Hag Night Read online

  HAG NIGHT

  By

  Tim Curran

  “Something black and of the night had come

  crawling out of the Middle Ages.”

  —Richard Matheson

  PART ONE: SNOWBOUND

  1

  There was a blizzard waiting in the wings threatening to dump another three to four feet of snow, but Morris was unconcerned because he figured they could outrun it. He was a TV producer for godsake. The sort of guy that squeezed extra dollars from emaciated budgets and fought scheduling and uppity suits from the front office. He and deadlines were old enemies: they had met on the field of battle again and again and he’d always come out victorious. This time would be no different. To him, the blizzard was just another deadline and he would beat it.

  “I don’t like the looks of this,” Wenda told him, studying the frozen white world through the windows. Now that it was night it looked even more threatening than it had an hour before.

  “Just a quick shoot,” Morris told her, “and we’re out of here.”

  From the front of the bus, Burt said, “She’s getting rough out there, people. This keeps up we’re going to need skis.”

  “More driving, less commentary,” Morris told him.

  But he was right and Wenda knew it.

  The snow was flying thick in the headlights of the bus. It was piling up heavy on the road before them in snaking currents of white. Drifts were pushing in from both sides and they hadn’t seen anything resembling a town in well over an hour now since they’d cut off the main highway and onto the secondary road. A city girl born and bred, Wenda did not like the idea of being trapped in a blizzard out here in this godawful desolation. Hell, there wasn’t even a Starbucks within sixty miles, she joked to the others, and she wasn’t much without a hot Caffè Misto. But, all kidding aside, if they got stuck out here with that blizzard raging they’d be buried alive.

  “Are we lost?” Bailey said from the back.

  There was an aggravated sigh from Megga. “Nobody gets lost these days, princess. They call it OnStar…hello.”

  Mole and Reg ignored it all, both of them obsessively toying about with their equipment: the DAT unit, HD video, light meters, laptops, and peripherals. They were in their own techie fantasy zone and oblivious to the world around them. Doc was snoozing.

  Wenda knew the logical, practical thing was to call this off and make for the main highway while they still could, but there was no way Morris would admit defeat. The ghost town shoot was too important to him. More so, it was important for the network and the sponsors who’d already paid big bucks.

  Burt had the radio on and the National Weather Service was still broadcasting its alerts, which had become warnings and traveler’s advisories now. They were calling for an unprecedented 36 inches of snow in the next twenty-four hours with gale force winds blowing at fifty-miles-an-hour which would push the wind chill down into the single digits. Back in the city, Manhattan was already getting nailed with blowing and drifting snow and they were closing Fifth Avenue, which was pretty much like cutting the throat of Midtown.

  Yeah, great day for a fucking location shoot, Wenda thought.

  “We’re getting close now,” Burt announced as the shadows grew long. “About five minutes we should see it.”

  “This is the shits,” Mole said. “No service on my cell, no internet for my laptop. Damn, it’s like the Middle Ages here.”

  “So you’ll be porn-free for a couple hours. Do you some good,” Morris said.

  That got laughs from Reg and Bailey.

  Megga saw it as an opportunity. “He’s right, Mole-Man. Maybe if you gently wean yourself from chickswithdicks.com you might learn to appreciate the real thing.”

  “Oh, I know all about the real thing,” he told her.

  She chuckled. “As if.”

  Wenda sighed. On your average day of shooting, she knew, things could get a little tense with this crew…but out here, in the confined spaces of the bus, there would be blood in the offing. Although Bailey was sweet-natured and vacuous, Megga had an evil streak in her a mile wide and was not above putting it to work against Reg and Mole, particularly Mole. There was nothing she enjoyed better than demeaning his maleness at every opportunity with a constant string of barbs concerning his sexual preference or lack thereof. She would keep at him until he got pissed and then Reg would come to his defense and Bailey would get upset and Doc would try to counsel them with sage advice until Morris lost it and yelled at all of them.

  It was coming, oh yes.

  Wenda could sense the venom welling up inside Megga and it was only a matter of time before she sank her fangs in someone. This group was almost comically dysfunctional on the best of days, but trapped in the bus with that storm descending on them, things were more tense than usual.

