He fell backward through the door, crashing to the floor with the boy holding fast, tethered to his throat, sitting astride his chest. Then the pulling began. The drawing out. The sucking. The draining.
Mark tried to speak, tried to scream, but the words clotted in his throat and he choked on them. He was paralyzed. Something in his pulse changed-was interrupted-and he couldn't utter a sound.
The boy's chest pressed against his, and he could feel the faint thumping of its heart-or something-against his own. As the blood rushed out of Mark's body, he felt the boy's rhythm accelerate and become stronger-thump-thump-thump-reaching a frenzied, intimate gallop that was close to pleasure.
The boy's stinger engorged as he fed, and the whites of his eyes, as he stared at Mark, flushed crimson. Methodically, the boy kept twining his crooked, bony fingers through Mark's hair. Tightening his grip on his prey...
The others burst through the door, setting upon the victim, tearing at his clothes. As their stingers pierced his flesh, Mark felt a renewed pressure change inside his body, not decompression but compression. Vacuum collapse, like a juice pack being consumed.
And at the same time, a scent overpowered him, rising into his nose and eyes like a cloud of ammonia. He felt an eruption of wetness over his chest, warm, like freshly made soup, and his hands gripping the little fiend's body felt a sudden, hot dampness. The boy had soiled himself, defecating over Mark as he fed-though the excretion seemed more chemical than human.
Pain like a motherfucker. Corporeal, all over, his fingertips, his chest, his brain. The pressure went away from his throat, and Mark hung there like a bright white star of effulgent pain.
Neeva pushed open the bedroom door just a sliver, to see that the children were finally asleep. Keene and Audrey Luss lay in sleeping bags on the floor next to her own granddaughter Narushta's bed. The Luss children were all right most of the time-Neeva, after all, had been their sole daytime caretaker since Keene was four months old-but they had both cried tonight. They missed their beds. They wanted to know when they could go home, when Neeva would take them back. Sebastiane, Neeva's daughter, was constantly asking how long until the police came and knocked down their door. But it was not the police coming for them that concerned Neeva.
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.