The Strain

by Guillermo Del Toro; Chuck Hogan

  Ansel let out a guttural groan, voiceless, as though from deep in the pit of his empty stomach.

  She couldn’t do it. Ann-Marie wept as she closed the shed doors on him. She pressed her shoulder to them, shutting him up like a corpse neither quite alive nor yet quite dead. He was too weak to charge the doors now. She heard only another moan of protest.

  She was running the first length of chain back through the door handles when she heard a step on the gravel behind her. Ann-Marie froze, picturing that police officer returning. She heard another step, then spun around.

  He was an older man, balding, wearing a stiff-collared shirt, open cardigan, and loose corduroys. Their neighbor from across the street, the one who had called the police: the widower, Mr. Otish. The kind of neighbor who rakes his leaves into the street so that they blow into your yard. A man they never saw or heard from unless there was a problem that he suspected them or their children of having caused.

  Mr. Otish said, “Your dogs have found increasingly creative ways to keep me awake at night.”

  His presence, like a ghostly intrusion upon a nightmare, mystified Ann-Marie. The dogs?

  He was talking about Ansel, the noises he made in the night.

  “If you have a sick animal, you need to take it to a veterinarian and have it treated or put down.”

  She was too stunned even to reply. He walked closer, coming off the driveway and onto the edge of the backyard grass, eyeing the shed with contempt.

  A hoarse moan rose from inside.

  Mr. Otish’s face shriveled in disgust. “You are going to do something about those curs or else I am going to call the police again, right now.”

  “No!” Fear escaped before she could hold it in.

  He smiled, surprised by her trepidation, enjoying the sense of control over her that it gave him. “Then what is it you plan to do?”

  Her mouth opened, but she couldn’t think of anything to say. “I…I’ll take care of it…I don’t know how.”

  He looked at the back porch, curious about the light on in the kitchen. “Is the man of the house available? I would prefer to speak with him.”

  She shook her head.

  Another pained groan from the shed.

  “Well, you had damn well better do something about those sloppy creatures—or else I will. Anybody who grew up on a farm will tell you, Mrs. Barbour, dogs are service animals and don’t need coddling. Far better for them to know the sting of the switch than the pat of a hand. Especially a clumsy breed such as the Saint Bernard.”

  Something he’d said got through to her. Something about her dogs…

  Sting of the switch.

  The whole reason they’d built the chain-and-post contraption in the shed in the first place was because Pap and Gertie had run off a few times…and once, not too long ago…Gertie, the sweetheart of the two, the trusting one, came home with her back and legs all ripped up…

  …as though someone had taken a stick to her.

  The normally shy and retiring Ann-Marie Barbour forgot all of her fear at that moment. She looked at this man—this nasty little shriveled-up excuse for a man—as though a veil had been lifted from her eyes.

  “You,” she said. Her chin trembled, not from timidity anymore but from rage. “You did that. To Gertie. You hurt her…”

  His eyes flickered for a moment, unused to being confronted—and simultaneously betraying his guilt.

  “If I did,” he said, regaining his usual condescension, “I am sure he had it coming.”

  Ann-Marie burst with hatred suddenly. Everything she had been bottling up over these past few days. Sending away her children…burying her dead dogs…worrying about her afflicted husband…

  “She,” Ann-Marie said.

  “What?”

  “She. Gertie. Is a she.”

  Another tremulous groan from within the shed.

  Ansel’s need. His craving…

  She backed up, shaking. Intimidated, not by him, but by these new feelings of rage. “You want to see for yourself?” she heard herself say.

  “What is that?”

  The shed crouched behind her like some beast itself. “Go ahead, then. You want a chance to tame them? See what you can do.”

  He stared, indignant. Challenged by a woman. “You aren’t serious?”

  “You want to fix things? You want peace and quiet? Well, so do I!” She wiped a bit of saliva off her chin and shook her wet finger at him. “So do I!”

  Mr. Otish looked at her for one long moment. “The others are right,” he said. “You are crazy.”

  She flashed him a wild, nodding grin, and he walked to a low branch of the trees bordering their yard. He pulled at a thin switch, twisting it, tugging hard until it finally tore free. He tested it, listening for the rapierlike swish as he sliced it through the air, and, satisfied, stepped to the doors.