  “We gotta almost be on top of your ghost town right now,” Burt said over his shoulder to Morris. The bus lurched as it moved up a hill. The road was zigzagging and Burt slowed, cut to the left then to the right. Everyone seemed to be holding on tight. The snow in the headlights was thick as drifting silt in the belly of a sunken ship. As he banked another turn, the headlights swept over a hilltop crowded with leaning monuments and old tombs jutting from the snowpack. For one brief second, Wenda thought she saw someone standing in the darkness just inside the stone wall that encircled it. Someone whose eyes shined yellow in the bus lights.

  “Hey…did you see that?” Burt said. “Now that was weird.”

  “What?” Megga said, always in search of the weird wherever she could find it.

  “I saw someone standing there by the graves,” Burt told her.

  “Out here?” Morris said. “In the storm?”

  “Maybe I just imagined it,” Burt admitted, but from the tone of his voice it was obvious he did not believe that at all.

  “I saw it, too,” Wenda said. “Its eyes were yellow.”

  Morris swallowed. “Now listen, kid, this horror-thing is our bread-and-butter, but let’s not go believing it ourselves. C’mon already. Remember, Cobton, our ghost town, is damn old. What you saw was probably one of them statues people used to put up. You know, an angel or something.”

  “Yes, a Death Angel. Sometimes they’re statues and sometimes they’re not,” Megga said, notching things up as she always did.

  Wenda did not bother defending her position. She had seen it. The gooseflesh that spread over her arms and up her spine was testament to that, and statues did not have eyes. Shining eyes.

  It seemed like at that moment everyone tapped into what she was feeling. They went silent and the atmosphere was thick and ominous. The only sounds were the rumble of the bus’s engine, the frantic swish-swash of the wipers, and the sound of the wind throwing snow against the windows.

  Burt lit a cigarette, breaking the anxiety. “What a drive,” he said.

  “Hey!” Morris said. “No smoking. This a rental for chrissake.”

  “My union contract clearly states that I get a fifteen minute break for every three hours I work,” Burt explained, the cigarette smoldering in the corner of his mouth. “I been driving for closer to four. Besides, my nerves ain’t for shit right now. I been staring through this windshield for too fucking long. I’m seeing shit.”

  “What sort of shit?” Megga asked him.

  “The sort of shit that ain’t there, honey.”

  Bailey was getting scared and Megga held her hand. Reg and Mole had completely forgotten about their gadgets. Morris was staring at the windshield, clicking his pen. The snow seemed heavier, the wind making a low moaning sound like death exhaled from the belly of the graveyard they had just passed. More twists and turns in the road. The bus bumped over drifts and potholes.

  “There…” Burt said, blowing smoke out his nose. “Your ghost town is down in the hollow below, Morris. I just saw it. Looks pitch black. Ain’t a light to be seen.”

  “The caretakers should be there,” Morris said. “They better be: I’m paying them.”

  “Well, if they are,” Burt offered, “then they sure as hell ain’t afraid of the dark.”

  2

  As Burt moved the bus carefully down towards Cobton, Doc Blood came awake, yawned and stretched, then smiled. “Ah, a refreshing little siesta,” he said. “It does a body good.”

  “You can sleep anywhere,” Reg said.

  “It’s a gift he has,” Morris said.

  “More than a gift,” Doc told them, “it’s a matter of discipline. When I was in ‘Nam we barely got any sleep. Dexies to get you going and Bennies to take you down. We’d come in off patrol and three hours later we were going back out again. We were lucky if we got in a solid eight hours of rack-time a week. That’s when I learned to turn all my down time into refreshing sleep. I nodded off between firefights, on choppers, during briefings. I became a master of slumber. I practice it to this day.”

  “You should teach me,” Megga said. “Most nights I wander from one end of my apartment to the other in daze.”

  “Kinda like she does all day,” Mole said.

  “Piss off,” Megga told him.

  “You should eat more fruits and vegetables,” Bailey suggested. “I sleep like a baby every night.”

  Megga rolled her eyes.

