The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal

by Guillermo Del Toro

  Between Bellevue and the New York University Medical Center, two of the largest hospitals in the world, stood perhaps the ugliest building in all of Manhattan. The headquarters of the chief medical examiner of New York was a misshapen rectangle of sickly turquoise. As the fish truck off-loaded bagged corpses, wheeled on stretchers into the autopsy rooms and walk-in refrigerators in the basement, Gossett Bennett, one of the office’s fourteen medical examiners, stepped outside for a quick break. He could not see the moon-sun from the small park behind the hospital—the building itself was in his way—so he instead watched the watchers. All along FDR Drive, which the park overlooked, people stood between parked cars on the never-idle throughway. The East River beyond was dark, a river of tar reflecting the dead sky. Across the river, a gloom overhung all of Queens, broken only by the glow of the sun’s corona reflected in a few of the highest, west-facing windows, like the white-hot flame of some spectacular chemical-plant blaze.

  This is what the beginning of the end of the world will look like, he thought to himself before returning to the M.E.’s office to assist in the cataloging of the dead.

  JFK International Airport

  THE FAMILIES OF the deceased passengers and crew of Regis Air Flight 753 were encouraged to take a break from paperwork and Red Cross coffee (decaf only for the aggrieved), and walk outside onto the tarmac in the restricted area behind terminal 3. There, with nothing in common but their grief, the hollow-eyed mourners huddled together and faced the eclipse arm in arm—some leaning on others in solidarity, others in need of actual physical support—their faces turned to the dark western sky. They did not know yet that they would be split up soon into four groups and shuttled in school buses to their respective medical examiner’s offices where, one family at a time, they would be invited into a viewing room and shown a postmortem photograph and asked to formally identify their loved one. Only families who demanded to view the actual physical remains would be allowed to do so. They then would be issued hotel room vouchers to the airport Sheraton, where a complimentary dinner buffet would be offered and grief counselors placed at their disposal all night and into the next day.

  For now, they stared up at the black disk glowing like a spotlight in reverse, sucking light away from this world and back up to the heavens. This obliterating phenomenon was to them a perfect symbol of their loss at that very moment. To them, the eclipse was the opposite of remarkable. It seemed merely appropriate that the sky and their God would see fit to mark their despair.

  Outside the Regis Air maintenance hangar, Nora stood apart from the other investigators, waiting for Eph and Jim to return from the press conference. Her eyes were turned toward the ominous black hole in the sky, but her vision was unfocused. She felt caught up in something she did not understand. As though a strange new foe had arisen. The dead moon eclipsing the living sun. Night occulting day.

  A shadow flowed past her then. She detected it as a shimmer from out of the corner of her eye, something like the slithering worm shadows that had undulated over the tarmac just before totality. Something just outside her field of vision, at the very edge of perception. Fleeing the maintenance hangar like a dark spirit. A shadow she felt.

  In the split second it took her pupil to move to it, the shadow was gone.

  Lorenza Ruiz, the airport baggage-conveyer operator who had been the first to drive out to the dead airplane, found herself haunted by the experience. Standing in the aircraft’s shadow that previous night, Lo couldn’t get it out of her mind. She hadn’t slept at all, tossing and turning, finally rising to pace. A late-night glass of white wine failed to do the trick. It weighed on her like something she could not let go of. When sunrise finally came, she found herself eyeing the clock—in anticipation, she realized, of returning to work. She found she couldn’t wait to get back to JFK. Not out of morbid curiosity. It was the image of that dormant plane, impressed upon her mind like a bright light flashed into her eye. All she knew was that she had to get back to see it again.

  Now this eclipse, and for the second time in twenty-four hours, the airport was shut down. This stoppage had been in the planning for months—the FAA had cleared a fifteen-minute window of downtime for airports within the range of the occultation, out of concern for the vision of the pilots, who couldn’t very well wear filtered glasses during takeoff or landing—but still, the math struck her as pretty damning and pretty simple:

  Dead Airplane + Solar Eclipse = Not Good.

