The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (45 page)

Eph looked at Nora. “What about you?”

“The same. And that Bolivar bought the property expressly because it was an old bootlegger’s pad, and because it was said that the owner before that was a Satanist who held black masses on the rooftop altar around the turn of the twentieth century. Bolivar’s been renovating that building and combining it with the one next to it on and off for the past year, constructing one of the largest private residences in New York.”

“Good,” said Eph. “Where did you go, the library?”

“No,” she said, handing over a printout featuring photos of the original town house interior and current photos of Bolivar in stage makeup. “
People
magazine online.”

They were buzzed in and rode up to Jim and Sylvia’s small ninth-floor unit. Sylvia answered the door in a flowing linen dress befitting a horoscope columnist, her hair pulled back with a wide headband. She was surprised to see Nora, and doubly shocked to see Eph.

“What are you doing—?”

Eph moved inside. “Sylvia, we have some very important questions, and we only have a little time. What do you know about Jim and the Stoneheart Group?”

Sylvia held her hand to her chest as if she didn’t understand. “The who?”

Eph saw a desk in the corner, a tabby cat snoozing on top of a closed laptop. He crossed to it and started opening drawers. “Do you mind if we take a quick look through his things?”

“No,” she said, “if you think it will help. Go ahead.”

Setrakian remained near the door while Eph and Nora searched the contents of the desk. Sylvia apparently received a strong vibration from the old man’s presence. “Would anyone like anything, a drink?”

“No,” said Nora, smiling briefly, then getting back to the search.

“I’ll be right back.” Sylvia went to the kitchen.

Eph stood back from the cluttered desk, mystified. He didn’t even
know what he was looking for. Jim working for Palmer? How far back in time did this reach? And what was Jim’s motive anyway? Money? Would he have turned on them like that?

He went to ask Sylvia a delicate question about their finances, leaving the room to find her in the kitchen. As Eph turned the corner, Sylvia was replacing her wall phone. She stepped backward with a strange look on her face.

Eph was confused at first. “Who were you calling, Sylvia?”

The others came in behind him. Sylvia felt for the wall behind her, then sat down in a chair.

Eph said, “Sylvia—what’s going on?”

She said, without moving, and with an eerie sense of calm behind her wide, damning eyes, “You’re going to lose.”

PS 69, Jackson Heights

K
ELLY USUALLY
never turned her mobile phone on in the classroom, but now it sat to the left of her calendar blotter, set to silent. Matt had stayed out all night, not unusual for overnight inventories; he often took the crew out to breakfast afterward. But he always called to check in as well. The school was a no-cell-phone zone, but she had sneaked a few calls to him, getting his voice mail each time. Maybe he was out of range. She was trying not to worry, and losing the battle. Attendance was low at the school.

She regretted listening to Matt and giving in to his arrogance about not leaving the city. If he had somehow put Zack at risk …

Then her phone lit up and she saw the envelope icon. A text message from his mobile.

It read:
COME HOME
.

That was it. Two words, lower case, no punctuation. She tried to call him right back. The phone rang and then stopped ringing as though he had answered. But he didn’t say anything.

“Matt? Matt?”

Her fourth-graders looked at her strangely. They had never seen Ms. Goodweather talking on a phone in class.

Kelly tried their home phone, and got a busy signal. Was the voice mail broken? When was the last time she’d heard a busy signal?

She decided to leave. She’d have Charlotte open the door to her classroom next door, keep an eye on her students. Kelly thought about packing it in for the day and even picking up Zack at the middle school, but no. She’d shoot home, find out what was wrong, then evaluate her options and go from there.

Bushwick, Brooklyn

T
HE MAN WHO MET THEM
at the empty house filled most of the door frame. The shadow of a skipped shave blackened his jutting jaw like a dusting of soot. He carried a large white sack at his hip, one hand choking its neck, an oversize pillowcase with something heavy inside.

After the introductions, the big man went into his shirt pocket and unfolded a worn copy of a cover letter bearing the CDC seal. He showed the letter to Eph.

“You said you had something to show us?” said Eph.

