Charlaine Harris

by Night's Edge

  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 he
r 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!

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  PHIL CURSED, FLUNG HIS weight against the door. The hollow metallic clatter turned to obscene laughter in the dark. “Pry bar,” Maddie said, feeling strangely calm. “Hinges.” She dug the hammer out of her bag and stood back, holding Tessa by the hand.

  “The laws of physics goddamn better apply around here.” Phil swung the hammer at the bar, the crash like cannon fire in the dark. “If this doorjamb is made of something other than wood…”

  “Maddie!” Tessa screamed, and red light poured over them as fire burst out under the tables in the center of the room.

  It was horrifying how fast the fire spread. Oil, rags, dust went up; lines of fire raced across the wooden floorboards, climbed the walls where the film of cotton dust exploded into sheets of flame. Heat smote them, driving Tessa and Maddie back toward the door where Phil hammered at the end of the pry bar, like a dark-haired, desperate Thor. Though Maddie could see no one else in the long spaces of the loft, she could hear them, hear their voices screaming: Fuego! And Dear Jesus in Heaven, save us….

  The wooden jamb splintered and both girls flung themselves at the door, felt it give. Maddie cried again, “Help us!” and whether the wild, terrified energies in the burning room responded—whether they could respond—she didn’t know. But when she and Tessa hurled their weight against the metal again it tore free of the broken jamb, opening a narrow space where the hinges were half torn free.

  Phil slid through first, swore again—smoke poured through and it seemed to Maddie for a moment that the broken door, the shattered jamb, tried to close up again around him, crushing his body like a huge mouth. He braced his back, fought the iron and the wood apart and gasped, “Can you get through past me?” As the two women slithered through the narrow gap, Maddie heard Glendower’s voice shouting, not in her mind this time but seeming to come from the fire-saturated darkness all around them.