I didn’t see Michael Adderly anywhere.
I pushed open the glass door. Billy had his hands on two bars of the security fence. I walked down the ramp toward him. Something moved above and behind me. “Chris,” it said in a choked whisper that sent my pulse racing. I whirled around.
There he stood. Michael Adderly. The piercing blue eyes, the imperfect aquiline nose, the supple mouth. Where had he come from? The flagpole jutting from the side of the building, twenty feet up? He wore dark jeans and a button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up his forearms. He was painfully handsome. My chest and throat tightened inexplicably as I gazed at him.
“You know I thought you were dead,” he snarled. “All those years. Pining for you. I thought you’d died like the others, but you woke me, and stalked me, and now here you are. Here you are, still young. After all these years. Why, Chris? What did they offer you? Was it Thisbe? The Crone? The Viscount? Who do you belong to?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I only belong to myself.”
The wind stirred his hair and the flag overhead flapped noisily. “Yes, they make you believe that for the first decade or two, don’t they? But you should have learned by now, my girl, they’re all users. They will use you as long as you have a purpose, and then flush you away the minute you outlast your usefulness. Is that what happened? Did you wake me to cry wolf now that your master has bored of you?” he sneered. It made him ugly for a moment.
“I told you I have no idea what you’re talking about!” I cried. “I don’t have a master and I don’t know who Chris is!”
“Was it Irina? Did she get to you?”
“All I know about Irina Van Horn is that she killed Tamara. I know that now. That you didn’t.”
“Poor Tamara,” he said, with a sad sigh. “I thought Irina—but how do you know? Why this façade, Chris? How can you say that you don’t know me? How do you know she killed Tamara?”
He was so mercurial—one moment angry, the next sincere. But if he was sincere, if he wasn’t a murderer, why was he keeping Billy? Controlling him?
“Look, all I want is for you to let Billy go.”
“Ah, yes, Billy. I appreciated that you brought me a meal. Though not a very happy one.” He frowned a moment, looking from me to Billy. “Come here, William,” he commanded. Billy turned from the security fence, moving mechanically toward us.
“No!” I shouted. “Just stop. Leave him out of this!” I thrust my right palm out, fingers spread wide. The gesture was meant to emphasize my meaning. To tell Adderly to stop. I could feel my hand shaking, thought I couldn’t tell if it was from fear or anger. I could feel the hot blood pumping through the veins in my arm. My fingertips pulsed with heat.
Adderly’s face softened for a moment and he took a step forward. My heart sped up and my breathing did too. He came closer, and my hand brushed his arm.
And the arm caught fire.
Flames burst from his shirt sleeve.
He moved. It was a blur. Past me, to Billy, and then away.
I was so busy trying to figure out what had just happened that I was surprised when my thigh felt hot.
I looked down and realized my jeans were smoking. I screeched and beat the spot with my palm. Is my hand on fire? I held it before my eyes, seeing tiny flames lick from my thumb, forefinger, and middle finger. Yet I felt no pain. This can’t be happening. I flapped my hand against my shoulder and looked again. The flames were gone.
“How did you do that?” came Adderly’s voice from above. His sleeve was scorched and Billy stood beside him. They were both up there now, standing on the horizontal flag pole like tightrope walkers. How did it hold both their weights? Adderly stared at me, his eyes gone completely black. No iris, no pupil, just black.
“You’re asking me? I have no idea. I thought you did it!”
“Shall I kill the boy then?” Adderly dangled Billy off the edge.
“No, no, please! I’ll do anything.”
“Anything? My, that’s a tempting offer.” He smiled an insincere smile and I saw fangs.
“What do you want?”
“I want the truth!” he shouted.
“The truth is that I don’t know! I don’t know anything! I have amnesia. Didn’t Billy tell you? Didn’t you ask him? Why don’t you ask him now?”
“I did ask William about you. He seemed quite enamored of you at the time. He said your name was Madison and that you were hiding from someone.”
