Night’s Edge (28 page)

Only she’d needed a place to teach a class, if she were going to make her rent. Like the little Jewish and Russian and Cuban girls who’d gone up and down the stairs each day to a factory floor they knew was a firetrap, to work for a man who summoned them into his office under threat of blacklist, she did what she needed to do to survive.

And as she relaxed her mind, she felt those early feelings of dread sharpen and crystallize, as if the veils that shrouded and blurred them were being drawn, one by one, aside.

She heard no voices, and saw no shadows, but she was very conscious of those girls now, slipping along the hall in twos and threes with their shawls wrapped around them in the cold, their long hair braided up to keep it out of the machines. Names flickered through her mind and were gone.

She put out her hand, fingers spread as Diana had
taught her, and brought it slowly close to the wall. She felt the energy at once, like the prickly horror of ants crawling on her skin. It took all her will not to jerk her hand away.

He was here. He was here everywhere in the building, as if his mind had spread like fungal fibers through the old brick that underlay all those layers of wallpaper and paint. Not living, but holding on to the living world, to the material pleasures and power that all his life he had refused to give up. A psychic monster that fed on what it could get.

Maddie walked forward slowly, following the fast-streaming energy along the wall. “There was a lobby here,” she whispered through lips that felt numb, “outside the office door.” She could see it, as if she’d visited the place in a dream. The stairway had continued up, where that wall now was. Farther down the main hall the energy ceased, turned cold. Unwinding the string behind her she entered one of the smaller halls, she was dimly aware of the blue chalk X at the corner and of Phil walking behind her, the flashlight in one hand and the pry bar in the other. He seemed barely more than a shadow to her, half unreal.

More real, a thousand times, was the sense of vile consciousness, the anger that seemed to vibrate the air. He was muttering, snarling like a caged dog, that hoarse, thick voice that had spoken to her ten nights ago at the foot of the stairway. He was somewhere just out of clear hearing, savage, furious, but she could smell his sweaty woolen suit, his expensive cologne, the brandy on his breath and the cigar smoke that permeated his flesh and his hair. His need—for women, for power, for domination over those too weak to fight back—was a second stench, deeper than the first.

She turned a corner and then another, the string trailing from her fingers. Office doors, then another little hallway branching off toward a suite, but she knew where the stairway lay. She turned right again and was conscious that the hallway and all the floor behind her was dark, though she didn’t know just when the lights had gone out.

The glow of the flashlight touched the stairway. Narrow, barely wider than her shoulders, wooden steps splintery and dirty, walls stained.

She could hear Glendower talking now. Hear him cursing.
Uppity women…come here organizing…man can do what he wants to with his property. Mind your own business. I’ll get you…. You little tramps don’t like it, you go someplace else and work. Lazy foreigners, steal me blind, spend all your time sneaking cigarettes in the toilets while I’m paying you to work….

Vile whisperings, chewed over and fermented for nearly a century. Resentment and rage, and under them the red strength of a soul that absorbs power from the pain of others. The death of others.

“He’s up there,” Maddie whispered, and put her hand on the fouled paint of the wall. “Tessa?”

And out of the darkness above—the darkness at the top of a stairway that had been destroyed ninety-five years before—came the stifled wail of a terrified girl.

Maddie put her foot on the lowest step, and the blast of rage that pounded down on her from the darkness was like the physical force of an explosion.
Get out of here! Get out of here, goddamn do-gooder hag! Rob a man of what’s his! Tell a man what he can do on his own property, with his own girls!

Nearly a hundred years ago to the day, the thing in
the darkness above her had died, and in dying had swallowed up the strength of those who had perished with it in the inferno. As she climbed the steps, Maddie could feel those from whom that life force had been taken, the walls around her twittering, like trapped birds. Russian, Spanish, Yiddish, Italian—fragments of horror and pain. A warm hand closed on her wrist, reassuring and strong. “What
is
it?” breathed Phil. “This wasn’t here….”

