Night’s Edge (25 page)

“I must have sleepwalked.” Tessa pulled the thick cotton quilt tighter around herself, shivering as if she would shake her bones loose. “Jesus, I’ve
never
sleepwalked that far! My dad told me I once got out of the house and halfway down the block, when I was about six. I don’t remember that. But this time I woke up like in those crazy dreams, where you go to school in your pajamas, only it was for real. I was up in Phil’s studio….”

Maddie’s eyes widened and snapped to the man kneeling at Tessa’s feet. She must have made some sound or move, because he looked up, met her furious gaze.

Saw the thought that screamed,
Oh, yeah?

And she saw his startled, almost disbelieving shock that she’d suspect him of…what?

Kidnapping Tessa out of her apartment?

The absurdity of the suspicion doused her anger—and her suspicious demand,
And what were
you
doing happening along just at that moment…?
—and she said, “Thank you,” and meant it. She drew a couple of deep breaths, trying to force herself calm. “You look frozen.
There’s another blanket in that chest over there. You both look like you need some cocoa.”

Phil got to his feet, his cheekbones red. “I’m okay.” He sounded like he, too, was keeping his voice neutral with an effort. “I better let you get her to bed….”

“No.” Maddie stepped quickly to intercept him on the way to the door. “Please. I’ll make you some cocoa,” she repeated softly. “Is that your only coat you lent her?”

Phil nodded, looking down into her face. His own anger faded as he saw her look of mortified remorse. He followed her around the end of the counter, into the so-called kitchen, which was in fact a nook about the size of Maddie’s mother’s dining room table back in Baton Rouge. “I was just coming back from the Met,” he said.
“La Bohème
—if you’re up in the nosebleed seats they don’t care what you wear. When I saw her from down the street I thought she was some poor crazy woman, the kind you see wandering around the subways in housecoats with crocheted afghans wrapped around them. Then I got close and saw who it was. She was just about unconscious with the cold….”

“I know she sleepwalks.” While the milk was slowly warming Maddie dug the cocoa out of one sealed container and the sugar out of another, and a package of marshmallows out of a third, even the cleanest of New York apartments being what they are. “She tried to get out of here the other night. And I just…” She hesitated, looking up at him, wondering how the hell she could explain the shadow in the hallway. The deep-seated sense of danger that haunted her dreams.

Phil leaned a shoulder against the corner of the cupboard and folded his arms. “You don’t think much
of men, do you?” There was no mockery in his voice, no scorn. Just a question.

Maddie said, “No, I know I don’t. I’m sorry.”
I’m sorry I immediately assumed you were a stalker, a kidnapper, and a rapist. My bad
.

“Are you a dyke?” He used the word as he would have used any other, without venom or judgment, just a question. A one-syllable word instead of a three.

She shook her head, the gaudy jewels in her long hair glittering. “Just a survivor.”

He nodded. The comprehension in his eyes was like the glimpse of a scar.

They stood for a minute looking at each other in the cold, white glare of the single fluorescent light over the stove.

Quietly, Maddie said, “That night I first met you, when Tessa was wandering around on the sixth floor,
did
you see or hear anyone else in the building? I asked you that before, and I think you ducked the question.”

Phil was silent for a long time, the only sound in the kitchen the whisper of the wooden spoon as Maddie stirred the slow-heating milk in its pan. Then he said, “When you read tarot cards, does that mean you’re psychic?”

Maddie shook her head. “Sometime—if you’re interested—I’ll explain why I think the tarot works, when it works. But you don’t have to have second sight or be able to see auras or anything. They just…work.” She said nothing for a time, swishing the spoon back and forth in the milk, then asked, “Have you seen something in the building?”

“No.” Phil answered very quickly and looked away from her as he did so. Maddie said nothing.

After a long time he said, “You mean like a ghost?”
and this time there was a biting note in his voice that spoke of all his feelings about the inherent bull of the supernatural.

And that spoke more deeply still of fear.

“I don’t know what I mean,” replied Maddie quietly. “What do
you
mean?”

Phil drew in his breath, let it out. His face in profile was expressionless, except for a small line in one corner of his mouth. He said, “I haven’t seen a ghost. I haven’t seen anything.” He shifted his arms, one hand cupping his chin so that the fingers half hid his mouth, concealed the telltale line. “It’s just I have these dreams.”

“Since you’ve been sleeping in the building?”

He nodded, and his breath drew in, then rushed out as if he were trying to flush out some darkness inside. Then his eye went past her and he half grinned. “You’re going to lose that milk.” Maddie turned quickly, shifted the pan from the stove and began stirring in cocoa and sugar. Phil stepped closer, looking down over her shoulder admiringly. “You’re the first person I’ve met since I left Tulsa who makes it the real way.”

