Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (56 page)

    They owned the top floor of the five-storey building. They'd had a fleet of architects and construction crews come in and bang down walls and shore up doorways and put in flamboyant filigreed arches. In the end they were left with sixteen rooms. I'd been inside their place but never gotten a grand tour. I'd mostly stuck to the bathrooms and fixed the toilet when it broke. I imagined the library, the den, the sun room, the bedroom. I didn't know of sixteen different types of rooms. Was there a ballroom? A music room? A solarium? I had a passkey to all the apartments in Stark House, even theirs, but I'd somehow managed to resist the temptation to comb through their home.

    The other four storeys were inhabited by elderly, faded film and television stars, one-hit pop song wonders, and other forgotten former celebrities who'd become short-lived cultural icons for reasons ranging from the noble to the ludicrous. They were mostly shut-ins who every so often would skulk about the halls for reasons unknown or appear, momentarily, in their darkened doorways, maybe give a wave before retreating.

    We had the guy who'd invented aluminium foil. We had a lady who'd given mouth-to-mouth to a former president's son after a pile-up on I-95 and saved his life. We had a performance artist/environmentalist who'd appeared on national television after soaking in a tub of toxic waste in front of the Museum of Modern Art twenty years ago. He was still alive even though there was only about forty per cent of him left after all the surgery. He rolled around the corridors with half a face, tumour packed, sucking on an oxygen tube.

    Corben shouted some more. It sounded like he said, "Radiant Face". It was the title of his first book. He was going through his bibliography again. I sat on the stairs and lit a cigarette. The old loves and hates heaved around in my chest. I looked around the lobby trying to figure out why I was doing this to myself. Why I was no smarter than him when it came to bucking fate.

    Our story was as flatly cliched and uninteresting as it was honest and full of bone and pain. To me, anyway. Corben and I had been childhood best friends. We'd gotten our asses kicked by neighbourhood thugs and spent two nights in jail trying hard to act tough and be strong and not huddle too closely together. We nearly sobbed with relief the afternoon they let us out. We'd encouraged each other as neophyte novelists and helped one another to hone our craft. I'd taken thirty-seven stitches in bar fights for him, and he'd broken his left arm and gotten a concussion for me. We aced entrance exams to the same Ivy League University.

    It was a righteous partnership that went south our junior year in college. We were both getting drunk a lot around then. It had something to do with an older woman, perhaps. I had the memory blocked, or maybe it just bored me too much too care anymore, but I couldn't recall the details. Perhaps she was mine and he took her away, or maybe she was his and wound up on my arm or in my bed. However it played out it released a killing flood of repressed jealousy and animosity from both of us and we didn't see each other again for thirteen years.

    We settled in to write our novels. His career caught on with his second book, a thriller about a father chasing down the criminals who stole the donated heart on ice the guy needed for his son's transplant. I liked the book in spite of myself. When it sold to the movies it became a major hit that spawned several sequels. He ripped himself off with a similar novel that dealt with a mob hit-man chasing a crippled girl who needed to get to the hospital within thirty-six hours to get the operation that might let her walk again. It aced the bestseller list for six months. Corben got a cameo in the movie version. He was the kindly doctor who sticks the little metal prod in the girl's foot and makes her big toe flinch.

    My own books sold slowly and poorly. They received a generous amount of praise and critical comments, but not much fanfare. I brooded and got into stupid scrapes trying to prove myself beyond the page. I couldn't. Corben assailed me in every bookstore, every library, every time I checked the bestseller list. I wrote maudlin tales that sold to literary rags. I won awards and made no money. I took part-time jobs where I could find them. I delivered Chinese food. I taught English as a second language, I ran numbers for a local bookie until he got mopped up in a state-wide sting. I kept the novels coming but their advances and sales were pitiful.

    There were women but none of them mattered much. I never fell in love. I wrote thrillers, I wrote mysteries featuring my heroic PI King Carver. I didn't copy Corben but I was surprised at how similar our tastes and capabilities were. I thought my shit blew away his shit.

    Thirteen years went by like that, fast but without much action. I lucked into the job as a manager/handyman of Stark House. I lived in Apartment "A", a studio nearest the basement. So near it was actually
in
the fucking basement. It was the basement. I hadn't sold a novel in almost two years. I kept writing them and sending them to my agent. The rejection letters grew shorter and more tersely formal as time went on. I'd lost what little momentum I might've ever had. Eventually all the manuscripts came back and I stacked them on the floor of my closet hoping I might one day have the courage to burn them.

    Maybe I had been waiting for Corben, or maybe he'd been waiting for me.

    We used to walk past Stark House when we were kids and discuss the history of the building. It had always accommodated misfits of one sort or another. There were rumours about it a little more cryptic and wondrous than the rumours about every other building.

    In the late nineteenth century it had been owned by a family of brilliant eccentrics who'd turned out scientists, senators, and more than a few madmen. A number of murders occurred on the premises. Local legends grew about the shadow men who served the politicians. They said the Stark family carried bad blood.

    In the early twentieth century the place had been converted to apartments and became home to a famous opera singer, a celebrity husband and wife Broadway acting team, and a bootlegger who'd made a fortune from prohibition. They said there were secret walls. I searched but never found any. The place still called to life a certain glamour nearly lost through time. The wide staircase bisecting the lobby gave the impression of romantic leading men sweeping their lovers upstairs in a swirl of skirts, trains, and veils. The original chandelier still hung above as it had for over a hundred years and I waited for the day it tore from its supports and killed us all.

