DIANA VALE HAD ENOUGH friends in difficult living situations that Maddie knew she never left her phone turned off at night or refused to pick up calls, even at two in the morning. After eleven rings it was obvious that the owner of Darkness Visible wasn’t at home that night. Maddie tried, without much hope of success, calling the shop, but not much to her surprise got only the answer-droid. She hung up, her heart pounding and her breath coming fast.
There’s something weird going on here and I think you’d better come down….
Maddie dumped out her costume bag, shoved her big flashlight into it and a pack of spare batteries. Two balls of string and a sharp folding knife, from the apartment’s utility drawer, at the thought of those dark mazes of little halls on the upper floors. The household hammer and a pry bar that could double as a club. What else?
Garlic? Silver bullets? Cold iron? A crucifix? She slung the bag over her shoulder, headed for the subway.
Love you…
She saw Phil across Twenty-ninth Street, coming out of—as she had suspected—the all-night liquor store where there was a phone. Even at that distance she recognized the tall, angular shape, the way he walked. She called “Phil!” without even considering what she’d do or say if it wasn’t him; he stopped and turned.
“Maddie!”
She crunched through a clotted drift of snow and dirt piled up at the curb, dashed across the icy street. At this hour there was almost no one abroad even on the avenues, let alone in this slightly run-down block. A few dim streetlights glittered on the ice-slick pavement, and turned Phil’s breath into a cloud of diamonds. When he caught her in his arms—when he kissed her, quick and hard and relieved, on the lips, and when she returned both the embrace and the kiss—it felt like something they’d been doing for years.
“Jesus, am I glad to see you….”
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know.” He fumbled in his pocket for the lobby key as they walked the last few yards to the door. The reconverted lofts and boutiques and the emporia hawking Korean electronics, which had taken over the old brick factory buildings, were shut down and dark. Dingy utility lights made a yellowish square of the Owl’s window behind an iron grille. The serviceways and alleys between the buildings were slabs of primordial night, and the cold defeated even the faint pong of old garbage and backed-up drains that seemed to be ground into the very fabric of Manhattan. Between the angular outlines of towering walls, black cloud made a matte nothingness of the sky.
“She stayed after Darth Irving’s advanced class tonight and asked if I’d play for her. I said yes and went up to my studio to get a cup of coffee—Tessa had unplugged and washed out the office pot when she went off work before class. When I came back to the big studio she was gone. Her bag was there, so I waited….”
He let them into the gray little coffin of the front hall, locked the door and bolted it behind them, led her past Quincy the caretaker’s empty booth and up the stairs. As she ascended that first long flight—two floors past the ground-floor shops’ storerooms—Maddie found herself wondering if the door onto Twenty-ninth Street was the same as it had always been. If that had been the entrance by which all those Russian, Jewish and Cuban girls had gone into the building every day, to work at Pinnacle Ready-Made.
She thought of them, girls who these days would be the little green-haired Gothettes going in groups to the Village to get butterflies tattooed on their hips, or hooking up their laptops to do their NYU homework at Starbucks. Saw them in her mind, hugging faded shawls around themselves and gathering up their long, flammable skirts to hurry past the sixth floor, praying Mr. Glendower wouldn’t step out of his office just then and say, Come in here. I want to see you.
“I went through this whole building,” Phil said. “Quincy’d left by then, and I’ve been trying to reach him all night. No answer. I called for her—yelled up and down those creepy hallways. Turned on every light and tried every doorknob in the place, looked in the men’s rooms and the ladies’…everywhere. Her key to the front door was in her bag, she couldn’t have got out.”
“No,” said Maddie. “No, I don’t think she did.”
They crossed through the Dance Loft’s seedy front office, stepped into the fluorescent blaze of the big studio, the glare of the lights off its walls of mirrors all the more shocking after the gloom elsewhere. According to Diana’s e-mail the third floor had been a silk warehouse in January 1908. In the winter of 1962 it had contained three or four “to-the-trade” showrooms for wholesalers in artificial flowers and feathers, where a girl named Hannah Sears had worked…and where her purse, coat and galoshes had been found one morning, with the key to the locked downstairs lobby door lying on top of them.
Looking up, Maddie could see where one of the partition walls had been removed, a rough band like a welt in the wall above the line of the mirrors, painted over a dozen times.
“Phil,” said Maddie, “I would rather say anything in the world to you other than this.” She looked up at him, with his dark rough hair falling forward into his eyes and his shirt half-unbuttoned under his pea coat; the face that was already so familiar to her, so much a part of her thoughts. She was very aware that she had the choice to say Call the cops—they’ll be able to put a trace on her if she left the city….
It would be the rational and sensible thing to do.
And it would mean Phil wouldn’t look at her as he’d looked at her last night, sitting on the floor of the kitchen, when she’d spoken of the narrow stairway leading up from the sixth floor, the stairway that he claimed didn’t exist.
Who is this nutball? And why am I wasting my time talking to her?
And nobody could say she hadn’t done her best.
Only she knew that the police had been called in when Maria Diaz had disappeared in 1956, and Vera Rosenfeldt in 1972, and little Moongirl in 1967…and for others as well.
See where he fits into your life, Diana had said. Not where you can fit yourself into his.
Which included, she supposed, his idea of how the universe was supposed to work.
She took a deep breath. “Tessa isn’t the only woman to disappear in this building,” she said, and told him, as quickly and in as few words as she could, the content of Diana’s e-mail. “Now, people disappear in New York all the time,” she said. “I have no idea what the statistics are for any single building, chosen at random, for people who’re last seen in it and never heard from again. Sometime when we’re free, I’ll be perfectly happy to go down to City Hall and look up other buildings as a control group.”
