The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal (28 page)

“I see you collect mirrors,” Eph said.

“Certain kinds. I find older glass to be most revealing.”

“Are you now ready to tell us what is going on?”

The old man dipped his head gently to one side. “Doctor, this isn’t something one simply tells. It is something that must be revealed.” He moved past Eph to the door through which they had entered. “Please—come with.”

Eph followed him back down the stairs, Nora behind him. They passed the first-floor pawnshop, continuing through another locked door to another curling flight leading down. The old man descended, one angled step at a time, his gnarled hand sliding down the cool iron rail, his voice filling the narrow passageway. “I consider myself a repository of ancient knowledge, of persons dead and books long forgotten. Knowledge accumulated over a life of study.”

Nora said, “When you stopped us outside the morgue, you said a number of things. You indicated that you knew the dead from the airplane were not decomposing normally.”

“Correct.”

“Based upon?”

“My experience.”

Nora was confused. “Experience with other aircraft-related incidents?”

“The fact that they were on an airplane is completely incidental.
I have seen this phenomenon before, indeed. In Budapest, in Basra. In Prague and not ten kilometers outside Paris. I have seen it in a tiny fishing village on the banks of the Yellow River. I have seen it at a seven-thousand-feet elevation in the Altai Mountains of Mongolia. And yes, I have seen it on this continent as well. Seen its traces. Usually dismissed as a fluke, or explained away as rabies or schizophrenia, insanity, or, most recently, an occasion of serial murder—”

“Hold on, hold on. You yourself have seen corpses slow to decompose?”

“It is the first stage, yes.”

Eph said, “The first stage.”

The landing curled to an end at a locked door. Setrakian produced a key, separate from the rest, hanging from a chain around his neck. The old man’s crooked fingers worked the key into two padlocks, one large, one small. The door opened inward, hot lights coming on automatically, and they followed him inside the humming basement room, bright and deep.

The first thing to catch Eph’s eye was a wall of battle armor, ranging from full knight’s wear to chain mail to Japanese samurai torso and neck plates, and cruder gear made of woven leather for protecting the neck, chest, and groin. Weapons also: mounted swords and knives, their blades fashioned of bright, cold steel. More modern-looking devices were arranged on an old, low table, their battery packs in chargers. He recognized night-vision goggles and modified nail guns. And more mirrors, mostly pocket-size, arranged so that he could see himself staring in bewilderment at this gallery of … of what?

“The shop”—the old man gestured to the floor above them—“gave me a fair living, but I did not come to this line of business because of an affinity for transistor radios and heirloom jewelry.”

He closed the door behind them, the lights around the door frame going dark. The installed fixtures ran the height and length of the door—purple tubes Eph recognized as ultraviolet lamps—arranged around the door like a force field of light.

To prohibit germs from entering the room? Or to keep something else out?

“No,” he continued, “the reason I chose it as my profession was because it afforded me ready access to an underground market of esoteric items, antiquities, and tomes. Illicit, though not usually illegal. Acquired for my personal collection, and my research.”

Eph looked around again. This looked less like a museum collection than a small arsenal. “Your research?”

“Indeed. I was for many years a professor of Eastern European Literature and Folklore at the University of Vienna.”

Eph appraised him again. He sure dressed like a Viennese professor. “And you retired to become a Harlem pawnbroker-slash-curator?”

“I did not retire. I was made to leave. Disgraced. Certain forces aligned against me. And yet, as I look back now, going underground at that time most certainly saved my life. It was in fact the best thing I could have done.” He turned to face them, folding his hands behind his back, professorially. “This scourge we are now witnessing in its earliest stages has existed for centuries. Over millennia. I suspect, though cannot prove, it goes back to the most ancient of times.”

Eph nodded, not understanding the man, only glad to finally be making some progress. “So we are talking about a virus.”

“Yes. Of sorts. A strain of disease that is a corruption of both the flesh and the spirit.” The old man was positioned in such a way that, from Eph’s and Nora’s perspective, the array of swords on the wall fanned out on either side of him like steel-bladed wings. “So, a virus? Yes. But I should also like to introduce you to another
v
word.”

