Melody Burning

by Whitley Strieber

  I turn. Now I’m facing the window at the far end of this hall. To my left is the door into the den. I enter it.

  This is where all my books are. My poetry book that Daddy read to me when I was little. “The old canoe by the shadowy shore . . .” I would sit cuddled in his arms. We had a nice life, I thought. Guess nobody was happy except me.

  Okay, the door is right over there. All I have to do is unlock it and step out into the stairwell. Oh, God, I am so scared. Mom’s room is far away. I could scream but she’d never believe me. And Mace? What if it doesn’t work, or I spray myself? What if he has a gun?

  I put a hand on the bolt and, as silently as possible, I turn it. There is the faintest of scrapes.

  My song echoes in my mind. “I hear you, I know I do, I know I do . . .”

  Vampire?

  Don’t go there, girl. Anyway, they don’t exist.

  Ghost?

  I lean against the door. The silence from the other side is total.

  So maybe it is a ghost.

  And then I feel the door move. As in, somebody just leaned against it from the other side. Pushing.

  The second I turn the knob, they’re going to burst in on me.

  Very slowly, very quietly, I turn the bolt back . . . only it won’t go back—it’s stuck. Because he’s out there pushing so hard the door is warping.

  He must be incredibly strong. He must be huge.

  And he knows I’m here, and he’s just an inch away.

  I twist the bolt harder . . . and finally it clicks in.

  The whole door creaks. Then it sort of lets go. Has he moved away? Was he even there?

  I am about to be sick. I want to say “I have a gun,” but I can’t make my throat work.

  I run back into my room, lock my door, and dive into bed. I clutch the Mace like it’s a lifeline.

  And now, another sound against the wall. I hate this! I can’t stand this! Am I losing my mind for real?

  I look at the phone. If I pick it up and call Julius, he’ll be up here in five minutes with ten cops trailing behind. Except I just wish I could prove there really is a guy out there and it’s not all in my head. Because it could be. I fear that.

  I get out of bed and pick up my guitar.

  I hear you, I know I do.

  Who are you?

  Who are you?

  Don’ t scare me,

  don’ t hurt me, Don’ t go, don’ t go, don’ t go. ...

  Am I completely insane to even sing that? Except it’s got flow. It does. I click on Voice Memo on my iPad and do it again. Let the songs come.

  Real songs come out of hurt and loss and longing. If they also come out of fear, then this is a winner.

  I close my eyes, imagining who I used to be. Melanie Cholworth. Melody McGrath is much better—I have to admit Mom is right about that. Nowadays, I have to actually pretend that I’m the real me. I guess Melody took over.

  I get back into bed and close my eyes. But sleep doesn’t come; sleep is far away. Even though it’s quiet now, I can’t stop listening. I imagine claws coming through the wall.

  On the day we moved in and I arrived with my gaggle of snapping paparazzi, I looked up at the soaring facade and I had this gut reaction that made me go, “Ohmygosh.”

  In my mind’s eye, I saw people tumbling off the balconies. . . . They were all girls about my age, and they all had my hair and my complexion and my clothes on, and they were all falling just like I think I would probably fall, with their arms spread wide, trying to say “I am flying, Mother dear—look at me!”

  Fly and fly and fly and fly. . . . There’s a song there, girl, remember that. Songs live in my nooks and crannies. I have to hunt for them like a miner looking for diamonds or whatever, I guess.

  Shit! I hear it again.

  No way am I staying in my room, but also no way am I going to Mom’s room when she and Dapper D might be getting cozy.

  So I drag the mattress, which turns out to be really heavy, until it’s all the way across the room.

  I look at my wall. How thick is it? Could he cut his way through?

  I will sing all night, until the dawn. Trouble is, dawn’s so far away and I am so alone.

  CHAPTER 2

  Deep in the Beresford’s basement, Frank the Torch listened, and he didn’t like what he was hearing. This was exactly what Mr. Szatson had complained about. Some squatter. “Get him outta there, Frank. Wylie couldn’t do it, but you know your way around buildings. Get him out.” Wylie had been his predecessor. Fired over the squatter. Or so it appeared.