I gaped at him. “Hiding from someone? I’m not hiding from anyone! I just don’t know who I really am!”
“William, is that true? Is your friend hiding from someone or not?”
Billy’s face didn’t change at all from its blank expression. “I don’t know.”
Adderly’s brow furrowed in consternation. “That’s not what you said before, William. Which is it?”
“I don’t know,” Billy said again, his tone flat and lackluster.
“Please, how can you expect him to know anything when you have him all zombied-up like this? Just let him go.”
Adderly pointedly stared at me as if I’d just done something interesting. “Why should you care what I do with him?” he asked.
“Because he’s my friend and you’re controlling him and it’s not right.”
“Since when do you care about what’s right?”
“I don’t know what you think you know about me. I will not help you or answer you in any way until you unzombify him and let him go.”
Adderly sighed. “Very well.” He took Billy by the shoulders and stared into his eyes. “William, I release you.”
It was like watching someone wake up, except that Billy wasn’t asleep. Suddenly, the real Billy was back behind his eyes, and he almost lost his balance. Adderly steadied him.
“What the actual fuck?” Billy exclaimed.
“Language,” Adderly said.
Billy blinked a few times. “Wait a second, I remember . . . you . . . you drank from me? You made me drink your blood . . . You controlled me!”
“I saved your life,” Adderly said. “I’d think you’d be more grateful.”
“Grateful!? I was your slave! You took my phone, my jacket, my free will. You turned me into a spy for you!” Billy tried to pull away, but Adderly held him there.
“Careful now,” he warned. “Perhaps you should try talking to him,” he said to me.
“Billy,” I said.
“What the fuck, Maddy? What are you doing here?”
“I followed you. I’m here to help you.”
“Help me? You can’t help me. I’m a slave to this . . . this . . . thing.”
Adderly frowned. “Maybe I shouldn’t have saved your life. I could change that, you know.”
“Billy, just answer his questions. Tell him everything you know about me.”
“What? I’m not telling this guy anything.”
“Convince him,” Adderly growled, lifting Billy off his feet.
“Please don’t hurt him!”
He placed Billy back on his feet again. “You really do care what happens to this boy?” Adderly’s brow furrowed.
“Will you let him go?” I asked.
“Will you tell me everything?”
“Just let him go,” I pleaded.
I saw it happen. First, Adderly released him. Then I heard Billy’s words, and then it happened. In the blink of an eye.
“You know what? I’d rather be dead than anyone’s slave.” And then with a running leap, he dove over the security fence.
“Damn,” said Michael Adderly. Our eyes met for a moment. In one bound, he was at the end of the flagpole. “This isn’t over,” he said. Then he dove off the building.
I rushed to the fence. A blur of movement below, then nothing but the brightly lit night streets of New York City.
Chapter Twenty-One
I rushed to the elevator and took it all the way down to the lobby. Sgt. Keene was back at his post, writing on a clipboard. “Goodnight,”
he said as I pushed the door open and ran out to the sidewalk.
I don’t know what I expected to see. Billy’s broken body splattered across the sidewalk? Michael Adderly floating in mid-air? The two of them doing a tango down 35th Street?
Whatever I’d been expecting, I didn’t see it. Just cars on the streets and regular people on the sidewalks, trying to get wherever they were trying to get to.
I stood with my back against the building for several minutes, letting the pounding in my chest subside, thinking about everything that I’d just seen, just heard, just done. It made my head ache.
The next morning, I rolled over and stretched, slowly sitting up, before freezing in mid-yawn. I didn’t freeze literally, because I didn’t turn to ice, but it was cold in the room—much colder than it should have been, because my window was open. Not wide open, but a few inches. It had been closed when I went to sleep.
And that wasn’t all. My dresser drawers were open. My desk drawers were open. My laptop was open. Papers were all over the desk. Clothes lay all over the floor. Every piece of furniture in my room that might conceal any object at all had been opened, and presumably, searched. What for? I fought the rising feeling of panic in my chest and tried to calm my breathing.