  When the moon snuffed out the sun, like a hand covering up a scream, Lo felt the same electric panic as when she had stood on top of the luggage ramp beneath the belly of the darkened 777. The very same impulse to run, this time coupled with the knowledge that there was absolutely no place to go.

  Now she was hearing it again. Same noise she’d been hearing since arriving for her shift, only steadier now, louder. A humming. A droning sound, and the weird thing was, she heard it at the same volume whether she wore her protective headphones or not. Headachelike, in that way. Interior. And yet, like a homing beacon, it strengthened in her mind once she returned to work.

  With the fifteen minutes of downtime during the eclipse, she decided to set off on foot in search of the source of the tone, following it. Without any sense of surprise, she now found herself looking at the cordoned-off Regis Air maintenance hangar where the dead 777 was being stored.

  The noise sounded like no machine she had ever heard. A churning, almost, a rushing sound, like coursing fluid. Or like the murmur of a dozen voices, a hundred different voices, trying to make sense. Maybe she was picking up radar vibrations in her teeth fillings. There was a group of people out in front, officials gazing up at the blocked sun—but no one else like her, lurking there, bothered by or even cognizant of a hum. So she kept it to herself. And yet, for some weird reason, it felt momentous, being right here, this very moment, hearing the noise and wishing—to salve her curiosity, or was it more than that?—that she could get inside the hangar for another look at the plane. As though seeing the plane would somehow resolve the thrumming in her head.

  Then suddenly she felt a charge in the atmosphere, like a breeze changing course, and now—yes—it seemed to her that the source of the noise had moved somewhere off to her right. This sudden change startled her, and she followed it under the negative light of the glowing moon, carrying her headphones and protective glasses in her hand. Dumpsters and storage trailers lay ahead, before a few large box containers, and then some scrub brush and hardy, gray, wind-whipped pine trees, their branches full of snagged trash. Then the hurricane fence, beyond which lay hundreds of acres of scrub wilderness.

  Voices. It was more like voices to her now. Trying to rise to one single voice, a word … something.

  As Lo neared the trailers, an abrupt rustling in the trees, a lifting, made her leap back. Gray-bellied seagulls, apparently spooked by the eclipse, exploded out of the branches and Dumpsters, like winged shards of glass from a smashed window, scattering in all directions.

  The droning voices were sharper now, grown almost painful. Calling on her. Like a chorus of the damned, the cacophony rising from a whisper to a roar and back again, struggling to articulate one word, sounding like, as best she could make out:

  “…… hhrrhhrrhhrrhhrrhhrrHERE.”

  She set down her headphones on the edge of the tarmac, hanging on to her filtered glasses for when the eclipse ended. She veered away from the Dumpsters and their rank garbage smell, instead going toward the large storage trailers. The sound seemed to be emanating not from inside the trailers, but maybe from behind them.

  She walked between two six-foot-tall containers and around an old decaying airplane tire, coming upon another row of older, pale green containers. Now she felt it. Not just heard the thrum but felt it, a nest of voices vibrating in her head and in her chest. Beckoning to her. She placed her hand on the containers but felt no pulsation there, then continued forward, slowing at the corner, leaning out.

  Set on top of the blown trash
and uncut, sun-bleached grass was a large, ancient-looking, ornately carved black wooden box. She ventured into the small clearing, wondering why someone would throw such an obviously well-maintained antique all the way back here. Theft—organized and otherwise—was a fact of life at the airport; maybe someone had stashed it here, planning to swing by later to pick it up.

  Then she noticed the cats. The outer airport was crawling with wild cats. Some of them were pets who had escaped their transport cages. Many had simply been released onto airport property by locals looking to get rid of unwanted pets. Worst of all were the travelers who abandoned their cats at the airport rather than pay high kennel fees. Domestic cats who did not know how to fend for themselves in the wild, and who, if they avoided becoming prey to larger animals and survived, joined the colony of feral cats roaming the hundreds of acres of undeveloped airport property.

