The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (79 page)

A stallion—its coat, mane, and tail aflame—is charging at him. The horse is fully consumed, and Fet, always at the very last second, dives out of its path, turning and watching the animal tear off across the countryside, trailing dark smoke in its wake.

“How is it out there?”

Fet set down his satchel. “Quiet. Menacing.” He shrugged off his jacket, pulling a jar of peanut butter and some Ritz crackers from the pockets. He had stopped off at his apartment. He offered some to Setrakian. “Any word?”

“Nothing,” said Setrakian, inspecting the cracker box as though he might turn down the snack. “But Ephraim is long overdue.”

“The bridges. Clogged.”

“Mmm.” Setrakian pulled out the wax wrapper, sniffing at the contents before trying a cracker. “Did you get the maps?”

Fet patted his pocket. He had journeyed to a DPW depot in Gravesend in order to procure sewer maps for Manhattan, specifically the Upper East Side. “I got them, all right. Question is—will we get to use them?”

“We will. I am certain.”

Fet smiled. The old man’s faith never failed to warm him. “Can you tell me what you saw in that book?”

Setrakian set down the box of crackers and lit up a pipe. “I saw … everything. I saw hope, yes. But then … I saw the end of us. Of everything.”

He slid out a reproduction of the crescent moon drawing seen both in the subway, via Fet’s pink phone video, and in the pages of the
Lumen.
The old man had copied it three times.

“You see? This symbol—like the vampire itself, how it was once seen—is an archetype. Common to all mankind, East and West—but within it, a different permutation, see? Latent, but revealed in time, like any prophecy. Observe.”

He took the three pieces of paper and, utilizing a makeshift light table, laid them out, superimposing one atop another.

“Any legend, any creature, any symbol we ever stumble on, already exists in a vast cosmic reservoir where archetypes wait. Shapes looming outside our Platonic cave. We naturally believe ourselves clever and wise, so advanced, and those who came before us so naïve and simple … when all we truly do is echo the order of the universe, as it guides us …”

The three moons rotated in the paper, and joined together.

“These are not three moons. No. They are occultations. Three solar eclipses, each occurring at the exact latitude and longitude, marking an even, enormous span of years—signaling an event, now complete. Revealing the sacred geometry of omen.”

Fet saw with amazement that the three shapes together formed a rudimentary biohazard sign:
. “But this symbol … I know it from my work. It was just designed in the sixties, I think …”

“All symbols are eternal. They exist even before we dream of them …”

“So how did …”

“Oh, we know,” said Setrakian. “We always know. We don’t discover, we don’t learn. We just remember things that we have forgotten …” He pointed to the symbol. “A warning. Dormant in our mind, reawakened now—as the end of time approaches.”

Fet regarded the work table Setrakian had taken over. He was experimenting with photography equipment, explaining something about “testing a metallurgical silver emulsion technique” that Fet
did not understand. But the old man seemed to know what he was doing. “Silver,” said Setrakian. “
Argentum,
to the ancient alchemists and represented by this symbol …” Again, Setrakian presented Fet with the image of the crescent moon.

“And this, in turn …” said Setrakian, producing the engraving of the archangel. “Sariel. In certain Enochian manuscripts he is named Arazyal, Asaradel. Names all too similar to Azrael or Ozryel …”

Placing the engraving side to side with the biohazard sign and the alchemical symbol of the crescent moon gave the images a shocking through-line. A convergence, a direction; a goal.

Setrakian felt a surge of energy and excitement. His mind was hunting.

“Ozryel is the angel of death,” said Setrakian. “Muslims call him ‘he of the four faces, the many eyes, and the many mouths. He of the seventy thousand feet and four thousand wings.’ And he has as many eyes and as many tongues as there are men on earth. But you see, that only speaks of how he can multiply, how he can spread …”

Fet’s thoughts swam. The part that most concerned him was safely extracting the blood worm from Setrakian’s jar-sealed vampire heart. The old man had lined the table with battery-powered UV lamps in order to contain the worm. Everything appeared ready, and the jar was close at hand, the fist-size organ throbbing—and yet, now that the time had come, Setrakian was reluctant to butcher the sinister heart.