“What’s that?” he said.

“Vampire.”

A word like that, spoken in earnestness, hangs in the air for a while.

“You are thinking,” said Setrakian, the former professor, “of a moody overactor in a black satin cape. Or else a dashing figure of power, with hidden fangs. Or some existential soul burdened with the curse of eternal life. Or—Bela Lugosi meets Abbott and Costello.”

Nora was looking around the room again. “I don’t see any crucifixes or holy water. No strings of garlic.”

“Garlic has certain interesting immunological properties, and can be useful in its own right. So its presence in the mythology is biologically understandable, at any rate. But crucifixes and holy water?” He shrugged. “Products of their time. Products of one Victorian author’s fevered Irish imagination, and the religious climate of the day.”

Setrakian had expected their expressions of doubt.

“They have always been here,” he continued. “Nesting, feeding. In secret and in darkness, because that is their nature. There are seven originals, known as the Ancients. The Masters. Not one per continent. They are not solitary beings as a rule, but clannish. Until very recently—‘recently’ considering their open-ended life span—they were all spread throughout the greatest landmass, what we know today as Europe and Asia, the Russian federation, the Arabian peninsula, and the African continent. Which is to say, the Old World. There was a schism, a clash among their kind. The nature of this disagreement, I do not know. Suffice it to say, this rift preceded the discovery of the New World by centuries. Then the founding of the American colonies opened the door to a new and fertile land. Three remained behind in the Old World, and three went ahead to the New. Both sides respected the other’s domain, and a truce was agreed upon and upheld.

“The problem was that seventh Ancient. He is a rogue who turned his back on both factions. While I cannot prove it at this time, the abrupt nature of this act leads me to believe that he is behind this.”

“This,” said Nora.

“This incursion into the New World. Breaking the solemn truce. This upsetting of the balance of their breed’s existence. An act, essentially, of war.”

Eph said, “A war of vampires.”

Setrakian’s smile was for himself. “You simplify because you cannot believe. You reduce; you diminish. Because you were raised to doubt and debunk. To reduce to a small set of knowns for easy digestion. Because you are a doctor, a man of science, and because this is America—where everything is known and understood, and God is a benevolent dictator, and the future must always be bright.” He clasped his gnarled hands, as best as he could, touching his bare fingertips to his lips in a pensive moment. “This is the spirit here, and it is beautiful. Truly—I don’t mock. Wonderful to believe only in what you
wish
to believe in, and to discount all else. I do respect your skepticism, Dr. Goodweather. And I say this to you in the hope that you will in turn respect my experience in this matter, and allow my observations into your highly civilized and scientific mind.”

Eph said, “So you’re saying, the airplane … one of them was on it. This rogue.”

“Exactly.”

“In the coffin. In the cargo hold.”

“A coffin full of soil. They are of the earth, and like to return to that from which they arose. Like worms.
Vermis
. They burrow to nest. We would call it sleep.”

“Away from daylight,” said Nora.

“From sunlight, yes. It is in transit that they are most vulnerable.”

“But you said this is a war of vampires. But isn’t it vampires against people? All those dead passengers.”

“This too will be difficult for you to accept. But to them we are not enemies. We are not worthy foes. We don’t even rise to that level in their eyes. To them we are prey. We are food and drink. Animals in a pen. Bottles upon a shelf.”

Eph felt a chill, but then just as quickly rejected his own shivery response. “And to someone who would say this sounds like so much science fiction?”

Setrakian pointed to him. “That device in your pocket. Your mobile telephone. You punch in a few numbers, and immediately you are in conversation with another person halfway around the world.
That
is science fiction, Dr. Goodweather. Science fiction come true.” Here Setrakian smiled. “Do you require proof?”

Setrakian went to a low bench set against the long wall. There was a thing there covered in a drape of black silk and he reached for it in an odd way, his arm outstretched, pinching the nearest edge of fabric while keeping his body as far away from it as possible, and then drawing the cover off.

A glass container. A specimen jar, available from any medical supply house.

Inside, suspended in a dusky fluid, was a well-preserved human heart.

