The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (61 page)

The traffic was slow in many spots, due to the jam-ups surrounding Greater New York, but the driver kept the children entertained with riddles and banter. At other times, he narrated the ride, or described the interesting things he could see out the window, or invented details in order to make the mundane interesting. He was a longtime employee of St. Lucia’s, who didn’t mind playing the clown. He knew that one secret to unlocking the potential of these traumatized children, and opening their hearts to the challenges ahead, was to feed their imagination and involve and engage them.

“Knock-knock.”

Who’s there?

“Disguise.”

Disguise who?

“Disguise jokes are killing me.”

The stop at McDonald’s went well, all things considered, except that the Happy Meal toy was a hologram card. The driver sat apart from the group, watching the youngsters finding their French fries with tentative hands, having not yet learned to “clock” their meal for ease of consumption. At the same time, unlike the majority of blind children who were born sight-impaired, McDonald’s had visual meaning for them, and they seemed to find comfort in the smooth plastic swivel chairs and oversize drinking straws.

Back on the road, the three-hour ride stretched into double that amount of time. The chaperones led the children singing in rounds, then broadcast some audiobooks on the overhead video screens. A number of the younger children, their biological clocks thrown off by blindness, dozed on and off.

The chaperones perceived the change in light quality through the coach windows, aware of darkness falling outside. The coach moved more swiftly as they got into New York State—until all at once they felt it decelerate suddenly, enough so that stuffed animals and drink cups fell to the floor.

The coach pulled to the side and stopped.

“What is it?” asked the lead chaperone, a twenty-four-year-old assistant teacher named Joni, sitting closest to the front of the bus.

“Don’t know … something strange. Just sit tight. I’ll be right back.”

Then the driver was gone, but the chaperones were too busy to worry—anytime the coach stopped, hands went up for assistance to the restroom in back.

Some ten minutes later, the driver returned. He started up the bus without a word, despite the fact that the chaperones were still supervising bathroom trips. Joni’s request to him to wait was ignored, but the kids were eventually helped back to their seats, and everyone was okay.

The coach rolled on quietly from there. The audio program was not continued. The driver’s banter ceased, and, in fact, he refused to respond to any questions Joni asked, seated right behind him in the first row. She grew alarmed, but decided she must not let the others sense her concern. She told herself that the coach was still moving properly, they were traveling at an appropriate rate of speed, and anyway they had to be close to their destination by now.

Some time later, the coach turned onto a dirt road, waking everyone up. Then it rolled onto even rougher ground, everyone holding on, drinks spilling into laps as the bus bumped along. They endured this shaking for one full minute—until the bus abruptly stopped.

The driver turned off the engine and they heard the door fold open with a pneumatic hiss. He departed without a word, his keys jingling faintly into the distance.

Joni instructed the chaperones to wait. If they had indeed arrived at the academy, as Joni hoped, they would be greeted by the staff at any moment. The problem of the silent bus driver could be addressed at the appropriate time.

Increasingly, however, it seemed that this was not the case, and that no one was coming to greet them.

Joni gripped the back of her seat and stood, feeling her way to the open door. She called into the darkness:

“Hello?”

She heard nothing other than the popping and pinging of the coach’s cooling engine, and the flutter of a passing bird’s wings.

She turned to the young passengers in her care. She sensed their exhaustion and their anxiety. A long trip, now with an uncertain end. Some of the children in back were crying.

Joni called a chaperone meeting at the front. Amid frantic whispering, no one knew what to do.

“Out of range,” explained Joni’s cell phone, in an annoyingly patient voice.

One of them felt along the large dashboard for the operator’s radio but could not locate the handset. He did notice that the driver’s seat of cushioned plastic was still exceedingly warm.

Another chaperone, a brash nineteen-year-old named Joel, finally unfolded his cane and picked his way down the bus steps to the ground.

“It’s a grassy field,” he reported back. Then he yelled, to the driver or to anyone else who might be within earshot: “Hello! Is anybody there?”