Maddie’s mouth felt like she’d had an injection of lidocaine at the dentist. “It’s the world he created,” she mumbled. “The world that still exists in his mind…”

Pain stabbed at her, so sudden that she staggered. With the pain was a horrible and frightening sensation she’d never felt before, but she knew at once what it was: a cold grip twisting at her mind, seeking to tear her soul free of her brain. She gasped, turned her hand in Phil’s and clutched at his fingers—“Hold me…”

His arms were around her, supporting her as the steps seemed to tip under her feet, or else there was something thrusting at her, shoving her, trying to knock her back down the inky slot of the stairway. A voice was shouting in her ears, black thunder that shook the walls around them, and under it Phil’s voice, “I’ve got you, baby, I’m here….”

And like a wind-whirled bird, somewhere came Tessa’s cry, “Maddie…!”

The pain ceased with a suddenness that made her gasp. The shouting ended in silence like the fall of an ax. But as Maddie led the way, stumbling, up the last few stairs, she felt the darkness taking shape above them, waiting for them, drawing in on itself. Preparing another blow.

The world at the top of the stairs was the world that
had been the Glendower Building before the fire, mutated into a lightless nightmare by the mind that had remembered and maintained it for nearly a hundred years. The high-ceilinged loft room stretched away into darkness, the air a fog of cotton dust that clogged the lungs and throat. The dark shapes of bales, boxes, machines loomed everywhere. The walls and floor shuddered with the dull throbbing of engines, growing louder as the beam of the flashlight weakened and failed. Phil called out “Tessa!” but the roaring of the machines boomed louder still around them. “Tessa!”

We’ll never hear her!
thought Maddie in despair.
She’s growing weaker, she can’t fight him!

For a moment she wanted to weep, to flee back to the stairway—if she could find it—to get herself out of this place….

She concentrated on her breathing, on steadying her mind. “Help me find her,” she said, her voice quiet in the shaking darkness. “Help me get her out.”

She felt the energy running over her hands again, tugging gently at her arms and her long hair. Touching her cheeks with feathery warmth, like stiff fingers callused by needles and pins.
Allá, hermana,
a voice seemed to breathe in her ear, patting, guiding.
Oi, the
momzer,
is he gonna be mad….

She followed the energy through vibrating darkness, through what felt like a maze of corridors, loft rooms, then up another stairway whose walls brushed her shoulders on either side. Rats sat up and hissed at her on the steps ahead, red eyes glaring. Phil gave Maddie the flashlight, strode forward with the pry bar, never letting go of her wrist. His face was expressionless: he, too, was a man, thought Maddie, who would do what he had to do.

The rats retreated, but their stink was everywhere around them as they ascended the dark stairway. Partway up, Maddie felt the walls seeming to close in on them, felt the greedy, angry power of Lucius Glendower’s mind grip and tear at hers. Pain pounded in her head again, cramped in her body, and she heard him howling:
I’ll get you, you troublemaker! I’ll get you
….

Like the Devil on the tarot card, raving and ugly, with the lovers held in chains at his feet.
But the chains
—she recalled the image clearly—
are loose. We can take them off, anytime we please.

Then he was gone. The cold, tearing pain in her mind vanished, into a silent stillness more terrible than before.

There may have been some warning, some movement or sound, or the sudden reek of Glendower’s tobacco and cologne. Maddie didn’t know. But she looked quickly up into Phil’s face and saw his eyes change, saw the blaze of greed and lust and triumph kindle there, in the instant before he snapped off the flashlight, slammed her against the wall of the narrow staircase, fell upon her in the dark.

She may have screamed his name—she didn’t afterward recall. He bit her neck, her shoulders as he ground his body against hers, ripped open her shirt, tried to drag her to the floor. She’d had a split second to brace herself, to pull away, but he was terrifyingly strong. The next instant he thrust her away, turned as if he would flee, and Maddie grabbed his arm, the violence of his effort to wrench from her nearly breaking her wrist.

