The Night Eternal

Extract from the Diary of Ephraim Goodweather

Most midlife crises are not this bad. In the past, it used to be that people would watch their youth fade, their marriage break, or their careers grow stagnant. Those were the breaks, usually eased by a new car, a dab of Just for Men, or a big Mont Blanc pen, depending on your budget. But what I have lost cannot be compensated for. My heart races every time I think of it, every time I sense it. It is over. Or it will be over soon enough. Whatever I had, I have squandered—and what I hoped for will never be. Things around me have taken their permanent, horrible final form. All the promise in my life—youngest graduate in my class, the big move east, meeting the perfect girl— all that is gone. The evenings of cold pizza and a movie. Of feeling like a giant in my son’s eyes…

When I was a kid, there was this guy on TV called Mr. Rogers, and he used to sing: “You can never go down / can never go down / can never go down the drain.” What a fucking lie.

Once, I might have gathered my past in order to present it as a CV or a list of accomplishments, but now… now it seems like an inventory of trivialities, of things that could have been but are not. As a young man I felt the world and my place in it was all part of a plan. That success, whatever that is, was something to be gained simply by focusing on my work—on being good at “What I did.” As a workaholic father, I felt that the day-to-day grind was a way to provide, to see us through while life took its final shape. And now… now that the world around me has become an unbearable place, and all I have is the nausea of wrong turns taken and things lost. Now I know this is the real me. The permanent me. The solidified disappointment of that young man’s life—the subtraction of all those achievements of youth—the minus of a plus that was never tallied. This is me: weak, infirm, fading. Not giving up, because I never do… but living without faith in myself or my circumstance.

My heart flutters at the notion of never finding Zack—at the idea that he is gone forever. This I cannot accept. I will not accept.

Not thinking straight. But I will find him, I know I will. I have seen him in my dreams. His eyes looking at me, making of me that giant once again, calling me by the truest name a man can ever aspire to: “Dad.”

I have seen a light surrounding us. Purging us. Absolving me—of the booze and the pills and the blind spots of my heart. I have seen this light. I long for it again in a world this dark.

Beneath Columbia University

EPH WANDERED AWAY through the subterranean tunnels of the former insane asylum beneath the former Columbia University. All he wanted to do was walk. Seeing Zack atop Belvedere Castle with Kelly and the Master had shaken Eph to the core. Of all the fates he had dreaded for his son—Zack murdered or starving in a locked cage somewhere—standing at the Master’s side had never occurred to him.

Was it the demon Kelly who had drawn their son into the fold? Or was it the Master who wanted Zack with him, and if so, why?

Perhaps the Master had threatened Kelly, and Zack had no choice but to play along. Eph wanted to cling to this hypothesis. Because the idea that the boy would freely align himself with the Master was unimaginable. The corruption of one’s child is a parent’s worst fear. Eph needed to believe in Zack as a little lost boy, not a wayward son.

But his fear wouldn’t let him slip into this fantasy. Eph had walked away from the video screen feeling like a ghost.

He dug into his coat pocket, finding two white Vicodin tablets. They glowed in his palm, made brilliant by the light of his battery-powered headlamp. He thrust them into his mouth, dry-swallowing them. One of them lodged at the base of his esophagus, and he had to jump up and down a few times in order to force it down.

He is mine.

Eph looked up fast. Kelly’s voice—muffled and distant, but distinctly hers. He turned around twice but found himself quite alone in the underground passage.

He has always been mine.

Eph drew his sword a few inches out of its sheath. He started forward, toward a short flight of stairs heading down. The voice was in his head, but some sixth sense was showing him the way.

He sits at the right hand of the Father.

Eph running now, furious, the light from his headlamp shaking, turning down another dim corridor, turning into…

The dungeon room. Gus’s caged mother.

Eph swept the room. It was otherwise empty. Slowly he turned to the helmeted vampire standing still in the center of its cage. Gus’s vampire mother stood very still, Eph’s light casting a grid shadow onto her body.

Kelly’s voice said, Zack believes you are dead.

Eph drew his sword fully from its sheath. “Shut up,” he said.

He is starting to forget. The old world and all its ways. It’s gone now, a dream of youth.

“Quiet!” Eph said.

He is attentive to the Master. He is respectful. He is learning.

Eph thrust his sword in between two bars. Gus’s mother flinched, repelled by the presence of silver, her pendulous breasts swinging in the half light. “Learning what?” said Eph. “Answer me!”

Kelly’s voice did not.

“You’re brainwashing him,” said Eph. The boy was in isolation, mentally vulnerable. “Are you brainwashing him?”

We are parenting him.

Eph winced as though cut by her words. “No. No… what can you know about that? What can you know about love—about being a father or being a son… ?”

We are the fertile blood. We have birthed many sons… Join us.

“No.”

It is the only way you will be reunited with him.

Eph’s arm lowered a bit. “Fuck you. I will kill you—”

Join us and be with him forever.

Eph froze there a moment, paralyzed by despair. She wanted something from him. The Master wanted something. He made himself pull back. Deny them. Stop talking. Walk away.

Shut the fuck up—! he thought, his rage louder than his voice. He held tightly to his silver blade at his side. He ran back out of the room and into the passageways, Kelly’s voice staying in his head.

Come to us.

He turned a corner, thrusting open a rusty door.

Come to Zack.

He kept running. With each step, he grew angrier, becoming enraged.

You know you want to.

And then her laughter. Not her human laugh, high and light and infectious, but a taunting laugh, meant to provoke him. Meant to turn him back.

But on he ran. And the laughter melted away, fading with distance.

Eph went on blindly, his sword blade clanging into the legs of discarded chairs and scraping against the floor. The Vikes had kicked in, and he was swimming a bit, his body numb but not his head. In walking away, he had turned a corner in his own mind. Now more than ever he wanted to free Nora from the blood camp. To deliver her from the clutches of the vampires. He wanted to show the Master—show it that even in a fucked-up time such as this, it could be done: a human could be saved. That Zack was not lost to Eph, and that the Master’s hold on him was not as secure as it might think.