Audrey’s Door (26 page)

A
udrey turned toward 14B and shook her head, as if cleaning it out: what had just happened? The carpet beneath her wobbled. No sleep last night and pills today. Had the lithium precipitated an hallucination? Had that Agnew article existed at all? She was so tired she was dizzy.

She trod over hula girl, poor hula girl. Even her lightbulb was smashed. The door opened without a key.
The
light that shone through its crack made two triangles inside the hall, dark and bright, juxtaposed against each other.

She squinted. Hadn’t she locked it? She couldn’t remember. But she
always
locked her doors. She lingered over the threshold. A part of her was tempted to sit in the common hall and wait for morning. But Clara’s sweatpants—she had to change out of them. And Wolverine needed water. And her wallet. She took a breath, and plunged in.

Her broken ballet flats
tap-tapped
along the fifty-foot hall. She slipped them off as she walked and noticed for the first time why her feet had been so cold all day. Rainwater had seeped through the hula-girl slashes in her shoes.

In the den, everything was how she’d left it. The clothes a loose carpet. The air mattress deflated. The piano shone prettily, and she immediately thought of Saraub singing an off-key “Heart and Soul”:
I fell in love with you madly!
Silly man, he’d sang it like a joke, but he’d meant it for real.

She went to the turret first. Out the window, the M63 opened its doors. Half past one on a stormy Tuesday morning. Passengers spilled out, and umbrellas blossomed like funereal flowers in the swelling rain. She pressed her nose against the stained glass. What if this place wasn’t haunted at all, and this specter she was running from was herself?

“It’s-after-us-Lamb!” Betty had cried that afternoon in Hinton almost twenty years ago. Her hands had dripped blood on the white diamond kitchen floor. In Audrey’s memory, the perfect version of herself, she’d been at school all day. But the truth was, she’d been drinking stolen Canadian Mist behind the restaurant where she washed dishes, then she’d stumbled through town on rubbery legs. When she found Betty with that knife, she’d still been drunk. Not so surprising that Betty hadn’t seemed to recognize her at first, given how different she must have looked from that clean-cut little girl she’d once been in Wilmette.

Would the doctors put her in a straitjacket if she checked into Bellevue? She’d be trapped, just like Betty? Would Bethy from the office find out and spread the news like holy-roller gospel: “Audrey Lucas is NUTS!” Her eyes watered at the thought. Bellevue was surrender. She didn’t want to live if it meant sharing Betty’s
fate. Because the damage in that CAT scan hadn’t happened overnight. No, it had taken years for the meds to bore those holes into her mother’s mind. And the thing is, if you lose your soul that slowly, does it still belong to you?

She decided then. She’d pack her things and leave tonight. She’d take care of herself, like always. If this was all in her head, well, time would tell. But the first step to finding that out was leaving The Breviary.

That was when she noticed that the turret ledge was bare. Where was Wolverine? She surveyed the room. The thing that caught her eye was too disturbing to decipher, so she focused instead on the torn clothes rustling near the heat duct like pigeons’ feathers. At the edge of the air mattress, two pairs of shoes lined up like waltz partners, perfectly even. Her soiled pants, which she’d forgotten to soak or even fold, lay on the floor. A three-foot-long rebar with red gristle caught in its wires leaned against the piano. After looking at these things, her gaze returned to its original object:
the door.

Since she’d left this morning, someone had taken it out of the closet and propped it against the wall behind the piano. It was bigger than when she’d last seen it, before Nebraska. All the loose extra boxes had been taped to its now six-foot-by-eight-foot body, and its handle had been fitted with the hot-water handle from her bathtub. Four rounded spokes like a cross with the letter H in the center.

But the faucet wasn’t the most perverse part of all this. Nor the magically appearing rebar with its gristle, nor the door that she’d clearly improved upon during the night, nor even the realization, as she mapped the distances between apartments and elevator in her mind, that Loretta hadn’t been startled at all. She’d jumped because Audrey had caught her leaving 14B, where she’d pulled the door from the closet and deposited a
rebar. Probably, she’d been the one to put Clara’s sweat suit and glasses in the bureau while Audrey had been out of town, too.