Setrakian leaned in close to the specimen jar, and a tentacled outgrowth shot out, the mouth-like sucker at its tip adhering to the glass. These blood worms were nasty suckers. Fet understood that the old man had been feeding it drops of his blood for decades now, nursing this ugly thing, and, in doing so, had formed some eerie attachment to it. That was natural enough. But Setrakian’s hesitation here contained an emotional component beyond pure melancholy.

This was more like true sorrow. More like despair.

Fet realized something then. Now and then, in the middle of the night, he had seen the old man speaking to the jar, feeding
the thing inside. Alone by candlelight he stared at it, whispered to it, and caressed the cold glass containing the unholy flesh. Once Fet swore he’d heard the old man singing to it. Softly, in a foreign tongue—not Armenian—a lullaby …

Setrakian had become aware of Fet looking at him. “Forgive me, professor,” said Fet. “But … whose heart is it? The original story you told us …”

Setrakian nodded, having been found out. “Yes … that I cut it out of the chest of a young widow in a village in northern Albania? You are right, that tale is not entirely true.”

Tears sparkled in the old man’s eyes. One drop fell in silence, and, when he finally spoke, he did so in a whisper—as the tale he told required it.

INTERLUDE III

SETRAKIAN’S HEART

A
LONG WITH THOUSANDS OF
H
OLOCAUST SURVIVORS,
Setrakian had arrived in Vienna in 1947, almost entirely penniless, and settled in the Soviet zone of the city. He was able to find some success buying, repairing, and reselling furniture acquired from unclaimed warehouses and estates in all four zones of the city.

One of his clients became also his mentor: Professor Ernst Zelman, one of the few surviving members of the mythical Weiner Kreis, or the Vienna Circle, a turn-of-the-century philosophical society recently dispersed by the Nazis. Zelman had returned to Vienna from exile after having lost most of his family to the Third Reich. He felt enormous empathy with the young Setrakian, and, in a Vienna full of pain and silence—at a time when speaking about “the past” and discussing Nazism was considered abhorrent—Zelman and Setrakian found great solace in each other’s company. Professor Zelman allowed Abraham to borrow freely from his abundant library, and Setrakian, being a bachelor and an insomniac, devoured the books rapidly and systematically. He first applied for studies in philosophy in 1949, and, a few years later, in a very fragmented, very permeable University of Vienna, Abraham Setrakian became associate professor of philosophy.

After he accepted financing from a group headed by Eldritch
Palmer, an American industrial magnate with investments in the American zone of Vienna as well as an intense interest in the occult, Setrakian’s influence and collection of cultural artifacts expanded at a great rate throughout the early 1960s, capped by his most significant prize, the wolf’s-head walking stick of the mysteriously disappeared Jusef Sardu.

But certain developments and revelations out in the field eventually convinced Setrakian that his and Palmer’s interests were not compatible. That Palmer’s ultimate agenda was, in fact, entirely contrary to Setrakian’s intentions to hunt down and expose the vampiric cabal—which led to an ugly rift.

Setrakian knew, beyond doubt, who it was who later spread rumors of his affair with a student, resulting in his removal from the university. The rumors, alas, were entirely true, and Setrakian, freed now by the airing of this secret, swiftly married the lovely Miriam.

Miriam Sacher had survived polio as a child, and walked with arm and leg braces. To Abraham, she was simply the most exquisite little bird who could not fly. Originally a Romance languages expert, she had enrolled in several of Setrakian’s seminars and slowly gained the professor’s attention. It was anathema to date a student, so Miriam convinced her wealthy father to hire Abraham as her private tutor. To reach the Sacher family estate, Setrakian had to walk a good hour after taking two trams out of Vienna. The mansion had no electricity, so Abraham and Miriam read by the light of an oil lamp in the family library. Miriam moved around using a wood-and-wicker wheelchair that Setrakian used to push near the bookshelves as new volumes were required. As he did so, he felt the soft, clean scent of Miriam’s hair. A scent that intoxicated him and that, as a memory, greatly distracted him in the few hours they spent apart. Soon, their mutual intentions were made manifest and discretion gave way to apprehension as they hid in dark, dusty corners to find each other’s breath and saliva.