“Down on the bayou
everybody
makes cocoa the real way. I heard tell from some Yankee once something about powder and microwaves, but I didn’t believe it. There’re things even Yankees couldn’t possibly do.”

“Don’t trust us, Miss Scarlett.” Phil shook his head as she handed him a mug. “We’re capable of anything.”

Maddie picked up her own mug and Tessa’s, but when they carried them back into the living room they found Tessa curled up under the blankets, still wearing Phil’s dilapidated pea coat, sound asleep. Phil switched off the main light and carried the cocoa back to the kitchen, where Maddie flicked on one of the fake
candle-flame lamps she’d bought for a Halloween party a few years ago—the lowest light she could manage—and turned off the fluorescent light over the stove.

“Can I have her marshmallow?” asked Phil, and Maddie obligingly scooped it into his mug. They settled on the floor of the kitchen, lamp and cups between them, and Phil shrugged out of his sweater and one of the flannel shirts. She saw under the second one the rumpled white dress shirt he must have worn to the opera, and around his neck a loosened black satin tie. At the same time she noted that none of his clothes smelled of tobacco, the stench she remembered in the mix of smells that had hung around the whisperer.

Sweat and cologne could be cleaned away from clothing, cigar smoke almost never.

She drew in her breath, feeling as if she were slowly prying her fingers away from their grip on mistrust.

She had spent enough years reading the cards—dealing with people who had exhausted rational explanations for their feelings—to know that all this time while they’d been joking and kidding, he was working himself up to go back and look into the dark box of his dreams.

“The first week I was sleeping there I walked through the halls of that building six, seven times a night,” he said in time. “Turning on lights, listening…And there was nobody there. Then I’d go back to my studio and double and triple lock the door—I’ll take you up sometime and show you the burglar bar and chains I got for it. That was before I realized what I was hearing was just dreams, those awful dreams where you think you’re awake.”

He spoke with his face turned slightly away, talking to the air, as if he were answering questions in a military debriefing.

“What did you dream about?”

“Girls. Not like you think,” he added, with a faint gleam of humor, and Maddie shook her head. “Sometimes I just hear their voices, or hear them crying. Once I heard—I thought I heard—one of them say ‘Stop it,’ or ‘Don’t touch me,’ something like that…. And I heard him laugh.”

“Who laugh?”

“I don’t know. A man. Then I wake up and there’s nothing.” He looked again at her sidelong, not as if he expected she wouldn’t believe him—she was pretty sure he knew she would—but as if he expected some reaction that would turn his dream into mockery in his own eyes.

Maddie asked, “Where are you in the dreams?”

Whatever reaction he’d expected—possibly a long account of
her
supernatural dreams and how she knew they were part of some past life experience, something Maddie had frequently encountered when speaking of the world of dreams—the matter-of-fact question seemed to reassure him.

“In my studio,” he said. “That’s the creepy thing. I’m in my sleeping bag on the floor and I can see the piano and the tape machine and the laptop and the boxes, everything exactly the way it really is. But I hear these girls crying—and I swear to you it sometimes sounds like they’re right outside the door. And I hear this…this
bastard
chuckle, or sometimes words I can’t make out. A couple of nights ago I heard him say, yell, ‘You little sluts are all alike,’ and it sounded like he was about three feet away, in the room with me.”

He raked his fingers through his hair, rubbed the back of his neck, a gesture she’d seen him make before.

“Other times it’s far off. Or it’s just footsteps. Foot
steps overhead, only I know there’s nothing overhead…My studio’s on the top floor.” He shrugged.

“The first time I heard anything—I think it was the third night I slept there—it was…” He frowned, piecing together exactly what he had heard, or dreamed he’d heard. “That was weird. I did that dream-you’re-awake number—which I’ve had maybe twice or three times in my entire life—and I heard this sound, this metallic rattling and pounding, like something being shaken or hammered on. Then I woke up sweating, and it was quiet. But I got up and got my flashlight and went out to look, and I went all around the halls switching on lights. And I not only didn’t see anything that made the noise, but I didn’t see anything that
could
have made a noise like that.”

He finished his cocoa, set the cup on the floor between them, his long arms wrapped around his knees. The flickering orange of the artificial candlelight hid his eyes in shadow, but Maddie saw by the drawn look of their corners that there were memories uglier still.

