The Night Eternal

for two years, they had come to accept a new reality and a new regime. Old faiths had been shattered; others had been reaffirmed. But everything was open to question. Uncertainty was the new plague.

Nora counted herself among those who needed time to make sure that this way of life was going to stick. That there weren’t any other nasty surprises waiting for them just around the corner.

Fet said one day, broaching the subject gently, “What are we going to do? We have to return to New York sometime.”

“Do we?” asked Nora. “I don’t know if it’s there for me anymore.” She took his hand. “Do you?”

Fet squeezed her hand and looked out over the river. He would let her take as much time as she needed.

As it turned out, Nora and Fet never went back. They took advantage of the Federal Property Reclamation Act proposed by the interim government and moved into a farmhouse in northern Vermont, safely outside the void zone caused by the detonation of the nuclear device in the Saint Lawrence River. They never married—neither of them felt the need—but they had two children of their own, a boy named Ephraim and a girl named Mariela, after Nora’s mother. Fet posted the annotated contents of the Occido Lumen on the reinvigorated Internet and attempted to retain his anonymity. But when its veracity was eventually questioned, he embarked upon “the Setrakian Project,” curating and posting the entirety of the old professor’s writings and source materials on the Internet, free for all. Fet’s lifelong project became the tracing of the Ancients’ influence over the course of human history. He wanted to know the mistakes we had collectively made and devoted himself to avoiding their being repeated ever again.

For a time there was unrest and talk of criminal trials to identify and punish those guilty of human rights abuses under the shade of the holocaust. Guards and sympathizers were occasionally spotted and lynched, and revenge murders were widely suspected, but, in the end, more tolerant voices rose to answer to the question of who did this to us. We all did. And—little by little—with all our rancor and ghosts bearing the weight of our past, people learned to coexist once again.

In due time, others claimed to have taken down the strigoi. A biologist claimed to have released a vaccine into the water system, a few gang members exhibited assorted trophies claiming to have killed the Master, and, in the strangest twist, a large group of skeptics began to deny that the plague itself ever occurred. They attributed it all to a huge new-world-order plot, calling the entire event a manufactured coup. Disappointed, but never bitter, Fet slowly restarted his exterminating business. The rats had returned, thriving once again, another challenge to be met. He was not one to believe in perfection or happy endings: this was the world they had saved, rats and all. But to a handful of believers, Vasiliy Fet became a cult hero, and though he was uncomfortable with fame of any kind, he settled for this, and counted his blessings.

Nora, every night she put her baby boy, Ephraim, down to sleep, rubbed his hair and thought of his namesake, and his namesake’s son, and wondered what the end had been like for them. For the first few years of his life, she often speculated about what her life—with Eph—might have resembled had the strain never occurred. Sometimes she cried, and on those occasions, Fet knew better than to ask. This was a part of Nora that he did not share—that he would never share—and he gave her the room to grieve alone. But as the boy grew older and came into his own, becoming so much like his father and nothing at all like his namesake, the reality of the days washed away the possibilities of the past, and time moved on. For Nora, death was no longer one of her fears, because she had vanquished its more malignant alternative.

She carried with her always the mark on her forehead: the scar from Barnes’s gunshot. She regarded this scar as a symbol of how close she had come to a fate worse than death, though, in her later years, it became instead for her a symbol of luck. For now, as Nora gazed into the face of her baby—unmarked and full of peace—a great serenity overcame her, and out of nowhere, she remembered her mother’s words:

Looking back on one’s life, you see that love was the answer to everything.

How right she was.

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to acknowledge Dr. Seth Richardson at the University of Chicago for his assistance with Mesopotamian and biblical lore.

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Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the authors’ imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE NIGHT ETERNAL. Copyright © 2011 by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780007328628

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