Guillermo del Toro - The Strain. Book I of The Strain Trilogy

She had always ascribed evil to this object. Had always imagined it would be somehow significant in the fate of this household, possibly as an instrument of Glory’s own demise at Hermann’s hands. Accordingly, she unwrapped it with great care, as though unswaddling a sleeping baby demon. Hermann had never liked her touching his special things.

The blade was long, wide, and flat. The grip was formed of wrapped leather straps worn to a soft brown by the hand of the former owner. She lifted it, turning it over, feeling the weight of this strange object in her hand. She caught sight of her reflection in the microwave door, and it scared her. A woman standing with a machete in her kitchen.

He had made her crazy.

She walked upstairs with it in her hand. She stopped beneath the ceiling door and reached for the bottom knot of the dangling white rope handle. It opened down to a forty-five-degree angle on groaning springs. That noise should have scared any lurking critters. She listened for scattering sounds, but there were none.

She reached for the high wall switch, but no light came on above. She flicked it a couple of times, but still nothing. She hadn’t been up here since after Christmas, and the bulb could have burned out at any time between now and then. There was a small skylight cut into the rafters. That would provide enough light.

She unfolded the hinged stairs and started up. Three steps brought her eye line above the attic floor. It was unfinished, with foil-backed pink fiberglass insulating blankets unrolled between the exposed joists. Plywood was laid out north — south and east — west, in a cross pattern, creating a walking path to each of the four quadrants of storage space.

The space was darker than she had expected, and then she saw that two of her old clothes racks had been moved, effectively blocking the low skylight. Clothes from her life before Hermann, zipped up in plastic and left in storage for thirteen years. She followed the plywood and moved the racks to allow more light in, with the idea of maybe sorting through the clothes and revisiting her old self. But then she saw, beyond the plywood walkway, a bare lane of floor between two long joists where the insulation had, for some reason, been pulled up.

Then she noticed another bare lane.

And another.

She froze there. She sensed something at her back suddenly. She was afraid to turn — but then she remembered the machete in her hand.

Behind her, against the vertical edge of the attic, farthest from the skylight, the missing strips of insulation had been piled up into a lumpy mound. Some of the fiberglass had been shredded, as though by an animal feathering an enormous nest.

Not a raccoon. Something bigger. Much bigger.

The mound was completely still, arranged as though to hide something. Had Hermann been tending to some strange project without her knowing? What dark secret had he stored under here?

With the machete raised in her right hand, she pulled on the end of a strip, drawing it away from the mound in a long trail that revealed…

…nothing.

She dragged away a second strip then — stopping when it revealed a man’s hairy arm.

Glory knew that arm. She also knew the hand it was connected to. Knew them both intimately.

She could not believe what she was seeing.

With the machete raised in front of her, she pulled away another length of insulation.

His shirt. One of the short-sleeved button-ups he favored, even in winter. Hermann was a vain man, proud of his hairy arms. His wristwatch and wedding ring were gone.

Glory stood riveted by the sight, melting with dread. Still, she had to see. She reached for another strip which, when drawn away, made most of the rest of the insulation slide off to the floor.

Her dead husband, Hermann, lay asleep in her attic. On a bed of shredded pink fiberglass, fully dressed except for his feet, which were filthy, as though from walking.

She could not process this shock. She could not deal with it. The husband she had thought she was rid of. The tyrant. The batterer. The rapist.

She stood over his sleeping body, the machete a sword of Damocles, ready to fall if he offered the slightest move.

Then, by degrees, she lowered her arm, the machete blade coming to rest at her side. He was a ghost now, she realized. A man returned from the dead, a presence, meaning to haunt her forever. She would never be free of him.

As she was thinking this, Hermann opened his eyes.

The lids rose on his eyeballs, staring straight up.

Glory froze. She wanted to run and she wanted to scream and she could do neither.

Hermann’s head rotated until his staring eyes fixed on her. That same taunting look, as always. That sneer. The look that always preceded the bad things.

And then something clicked inside her head.

At that same moment, four houses down the street, three-year-old Lucy Needham stood in her driveway feeding a doll named Baby Dear from a snack-size bag of Cheez-Its. Lucy stopped munching the loud crackers, and instead listened to the muffled screams and hard, chopping thwacks coming from…somewhere nearby. She looked up at her own house, then north, her nose scrunched up toward her eyes in innocent confusion. She stood very still, an orange tongue of half-chewed, cheese-baked crackers sticking out of her open mouth, listening to some of the strangest noises she had ever heard. She was going to tell Daddy when he came back outside with the telephone, but by then her bag of Cheez-Its had spilled and she was squatting and eating them off the driveway, and after getting yelled at she forgot the whole thing.

Glory stood there gasping in her attic, retching, the machete gripped in both hands. Hermann lay in pieces among the sticky pink insulation, the attic wall splattered in dripping white.

White?

Glory trembled, soul sick. She surveyed the damage she had done. Twice, the blade had become lodged in the wood joist, and in her mind it was Hermann trying to wrench the machete away from her, and she’d had to rock it back and forth violently to get it free again and keep swinging at his flesh.

She backed away one step. She was experiencing an out-of-body sensation. It was shocking what she had done.

Hermann’s sneering head had rolled off between two joists, facedown now, a fluffy pinch of pink fiberglass stuck to his cheek like cotton candy. His torso was gouged and gored, his thighs sliced to the femur, his groin bubbling up white.

White?

She felt something poking her slipper, tap-tap-tap. She saw blood there — red blood — and realized she had nicked herself somehow, her left arm, though she felt no pain. She raised it for inspection, dripping fat, red plops onto the plywood.

White?

She saw something dark and small, slithering. She was bleary-eyed and blinking, still in the grip of a homicidal rage. She couldn’t trust her sight.

She felt an itch on her ankle, underneath her bloody slipper. The itch crawled up her leg and she swatted at her thigh with the flat side of the sticky white blade.

Then — another tickle on the front of her other leg. And — separately — her waist. She realized she was having some sort of hysterical reaction, as if bugs were attacking her. She stumbled back another step, and almost tumbled off the plywood walkway.

There was then a most unnerving wriggling sensation around her crotch — and then a sudden, twisting discomfort in her rectum. An intrusive slithering that made her jump and clench her buttocks, as though she were about to soil herself. Her sphincter dilated and she stood that way for a long moment, paralyzed, until the feeling started to fade. She allowed herself to unclench, to relax. She needed to get to a bathroom. Another wriggle distracted her, inside her blouse sleeve now. And she felt a burning itch over the cut in her arm.