  “I want you to know,” said Mr. Otish, “I do this for your benefit more than mine.”

  Ann-Marie trembled as she watched him run the chain through the shed door handles. The doors started to swing open, Mr. Otish standing near enough to the opening for the pole chain to reach him.

  “Now,” he said, “where are these beasts?”

  Ann-Marie heard the inhuman growl, and the chain leash moving fast, sounding like spilled coins. Then the doors flew open, Mr. Otish stepped up, and in an instant his stupefied cry was cut short. She ran and threw herself against the shed doors, fighting to close them as the struggling Mr. Otish batted against them. She forced the chain through and around the handles, clasping the lock tight…then fled into her house, away from the shuddering backyard shed and the merciless thing she had just done.

  M ark Blessige stood in the foyer of his home with his BlackBerry in hand, not knowing which way to turn. No message from his wife. Her phone was in her Burberry bag, the Volvo station wagon in the driveway, the baby bucket in the mudroom. No note on the kitchen island, only a half-empty glass of wine abandoned on the counter. Patricia, Marcus, and baby Jackie were all gone.

  He checked the garage, and the cars and strollers were all there. He checked the calendar in the hallway—nothing was listed. Was she pissed at him for being late again and had decided to do a little passive-aggressive punishment? Mark tried to flip on the television and wait it out, but then realized his anxiety was real. Twice he picked up the telephone to call the police, but didn’t think he could live down the public scandal of a cruiser coming to his house. He went out his front door and stood on the brick step overlooking his lawn and lush flower beds. He looked up and down the street, wondering if they could have slipped over to a neighbor’s—and then noticed that almost every house was dark. No warm yellow glow from heirloom lamps shining on top of polished credenzas. No computer monitor lights or plasma TV screens flashing through hand-sewn lace.

  He looked at the Lusses’ house, directly across the street. Its proud patrician face and aged white brick. Nobody home there either, it seemed. Was there some looming natural disaster he didn’t know about? Had an evacuation order been issued?

  Then he saw someone emerge from the high bushes forming an ornamental fence between the Lusses’ property and the Perrys’. It was a woman, and in the dappling shadow of the oak leaves overhead she appeared disheveled. She was cradling what looked to be a sleeping child of five or six in her arms. The woman walked straight across the driveway, obscured for a moment by the Lusses’ Lexus SUV, then entered the side door next to the garage. Before entering, her head turned and she saw Mark standing out on his front step. She didn’t wave or otherwise acknowledge him, but her glance—brief though it was—put a block of ice against his chest.

  She wasn’t Joan Luss, he realized. But she might have been the Lusses’ housekeeper.

  He waited for a light to come on inside. None did. Superstrange, but whatever the case, he hadn’t seen anyone else out and about this fine evening. So he started out across the road—first down his walk to the driveway, avoiding stepping on the lawn grass�
��and then, hands slipped casually into his suit pants pockets, up the Lusses’ drive to the same side door.

  The storm door was shut but the interior door was open. Rather than ring the bell, he gave the glass a jaunty knock and entered, calling, “Hello?” He crossed the tiled mudroom to the kitchen, flipping on the light. “Joan? Roger?”

  The floor was streaked all over with dirty footprints, apparently from bare feet. Some of the cabinets and the counter edges were marked with soil-smudged handprints. Pears were rotting in a wire bowl on their kitchen island.

  “Anybody home?”

  He wagered that Joan and Roger were gone, but he wanted to speak to the housekeeper anyway. She wouldn’t go around blabbing how the Blessiges didn’t know where their children were, or that Mark Blessige couldn’t keep track of his boozy wife. And if he was wrong and Joanie was here, well then he’d ask her about his family as though he had a tennis racket on his shoulder. The kids are sooo busy, how do you keep track? And if he ever heard anything from anyone else about his wayward brood, he’d have to bring up the horde of barefoot peasants the Lusses’ evidently had stampeding through their kitchen.

  “It’s Mark Blessige from across the street. Anybody home?”

