Гильермо дель Торо – The Complete Strain Trilogy: The Strain, The Fall, The Night Eternal (страница 53)

Pain like a motherfucker. Corporeal, all over, his fingertips, his chest, his brain. The pressure went away from his throat, and Mark hung there like a bright white star of effulgent pain.

Neeva pushed open the bedroom door just a sliver, to see that the children were finally asleep. Keene and Audrey Luss lay in sleeping bags on the floor next to her own granddaughter Narushta’s bed. The Luss children were all right most of the time—Neeva, after all, had been their sole daytime caretaker since Keene was four months old—but they had both cried tonight. They missed their beds. They wanted to know when they could go home, when Neeva would take them back. Sebastiane, Neeva’s daughter, was constantly asking how long until the police came and knocked down their door. But it was not the police coming for them that concerned Neeva.

Sebastiane had been born in the United States, educated in United States schools, stamped with an American arrogance. Neeva took her daughter back to Haiti once each year, but it was not home to her. She rejected the old country and its old ways. She rejected old knowledge because new knowledge was so shiny and neat. But Sebastiane making her mother out to be a superstitious fool was almost more than Neeva could take. Especially since, by acting as she had, saving these two spoiled yet potentially redeemable children, she had placed the members of her own family at risk.

Though she had been raised a Roman Catholic, Neeva’s maternal grandfather was Vodou and a village bokor, which is a kind of houngan, or priest—some call them sorcerers—who practices magic, both the benevolent kind and the dark kind. Though he was said to bear a great ashe (wield much spiritual power), and dabbled often with healing zombi astrals—that is, capturing a spirit in a fetish (an inanimate object)—he never attempted the darkest art, that of reanimating a corpse, raising a zombie from a dead body whose soul has departed. He never did so because he said he had too much respect for the dark side, and that crossing that infernal border was a direct affront to the loa, or the spirits of the Vodou religion, akin to saints or angels who act as intermediaries between man and the indifferent Creator. But he had participated in services that were a kind of back-country exorcism, righting the wrongs of other wayward houngan, and she had accompanied him, and had seen the face of the undead.

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