  Six weeks ago, he’d come off a nickel in San Quentin two years early. Why the sentence reduction he did not know, but he was not about to argue. He’d been in for a dumb little job in City of Industry, the Alert Cleaners fire. The owner was looking to cash out and retire and couldn’t find a buyer, so he’d called Frank. It had been an easy job—ten bills in his wallet, don’t even think about it.

  Except he’d come up against a control-freak insurance investigator who’d found an image of him on the security camera tape of the gas station across the street. With his record, it was a no-brainer. The jury took nineteen minutes to convict.

  As soon as he was out, he’d gotten a call on his cell: Mr. Szatson wants to see you. He’d known Szatson for years, for the same reason that he knew a lot of real estate developers. They needed fires, these guys, and arson was Frank’s profession. Also, he was at the top of the heap when it came to skills. He’d been a civil engineer, so he knew structures. If you hired him, you could count on three things: The fire would work. The arson investigators would not trace it back to you. You would get your payday.

  Mr. Szatson had sent him to work at the Beresford as its superintendent. “You’re an engineer, Frank. I need an engineer. Because the place has problems. There’s a squatter and a lot of famous and rich tenants. I don’t need that crap, so I want you to get rid of him.”

  There were lots of ways to hide in a big place like this. Too many.

  He didn’t think that was the only reason he’d been hired, though. Maybe Szatson had even pulled him out of the stir. He was that powerful. To put it bluntly, Szatson needed a fire. Somewhere in the Szatson empire, Frank the Torch was going to do a job, and probably more than one. Not here, though. This was the Szatson flagship.

  Frank was thrilled by the Beresford. Aside from making sure the heat worked and the elevators didn’t get stuck, there wasn’t a lot to do but watch the beautiful people come and go. There were stars in the place, Melody McGrath, for instance. Pretty as a picture, sweet as honey. But that mother of hers—wow, that was one power hitter. He’d never tangled with her, but he’d been warned by other members of the staff that she was a bullmastiff and you did not want to cross her.

  You also did not want her to pull her precious daughter out of the place since she brought so much media attention. If anything went wrong, they would surely leave.

  He flipped from one security camera to the next. He’d seen this character—glimpsed him—standing in front of the laundry room. Black clothes, head to foot. Wild hair.

  He was going to find him and take him somewhere far away. Maybe even drop the bastard off a cliff. Or at least punch him out.

  CHAPTER 3

  I went through today like a zombie and made everybody on the Swingles set furious. Mom thinks I’m hallucinating or whatever, and here I am alone in my room and I just heard it again! This time it went hisss, not like a snake but as if it was sliding against my wall.

  Sleep is once again not an option, so I’m gonna work. The Swingles call is at six thirty tomorrow, and I could memorize my lines now instead of in the limo at the crack of dawn like I did this morning.

  Swingles is pretty fun, actually. The pilot was huge in the ratings, and then came better news: the second week didn’t bring all that much ratings deterioration, as they call it.

  I’m lying on my right side and facing my wall of glass, letting my eyes slowly close to LA at night with a slice of
moon above. Very beautiful and mysterious, as long as you don’t think about the fact that the city is really a sea of condos and strip malls.

  While I’m lying here thinking of the mysteries of life and wondering if love will ever come my way (I’m such a drama queen), the sound comes and I jump off the bed.

  After a moment, the sliding starts again.

  Is it coming from the other side of the wall, or inside it?

  I grab my laptop and go to the Beresford’s website, where I pull up the apartment layouts. (Can we really afford eleven grand a month for this amazing apartment?)

  Anyway, my bedroom backs onto a ser vice shaft beside the stairwell outside our den.

  So maybe Mom is sort of right. But it’s not the building swaying—it’s projected sound from somewhere coming up through the shaft behind my room or the stairwell behind that.

