The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (62 page)

They looked upon him with suspicion, as though there was a distinct code of conduct for looters, never mind vaguely defined areas of claim. Even his vestments did not slow their digging or melt their resolve. A few may have slowed and looked down—not in shame exactly, but in the manner of those who know better—and then waited for him to continue on before resuming their grave-robbing.

Setrakian walked on from the old camp site, leaving its outline and retracing his old escape route into the forest. After many wrong turns, he arrived at the old Roman ruin, which looked unchanged to his eye. He entered the cave where he had faced and destroyed the Nazi Zimmer, broken hands and all—hauling the being into the light of day and watching it cook in the sun.

As he looked around inside, he realized something. The scores on the floor, the worn path inside the entrance: the cave showed signs of recent habitation.

Setrakian exited quickly and felt his chest constrict as he stood outside the foul ruin. He did sense evil in the area. The sun was dipping low in the west, darkness soon to take the region.

Setrakian closed his eyes in the manner of a priest in prayer. But he was not appealing to a higher being. He was centering himself, pushing down his fear and accepting the task that had presented itself to him.

By the time he had returned to the farmhouse, the locals had all gone home, the fields as still and gray as the graveyard they were.

Setrakian entered the farmhouse. He poked about a bit, just enough to make sure that he was indeed alone there. In the parlor, he received a fright. On the small reading table next to the best chair in the room, a finely carved wooden smoking pipe lay on its side. Setrakian reached for the pipe, taking it into his crooked fingers—and knew instantly.

The handiwork was indeed his. He had crafted four of these,
carved at the order of a Ukrainian captain at Christmastime 1942, to be given away as gifts.

The pipe trembled in Setrakian’s hand as he imagined the guard Strebel sitting in this very room with his family, surrounded by the bricks of the death house, enjoying his tobacco and the fine ribbon of smoke trailing toward the ceiling—on the very site where the fire pits roared and the stench of human immolation rose like screams to the unhearing heavens.

Setrakian broke the pipe in his hands, snapping it in two, then dropping it to the floor and further crushing it with his heel, shivering with a fury he had not experienced in many months.

And then, as suddenly as it came—the mania passed. He was calm again.

He returned to the modest kitchen. He lit a single candle and placed it in the window facing the woods. And then he sat at the table.

Alone in the home, flexing his broken hands while he waited, he recalled the day he came upon the village church. He went seeking food, a man on the run, and discovered the religious house empty. All the Catholic priests had been rounded up and taken away. Setrakian discovered warm vestments in the small rectory adjacent to the church, and more out of necessity than any sort of plan—his clothes were tattered beyond repair, marking him as a refugee of some stripe, and the nights were very cold—he pulled them on. He came upon the ruse of the bandage, which no one questioned in a time of war. Even in silence, and perhaps out of a hunger for religion in that dark year, the villagers took to him, airing their confessions to this young man in holy garb who could only offer them a blessing with his mangled hands.

Setrakian was not the rabbi his family had intended him to become. He was something much different, and yet so oddly similar.

It was there, in that abandoned church, that he wrestled with what he had seen, at times wondering how any of it—from the sadism of the Nazis to the grotesquery of the great Vampire—could have been real. He had only his broken hands as proof. By then, the camp, as he had been told by other refugees to whom he offered
“his” church as sanctuary—peasants on the run from the Armia Krajowa, deserters from the Wehrmacht or the Gestapo—had been wiped off the face of the earth.

After dusk, when full night had claimed the countryside, an eerie silence settled over the farm. The countryside is anything but quiet at night, and yet the zone surrounding the former death camp was hushed and solemn. It was as though the night were holding its breath.

A visitor arrived soon enough. He appeared in the window, his worm-white face illuminated by the candle flame flickering against the thin, imperfect glass. Setrakian had left the door unlocked, and the visitor walked inside, moving stiffly as though recovering from some great, debilitating disease.

