Smiling, backlit in the rain, hair sleek and dirty, mouth horribly distended and red eyes ablaze—Kelly Goodweather stared at Nora Martinez.
Their eyes locked as the train rolled past. Kelly’s finger followed Nora.
Nora pressed her forehead against the glass, sickened by the sight of the vampire, and yet knowing what Kelly was about to do.
Kelly jumped at the last moment, leaping with preternatural animal grace, disappearing from Nora’s sight as she latched on to the train.
The Flatlands
SETRAKIAN WORKED QUICKLY, hearing Fet’s van arrive at the back of the shop. He flipped madly through the pages of the old volume on the table, this one the third volume of the French edition of Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs, published by Berthelo
t and Ruelle in Paris in 1888, his eyes going back and forth between its engraved pages and the sheets of symbols he had copied from the Lumen. He studied one symbol in particular. He finally located the engraving, his hands and eyes stopping for a moment.
A six-winged angel, wearing a crown of thorns, with a face both blind and mouth-less—but with multiple mouths festooning each of its wings. At its feet was a familiar symbol—a crescent moon—and a single word.
“Argentum,” read Setrakian. He gripped the yellowing page reverently—and then tore the engraving from its old binding, jamming it inside the pages of his notebook, just as Fet opened the door.
Fet was back before sundown. He was certain he had not been found or traced by the vampire brood, which would lead the Master straight back to Setrakian.
The old man was working over a table near the radio, closing up one of his old books. He had tuned in a talk show, playing low, one of the few voices still on the airwaves. Fet felt a true affinity for Setrakian. Part of it was the bond that grows between soldiers in times of battle, the brotherhood of the trench—in this case, the trench being New York City. Then there was the great respect Fet felt for this weakened old man who simply would not stop fighting. Fet liked to think there were similarities between himself and the professor, in their dedication to a vocation, and mastery of knowledge about their foes—the obvious difference being one of scope, in that Fet fought pests and nuisance animals, while Setrakian had committed himself, at a young age, to eradicating an inhuman race of parasitic beings.
In one sense, Fet thought of himself and Eph as the professor’s surrogate sons. Brothers in arms, yet as opposite as could be. One was a healer, the other an exterminator. One a university-trained family man of high status, the other a blue-collar, self-educated loner. One lived in Manhattan, the other Brooklyn.
And yet the one who had originally been at the forefront of the outbreak, the medical scientist, had seen his influence fall away in the dark days since the source of the virus had become known. While his opposite number, the city employee with a little sideline shop in Flatlands—and the killer instinct—now served at the old man’s side.
There was one other reason Fet felt close to Setrakian. Something Fet could not bring up to him, nor something he was entirely clear on himself. Fet’s parents had immigrated to this country from the Ukraine (not Russia, as they told people, and as Fet still claimed), not only in search of the opportunities all immigrants seek but also to escape their past. Fet’s father’s father—and this was nothing he had ever been told, because no one in his family spoke of it directly, especially his sour father—had been a Soviet prisoner of war, who was conscripted into service at one of the extermination camps during World War II. Whether it was Treblinka or Sobibor or elsewhere, Fet did not know. It was nothing he ever desired to explore. His grandfather’s role in the Shoah was revealed two decades after the war ended, and he was jailed. In his defense, he claimed that he had been victimized at the hands of the Nazis, forced into the lowly role of camp guard. Ukrainians of German extraction had been installed in positions of authority, while the rest toiled at the whim of the sadistic camp commanders. Yet prosecutors submitted evidence of personal enrichment in the postwar years, such as the source of Fet’s grandfather’s wealth in starting his dressmaking company, which he was unable to explain. But it was a blurred photograph of him wearing a black uniform, standing against a fence of barbed wire with a carbine in his gloved hands—lips curled in an expression claimed by some to be a nasty smirk, by others a grimace—that ultimately did him in. Fet’s father never spoke of it while he was alive. What little Fet knew, he had learned from his mother.
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.