  So here’s a creepy thought: what if what I’m hearing is somebody actually cutting through the wall, not from the stairwell but from inside the shaft beside it? I’ve already had about forty-seven stalkers, guys with dirty T-shirts and gray skin and hunter’s eyes.

  If you had a gun, you could shoot me right through the wall that’s behind the headboard of my bed. While I was on the Swingles set today, the maid put my bed back together. Maybe I’ll move the mattress again.

  Jesus—I am so neurotic, which is why my insides are turning into an acid bath. I’m sixteen and already chug Mylanta. Xanax is next, then amitriptyline, then up the line through Prozac to the Effexors of the world. I know the drill.

  Maybe there is no .357 Magnum out there an inch from my headboard. Maybe it’s something innocent but annoying, like a papi trying to plant a spike camera. If you don’t know what that is, it looks just like a nail. Stick it through a wall, and you’ve got an eye in the room. Add a spike mike, and your target is in a movie.

  What if it’s some horrible old man who lives in the basement and comes up at night? What if he isn’t a vampire but a cannibal? Has anybody ever disappeared in this place?

  You’re sixteen years old, girl, and there’s no bogeyman here. Oh, my dear Beresford that I must now call home, you are haunted by a very real something.

  I listen. Breathing? Maybe. Or maybe it’s that I’m insane. That’s what Mom would think.

  Quiet time of the night, everybody asleep except me. Is somebody in with Mom? Don’t know. Instead of looking, this time I just lock my door. I take my Mace out and cradle it. Earlier, I reread the instructions. Pull the ring and press the red button. It’s pretty simple, actually.

  If a shot came through the wall, would I even have a second to realize I was dying?

  I know he’s out there.

  Except now he’s quiet. So maybe it’s something else. I close my eyes and let my music take my mind.

  “Far and far and far and far, I’m going far and far and far and far, and the stars are way behind me, the stars are way behind me.”

  I sleep with my head at the foot of the bed and all my pillows piled up against the wall to cushion the bullets.

  CHAPTER 4

  He could hear her; she was singing, and he pressed against the wall, listening to her voice—“far and far and far and far . . .” And he was so close to her, but also far and far and far.

  Before Melody, he had looked at girls and liked girls, but now there was this huge difference. Seeing her for the first time had caused an explosion inside him. He had no idea that feelings like this existed. Sure, he’d seen girls, plenty of them, but never one who glowed like Melody McGrath, whose hair seemed filled with the sun, whose eyes laughed and said “come here,” whose skin looked as soft as the air itself.

  He hadn’t known that you could feel this way, and he wasn’t sure if it meant that he was okay or that he was not okay.

  He had to be near her. But he must never let her see him. Leaving this shaft where he was practically living now was too hard for him. He’d never known anything like the desire that kept him pressed up here against the drywall, listening to every faint sound from her room on the other side and holding an image of her in his mind.

  He could see the gleam of her eyes, the broad paleness of her forehead, the way her lips seemed to laugh gently, as if she possessed some secret knowledge.

  All of this he’d watched on Swingles. His love affair—for that’s what it was, even if he did not understand it—had started when he’d been watching the show one evening in some vacationer’s apartment.

  A bristling shock had shot through him when he recognized her as one of the new people here in the Beresford and also realized that she was the most beautiful girl on earth.

  Immediately, he’d climbed the chase, or shaft, up to an apartment whose tenants used their TiVo a lot, slipped in through his hatch, and added Swingles to their queue. Now when they were gone, he could watch. And he did, over and over again, loving her, longing for her with a pain at once sweeter and sharper than any he knew, except when he held the blue rose.

  More than once, the thought of going in there had crossed his mind. He was afraid, though. He did not like her mother’s voice; it had a knife in it.

  He was much too shy to ever look at a girl changing or in the shower or anything like that. He tried not to go into the same apartment too often. Except for Mrs. Scutter’s—to be sure she wasn’t setting her bed on fire with a cigarette. She’d done that once, and since then he made sure to check on her every night.