  Doc reached in his coat for a pack of Marlboros and lit up much to Morris’s chagrin. “Do you have troubling dreams?” he asked her, running a hand through his thick white locks. “Often dreams are the seat of trouble. Look at me. For years I had a continuing nightmare that I was going about my day clad only in underwear. It’s
true. I stopped wearing them and the dreams faded. Often, when I’m alone, I go about my day entirely unclothed. There’s nothing like a nice fire, a good book, and your own nakedness.”

  It was Wenda’s turn to roll her eyes.

  Before anyone could comment on what he’d said, Megga began telling him in detail about her own reoccurring dreams which involved rusty sawblades, impaled kittens, and plastic baby doll heads in her closet that could be heard licking their lips in the dead of night. Doc listened, then searched for a root cause.

  “Hmm, most unusual,” he said, pulling off his cigarette. “Baby doll heads.”

  “Her closet’s probably full of them,” Mole said.

  “It is. She collects them,” Bailey put in.

  They’re all fucking whackos, Wenda thought.

  Playing the horror bit was one thing, but Megga lived it. Wenda had gone to her place once for dinner and it was absolutely disturbing…much like Megga herself who slept in a room painted black with two beds—one for her and one for the mannequin she called Missy Creep. Wenda was pretty sure Doc wasn’t going to be able to do a three-minute analysis on this girl; it would take months to sift through her shocking array of psychological baggage.

  Megga, Megga, Megga.

  Wenda could never be a hundred percent sure whether Megga was just the consummate actress or the real thing. On set, she was professional. Incredibly professional. She never missed a cue, never dropped a line. But what about the real Megga? That was hard to know. She was so good at role-playing that it was nearly impossible to get a glimpse of the real her. Wenda was never sure whether she was just an unbelievably good, natural actress or a thing that sucked blood by night.

  Don’t put it past her. Don’t put anything past her.

  In the headlights, Wenda could just make out bits of the town below—a steeple, a jagged roofline, a crooked chimney. The sight of it made something move in her belly with a slow crawl.

  “Lots of drifts over the road going in,” Burt said. “Hang on tight, I’m going to have to give her some speed to punch our way through.”

  “I wonder why the caretakers have all the lights off,” Bailey mused, mostly to herself.

  Megga laughed wickedly.

  “That,” Doc said, “is what we’ll find out very soon now, for better or worse.”

  3

  Chamber of Horrors. Fridays at Midnight.

  That was it. That was Wenda’s ticket. And that was also why she was out in the bus with the crew in the middle of the blizzard of the century (as it was being called). Maybe her mom and her sister and her next door neighbor knew her as Wenda Keegan, but to the rest of the world she was Vultura, the host of Chamber of Horrors. In high school, there had been a few plays—Our Town and The Corn is Green—followed by some community theater and stagework in college, but it never led anywhere. She was a good strong alto, but she didn’t have the force to headline anything. Her dramatic skills were “stilted” as her drama coach told her at Stony Brook U. Upon advice from her mom—it’s a pipe dream, Wenny, a girl like you working on the stage—she switched to marketing and shortly after graduation landed a job at WKKX Channel 5 in Albany. It was a good position. She worked hard. Within four years, she was number two in the department selling air time and programming spots.

  That’s when Morris discovered her.

  Or discovered my legs and tits, she decided later. Morris was a producer and director who had just moved from Manhattan to Albany and was overseeing shows like Morning Edition and Cooking with Granny, which, despite the title or maybe because of it, owned its time slot in the Capital District-Schenectady-Troy metro area. Granny was Miriam Clayton, a sixties-something farm woman with a razor-sharp wit, reams of down-home advice, and a collection of recipes that had made her not only a star but the author of two cookbooks. Morris was riding high at the station. The station manager, Lou Phelps, asked him to take on the Friday midnight timeslot. He wanted something young and wild and hip. And Morris, having grown up with Zacherley’s Chiller Theater and Creature Features hosted by “The Creep”, knew exactly what he wanted. Drawing upon WKKX’s extensive catalog of old movies, he created Vultura and Chamber of Horrors.

  All he lacked was Vultura herself.

