Audrey’s Door (34 page)

T
he door opened. The Breviary screamed in pain and joy. On the other side of the door were the monsters, at last. Spiderlike Edgar Schermerhorn was up front. Behind him were Loretta Parker, Evvie Waugh, Francis Galton, and the rest of the tenants, too. And then, to the left, shadow versions of Audrey Lucas and Saraub Ramesh. Their likeness was unmistakable, only their joints were rounded and their eyes were black. They walked on four legs.

She understood then what was behind the door. Humanity’s dark, soulless twins. Cast off by reason and consequence but always searching for ways to return, be it through the subtlety of sickness or the enormity of a door. They were shaped like insects because insects are the only animals that have no souls.

Snarling, they pushed against the boundaries that trapped them inside the door, which would collapse as
soon as The Breviary died. From its groans of pain, perhaps even The Breviary regretted what it had done.

“Stupid building. I’m the boss. Me!” Loretta cried. Then she charged the door and somehow raced through its aperture. Her arms were opened wide, as if to give Schermerhorn a hug, but it was her opposite Loretta who caught her, and took the first bite. The rest helped. They pulled her apart. Unsocial creatures, none voluntarily shared.

The building smoldered. Chips of plaster fell, and the door rocked inside its frame. Francis Galton was the next to race through the opening. The same fate greeted him. This time it was Schermerhorn who caught him. The dark, spiderlike Schermerhorn she’d met upon Jayne’s death, who’d consumed his human counterpart and had lived here ever since, guiding The Breviary’s hand.

“Run!” Evvie Waugh exclaimed, then beat his way backward through the crowd with Edgardo’s cane. Some followed him, others followed Loretta.

The shadow creatures pushed against the opening but so far could only lure the tenants inside, and couldn’t yet break free.

Audrey could not help but look. Behind the monsters was a red-sunned world with dirt instead of grass and air thick as ashes. Her shadow twin was hunched, with hard features and narrow, ungenerous eyes.

She realized she’d seen this thing before, only back then, she hadn’t recognized it. Hinton, 1992.

“We’ve got to break the door,” Saraub said, as the tenants scurried down the hall or else flung themselves inside the door. He lifted the rebar with one of his broken arms. His own shadow self retained his features but stood only as tall as a child. A stunted thing, it sucked its thumb.

“No, it’ll collapse before it can open,” she told him. “We just have to get out.”

He grimaced. “I have to take it down,” he said, and
she understood that what he meant was, every second it stands is an abomination.

Another tenant screamed as she walked through the door. And another. She didn’t hear the sound of smacking lips, or grunts. Even these would have marked a human kind of delight.

The floor beneath them buckled. Saraub advanced too slowly. She took the rebar from him. “Let me.”

As she approached the door, she thought about what she’d forgotten in Hinton. Bloody-necked, she’d escaped her mother’s knife and bent down over the hole to help dig. One clump of dirt, another. And then, a face. Frantic, she’d clawed more dirt and so had Betty, until they’d unearthed the thing.

Black-eyed Audrey Lucas had peered back at them. Human-sized, a grown woman aged before her time, it had
scritch-scratched
with fingers worn to bones against the floor it was trapped beneath. Though she hadn’t recognized it as her twin, in her drunken horror, she’d screamed.

It was Betty who’d stabbed it with her knife. First slitting its throat, then cutting off its head. It was then that the red ants had swelled up from the ground and filled the kitchen while Audrey and her mother had stomped. They’d chewed flesh and blood and bones, until every last bit of the monster was gone.

By the time the ants had finished, she’d forgotten. Maybe it had been too terrible. Maybe it was a secret humans weren’t meant to know.

The red ants were not the imaginary symptom of madness, like she’d always believed. They were the gatekeepers that kept the shadow world and the hopeful world separate. Her mother, attuned to both places, had heard Audrey’s monster that day and murdered it. And then she’d fled, to escape her own monster.

Audrey swung the rebar. Hard. One hit was all it took because she knew that the top left corner of the frame
was the weakest part. The trapped things wailed in fury as the frame crashed down. The cruciform handle tumbled end to end.

She and Saraub backed away. Together, they scrambled down the hall. Behind them, ants swarmed the room. Wood chips, boxes, the air mattress, the ivories, torn old clothes, they chewed and chewed. Gnawing, gnawing, until all remnants of the door were gone.

They stumbled down the hall, where the rest of The Breviary’s wild-eyed tenants wandered, aimless. Thick smoke filled the air. By now their bodies were so deformed that they looked identical to their shadow selves. Before she and Saraub started down the stairs, Audrey glanced back once. The entire den was squirming with red.

They gave up trying to limp down the steps, and instead got down on their bottoms and slid. The building creaked and moaned like wheezing breaths. Three more flights—the lobby. At the front doors, they found two police officers in blue uniforms, and behind that, a fire truck. She and Saraub slowed, but kept walking. “Bad fire. Be careful,” she said to one of the firemen as they passed.

“Should we go back?” Saraub asked, panting, once they got to the doorman’s podium. “See if we can help get some of those people out of the building?” His shoulder was bleeding badly, and he needed to go to a hospital.

She shook her head. “No. They’re not worth it.”

