The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (42 page)

In the master bedroom, the bedsheets were all kicked down, and inside the master bath, floating unflushed in the toilet, was what looked to him like curdled, days-old vomit. He picked a towel up off the floor and, letting it fall open, discovered dark clots of staining blood, as though the plush cotton had been used as a coughing rag.

He ran back down the front stairs. He picked up the wall phone in the kitchen and dialed 911. It rang once before a recording played, asking him to hold. He hung up and dialed again. One ring and the same recording.

He dropped the phone from his ear when he heard a thump in the basement beneath him. He threw open the door, about to call down into the darkness—but something made him stop. He listened, and heard … something.

Shuffling footsteps. More than one set, coming up the stairs, approaching the halfway point where the steps hooked ninety degrees and turned toward him.

“Joan?” he said. “Keene? Audrey?”

But he was already backpedaling. Falling backward, striking the door frame, then scrambling back through the kitchen, past the gunk on the walls and into the mudroom. His only thought was to get out of there.

He slammed through the storm door and out into the driveway, running to the street, yelling at the driver sitting behind the wheel, who
didn’t understand English. Roger opened the back door and jumped inside.

“Lock the doors! Lock the doors!”

The driver turned his head. “Yes. Eight dollar and thirty.”

“Lock the goddamn doors!”

Roger looked back at the driveway. Three strangers, two women and one man, exited his mudroom and started across his lawn.

“Go! Go! Drive!”

The driver tapped the pay slot in the partition between the front and back seats. “You pay, I go.”

Four of them now. Roger stared, stupefied, as a familiar-looking man wearing a ripped shirt knocked the others aside to get to the taxi first. It was Franco, their gardener. He looked through the passenger-door window at Roger, his staring eyes pale in the center but red around the rims, like a corona of bloodred crazy. He opened his mouth as though to roar at Roger—and then this thing came out, punched the window with a solid
whack
, right at Roger’s face, then retracted.

Roger stared.
What the hell did I just see?

It happened again. Roger understood—on a pebble level, deep beneath many mattresses of fear, panic, mania—that Franco, or this thing that was Franco, didn’t know or had forgotten or misjudged the properties of glass. He appeared confused by the transparency of this solid.

“Drive!”
screamed Roger. “
Drive!”

Two of them stood close, in front of the taxi now. A man and a woman, headlights brightening their waists. There were seven or eight in total, all around them, others coming out of the neighbors’ houses.

The driver yelled something in his own language, leaning on the horn.

“Drive!”
screamed Roger.

The driver reached for something on the floor instead. He pulled up a small bag the size of a toiletry case and ran back the zipper, spilling out a few Zagnut bars before getting his hand on a tiny silver revolver. He waved the weapon at the windshield and hollered in fear.

Franco’s tongue was exploring the window glass. Except that the tongue wasn’t a tongue at all.

The driver kicked open his door. Roger yelled, “
No!”
through the partition glass, but the driver was already outside. He fired the handgun from behind the door, shooting it with a flick of his wrist, as though
throwing bullets from it. He fired again and again, the pair in front of the car doubling up, struck by small-caliber rounds, but not dropping.

The driver kicked off two more wild shots and one of them struck the man in the head. His scalp flew backward and he stumbled to the ground.

Then another grabbed the driver from behind. It was Hal Chatfield, Roger’s neighbor, his blue bathrobe hanging off his shoulders.

“No!” Roger shouted, but too late.

Hal spun the driver to the road. The thing came out of his mouth and pierced the driver’s neck. Roger watched the howling driver through his window.

Another one rose up into the headlights. No, not another one—the same man who had been shot in the head. His wound was leaking white, running down the side of his face. He used the car to hold himself up, but he was still coming.

Roger wanted to run, but he was trapped. To the right, past Franco the gardener, Roger saw a man in UPS brown shirt and shorts come out of the garage next door with the head of a shovel on his shoulder, like the baseball bat of an on-deck hitter.