  The skinny cats all sat on their hindquarters, facing the cabinet. A few dozen of these mangy, dirty felines—until Lo looked at the trash-strewn tree and along the hurricane fence, and saw that there were in fact close to a hundred of these feral cats, sitting and facing the wooden box, paying her no attention.

  The box wasn’t vibrating, wasn’t emitting the noise she had been attuned to. She was mystified, after coming all this way, to discover something this strange here on the outskirts of the airport—and that was not, in fact, the source she was seeking. The thrumming chorus went on. Were the cats tuned in to it as well? No. Their focus was on the closed cabinet.

  She was starting to back away when the cats stiffened. The fur along their backs prickled—each of them, all at once. Their scabby heads all turned her way, one hundred pairs of wild cat eyes staring at her in the gloaming night-day. Lo froze, fearing an attack—and then a darkness fell over her, like a second eclipse.

  The cats turned and ran. They fled the clearing, claws grabbing willy-nilly at the high fence or scrambling through predug holes beneath it.

  Lo could not turn. She felt a rush of heat from behind her, as from an oven door when you open it. A presence. As she tried to move, the sounds in her head coalesced into one single horrible voice.

  “HERE.”

  And then she was lifted off the ground.

  When the legion of cats returned, they discovered her body with its head crushed, cast deep into their side of the hurricane fence like so much litter. The gulls had found her first—but the cats quickly scared them off and got right to work, hungrily shredding her clothes to get to the feast within.

  Knickerbocker Loans and Curios, East 118th Street, Spanish Harlem

  THE OLD MAN SAT BEFORE the three adjacent windows at the western end of his dimmed apartment, gazing up at the occluded sun.

  Five minutes of night in the middle of the day. The greatest naturally occurring celestial event in four centuries.

  The timing could not be ignored.

  But to what purpose?

  Urgency seized him like a fevered hand. He had not opened the shop that day, instead spending the hours since daybreak hauling things up from his basement workshop. Items and curiosities he had acquired over the years …

  Tools of forgotten function. Rare implements of obscure origin. Weapons of lost provenance.

  Why he sat here tired now, his gnarled hands aching. No one else but he could foresee what was coming. What was—by every indication—already here.

  No one else who would believe him.

  Goodfellow. Or Goodwilling. Whatever was the last name of that man who had spoken at the otherwise ridiculous news conference on the television, standing next to the doctor in the navy uniform. How cautiously optimistic all the others had seemed. Exulting over the four survivors, while claiming not to know the final tally of all the dead. We want to assure the public that this threat is contained. Only an elected official would dare to declare a thing safe and finished when he or she didn’t even know yet what it was.

  This man was the only one behind the microphones who seemed to think there might be more to this than a malfunctioning aircraft full of dead passengers.

  Goodwater?

  From the disease control center, the one in Atlanta. Setrakian didn’t know, but he thought his best chance might be with this man. Maybe his only chance.

  Four survivors. If they only knew …

  He looked out again at the glowing black disk in the sky. Like staring at an eye blinded by a cataract.

  Like staring into the future.

  Stoneheart Group, Manhattan

  THE HELICOPTER touched down on the helipad of the Stoneheart Group’s Manhattan headquarters, a building of black steel and glass in the heart of Wall Street. Its top three floors were occupied by Eldritch Palmer’s private New York residence, a regal penthouse constructed with onyx floors, its tables laden with Brancusis, its walls papered with Bacons.

  Palmer sat alone in the media room with the shades all drawn, the glowing black eyeball rimmed in fierce crimson and ringed with flaming white staring out at him from a seventy-two-inch viewing screen. This room, like his home in Dark Harbor and the cabin of his medical helicopter, was kept regulated at exactly sixty-two degrees.

  He could have gone outside. It was, after all, cold enough for him; he could have been taken up to the roof to witness the occultation. But technology brought him closer to the event itself—not the resulting shadow, but the image of the sun subordinated to the moon—that was the prelude to the devastation. His Manhattan sojourn would be brief. New York City would not be a very pleasant place to visit, not for much longer.