“Goddamn you, you bastard!” he screamed into the darkness. “You son of a bitch, you catch fire and die!” And he fell against the wall, his breath coming in harsh sobs.

Maddie clung to his arm, felt the shudder of his flesh
gradually lessen. She knew exactly what had happened, what Glendower had tried to do. For one instant, she had seen Lucius Glendower looking out of Phil’s eyes.

After a time she said, “He’s trying to split us up. Trying to get me to run from you, or you from me, so he can get us lost, deal with us separately. Don’t let go of me.”

Phil caught her wordlessly against him, his strength just as frightening as it had been a moment before when the evil old man’s spirit had possessed his mind. But he only held her to him, desperate, for a long minute, his breath burning against the side of her face.

Maddie whispered, “Come on. He’s going to try again.”

She felt him nod. The flashlight came on again, the light of its beam fading and uncertain, as if the psychic forces loose in this madhouse dimension were even drinking the chemical energies of the batteries. Maddie pulled her shirt closed around her bleeding shoulders, clung to Phil’s hand as they ascended the last of the stairs.

Tessa lay in what Maddie guessed to be the original eighth floor of the Glendower Building, the loft that had been one of the factory floors. They saw her through the loft’s open doors, crumpled unconscious on the rag-strewn planks. The room was hellishly cold, snow falling onto the plates of glass of the big windows overhead. Beyond that snow—beyond the glass of the windows lower in the walls—only darkness. Maddie wondered what she would have seen, could she have looked out in the daytime, if it was ever daylight here.

Dust hazed the air, furred the long tables down the center of the room, the oily black shapes of the sewing machines. Rats scampered along the walls. As Phil and Maddie hurried through the open iron doors into the loft, Phil whispered, “Here. I saw this room in my dream….”

“Tessa!” Maddie knelt beside her friend. “Tessa, are you all right?” For a moment she feared, as the younger girl opened her eyes, that she would see in them, too, the demon-glare of Lucius Glendower’s consciousness, as she had seen it in Phil’s.

But Tessa only blinked up at her, dazed. “Get me out of here,” she whispered in a broken voice. “He said he’d kill me—he’d keep me here…. Keep me here forever.”

“You’ll be okay, honey.” Phil knelt beside her, picked her up in his arms. “Can you walk?”

Tessa nodded, reaching down with her long legs, her arms still around Phil’s neck. The flashlight beam showed his eyebrows standing out very dark against a face blanched with shock and strain. Maddie wondered if Glendower’s cold, ripping mind were twisting even now at Phil’s thoughts, struggling to take over again. She swung the flashlight around the loft, but the beam was too weak to penetrate the darkness. In contrast to the roaring of the machines downstairs, this place was silent, with a silence that watched their every move.

In her mind she heard that evil voice again, a muttering babble of half-heard words.
Mine…mine…come in and tell me what I can and can’t do…show them…Get them. Get them. Show them. Little tramps…only good for one thing…

Only good to feed his lust
, Maddie thought.
To fuel the undead greediness of his mind
. She said, “We’d better get out of here.” The voice was growing louder. Coming closer.

Beneath the smells of machine oil and rats and cotton dust, beneath the sudden reek of tobacco and cologne, she could smell smoke.

Supporting Tessa between them, Phil and Maddie
headed for the door. Stumbling, running, as Maddie realized what would happen…

The iron door swung shut with a booming clang.

Far off in the blackness, she heard a girl scream,
Fire!

P
HIL CURSED, FLUNG HIS
weight against the door. The hollow metallic clatter turned to obscene laughter in the dark. “Pry bar,” Maddie said, feeling strangely calm. “Hinges.” She dug the hammer out of her bag and stood back, holding Tessa by the hand.