  He hadn’t been in their house since the boy’s birthday party in May. The parents had bought him one of those electric kiddie race cars, but because it didn’t come with a pretend trailer hitch—the kid was obsessed with trailer hitches, apparently—he drove the car straight into the cake table just after the hired help in the SpongeBob SquarePants costume had filled all the cups with juice. “Well,” Roger had said, “at least he knows what he likes.” Cue forced laughter and a fresh round of juice.

  Mark ducked through a swinging door into a sitting room where, through the front windows, he got a good look at his own house. He savored the view for a moment, as he didn’t often get a neighbor’s perspective. Damn fine house. Although that stupid Mexican had clipped the west hedges unevenly again.

  Footsteps came up the basement stairs. More than one set—more even than a few sets. “Hello?” he said, wondering about those barefoot hordes, and supposing he had gotten too comfortable in the neighbors’ house. “Hi, there. Mark Blessige, from across the way.” No voices answered. “Sorry to barge in like this, but I was wondering—”

  He pushed back the swinging door and stopped. Some ten people stood facing him. Two of them were children who stepped out from behind the kitchen island—neither of them were his. Mark recognized a few of the people by face, fellow Bronxville residents, people he saw at Starbucks or the train station or the club. One of them, Carole, was the mother of a friend of Marcus’s. Another was just a UPS delivery man, wearing the trademark brown shirt and shorts. Quite a random assortment for a get-together. Among them was nary a Luss nor a Blessige.

  “I’m sorry. Am I interrupting…?”

  Now he really started to see them, their complexions and their eyes as they stared at him without speaking. He had never been stared at like that by people before. He felt a heat from them that was separate from their gaze.

  Behind them stood the housekeeper. She looked flushed, her complexion red and her staring eyes scarlet, and there was a red stain on the front of her blouse. Her hair was stringy and unwashed and her clothes and skin couldn’t have been dirtier if she had been sleeping in real dirt.

  Mark flipped a forelock of hair out of his eyes. He felt his shoulders come up against the swinging door and realized he was backing up. The rest of them moved toward him, with the exception of the housekeeper, who merely stood and watched. One of the children, a twitchy boy with jagged black eyebrows, stepped up on an open drawer to climb onto the kitchen island, so that he stood a head taller than anyone else. He took a running start off the granite countertop and launched himself into the air toward Mark Blessige, who had no choice but to put out his arms and catch him. The boy’s mouth opened as he leaped, and by the time he grabbed Mark’s shoulders his little stinger was out. Like a scorpion’s tail, it flexed up before shooting straight out, piercing Mark’s throat. It split skin and muscle to anchor in his carotid artery, and the pain was like that of a hot skewer rammed halfway into his neck.

  He fell backward through the door, crashing to the floor with the boy holding fast, tethered to his throat, sitting astride his chest. Then the pulling began. The drawing out. The sucking. The draining.

  Mark tried to speak, tried to scream, but the words clotted in his throat and he choked on them. He was paralyzed. Something in his pulse changed—was interrupted—and he couldn’t utter a sound.

  The boy’s chest pressed against his, and he could feel the faint thumping of its heart—or something—against his own. As the blood rushed out of Mark’s body, he felt the boy’s rhythm accelerate and become stronger—thump-thump-thump—reaching a frenzied, intimate gallop that was close to pleasure.

  The boy’s stinger engorged as he fed, and the whites of his eyes, as he stared at Mark, flushed crimson. Methodically, the boy kept twining his crooked, bony fingers through Mark’s hair. Tightening his grip on his prey…

  The others burst through the door, setting upon the victim, tearing at his clothes. As their stingers pierced his flesh, Mark felt a renewed pressure change inside his body, not decompression but compression. Vacuum collapse, like a juice pack being consumed.

  And at the same time, a scent overpowered him, rising into his nose and eyes like a cloud of ammonia. He felt an eruption of wetness over his chest, warm, like freshly made soup, and his hands gripping the little fiend’s body felt a sudden, hot dampness. The boy had soiled himself, defecating over Mark as he fed—though the excretion seemed more chemical than human.

