The Strain, the Fall, the Night Eternal

by Guillermo Del Toro

  “We’ll never forget you, man,” said Joaquin.

  Bruno’s face was set angry to hide his softer emotions. He looked back at the bloodletting building. “Neither will these fuckers. I guarantee it.”

  Fet had turned the backhoe around and now drove it forward, ramming straight into the high perimeter fence, the tractor’s wide treads riding up and over it.

  Police sirens were audible now. Many of them, growing closer.

  Bruno went to Nora. “Lady?” he said. “I’m going to burn down this place. For you and for me. Know that.”

  Nora nodded, still inconsolable.

  “Now go,” said Bruno, turning and starting back into the slaughterhouse with his sword in hand. “All of you!” he yelled at the humans wearing camp jumpsuits, scaring them away. “I need every minute I got.”

  Eph offered Nora his hand, but Fet had returned for her, and she left under Fet’s arm, moving past Eph—who, after a moment, followed them over the downed razor wire.

  Bruno, raging with pain, felt the worms move inside of him. The enemy was inside his circulatory system, spreading throughout his organs and wriggling inside his brain. He worked quickly to transport the stand-alone UV lamps from the farmstead garden to the bloodletting factory, setting them inside the doors to delay the incursion of the vampires. Then he set about severing the tubes and dismantling the blood-collecting apparatus as though he were tearing apart his own infected arteries. He stabbed and sliced the refrigerated packs of blood, leaving the floor and his clothes awash in scarlet. It splattered everywhere, drenching him, but not before he made sure he wasted every last unit. Then he went about destroying the equipment itself, the vacuums and pumps.

  The vampires trying to enter were getting fried by the UV light. Bruno tore down the carcasses and human pelts but did not know what else to do with them. He wished for gasoline and a source of flame. He started up the machinery and then hacked at the wiring, hoping to short-circuit the electrical system.

  When the first policeman broke through, he found a wild-eyed, bloody-red Bruno trashing the place. Without any warning he fired upon Bruno. Two rounds broke his collarbone and snapped his left shoulder, shattering it to pieces.

  He heard more entering and climbed up a ladder alongside storage shelves, ascending to the highest point in the building. He hung one-handed over the approaching cops and vampires driven wild both by the destruction he had wrought and by the blood soaking his body, dripping to the floor. As vampires ran up the ladder, bounding toward him, Bruno arched his neck over the hungry creatures below, pressing his sword to his throat, and—Fuck you!—wasted the very last vessel of human blood remaining in the building.

  New Jersey

  THE MASTER LAY still within the loam-filled coffin—long ago handcrafted by the infidel Abraham Setrakian—loaded into the cargo hold of a blacked-out van. The van was part of a four-vehicle convoy crossing from New Jersey back into Manhattan.

  The many eyes of the Master had seen the bright trace of the burning spaceship blazing across the dark sky, ripping open the night like God’s own fingernail. And then the column of light and the unfortunate but not surprising return of the Born . . .

  The timing of the brilliant streak in the sky coincided exactly with Ephraim Goodweather’s moment of crisis. The fiery bolt had spared his life. The Master knew: there were no coincidences, only omens.

  Which meant what? What did this incident portend? What was it about Goodweather that had provoked the agencies of nature to come to his rescue?

  A challenge. A true and direct challenge—one that the Master welcomed. For victory is only as great as one’s enemy.

  That the unnatural comet burned the skies over New York confirmed the Master’s intuition that the site of its origin, still unknown, was somewhere within that geographic region.

  This knowledge engaged the Master. In a way, it echoed the comet that had announced the birthing site of another god walking the earth two thousand years ago.

  Night was about to fall, the vampires about to rise. Their king reached out, readying them for battle, mobilizing them with its mind.

  Every last one of them.

  JACOB AND

  THE ANGEL

  Saint Paul’s Chapel, Columbia University

  ACID RAIN HAD continued to fall abundantly and steadily, staining everything, soiling the city.