“This is so wrong,” said Joni, who, as the lead chaperone, felt as helpless as the little ones in her care. “I just can’t understand it.”

“Wait,” said Joel, talking over her. “Do you hear that?”

They were all quiet, listening.

“Yes,” said another.

Joni heard nothing aside from an owl hooting in the distance. “What?”

“I don’t know. A … a humming.”

“What? Mechanical?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. It’s more like … almost like a mantra from yoga class. You know, one of those sacred syllables?”

She listened longer. “I don’t hear a thing, but … okay. Look, we have two choices. Close the door and stay here, and be helpless—or get everybody outside and mobilize them to find help.”

No one wanted to stay. They had been on the bus too long.

“What if this is some test?” speculated Joel. “You know, part of the weekend.”

Another murmured her agreement.

That sparked something in Joni. “Fine,” she said. “If this is a test, then we’re going to ace it.”

They unloaded the children by rows, and shepherded them
into tight columns where they could walk with one hand resting on the shoulder of the child in front of them. Some of the children acknowledged the “hum,” responding to it, trying to replicate the noise for the others. Its presence seemed to calm them. Its source gave them all a destination.

Three chaperones led the way, sweeping their sticks over the surface of the field. The ground was rugged but largely clear of rocks or other treacherous obstacles.

Soon, they heard animal noises in the distance. Someone guessed donkeys, but most agreed no. It sounded like pigs.

A farm? Maybe the humming was a large generator? Some sort of feed machine grinding at night?

Their pace quickened until they reached an impediment: a low wooden rail fence. Two of the three leaders split up left and right, searching for an opening. One was located, and the group was herded to it, moving inside. The grass turned to dirt beneath their shoes, and the pig noises grew louder, nearer. They were on some sort of broad path, and the chaperones drew the children into tighter columns, striding forward until they reached a building of some sort. The path led directly to a large, open doorway, and they entered, calling out but receiving no answer.

They were inside a vast room of various contrapuntal noises. The hogs reacted to their presence with squeals of curiosity that frightened the children. They butted their tight pens and scraped their hooves against the straw-laden floor. Joni felt for the stalls lining either side of the group. The smell was of animal excrement, but also … something more foul. Something like charnel.

They had found the inside of the swine wing of a slaughterhouse, though none of them would have called it by that name.

The hum had become a voice for some of them. Those children felt compelled to break ranks, apparently responding to something familiar in the voice—and the chaperones had to round them up again, some by force. They initiated a new head count to make sure they were all still together.

While she was participating in the count, Joni finally heard the voice. She recognized it as her own, the strangest sensation—the
voice seeming to originate inside her own head, hailing her, as in a dream.

They followed the call of the voice, walking forward down a wide ramp to a common area thick with the smell of charnel.

“Hello?” said Joni, her voice trembling—still hoping that the corny bus driver would answer them. “Can you help us?”

A being awaited them. A shadow akin to an eclipse. They felt its heat and sensed its immensity. The droning noise swelled, filled their heads beyond distraction, blanketing their most profound remaining sense—aural recognition—and leaving them in a state of near-suspended animation.

None of them heard the tender crinkling of the Master’s burned flesh as he moved.

INTERLUDE I

FALL 1944

T
HE OX-DRIVEN CART BUMPED OVER DIRT AND MATTED
grass, rolling stubbornly through the countryside. The oxen were agreeable beasts, as are most castrated draught animals, their thin, braided tails swaying in sync like pendulum rods.

The driver’s hands were leathered where he gripped the driving rope. The man seated next to the driver, his passenger, wore a long black gown over black pants. Around his neck hung the long holy beads of a Polish priest.

Yet this young man dressed in holy vestments was not a priest. He was not even Catholic.

He was a Jew in disguise.

An automobile approached from behind. It drew even with them on the rutted road, a military vehicle transporting Russian soldiers, then passed them on the left. The driver did not wave or even turn his head in acknowledgment, using his long stick to prod the slowed oxen as they pushed through the smoky exhaust of the diesel engine. “Doesn’t matter how fast you travel,” he said, once the fumes cleared. “In the end we all arrive at the same destination, eh, Father?”

