Night's Edge

by Maggie Shayne, Charlaine Harris, Barbara Hambly

  “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….”

  “You mean like a ladder up to the roof? Because there’s one of those…”

  “I mean like a staircase.” She closed her eyes, picturing it again. Picturing Tessa standing at the bottom of that slot of blackness in her pink tights and Broken Glass U.S. Tour T-shirt, swaying a little on her feet as she’d swayed a few nights ago, when she’d stood fumbling with the burglar bar in her sleep. Slowly, calling the images back to her mind, she said, “The steps are wood. The walls are dirty, pale, there’s paint peeling and water stains….”

  There’s evil up there, she thought. Something terrible, waiting in the darkness.

  Maddie opened her eyes and saw Phil regarding her doubtfully, as if she’d begun a monologue about who she’d been in a past life, or how spirits channeled their thoughts through her while she meditated. She knew the look because she’d so frequently worn it herself.

  It was quite common, when people got their cards read, for them to feel called upon to discuss every other aspect of their contacts with the supernatural, either because they felt themselves to be in the presence of a sympathetic ear or because they wanted to impress her. In her nearly two years of consulting in the back room of the Darkness Visible bookstore, Maddie had encountered large numbers of people who felt themselves to be reincarnated priestesses of Isis, or channelers of various spirits from realms beyond Earth, or returned alien abductees. And while she had met people whom she felt did, in truth, remember past lives, or have contact with spirits—she wasn’t so sure about abductees, at least not the ones she’d met—she was fairly sure there weren’t that many of them walking around.

  Phil said—speaking as if he were choosing his words with care—“Look, Maddie…What I had were creepy dreams. But dreams are all they were. I don’t know what you saw, but I’ve been over every inch of the sixth floor, and there isn’t a stairway like that. I’ve been through the other floors, too, and yes, that place is like a Skinner-box rat maze, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a stairway like that in the whole building.”

  “You must have been pretty shook up,” said Maddie quietly, “to search the whole building.”

  He looked away from her, then back. “Yeah. I was pretty shook up.”

  Unless you’re lying. The thought came so close behind the impulse to reach across the slight space that separated them, to put her hand on his wrist—to lean into his touch and see if his lips would taste the way they tasted in her dream—that she suspected that her wariness sprang more from the recollection of Sandy’s manipulative vulnerability than from any true judgment of danger.

  Their eyes met and she felt—she knew—that he was inches from drawing her to him, breaths from pressing her down to the floor beneath his gentle weight, uncaring that she was a raving kook or that he was a whispering stalker who rambled empty buildings in darkness. It’s safe, she had said…

  In my dream! she reminded herself.

  Not in real life. There was no safe in real life.

  If I step over the cliff, will I fall or be borne up on the wind and realize I can fly again?

  He said, “I’d better go.”

  Stay. “All right.”

  You little sluts are all alike. Had the words come from something that whispered in the halls of the Glendower Building—in the dreams of whoever drifted off to sleep there? Or from the dark at the bottom of this man’s mind?

  Rather than wake Tessa, Maddie dug Sandy’s old leather jacket out of the back of the closet. Sandy had been thinner than Phil and narrower through the shoulders—putting the sweater back on underneath didn’t help the fit any—but the jacket would at least still zip, and it was better than freezing. Phil turned the leather shoulder over and grinned at the Cleveland Indians patch. “That looks like it dates from the days before the Tribe was any good.”

  Maddie smiled at the memory. “He never gave up on them.”

  “Your husband?”

  Tessa must have told him. Had he asked?

  Maddie nodded. “She’ll bring your stuff back tomorrow—or the day after, if I can talk her into taking a break for a day and resting. Thank you for getting her here safe.” She turned the key in the lock as she stepped out into the hall with him and walked him down to the elevator. It took its usual endless rattling time to arrive, though God knew where else it was or who else was using it at two in the morning.

  “Like I was gonna leave her on the sidewalk?”

  Maddie poked him with her elbow. “What do you want, me to act like it was something you owed us? Did you bring her in a cab?” She fished in her pocket for part of the dancing money, and Phil raised his hand, refusing.

  “We walked.” It was a blatant lie—the dry socks on Tessa’s feet would have proved that even if Maddie had thought even for one moment that Phil would force a half-frozen girl to cross most of Manhattan Island on foot at one in the morning.

  She gestured her surrender. “Then let me buy you lunch.”

  “You’ve got a deal. I’m glad she has someone to look after her,” Phil added in a quieter voice. “So many of them don’t. The girls at the Dance Loft,” he explained at Maddie’s inquiring look. “And the other schools where I play. When the ABA’s auditioning, or when any of the big companies come through town, they—the girls—get crazy, starving themselves or fainting in class or driving themselves in class after class as if it was the end of the world. It’s not good for them, I know it’s not. And some of the little ones are the worst, with these wild-eyed mothers hanging on the sidelines like vultures.”

