The Strain

Her mouth opened, but she couldn’t think of anything to say. “I… I’ll take care of it… I don’t know how.”

He looked at the back porch, curious about the light on in the kitchen. “Is the man of the house available? I would prefer to speak with him.”

She shook her head.

Another pained groan from the shed.

“Well, you had damn well better do something about those sloppy creatures—or else I will. Anybody who grew up on a farm will tell you, Mrs. Barbour, dogs are service animals and don’t need coddling. Far better for them to know the sting of the switch than the pat of a hand. Especially a clumsy breed such as the Saint Bernard.”

Something he’d said got through to her. Something about her dogs…

Sting of the switch.

The whole reason they’d built the chain-and-post contraption in the shed in the first place was because Pap and Gertie had run off a few times… and once, not too long ago… Gertie, the sweetheart of the two, the trusting one, came home with her back and legs all ripped up…

…as though someone had taken a stick to her.

The normally shy and retiring Ann-Marie Barbour forgot all of her fear at that moment. She looked at this man—this nasty little shriveled-up excuse for a man—as though a veil had been lifted from her eyes.

“You,” she said. Her chin trembled, not from timidity anymore but from rage. “You did that. To Gertie. You hurt her…”

His eyes flickered for a moment, unused to being confronted—and simultaneously betraying his guilt.

“If I did,” he said, regaining his usual condescension, “I am sure he had it coming.”

Ann-Marie burst with hatred suddenly. Everything she had been bottling up over these past few days. Sending away her children… burying her dead dogs… worrying about her afflicted husband…

“She,” Ann-Marie said.

“What?”

“She. Gertie. Is a she.”

Another tremulous groan from within the shed.

Ansel’s need. His craving…

She backed up, shaking. Intimidated, not by him, but by these new feelings of rage. “You want to see for yourself?” she heard herself say.

“What is that?”

The shed crouched behind her like some beast itself. “Go ahead, then. You want a chance to tame them? See what you can do.”

He stared, indignant. Challenged by a woman. “You aren’t serious?”

“You want to fix things? You want peace and quiet? Well, so do I!” She wiped a bit of saliva off her chin and shook her wet finger at him. “So do I!”

Mr. Otish looked at her for one long moment. “The others are right,” he said. “You are crazy.”

She flashed him a wild, nodding grin, and he walked to a low branch of the trees bordering their yard. He pulled at a thin switch, twisting it, tugging hard until it finally tore free. He tested it, listening for the rapierlike swish as he sliced it through the air, and, satisfied, stepped to the doors.

“I want you to know,” said Mr. Otish, “I do this for your benefit more than mine.”

Ann-Marie trembled as she watched him run the chain through the shed door handles. The doors started to swing open, Mr. Otish standing near enough to the opening for the pole chain to reach him.

“Now,” he said, “where are these beasts?”

Ann-Marie heard the inhuman growl, and the chain leash moving fast, sounding like spilled coins. Then the doors flew open, Mr. Otish stepped up, and in an instant his stupefied cry was cut short. She ran and threw herself against the shed doors, fighting to close them as the struggling Mr. Otish batted against them. She forced the chain through and around the handles, clasping the lock tight… then fled into her house, away from the shuddering backyard shed and the merciless thing she had just done.

Mark Blessige stood in the foyer of his home with his BlackBerry in hand, not knowing which way to turn. No message from his wife. Her phone was in her Burberry bag, the Volvo station wagon in the driveway, the baby bucket in the mudroom. No note on the kitchen island, only a half-empty glass of wine abandoned on the counter. Patricia, Marcus, and baby Jackie were all gone.

He checked the garage, and the cars and strollers were all there. He checked the calendar in the hallway— nothing was listed. Was she pissed at him for being late again and had decided to do a little passive-aggressive punishment? Mark tried to flip on the television and wait it out, but then realized his anxiety was real. Twice he picked up the telephone to call the police, but didn’t think he could live down the public scandal of a cruiser coming to his house. He went out his front door and stood on the brick step overlooking his lawn and lush flower beds. He looked up and down the street, wondering if they could have slipped over to a neighbor’s—and then noticed that almost every house was dark. No warm yellow glow from heirloom lamps shining on top of polished credenzas. No computer monitor lights or plasma TV screens flashing through hand-sewn lace.

He looked at the Lusses’ house, directly across the street. Its proud patrician face and aged white brick. Nobody home there either, it seemed. Was there some looming natural disaster he didn’t know about? Had an evacuation order been issued?

Then he saw someone emerge from the high bushes forming an ornamental fence between the Lusses’ property and the Perrys’. It was a woman, and in the dappling shadow of the oak leaves overhead she appeared disheveled. She was cradling what looked to be a sleeping child of five or six in her arms. The woman walked straight across the driveway, obscured for a moment by the Lusses’ Lexus SUV, then entered the side door next to the garage. Before entering, her head turned and she saw Mark standing out on his front step. She didn’t wave or otherwise acknowledge him, but her glance—brief though it was—put a block of ice against his chest.

She wasn’t Joan Luss, he realized. But she might have been the Lusses’ housekeeper.

He waited for a light to come on inside. None did. Superstrange, but whatever the case, he hadn’t seen anyone else out and about this fine evening. So he started out across the road—first down his walk to the driveway, avoiding stepping on the lawn grass—and then, hands slipped casually into his suit pants pockets, up the Lusses’ drive to the same side door.

The storm door was shut but the interior door was open. Rather than ring the bell, he gave the glass a jaunty knock and entered, calling, “Hello?” He crossed the tiled mudroom to the kitchen, flipping on the light. “Joan? Roger?”

The floor was streaked all over with dirty footprints, apparently from bare feet. Some of the cabinets and the counter edges were marked with soil-smudged handprints. Pears were rotting in a wire bowl on their kitchen island.

“Anybody home?”

He wagered that Joan and Roger were gone, but he wanted to speak to the housekeeper anyway. She wouldn’t go around blabbing how the Blessiges didn’t know where their children were, or that Mark Blessige couldn’t keep track of his boozy wife. And if he was wrong and Joanie was here, well then he’d ask her about his family as though he had a tennis racket on his shoulder. The kids are sooo busy, how do you keep track? And if he ever heard anything from anyone else about his wayward brood, he’d have to bring up the horde of barefoot peasants the Lusses’ evidently had stampeding through their kitchen.

“It’s Mark Blessige from across the street. Anybody home?”

He hadn’t been in their house since the boy’s birthday party in May. The parents had bought him one of those electric kiddie race cars, but because it didn’t come with a pretend trailer hitch—the kid was obsessed with trailer hitches, apparently—he drove the car straight into the cake table just after the hired help in the SpongeBob SquarePants costume had filled all the cups with juice. “Well,” Roger had said, “at least he knows what he likes.” Cue forced laughter and a fresh round of juice.

Mark ducked through a swinging door into a sitting room where, through the front windows, he got a good look at his own house. He savored the view for a moment, as he didn’t often get a neighbor’s perspective. Damn