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

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.