Читать книгу The Complete Strain Trilogy: The Strain, The Fall, The Night Eternal - Чак Хоган, Гильермо дель Торо, Guillermo Toro del - Страница 60

NEEVA, THE LUSSES’ NANNY, still very much rattled by the events of the past twenty-four hours, left the children in the care of her nephew, Emile, while her daughter, Sebastiane, drove her back to Bronxville. She had kept the Luss children, Keene and his eight-year-old sister, Audrey, eating Frosted Flakes for lunch, and cubed fruit, things Neeva had taken with her from the Luss house when she’d fled.

Now she was returning for more. The Luss children wouldn’t eat her Haitian cooking, and—more pressingly—Neeva had forgotten Keene’s Pulmicort, his asthma medication. The boy was wheezing and looking pasty.

They pulled in to find Mrs. Guild’s green car in the Lusses’ driveway, the sight of which gave Neeva pause. She told Sebastiane to wait for her there, then got out and straightened her slip beneath her dress, going with her key to the side entrance. The door opened without any tone, the house alarm not set. Neeva walked through the perfectly appointed mudroom with built-in cubbies and coat hooks and heated tile floor—a mudroom that had never seen any mud—and pushed through the French doors into the kitchen.

It did not appear that anyone had been in the room since she had left with the children. She stood still inside the doorway and listened with extraordinary attention, holding her breath for as long as she could before exhaling. She heard nothing.

“Hallo?” she called a few times, wondering if Mrs. Guild, with whom she had a largely silent relationship—the housekeeper, Neeva suspected, was a silent racist—would answer. Wondering if Joan—a mother so devoid of natural maternal instinct as to be, for all her lawyerly success, like a child herself—would answer. And knowing, in both cases, that they would not.

Hearing nothing, she crossed to the central island and laid her bag gently down on it, between the sink and the countertop range. She opened the snack cabinet, and quickly, a bit more like a thief than she had imagined, filled a Food Emporium bag with crackers and juice pouches and Smartfood popcorn—stopping once in a while to listen.

After raiding the paneled refrigerator of string cheese and yogurt drinks, she noticed Mr. Luss’s number on the contact sheet taped to the wall near the kitchen phone. A bolt of uncertainty shot through her. What could she say to him? Your wife is ill. She is not right. So I take the children. No. As it was, she barely exchanged words with the man. There was something evil in this magnificent house, and her first and only duty—both as an employee and as a mother herself—was the safety of the children.

She checked the cabinet over the built-in wine cooler, but the box of Pulmicort was empty, just as she had dreaded. She had to go down to the basement pantry. At the top of the curling, carpeted stairs, she paused and pulled from her bag her black enameled crucifix. She descended with it at her side just in case. From the bottom step, the basement appeared very dark for that time of day. She flipped up every switch on the panel and stood listening after the lights came on.

They called it the basement, but it was actually another fully appointed floor of their home. They had installed a home theater downstairs, complete with theater chairs and a reproduction popcorn cart. Another subroom was jammed with toys and game tables; another was the laundry where Mrs. Guild kept up with the family’s clothing and linens. There was also a fourth bathroom, the pantry, and a recently installed temperature-controlled wine cellar. It was European in style, the workers having broken through the basement foundation to create a pure dirt floor.

The heat came rumbling on with a sound like that of somebody kicking the furnace—the actual working guts of the basement were hidden behind a door somewhere—and the sound nearly sent Neeva through the ceiling. She turned back to the stairs, but the boy needed his nebulizer medicine, his color wasn’t good.

She crossed the basement determinedly, and was between two leather theater chairs, halfway to the folding door of the pantry, when she noticed the stuff stacked up against the windows. Why it had seemed so dark down there in the middle of the day: toys and old packing cartons were arranged in a tower up the wall, obscuring the small windows, with old clothes and newspapers snuffing out every ray of the day’s sun.

Neeva stared, wondering who had done this. She hurried to the pantry, finding Keene’s asthma medicine stacked on the same steel-wire shelf as Joan’s vitamins and tubs of candy-colored Tums. She pulled down two long boxes of the plastic vials, ignoring the rest of the food in her haste, rushing away without closing the door.

Starting back across the basement, she noticed that the door to the laundry room was ajar. Something about that door, which was never left open, represented the disruption of normal order that Neeva felt so palpably in this house.

She saw rich and dark dirt stains on the plush carpeting then, spaced almost like footprints. Her eye followed them to the wine cellar door she had to pass in order to reach the stairs. She saw soil smeared on the door handle.

Neeva felt it as she neared the wine cellar door. From that earthen room, a tomblike blackness. A soullessness. And yet—not a coldness. Instead, a contradictory warmth. A heat, lurking and seething.

The door handle began to turn as she rushed past it to the stairs. Neeva, a fifty-three-year-old woman with bad knees, her feet as much kicking at the steps as running up them. She stumbled, steadying herself against the wall with her hand, the crucifix gouging out a small chunk of plaster. Something was behind her, coming up the stairs at her. She yelled in Creole as she emerged into the sunlit first floor, running the length of the long kitchen, grabbing her handbag, knocking over the Food Emporium bag, snacks and drinks crashing to the floor, too scared to turn back.

The sight of her mother running screaming from the house in her ankle-length floral dress and black shoes brought Sebastiane out of her car. “No!” yelled her mother, motioning her back inside. She ran as if she was being chased, but in fact there was no one behind her. Sebastiane dropped back into her seat, alarmed.

“Mama, what happened?”

“Drive!” Neeva yelled, her large chest heaving, her eyes still wild, focused on the open side door.

“Mama,” said Sebastiane, putting the car into reverse. “This is kidnapping. They have laws. Did you call the husband? You said you would call the husband.”

Neeva opened her palm, finding it bloody. She had gripped the beaded crucifix so tightly the crosspiece had cut into her flesh. She let it fall to the floor of the car.