his workshop the smell of flesh and petrol mixed with sawdust. As his fear took hold of his heart, so did the hole take residence there.
To this day, Setrakian still felt it in him, every time fear took hold — whether crossing a dark street, closing his shop at night, or upon waking from the nightmares — the tatters of his memories revived. Himself kneeling, naked, praying. In his dreams he could feel the mouth of the gun pressing against his neck.
Extermination camps had no function other than killing. Treblinka was disguised to look like a train station, with travel posters and timetables, and greenery woven into the barbed wire. He arrived there in September 1942 and spent all of his time working. “Earning his breath,” he called it. He was a quiet man, young but well raised, full of wisdom and compassion. He helped as many prisoners as he could and prayed in silence all the time. Even with the atrocities he witnessed daily, he believed that God was watching over all men.
But one winter night, in the eyes of a dead thing, Abraham saw the devil. And understood the ways of the world to be different from what he’d thought.
It was past midnight and the camp was as quiet as Setrakian ever saw it. The forest murmur had quieted down and the cold air was splitting his bones. He shifted quietly in his bunk and gazed blindly at the darkness surrounding him. And then he heard it—
Exactly as his
His breath vanished and he felt in his heart the burning hole. In a corner of the barracks, the darkness moved. A
Sardu. Or a Thing that once had been him. Its skin was shriveled and dark, blending with the fold of its dark, loose robes. Much like an animated blotch of ink. The Thing moved effortlessly, a weightless phantom gliding across the floor. Its talonlike toenails scraped the wood ever so softly.
But — it couldn’t be. The world was real — evil was real, and surrounding him all the time — but this could not be real. This was a
In a matter of seconds, the long-dead Thing reached the bunk across from Setrakian. Abraham could smell it now: dried leaves and earth and mold. He could see hints of its blackened face as it emerged from the bundled darkness of the body — and leaned forward, smelling the neck of Zadawski, a young Pole, a hard worker. The Thing stood the height of the barracks, its head among the beams above, breathing hard and hollowly, excited, hungry. It moved along to the next bunk, where its face was briefly outlined by the light of a nearby window.
The darkened skin became translucent, like a sliver of dry meat against the light. It was all dry and matte — except for its eyes: two gleaming spheres that seemed to glow intermittently, like lumps of burning coal catching a reanimating breath. Its dry lips drew back to reveal mottled gums and two rows of small, yellowed teeth, impossibly sharp.
It paused above the frail form of Ladizlav Zajak, an old man from Grodno, a late arrival sickened with tuberculosis. Setrakian had supported Zajak since his arrival, showing him the ropes and shielding him from scrutiny. His disease alone was reason enough for instant execution — but Setrakian claimed him as his assistant, and kept him away from the SS overseers and Ukrainian guards at critical times. But Zajak was gone now. His lungs were giving out, and, more important, he had lost the will to live: shutting down, seldom speaking, constantly crying in silence. He had become a liability to Setrakian’s survival, but his entreaties no longer inspired the old man — Setrakian hearing him shudder with silent coughing spasms and quietly sobbing until dawn.
But now, towering above him, the Thing observed Zajak. The arrhythmic breathing of the old man seemed to please it. Like the angel of death, it extended its darkness over the man’s frail body and clucked its dry palate eagerly.
What the Thing did then…Setrakian could not see. There was noise, but his ears refused to hear it. This great, gloating Thing bent over the old man’s head and neck. Something about its posture indicated…a feeding. Zajak’s old body twitched and spasmed ever so lightly, but, remarkably, the old man never awoke.
And never did again.
Setrakian muffled a gasp with his hand. And the feeding Thing didn’t seem to mind him. It spent time over the various sick and infirm. By night’s end, three corpses were left behind, and the thing looked flushed — its skin suppler but equally dark.
Setrakian saw the Thing fade away into the darkness and leave. Cautiously, he got up and moved next to the bodies. He looked them over in the faint light, and there was no sign of any trauma — other than a thin slit in the neck. A breach so thin as to be nearly imperceptible. If he hadn’t witnessed the horror himself…
Then it dawned on him. This Thing. It would return again — and soon. This camp was a fertile feeding ground, and it would graze on the unnoticed, the forgotten, the inconsequential. It would feed on them. All of them.
Unless someone rose up to stop it.
Someone.
Him.
Movement
Flight 753 survivor Ansel Barbour huddled with his wife, Ann-Marie, and his two children, eight-year-old Benjy and five-year-old Haily, on a blue chintz sofa in the back sunroom of their three-bedroom home in Flatbush, New York. Even Pap and Gertie got into the act, the two big Saint Bernards allowed inside the house for this special occasion, so happy to see him home, their man-size paws leaning on his knees and patting gratefully at his chest.
Ansel had been seated in aisle seat 39G, in coach, returning home from an employer-paid database security training session in Potsdam, southwest of Berlin. He was a computer programmer embarking on a four-month contract with a New Jersey — based retailer following the electronic theft of millions of customers’ credit card numbers. He had never been out of the country before, and had missed his family intensely. Downtime and sightseeing tours were built into the four-day conference, but Ansel never ventured outside his hotel, preferring to remain inside his room with his laptop, talking to the kids via Webcam and playing hearts over the Internet with strangers.
His wife, Ann-Marie, was a superstitious, sheltered woman, and Flight 753’s tragic end only confirmed her closely held fears of air travel and new experiences in general. She did not drive a car. She lived in the grip of dozens of borderline obsessive-compulsive routines, including touching and repetitively cleaning every mirror in the house, which reliably warded off bad luck. Her parents had died in an automobile accident when she was four — she’d survived the crash — and she was raised by an unmarried aunt who passed away just one week before Ann- Marie and Ansel’s wedding. The births of her children had only intensified Ann-Marie’s isolation, amplifying her fears, to the point where she would often go days without leaving the safety of her own house, relying exclusively on Ansel for anything involving a transaction with the outside world.
The news of the crippled airplane had brought her to her knees. Ansel’s subsequent survival revived her with the power of an exultation that she could define only in religious terms, a deliverance confirming and consecrating the absolute necessity of her redundant, life-preserving routines.
Ansel, for his part, was intensely relieved to be back home. Both Ben and Haily tried to pile on top of him, but he had to hold them off due to the lingering pain in his neck. The tightness — his muscles felt like ropes being torturously twisted — was centralized in his throat, but extended past the hinges of his jaw up to his ears. When you twist a rope, it shortens, and that was how his muscles felt. He stretched his neck, hoping for some chiropractic relief—
— which nearly doubled him over. The pain wasn’t worth the effort.