Phil said nothing. Only looked down at her, his eyebrows drawn together, listening and thinking…What?
“But every one of those girls disappeared between mid-December and the thirteenth of January—the anniversary of the 1908 fire. That’s today. And every one of those girls was of the same age and general appearance of the girls that Lucius Glendower victimized here in his life—first- or second-generation Americans, mostly Latin or Jewish.”
“Except for the last one, Padmini Raschad.” His voice was quiet in the brightly lit box of the studio, and there was a flicker of anger in his dark eyes. “Quincy told me about her. Quincy has sat in that lobby every day since 1980, and since I can’t piss him off by walking away too fast or too often, believe me, there isn’t a thing that’s gone on in this building that I haven’t heard about, several times.”
He slid out of his pea coat, draped it over the bench of the piano in the corner of the studio as he spoke, like a man preparing himself for a fight. “Padmini Raschad disappeared in 1994. She worked at a travel agency up on the fifth floor. There was a little bit of a stink when she disappeared—Quincy said they had the police in, but nobody ever found anything. But that means the Dayforths knew about her. They had to, the Dance Loft’s been here since the eighties. And they never bothered to tell anybody that there was, or might be, something strange about the building. Probably didn’t want to scare away customers.”
Maddie had never had much use for Charmian Dayforth since the time her own classes had been dumped without notice. From what she knew of her, Phil was undoubtedly right. She couldn’t see Mrs. Dayforth notifying anyone even if she’d seen Lucius Glendower’s ghost prowling around the halls.
Phil continued, “I suppose a Pakistani would look pretty much like an Italian to someone who didn’t really care.”
Maddie shut her eyes briefly and whispered a prayer of thanks for the garrulous old vet who watched over the lobby.
“So what do we do?”
“Let’s go up to the sixth floor.”
The silence of the building pressed around them as they climbed the flights of stairs. Even with all the lights on, the sense of cold evil persisted, of something waiting for them, of something walking behind them, something that disappeared every time Maddie turned her head. A dark-haired man, Diana had said Glendower had been: a wealthy man and a ruler of industry.
The King of Pentacles, whose shadow Maddie had mistaken for Phil.
The king who fed on the spirits of the girls whose bodies he broke to his will.
The king who still stirred alive in the winter months, when the nights were long at the midnight of the year. Who, when he grew hungry enough, whispered to girls in the dark.
In her mind she saw Tessa again, standing at the foot of that narrow stairway, looking up. Listening. She was exhausted emotionally and pushed to her physical limits; Maddie had seen her too many nights stumble home and doze off before she could finish dinner. If Lucius Glendower’s voice murmured to her in her dreams, it would find an easy entry to the dark part of the mind where the consciousness goes in sleep.
No me toque, she had cried in her sleep. Maddie had looked it up in a Spanish dictionary, before leaving for Mrs. Buz’s wingding earlier that afternoon. Don’t touch me.
She wondered where Lucius Glendower’s office had been, in what was now the maze of subdivided offices and cubicles, studios and windowless rehearsal halls of the sixth floor. Near the main stair, where his shadow had hissed obscenities at her in the dark?
“Do you want to make another search?” asked Phil when they got to the top of the stairs and Maddie halted and began to dig through her bag.
“Do you feel satisfied that she’s not up here?”
He nodded. “I searched every nook and cranny.” From his pocket he produced the blue chalk that Mrs. Dayforth used to mark the scheduling board at the Dance Loft. “I marked every place I checked—which means I’d better make sure there’s not a molecule of blue chalk dust anywhere on me when Quincy has to come up here and clean it up, or I’ll be sucking sidewalk by nightfall. What you got?”
“Insurance.” Maddie tied one end of the string to the banister of the main stair that led down to the fifth floor.
Phil raised his eyebrows. “What do you think’s going to be chasing us, that we have to find the way through the halls that fast?”
“Things you don’t believe in,” said Maddie. “And neither do I. Not really.”
Phil said softly, “Like Hamlet said, I guess there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy. You really think there’s something up here?”
“I do,” said Maddie. “Something that’s been up here for a long time.” She handed him the flashlight and closed her eyes.
It was one thing to read the cards, to accept that the random arrangement of symbols would line up along the intricate networks of energy and destiny comprising Time and Space. It was one thing to go with Diana to certain places in Central Park, or to old buildings upstate in the Hudson Valley, and watch her friend pass her hands along the stone of the walls, scrying deep-buried energies there. When Diana had talked her down into a deep trance, and had shown her how to seek the minute changes in temperature that indicated active psychic residue, Maddie had thought she felt them.
But looking back now, she wasn’t sure.
And it was quite another thing, to breathe deep and slow, to empty and order her mind into the state of trance, knowing that the life of someone she cared about might be—was—at stake. I shouldn’t be doing this, she thought desperately. I should be watching Diana do it, Diana who’s had years of trance-work and spirit-watching, who has crossed back and forth over the curtain that separates the world as we know it from those unseen places where energies have form. Diana knows what she’s doing. I don’t.
But her instincts told her that the longer she waited, the less chance there would be of following Tessa to wherever she’d been lured. The less chance there was of bringing her back safe.
The deeper she breathed, the more she relaxed her mind, the greater Maddie’s sense of peril grew. She remembered clearly her feelings the first time she’d stepped through the door of the Glendower Building, seeking a studio to rent to teach dance less than a month after she’d found Sandy a furnished room and helped him move his stuff there…. That sense of uncleanness. Of ugliness. Of energies that screamed at her, Don’t come in here….
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!