I could have sworn my window was locked. Would have sworn it.
But what good is a locked window against a vampire?
With dread, I looked down at my tank top for bloodstains and then went to the bathroom mirror to check my neck, sighing with relief when there were no marks there.
Then again, he’d bitten Billy and Billy didn’t seem to have any bite marks either. Then again, he hadn’t killed Tamara. Did I need to be worried about Michael Adderly?
I stared steadily at myself in the mirror. My eyes looked big and scared. “It’s okay,” I told myself. “Just go back in. They can’t come out during the day, right? Go back in there and clean up.” I took a deep breath and returned to my bedroom.
I found my hospital discharge papers with my diagnosis, dissociative fugue, on top of the pile. I stacked the papers neatly and put them away with the rest of my unanswered questions.
One answer arrived three nights later. There was a note waiting for me on the kitchen table when I got in from work. “Package for you, Maddy,” the note read in Kara’s handwriting, with an arrow pointing down. On the floor was a large brown cardboard box, about three feet by three feet by one foot. The apartment was quiet as I examined the box. No return address. Postmarked today in Brooklyn. There was definitely something weighty inside, though I couldn’t imagine what.
I clicked on my small bedside lamp and used scissors to open the box. I pulled out the wadded up brown paper stuffing and found a surprise beneath: a wooden box with speakers in the front and a hinged lid. Inside was a Victrola record player. Who had sent it? I pulled it out and gasped at what I saw beneath. A record in a sleeve: Michael Adderly’s single, produced by Romeo Records: “The Kiss” played by Les Elliott and His Orchestra.
I moved the record player to the top of my bureau and plugged it in, then carefully slid the shiny black record from its jacket and placed it on the turntable.
I held my breath when I put the needle on the record’s outer rim. The static-filled white noise of the recording gave me goosebumps.
And then he began to sing.
Once again, I was transported. This time it was from the four walls of my bedroom to some non-place inside my mind, an empty labyrinth of hallways filled with fog and blurred images, feelings that had no context, no faces to identify, but that voice, something about that voice, made me feel that there’d been a terrible mistake. I knew that voice. I had lost that voice. Something awful had happened. I just knew it.
The song came to an end and my cheeks were wet with tears. I picked up the paper sleeve to put the record away and a folded piece of newsprint fell out.
The edges were yellowed with age, and it was heavily creased, as if it had been folded and refolded many times. I sat down on the bed and opened it in the light from the bedside lamp, only to find myself staring at a black and white photo of . . . me. The hair was a little shorter, but the wide smile and high cheekbones were the same. It was me. Maybe a little younger, but me, wearing a flowered top, in a newspaper clipping. The headline read “MISSING.” Beneath the headline was the following text:
Name: Christina Marie Taylor
Sex: female
Age: 18
Hair: blond/strawberry
Eyes: blue
Height: 5’9”
Weight: 135 lbs.
Details: Last seen wearing jeans, a black V-neck sweater, and a pair of black Converse sneakers, in SoHo in the company of a man with longish brown hair. Reward offered for information leading to her being found.
Missing Since: Tues. Oct. 13, 1987
My mouth dropped open. It couldn’t be. Was it a typo?
The top of the newspaper cut-out read October 19, 1987. Could someone fake a newspaper? The reverse of the page was a part of the “for sale” section of the newspaper. It seemed real enough.
I read the description again. The details, what Christina was wearing . . . It was the same outfit I’d had on when I found myself standing on Madison Avenue.
Christina had disappeared in Soho . . . seen with a man with “longish brown hair.” Could it have been Michael? Soho . . . Raoul’s restaurant was in Soho.
Christina. Christina Marie. It didn’t sound familiar. He’d called me “Chris.” Maybe it was a nickname for Christina.
