Guillermo del Toro - The Fall. Book II of The Strain Trilogy

Shame can indeed be visited upon future generations, and Fet carried this with him now like a terrible burden, a hot dose of shame always in the pit of his stomach. Realistically, a man can bear no responsibility for the actions of his grandfather, and yet…

And yet one carries the sins of his forebears as one carries their features in his face. One bears their blood, and their honor or their blight.

Fet had never suffered from this affiliation as he did now — except perhaps in dreams. One sequence recurred, disrupting his sleep again and again. In it, Fet has returned to his family’s home village, a place he had never visited in real life. Every door and window is shut to him, and he walks the streets alone, yet watched. And then suddenly, from one end of the street, a roaring burst of angry orange light flies toward him on the cadence of galloping hooves.

A stallion — its coat, mane, and tail aflame — is charging at him. The horse is fully consumed, and Fet, always at the very last second, dives out of its path, turning and watching the animal tear off across the countryside, trailing dark smoke in its wake.

“How is it out there?”

Fet set down his satchel. “Quiet. Menacing.” He shrugged off his jacket, pulling a jar of peanut butter and some Ritz crackers from the pockets. He had stopped off at his apartment. He offered some to Setrakian. “Any word?”

“Nothing,” said Setrakian, inspecting the cracker box as though he might turn down the snack. “But Ephraim is long overdue.”

“The bridges. Clogged.”

“Mmm.” Setrakian pulled out the wax wrapper, sniffing at the contents before trying a cracker. “Did you get the maps?”

Fet patted his pocket. He had journeyed to a DPW depot in Gravesend in order to procure sewer maps for Manhattan, specifically the Upper East Side. “I got them, all right. Question is — will we get to use them?”

“We will. I am certain.”

Fet smiled. The old man’s faith never failed to warm him. “Can you tell me what you saw in that book?”

Setrakian set down the box of crackers and lit up a pipe. “I saw… everything. I saw hope, yes. But then… I saw the end of us. Of everything.”

He slid out a reproduction of the crescent moon drawing seen both in the subway, via Fet’s pink phone video, and in the pages of the Lumen. The old man had copied it three times.

“You see? This symbol — like the vampire itself, how it was once seen — is an archetype. Common to all mankind, East and West — but within it, a different permutation, see? Latent, but revealed in time, like any prophecy. Observe.”

He took the three pieces of paper and, utilizing a makeshift light table, laid them out, superimposing one atop another.

“Any legend, any creature, any symbol we ever stumble on, already exists in a vast cosmic reservoir where archetypes wait. Shapes looming outside our Platonic cave. We naturally believe ourselves clever and wise, so advanced, and those who came before us so naïve and simple… when all we truly do is echo the order of the universe, as it guides us…”

The three moons rotated in the paper, and joined together.

“These are not three moons. No. They are occultations. Three solar eclipses, each occurring at the exact latitude and longitude, marking an even, enormous span of years — signaling an event, now complete. Revealing the sacred geometry of omen.”

Fet saw with amazement that the three shapes together formed a rudimentary biohazard sign: . “But this symbol… I know it from my work. It was just designed in the sixties, I think…”

“All symbols are eternal. They exist even before we dream of them…”

“So how did…”

“Oh, we know,” said Setrakian. “We always know. We don’t discover, we don’t learn. We just remember things that we have forgotten…” He pointed to the symbol. “A warning. Dormant in our mind, reawakened now — as the end of time approaches.”

Fet regarded the worktable Setrakian had taken over. He was experimenting with photography equipment, explaining something about “testing a metallurgical silver emulsion technique” that Fet did not understand. But the old man seemed to know what he was doing. “Silver,” said Setrakian. “ Argentum, to the ancient alchemists and represented by this symbol…” Again, Setrakian presented Fet with the image of the crescent moon.

“And this, in turn…” said Setrakian, producing the engraving of the archangel. “Sariel. In certain Enochian manuscripts he is named Arazyal, Asaradel. Names all too similar to Azrael or Ozryel…”

Placing the engraving side to side with the biohazard sign and the alchemical symbol of the crescent moon gave the images a shocking through-line. A convergence, a direction; a goal.

Setrakian felt a surge of energy and excitement. His mind was hunting.

“Ozryel is the angel of death,” said Setrakian. “Muslims call him ‘he of the four faces, the many eyes, and the many mouths. He of the seventy thousand feet and four thousand wings.’ And he has as many eyes and as many tongues as there are men on earth. But you see, that only speaks of how he can multiply, how he can spread…”

Fet’s thoughts swam. The part that most concerned him was safely extracting the blood worm from Setrakian’s jar-sealed vampire heart. The old man had lined the table with battery-powered UV lamps in order to contain the worm. Everything appeared ready, and the jar was close at hand, the fist-size organ throbbing — and yet, now that the time had come, Setrakian was reluctant to butcher the sinister heart.

Setrakian leaned in close to the specimen jar, and a tentacled outgrowth shot out, the mouth-like sucker at its tip adhering to the glass. These blood worms were nasty suckers. Fet understood that the old man had been feeding it drops of his blood for decades now, nursing this ugly thing, and, in doing so, had formed some eerie attachment to it. That was natural enough. But Setrakian’s hesitation here contained an emotional component beyond pure melancholy.

This was more like true sorrow. More like despair.

Fet realized something then. Now and then, in the middle of the night, he had seen the old man speaking to the jar, feeding the thing inside. Alone by candlelight he stared at it, whispered to it, and caressed the cold glass containing the unholy flesh. Once Fet swore he’d heard the old man singing to it. Softly, in a foreign tongue — not Armenian — a lullaby…

Setrakian had become aware of Fet looking at him. “Forgive me, professor,” said Fet. “But… whose heart is it? The original story you told us…”

Setrakian nodded, having been found out. “Yes… that I cut it out of the chest of a young widow in a village in northern Albania? You are right, that tale is not entirely true.”

Tears sparkled in the old man’s eyes. One drop fell in silence, and, when he finally spoke, he did so in a whisper — as the tale he told required it.

Along with thousands of holocaust survivors, Setrakian had arrived in Vienna in 1947, almost entirely penniless, and settled in the Soviet zone of the city. He was able to find some success buying, repairing, and reselling furniture acquired from unclaimed warehouses and estates in all four zones of the city.

One of his clients became also his mentor: Professor Ernst Zelman, one of the few surviving members of the mythical Weiner Kreis, or the Vienna Circle, a turn-of-the-century philosophical society recently dispersed by the Nazis. Zelman had returned to Vienna from exile after having lost most of his family to the Third Reich. He felt enormous empathy with the young Setrakian, and, in a Vienna full of pain and silence — at a time when speaking about “the past” and discussing Nazism was considered abhorrent — Zelman and Setrakian found great solace in each other’s company. Professor Zelman allowed Abraham to borrow freely from his abundant library, and Setrakian, being a bachelor and an insomniac, devoured the books rapidly and systematically. He first applied for studies in philosophy in 1949, and, a few years later, in a very fragmented, very permeable University of Vienna, Abraham Setrakian became associate professor of philosophy.