The Strain

THE SECOND NIGHT

Patricia ran a hand vigorously back through her hair, as though shaking out the lost hours of another day gone by. She found herself actually looking forward to Mark coming home, and not just for the satisfaction of throwing the kids at him and saying, “Here.” She wanted to fill him in on the only real news of the day, the Lusses’ nanny—who Patricia spied through the sheers of the front-facing dining room windows—racing out of the Lusses’ house not five minutes after arriving, children nowhere in sight, the old black woman running as if she was being chased.

Oooh, the Lusses. How neighbors can get under your skin. Whenever she thought of skin-and-bones Joanie tossing off a description of her “European-style pure-soil wine cellar,” Patricia shot an automatic middle finger in the general direction of the Luss house. She was dying to find out what Mark knew about Roger Luss, if he was still overseas. She wanted to compare notes. The only time she and her husband seemed to get on the same page was when they were tearing down friends, family, and neighbors. Maybe because savoring others’ marital problems and family misfortunes somehow made hers and Mark’s seem less troublesome.

Scandal always went better with a glass of pinot, and she finished off her second with a flourish. She checked the kitchen clock, with sincere thoughts of pacing herself, given Mark’s predictable impatience whenever he arrived home to find her two drinks ahead of him. Screw him, snug in his office in the city all day, doing his lunches, walking about at his leisure, hobnobbing on the late train home. Meanwhile, she was stuck here with the baby and Marcus and the nanny and the gardener…

She poured herself another glass, wondering how long it would be until Marcus, that jealous little demon, went in to wake up his napping sister. The nanny had put Jacqueline down before she left, and the little baby hadn’t woken up yet. Patricia checked the clock again, remarking at this extended period of quiet in the house. Wow—sleeping like a champ. Fortified with another swallow of pinot, and mindful of her impish little four-year-old terrorist, she pushed back the ad-crammed Cookie magazine and started up the back steps.

She looked in on Marcus first, finding him lying facedown on the New York Rangers rug next to his sleigh bed, his portable game-unit thingy still turned on near his outstretched hand. Worn out. Of course, they would pay dearly for this late nap when the whirling dervish wouldn’t settle down at bedtime—but by then it would be Mark’s turn to deal.

She went down the hall—puzzled by and frowning at a few clumps of dark soil on the runner (that little demon)—to the closed door with the SH-SH-SH!—ANGEL SLEEPING heart-shaped silk pillow hanging from the doorknob on a frilly lace ribbon. She eased it open on the dim, warm nursery, and was startled to see an adult sitting in the rocking chair next to the crib, swaying back and forth. A woman, holding a little bundle in her arms.

The stranger was cradling baby Jacqueline. But in the quiet warmth of the room, under the softness of the recessed lighting, and feeling the high pile of the rug underfoot, everything still seemed okay.

“Who…?” As Patricia ventured in farther, something in the rocking woman’s posture clicked. “Joan? Joan—is that you?” Patricia stepped closer. “What are you…? Did you come in through the garage?”

Joan—it was her—stopped her slow rocking and stood up from the chair. With the pink-shaded lamp behind her, Patricia barely made out the odd expression on Joan’s face—in particular, the strange twist of her mouth. She smelled dirty, and Patricia’s mind went immediately to her own sister, and that horrible, horrible Thanksgiving last year. Was Joan having a similar breakdown?

And why was she here now, holding baby Jacqueline?

Joan extended her arms to hand the infant back to Patricia. Patricia cradled her baby, and in a moment knew that something wasn’t right. Her daughter’s stillness went beyond the limpness of infant sleep.

With two anxious fingers, Patricia pinched back the blanket covering Jackie’s face.

The baby’s rosebud lips were parted. Her little eyes were dark and fixed and staring. The blanket was wet around her little neck. Patricia’s two fingers came away sticky with blood.

The scream that rose in Patricia’s throat never reached its destination.

Ann-Marie Barbour was literally at her wits’ end. Standing in her kitchen, whispering prayers and gripping the edge of the sink as though the house she had lived in all her married life were a small boat caught in a swirling black sea. Praying endlessly for guidance, for relief. For a glimmer of hope. She knew that her Ansel was not evil. He was not what he seemed. He was just very, very sick. (But he killed the dogs.) Whatever illness he had would pass like a bad fever and everything would return to normal.