  Atop the exterior domed structure on Saint Paul’s Chapel, Mr. Quinlan observed as the column of daylight started to close and lightning detonated within the dark clouds. Sirens were audible now. Police cars were visible heading toward the camp. Human police would soon be there. He hoped Fet and the others could evacuate soon.

  He found the small maintenance niche at the base of the dome. There he retrieved the book: the Lumen. He crawled deeper into the niche and found refuge in a structural alcove—away from the rain and the incipient daylight. It was a cramped place beneath the granite roof structure and Mr. Quinlan fit snugly. In a notebook he had jotted some observations, annotated some clues. Safe and dry, he carefully laid down the book.

  And he began to read again.

  INTERLUDE III

  OCCIDO LUMEN:

  SADUM AND AMURAH

  THE ANGEL OF DEATH SANG WITH THE VOICE OF GOD AS THE cities were destroyed in a rain of sulfur and fire. God’s face was revealed and His light burned it all in a flash.

  The exquisite violence of the immolation was, however, nothing to Ozryel—not any longer. He yearned for more personal destruction. He longed to violate the order, and in doing so, achieve mastery over it.

  As Lot’s family fled, his wife turned back and gazed into God’s face, ever changing, impossibly radiant. Brighter than the sun, it burned everything around her and turned her into a pillar of white, crystalline ashes.

  The explosion transformed the sand within a five-mile radius of the valley into pure glass. And over it the archangels walked on, their mission accomplished, ordered to return to the ether. Their time as men on earth was at an end.

  Ozryel felt the warm smooth glass beneath his soles and felt the sun upon his face and felt an evil impulse rising within him. With the flimsiest of excuses, he lured Michael away from Gabriel, leading him up a rocky bluff, where he cajoled Michael into spreading his silver wings and feeling the heat of the sun upon them. Thus aroused, Ozryel could not control his impulses any longer and fell upon his brother with extraordinary strength, tearing open the archangel’s throat and drinking his luminous, silvery blood.

  The sensation was beyond belief. Transcendent perversion. Gabriel came upon him in the throes of violent ecstasy, Ozryel’s brilliant wings open to their full expanse, and was appalled. The order was to return immediately, but Ozryel, still in the grip of mad lust, refused and tried to turn Gabriel away from God.

  Let us be Him, here on earth. Let us become gods and walk among these men and let them worship us. Have you not tasted the power? Does it not command you?

  But Gabriel held fast, summoning Raphael, who arrived in human form on an arrow of light. The beam paralyzed Ozryel, fixing him to the earth he so loved. He was held between two rivers. The very rivers that fed the canals in Sadum. God’s vengeance was swift: the archangels were ordered to rend their brother to pieces and scatter his limbs around the material world.

  Ozryel was torn asunder, into seven pieces, his legs, arms, and wings cast to distant corners of the earth, buried deep, until only his head and throat remained. As Ozryel’s mind and mouth were most offensive to God, this seventh piece was flung far into the ocean, submerged many leagues deep. Buried in the darkest silt and blackest sand at the bottom. No one could ever touch the remains. No one could remove them. There they would stay until the day of judgment at the end of days when all life on earth would be called forth before the Creator.

  But, through the ages, tendrils of blood seeped out of the interred pieces and gave birth to new entities. The Ancients. Silver, the closest substance to the blood they drank, would forever have an ill effe
ct on them. The sun, the closest thing to God’s face on earth, would always purge them and burn them away, and as in their very origin, they would remain trapped between moving bodies of water and could never cross them unassisted.

  They would know no love and could breed only by taking life. Never giving it. And, should the pestilence of their blood ever spread without control, their demise would come from the famine of their kind.

  Columbia University

  MR. QUINLAN SAW the different glyphs and the coordinates that signaled the location of the internments.

  All the sites of origin.

  Hastily, he wrote them down. They corresponded perfectly to the sites the Born had visited, gathering the dusty remains of the Ancients. Most of them had a nuclear plant built above them and had been sabotaged by the Stoneheart Group. The Master had of course prepared this coup very carefully.

