“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.
The Strain Page 26