Charlaine Harris

by Night's Edge

  “Were you dreaming about something?” Maddie walked her back to the couch, switched on the small reading lamp at its head. Last night—or maybe the night before?—Maddie had been wakened by Tessa crying out in her sleep in Spanish: No! No me toque!

  Tessa shook her head uncertainly, groping for some half-recalled image. But the next moment the fine arches of her brows pulled together, and she flinched away from the memory of whatever it was.

  “What did you dream?” asked Maddie softly.

  “I don’t remember.”

  The father who’d leave her sitting in his truck outside the bars in El Paso until one in the morning on the way home from picking her up after school? The mother who’d come screaming drunk into her bedroom at midnight pulling dresser drawers out and throwing everything into the middle of the floor?

  Maddie had heard about both of these individuals. Tessa answered too quickly, but Maddie didn’t press her. Maybe she didn’t remember.

  FOUR NIGHTS A WEEK, Maddie danced at Al-Medina—sometimes with the incomparable Josi, sometimes with Zafira Mafous, a beautiful Lebanese girl who danced under the stage name of Lucy—and finished her last set at eleven. Upon occasion she’d get a private gig, a birthday party or bar mitzvah, and then it was anybody’s guess when she’d get home, which was the case the following Saturday night.

  She unlocked the door at one—tired, smelling a little of champagne thanks to a tipsy rabbi, and three hundred dollars richer—and saw in the ghostly glow of the reflected street lamps the tumble of Tessa’s bedding on the couch and the bathroom door open and dark.

  Tessa was gone.

  Maddie crossed at once to the curtain of sheets and looked through to her own bed. But the only one there was Baby, curled up on the pillows with that And where have you been all night, young lady? look in her green eyes.

  In a New York studio apartment there are very, very few places where even an anorexic ballerina can hide.

  In her mind Maddie saw Tessa standing in her nightgown, her long black hair hanging down her shoulders, fumbling at the door. When one or the other of them was home they left the key in the lock. The only thing that had defeated her the other night was the burglar bar.

  Maddie whispered, “Damn it!” The January night was freezing cold with an icy wind blowing off the harbor. A glance around the apartment showed Tessa’s street shoes and coat still there, her jeans folded neatly on the arm of the sofa and the tights she’d had on earlier that evening when she’d left for class crumpled in the bathroom hamper. The clothes for tomorrow—white shirt and black trousers for work, tights and leotard for class—lay on top of her gym bag. The red sweatshirt she sometimes wore over her nightgown was gone, and that was all.

  How far could someone walk in their sleep? Maddie couldn’t imagine Tessa operating the elevator, for instance, but even the residents of the tenth floor sometimes used the stairs out of sheer exasperation with the single rickety car. The thought of her roommate heading blithely for the stairs—did she walk with her eyes shut?—turned Maddie cold inside. The thought of her wandering around the hallway of the tenth floor was worse, given some of the creeps the tenant of 10-C sublet to. Maddie dumped her dance bag onto the couch and was heading back to the door when the key rattled in the lock.

  It was Tessa, shivering and wrapped in a navy pea coat far larger and shabbier than her own, underneath which were visible a pair of familiar, patched and superannuated jeans, rolled up at the ankle, and two pairs of wool socks.

  Phil, beside her, wore frayed black dress pants, a muffler wrapped around his neck over two flannel shirts and his green wool sweater, and looked frozen to death.

  “I found her outside the Glendower Building, trying to get in,” he said, leading Tessa to the couch and settling her down, tugging the blanket over her. “God knows how long she’d been there. Probably not long, dressed like she was, in this town—she was just in her nightgown and a sweatshirt….”

  “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. Footsteps 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.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MADDIE 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….”