But no, that wasn’t the worst. The worst was this: at the door’s center were two overlapping piles of wet, green mash shaped like oblong wings. They were adhered to the cardboard by tiny, prickling spines. She didn’t want to think it. Oh, how she hoped it was not true. But she remembered now, as if from a dream, what Schermerhorn had told her last night as she’d worked: you have to make your door with things you love, or it will never open.

Her sore pricked fingers suddenly made sense. “Oh, Wolverine, I’m so sorry.”

She saw now how she’d failed. It was the same old tune that had played her whole life though she only realized it now. The Breviary was haunted. The tenants were in on it, perhaps even possessed by it. From the moment she’d set foot in this building, she’d been in danger. She wasn’t crazy and never had been. Just damaged, like everybody else in the world. She’d known these things all along, just like she’d known twenty years ago that she had to leave Betty and start a life of her own. But she’d never trusted herself enough to follow those instincts, and because of that, she’d made a lot of really stupid mistakes.

It was time to leave this place and never look back.

That was when the wall she was leaning against began to hum. The low pitch carried a syncopation that sounded like Schermerhorn’s voice:
Audrey,
it whispered.

She did not take stock, or wait for another word, or wonder if she was imagining, or even search for her shoes. She ran for the door. Her third step, she tripped over the air mattress, then crab-walked backward out of the den.

The floors and walls hummed soft and soothing. The tickle diffused through her skin, up her bloodstream,
and into her chest and mind, where it woke the wriggling worm.
Shhh, Audrey. Don’t leave us,
he chided.
Stop running away for once in your life.
The accent wasn’t British like she’d thought, just old-fashioned and sophisticated, like he’d been educated on the Continent in the 1840s.

She moved fast. And then the floors rumbled:
Audrey, darling.
This time it wasn’t just Schermerhorn, but Clara, the children (Keith! Olivia! Kurt! Deirdre!), Loretta Parker, Martin Hearst, Evvie Waugh, and Francis Galton. The other tenants, dead and living, too. All different pitches, so dissonant as to be harmonious, but none quite human. It reminded her of the summertime language of locusts.

She scooted faster. Vibrations roared through the floor, met the tips of her fingers and traveled back to her chest. Hot and terrible. The worm chewed. She felt it climb up her gut and expand in her chest, wriggling.

And then, in the den, projector lights flickered. Against the cardboard door, a black-and-white film still shone. The picture showed a split-level ranch house and broken picket fence. A blond man and pretty woman with long, dark hair and dimples. They held a mewing infant in their arms.

Audrey stopped to look. The image shook slightly, but she knew what it contained. Her family before it got broken.
Audrey,
a voice called through the walls and floors and even the air of 14B, only this time, its sound offered comfort. Tears came to her eyes. This time it was Betty.

“Momma?” Audrey asked. The black-and-white image zoomed in on the woman and child. The man disappeared. So did the house, with its broken picket fence. In the picture, tiny red ants crawled across the baby’s skin.

Finish the door, Audrey, so we can always be together.
The vibrations murmured through the floors, caressing
her hands and knees like a warm blanket, while against the door, Betty’s image was mute. Only her eyes moved. They followed Audrey like a Cheshire Cat clock.

The worm gnawed on her organs, tiny little bites. “You’re not my mother. Betty’s gone. She abandoned me,” Audrey sniffled.

You forgot your promise, but I didn’t. I kept that second-grade picture. You and me, forever. You betrayed me, Lamb. You left me alone in that terrible place. But I forgive you. Finish the door,
Betty answered.

The hall light flickered, then went out. Everything got dark, except for the image of Betty holding a baby. The camera zoomed closer. Pretty dimples, vacant smile. Audrey remembered the CAT scan, and the black wings, and that red-ant day in Hinton, when her whole life changed.

“It was your madness chasing us. It was never after me, Momma, because I’m not crazy,” Audrey whispered.

It was you, Audrey,
the walls echoed with Betty’s voice.

She remembered that day twenty years ago. There was more to the story than she’d always allowed herself to believe.

Betty’s knife against her throat. Beads of blood. “Shhhh, Momma,” drunken young Audrey had whispered, when she’d finally mustered the courage to speak. “Shhhhh. It’s your Audrey.”