  Maddie thought of her own mother, taking her to the doctor for diet pills and paying one of the neighboring college students to write her school papers for her when she had an audition coming up, so she could fit in just one more class. “It’s a fine line between supporting someone else’s dream and seducing them into your own,” she said. “I gather Tessa never had anyone to support hers.”

  “Which is why she’s pushing herself like this.” Phil folded his arms, leaned against the jamb of the dilatory elevator’s door. “Trying to sleepwalk back to the studio to get in just one more saute de basque if it kills her…”

  “Is that what you think she was doing tonight?”

  Phil raised his eyebrows.

  As opposed to falling under the evil influence of a haunted building?

  Maddie drew a deep breath. In either case, the answer was the same. “I’ll do what I can to look after her,” she said. “I understand that craziness. I went through it myself for years. Sort of like sleeping on the floor in a haunted piano studio in New York in order to write music instead of making a good living bustin’ rods in Tulsa.”

  Phil swallowed a grin and shook a finger at her nose. “There is absolutely no comparison,” he said severely. “And don’t you think it.”

  And then, because his pointing finger was so close to her face, he slipped his hand under the bejeweled waterfall of her hair and drew her mouth gently to his.

  Maddie’s lips parted, she felt the wall behind her shoulders, the hard grip of his arm around her rib cage and the cracked old leather under her palms. Felt the scratch of beard stubble against her chin, against her jaw and her throat as she turned her head aside to let him kiss her neck,
the thin skin where her shirt opened above her sternum. Her own lips brushed his temple, the delicate rim of bone around the socket of his eye as her fingers tangled with the rough horsetail stiffness of his hair…and the whole world turned into a single dark, sweet torrent of need.

  Where his body pressed hers she could feel him shake.

  The elevator bell dinged.

  Phil stepped back from her. They were both trembling, staring into each other’s eyes, breathing deep and hard.

  No possibility of pretense.

  His rough-knotted fingers traced the shape of her cheekbone, her lips, as they’d traced her breasts in her dream.

  He said, “I’ll see you?”

  Maddie nodded. She felt as if her body had been rock, in a single instant shattering and turning to light.

  He stepped into the elevator and was gone.

  THE DARKNESS VISIBLE bookstore was down a flight of steps in one of those old brownstones of the West Village, the railed areaway below sidewalk level hosting, in summertime, a coffee machine and a couple of bins full of old Grateful Dead posters and battered prints of unlikely sixties rock-stars in historical garb. Now, in December, the bins and coffee machine occupied the front part of the tiny shop, along with shelves of dried sage bundles and packets of pennyroyal and hyssop, assorted versions of the tarot deck, from Aleister Crowley’s to the Barbie tarot, boxes of crystals, sets of runes, a small harp, yarrow stalks and small bronzes of Ganesh, Athene and Quetzalcoatl. From there back it was books, on every conceivable and inconceivable subject and, at the rear of the store, a stairway leading up to two small chambers draped in sari fabrics and chiffon, where Maddie and various other part-time diviners consulted with their clients. Beside the stair—its contents spilling over onto the surrounding wall—was the bulletin board, half an inch thick with flyers for drum circles and healing seminars, with lost-and-found announcements and the cards of every psychic counselor, personal trainer, computer consultant, dancer, musician, baby-sitter and housekeeper who had passed through the West Village since 1964.

  Under an enormous painting of Shiva dancing with Rita Hayworth, Diana Vale sat at her tall Victorian desk, a square-faced, gray-haired, kindly woman who looked like she could have been the Good Witch of Someplace or Other or somebody’s mother. She was in fact both, and a good deal besides. She said, “Hello, sweetheart,” and hopped down from her stool to hug Maddie as she came in. “Did you have readings this afternoon? I don’t have anything written down.”

  Maddie shook her head. “I have a gig tonight out on Long Island. A Turkish gentleman’s ninetieth birthday party, given to him by five of his daughters. I have to catch the train in about an hour and a half, but I need some advice. Have you ever heard of the Glendower Building?”

  Diana’s eyes narrowed. “It rings a bell….” Between running the bookstore and serving on the board of the local low-cost day care center, Diana wrote articles for a dozen magazines and journals concerning the occult. There was very little about haunted buildings that she didn’t know or at least know how to find out about. “Where is it?”

  “Here in town, over on Twenty-ninth Street. It’s the building the Dance Loft is in. There’s a dancewear store downstairs and storerooms on the second floor, then the Dance Loft has two floors and the upper two floors are rented out as studios and offices.”

  “I remember.” Diana nodded. “You said you never liked it.”

  Maddie nodded. “It’s a creepy building. I never could put my finger on what’s wrong with it, and at the time it was the only place I could rent space to start dance classes. But I was actually glad when Mrs. Dayforth rescheduled the room out from under me.”

  “And you think you saw or heard something?”

  “I saw a man—a shadow after the lights went out—whispering things to me, terrible things. At first I thought it was…well, someone Tessa knows who’s staying in the building because he lost his apartment. But now I’ve gotten to know this person and he doesn’t seem like someone who’d do that—aside from the fact that I smelled tobacco on this person and Phil doesn’t smoke. And Phil says that while sleeping in the building he’s had weird dreams, about a fire, and young girls being hurt. He says they’re just dreams….”