  But the seventh site, the most important of them all, appeared as a dark spot on the page. A negative form in the northeastern Atlantic Ocean. With it, two words in Latin: Oscura. Aeterna.

  Another, odd shape was visible in the watermark.

  A falling star.

  The Master had sent helicopters. They had seen them from the windows of their cars on the slow drive south, back to Manhattan. They crossed the Harlem River from Marble Hill, staying off the parkways, abandoning their vehicles near Grant’s Tomb and then making their way through the steady night rain like regular citizens, slipping onto the abandoned campus of Columbia University.

  While the others went below to regroup, Gus crossed Low Plaza to Buell Hall and rode the service dumbwaiter to the roof. He had his coop up there, for the messenger pigeons.

  His “Jersey Express” was back, squatting underneath the perch gutter Gus had fashioned.

  “You’re a good boy, Harry,” said Gus as he unfurled the message, scrawled in red pen on a strip of notebook paper. Gus immediately recognized Creem’s all-capitals handwriting, as well as his former rival’s habit of crossing out his O’s like null signs.

  HEY MEX.

  BAD HERE—ALWAYS HUNGRY. MIGHT CøøK

  BIRD WHEN IT FLY BACK.

  GøT YR MESSAGE ABøUT DETøNATøR. GøT IDEA

  4 U. GIMME YR LøCATIøN AND PUT øUT SøME

  DAMN FøøD. CREEM CøMIN 2 TøWN. SET MEET.

  Gus ate the note and found the carpenter’s pencil he stowed with the corn feed and shreds of paper. He wrote back to Creem, okaying the meet, giving him a surface address on the edge of campus. He didn’t like Creem, and he didn’t trust him, but the fat Colombian was running the black market in Jersey, and maybe, just maybe, he could come through for them.

  Nora was exhausted but could not rest. She cried for long bouts. Shuddering, howling, her abs hurting from the intense sobbing.

  And when silence finally came she kept running her palm over her bare head, her scalp tingling. In a way, she thought, her old life, her old self—the one that had been born that night in the kitchen, the one birthed out of tears—was now gone. Born to tears, died by tears.

  She felt jittery, empty, alone . . . and yet somehow renewed. The nightmare of their current existence, of course, paled in comparison to imprisonment in the camp.

  Fet sat at her side constantly, listened attentively. Joaquin sat near the door, leaning against the wall, resting a sore knee. Eph leaned against the far wall, his arms crossed, watching her try to make sense of what she had seen.

  Nora thought that Eph had to suspect her feelings for Fet by now; this was clear from his posture and his location across the room from them. No one had spoken of it yet, but the truth hung over the room like a storm cloud.

  All this energy and these overlapping emotions kept her talking fast. Nora was still most hung up on the pregnant campers in the birthing zone. Even more so than on her mother’s death.

  “They’re mating women in there. Trying to produce B-positive offspring. And rewarding them with food, with comfort. And they . . . they seem to have adjusted to it. I don’t know why that part of it haunts me so. Maybe I’m too hard on them. Maybe the survival instinct isn’t this purely noble thing we make it out to be. Maybe it’s more complicated than that. Sometimes surviving means compromise. Big compromise. Rebellion is hard enough when you’re fighting for yourself. But once you have another life growing in your belly . . . or even a young child . . .” She looked at Eph. “I understand it better now, is what I’m trying to say. I know how torn you are.”

  Eph nodded once, accepting her apology.

  “That said,” said Nora, “I wish you had met me at the medical examiner’s office when you were supposed to. My mother would still be here today.”

  “I was late,” said Eph, “I admit that. I got hung up—”

  “At your ex-wife’s house. Don’t deny it.”

  “I wasn’t going to.”

  “But?”

  “Just that you being found here wasn’t my fault.”

  Nora turned toward him, surprised by the challenge. “How do you figure that?”

  “I should have been there. Things would have been different had I been there on time. But I didn’t lead the strigoi to you.”

  “No? Who did?”

  “You did.”

  “I . . . ?” She could not believe what she was hearing.

  “Computer use. The Internet. You were using it to message Fet.”