Disgraced by the university after a prolonged process to remove him from tenure, and facing opposition from Miriam’s family, Setrakian the Jew eloped with the blue-blooded Sacher girl and they
married in secret in Mönchhof. Only Professor Zelman and a handful of Miriam’s friends were in attendance.

As the years went by, Miriam emerged as a partner in his expeditions, a comfort during the dark times, and a true believer in his cause. For over a decade, Setrakian was able to make a living by writing small pamphlets and working as a curator for antique houses all over Europe. Miriam made the most of their modest resources, and nights at the Setrakian house were usually uneventful. Every night, Abraham would rub Miriam’s legs with a mixture of alcohol, camphor, and herbs, patiently massaging out the painful knots that cramped muscle and sinew—hiding the fact that, while he did so, his hands hurt as much as her legs. Night after night, the professor told Miriam about ancient knowledge and myth, reciting stories full of hidden meaning and lore. He would end by humming old German lullabies to help her forget her pain and drift into sleep.

In the spring of 1967, Abraham Setrakian picked up Eichhorst’s trail in Bulgaria, and a hunger for vengeance against the Nazi rekindled the fire in his belly. Eichhorst, his commandant at Treblinka, was the man who issued Setrakian his craftsman star. He had also twice promised to execute his favorite woodworker, to do so personally. Such was a Jew’s lot in the extermination camp.

Setrakian tracked Eichhorst to the Balkans. Albania had been a communist regime since the war, and, for whatever reason,
strigoi
appeared to flourish in similar political and ideological climates. Setrakian had high hopes that his old camp warden—the dark god of that kingdom of industrialized death—might even lead him to the Master.

Because of her physical infirmity, Setrakian left Miriam at a village outside Shkodër, and led a pack horse fifteen kilometers to the ancient town of Drisht. Setrakian pulled the reluctant animal up the steep limestone incline, along old Ottoman paths rising to the hilltop castle.

Drisht Castle (
Kalaja e Drishtit
) dated to the twelfth century, erected as part of a mountaintop chain of Byzantine fortifications. The castle came under Montenegrin and then, briefly, Venetian rule, before the region fell to the Turks in 1478. Now, nearly five
hundred years later, the fortress ruins contained a small Muslim village, a small mosque, and the neglected castle, its walls falling prey to nature.

Setrakian discovered the village empty, with little sign of recent activity. The views from the mountaintop out to the Dinaric Alps to the north, and the Adriatic Sea and the Strait of Otranto to the west were sweeping and majestic.

The crumbling stone castle with its centuries of stillness was a spot-on location for vampire hunting. In retrospect, that should have tipped Setrakian off that things were perhaps not as they seemed.

In the belowground chambers, he discovered the coffin. A simple and modern funerary box, a tapered hexagon constructed of all wood, apparently cypress, containing no metal parts, utilizing wooden pegs instead of nails, and leather hinging.

It was not yet nightfall, but the light in the room was not strong enough that he could rely on it to do the job. So Setrakian prepared his silver sword, making ready to dispatch his former tormentor. Weapon set, he raised the lid with his crooked-fingered hand.

The box, indeed, was empty. Emptier than empty: it was bottomless. Fixed to the floor, it functioned as a trapdoor of sorts. Setrakian strapped on a headlamp from his bag and peered down.

The dirt bottomed some fifteen feet below, then tunneled out.

Setrakian loaded himself up with tools—including an extra flashlight, a pouch of batteries, and his long silver knives (his discovery of the killing properties of ultraviolet light in the C range was yet to come—as was the advent of commercially available UV lamps), leaving behind all of his food and most of his water. He tied a rope to the wall chains and lowered himself into the coffin tunnel.