Just then the chandelier dropped and the old lobby’s ceiling caved in. Plaster fell. Cops and firemen headed for the exit. With a loud, ear-rattling moan, The Breviary died, trapping the drunks and monsters and gray-haired children within its corpse.

Holding hands, Audrey Lucas and Saraub Ramesh limped out the door and into the world. They did not look back.

Flight

October 27, 2012

Gothamites with keen noses know that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. As by now most readers have heard, the landmark building The Breviary in Manhattan’s tony Morningside Heights went up in flames last night. Eighteen residents, with the aid of New York’s bravest, escaped the towering inferno. Tragically, another thirty-four locked themselves in their apartments, where help could not arrive, and were consumed by the hellfire. The angels must have been watching, though, because not a single cop or fireman was injured.

Fire Chief Warren Otis gave a brief statement this morning, “Preliminary investigations indicate arson at more than one point of origin, with more than one type of incendiary—basically we found evidence of gasoline in the basement, nail polish remover dumped all over the lobby rugs, and lighter fluid and newspaper stuffed on top of burning stove pilots in many of the apartments.” When asked whether the residents had participated in a Jonestown variety mass suicide, he declined comment.

The building was, until recently, privately owned by its blue-blooded occupants, whose median age was eighty-five. Most were related to each other, and all were members of a cult called Chaotic Naturalism. The pseudoreligion predicted a slew of dastardly deeds, such as the death of mankind and a return to the age of beasts. Their masses reputedly took place Monday evenings, in the form of cocktail parties, where they drank the blood of a slaughtered animal. Over the years this ritual apparently proved too onerous, and they converted instead to booze and that rare African delicacy, chocolate-covered ants. Occupants were known for erratic behavior, such as discharging BB guns from their roof, stealing from their cleaning staffs, and making obscene gestures at pedestrians down below.

In keeping with the city’s recent love affair with the maudlin, there will be a five-borough moment of silence at noon today to honor the victims, as well as a memorial service at St. John the Divine. Strangers with time on their hands might also want to add their flowers to the six-foot-high clump of baby’s breath and hydrangea in front of the building’s burnt-out shell.

After the Twenty-sixth Precinct finishes its investigation, the building is slated for demolition. In a new development, it turns out that The Breviary’s residents had recently sold their shares in The Breviary to Columbia University Graduate Student Housing in order to cover back taxes. Several months ago, they received letters
from the University, as well as the city housing authority, asking them to vacate by summer for reasons of public health, which some reporters believe sparked the mass suicide.

This investigation is ongoing. Turn to page 5 for eyewitness accounts.

From
The New York Post

I
t wasn’t a switch, but a button. A November day in Lincoln, the trees out the window were all barren. She straightened Betty’s jagged bangs. Her hands had thinned, and her closed eyes were more sunken. An IV tree fed the tube in her arm.

Audrey knew then why she’d thought her alarm clock read 5:18 that first morning in The Breviary. Because that had been the same time that Betty had entered her coma. It really had been Betty who’d come to her at her darkest hour. She’d broken through Audrey’s dreams to warn her and make her whole again. Because love endures all kinds of things. Hurt, betrayal, hatred, bad luck, and even death. “I love you, Momma,” she said. “I hope you rest well, now.”

The doctor she’d never before met pushed the button, and the respirator slowed, then stopped. The beeping things got quiet. Betty left her flawed, iron-winged body, and Audrey hoped that she was free now, to fly someplace good.

Two days later, she and Saraub boarded a flight from Omaha back to New York. She was wearing his ring
again, and though it had only been a few weeks, in this case the human mind proved resilient. They’d both forgotten much of what had happened, except in nightmares.

Saraub’s film was almost finished, and he was scheduled to spend the winter editing it. He’d decided to include all the material he’d filmed and face a possible lawsuit once he realized that it was Sunshine that was liable, not him personally. After that, like always, he’d find another mountain to climb.

Audrey’s own 59
^th
Street Project had gotten the go-ahead from AIAB, and was under construction. Though she’d been out of the office and Simon had given the presentation, he’d used the new plans he’d found in her cubicle her last night at Vesuvius. Because she’d missed so much work, the Pozzolana brothers had wanted to fire her, but Jill had fought bitterly, not only to keep her aboard but to give her a raise. In the end, the Pozzolanas had buckled though she doubted she’d be staying at Vesuvius for long. She and Jill were talking about starting their own firm and working out of her apartment on the Upper East Side in another year. They’d take David with them.

The flexible hours would come in handy, because that last time she and Saraub had been in Lincoln, they’d conceived more than she’d anticipated. This morning, after her mother’s burial, she took a pregnancy test. Only six weeks along, but Saraub had been too excited to contain himself. When Sheila called him about having Audrey over for dinner, he’d blurted the news. To their surprise, she’d ask to talk to Audrey. “Forgive an old woman. Let’s start over,” she’d blurted into the phone. “Now, what’s your favorite dessert?”

And now, here they were, heading down the runway. It occurred to her that all children inherit their parents’ debts, and it is up to each generation to determine how, or whether, to repay them. Ahead of them was work
and weddings and babies, and dinner tonight with his family for the first time in over a year. Behind them was the hard path that had led them to this good place. And though they were both awed and even frightened by the audacity of the American Airlines 767 as it lifted off into the sky and began to soar, they trusted that it would land safely in New York, where together, they would fill the holes they found there with something better than flowers.