Abraham Setrakian did not answer. Because he wasn’t certain anymore that what the man said was true.

The thick bandage Setrakian wore around his neck was a ruse. He had learned to understand much of the Polish language, but he could not speak it well enough to pass.

“They beat you, Father,” said the oxcart driver. “Broke your hands.”

Setrakian regarded his young, mangled hands. The smashed knuckles had healed improperly during his time on the run. A local surgeon took pity on him and re-broke and reset the middle joints, which relieved some of the bone-on-bone grinding. He had some mobility in them now, more so than he might have hoped. The surgeon told him his joints would get progressively worse as he aged. Setrakian flexed them throughout the day, up to and then well past the point of pain, in an effort to increase their flexibility. The war cast a dark shadow over any man’s hope for a long and productive life, but Setrakian had decided that, however much time he had left, he would never be considered a cripple.

He did not recognize this part of the countryside upon his return—but then how would he? He had arrived to this locale inside a closed, windowless train. He had never left camp until the uprising, and then—on the run, deep into the woods. He looked now for the train tracks, but, apparently, they had been pulled up. The train’s path remained, however, its telltale scar running through the farmland. One year’s time was not long enough for nature to reclaim that trail of infamy.

Setrakian climbed down off the cart near the final turn, with a blessing for the peasant driver. “Do not stay here long, Father,” said the driver, before whipping his oxen into action. “There’s a pall over this place.”

Setrakian watched his beasts amble off, then walked up the beaten path. He came to a modest brick farmhouse set alongside an overgrown field tended to by a few workers. The extermination camp known as Treblinka was constructed to be impermanent. It was conceived as a temporary human slaughterhouse, constructed for maximum efficiency and intended to disappear completely once its purpose had been served. No tattooed arms as at Auschwitz; very little paperwork whatsoever. The camp was disguised as a train
station complete with a false ticket window, a false station name (“Obermajdan”), and a fictitious list of connecting stations. The architects of the Operation Reinhard death camps had planned the perfect crime on a genocidal scale.

Soon after the prisoner uprising, Treblinka was indeed dismantled, torn down in the fall of 1943. The land was ploughed over, and a farm was erected on the site, with the intention of discouraging locals from trespassing and scavenging. The farmhouse was constructed using bricks recovered from the old gas chambers, and a former Ukrainian guard named Strebel and his family were installed as its occupants. The Ukrainian camp workers were former Soviet prisoners of war conscripted into service. The work of the camp—mass murder—affected one and all. Setrakian had seen for himself how these former prisoners themselves—especially the Ukrainians of German extraction, who were given greater responsibilities, such as commanding platoons or squads—succumbed to the corruption of the death camp and its opportunities for sadism as well as personal enrichment.

This man, Strebel, Setrakian could not conjure his face by name alone, but he remembered well the Ukrainians’ black uniforms, as well as their carbines—and their cruelty. Word had reached Setrakian that Strebel and his family had only recently abandoned this farmland, fleeing ahead of the advancing Red Army. But Setrakian, in his position as country priest some sixty miles away, also was privy to tales describing a plague of evil that had settled over the region surrounding the former death camp. It was whispered that the Strebel family had disappeared one night without a word, without taking any possessions with them.

It was this last tale that intrigued Setrakian the most.

He had come to suspect he had gone at least partly, if not fully, insane inside the death camp. Had he seen what he thought he’d seen? Or was this great vampire feasting on Jewish prisoners some figment of his imagination, a coping mechanism, a golem to stand for the Nazi atrocities his mind could not bear to accept?

Only now did he feel strong enough to seek an answer. He went out past the brick house, walking among the workers tilling
the field—only to discover that they were not laborers at all, but locals bearing digging tools from home, turning over soil in search of Jewish gold and jewelry lost in the massacre. Yet all they kept unearthing were barbed wire and the occasional chunk of bone.