  Enter Wenda Keegan, WKKX assistant marketing director. A somewhat shy and high-strung young woman with bright red hair and sparkling green eyes, who had the legs and the impressive bosom to pull in the Friday night male viewership.

  “But a horror movie host?” Lou Phelps said. “I don’t know. That kind of stuff went out in seventies.”

  “Which is why it has to be re-introduced. Retro, man, everything’s retro. We’ve got the movies. Why play ‘em late at night or on Saturday afternoons? Why not repackage them with Chamber of Horrors hosted by Vultura? We’re not talking Zacherley or Svengoolie or Dr. Paul Bearer here, we’re leaning towards Elvira, Vampira. We’re selling sex here, Lou. It’s the only thing that does sell.”

  “Who do you got for the girl?”

  Morris told him. “This lady is a knock-out. Model pretty, she’s got the legs and tits and flirty eyes to keep the boys coming back. She belongs in front of a camera, not behind a desk hawking air space for Burger King and Pennzoil Quik-Lube. She has the look. She’s a little uncomfortable with it, but I’ll bring her around.”

  And Morris did just that.

  Forcing her to watch hours of 1950’s horror host Vampira and her later-day imitator, Elvira, Morris created Vultura from whole cloth…with a little help from Kansas City’s Ghostess with the Mostess, Crematia Mortem, and the all-too hilarious Ivonna Cadaver from LA. Wearing a ragged black dress cut thigh-high with a plunging neckline that showed Wenda’s charms to full effect, Morris had the makeup people paint her face ghost-white and lips midnight-black. The first color test shots weren’t grabbing him, though. That’s when he decided to do the entire thing in stark black-and-white, which would mirror a lot of the old scare flicks they were playing. A cobwebby set was built, lots of candelabras and faux-stone walls, an alternate graveyard set, and Vultura was off and running. With the long black braids and the makeup, Wenda lost herself in the character. Maybe as Wenda Keegan she was somewhat shy and unsure of herself despite her looks (again, maybe because of them), but when she morphed into Vultura and saw herself on the monitor in the shifting grays and guttering candlelight of black-and-white, she suddenly knew the character and had no trouble pouring on the juice in her low seductive voice. Unlike Elvira, Vultura took her movies and herself absolutely seriously, laying on the sex hot and heavy reminiscing about her favorite dank tombs and coffins she’d laid (or been laid) in while discussing movies like Curse of the Living Corpse and The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake as if they were artistic masterpieces of mood and subtlety and not low-brow creaky late show fare.

  It worked.

  It worked 100%.

  In six months her salary doubled, then tripled. Advertisers lined up. There were remote shoots at record stores and nite clubs, live feeds from cemeteries on Halloween night. They started with old late-night standbys from Universal—The Ghost of Frankenstein and Creature from the Black Lagoon—and Technicolor Hammer classics—Plague of the Zombies and The Brides of Dracula—but soon enough Morris realized the movies were absolutely secondary so they started running Grade-Z programmers like The Bride of the Gorilla, Frankenstein’s Daughter, and Zontar: The Thing from Venus.

  Morris was right.

  It mattered naught.

  Most of the stuff they showed was easily available on DVD, what wasn’t available was Chamber of Horrors and Vultura herself. The movies got worse and the ratings got higher. Go figure. They spent more air-time in the dungeon with Vultura and her cohorts, assembling dozens of subplots amongst the renovated dungeon complete with the stretching rack (where Vultura was to be found at the opening of each show, lots of leg and heaving cleavage, tied down and being stretched, screaming out her joy), hanging cage, and Diabolical Den (which sounded like a 1970’s Aurora monster kit). It was this latter set that was the home of the Graveyard Girls (Megga and Bailey), two strumpet vampiresses seething with barely concealed lust who spent a lot of time talking about sucking things—I’d like to sink my teeth into that—and licking other things—Mmmm, I can practically taste it now. In their low-cut vampire girl gowns with ample charms on display (breasts often pressed up against one another), they became an instant hit, sleeping together in the same coffin and practically tonguing each other on camera…and launching a hundred masturbatory fantasies.