Charlaine Harris

by Night's Edge

  Maddie dumped her bag on the floor, looked at the clock.

  Ten to two.

  Shit.

  She scooped up the telephone, tapped through to the message service. The first was from Diana. “Maddie, I’ve sent you an e-mail about what I could learn of the Glendower Building. Even if it’s late when you get in, I think you’d better read it right away.”

  The second was from Phil. “I hope you pick up your messages the minute you get in. There’s something weird going on here and I think you’d better come down. I’ll be in the lobby waiting to let you in. If I’m not there, please wait for me, I won’t be more than a few minutes. Love you.”

  The next three were hang-ups. Phil, probably—there was one per hour, nearly on the hour, as if he was walking across to the Owl—which closed at midnight—or down to the all-night liquor store on the corner to make them. Part of her mind tagged the information, and the fact that whatever “weird” was, it obviously was something that couldn’t be explained to a 911 operator.

  Part of her mind jarred breathlessly on his first message’s closing.

  What did you say to me?

  Love you.

  Quick and casual, like a kiss in passing or a pat on the shoulder.

  Love you.

  She was already on her way through the curtain to her alcove, where the laptop was set up on the tiny dresser under the soft glow of the bronze lamp. She clicked onto the Net and an obnoxiously perky droid voice informed her, You have mail .

  To: BeautifulDancer909

  From: ValedGoddess@DarknessVisible.com

  Maddie,

  Here’s what I’ve been able to find out about the Glendower Building and the man who built it, and what happened there in January 1908.

  The Glendower Building was constructed in 1884 by Lucius Glendower, who owned a number of construction companies, tenement buildings, clothing factories and match factories on the Lower East Side. It was eight stories tall, the upper three floors of which were occupied by the Pinnacle Ready-Made Shirt Company, which Glendower owned.

  As you probably know, in the days before trade unions there was not only no regulation of how little an employer could pay—or how many hours’ work he could demand of employees, firing at will those who refused to do as they were told—but there were no safety regulations, either. Glendower had a bad reputation even among the garment workers of the Lower East Side.

  Maddie thought, Yikes! Her grandfather had been a reporter covering labor strikes early in the century, so she knew a little about the people who were running the garment business then. It was saying something for one man to have a “bad reputation” among that gang of robber barons.

  Glendower paid four dollars a week and hired mostly Russian, Jewish, Italian, Irish and Cuban girls whose families desperately needed any income they could get. The girls worked a twelve-hour day in the winter, sixteen hours in the summer, and Glendower’s floor managers routinely locked the doors of the factory loft except for a brief break at lunchtime. They said this was to check pilfering (the only toilets were in the yard behind the building and fabric could be sneaked over the fence) and also to make sure the girls didn’t go down to the yard simply to loaf. This was common practice then.

  The windows were locked for the same reason, also usual business practice in the garment industry. If nothing else it led to several faintings a day in the summertime and at least one girl’s death from heat stroke and dehydration. Glendower paid off the city inspectors rather than go to the expense of putting fire escapes on the building, though they were added later.

  What gave Glendower a smelly reputation was his sexual abuse of the girls who worked for him. His office was on the sixth floor and he would routinely take girls there and molest them, with the threat of being fired—and blacklisted from work in any of the other garment factories on the East Side—if they refused. This wasn’t that uncommon, either, by the way. Back then it was thought that a girl who worked—especially an immigrant girl—was fair game. Judging by complaints to the fledgling ILGWU, it sounds like Glendower—a massive dark-haired man whose father made a fortune selling guns to both sides in the Civil War—was a sex addict and, if not clinically a sadist, at least got a kick out of roughing up girls.

  Phil had said, I hear them crying…. And I heard him laugh . Maddie heard again in her mind the whispering voice from the darkness: little sluts are all alike…good for one thing …

  She thought of the endless stream of bright-faced children trotting up and down those stairs in their pink beginner’s leotards, their wispy little practice skirts. The floors that had been trodden by girls not much older, on their way to earn enough money to keep their parents and siblings from being thrown out of their tenement rooms, were buried these days under God knew how many layers of subsequent linoleum and paint.

  But it was as if the walls remembered, and wept with shame in the dark.

  Like most loft garment factories at that time, Pinnacle Ready-Made was a disaster waiting to happen. Rags soaked with sewing-machine oil weren’t taken out nearly often enough—it would be a nuisance to maneuver anything down the stairways, which were about two feet wide to get maximum advantage of space in the building for office and warehouse rental—and were allowed to pile up under the worktables. This was long before any kind of flame retardant was used on cloth, and the factory floors were piled with rags, scrap, lint from the machines and cotton dust, and cotton dust, which is highly flammable, permeated the air.

  On the morning of January 13, 1908, the inevitable happened and fire broke out in the seventh-floor factory.

  Maddie closed her eyes, hearing in her mind the sound Phil had described, the frantic clattering of fists pounding on a locked metal door.

  Ninety girls were killed. The seventh and eighth floors were destroyed completely and the sixth floor gutted. Lucius Glendower’s body was found in one of the stairwells, where he’d apparently become disoriented in the smoke and confusion and burned to death. The consensus of local opinion was that this was only a preliminary to a similar but more lasting destiny.

  His estate was divided between his second wife and his nephew, Grayson, who married one another in order to consolidate the stock holdings. They repaired the building, which they sold in 1925.

  Maddie tried to imagine someone that coldheartedly calculating and greedy, and felt a little glow of gladness that Lucius Glendower had spent a portion of his life with not one, but two of them. Served them all right.

  She scrolled down, expecting only an account of subsequent remodeling and sales.

  The first time a girl disappeared in the building after the fire was in 1919. I couldn’t find much about her except that she was one of Grayson Glendower’s factory girls, but there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that she never left the building, and that her body was never found.

  Maddie thought, her heart curling in on itself with shock, The first time…?

  She scrolled down fast through the succeeding paragraphs of Diana’s e-mail. Counting names and dates. Too appalled, at first, to believe what she read.

  In all, since 1919, at least ten girls had gone into the Glendower Building and had not come out.

  New York’s finest had come up with a number of logical explanations to account for as many of them as possible. Some of them may even have been correct. One of the girls, a sewing machine operator who vanished in 1943, was called a “troublemaker” by her family and was apparently dating a Protestant boy they didn’t like, a boy who’d gone into the army. There was speculation she’d run off to join him before he was shipped off to fight in Italy, where he was killed a few months later; there was little surprise that no one had ever heard from her again. And the one who’d disappeared while working late one night in December 1967 had been a sixteen-year-old runaway from Portland, whose true name her fellow hippies in her East Village crash-pad didn’t even know.

  But even discounting those—and the few witnesses involved swore that neither girl had lef
t the building—that still left eight girls whose families, boyfriends and roommates were positive they had no reason to drop out of sight. Eight girls who had simply disappeared in the mazes of the Glendower Building’s dark upper floors.

  Eight girls between the ages of sixteen and twenty. All of them except Eileen Kirkpatrick dark-haired, like most of the girls who’d been fodder for the East Side garment shops at the nineteenth century’s turn. All of them between mid-December and the thirteenth of January, the dark midnight of the year.

  Little sluts are all alike…good for one thing…

  CHAPTER SIX

  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 time
s.”

  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.