The head-wound man pulled himself around the driver’s open door and climbed into the front seat. He looked through the plastic partition at Roger, the front-right lobe of his head raised like a forelock of flesh. White ooze glazed his cheek and jaw.

Roger turned just in time to see the UPS guy swing the shovel. It clanged off the rear window, leaving a long scrape in the reinforced glass, light from the streetlamps glinting in the spiderweb cracks.

Roger heard the scrape on the partition. The head-wound man’s tongue came out, and he was trying to slip it through the ashtray-style pay slot. The fleshy tip poked through, straining, almost sniffing at the air as it tried to get at Roger.

With a scream, Roger kicked at the slot in a frenzy, slamming it shut. The man in front let out an ungodly squeal, and the severed tip of his … whatever it was, fell directly into Roger’s lap. Roger swatted it away as, on the other side of the partition, the man spurted white all over, gone wild either in pain or in pure castration hysteria.

Whamm!
Another swing of the shovel crashed against the back window behind Roger’s head, the antishatter glass cracking and bending but still refusing to break.

Pown-pown-pown.
Footsteps leaving craters on the roof now.

Four of them on the curb, three on the street side, and more coming from the front. Roger looked back, saw the deranged UPS man rear back to swing the shovel at the broken window again. Now or never.

Roger reached for the handle and kicked the street-side door open with all his might. The shovel came down and the back window was smashed away, raining chips of glass. The blade just missed Roger’s head as he slid out into the street. Someone—it was Hal Chatfield, his eyes glowing red—grabbed his arm, spinning him around, but Roger shed his suit jacket like a snake wriggling out of its skin and kept on going, racing up the street, not looking back until he reached the corner.

Some came in a hobbling jog, others moved faster and with more coordination. Some were old, and three of them were grinning children. His neighbors and friends. Faces he recognized from the train station, from birthday parties, from church.

All coming after him.

Flatbush, Brooklyn

E
PH PRESSED THE DOORBELL
at the Barbour residence. The street was quiet, though there was life in the other homes, television lights, bags of trash at the curb. He stood there with a Luma lamp in his hand and a Setrakian-converted nail gun hanging on a strap from his shoulder.

Nora stood behind him, at the foot of the brick steps, holding her own Luma. Setrakian brought up the rear, his staff in hand, its silver head glowing in the moonlight.

Two rings, no answer. Not unexpected. Eph tried the doorknob before looking for another entrance, and it turned.

The door opened.

Eph went in first, flicking on a light. The living room looked normal, slipcovered furniture and throw pillows set just so.

He called out, “Hello,” as the two others filed in behind him. Strange, letting himself into the house. Eph trod softly on the rug, like a burglar or an assassin. He wanted to believe he was still a healer, but that was becoming more difficult to believe by the hour.

Nora started up the stairs. Setrakian followed Eph into the kitchen. Eph said, “What do you think we will learn here? You said the survivors were distractions—”

“I said that was the purpose they served. As to the Master’s intent—I don’t know. Perhaps there is some special attachment to the Master. In any event, we must start somewhere. These survivors are our only leads.”

A bowl and spoon sat in the sink. A family Bible lay open on the table, stuffed with mass cards and photographs, turned to the final chapter. A passage was underlined in red ink with a shaky hand, Revelations 11:7–8:

… the beast that ascends from the bottomless pit will make war upon them and conquer them and kill them, and their dead bodies will lie in the street of the great city which is allegorically called Sodom …

Next to the open Bible, like instruments set out upon an altar, were a crucifix and a small glass bottle Eph presumed to be holy water.

Setrakian nodded at the religious articles. “No more reasonable than duct tape and Cipro,” he said. “And no more effective.”

They proceeded into the back room. Eph said, “The wife must have covered for him. Why wouldn’t she call a doctor?”

They explored a closet, Setrakian tapping the walls with the bottom of his staff. “Science has made many advances in my lifetime, but the instrument has yet to be invented that can see clearly into the marriage of a man and a woman.”

They closed the closet. Eph realized they were out of doors to open. “If there’s no basement?”

Setrakian shook his head. “Exploring a crawl space is many times worse.”