“Two things. First, this.”

Fet loosened the drawstring on his sack and overturned the contents onto the floor. Four furry rodents landed in a heap, all dead.

Eph jumped back and Nora gasped.

“I always say, you want to get people’s attention, bring ’em a bag of rats.” Fet picked one up by its long tail, its body twirling slowly back and forth under his hand. “They’re coming up out of their burrows all across the city. Even in daytime. Something’s driving them out. Meaning, something’s not right. I know that during the black death, rats came out and dropped dead in the streets. These rats here aren’t coming up to die. They’re coming up plenty alive and plenty desperate and hungry. Take my word for it, when you see a big change in rat ecology, it means bad news is on the way. When the rats start to panic, it’s time to sell GE. Time to get out. Know what I mean?”

Setrakian said, “I do indeed.”

Eph said, “I’m missing something here. What do rats have to do with …?”

“They are a sign,” said Setrakian, “as Mr. Fet rightly states. An ecological symptom. Stoker popularized the myth that a vampire can change its form, transforming into a nocturnal creature such as a bat or a wolf. This false notion arises out of a truth. Before dwellings had
basements or cellars, vampires nested in caves and dens on the edges of villages. Their corruptive presence displaced the other creatures, bats and wolves, driving them out so that they overran the villages—their appearance always coinciding with the spreading sickness and the corruption of souls.”

Fet was paying close attention to the old man. “You know what?” he said. “Twice when you were just talking, I heard you say the word ‘vampire.’”

Setrakian looked at him evenly. “That you did.”

After a contemplative pause, and a long look at the others, Fet said, “Okay.” As though he was starting to get it. “Now let me show you the other thing.”

He led them down into the basement. The smell was one of foul incense, of something diseased that had been burned. He showed them the atomized flesh and bone, now cold cinder lying on the floor of the basement. The rectangle of window sunlight had elongated and moved, shining against the wall now. “But it was beaming down here, and they went into it, and it cooked them in an instant. But, before that, they came at me with this …
thing
shooting out from underneath their tongues.”

Setrakian told him the short version. The rogue Master stowing away on Flight 753. The disappearing coffin. The morgue dead rising and returning to their Dear Ones. The household nests. The Stoneheart Group. Silver and sunlight. The stinger.

Fet said, “Their heads tipped back and their mouths opened up … and it was like that candy, that kids’ candy—the one that used to come with
Star Wars
character heads.”

Nora said, after a moment, “A Pez dispenser.”

“That’s it. You tip up the chin, candy pops out of the neck.”

Eph nodded. “Except for the candy part, an apt description.”

Fet looked at Eph. “So why are you public enemy number one?”

“Because silence is their weapon.”

“Hell, then. Somebody has to make some noise.”

“Exactly,” said Eph.

Setrakian eyed the light clipped on the side of Fet’s belt. “Let me ask you this. Your profession uses black light, if I am not mistaken.”

“Sure. To pick up rodent urine traces.”

Setrakian glanced over at Eph and Nora.

Fet took another look at the old man in the vest and suit. “You know about exterminating?”

Setrakian said, “I have had some experience.” He stepped over to the turned property manager, who had crawled or dragged himself away from the sunlight, and was now curled up in the far corner. Setrakian examined him with a silver-backed mirror, and showed Fet the result. The exterminator looked back and forth between the property manager as he appeared to his eyes and the vibrating blur reflected in the glass. “But you strike me as an expert on things that burrow and hide. Creatures who nest. Who feed off the human population. Your job is to drive out these vermin?”

Fet looked at Setrakian and the others like a man standing on an express train, gathering speed out of the station, suddenly realizing he had boarded on the wrong track. “What are you getting me into here?”

“Tell us, then, please. If vampires are vermin—an infestation spreading quickly throughout the city—how would you stop them?”

“I can tell you that, from a pest control point of view, poisoning and trapping are short-term solutions that won’t work in the long run. Picking these babies off one by one gets you nowhere. The only rats you ever see are the weakest ones. The hungry ones. Smart ones know how to survive. Control is what works. Managing their habitat, disrupting their ecosystem. Removing the food supply and starving them out. Then you get to the root of the infestation, and wipe it clean.”