“So about a week ago I dream about a fire. I dream I’m caught in this dark place, and there’s smoke everywhere and I can’t breathe. Lines of fire run along the wood floor and up the walls. And I’m scared. I don’t know when I’ve been that scared in a dream.” He looked down at the floor, turned his mug so that the handle lined up with the lines in the linoleum of the floor.

“These girls are all around me, tripping over these big tables down the center of the room, trying to get out of there. And there’s no way out. The stuff on the tables is all catching fire, and sparks and bits of burning stuff are swirling around in the air. One girl I remember—her skirt caught fire, long skirts down to the floor….”

His voice cracked and he shook his head, trying to rid it of images that would not go away.

“Jesus, it was awful, and so goddamn clear. I look around for some way to help them, to get them out of there, but I can’t. The girls all run to this door, this metal door, and try to open it. But it’s locked. They’re all shaking it and hammering on it and screaming, and I realize that’s the noise I heard, the rattling of the metal door as they pounded on it with their fists.

“Some of them jump out the windows,” he finished softly. “Through the smoke I can see the roofs across the street, and it’s high up, seven or eight floors. But there’s no other way out.”

He stared straight ahead of him, his hands folded in front of his mouth again, fear and horror at what he had seen like a darkness in his eyes. After a while, he said, “I don’t know where I got all that from. Too many video clips of 9/11, maybe.”

Maddie shook her head, trying not to see the nightmare that his words summoned to her mind. “That’s not what it sounds like,” she said quietly. “It sounds to me like the building is haunted. There may have been a fire there years ago….”

“Yeah. Right.” The twist of Phil’s mouth was sardonic again. “So who we gonna call?”

Maddie didn’t smile back at the
Ghostbusters
joke. She leaned a little to glance around the edge of the counter that separated the kitchen from the rest of the apartment, saw the bony little lump that was Tessa, a shadow on the couch in the shadowy dark. “What worries me,” she said softly, “is that this seems to be having an effect on Tessa. What was she doing on the sixth floor that night, trying to go up those stairs? Even
she couldn’t tell me. She’d been up since four-thirty that morning. If she rested between exercises, dozed off and sleepwalked…”

“Whoa,” said Phil. “What stairs? There’s no stairway up from the sixth floor.”

M
ADDIE BLINKED AT HIM
in surprise. “Yes, there is. When I caught up with Tessa she was standing at the bottom of a flight of stairs, leading up to the floor above. I asked her what she was doing and she said she’d heard a noise, or voices talking. But I got the feeling that she really didn’t know.”

“And you didn’t hear anything? Or go looking for anything? Because if you came up another flight…”

“We didn’t,” insisted Maddie. “This was just before we met you. The lights went off when I was on the stairway from the fifth floor up to the sixth. I didn’t go up any farther than that.”

“Well, if the lights were off, how did you see a stairway?” asked Phil. “With that dinky little flashlight you had I’m surprised you didn’t walk into a wall. You could have gone around a couple more turns of the stairs without knowing it….”

“Even in the dark I know up from down,” pointed out Maddie. “Once I found Tessa there was no reason for me to climb any more stairs. And I saw the stairway. It was down one of those convoluted little hallways, away from the main stair….”

“You mean like a ladder up to the roof? Because there’s one of those…”

“I mean like a staircase.” She closed her eyes, picturing it again. Picturing Tessa standing at the bottom of that slot of blackness in her pink tights and Broken Glass U.S. Tour T-shirt, swaying a little on her feet as she’d swayed a few nights ago, when she’d stood fumbling with the burglar bar in her sleep. Slowly, calling the images back to her mind, she said, “The steps are wood. The walls are dirty, pale, there’s paint peeling and water stains….”

There’s evil up there, she thought. Something terrible, waiting in the darkness.

Maddie opened her eyes and saw Phil regarding her doubtfully, as if she’d begun a monologue about who she’d been in a past life, or how spirits channeled their thoughts through her while she meditated. She knew the look because she’d so frequently worn it herself.

It was quite common, when people got their cards read, for them to feel called upon to discuss every other aspect of their contacts with the supernatural, either because they felt themselves to be in the presence of a sympathetic ear or because they wanted to impress her. In her nearly two years of consulting in the back room of the Darkness Visible bookstore, Maddie had encountered large numbers of people who felt themselves to be reincarnated priestesses of Isis, or channelers of various spirits from realms beyond Earth, or returned alien abductees. And while she had met people whom she felt did, in truth, remember past lives, or have contact with spirits—she wasn’t so sure about abductees, at least not the ones she’d met—she was fairly sure there weren’t
that
many of them walking around.