“Up here!” It was Nora, calling down from upstairs, urgency in her voice.

Ann-Marie Barbour was slumped over from a sitting position on the floor between her nightstand and her bed, dead. Between her legs was a wall mirror that she had shattered on the floor. She had selected the longest, most daggerlike shard and used it to sever the radial and ulnar arteries of her left arm. Wrist cutting is one of the
least effective methods of suicide, with a success rate of less than 5 percent. It is a slow death, due to the narrowness of the lower arm, and the fact that only one wrist cut is possible: a deep slice severs nerves, rendering that hand useless. It is also extremely painful, and as such, generally successful only among the profoundly depressed or the insane.

Ann-Marie Barbour had cut very deeply, the severed arteries as well as the dermis pulled back, exposing both bones in the wrist. Tangled in the curled fingers of her immobilized hand was a bloodied shoelace, upon which was strung a round-headed padlock key.

Her spilled blood was red. Still, Setrakian produced his silver-backed mirror and held it at an angle to her down-turned face, just to be sure. No blurring—the image was true. Ann-Marie Barbour had not been turned.

Setrakian stood slowly, bothered by this development. “Strange,” he said.

Eph stood over her in such a way that her down-turned face—her expression one of bewildered exhaustion—was reflected in the pieces of shattered glass. He noticed, tucked beneath a twin frame containing photographs of a young boy and girl on the nightstand, a folded piece of notebook paper. He slid it out, paused a moment with it in his hand, then opened it carefully.

Her handwriting was shaky, in red ink, just like the notation in the kitchen Bible. Her lower case
i
’s were dotted with circles, giving the penmanship a juvenile appearance.

“‘To my dearest Benjamin and darling Haily,’” he began reading.

“Don’t,” interrupted Nora. “Don’t read it. It’s not for us.”

She was right. He scanned the page for pertinent information—“The children are with the father’s sister in Jersey, safe”—skipping down to the final passage, reading just that bit. “‘I am so sorry, Ansel … this key I hold I cannot use … I know now that God has cursed you to punish me, he has forsaken us and we are both damned. If my death will cure your soul, then He can have it …”

Nora knelt, reaching for the key, drawing the bloody shoelace away from Ann-Marie’s lifeless fingers. “So … where is he?”

They heard a low moan that almost passed for a growl. It was bestial, glottal, the kind of throaty noise that can only be made by a creature with no human voice. And it came from outside.

Eph went to the window. He looked down at the backyard and saw the large shed.

They went out silently into the backyard, to stand before the chained handles of the twin shed doors. There, they listened.

Scratching inside. Guttural noises, quiet and choked.

Then the doors
bang
ed. Something shoved against them. Testing the chain.

Nora had the key. She looked to see if anyone else wanted it, and then walked to the chain herself, inserting the key in the padlock and turning it gingerly. The lock clicked and the shackle popped free.

Silence inside. Nora lifted the lock out of the links, Setrakian and Eph ready behind her—the old man drawing his silver sword from its wooden sheath. She began unwinding the heavy chain. Threading it through the wooden handles … expecting the doors to burst open immediately …

But nothing happened. Nora pulled the last length free and stepped back. She and Eph powered on their UVC lamps. The old man was locked in on the doors, so Eph sucked in a brave breath and reached for the handles, pulling open the doors.

It was dark inside. The only window was covered with something, and the outward-opening doors blocked most of the light coming down from the house porch.

It was a few airless moments before they perceived the form of something crouching.

Setrakian stepped forward, stopping within two paces of the open door. He appeared to be showing the occupant of the shed his silver blade.

The thing attacked. It charged, running at Setrakian, leaping for him, and the old man was ready with his sword—but then the leash chain caught, snapping the thing back.

They saw it now—saw its face. It sneered, its gums so white it appeared at first that its bared teeth went all the way up into the jaw. Its lips were pale with thirst, and what was left of its hair had whitened at the roots. It crouched on all fours on a bed of soil, a chain collar locked tight around its neck, dug into the flesh.