The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (23 page)

Eph returned, this time running the violet lamplight over Redfern’s face. The image revealed beneath it, the mottled sub-flesh, formed a kind of mask. Like a second self lurking behind the airline pilot’s face, aged and malformed. A grim visage, an evil awake within him while the sick man slept. Eph brought the lamp even closer … and again the interior shadow rippled, almost forming a grimace, trying to shy away.

Redfern’s eyes opened. As though awakened by the light. Eph jerked back, shocked by the sight. The pilot had enough secobarbital in him for two men. He was too heavily sedated to reach consciousness.

Redfern’s staring eyes were wide in their sockets. He stared straight
at the ceiling, looking scared. Eph held the lamp away and moved into his line of sight.

“Captain Redfern?”

The pilot’s lips were moving. Eph leaned closer, wanting to hear what Redfern was trying to say.

The man’s lips moved dryly, saying, “He is here.”

“Who is here, Captain Redfern?”

Redfern’s eyes stared, as though witnessing a terrible scene being played out before him.

He said, “Mr. Leech.”

M
uch later, Nora returned, finding Eph down the hallway from radiology. They spoke standing before a wall covered with crayon artwork from thankful young patients. He told her about what he had seen under Redfern’s flesh.

Nora said, “The black light of our Luma lamps—isn’t that low-spectrum ultraviolet light?”

Eph nodded. He too had been thinking about the old man outside the morgue.

“I want to see it,” said Nora.

“Redfern’s in radiology now,” Eph told her. “We had to further sedate him for MRI imaging.”

“I got the results from the airplane,” said Nora, “the liquid sprayed around there. Turns out you were right. There’s ammonia and phosphorous—”

“I knew it—”

“But also oxalic and iron and uric acids. Plasma.”

“What?”

“Raw plasma. And a whole load of enzymes.”

Eph held his forehead as though taking his own temperature. “As in digestion?”

“Now what does that remind you of?”

“Excretions. Birds, bats. Like guano. But how …”

Nora shook her head, feeling in equal parts both excited and bewildered. “Whoever, whatever was on that airplane … took a giant shit in the cabin.”

While Eph was trying to wrap his mind around that one, a man in hospital scrubs came hustling down the hallway, calling his name. Eph recognized him as the technician from the MRI room.

“Dr. Goodweather—I don’t know what happened. I just stepped out to get some coffee. I wasn’t gone five minutes.”

“What do you mean? What is it?”

“Your patient. He’s gone from the scanner.”

J
im Kent was downstairs near the closed gift shop, away from the others, talking on his mobile phone. “They are imaging him now,” he told the person on the other end. “He seems to be going downhill pretty fast, sir. Yes, they should have the scans in just a few hours. No—no word on the other survivors. I thought you’d want to know. Yes, sir, I am alone—”

He became distracted by the sight of a tall, ginger-haired man wearing a hospital johnny, walking unsteadily down the hallway, trailing along the floor IV tubes from his arm. Unless Jim was mistaken, it was Captain Redfern.

“Sir, I … something’s happening … let me call you back.”

He hung up and plucked the wire from his ear, stuffing it into his jacket pocket and following the man a few dozen yards away. The patient slowed for just a moment, turning his head as though aware of his pursuer.

“Captain Redfern?” said Jim.

The patient continued around a corner and Jim followed, only to find, when he turned the same corner, the hallway empty.

Jim checked door signs. He tried the one marked
STAIRS
and looked down the narrow well between half flights. He caught sight of an IV tube trailing down the steps.

“Captain Redfern?” said Jim, his voice echoing in the stairwell. He fumbled out his phone as he descended, wanting to call Eph. The display said
NO SERVICE
because he was underground now. He pushed through the door into the basement hallway and, distracted by his phone, never saw Redfern running at him from the side.

W
hen Nora, searching the hospital, went through the door from the stairwell into the basement hallway, she found Jim sitting against the wall with his legs splayed. He had a sleepy expression on his face.

Captain Redfern was standing barefoot over him, his johnny-bare back to her. Something hanging from his mouth spilled driblets of blood to the floor.