Setrakian turned to face the man with trembling disbelief. SS-Sturmscharführer Hauptmann, his former taskmaster inside the camp. The man responsible for the carpentry shop, and all of the so-called “court Jews” who supplied skilled personal services to the SS and the Ukrainian staff. His familiar, all-black Schutzstaffel uniform—always pristine—was now in tatters, the hanging shreds revealing twin SS tattoos on his now-hairless forearms. His polished buttons were missing, as were his belt and black cap. The death-head insignia of the SS-Totenkopfverbände remained on his worn black collar. His black leather boots, always buffed to a high sheen, were now cracked and caked with grime. His hands, mouth, and neck were stained with the dried black blood of former victims, and a halo of flies clouded the air around his head.

He carried burlap sacks in his long hands. For what reason, wondered Setrakian, had this former ranking officer of the Schutzstaffel come to collect earth from the site of the former Treblinka camp? This loam fertilized with the gas and ash of genocide?

The vampire looked down upon him with rusty red eyes, its gaze remote.

Abraham Setrakian.

The voice came from somewhere, not the vampire’s mouth. Its bloodied lips never moved.

You escaped the pit.

The voice within Setrakian was deep and broad, reverberating in him as though his spine were a tuning fork. That same, many-tongued voice.

The great vampire. The very one he had encountered inside the camp—speaking through Hauptmann.

“Sardu,” said Setrakian, addressing him by the name of the human form he had taken, the noble giant of legend, Jusef Sardu.

I see you are dressed as a holy man. You once spoke of your God. Do you believe He delivered you from the burning pit?

Setrakian said, “No.”

Do you still wish to destroy me?

Setrakian did not speak. But the answer was yes.

It seemed to read his thought, its voice burbling with what could only be described as pleasure.

You are resilient, Abraham Setrakian. Like the leaf that refuses to fall.

“What is this now? Why are you still here?”

You mean Hauptmann. He was made to facilitate my involvement in the camp. In the end, I turned him. And he then fed upon the young officers he once favored. He had a taste for pure Aryan blood.

“Then—there are others.”

The chief administrator. And the camp doctor.

Eichhorst, thought Setrakian. And Dr. Dreverhaven. Yes indeed. Setrakian remembered them both well.

“And Strebel and his family?”

Strebel interested me not at all, except as a meal. Those bodies we destroy after feeding, before they begin to turn. You see, food here has become scarce. Your war is a nuisance. Why create more mouths to feed?

“Then—what do you want here?”

Hauptmann’s head tilted unnaturally, his full throat clucking once, like a frog’s.

Why don’t we call it nostalgia. I miss the efficiencies of the camp. I have become spoiled by the convenience of a human buffet. And now—I am tired of answering your questions.

“One more then.” Setrakian looked again at the sacks of soil in
Hauptmann’s hands. “One month before the uprising, Hauptmann directed me to construct a very large cabinet. He even supplied the wood, a very thick ebony grain, imported. I was given a drawing to copy, carving into the top doors.”

Indeed. You do good work, Jew.

A “special project,” Hauptmann had called it. At the time, Setrakian, having no choice in the matter, feared he was building furniture for an SS officer in Berlin. Perhaps even Hitler himself.

But no. It was much worse.

History told me the camp would not last. None of the great experiments do. I knew that the feast would end, and that I would be moving soon. One of the Allies’ bombs had struck an unintended target: my bed. So I needed a new one. Now I am sure to keep it with me at all times.

Setrakian’s anger, not fear, was the cause of his shaking.

He had built the great vampire’s coffin.

And now, Hauptmann must feed. I am not at all surprised that you returned here, Abraham Setrakian. It seems we are both sentimental about this place.

Hauptmann dropped his bags of dirt. Setrakian stood as the vampire started toward the table, backing up against the wall.

Do not worry, Abraham Setrakian. I will not give you to the animals after. I think you should join us. Your character is strong. Your bones will heal, and your hands will again serve us.

Up close, Setrakian felt Hauptmann’s uncanny heat. The vampire radiated its fever, and stunk of the earth it had been collecting. Its lipless mouth parted and Setrakian could see the tip of the stinger inside, ready to strike at him.

He looked into vampire Hauptmann’s red eyes, and hoped that the Sardu Thing was indeed looking back.