  There. It was out. Nora stiffened at first, a wave of guilt, but quickly shook it off. “Is that right?”

  Fet rose to defend her. All six feet plus of him. “You shouldn’t talk to her like that.”

  Eph did not back up. “Oh, I shouldn’t—? I’ve been in that building for months with almost no problem. They’re monitoring the Net. You know that.”

  “So I brought this on myself.” Nora slipped her hand underneath Fet’s. “My punishment was a just punishment—in your eyes.”

  Fet shuddered at the touch of her hand. And as her fingers wrapped around his thick digits, he felt as if he could cry. Eph saw the gesture—small under any other circumstances—as an eloquent public expression of the end of his and Nora’s relationship.

  “Nonsense,” Eph said. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “That is what you are implying.”

  “What I am implying—”

  “You know what, Eph? It fits your pattern.” Fet squeezed her hand to slow her down, but she blew past that stop sign. “You’re always showing up just after the fact. And by ‘showing up,’ I mean ‘getting it.’ You finally figured out how much you loved Kelly . . . after the breakup. You realized how important being an involved father was . . . after you weren’t living with Zack anymore. Okay? And now . . . I think maybe you’re going to start realizing how much you needed me. ’Cause you don’t have me anymore.” It shocked her to hear herself saying these things out loud, in front of the others—but there it was. “You’re always just a little too late. You’ve spent half your life battling regrets. Making up for the past rather than getting it done in the present. I think the worst thing that ever happened to you was all your early success. The ‘young genius’ tag. You think if you work hard enough, you can fix the precious things you’ve broken—rather than being careful with them in the first place.” She was slowing down now, feeling Fet pulling her back—but her tears were flowing, her voice hoarse and full of pain. “If there’s one thing you should have learned since this terrible thing started, it’s that nothing is guaranteed. Nothing. Especially other human beings . . .”

  Eph remained still across the room. Pinned to the floor, actually. So still that Nora wasn’t sure her words had gotten through to him. Until, after an appropriate amount of silence, when what Nora said appeared to be the last word, Eph stood off the wall and slowly walked out the door.

  Eph walked the ancient corridor system, feeling numb. His feet made no impact upon the floor.

  Twin impulses had torn at him in there. At first, he wanted to remind Nora how many times her mother had nearly gotten them captured or
turned. How badly Mrs. Martinez’s dementia had slowed all of them down over the past many months. Evidently, it didn’t matter now that Nora had, numerous times, directly expressed her wish that her mother be taken from them. No. Everything that went wrong was Eph’s fault.

  Second, he was stunned to see how close she seemed to Fet now. If anything, her abduction and ultimate rescue had brought them closer together. Had strengthened their new bond. This twisted most sharply in his side, because he had seen saving Nora as a dry run for saving Zack, but all it had done was expose his deepest fear: that he might save Zack and still find him changed forever. Lost to Eph—forever.

  Part of him said it was already much too late. That part of him was the depressive part, the part he tried to stave off constantly. The part he medicated with pills. He felt around for the pack on his back and unzipped the small compartment meant for keys or loose change. His last Vicodin. He placed it on his tongue and then held it there as he walked, waiting to work up enough saliva to swallow it.

  Eph conjured up the video image of the Master overlooking its legion in Central Park, standing high upon Belvedere Castle with Kelly and Zack at its side. This green-tinted image haunted him, ate at him as he kept walking, only half-aware of his direction.

  I knew you would return.

  Kelly’s voice and the words were like a shot of adrenaline, straight to his heart. Eph turned into a familiar-looking corridor and found the door, heavy wood and iron-hinged, not locked.

  Inside the asylum chamber, in the center of the corner cage, stood the vampire that was once Gus’s mother. The dented motorcycle helmet tilted ever so slightly, acknowledging Eph’s entrance. Her arms remained bound behind her back.

  Eph approached the cage door. The iron bars were spaced six inches apart. Vinyl-sleeved, braided steel-cable bicycle locks secured the door at the top, bottom, and through the old padlock clasp in the middle.