“Jim!” she yelled, though Jim did not react in any way to her voice. Captain Redfern stiffened, however. When he turned to her, Nora saw nothing in his mouth. She was shocked by his color, formerly quite pale, now florid and flushed. The front of his johnny was indeed bloodstained, and blood also rimmed his lips. Her first thought was that he was in the grip of some sort of seizure. She feared he had bitten off a chunk of his tongue and was swallowing blood.

Closer, her diagnosis became less certain. Redfern’s pupils were dead black, the sclera red where it should have been white. His mouth hung open strangely, disjointedly, as though his jaw had been reset on a lower hinge. And there was a heat coming off him that was extreme, beyond the warmth of any normal, natural fever.

“Captain Redfern,” she said, calling him over and over, trying to snap him out of it. He advanced on her with a look of vulturelike hunger in his filmy eyes. Jim remained slumped on the floor, not moving. Redfern was obviously violent, and Nora wished she had a weapon. She looked around, seeing only a hospital phone, 555 the alert code.

She grabbed the receiver off the wall, barely getting it into her hand before Redfern attacked, throwing her to the floor. Nora kept hold of the receiver, its cord pulling right out of the wall. Redfern had maniacal strength, descending on her and pinning her arms hard to the polished floor. His face strained and his throat bucked. She thought he was about to vomit on her.

Nora was screaming when Eph came flying from the stairwell door, throwing his weight into Redfern’s torso, sending him sprawling, off her. Eph righted himself and held out a cautionary hand toward his patient, dragging himself up from the floor now. “Hold on—”

Redfern emitted a hissing sound. Not snakelike, but throaty. His black eyes were flat and vacant as he started to smile. Or seemed to smile, using those same facial muscles—only, when his mouth opened, it kept on opening.

His lower jaw descended and out wriggled something pink and fleshy that was not his tongue. It was longer, more muscular and complex … and squirming. As though he had swallowed a live squid, and one of its tentacles was still thrashing about desperately inside his mouth.

Eph jumped back. He grabbed the IV tree to keep from falling, and then upended it, using it like a prod to keep Redfern and that thing in his mouth at bay. Redfern grabbed the steel stand and then the thing in his mouth lashed out. It extended the six-foot distance of the IV tree, Eph spinning out of the way just in time. He heard the
flap
of the end of the appendage—narrowed, like a fleshy stinger—strike the wall. Redfern flung the stand to the side, cracking it in half, Eph tumbling with it backward into a room.

Redfern entered after him, still with that hungry look in his black-and-red eyes. Eph searched around wildly for anything that would help him keep this guy away from him, finding only a trephine in a charger on a shelf. A trephine is a surgical instrument with a spinning cylindrical blade generally used for cutting open the human skull during autopsy. The helicopter-type blade whirred to life, and Redfern advanced, his stinger mostly retracted yet still lolling, with flanking sacs of flesh pulsing at its sides. Before Redfern could attack again, Eph tried to cut it.

He missed, slicing a chunk out of the pilot’s neck. White blood kicked out, just as he had seen in the morgue, not spraying out arterially but spilling down his front. Eph dropped the trephine before its whirring blades could spit the substance at him. Redfern grabbed at his neck, and Eph picked up the nearest heavy object he could find, a fire extinguisher. He used the butt end of it to batter Redfern in the face—his hideous stinger Eph’s prime target. Eph smashed him twice more, Redfern’s head snapping back with the last blow, his spine emitting an audible crack.

Redfern collapsed, his body giving out. Eph dropped the tank and stumbled back, looking in horror at what he had done.

Nora came rushing in wielding a broken piece of the IV tree, then saw Redfern lying in a heap. She dropped the shaft and rushed to Eph, who caught her in his arms.

“Are you okay?” he said.

She nodded, her hand over her mouth. She pointed at Redfern and
Eph looked down and saw the worms wriggling out of his neck. Reddish worms, as though blood filled, spilling out of Redfern’s neck like cockroaches fleeing a room when a light is turned on. Eph and Nora backed up to the open doorway.

“What the hell just happened?” said Eph.

Nora’s hand came away from her mouth. “Mr. Leech,” she said.

They heard a groan from the hallway—Jim—and rushed out to tend to him.

