Chapter Eight
THE DOOR ATthe top of the stairs was still propped open, the glare of fluorescent lights from the entry evidence of how dark the stairwell had gotten. Jonah caught his foot on the edge of a step and pitched forward. He saved himself on the railing before he went face-first into the stone. Then something yanked on his foot.
“Fuck!”
Two steps ahead of him, Luke stopped and turned around. He started to take a step down and then froze, his face sweaty as he licked his lips.
“It’s—“
Dry, stiff fingers squeezed around Jonah’s ankle and dragged at him. He could feel the pressure in his knee and hip as they stretched, in the fingers he had white-knuckle locked around the black plastic handrail.
“I know,” he said through gritted teeth. The keys were in his pocket, a clumsy knot against his hipbone. Jonah fumbled them out and tossed them to Luke. The bundle hit Luke’s chest with a jangle and fell to the floor. Habit made Luke stoop to grab them and broke his line of sight with the hag. “Get the truck. If I don’t catch up, don’t wait.”
This time Luke had the good sense not to look directly at the hag. He backed up a step and hesitated.
“What about you?”
“I’m just in her way,” Jonah said. His sweaty hand slipped on the rail, and he bumped viciously down a step. “Go! Fuck’s sake, run.”
Luke clenched his hand around the keys, his knuckles white, and then did as he was told. He took the steps two at a time and burst through the door at the top with a ragged whoop of sucked-in air.
The hag gurgled out a laugh.
Jonah let go of the rail and skidded down the steps. He bounced his chin off the edge of one, a solid crack of bone on concrete that flashed red behind his eyes, before he managed to twist around onto his back. The hag had wrapped its concept of itself back over naked bones. Filthy hair, the ends wet and yellow with piss and the butts knotted into the matted plaits smoky and lipstick-stained, trailed over Jonah’s legs as she dragged herself up him.
It wasn’t a physical thing—the hag—but Jonah could feel the weight of it on him. His bones creaked as he was pushed against the stairs. The gaudy gash of its mouth opened behind the messy hair, and it worked the wormy mess of its tongue out.
No. No. What are you doing? No. No!
It wasn’t a voice; it was the memory of words. Jonah could feel cracked linoleum under his knees and the smell of bleach and piss on the air. It wasn’t even a fully formed memory. The words faded in out of an awful spiritual crackle.
The moment it died? he wondered.
“It wasn’t Luke’s fault,” he said as he got his elbow under him. “He didn’t do anything to you.”
Probably. Odds were against it.
The hag rolled its head too far to the side and crawled up him. A withered tit, dried out and stained, swung out of its bra and scraped along his jeans with a sound like leather. It didn’t know what he wanted from it, but it listened as well as it could. Maybe it hoped for another riddle.
“What the hell do you want?” Jonah breathed out in frustration. Then he pulled his knees up to his chest and planted his feet in the hag’s chest. It wasn’t a physical thing, but it had made itself solid. He kicked it off him and back down the stairs. It went farther than he’d expected, bony arms and legs splintered off the risers.
Jonah twisted and scrambled up the stairs on all fours. He was close enough to stretch his fingers out in the entry when it landed on his back. The air and a bitter broth of half-digested chicken ball puked out of him.
Broken bones scraped against his scalp as the hag grabbed a handful of hair and bounced his head against the lintel of the door. He grayed out for a second, vaguely aware of being shoved over onto his back but not able to reach rag-doll limbs.
The first thing that came back was his gag reflex as the filthy hair trailed over him. He retched again, and the hag stuck bloody, ruined fingers into his mouth. Her nails scraped against his tongue, and then she pressed that ruined, gaudy stain of a mouth over his.
For a second, he tasted apples. It wasn’t a good taste. It was the gag-sweetness of rotted fruit and ketones. Then the whiskey horked up out of her and ran down his throat.
Jonah choked and tried to scream. He grabbed a handful of filth-matted hair and tried to drag it off him. The hag’s scalp came away from the bone in dry, tattered patches, but the belch of whiskey didn’t ease.
His granddad had tried to drown him once. Jonah didn’t remember it. He’d been an infant; it had just been told to himenoughthat it felt real. Now that old nighttime terror spread through him and mingled with today. The imagined grip of his grandad’s clever cardsharp hands as they held him down and the whiskey sour taste of a cursed baptismal as Jonah sucked it in.
It choked him. He coughed it up in thin, greasy clots and then choked on more of it. His nose burned, and spillover dribbled down into his ears. The hag stank of apple rot and ashtrays, the stench of it claustrophobic as it weighted him down.
Panic seeped through him, slow and thick as tar. His heart stuttered, and then stagnant, flat water bubbled up into his mouth, cold as old stone. Jonah choked on it and spat up a mouthful of duckweed and a handful of cucumber-fresh smelt.
Jonah’s skin bruised in red-and-purple welts as he felt his bones go cold. A breath shuddered out of him, and mist wreathed the hag’s face. The hag recoiled in confusion, and Ram dragged himself, wet clothes and drenched black curls, out through Jonah. He grabbed the hag by the throat and clenched his fingers until they tore through her skin. Liquor instead of blood drooled out of the hag and over Ram. He didn’t give it a chance to recover as he grabbed it by the hair and dragged both of them down the stairs in a half-there tangle of arms, legs, and grotesque flashes of the corpse under the spirit-skin. Black river-rotted limbs, weeds tangled around bony arms and rooted between exposed ribs, wrapped around sun-dried leather and stained nylon as they tore at each other.