“The laws of physics goddamn better apply around here.” Phil swung the hammer at the bar, the crash like cannon fire in the dark. “If this doorjamb is made of something other than wood…”

“Maddie!” Tessa screamed, and red light poured over them as fire burst out under the tables in the center of the room.

It was horrifying how fast the fire spread. Oil, rags, dust went up; lines of fire raced across the wooden floorboards, climbed the walls where the film of cotton dust exploded into sheets of flame. Heat smote them, driving Tessa and Maddie back toward the door where Phil hammered at the end of the pry bar, like a dark-haired, desperate Thor. Though Maddie could see no one else in the long spaces of the loft, she could hear them, hear their voices screaming:
Fuego!
And
Dear Jesus in Heaven, save us….

The wooden jamb splintered and both girls flung themselves at the door, felt it give. Maddie cried again,
“Help us!” and whether the wild, terrified energies in the burning room responded—whether they
could
respond—she didn’t know. But when she and Tessa hurled their weight against the metal again it tore free of the broken jamb, opening a narrow space where the hinges were half torn free.

Phil slid through first, swore again—smoke poured through and it seemed to Maddie for a moment that the broken door, the shattered jamb, tried to close up again around him, crushing his body like a huge mouth. He braced his back, fought the iron and the wood apart and gasped, “Can you get through past me?” As the two women slithered through the narrow gap, Maddie heard Glendower’s voice shouting, not in her mind this time but seeming to come from the fire-saturated darkness all around them.

The string that stretched down the stairway was burning already, a thin line of fire through opaque black billows of smoke. The air burned in Maddie’s lungs, grit blinded her eyes. Somewhere she heard the sound Phil had described, the wild, despairing hammering of fists against a locked metal door. Screaming, a dim and far-off echo, like the wailing of storm winds above the guttural roar of the flames.

They plunged down the stairs, through the holocaust of burning walls, flame-wreathed corridors below, desperately running for the next set of stairs. Swirling energies tore at Maddie’s mind, wild spirits of panic and terror, eternally trapped in the darkness and the flame. Maddie clung grimly to Tessa’s wrist, dragged her forward, following the burning streak of the string. She saw the flame race along the string ahead of them, as it plunged down the next flight of
stairs; saw flame burst out of the walls, roar up in grabbing hands from the floor. The stairwell vomited smoke, hot wind pouring up it like a chimney, and in the smoke she saw him….

The shadow she’d seen, whispering to her at the foot of the stairs.

He blocked the stair below them, massive arms spread across it from wall to wall. His eyes were red, like the glaring eyes of the phantom rats. Nothing else of him could she see, but it seemed to Maddie, as she plunged down the stairwell toward him, that his whole body was formed of smoke, and of the writhing energies that he held twisted around his core. Beyond him lay the doorway to the real world, to the real Glendower Building as it existed in the twenty-first century, and the dingy glare of cheap electric bulbs, far off around the corners, framed him, illuminating the billow of the smoke.

She flung herself at that ghastly shape of smoke and hatred, swinging the flashlight like a club. Instead of the solid impact of flesh she felt a burning jolt of energy, like an electrical shock that numbed her arm. Yet his hands were solid as they seized her, shoved her against the wall as Phil had shoved her, with a force that knocked the breath out of her. She felt his weight buffet her, twist her, felt his teeth tear at her flesh.

Then Tessa dragged her free, and she heard the crackle and roar of energies as Phil slashed through the shadow of the ghost with the iron of the pry bar and hammer. Phil cried out, doubling over with shock and pain, but Glendower’s shadow had broken up. The next instant it re-formed in the burning air, even as Maddie and Tessa turned back, caught Phil as he staggered, dragged him down toward the lights of the sixth floor.

I’ll get you!
Glendower screamed.
I’ll show you…. No one takes from me what’s mine!

Phil stumbled, collapsed on the battered brown linoleum of the sixth-floor hall, and as Maddie bent down to drag him to his feet Tessa cried, “Look out!” Maddie raised her head and saw the glass windows of a nearby office door shatter, as if kicked by some monstrous energy within. Smoke poured out, red-stained by the flame that licked up close behind.