Betty had lowered the knife a little, but not far enough. So Audrey had put her fingers between the blade and her skin, then eased down until she’d knelt over the broken floor. “I’ll help, Momma,” she’d said. “Look. We’ll work together.” And so, she’d lifted a clump of dirt. She’d put holes in her own house, just to pacify her maniac mother.

“Look! There’s the monster!” Betty had cried twenty years ago, only it hadn’t been a monster—but an ant
hive, from which an angry swarm had risen. Biting. Biting. They’d flooded the white tiles. Audrey had stamped her feet until the floor was red while Betty had fled. When it was over, the floor was a mess of gore, as if Audrey had done murder.

The cop that showed up hadn’t just told her to wear turtlenecks, either. He’d written down the number for a children’s shelter. But like always, she’d stayed, and cleaned up the mess, and when Betty returned six weeks later sporting an oozing Playboy Bunny tattooed to her shoulder and a bad case of hep C in the making, she’d cleaned that up, too.

“That’s why we always ran, Momma. The ants were always chasing your holes. It had nothing to do with me,” Audrey now said as she changed direction, and crawled knee over knee back into the den. Betty’s Cheshire eyes went left, then right. Left, then right.

I miss you baby,
the walls answered in Betty’s voice as the camera zoomed closer. From the bottom of the black and white image tiny insects began to crawl. The baby squealed.

“You were sick, Momma. You were no good to me or anybody else,” she said, because she wished she’d said it back then instead of always playing along to keep the peace. Always pretending things were okay, even while her wrists had made a bathtub pink.

The ants covered the baby’s swollen face as it raged. The image was still, but the sound carried through the floors and walls. A weeping, furious wail.

We’re trapped in here, Lamb. Get us out,
Betty said as the image zoomed, and the baby disappeared.
If you build the door, we’ll go back to Wilmette, before the red ants came. Just you and me. We’ll live there forever, and you can always be my baby. Build the door.

Sobbing, Audrey covered her ears. The camera zoomed closer. Now it was only Betty, thirty-four years
ago. Pretty, with the world at her feet. Against the still frame, an ant darted across the white of her eye, and her skin wriggled.

Audrey touched the image against cardboard. It was soft, like her mother’s skin. With her free hand, she lifted the rebar. A steel pole wrapped inside tense, sharp wire. Its opposite end was clogged with fleshy chunks of what looked like rust.

Nobody loves you like we do. Nobody ever will. They’ll leave you, everyone one of them. Saraub. Jill. Even Jayne is already gone. But we’re here, Lamb of mine.

If she smashed the rebar against the piano, she could use the wood to build a sturdy frame. But they’d known that, hadn’t they? Loretta and the inhabitants of The Breviary. That’s why they’d left her this bloody present. That’s why they’d asked her about Saraub; they’d wanted to make sure she was alone. That’s why they’d let her live here for so cheap, and why Edgardo was missing: he’d warned her.

Aren’t you tired of fighting? No one else has had to work so hard for so little. You deserve this. Build the door, and you can rest. Momma will take care of you.

Audrey looked at the cardboard construction and realized that it was wrong. Too perfectly flat, too sturdy. It didn’t adhere to The Breviary’s skews. Just like her dream of Clara’s door, it would fall apart as soon as it opened. It needed curves, and functional chaos. It needed an architect instead of an opera singer, or a snotty author of personal histories. She smiled when she understood that 14B had picked her because it meant she was the most special girl.

Audrey hoisted the heavy rebar. The image zoomed closer. Ants scurried. Offscreen, an infant squawked, as if being burned. Betty’s face sagged. Her eyes turned black. Something was inside her, wearing her skin like a coat.

Do it now, Audrey. There’s not much time. Even buildings have their beginnings and ends.

Audrey blinked. Looked out the window at the driving rain. At her hands, full of tiny cactus wounds. Remembered the dream she’d had the night Betty died, “Better run, Lamb.” And those red ants in Hinton, she’d forgotten them, but they’d been real. They’d come out from a nest beneath the floor. Maybe it was even true that they’d followed Betty to every town, because not everyone is lucky enough to be born whole. Maybe some demons are real.

I got tired of fighting, Lamb,
the note had read.

She understood then that this thing was not her mother. Nor was it Clara, or the tenants, or even Schermerhorn. This thing that called to her was The Breviary. But there was something The Breviary didn’t know because she had not guessed it herself, until now.