She looked out at the locked shed in the dark backyard. It was quiet now.

The doubts returned, as they had when she saw the news report about the dead people from Flight 753 who had disappeared from the morgues. Something was happening, something awful (He Killed the Dogs)—and her overwhelming sensation of dread was alleviated only by repeated trips to the mirrors and her sink. Washing and touching, worrying and praying.

Why did Ansel bury himself under the dirt during the day? (He killed the dogs.) Why did he look at her with such craving? (He killed them.) Why wouldn’t he say anything, but only grunt and yowl (like the dogs he killed)?

Night had again taken the sky—the thing she had dreaded all day.

Why was he so quiet out there now?

Before she could think about what she was doing, before she could lose her reserve, she went out the door and down the porch stairs. Not looking at the dogs’ graves in the corner of the yard—not giving in to that madness. She had to be the strong one now. For just a little while longer…

The shed doors. The lock and the chain. She stood there, listening, her fist pressed hard against her mouth until her front teeth started to hurt.

What would Ansel do? Would he open the door if it were she inside? Would he force himself to face her?

Yes. He would.

Ann-Marie undid the lock with the key from around her neck. She threaded out the thick chain, and this time stepped back to where she knew he could not reach her—past the length of the runner leash fixed to the dog pole—as the doors fell open.

An awful stink. A godless fetor. The stench alone brought tears to her eyes. That was her Ansel in there.

She saw nothing. She listened. She would not be drawn inside.

“Ansel?”

Barely a whisper on her part. Nothing came in return.

“Ansel.”

A rustling. Movement in the dirt. Oh, why hadn’t she brought a flashlight?

She reached forward just enough to nudge one door open more widely. Enough to let in a little more of the moonlight.

There he was. Lying half in a bed of soil, his face raised to the doors, eyes sunken and fraught with pain. She saw at once that he was dying. Her Ansel was dying. She thought again of the dogs who used to sleep here, Pap and Gertie, the dear Saint Bernards she had loved more than mere pets, whom he had killed and whose place he had willingly taken… yes… in order to save Ann-Marie and the children.

And then she knew. He needed to hurt someone else in order to revive himself. In order to live.

She shivered in the moonlight, facing the suffering creature her husband had become.

He wanted her to give herself over to him. She knew that. She could feel it.

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.

Mark 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.

Neeva 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…

The faint sound of scratching awoke her with a start. Her chin bobbed off her chest and she saw that the television was showing an infomercial for a sponge mop that was also a vacuum. She froze and listened. It was a clicking coming from the front door. At first she thought Emile was coming home—her nephew drove a taxi nights—but if he had forgotten his key again, he would have rung the bell.

Somebody was outside the front door. But they didn’t knock or press the bell.

Neeva got to her feet as quickly as she could. She crept down the hallway and stood before the door, listening, only a slab of wood separating her from whoever—whatever—was on the outside.

She felt a presence. She imagined that, if she touched the door—which she did not—she would feel heat.

It was a plain exterior door with a security dead-bolt lock, no screen outside, no windows in the wood. Only an old-fashioned mail slot was centered near the bottom, one foot above the floor.

The hinge on the mail slot creaked. The brass flap moved—and Neeva rushed back down the hall. She stood there for a moment—out of sight, in a panic—then rushed to the bathroom and the basket of bath toys. She grabbed her granddaughter’s water gun and uncapped the bottle of holy water and poured it into the tiny aperture, spilling much of it as she filled the plastic barrel.

She took the toy to the door. It was quiet now, but she felt the presence. She knelt down clumsily on her swollen knee, snagging her stocking on the roughened wood of the floor. She was near enough to feel the whisper of cool night air through the brass flap—and see a shadow along its edge.

The toy gun had a long front nozzle. Neeva remembered to slide back the underside pump action to prime the pressure, then used the very end of the muzzle to tip up the flap. When the hinge emitted a plaintive squeak, she put the gun in, thrusting the nozzle through and squeezing the trigger.

Neeva aimed blindly, up, down, and from side to side, squirting holy water in all directions. She imagined Joan Luss being burned, the acidlike water cutting through her body like Jesus’ own golden sword—yet she heard no wailing.

Then a hand came through the slot. It grabbed at the gun muzzle, trying to take it away. Neeva pulled it back, reflexively, and got a good look at the fingers. They were gravedigger dirty. The nail beds were bloodred. The holy water spilled down the skin, merely smearing the dirt, with no steaming or burning.