But the year—1987? If I was eighteen in 1987, then I’d be . . . forty-eight now? I sure as hell didn’t look forty-eight. And the date, October 13th, was the same as when I’d come to. Almost thirty years later. Nothing made any sense. It was impossible.
I rushed to the mirror to search my face, fearing it had somehow changed. But the same young face stared back from the shadows, pale and lost, like a half moon reflected in a dark body of water.
THE END
Madison will return
in
INTO THE DARK MARKET
Book 2 of the Madison Roberts Series
APRIL 2020
Acknowledgements
This self-publishing endeavor has been in the works for several years and I am glad to have pushed this hapless bird out of the teeming nest that is my brain.
I could probably thank every person I am connected to in real life and through social media, because surely each one has contributed in some small way to any given portion of this project: by responding to my woes, making me laugh, or sharing some pithy meme that uplifted my spirits. However, I’d like to thank the following individuals for their assistance in getting this particular book out there.
The first person I’d like to thank is my editor Marcel Leroux, whose keen insight on dramatic structure and tough love on redundant nods, movements, and phrases helped this book find its final form. Any mistakes or typos that remain are most definitely my own.
I am also grateful to my cover illustrator Steven Novak, who deserves a medal for his endless patience and an award for his amazing artwork.
I’ve had a remarkable group of beta readers who shared their thoughts, opinions, and confusions during the writing and revising process (some of whom read multiple drafts!). I wouldn’t have felt confident enough to put the book out there without your feedback and encouragement. Thank you: Staci McGranaghan, Diana Ballard, Evette Alvarado, Amy Marcoux, Tina Hudec, Janelle Lannan Schittone, Miriam Lover-Williams, Lindsay Wisneski, Sheri Sikes, Melissa Grzybowski, Karsen LaRue, Marta Gregory, Kat Redfern-Shaw, Alexei Esikoff, and John Sisson.
For advice, helping with research, publication readiness, marketing plan, and other support, I thank: Sean Clarke, Michael Boucher, M.J. Heiser, E.J. Runyon, Jimi Ripley-Black, Alyssa Naley, and Christy Decker. Thank you, also, to Amanda Van Horn for the loan of her last name for one of my characters. I’d also like to thank indie publisher-writer Anna Castle, who—when I revealed my anxieties about self-publication
—told me, “Just jump!”
Last but certainly not least, I need to thank my husband, Sam Garrett, to whom this book is dedicated. Sam has been a tireless cheerleader, writer’s therapist, cat wrangler, head chef and housekeeper, as well as parent-and-midwife to the concept of this book. He has supported me in countless ways, taught me to be kinder to myself and my words, and loved me when I felt least loveable. I would not, and could not, have written and published this book without him.
Finally, I want to acknowledge my research materials. For those who are curious about ghosts and haunted locations, check out Loyd Auerbach’s ESP, Hauntings and Poltergeists: A Parapsychologist’s Handbook (1986), S.E. Schlosser’s Spooky New York (2005), and Dolores Riccio & Joan Bingham’s Haunted Houses USA (1989). I’m sure there are newer books out there on the topic; these happened to be on my shelf.
Readers who are interested in the history of Dutch architecture in New York might enjoy Maud Esther Dillard’s Old Dutch Houses of Brooklyn (1945) and Helen Wilkinson Reynolds’s Dutch Houses in the Hudson Valley Before 1776 (1965). Fans of Art Deco design will love the photos in Patricia Bayer’s Art Deco Interiors: Decoration and Design Classics of the 1920s and 1930s (1990) and Theodore Menten’s The Art Deco Style: In Household Objects, Architecture, Sculpture, Graphics, Jewelry; 468 Authentic Examples (1972). These books, borrowed from Brooklyn Library, were instrumental in helping me establish the look and contents of Adderly House, with one exception: the attic portrait of Catharina Van Horn was inspired by Bartholomeus van der Helst’s painting Anna du Pire as Granida (1660).
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