Eph stooped to regard it from a few feet away. “Adult female, judging by the size. Healthy. Fairly young. A fresh specimen.” He looked back at Setrakian. “Where’d you get it?”

“I cut it out of the chest of a young widow in a village outside Shkodër, in northern Albania, in the spring of 1971.”

Eph smiled at the strangeness of the old man’s tale, leaning in for a closer look at the jar.

Something like a tentacle shot out of the heart, a sucker at its tip grabbing the glass where Eph’s eye was.

Eph straightened fast. He froze, staring at the jar.

Nora, next to him, said, “Um … what the hell was that?”

The heart began moving in the serum.

It was throbbing.

Beating.

Eph watched the flattened, mouthlike sucker head scour the glass. He looked at Nora, next to him, staring at the heart. Then he looked at Setrakian, who hadn’t moved, hands resting inside his pockets.

Setrakian said, “It animates whenever human blood is near.”

Eph stared in pure disbelief. He edged closer again, this time to the right of the sucker’s pale, lipless receptor. The outgrowth detached from the interior surface of the glass—then suddenly thrust itself toward him again.

“Jesus!”
exclaimed Eph. The beating organ floated in there like some meaty, mutant fish. “It lives on without …” There was no blood supply. He looked at the stumps of its severed veins, aorta, and vena cava.

Setrakian said, “It is neither alive nor dead. It is animate. Possessed, you might say, but in the literal sense. Look closely and you will see.”

Eph watched the throbbing, which he found to be irregular, not like a true heartbeat at all. He saw something moving around inside it. Wriggling.

“A … worm?” said Nora.

Thin and pale, lip-colored, two or three inches in length. They watched it make its rounds inside the heart, like a lone sentry dutifully patrolling a long-abandoned base.

“A blood worm,” said Setrakian. “A capillary parasite that reproduces in the infected. I suspect, though have no proof, that it is the conduit of the virus. The actual vector.”

Eph shook his head in disbelief. “What about this … this sucker?”

“The virus mimics the host’s form, though it reinvents its vital systems in order to best sustain itself. In other words, it colonizes and adapts the host for its survival. The host being, in this case, a severed
organ floating in a jar, the virus has found a way to evolve its own mechanism for receiving nourishment.”

Nora said, “Nourishment?”

“The worm lives on blood. Human blood.”

“Blood?” Eph squinted at the possessed heart. “From whom?”

Setrakian pulled his left hand out of his pocket. The wrinkled tips of his fingers showed at the end of the glove. The pad of his middle finger was scarred and smooth.

“A few drops every few days is enough. It will be hungry. I’ve been away.”

He went to the bench and lifted the lid off the jar—Eph stepping back to watch—and, with the point of a little penknife from his keychain, pricked the tip of his finger over the jar. He did not flinch, the act so routine that it no longer hurt him.

His blood dripped into the serum.

The sucker fed on the red drops with lips like that of a hungry fish.

When he was done, the old man dabbed a bit of liquid bandage on his finger from a small bottle on the bench, returning the lid to the jar.

Eph watched the feeder turn red. The worm inside the organ moved more fluidly and with increased strength. “And you say you’ve kept this thing going in here for …?”

“Since the spring of 1971. I don’t take many vacations …” He smiled at his little joke, looking at his pricked finger, rubbing the dried tip. “She was a revenant, one who was infected. Who had been
turned
. The Ancients, who wish to remain hidden, will kill immediately after feeding, in order to prevent any spread of their virus. One got away somehow, returned home to claim its family and friends and neighbors, burrowing into their small village. This widow’s heart had not been turned four hours before I found her.”

“Four hours? How did you know?”

“I saw the mark. The mark of the
strigoi
.”

Eph said, “
Strigoi
?”

“Old World term for vampire.”

“And the mark?”

“The point of penetration. A thin breach across the front of the throat, which I am guessing you have seen by now.”

Eph and Nora were nodding. Thinking about Jim.

Setrakian added, “I should say, I am not a man who is in the habit of cutting out human hearts. This was a bit of dirty business I happened upon quite by accident. But it was absolutely necessary.”