INTERLUDE III
Revolt, 1943

A
UGUST WAS SEARING THROUGH THE CALENDAR AND
Abraham Setrakian, laying out beams for a suspended roof, felt its burden more than most. The sun was baking him, every day it was like this. But even more than that, he had come to loathe the night—his bunk and his dreams of home, which had formerly been his only respite from the horror of the death camp—and was now a hostage to two equally merciless masters.

The Dark Thing, Sardu, now spaced his visits to a regular pattern of twice-a-week feedings in Setrakian’s barracks, and probably the same in the other barracks as well. The deaths went completely unnoticed by guards and prisoners alike. The Ukrainian guards wrote the corpses off as suicides, and to the SS it meant only a change in a ledger entry.

In the months since the Sardu-Thing’s first visit, Setrakian—obsessed with the notion of defeating such evil—learned as much as he could from other local prisoners about an ancient Roman crypt located somewhere in the outlying forest. There, he was now certain, the Thing had made its lair, from whence it emerged each night to slake its ungodly thirst.

If Setrakian ever understood true thirst, it was that day. Water carriers circulated among the prisoners constantly, though many of them themselves fell prey to heat seizures. The burning hole was well fed
that day. Setrakian had managed to collect what he needed: a length of raw white oak, and a bit of silver for the tip. That was the old way to dispose of the
strigoi,
the vampire. He had sharpened the tip for days before treating it with the silver. Smuggling it into his barracks alone took the better part of two weeks of planning. He had lodged it in an empty space directly behind his bed. If the guards ever found it, they would execute him on the spot, for there was no mistaking the shape of the hardwood as a weapon.

The night before, Sardu had entered the camp late, later than usual. Setrakian had lain very still, waiting patiently for it to begin feeding on an infirm Romani. He felt revulsion and remorse, and prayed for forgiveness—but it was a necessary part of his plan, for the half-gorged creature would be less alert.

The blue light of impending dawn filtered through the small grated windows at the east end of the barracks. Just what Setrakian had been waiting for. He pricked his index finger, drawing a perfect crimson pearl out of his dry flesh. Yet he was completely unprepared for what happened next.

He had never heard the Thing utter a sound. It conducted its unholy repast in utter silence. But now, at the smell of young Setrakian’s blood, the Thing
groaned
. The sound reminded Setrakian of the creaking sound of dry wood when twisted, or the sputter of water down a clogged drain.

In a matter of seconds, the Thing was at Setrakian’s side.

As the young man cautiously slid his hand back, reaching for the stake, the two locked eyes. Setrakian couldn’t help but turn toward it when it moved near his bed.

The Thing smiled at him.

“Ages since we fed looking into living eyes,” the Thing said. “Ages …”

Its breath smelled of earth and of copper, and its tongue clicked in its mouth. Its deep voice sounded like an amalgam of many voices, poured forth as though lubricated by human blood.

“Sardu …” whispered Setrakian, unable to keep the name to himself.

The beady, burnished eyes of the Thing opened wider, and for a fleeting moment they looked almost human.

“He is not alone in this body,” it hissed. “How dare you call to him?”

Setrakian gripped the stake behind his bed, slowly sliding it out …

“A man has the right to be called by his own name before meeting God,” said Setrakian, with the righteousness of youth.

The Thing gurgled with joy. “Then, young thing, you may tell me yours …”

Setrakian made his move then, but the silver tip of the stake made a tiny scraping noise, revealing its presence a mere instant before it flew toward the Thing’s heart.

But that instant was enough. The Thing uncoiled its claw and stopped the weapon an inch from its own chest.

Setrakian tried to free himself, striking out with his other hand, but the Thing stopped that too. It lacerated the side of Setrakian’s neck with the tip of its stinger—just a gash, coming as fast as the blink of an eye, enough to inject him with the paralyzing agent.

Now it held the young man firmly by both hands. It raised him up from the bed.

“But you will not meet God,” the Thing said. “For I am personally acquainted with him, and I know him to be
gone
…”

Setrakian was on the verge of fainting from the vicelike pressure the claws exerted upon his hands. The hands that had kept him alive for so long in that camp. His brain was bursting with pain, mouth gaping, lungs gasping for breath, but no scream would surge from within.