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

“Me?”

“The attention, or whatnot. ‘Look at me, I’m important.’”

She shook her head fast, as if he was wasting her time. Sometimes it confounded her that Matt could be so wrong about people.

The doorbell rang, and Kelly stopped her pacing. Matt sprang up from his chair, but Kelly was at the door first.

It was Eph, with Nora Martinez behind him, and an old man in a long tweed coat behind her.

“What are you doing here?” said Kelly, looking up and down the street.

Eph pushed inside. “I’m here to see Zack. To explain.”

“He doesn’t know.”

Eph looked around, completely ignoring Matt, who was standing right there. “Is he upstairs doing homework on his laptop?”

“Yes,” said Kelly.

“If he has Internet access, then he knows.”

Eph went to the stairs, taking the steps two at a time.

Leaving Nora there at the door with Kelly. Nora exhaled, soaking in awkwardness. “Sorry,” she said. “Barging in on you like this.”

Kelly shook her head gently, looking her over with just a hint of appraisal. She knew that there was something going on between Nora and Eph. For Nora, Kelly Goodweather’s house was the last place she wanted to be.

Kelly then turned her attention to the old man with the wolf-head walking stick. “What is going on?”

“The ex — Mrs. Goodweather, I presume?” Setrakian offered his hand with the courtly manners of a lost generation. “Abraham Setrakian. A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

“The same,” said Kelly, taken aback, casting an uncertain glance at Matt.

Nora said, “He needed to see you guys. To explain.”

Matt said, “Doesn’t this little visit make us criminal accomplices to something?”

Kelly had to counter Matt’s rudeness. “Would you like a drink?” she asked Setrakian. “Some water?”

Matt said, “Jesus — we could both get twenty years for that glass of water…”

Eph sat on the edge of Zack’s bed, Zack at his desk with his laptop open.

Eph said, “I’m caught up in something I don’t really understand. But I wanted you to hear it from me. None of it is true. Except for the fact that there are people after me.”

Zack said, “Won’t they come here looking for you?”

“Maybe.”

Zack looked down, troubled, working through it. “You gotta get rid of your phone.”

Eph smiled. “Already did.” He clasped his conspiratorial son on the shoulder. He saw, next to the boy’s laptop, the video recorder Eph had bought him for Christmas.

“You still working on that movie with your friends?”

“We’re kind of in the editing stage.”

Eph picked it up, the camera small and light enough to fit into his pocket. “Think I could borrow this for a little while?”

Zack nodded slowly. “Is it the eclipse, Dad? Turning people into zombies?”

Eph reacted with surprise — realizing the truth was not much more plausible than that. He tried to see this thing from the point of view of a very perceptive and occasionally sensitive eleven-year-old. And it drew something up in him, from a deep reservoir of feeling. He stood and hugged his boy. An odd moment, fragile and beautiful, between a father and son. Eph felt it with absolute clarity. He ruffled the boy’s hair, and there was nothing more to be said.

Kelly and Matt were having a whispered conversation in the kitchen, leaving Nora and Setrakian alone in the glassed-in sunroom off the back of the house. Setrakian stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the glowing sky of early night, the third since the landing of the accursed airplane, his back to her.

A clock on the shelf went tick-tick-tick.

Setrakian heard pick-pick-pick.

Nora sensed his impatience. She said, “He, uh, he’s got a lot of issues with his family. Since the divorce.”

Setrakian moved his fingers into the small pocket on his vest, checking on his pillbox. The pocket was near his heart, as there were circulatory benefits to be gleaned just from placing nitroglycerin close to his aged pump. It beat steadily if not robustly. How many more beats did he have in him? Enough, he hoped, to get the job done.

“I have no children,” he said. “My wife, Anna, gone seventeen years now, and I were not so blessed. You would assume that the ache for children fades over time, but in fact it deepens with age. I had much to teach, yet no student.”

Nora looked at his walking stick, stood up against the wall near her chair. “How did you…how did you first come to this?”

“When did I discover their existence, you mean?”

“And devote yourself to this, over all these years.”

He was silent for a moment, summoning the memory. “I was a young man then. During World War Two, I found myself interred in occupied Poland, very much against my own wishes. A small camp northeast of Warsaw, named Treblinka.”

Nora shared the old man’s stillness. “A concentration camp.”

“Extermination camp. These are brutal creatures, my dear. More brutal than any predator one could ever have the misfortune of encountering in this world. Rank opportunists who prey on the young and the infirm. In the camp, myself and my fellow prisoners were a meager feast set unknowingly before him.”

“Him?”

“The Master.”

The way he said the word chilled Nora. “He was German? A Nazi?”

“No, no. He has no affiliation. He is loyal to no one and nothing, belonging not to one country or another. He roams where he likes. He feeds where there is food. The camp to him was like a fire sale. Easy prey.”

“But you…you survived. Couldn’t you have told someone…?”

“Who would have believed an emaciated man’s ravings? It took me weeks to accept what you are processing now, and I was a witness to this atrocity. It is more than the mind will accept. I chose not to be judged insane. His food source interrupted, the Master simply moved on. But I made a pledge to myself in that camp, one I have never forgotten. I tracked the Master for many years. Across central Europe and the Balkans, through Russia, central Asia. For three decades. Close on his heels at times, but never close enough. I became a professor at the University of Vienna, I studied the lore. I began to amass books and weapons and tools. All the while preparing myself to meet him again. An opportunity I have waited more than six decades for.”

“But…then who is he?”

“He has had many forms. Currently, he has taken the body of a Polish nobleman named Jusef Sardu, who went missing during a hunting expedition in the north country of Romania, in the spring of 1873.”

“1873?”

“Sardu was a giant. At the time of the expedition, he already stood nearly seven feet tall. So tall that his muscles could not support his long, heavy bones. It was said that his pants pockets were the size of turnip sacks. For support, he had to lean heavily on a walking stick whose handle bore the family heraldic symbol.”

Nora looked over again at Setrakian’s oversize walking stick, its silver handle. Her eyes widened. “A wolf’s head.”

“The remains of the other Sardu men were found many years later, along with young Jusef’s journal. His account detailed their stalking of their hunting party by some unknown predator, who abducted and killed them, one by one. The final entry indicated that Jusef had discovered the dead bodies inside the opening to an underground cave. He buried them before returning to the cave to face the beast, to avenge his family.”

She could not take her eyes off the wolf’s-head grip. “How ever did you get it?”

“I tracked this walking stick to a private dealer in Antwerp in the summer of 1967. Sardu eventually returned to his family’s estate in Poland, many weeks later, though alone and much changed. He carried his cane, but no longer leaned on it, and in time ceased carrying it altogether. Not only had he apparently been cured of the pain of his gigantism, he was now rumored to possess great strength. Villagers soon began to go missing, the town was said to be cursed, and eventually it died away. The house of Sardu fell into ruin and the young master was never seen again.”