Hauptmann’s dirty hand closed around the bandage covering Setrakian’s neck. The vampire pulled the gauze away, and in doing so uncovered a bright silver throat piece covering the esophagus and major arteries. Hauptmann’s eyes widened as it stumbled backward, repelled by the protective silver plate Setrakian had hired his village smith to fashion.

Hauptmann felt the opposite wall at his back. He groaned,
weakened and confused. But Setrakian could see that he was only readying his next attack.

Resilient to the end.

As Hauptmann ran at Setrakian, Setrakian produced, from the folds of his robe, a silver crucifix whose long end had been sharpened to a point, and met him halfway.

The slaying of the Nazi vampire was, in the end, an act of pure release. For Setrakian, it represented an opportunity for revenge upon Treblinka soil, as well as a blow against the great vampire and his mysterious ways. But, more than any of that, it served as confirmation of Setrakian’s sanity.

Yes, he had seen what he had seen in the camp.

Yes, the myth was true.

And yes, the truth was terrible.

The slaying sealed Setrakian’s fate. He thenceforth dedicated his life to educating himself about the
strigoi
—and hunting them down.

He shed his priestly vestments that night, trading them for the garments of a simple farmer, and burned clean the whitish tip of his crucifixion dagger. On his way out, he overturned the candle onto his robe and some rags, and walked off with the light from the flames of the cursed farmhouse flashing against his back.

COLD WIND BLOWING

Knickerbocker Loans and Curios, East 118th Street, Spanish Harlem

S
ETRAKIAN UNLOCKED THE
pawnshop door and raised the security gate, and Fet, waiting outside like a customer, imagined the old man repeating this routine every day for the past thirty-five years. The shop-owner came out into the sunlight, and for just a moment everything might have been normal. An old man squinting into the sun on a street in New York City. The moment inspired nostalgia in Fet, rather than encouragement. It did not seem to him that there were many more “normal” moments left.

Setrakian, in a tweed vest without jacket, white shirtsleeves rolled just past his wrists, looked at the large van. The door and side wall read:
MANHATTAN DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC WORKS.

Fet told him, “I borrowed it.”

The old professor appeared pleased and intrigued. “I wonder, can you get another?”

“Why? Where are we going?”

“We cannot remain here any longer.”

E
ph sat down on the flat exercise mat inside the odd-angled storage room on the top floor of Setrakian’s home. Zack sat there with one leg bent, his knee as high as his cheek, arms hugging his thigh. Zack looked ragged, like a boy sent off to sleepaway camp
who came back changed, and not for the better. Silver-backed mirrors surrounded them, giving Eph the feeling of being watched by many old eyes. The window frame within the iron bars had been hastily boarded over, a bandage uglier than the wound it covered.

Eph studied his son’s face, trying to read it. He was worried about the boy’s sanity, as he was worried about his own. He rubbed his mouth in preparation for talking, and felt roughness around the edges of his lips and chin, realizing he hadn’t shaved in days.

“I checked the parenting handbook earlier,” he began. “Unfortunately there was no chapter about vampires.”

He tried to smile, but wasn’t sure it worked. He wasn’t sure his smile was persuasive anymore. He wasn’t sure anyone should be smiling now.

“Okay, so, this is going to sound twisted—and it
is
twisted. But let me get it out. You know your mom loved you, Z. More even than you know, as much as a mother can love a son. That’s why she and I went through all we did, what felt to you at times like a tug-of-war—because neither one of us could bear being apart from you. Because you’re it. I know that children sometimes blame themselves for their parents’ breakup. But you were the one thing holding us together. And driving us crazy fighting over you.”

“Dad, you don’t have to—”

“I know, I know. Cut to it, right? But no. This stuff you need to hear, and right now. Maybe I need to hear it too, okay? We need to set each other straight. Put it right out in front of us. A mother’s love is … it’s like a force. It’s beyond simple human affection. It’s soul-deep. A father’s love—my love for you, Z—it’s the strongest thing in my life, absolutely it is. But this thing has made me realize that there’s something about maternal love—it might just be the strongest human spiritual bond there is.”