The Night Eternal

Beneath Columbia University

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HAD been, Gus knew, a big-shot school. Lots of old buildings, crazy expensive tuition, mucho security and cameras. He used to see some of the students out trying to mix with the neighborhood, some for community-minded reasons, which he never understood, and others for more illicit reasons, which he understood very well. But as for the university itself, the derelict Morningside Heights campus and all of its facilities, there was nothing much worth his time.

Now it was Gus’s base, his headquarters and his home. The Mexican gangbanger would never be made to leave his turf; indeed, he would blow it all up before allowing that to happen. As his sabotage and hunting activities dwindled in number and became more regimented, Gus started to look for a permanent base. He really needed it. It was hard to be efficient in this mad new world. Sticking it to the man became a 24/7 occupation, and one that was less and less rewarding every time. Police and fire departments, medical services, traffic surveillance—everything had been co-opted. When searching his old Harlem haunts for a place to coop, he’d connected with two of his La Mugre gangbangers and fellow saboteurs, Bruno Ramos and Joaquin Soto.

Bruno was fat—no other way to say it—fed mostly with Cheetos and beer. Joaquin was tight and lean. Groomed, tattooed, and full of ’tude. They were both brothers to Gus and they would die for him. Born ready.

Joaquin had done jail time with Gus. They’d done cell time together. Sixteen months for Gus. They’d watched each other’s back and Joaquin had done solitary for a good stretch after elbowing the teeth out of a guard, a big black guy named Raoul—what a fucked-up name for someone with no teeth: Raoul. After the vampires’ arrival— what some called the Fall—Gus had reconnected with Joaquin during the looting of an electronics store. Joaquin and Bruno helped him carry a big plasma TV and a box of video games.

Together they had taken the university and found it to be only slightly infested. Windows and doors were boarded and sealed with steel plates, the interiors razed and desecrated with ammonia waste. The students had all fled early, trying to evacuate the city and get back home. Joaquin guessed they never got very far.

What they found, in prowling around the deserted buildings, was a system of tunnels below the foundation. A book in the display case at the admissions office tipped Joaquin off to the fact that the campus had originally been erected on the grounds of a nineteenth-century insane asylum. The university architects had leveled all the existing hospital buildings except one and then built upon the existing foundations. Many of the linking tunnels were used for utilities, steam pipes generating scalding condensation, miles of electric wiring. Over time, a number of these passages had been boarded up or otherwise sealed in order to prevent injury to thrill-seeking students and urban spelunkers.

Together they had explored and claimed for themselves much of this underground network linking almost all of Columbia’s seventy-one campus buildings located between Broadway and Amsterdam on New York’s Upper West Side. Some more remote sections remained unexplored, simply because there wasn’t enough time in the day or night for hunting vampires, sowing chaos throughout Manhattan, and clearing musty tunnels.

Gus had carved out his own digs, concentrated in one quadrant of the campus’s main plaza. His domain started beneath the only remaining building original to the asylum, Buell Hall; ran beneath the Low Memorial Library and Kent Hall; and terminated at Philosophy Hall, the building outside of which was a bronze statue of a naked dude just sitting there, thinking.

The tunnels made for a cool crib, a real villain’s lair. The failure of the steam system meant he could access areas rarely visited in at least a century—the coarse black fibers sticking out of cracks in the underground walls were actual horsehairs used to strengthen the plaster mix—which had led him into a dank subbasement of iron- barred cells.

The loony bin. Where they caged up the maddest of the mad. No skeletons in chains or anything like that, though they had found scratches in the stonemasonry, like the jagged clawing of fingernails, and it didn’t take much imagination to hear ghostly echoes of the hideous, soul-baring screams from centuries past.