    I knew Corben would eventually try to buy the building. I was lucky to have gotten in before him. Even his wealth couldn't purchase Stark House outright. When he and I finally met face to face again after all those years, neither one of us showed any surprise at all. We didn't exchange words. We shared similar blank, expressionless features. He must've mentioned something to his wife later on because I caught her staring at me on occasion, almost as if she had plenty of questions for me but didn't want to trespass on such a mystery-laden history.

    It made perfect sense to me that I would fall in love with Gabriella Corben virtually the moment I met her.

    Upstairs, Corben screamed, "Wild Under Heaven! Ancient Shadows!" I never quite understood what kind of point he was trying to make when he ran through his list of titles. Gabriella spoke sternly and more stuff got knocked over. I heard him sob. It gave me no pleasure hearing it. Finally a door slammed and another opened. The corners of the building echoed with the small sounds of the lurking outcast phantoms slinking in and out of shadow. The old-fashioned elevator buzzed and hummed, moving between the second and third floors. I heard footsteps coming down the stairs, and she was there.

    I briefly glanced at Gabriella Corben and gave a noncommittal grin. She moved halfway down the staircase and sat in the middle of the carpeted step, her elbows on her knees, watching me. She wouldn't discuss their argument and wouldn't mention him at all. She never did.

    My hidden unrequited love was a secret even from her. Or perhaps not. She was perceptive and understanding and probably knew my heart as well as she understood her husband's, which might've been entirely or might've been not at all. He and I still weren't that different. He was up there screaming out loud and I was down here braying inside.

    I went about my business. I did my work. I waited for her to say what she wanted to say and I willed the muscles in my back not to twitch.

    I knew what I would see if I dared to look over my shoulder. A woman of twenty-five, comfortable beneath the finish of her own calm, with glossy curling black hair draped loosely to frame her face. Lightly freckled from the summer sun, her eyes a rich hazel to offset the glowing brown of her skin. Her body slim but full, her presence assured. I caught a whiff of her perfume combined with the heady, earthy scent of her sweat beneath it. I must've looked like a maniac, polishing one foot of banister over and over, so damn afraid to turn around.

    Where she went a kind of light travelled. She carried it with her. It lifted my heart and left me stunned. It was a feeling I wasn't accustomed to and for a long while I fought against it. I had learned to live with resentment instead of romance. It was my preferred state of being until she came along. Now I burned in silence.

    She said, almost sleepily, "You ever wonder what it would be like if you could dig down through all the layers of polish, the paint and wax, peeling back the years, say going in a half-inch deep, to a different time, and see what life here might've been like back then?"

    A half-inch deep. Probably eighty years. "I suspect you'd find a lot of the same."

    "Really?"

    "Life wasn't so different. Maybe you wouldn't trip over a guy who sat in toxic waste in front of the MOMA, but there'd be somebody comparable, I bet."

    "What could be comparable to that?"

    I shrugged. "A lunatic juggling hand grenades. A World War I vet used to panhandle out front here back in the 1920s, and if he didn't make enough coin he'd chase people around with a bayonet. He spooked the neighbours on the other side of the street by flipping around one of those German hand grenades."

    She waited but that was all I knew about it. Most tales about real people only had a modicum of interest to them, and no real ending. I didn't want to lose her attention and said, "There's always been plenty of crazy."

    "I think you're right. How about the rest of it?"

    "The rest of it?"

    "Life. Lots of happiness? Beauty? Romance?"

    "Sure. This lobby is so nice that there's been a lot of weddings performed right here, at the foot of the stairwell. The publicity shots were gorgeous. They'd have horse and carriages lined up out in the street, and after the ceremony the wedding party would hop in, ride over to Fifth Avenue and down past St Patrick's Cathedral. If the families of the bride or groom had enough pull, they could get the cardinal's okay to have the church bells ring as the carriages went by."

    "That must've been lovely."

    Dorothy Parker and one of her lovers used to drunkenly chase each other through the halls of Stark House in the raw, but that didn't quite have the right kind of romance I was going for. "A couple of silent film stars met on the fifth floor back in the 1920s. They split their time between Los Angeles and New York and lived next door to each other for a couple of years before ever meeting."

    "Which apartments?"

    By that she meant,
Which of my room?
"I don't know."

    "Okay, go on."

    "When they did run into each other here it was supposedly love at first sight. They got engaged a week later. The press went nuts with it. They made five movies together too."

    "I think I heard about that. Didn't they commit suicide? Jumped off the roof?"

    I was hoping to skip that part. Corben had told her more about the place than I thought he might. Or should've. Or maybe she'd been talking to some of the other tenants, though I couldn't figure out which of the shut-ins might actually chat with someone else.

    "Yeah, when sound came in. They both sounded too Brooklyn, and no matter what they did they couldn't get rid of the accent."

    "Death by Brooklyn," she said. "How sad." She put her hand on the banister and floated it down inch by inch until she'd almost reached the spot I was polishing. She tapped it with her nail. The length of her nail, a half-inch, eighty years. "I've heard there's been even more tragedy as well."

    "Of course. Plenty of births, you get plenty of deaths."

    "And not all of it by natural means certainly."

    "Why do you want to hear about this stuff?" I asked. For the first time I looked directly at her, and as usual, the lust and the ache swept through me. She pulled a face that meant that Corben had been talking up the house history and she wanted a different viewpoint.

    "Murder's pretty natural," I told her. "I don't know if that guy ever bayoneted anyone or if the hand grenade ever went off, but there's been a few grudges that ended with a knife or a handgun. One guy pushed his brother down the elevator shaft, and one of the scientists blew himself and his dog to hell mixing up some concoction."

    "Scientists?"

    "Some scientists used to live here."

    "And their dogs."

    "Well," I said, "yeah."