his head with a quick twisting motion like pulling the cork from a wine bottle, and tossed it off into space. Then she leapt up into the night, no longer a woman but something like a million tiny shards of twinkling glass that drew themselves into a whirlwind that spun across the rooftops and was no more.
    This i s what Bailey kept seeing.
    This i s what she could not shut out.
    And this i s what she knew waited for all of them in the darkness.
    But it’s not real. It can’t be real. You can’t know how he died. You weren’t there.
    True, true, and true. Yet…she did not doubt what she saw. The images were far too vivid. This was not sheer imagination, it was something beyond imagination. She had somehow channeled his death,