Maddie turned back, horrified. Smoke and fire belched from the stairway to the haunted realm above, the flames spraying, burning on the many-times-painted wallpaper, the wood of wainscots and doors. Against the flame the dark shape of Lucius Glendower rose, fists upraised, shouting incomprehensible curses, and fire poured forth around him and into the remainder of the building that had been his.

Maddie dragged Phil to his feet, thrust her shoulder under his arm on one side, Tessa supporting him on the other. His hand flailed, but Maddie felt the whole of his weight on them—smoke inhalation? The shock of breaking through the black energies of Glendower’s spirit? She gasped, trying to breathe and choking on the smoke. Somehow she dragged them on through the tangle of hallways toward where she knew the stairway down had to lie. In the smoke and darkness she could barely see the white line of the string, except where the blaze raced along the walls, seared in frames of fire around burning doors.

I’ll show you!
Glendower’s voice screamed behind them.
I’ll get you!

Tessa gasped, staggered, coughed, and when she fell the whole of her weight and Phil’s nearly pulled Maddie
to the floor. Her eyes burning, her vision blurred, Maddie fell to her knees beside them. “Get up! Please, get up!”

A dark shape emerged from the smoke beside her, reached down to drag Phil to his feet. Gasping, beyond speech, Maddie pulled Tessa up, hauled the younger girl’s arm around her shoulders, as a voice shouted something to her. She thought it was
This way
…but couldn’t be sure. Through the flaring horror of glare and smoke she could see the dark shapes of Phil and his rescuer following the line of the string, and she staggered after them.

The lights were gone, the fire spreading below them from floor to floor as they stumbled down the smoke-filled stairwell. Maddie heard, far off, the wail of sirens, New York’s heroes to the rescue again. She could see nothing, only clung to the banister, wondering how she would or could make it down five floors. Now and then a gleam of reflected red light showed her the two shapes descending ahead, and once she heard Phil cough.

He’s still breathing,
she thought.
He’s still alive.

Dear God, don’t let him die.

She glanced beside her at Tessa but could tell nothing in the superheated smoky black of the stairwell. Only, she could occasionally feel when the girl tried to help her, tried to walk, only to sag against her, gasping for breath. “Hang on,” she panted. “Please, hang on….”

Light reflected from below, the glare of searchlights from the street pouring into the lobby mingling with the firelight from above. The groan and screech of pry bars in the door frame, the confusion of shouts, sounding far away still at the bottom of that long double flight of final stairs.

The dark form that led Maddie stopped at the head of those stairs, lowered Phil down with his back to the
wall. Maddie let Tessa slip down as well, stood with her hand against the wall, panting, getting her breath for the final descent. She turned her head to gasp something to the man who had helped her….

It was Sandy.

Sandy before drink and drugs had eroded him away to a man he himself would have despised. Sandy not as she’d last seen him on that cold metal table in the morgue, but as she’d first seen him, with a wry smile under his mustache and the old elfin gleam sparkling in the darkest eyes Maddie had ever seen. Sandy as he had always wished and hoped and wanted to be.

He smiled at her, and held out his hand.

With the amount of power and energy swirling around in the air—with the half-materialized forces Glendower had so long summoned into being—Maddie realized she shouldn’t be surprised. Of course Sandy would figure out a way to mooch some of those energies, to come to her aid—to pay her back for nearly a decade of bailing him out of trouble. To save the life of the man she now loved. In his life, she recalled, Sandy had never been anything but generous.

She took his hand. Like Lucius Glendower’s, it had solidness and strength to it, and Sandy’s old lightness of touch. She said, “Thank you,” feeling no fear or shock. Only happy to see him…happy that he looked so well.

He glanced down at Phil, then back at her, and grinned, the old shy Sandy grin. He stepped forward and kissed her, very gently, on the lips, his mustache tickling as it always had.