Phil said—speaking as if he were choosing his words with care—“Look, Maddie…What I had were creepy
dreams. But dreams are all they were. I don’t know what you saw, but I’ve been over every inch of the sixth floor, and there isn’t a stairway like that. I’ve been through the other floors, too, and yes, that place is like a Skinner-box rat maze, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a stairway like that in the whole building.”

“You must have been pretty shook up,” said Maddie quietly, “to search the whole building.”

He looked away from her, then back. “Yeah. I was pretty shook up.”

Unless you’re lying
. The thought came so close behind the impulse to reach across the slight space that separated them, to put her hand on his wrist—to lean into his touch and see if his lips would taste the way they tasted in her dream—that she suspected that her wariness sprang more from the recollection of Sandy’s manipulative vulnerability than from any true judgment of danger.

Their eyes met and she felt—she knew—that he was inches from drawing her to him, breaths from pressing her down to the floor beneath his gentle weight, uncaring that she was a raving kook or that he was a whispering stalker who rambled empty buildings in darkness.
It’s safe
, she had said…

In my dream!
she reminded herself.

Not in real life. There was no safe in real life.

If I step over the cliff, will I fall or be borne up on the wind and realize I can fly again?

He said, “I’d better go.”

Stay
. “All right.”

You little sluts are all alike
. Had the words come from something that whispered in the halls of the Glendower Building—in the dreams of whoever drifted off to sleep there? Or from the dark at the bottom of this man’s mind?

Rather than wake Tessa, Maddie dug Sandy’s old leather jacket out of the back of the closet. Sandy had been thinner than Phil and narrower through the shoulders—putting the sweater back on underneath didn’t help the fit any—but the jacket would at least still zip, and it was better than freezing. Phil turned the leather shoulder over and grinned at the Cleveland Indians patch. “That looks like it dates from the days before the Tribe was any good.”

Maddie smiled at the memory. “He never gave up on them.”

“Your husband?”

Tessa must have told him. Had he asked?

Maddie nodded. “She’ll bring your stuff back tomorrow—or the day after, if I can talk her into taking a break for a day and resting. Thank you for getting her here safe.” She turned the key in the lock as she stepped out into the hall with him and walked him down to the elevator. It took its usual endless rattling time to arrive, though God knew where else it was or who else was using it at two in the morning.

“Like I was gonna leave her on the sidewalk?”

Maddie poked him with her elbow. “What do you want, me to act like it was something you owed us? Did you bring her in a cab?” She fished in her pocket for part of the dancing money, and Phil raised his hand, refusing.

“We walked.” It was a blatant lie—the dry socks on Tessa’s feet would have proved that even if Maddie
had
thought even for one moment that Phil would force a half-frozen girl to cross most of Manhattan Island on foot at one in the morning.

She gestured her surrender. “Then let me buy you lunch.”

“You’ve got a deal. I’m glad she has someone to look after her,” Phil added in a quieter voice. “So many of them don’t. The girls at the Dance Loft,” he explained at Maddie’s inquiring look. “And the other schools where I play. When the ABA’s auditioning, or when any of the big companies come through town, they—the girls—get crazy, starving themselves or fainting in class or driving themselves in class after class as if it was the end of the world. It’s not good for them, I know it’s not. And some of the little ones are the worst, with these wild-eyed mothers hanging on the sidelines like vultures.”

Maddie thought of her own mother, taking her to the doctor for diet pills and paying one of the neighboring college students to write her school papers for her when she had an audition coming up, so she could fit in just one more class. “It’s a fine line between supporting someone else’s dream and seducing them into your own,” she said. “I gather Tessa never had anyone to support hers.”

“Which is why she’s pushing herself like this.” Phil folded his arms, leaned against the jamb of the dilatory elevator’s door. “Trying to sleepwalk back to the studio to get in just one more
saute de basque
if it kills her…”

“Is that what you think she was doing tonight?”

Phil raised his eyebrows.

As opposed to falling under the evil influence of a haunted building?

Maddie drew a deep breath. In either case, the answer was the same. “I’ll do what I can to look after her,” she said. “I understand that craziness. I went through it myself for years. Sort of like sleeping on the floor in a haunted piano studio in New York in order to write music instead of making a good living bustin’ rods in Tulsa.”

Phil swallowed a grin and shook a finger at her nose. “There is absolutely no comparison,” he said severely. “And don’t you think it.”

And then, because his pointing finger was so close to her face, he slipped his hand under the bejeweled waterfall of her hair and drew her mouth gently to his.