  He placed a few phone calls, a few discreet consultations over his secure line. His cargo had indeed arrived as expected.

  Smiling, he rose from his chair, walking slowly but straight at the giant viewing screen, as though it were not a screen at all but a portal he was about to step through. He reached out and touched the LCD screen over the image of the angry black disk, liquid pixels squirming bacteria-like beneath the wrinkled pads of his fingers. As though he were reaching through it to touch the eye of death itself.

  This occultation was a celestial perversion, a violation of the natural order. A cold, dead stone deposing a burning, living star. For Eldritch Palmer, it was proof that anything—anything, even the grossest betrayal of natural law—was indeed possible.

  Of all the human beings watching the occultation that day, in person or via broadcast around the globe, he was perhaps the only one rooting for the moon.

  JFK International Control Tower

  THOSE IN THE VIEWING CAB of the air-traffic-control tower 321 feet above the ground glimpsed the eerie sunsetlike twilight way off to the west, out beyond the reach of the great moon shadow, past the edge of the umbra. The brighter penumbra, illuminated by the sun’s blazing photosphere, had turned the distant sky yellow and orange, not unlike the healing edge of a wound.

  This wall of light was advancing on New York City, which had now been dark for exactly four minutes and thirty seconds.

  “Glasses on!” came the order, and Jim Kent put his on, anxious for sunlight’s return. He glanced around, looking for Eph—everyone from the press conference, including the governor and the mayor, had been invited up into the tower cab for the viewing—and, not seeing him, assumed that Eph had slipped back to the maintenance hangar.

  In fact, Eph had used this enforced time-out in the best way he knew: by grabbing a chair as soon as the sun had disappeared and going through a packet of construction diagrams showing cutaway views and schematics of the Boeing 777, ignoring the occultation altogether.

  The End of Totality

  THE END WAS MARKED by an extraordinary phenomenon. Dazzling prominences of light appeared along the western edge of the moon, combining to form a single bead of dazzling sunlight, like a rip in the darkness, giving the effect of a blindingly radiant diamond set upon the moon’s silver ring. But the price for such beauty, despite a vigorous public service campaign dedicated to eye safety during the occultation, was that more than 270 people across the city, 93
of them children, suffered permanent blindness by watching the sun’s dramatic reappearance without wearing proper eye protection. There are no pain sensors in the retina, and the afflicted did not realize they were damaging their eyes until it was too late.

  The diamond ring expanded slowly, becoming a band of jewels known as “Baily’s beads,” which merged into the reborn crescent of the sun, essentially pushing the interloping moon away.

  On earth, the shadow bands returned, shimmering over the ground like inaugural spirits heralding the passing from one form of existence to another.

  As natural light began filling back in, the human relief on the ground was epic. Cheers and hugs and spontaneous applause. Automobile horns sounded all across the city, and Kate Smith’s recorded voice sang over the loudspeakers at Yankee Stadium.

  Ninety minutes later, the moon had completely departed from the path of the sun, and the occultation was over. In one very real sense, nothing at all had happened: nothing in the sky had been altered or otherwise affected, nothing had changed on earth except for the few minutes of late-afternoon shade across the northeastern United States. Even in New York itself, people packed up afterward as though the fireworks show was over, and those who had traveled away from home transferred the focus of their dread from the occluded afternoon sun to the traffic awaiting them. A compelling astronomic phenomenon had cast a shadow of awe and anxiety across all five boroughs. But this was New York, and when it was over—it was over.

  AWAKENING

  Regis Air Maintenance Hangar

  Eph returned to the hangar by electric cart, leaving Jim behind with Director Barnes, giving Eph and Nora some breathing room.

  The hospital screens had all been wheeled away from beneath the 777’s wing, the tarp pulled up. Ladders were now hung from the fore and aft exit doors, and a gang of NTSB officials was working near the aft cargo hatch. The aircraft was being regarded as a crime scene now. Eph found Nora wearing a Tyvek jumper and latex gloves, her hair pulled up under a paper cap. She was dressed not for biological containment but for simple evidence preservation.