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

Damn peculiar. Roger lifted his martini glass and looked around, but there was nobody to toast or nod to, no town politicking to be done. And so, with no eyes on him, Roger Luss slurped the cocktail, downing half of it in two great swallows. It hit his stomach and he let go a low purr in greeting. He speared one of the olives, tapping it dry on the edge of the glass before popping it into his mouth, swishing it around for a thoughtful moment, then squishing it between his back molars.

On the muted television built into the wood above the bar mirror, he saw clips from a news conference. The mayor flanked by other grim-faced city officials. Then — file footage of the Regis Air Flight 753 plane on the tarmac at JFK.

The silence of the club made him look around again. Where in the hell was everyone?

Something was going on here. Something was happening and Roger Luss was missing out.

He took another quick sip of the martini — and then one more — then set down the glass and stood. He walked to the front, checking the pub room off to the side — also empty. The kitchen door was just to the side of the pub bar, padded and black with a porthole window in the upper center. Roger peeked inside and saw the barman/groundskeeper all alone, smoking a cigarette and grilling himself a steak.

Roger went out the front doors, where he had left his luggage. No valets were there to call him a taxi, so he reached for his phone, searched online, found the listing that was closest, and called for a car.

While waiting under the high lights of the pillared carport entrance, the taste of the martini going sour in his mouth, Roger Luss heard a scream. A single, piercing cry into the night, from not so far away. On the Bronxville side of things, as opposed to Mount Vernon. Perhaps coming from somewhere on the golf course itself.

Roger waited without moving. Without breathing. Listening for more.

What spooked him more than the scream was the silence that followed.

The taxi pulled up, the driver a middle-aged Middle Eastern man wearing a pen behind his ear, who smilingly dumped Roger’s luggage into the trunk and drove off.

On the long private road out from the club, Roger looked out onto the course and thought he saw someone out there, walking across the fairway in the moonlight.

Home was a three-minute drive away. There were no other cars on the road, the houses mostly dark as they passed. As they turned onto Midland, Roger saw a pedestrian coming up the sidewalk — an odd sight at night, especially without a dog to walk. It was Hal Chatfield, an older neighbor of his, one of the two club members who had sponsored Roger into Siwanoy when Roger and Joan first bought into Bronxville. Hal was walking funny, hands straight down at his sides, dressed in an open, flapping bathrobe and a T-shirt and boxer shorts.

Hal turned and stared at the taxi as it passed. Roger waved. When he turned back to see if Hal had recognized him, he saw that Hal was running, stiff-legged, after him. A sixty-year-old man with his bathrobe trailing like a cape, chasing a taxi down the middle of the street in Bronxville.

Roger turned to see if the driver saw this also, but the man was scribbling on a clipboard as he drove.

“Hey,” said Roger. “Any idea what’s going on around here?”

“Yes,” said the driver, with a smile and a curt nod. He had no idea what Roger was saying.

Two more turns brought them to Roger’s house. The driver popped the trunk and jumped out with Roger. The street was quiet, Roger’s house as dark as the rest.

“You know what? Wait here. Wait?” Roger pointed at the cobblestone curb. “Can you wait?”

“You pay.”

Roger nodded. He wasn’t even sure why he wanted him there. It had something to do with feeling very alone. “I have cash in the house. You wait. Okay?”

Roger left his luggage in the mudroom by the side entrance and moved into the kitchen, calling out, “Hello?” He reached for the light switch but nothing happened when he flipped it. He could see the microwave clock glowing green, so the power was still on. He felt his way forward along the counter, feeling for the third drawer and rooting around inside for the flashlight. He smelled something rotting, more pungent than leftovers moldering in the trash, heightening his anxiety and quickening his hand. He gripped the shaft of the flashlight and switched it on.

He swept the long kitchen with the beam, finding the island counter, the table beyond, the range and double oven. “Hello?” he called again, the fear in his voice shaming him, prompting him to move faster. He saw a dark spatter on the glass-front cabinets and trained his beam on what looked like the aftermath of a ketchup and mayonnaise fight. The mess brought a surge of anger. He saw the overturned chairs then, and dirty footprints ( footprints? ) on the center island granite.

Where was the housekeeper, Mrs. Guild? Where was Joan? Roger went closer to the spatter, bringing the light right up to the cabinet glass. The white stuff, he didn’t know — but the red was not ketchup. He couldn’t be certain…but he thought it might be blood.

He saw something moving in the reflection of the glass and whipped around with the flashlight. The back stairs behind him were empty. He realized he had just moved the cabinet door himself. He didn’t like his imagination taking over, and so ran upstairs, checking each room with the flashlight. “Keene? Audrey?” Inside Joan’s office, he found handwritten notes pertaining to the Regis Air flight. A timeline of sorts, though her penmanship failed over the last couple of incomprehensible sentences. The last word, scrawled in the bottom-right corner of the legal pad, read, “hummmmmm.”

In the master bedroom, the bedsheets were all kicked down, and inside the master bath, floating unflushed in the toilet, was what looked to him like curdled, days-old vomit. He picked a towel up off the floor and, letting it fall open, discovered dark clots of staining blood, as though the plush cotton had been used as a coughing rag.

He ran back down the front stairs. He picked up the wall phone in the kitchen and dialed 911. It rang once before a recording played, asking him to hold. He hung up and dialed again. One ring and the same recording.

He dropped the phone from his ear when he heard a thump in the basement beneath him. He threw open the door, about to call down into the darkness — but something made him stop. He listened, and heard…something.

Shuffling footsteps. More than one set, coming up the stairs, approaching the halfway point where the steps hooked ninety degrees and turned toward him.

“Joan?” he said. “Keene? Audrey?”

But he was already backpedaling. Falling backward, striking the door frame, then scrambling back through the kitchen, past the gunk on the walls and into the mudroom. His only thought was to get out of there.

He slammed through the storm door and out into the driveway, running to the street, yelling at the driver sitting behind the wheel, who didn’t understand English. Roger opened the back door and jumped inside.

“Lock the doors! Lock the doors!”

The driver turned his head. “Yes. Eight dollar and thirty.”

“Lock the goddamn doors!”

Roger looked back at the driveway. Three strangers, two women and one man, exited his mudroom and started across his lawn.

“Go! Go! Drive!”

The driver tapped the pay slot in the partition between the front and back seats. “You pay, I go.”

Four of them now. Roger stared, stupefied, as a familiar-looking man wearing a ripped shirt knocked the others aside to get to the taxi first. It was Franco, their gardener. He looked through the passenger-door window at Roger, his staring eyes pale in the center but red around the rims, like a corona of bloodred crazy. He opened his mouth as though to roar at Roger — and then this thing came out, punched the window with a solid whack , right at Roger’s face, then retracted.