The Strain. Book I of The Strain Trilogy

stood there with her back against the wall, the boy wrapped in her arms.

Had the thing at the door heard its son’s voice?

Neeva tried to listen. The boy squirmed against her, trying to speak.

“Hush, child.”

Then she heard it. The squeak again. She grasped the boy even more tightly as she leaned to her left, risking a look around the corner.

The mail slot was propped open by a dirty finger. Neeva whipped back around the corner again, but not before she glimpsed a pair of glowing red eyes looking inside.

Gabriel Bolivar’s manager, Rudy Wain, cabbed over to his town house from Hudson Street after a late dinner meeting at Mr. Chow’s with the BMG people. He hadn’t been able to get Gabe on the phone, but there were whispers about his health now, following the Flight 753 thing and a paparazzi picture of him in a wheelchair and Rudy had to see for himself. When he showed up at the door on Vestry Street, there were no paparazzi in sight, only a few dopey-looking Goth fans sitting around on the sidewalk smoking.

They stood up rather expectantly when Rudy walked up the front-stoop stairs. “What’s up?” asked Rudy.

“We heard he’s been letting people in.”

Rudy looked straight up, but there were no lights on anywhere in the twin town houses, not even in the penthouse. “Looks like the party’s over.”

“It’s no party,” said one chubby kid with colored elastic bands hanging from a pin through his cheek. “He let the paparazzi in too.”

Rudy shrugged and punched in his key code, entered, and closed the door behind him. At least Gabe was feeling better. Rudy entered, past the black marble panthers and into the dark foyer. The construction lights were all dark, and the light switches still weren’t connected to anything. Rudy thought for a moment, then brought out his BlackBerry, changing the display to ALWAYS ON. He shone the blue light around, noticing, at the foot of the winged angel by the stairs, a heap of high-end digital SLRs and video cameras, weapons of the paparazzi. All piled there like shoes outside a swimming pool.

“Hello?”

His voice echoed dully through the unfinished first few floors. Rudy started up the curling marble stairs, following his BlackBerry’s pool of electronic blue light. He needed to motivate Gabe for his Roseland show next week, and there were scattered U.S. dates around Halloween to prepare for.

He reached the top floor, Bolivar’s bedroom suite, and all the lights were off.

“Hey, Gabe? It’s me, man. Don’t let me walk in on anything.”

Too quiet. He pushed into the master bedroom, scanning it with his phone light, finding the bedsheets tossed but no hungover Gabe. Probably out night crawling as usual. He wasn’t here.

Rudy popped into the master bathroom to take a leak. He saw an open prescription bottle of Vicodin on the counter, and a crystal cocktail glass that smelled of booze. Rudy deliberated a moment, then dealt himself two Vikes, rinsing out the glass in the sink and washing the pills down with tap water.

As he was replacing the glass on the counter, he caught sight of movement somewhere behind him. He turned fast, and there was Gabe, coming out of the darkness and into the bathroom. The mirrored walls on both sides made it seem as though there were hundreds of him.

“Gabe, Jesus, you scared me,” said Rudy. His genial smile faded as Gabe stood there staring at him. The blue phone light was indirect and faint, but Gabe’s skin looked dark, his eyes tinged red. He wore a thin black robe, to his knees, with no shirt underneath. His arms hung straight, and he offered his manager no indication of greeting. “What’s wrong, man?” His hands and chest were dirty. “You spend the night in a coal bin?”

Gabe just stood there, multiplied in the mirrors out to infinity.

“You really stink, man,” said Rudy, holding his hand to his nose. “What the hell you been into?” Rudy felt a strange heat coming off Gabe. He held his phone closer to Gabe’s face. His eyes didn’t do anything in the light. “Dude, you left your makeup on way too long.”

The Vikes were starting to kick in. The room, with its facing mirrors, expanded like an unpacked accordion. Rudy moved the phone light, and the entire bathroom flickered.

“Look, man,” said Rudy, unnerved by Gabe’s lack of reaction, “if you’re tripping, I can come back.”

He tried to glide out on Gabe’s left, but Gabe didn’t stand aside. He tried again, but Gabe would not give way. Rudy stood back, holding his phone light out on his longtime client. “Gabe, man, what the—?”

Bolivar opened his robe then, spreading his arms wide, like wings, before allowing the garment to fall to the floor.

Rudy gasped. Gabe’s body was gray and gaunt throughout, but the sight that made him dizzy was Gabe’s groin.

It was hairless and doll-smooth, lacking any genitalia.

Gabe’s hand covered Rudy’s mouth, hard. Rudy started to struggle, but much too late. Rudy saw Gabe grinning — and then that grin fell away, something like a whip writhing inside his mouth. By the trembling blue light of his phone — as he frantically and blindly felt for the numerals 9, 1, and 1—he saw the stinger emerge. Vaguely defined appendages inflated and deflated along its sides, like twin spongy sacs of flesh, flanked by gill-like vents that flared open and closed.

Rudy saw all of this in the instant before it shot into his neck. His phone fell to the bathroom floor beneath his kicking feet, the SEND button never pressed.

Nine-year-old Jeanie Millsome wasn’t tired at all on her way home with her mother. Seeing The Little Mermaid on Broadway was so awesome, she believed she was the most awake she had ever been in her life. Now she truly knew what she wanted to be when she grew up. No more ballet school instructor (after Cindy Veeley broke two toes on a leap). No more Olympic gymnast (pommel horse too scary). She was going to be (drumroll, please…) a Broadway Actress! And she was going to dye her hair coral red and star in The Little Mermaid in the lead role of Ariel, and at the end take the biggest and most graceful curtain curtsy of all time, and after the thunderous applause she was going to greet her young theatergoing fans after the show and sign all their programs and smile for camera-phone pictures with them — and then, one very special night, she was going to select the most polite and sincere nine- year-old girl in the audience and invite her to be her understudy and Best Friend Forever. Her mother was going to be her hairstylist, and her dad, who stayed home with Justin, would be her manager, just like Hannah Montana’s dad. And Justin…well, Justin could just stay home and be himself.

And so she sat, chin in hand, turned around in the seat on the subway running south underneath the city. She saw herself reflected in the window, saw the brightness of the car behind her, but the lights flickered sometimes, and in one of those dark blinks she found herself looking out into an open space where one tunnel fed into another. Then she saw something. No more than a subliminal flash of an image, like a single disturbing frame spliced into an otherwise monotonous strip of film. So fast that her nine-year-old conscious mind didn’t have time to process it, this image she did not understand. She couldn’t even say why she burst into tears, which woke up her nodding mother, so pretty in her theater coat and dress next to her, who comforted her and tried to draw out what had prompted the sobbing. Jeanie could only point to the window. She rode the rest of the way home cuddled beneath her mother’s arm.

But the Master had seen her. The Master saw everything. Even — especially — while feeding. His night vision was extraordinary and nearly telescopic, in varying shades of gray, and registered heat sources in a glowing spectral white.

Finished, though not satiated — never satiated — he let his prey slide limply down his body, his great hands releasing the turned human to the gravel floor. The tunnels around him whispered with winds that fluttered his dark cloak, trains screaming in the distance, iron clashing against steel, like the scream of a world suddenly aware of his coming.

Exposure