Setrakian nodded slowly, then looked back at Eph. “The Master. The root of this evil. Somewhere in Manhattan right now.” The old man looked again at the unfortunate curled up on the floor, who would animate after nightfall, become a vampire, vermin. “You will step back please,” he said, unsheathing his sword. With his pronouncement and a two-handed stroke, he decapitated the man where he lay. As pale pink blood eked out—the host was not yet fully turned—Setrakian wiped his blade on the man’s shirt and returned it to the walking stick. “If only we had some indication of where the Master might be nesting. The site would have been preapproved and perhaps even selected by him. A lair worthy of his stature. A place of darkness, offering shelter from, yet access to, the human world on the surface.” He turned back to Fet. “Do you have any notion where these rats might be rising from? The epicenter of their displacement?”

Fet nodded immediately, his eyes staring into the distance. “I think I know.”

Church Street and Fulton

I
N THE DECLINING
light of day, the two epidemiologists, the pawnbroker, and the exterminator all stood on the viewing platform on the upper edge of the World Trade Center construction site, the excavation dug one block wide and seventy feet deep.

Fet’s city credentials and one small lie—Setrakian was not a world-famous rodentologist in from Omaha—got them into the subway tunnel without an escort. Fet led them down to the same out-of-service track he had followed before, playing his flashlight upon the ratless tracks. The old man stepped carefully over the ties, picking his way along the bed stones with his oversize walking stick. Eph and Nora carried Luma lights.

“You are not from Russia,” Setrakian said to Fet.

“Just my parents and my name.”

“In Russia, they are called
vourdalak
. The prevailing myth is that one gains immunity from them by mixing the blood of a
vourdalak
with flour and making bread from the paste, which must then be eaten.”

“Does that work?”

“As well as any folk remedy. Which is to say, not very well at all.” Setrakian remained far to the right of the electrified third rail. “That steel rod looks handy.”

Fet looked at his length of rebar. “It’s crude. Like me, I suppose. But it gets the job done. Also like me.”

Setrakian lowered his voice to cut down on the tunnel echo. “I have some other instruments you might find at least as effective.”

Fet saw the sump hose the sandhogs had been working on. Farther ahead, the tunnel turned and widened, and Fet recognized the dingy junction at once. “In here,” he said, shining a flashlight beam around, keeping it low.

They stopped and listened to the dripping of water. Fet scoured the ground with his light. “I put down tracking powder last time. See?”

There were human footprints in the powder. Shoes, sneakers, and bare feet.

Fet said, “Who goes barefoot in a subway tunnel?”

Setrakian held up a wool-gloved hand. The tubelike tunnel acoustics brought them distant groans.

Nora said, “Jesus Christ …”

Setrakian whispered, “Your lamps, please. Turn them on.”

Eph and Nora did, their powerful UVC rays illuminating the dark underground, exposing a mad swirl of colors. Innumerable stains splashed wildly against the floor, the walls, the iron stanchions … everywhere.

Fet recoiled in disgust. “This is all …?”

“It is excrement,” said Setrakian. “The creatures will shit while they eat.”

Fet looked around in amazement. “I guess a vampire doesn’t have much need for good hygiene.”

Setrakian was backing away. He had a different grip on his walking stick now, the top half pulled several inches out of the bottom half, baring the bright, sharp blade. “We must leave here. Right now.”

Fet was listening to the noises in the tunnels. “No argument from me.”

Eph’s foot kicked something, and he jumped back, expecting rats. He shone his UVC lamp down and discovered a low mound of objects in the corner.

They were mobile phones. One hundred or more, piled up as though they had been thrown into the corner.

“Huh,” said Fet. “Somebody dumped a load of mobile phones down here.”

Eph reached for some on the top of the pile. The first two he tried were dead. The third had just one blinking bar of battery life. An
X
icon along the top of the screen indicated that there was no reception.

“That’s why the police can’t find all the missing people by their cell phones,” said Nora. “They’re all underground.”