Maddie’s lips parted, she felt the wall behind her shoulders, the hard grip of his arm around her rib cage and the cracked old leather under her palms. Felt the scratch of beard stubble against her chin, against her jaw and her throat as she turned her head aside to let him kiss her neck, the thin skin where her shirt opened above her sternum. Her own lips brushed his temple, the delicate rim of bone around the socket of his eye as her fingers tangled with the rough horsetail stiffness of his hair…and the whole world turned into a single dark, sweet torrent of need.

Where his body pressed hers she could feel him shake.

The elevator bell dinged.

Phil stepped back from her. They were both trembling, staring into each other’s eyes, breathing deep and hard.

No possibility of pretense.

His rough-knotted fingers traced the shape of her cheekbone, her lips, as they’d traced her breasts in her dream.

He said, “I’ll see you?”

Maddie nodded. She felt as if her body had been rock, in a single instant shattering and turning to light.

He stepped into the elevator and was gone.

T
HE DARKNESS VISIBLE
bookstore was down a flight of steps in one of those old brownstones of the West Village, the railed areaway below sidewalk level hosting, in sum
mertime, a coffee machine and a couple of bins full of old Grateful Dead posters and battered prints of unlikely sixties rock-stars in historical garb. Now, in December, the bins and coffee machine occupied the front part of the tiny shop, along with shelves of dried sage bundles and packets of pennyroyal and hyssop, assorted versions of the tarot deck, from Aleister Crowley’s to the Barbie tarot, boxes of crystals, sets of runes, a small harp, yarrow stalks and small bronzes of Ganesh, Athene and Quetzalcoatl. From there back it was books, on every conceivable and inconceivable subject and, at the rear of the store, a stairway leading up to two small chambers draped in sari fabrics and chiffon, where Maddie and various other part-time diviners consulted with their clients. Beside the stair—its contents spilling over onto the surrounding wall—was the bulletin board, half an inch thick with flyers for drum circles and healing seminars, with lost-and-found announcements and the cards of every psychic counselor, personal trainer, computer consultant, dancer, musician, baby-sitter and housekeeper who had passed through the West Village since 1964.

Under an enormous painting of Shiva dancing with Rita Hayworth, Diana Vale sat at her tall Victorian desk, a square-faced, gray-haired, kindly woman who looked like she could have been the Good Witch of Someplace or Other or somebody’s mother. She was in fact both, and a good deal besides. She said, “Hello, sweetheart,” and hopped down from her stool to hug Maddie as she came in. “Did you have readings this afternoon? I don’t have anything written down.”

Maddie shook her head. “I have a gig tonight out on Long Island. A Turkish gentleman’s ninetieth birthday
party, given to him by five of his daughters. I have to catch the train in about an hour and a half, but I need some advice. Have you ever heard of the Glendower Building?”

Diana’s eyes narrowed. “It rings a bell….” Between running the bookstore and serving on the board of the local low-cost day care center, Diana wrote articles for a dozen magazines and journals concerning the occult. There was very little about haunted buildings that she didn’t know or at least know how to find out about. “Where is it?”

“Here in town, over on Twenty-ninth Street. It’s the building the Dance Loft is in. There’s a dancewear store downstairs and storerooms on the second floor, then the Dance Loft has two floors and the upper two floors are rented out as studios and offices.”

“I remember.” Diana nodded. “You said you never liked it.”

Maddie nodded. “It’s a creepy building. I never could put my finger on what’s wrong with it, and at the time it was the only place I could rent space to start dance classes. But I was actually glad when Mrs. Dayforth rescheduled the room out from under me.”

“And you think you saw or heard something?”

“I saw a man—a shadow after the lights went out—whispering things to me, terrible things. At first I thought it was…well, someone Tessa knows who’s staying in the building because he lost his apartment. But now I’ve gotten to know this person and he doesn’t seem like someone who’d do that—aside from the fact that I smelled tobacco on this person and Phil doesn’t smoke. And Phil says that while sleeping in the building he’s had weird dreams, about a fire, and young girls being hurt. He says they’re just dreams….”

Maddie fell silent, trying to sort out facts from feelings and fears. “And Tessa’s been acting strangely. Phil—he’s the piano player at the Dance Loft—says it’s because of her audition for the ABA coming up, but I don’t know. She’s been sleepwalking, trying to get back into the building. Last night she managed to get out in just her nightgown and a sweatshirt. I think if Phil hadn’t been coming back from the opera when he did she might really have froze to death.”

She turned her head and glanced out into the little shop’s areaway. The slushy snow that had fallen late last night had congealed into dirt-fringed grayish globs on the steps. Boots and the hems of coats flickered by at sidewalk level, barely seen through the bookshop’s doors.