No effect at all.

The hand pulled hard on the muzzle, jamming it inside the mail slot. Now Neeva realized the hand was trying to get at her. So she let go of the gun, the hand pulling and twisting until the plastic toy cracked, loosening a final splash of water. Neeva pushed away from the slot, on her hands and her bottom, as the visitor began ramming the door. Throwing her entire body against it, rattling the knob. The hinges trembled and the adjoining walls shook, the picture of the man and the boy hunting fell off its nail, shattering the protective glass. Neeva kicked her way to the end of the short entrance hall. Her shoulder knocked over the umbrella stand with the baseball bat in it, and Neeva grabbed the bat and gripped the black-taped handle, sitting there on the floor.

The wood held. The old door she hated for swelling and sticking to the frame in the summer heat was solid enough to withstand the blows, as was the dead bolt and even the smooth iron doorknob. The presence behind the door eventually went silent. Maybe even went away altogether.

Neeva looked at the puddle of Christ’s tears on the floor. When the power of Jesus fails you, then you know you truly are shit out of luck.

Wait for daylight. That was all she could do.

“Neeva?”

Keene, the Luss boy, stood behind her in sweatpants and a T-shirt. Neeva moved faster than she imagined she ever could, clamping a hand over the young boy’s mouth and sweeping him away around the corner. Neeva stood there with her back against the wall, the boy wrapped in her arms.

Had the thing at the door heard its son’s voice?

Neeva tried to listen. The boy squirmed against her, trying to speak.

“Hush, child.”

Then she heard it. The squeak again. She grasped the boy even more tightly as she leaned to her left, risking a look around the corner.

The mail slot was propped open by a dirty finger. Neeva whipped back around the corner again, but not before she glimpsed a pair of glowing red eyes looking inside.

Gabriel Bolivar’s manager, Rudy Wain, cabbed over to his town house from Hudson Street after a late dinner meeting at Mr. Chow’s with the BMG people. He hadn’t been able to get Gabe on the phone, but there were whispers about his health now, following the Flight 753 thing and a paparazzi picture of him in a wheelchair and Rudy had to see for himself. When he showed up at the door on Vestry Street, there were no paparazzi in sight, only a few dopey-looking Goth fans sitting around on the sidewalk smoking.

They stood up rather expectantly when Rudy walked up the front-stoop stairs. “What’s up?” asked Rudy.

“We heard he’s been letting people in.”

Rudy looked straight up, but there were no lights on anywhere in the twin town houses, not even in the penthouse. “Looks like the party’s over.”

“It’s no party,” said one chubby kid with colored elastic bands hanging from a pin through his cheek. “He let the paparazzi in too.”

Rudy shrugged and punched in his key code, entered, and closed the door behind him. At least Gabe was feeling better. Rudy entered, past the black marble panthers and into the dark foyer. The construction lights were all dark, and the light switches still weren’t connected to anything. Rudy thought for a moment, then brought out his BlackBerry, changing the display to ALWAYS ON. He shone the blue light around, noticing, at the foot of the winged angel by the stairs, a heap of high-end digital SLRs and video cameras, weapons of the paparazzi. All piled there like shoes outside a swimming pool.

“Hello?”

His voice echoed dully through the unfinished first few floors. Rudy started up the curling marble stairs, following his BlackBerry’s pool of electronic blue light. He needed to motivate Gabe for his Roseland show next week, and there were scattered U.S. dates around Halloween to prepare for.

He reached the top floor, Bolivar’s bedroom suite, and all the lights were off.

“Hey, Gabe? It’s me, man. Don’t let me walk in on anything.”

Too quiet. He pushed into the master bedroom, scanning it with his phone light, finding the bedsheets tossed but no hungover Gabe. Probably out night crawling as usual. He wasn’t here.

Rudy popped into the master bathroom to take a leak. He saw an open prescription bottle of Vicodin on the counter, and a crystal cocktail glass that smelled of booze. Rudy deliberated a moment, then dealt himself two Vikes, rinsing out the glass in the sink and washing the pills down with tap water.

As he was replacing the glass on the counter, he caught sight of movement somewhere behind him. He turned fast, and there was Gabe, coming out of the darkness and into the bathroom. The mirrored walls on both sides made it seem as though there were hundreds of him.