  Pain like a motherfucker. Corporeal, all over, his fingertips, his chest, his brain. The pressure went away from his throat, and Mark hung there like a bright white star of effulgent pain.

  N eeva pushed open the bedroom door just a sliver, to see that the children were finally asleep. Keene and Audrey Luss lay in sleeping bags on the floor next to her own granddaughter Narushta’s bed. The Luss children were all right most of the time—Neeva, after all, had been their sole daytime caretaker since Keene was four months old—but they had both cried tonight. They missed their beds. They wanted to know when they could go home, when Neeva would take them back. Sebastiane, Neeva’s daughter, was constantly asking how long until the police came and knocked down their door. But it was not the police coming for them that concerned Neeva.

  Sebastiane had been born in the United States, educated in United States schools, stamped with an American arrogance. Neeva took her daughter back to Haiti once each year, but it was not home to her. She rejected the old country and its old ways. She rejected old knowledge because new knowledge was so shiny and neat. But Sebastiane making her mother out to be a superstitious fool was almost more than Neeva could take. Especially since, by acting as she had, saving these two spoiled yet potentially redeemable children, she had placed the members of her own family at risk.

  Though she had been raised a Roman Catholic, Neeva’s maternal grandfather was Vodou and a village bokor, which is a kind of houngan, or priest—some call them sorcerers—who practices magic, both the benevolent kind and the dark kind. Though he was said to bear a great ashe (wield much spiritual power), and dabbled often with healing zombi astrals—that is, capturing a spirit in a fetish (an inanimate object)—he never attempted the darkest art, that of reanimating a corpse, raising a zombie from a dead body whose soul has departed. He never did so because he said he had too much respect for the dark side, and that crossing that infernal border was a direct affront to the loa, or the spirits of the Vodou religion, akin to saints or angels who act as intermediaries between man and the indifferent Creator. But he had participated in services that were a kind of back-country exorcism, righting the wrongs of other wayward houngan, and she had accompanied him, and had seen the face of the undead.

  When Joan had shut herself away in her room that first night—her richly
appointed bedroom as nice as any of the hotel suites Neeva used to clean in Manhattan when she first arrived in America—and the moaning finally stopped, Neeva had peeked in to check on her. Joan’s eyes looked dead and faraway, her heart was racing, the sheets were soaked and putrid with sweat. Her pillow was stained with whitish, coughed-up blood. Neeva had nursed the ill and the dying alike, and she knew, looking at Joan Luss, that her employer was sinking not merely into sickness but into evil. That was when she took the children and left.

  Neeva went around checking the windows again. They lived on the first floor of a three-family house and could view the street and the neighbors’ houses only through iron bars. Security bars were a good deterrent for burglars, but beyond that, Neeva wasn’t sure. That afternoon, she had gone around the outside of the house, pulling on them, and they felt strong. As an extra precaution, she had (without Sebastiane’s knowledge, saving Neeva a lecture on fire safety) nailed the frames to the sills, and then blocked the children’s window view with a bookshelf as a makeshift barricade. She had also (smartly telling no one) smeared garlic on each of the iron bars. She kept a quart bottle of holy water from her church, consecrated by the parish priest—though she remained mindful of how ineffectual her crucifix had been inside the Lusses’ basement.

  Nervous but confident, she drew all the shades and put on every light, then took to her chair and put up her feet. She left her thick-heeled black shoes on (they were orthopedic—bad arches) in case she had to rush somewhere, had to be ready to stand watch for another night. She put the TV on low, just for company. It drew more electricity out of the wall than attention from Neeva.

  She was more bothered by her daughter’s condescension than perhaps she should have been. It is the concern of every immigrant that their offspring will grow to embrace their adoptive culture at the expense of their natural heritage. But Neeva’s fear was much more specific: she was afraid that her Americanized daughter’s overconfidence would end up hurting her. To Sebastiane, the dark of night was merely an inconvenience, a deficient amount of light, which immediately went away when you flipped a switch. Night was leisure time to her, playtime, time to relax. When she let her hair down, and her guard. To Neeva, electricity existed as little more than a talisman against the dark. Night is real. Night is not an absence of light, but in fact, it is daytime that is a brief respite from the looming darkness…