  When he imagined being with Melody, it was in the nicest place he knew, which was the park he could see far below. Trees and flowers bloomed there in summertime, and if he listened closely, he could hear music playing and kids yelling in happy voices.

  He’d looked at himself in mirrors in the bathrooms of vacancies and vacationers. Wasn’t he kind of odd looking? Every day, his nose got bigger, it seemed to him. And he cut his hair as best he could, but it was still too shaggy. He wanted to look like other guys, not like some kind of freak.

  His dad, he remembered, had short hair, and he thought he should have it, too. He barely remembered Mom, except that she had wavy blond hair like Melody, and she laughed, and she had given him his blue rose.

  He thought Melody was about his age, but he wasn’t really sure. How old was he, anyway?

  Now he was in the equipment shaft—called Chase Two during construction—beside Melody’s bedroom. It was making him happy and sad at the same time to hear her in there. Earlier, she’d moved her bed so she was no longer so close that he could listen to her voice and her guitar.

  Then he heard another sound, one that instantly drew his attention: a high, mournful sound like wind sweeping around the corner of the building. It was coming, he knew, from ten floors below, drifting up the chase from 4021.

  Gilford was crying. This was because Tommy was out late again, and Gilford cried then. Tommy had no idea how much Gilford loved him.

  He wanted to stay here near Melody, but he had a job to do, so he grasped the edge of one of the girders that framed the chase and quickly dropped down the ten floors, pulsing his fingers along the pipes, letting himself slide just fast enough but not so fast that he would lose control. The dark hole that yawned below hardly mattered to him. Falling was hard to imagine. When he was little, though, he’d fallen some—never more than a story or two.

  When he felt himself dropping, he’d let himself go loose. That way it didn’t hurt too much, but he knew he couldn’t withstand stories and stories.

  He arrived at forty and went along the crawl space to Tommy’s apartment. He was growing, so the crawl spaces were getting smaller. He wasn’t fat; he was just, well, big. Dad had been really, really huge, so maybe he would be huge, too. Then what happened? Without the ability to use his crawl spaces . . . he didn’t even want to think about it.

  He reached Tommy’s apartment and went over to where he had installed his hatch. Over the years, he’d built lots of hatches. People thought they were supposed to be there.

  He wanted to be where Melody was, to be her f
riend, to sit on the couch together. In a whisper in his mind, he told himself the same story again and again. He was with Melody on the couch. He said to her, “I love you,” and she turned to him, and that wonderful smile came across her face, and then their lips touched.

  Oh, yeah, like that would happen. He wanted to at least just breathe the air in her apartment. He wanted to, but he was scared because—well, the way she made him feel was just scary, with his whole body shivering like it did. As he slid open his hatch into Tommy’s, Gilford was already whining at the door of the little foyer closet it opened into. He dropped down, pushing back Tommy’s rarely used winter jackets, then opened the door.

  He stepped into the foyer and immediately listened to the apartment while Gilford wiggled. He could hear slow breathing coming from the bedroom. That would be Annabelle. The breaths were regular and long. She was sound asleep.

  He needed to be really careful here. He had not expected Annabelle to be home while Tommy was out.

  Bending down, he let Gilford lick his face. The dog was a mass of wiggles.

  “Hey, Gilly,” he whispered. “Hey, bud.” Gilford was a pug. That’s what Tommy told people he was, a pug. He had a pushed-in face and he snorted a lot, but he was very sweet.

  As Beresford went through to the living room, Gilford trotted with him, his nose in the air. He knew that it was treat and cuddle time because that’s what they both liked. But in the middle of the living room, Beresford stopped and listened carefully again. Annabelle had nearly caught him once. Just by nature, she was very quiet.

  He headed for the kitchen, Gilford capering beside him, jumping up on his jeans. Or rather, Marty Prince’s jeans. Beresford’s clothes were all borrowed from tenants’ closets.

  Tommy did not have one of the most wonderful kitchens in the building. For great kitchens, you needed the older people like Helen Dooling. She cooked chicken and made pie. He had learned to eat just a little here and a little there, never much in any one apartment.