Then he turned and stepped off the edge of the final flight down—like the Fool stepping off his cliff—and faded into darkness and smoke.

D
IANA WAS AT THE APARTMENT
when Maddie woke up the following afternoon. Maddie’s memories of the emergency room at Roosevelt Hospital were confused, due to shock and, she suspected, whatever the paramedics had given her while they were wrapping Phil and Tessa in wet sheets and dousing them with distilled water. She had a handful of sharp, clear images in her mind, like stills from a movie she barely recalled seeing: Phil propping himself up on his elbows on the gurney and saying groggily, “Wouldn’t it be cheaper to take a cab?” and, later, Tessa sitting next to her in the dreary ER waiting room while the triage nurses tried to sort them out from the cases of trauma, OD and gunshot wounds all around them—a typical night in New York.

While the paramedics had been loading Phil and Tessa into an ambulance—Maddie huddled in the doorway of the Owl to stay warm—the Glendower Building had collapsed, like the Falling Tower, in a shower of flaming debris.

“They kept Phil overnight.” Diana carried a plateful of kebabs and
sarigi burma
from the refrigerator to Maddie’s bedside. “Tessa’s gone down to help Charmian Dayforth try to talk the fire department into letting her salvage what records she can from the Dance Loft’s offices. I think she’s one of the few students who did. All the rest are evidently scrambling to find practice space to get ready for the ABA auditions tomorrow.” The white witch’s voice was wryly amused at this evidence of artistic dedication. “The building was nearly gutted.”

Maddie said, “Good. It should have been gutted—and razed—ninety-five years ago. Let’s hope they’ll finish the job this time.”

When the Tower fell, she remembered from some
interpretations of the tarot deck, the prisoners within it were freed. Lucius Glendower, and the spirits of all those girls whose souls had fed his greed. Freed to their final crossing, and to whatever, for them, would come next.

She sat up in bed, rubbed her neck, her arms. There were bandages where Glendower had bitten her, bruises where Phil had seized her by the arms. Her body felt as if she’d fallen down a flight of stairs, and her throat was sore as nobody’s business. “Is Phil all right?”

“He seems to be.” Diana glanced at the clock in the living room, through the white sheet curtains that had been opened wide. With her gray hair wound into a topknot and the sleeves of her homespun dress rolled over powerful forearms, she looked like a samurai den-mother. “I went down to Roosevelt Hospital this morning and talked to him. He asked several times if you were all right, and Tessa. He said Glendower had ‘gotten into his mind’; he was afraid you would not forgive him.”

“I hope you told him it was all right.”

“I told him you had enough experience with the supernatural to understand what had happened. He said, ‘I’m not sure that’s the kind of experience you want to have a lot of, but I’m glad.’ He seemed very shaken up.”

“Well, he just had it proved to him that the world isn’t put together the way he thought it was,” said Maddie. She picked a fragment of chicken off a skewer, held it out to Baby, who sniffed for a moment, then condescended to taste. “And so did Tessa…and really, so did I. It isn’t that I didn’t believe it was real, but…You can read about this, and hear about it, and even talk to people who’ve had experiences with the Other Side, but…” She shook her head at the memory
of flame and darkness and smoke, of the cold brutal clutch of Lucius Glendower’s mind, and of Sandy’s farewell smile.

She glanced shyly up at her teacher and asked, “Did he say anything else?”

“To tell you that he loves you.” Diana smiled and wiped the sticky syrup from the Turkish dessert from her fingers with a paper towel. “He said, ‘Tell her I love her to hell and back, which I think is what we just did.’ I don’t know him well, but he seems to be a very remarkable man.”

“I don’t know him well, either,” said Maddie. Baby climbed into her lap, settled down to washing her paws; there was great comfort in the soft black-and-white fur, the familiar presence. Maddie wondered if Sandy had ever appeared to his cat.