This was where he kept her. His madre. In an eight-by-six cage made of iron bars running ceiling to floor, forming a semicircle creating a corner cell. Gus’s mother’s hands were manacled behind her back with a pair of thick wrist cuffs he had found under a table in a nearby chamber, for which there was no key. A full-face black motorcycle helmet covered her head, much of the finish chipped away from her repeated headlong ramming against the bars during the first few months of her captivity. Gus had superglued the neck curtain of the helmet to her flesh. This was the only way he could fully contain her vampire stinger, for his own safety. It also covered the growing turkey wattle, the sight of which sickened him. He had removed the clear plastic face plate and replaced it with a padlocked iron flat, sprayed black and hinged at the sides. He had baffled the ear molds inside the helmet with thick cotton wadding.

She could therefore neither see nor hear anything, and yet, whenever Gus entered the chamber, the helmet turned and tracked him. Her head turned, eerily attuned to his walk, following him across the room. She gurgled and squealed as she stood in the center of the rounded corner cell, unclothed, her worn vampire body grimy from the asylum’s century-old dust. Gus had once attempted to clothe her through the bars, using cloaks, coats, then blankets, but they all fell away. She had no need for clothes and no concept of modesty. The soles of her feet had developed a pad of calluses, as thick as the treads on a pair of tennis sneakers. Insects and lice wandered freely over her body and her legs were stained, tanned by repeated defecation. Chaps of brown skin were delineated around her veiny, pale thighs and calves.

Months ago, after the fight inside the Hudson River train tunnel, once the air had cleared, Gus had separated from the others. Part of it was his nature, but part of it was his mother. He knew that she would soon find him—her Dear One—and he prepared for her arrival. When she did, Gus got the drop on her, bagging her head and hog-tying her. She fought him with ridiculous vampire strength, but Gus managed to jam the helmet on her, caging her head and trapping her stinger. Then he manacled her wrists and dragged her by the neck of the helmet to this dungeon. Her new home.

Gus reached in through the bars, sliding up her faceplate. Her dead black pupils, rimmed with scarlet, stared out at him, mad, soulless, but full of hunger. Every time he raised the iron shield, he could feel her desire to unleash her stinger, and sometimes, if she tried repeatedly, thick curtains of lubricant oozed out of any fissure in the seal.

In the course of their domestic life, Bruno, Joaquin, and Gus had formed a great, imperfect family together. Bruno was always ebullient and for some reason, he had the gift of cracking up both Gus and Joaquin. They shared every duty in the household but only Gus was allowed direct contact with his mother. He washed her, head to toe, every week and kept her cell as clean and dry as he humanly could.

The dented helmet gave her a machinelike appearance, like a banged-up robot or android. Bruno remembered a bad old movie he saw on TV late one night called Robot Monster. In the film, the titular creature had a steel helmet screwed atop a brutish apelike body. This is how he saw the Elizaldes: Gustavo vs. the Robot Monster.

Gus pulled a small pocketknife from his jacket and unfolded the silver blade. His mother’s eyes watched him carefully—like a caged animal’s. He pushed back his left sleeve, then extended both arms through the iron bars, holding them above her helmeted head as her dead eyes tracked the silver blade. Gus pressed the sharpened point against his left forearm, cutting, leaving a thin incision of less than half an inch in length. Rich, red blood spilled from the wound. Gus angled his arm so that the blood ran down to his wrist, dripping into the open helmet.

He watched his mother’s eyes as her mouth and stinger worked unseen inside the helmet, ingesting the blood meal.

She got maybe a shot glass’s worth of him before he pulled his arms back outside the cage. Gus retreated to a small table he kept across the room, ripping a square of paper towel from a thick brown roll and applying direct pressure to the wound, then sealing the cut with liquid bandage squeezed from an almost-empty tube. He pulled a baby wipe from a pop-up box and cleaned off the bloodstain on his arm. The length of his left forearm was scored with similar knife scratches, adding to his already impressive display of body art. In feeding her, he kept tracing and retracing the same pattern, opening and reopening the same old wounds, carving the word “MADRE” into his flesh.

“I found you some music, Mama,” he said, producing a handful of battered and burned CDs. “Some of your favorites: Los Panchos, Los Tres Ases, Javier Solis…”

Gus looked at her standing inside the cage, feasting on her son’s blood, and tried to remember the woman