Читать книгу The Complete Strain Trilogy: The Strain, The Fall, The Night Eternal - Чак Хоган, Гильермо дель Торо, Guillermo Toro del - Страница 58

ANN-MARIE BARBOUR checked again to make sure that she had locked all the doors, then went through the house twice—room by room, top to bottom—touching every mirror twice in order to calm herself down. She could not pass any reflective surface without reaching out to it with the first two fingers of her right hand, a nod following each touch, a rhythmic routine resembling genuflection. Then she went through a third time, wiping each surface clean with a fifty-fifty mix of Windex and holy water until she was satisfied.

When she felt in control of herself again, she phoned her sister-in-law, Jeanie, who lived in central New Jersey.

“They’re fine,” said Jeanie, referring to the children, whom she had come and picked up the day before. “Very well behaved. How is Ansel?”

Ann-Marie closed her eyes. Tears leaked out. “I don’t know.”

“Is he better? You gave him the chicken soup I brought?”

Ann-Marie was afraid her trembling lower jaw would be detected in her speech. “I will. I … I’ll call you back.”

She hung up and looked out the back window, at the graves. Two patches of overturned dirt. Thinking of the dogs lying there.

Ansel. What he had done to them.

She scrubbed her hands, then went through the house again, just the downstairs this time. She pulled out the mahogany chest from the buffet in the dining room and opened up the good silver, her wedding silver. Shiny and polished. Her secret stash, hidden there as another woman might hide candy or pills. She touched each utensil, her fingertips going back and forth from the silver to her lips. She felt that she would fall apart if she didn’t touch every single one.

Then she went to the back door. She paused there, exhausted, her hand on the knob, praying for guidance, for strength. She prayed for knowledge, to understand what was happening, and to be shown the right thing to do.

She opened the door and walked down the steps to the shed. The shed from which she had dragged the dogs’ corpses to the corner of the yard, not knowing what else to do. Luckily, there had been an old shovel underneath the front porch, so she didn’t have to go back into the shed. She buried them in shallow soil and wept over their graves. Wept for them and for her children and for herself.

She stepped to the side of the shed, where orange and yellow mums were planted in a box beneath a small, four-pane window. She hesitated before looking inside, shading her eyes from the sunlight. Yard tools hung from pegboard walls inside, other tools stacked on shelves, and a small workbench. The sunlight through the window formed a perfect rectangle on the dirt floor, Ann-Marie’s shadow falling over a metal stake driven into the ground. A chain like the one on the door was attached to the stake, the end of which was obscured by her angle of vision. The floor showed signs of digging.

She went back to the front, stopping before the chained doors. Listening.

“Ansel?”

No more than a whisper on her part. She listened again, and, hearing nothing, put her mouth right up to the half inch of space between the rain-warped doors.

“Ansel?”

A rustling. The vaguely animalistic sound terrified her … and yet reassured her at the same time.

He was still inside. Still with her.

“Ansel … I don’t know what to do … please … tell me what to do … I can’t do this without you. I need you, dearest. Please answer me. What will I do?”

More rustling, like dirt being shaken off. A guttural noise, as from a clogged pipe.

If she could just see him. His reassuring face.

Ann-Marie reached inside the front of her blouse, drawing out the stubby key that hung on a shoelace there. She reached for the lock that secured the chain through the door handles and inserted the key, turning it until it clicked, the curved top disengaging from the thick steel base. She unwound the chain and pulled it through the metal handles, letting it fall to the grass.

The doors parted, swinging out a few inches on their own. The sun was straight overhead now, the shed dark inside but for residual light from the small window. She stood before the opening, trying to see inside.

“Ansel?”

She saw a shadow stirring.

“Ansel … you have to keep quieter, at night … Mr. Otish from across the street called the police, thinking it was the dogs … the dogs …”

She grew teary, everything threatening to spill out of her.

“I … I almost told him about you. I don’t know what to do, Ansel. What is the right thing? I am so lost here. Please … I need you …”

She was reaching for the doors when a moanlike cry shocked her. He drove at the shed doors—at her—attacking from within. Only the staked chain jerked him back, strangling an animal roar in his throat. But as the doors burst open, she saw—before her own scream, before she slammed the doors on him like shutters on a ferocious hurricane—her husband crouched in the dirt, naked but for the dog collar tight around his straining neck, his mouth black and open. He had torn away most of his hair just as he had torn off his clothes, his pale, blue-veined body filthy from sleeping—hiding—beneath the dirt like a dead thing that had burrowed into its own grave. He bared his bloodstained teeth, eyes rolling back inside his head, recoiling from the sun. A demon. She wound the chain back through the handles with wildly fluttering hands and fastened the lock, then turned and fled back into her house.