“Gabe, Jesus, you scared me,” said Rudy. His genial smile faded as Gabe stood there staring at him. The blue phone light was indirect and faint, but Gabe’s skin looked dark, his eyes tinged red. He wore a thin black robe, to his knees, with no shirt underneath. His arms hung straight, and he offered his manager no indication of greeting. “What’s wrong, man?” His hands and chest were dirty. “You spend the night in a coal bin?”

Gabe just stood there, multiplied in the mirrors out to infinity.

“You really stink, man,” said Rudy, holding his hand to his nose. “What the hell you been into?” Rudy felt a strange heat coming off Gabe. He held his phone closer to Gabe’s face. His eyes didn’t do anything in the light. “Dude, you left your makeup on way too long.”

The Vikes were starting to kick in. The room, with its facing mirrors, expanded like an unpacked accordion. Rudy moved the phone light, and the entire bathroom flickered.

“Look, man,” said Rudy, unnerved by Gabe’s lack of reaction, “if you’re tripping, I can come back.”

He tried to glide out on Gabe’s left, but Gabe didn’t stand aside. He tried again, but Gabe would not give way. Rudy stood back, holding his phone light out on his longtime client. “Gabe, man, what the—?”

Bolivar opened his robe then, spreading his arms wide, like wings, before allowing the garment to fall to the floor.

Rudy gasped. Gabe’s body was gray and gaunt throughout, but the sight that made him dizzy was Gabe’s groin.

It was hairless and doll-smooth, lacking any genitalia.

Gabe’s hand covered Rudy’s mouth, hard. Rudy started to struggle, but much too late. Rudy saw Gabe grinning—and then that grin fell away, something like a whip writhing inside his mouth. By the trembling blue light of his phone—as he frantically and blindly felt for the numerals 9, 1, and 1—he saw the stinger emerge. Vaguely defined appendages inflated and deflated along its sides, like twin spongy sacs of flesh, flanked by gill-like vents that flared open and closed.

Rudy saw all of this in the instant before it shot into his neck. His phone fell to the bathroom floor beneath his kicking feet, the SEND button never pressed.

Nine-year-old Jeanie Millsome wasn’t tired at all on her way home with her mother. Seeing The Little Mermaid on Broadway was so awesome, she believed she was the most awake she had ever been in her life. Now she truly knew what she wanted to be when she grew up. No more ballet school instructor (after Cindy Veeley broke two toes on a leap). No more Olympic gymnast (pommel horse too scary). She was going to be (drumroll, please…) a Broadway Actress! And she was going to dye her hair coral red and star in The Little Mermaid in the lead role of Ariel, and at the end take the biggest and most graceful curtain curtsy of all time, and after the thunderous applause she was going to greet her young theatergoing fans after the show and sign all their programs and smile for camera-phone pictures with them—and then, one very special night, she was going to select the most polite and sincere nine-year-old girl in the audience and invite her to be her understudy and Best Friend Forever. Her mother was going to be her hairstylist, and her dad, who stayed home with Justin, would be her manager, just like Hannah Montana’s dad. And Justin… well, Justin could just stay home and be himself.

And so she sat, chin in hand, turned around in the seat on the subway running south underneath the city. She saw herself reflected in the window, saw the brightness of the car behind her, but the lights flickered sometimes, and in one of those dark blinks she found herself looking out into an open space where one tunnel fed into another. Then she saw something. No more than a subliminal flash of an image, like a single disturbing frame spliced into an otherwise monotonous strip of film. So fast that her nine-year-old conscious mind didn’t have time to process it, this image she did not understand. She couldn’t even say why she burst into tears, which woke up her nodding mother, so pretty in her theater coat and dress next to her, who comforted her and tried to draw out what had prompted the sobbing. Jeanie could only point to the window. She rode the rest of the way home cuddled beneath her mother’s arm.

But the Master had seen her. The Master saw everything. Even—especially—while feeding. His night vision was extraordinary and nearly telescopic, in varying shades of gray, and registered heat sources in a glowing spectral white.

Finished, though not satiated—never satiated—he let his prey slide limply down his body, his great hands releasing the turned human to the gravel floor. The tunnels around him whispered with winds that fluttered his dark cloak, trains screaming in the distance, iron clashing against steel, like the scream of a world suddenly aware of his coming.