  Maddie fell silent, trying to sort out facts from feelings and fears. “And Tessa’s been acting strangely. Phil—he’s the piano player at the Dance Loft—says it’s because of her audition for the ABA coming up, but I don’t know. She’s been sleepwalking, trying to get back into the building. Last night she managed to get out in just her nightgown and a sweatshirt. I think if Phil hadn’t been coming back from the opera when he did she might really have froze to death.”

  She turned her head and glanced out into the little shop’s areaway. The slushy snow that had fallen late last night had congealed into dirt-fringed grayish globs on the steps. Boots and the hems of coats flickered by at sidewalk level, barely seen through the bookshop’s doors.

  “Then sometimes I think it’s my imagination, like one of those pictures that sometimes looks like one thing and sometimes another. Phil may be right and it may be just Tessa’s own stress, and some combination of anxieties out of his past, that are doing this same thing to them at the same time. I don’t know. The building feels leprous to me—diseased. Especially at night. But a lot of buildings in New York feel that way.”

  “A lot of buildings in New York have some ugliness in their past that doesn’t bear looking at.” Diana took a mug from a hook on the wall behind her desk and went to pour herself some coffee. Her long gray braids hung down her back nearly to her waist, over a shawl she’d loomed herself. “New York is an old city, and it has always been a place where men would seek to make money regardless of the cost to those they exploited. Such things leave their mark.”

  She perched on her high stool again, turning to face her computer screen, and clicked into stored files, tapping in the name Glendower Building. Maddie leaned an elbow on the corner of the desk and watched her older friend’s keen, kindly face by the screen’s reflected glow.

  “Nothing here. I’ll go online and look it up in the Spirit Guide Web site, but you can’t find anything in the new edition since they rearranged the classifications. And I’ll see what I can find in the block records of the insurance companies.” She clicked on the DSL line, tunneling through the bright-colored ether of the Internet and dodging pop-ups like an X-wing fighter pilot evading attacking Imperial disintegrator beams.

  “Do you think what your friend—Philip, is it?—says about Tessa’s mental state is true? I haven’t seen her in weeks, but the last time she came here to meet you she did not look well. Not all evils in the world have supernatural explanations, you know.”

  “No,” agreed Maddie with a sigh. “And God knows back in my ballet days I went crazy enough when I had an audition coming up. She isn’t eating, and though I can’t imagine not being able to sleep after eight hours of work a day plus four ballet classes, she’s having nightmares, crying out in her sleep. I know I was always so dead tired all I’d dream about was sleep…and food. And sometimes Brad Pitt.”

  “But you didn’t have to work to pay your rent, on top of worrying about the audition,” Diana reminded her quietly, sitting back from the glowing screen. “And you had parents who, for all their faults, were at least present, and supported you in your dancing. From what you’ve told me, Theresa has none of these things. Who knows what ghosts are arising from the dark of her mind?”

  No, Tessa had cried in her sleep. No me toque….

  Maddie had no idea what that meant, and wondered if Tessa had screamed in Spanish because it was the language of her childhood, the language of her dreams…or because it was the language her father and mother spoke.

  The phone rang. Diana said, “Bother,” and picked it up, setting aside the mouse and turning her eyes from the screen as she listened to the caller. “I don’t think so, sir…. No, as far as I know, Barbie dolls were first marketed in 1956 and there’s no evidenc
e of a connection with ancient Egypt…. Of course not…”

  Maddie glanced at the clock, estimating how long it would take her to paint up, assemble her dance gear, and get to Grand Central from West Thirty-second Street if she had to check in at Mrs. Buz’s house at six. Outside snow had begun to drift down again. It would be a bitter night.

  Tessa had taken Phil’s jeans, socks and pea coat with her when she’d left that morning for work at Starbucks before the beginner class at nine. Since Phil had no phone, Maddie had folded a note in with them, saying that she’d be out until late, and was he off Saturdays?

  She had dreamed last night, disturbingly, of Sandy. Dreamed of those long, maddening arguments in which he’d insisted that he was just tired, he’d taken a long walk and gotten dehydrated, and he had a liver ailment that acted up now and again and made him “wibbly,” as he put it. Dreamed of searching the apartment, over and over, looking for hidden caches of pills. What kind of love do we have if you don’t trust me? he kept asking her, in that slurred singsong she’d come to identify and hate. Why can’t you learn to trust?

  Just as Diana hung up the phone a stout young man with greasy hair and a complexion like a mushroom came in, asking for a book on occult minerology. “The very fact that the outer circle of Stonehenge is composed of igneous diorite proves that the stones were raised by levitation, since it’s far easier to levitate igneous rock than it is to levitate sedimentary or composite….”

  No wonder Phil had looked at her that way last night.

  “I’m sure there’s something in that section that will interest you,” Diana finished, pointing the young truth-seeker to the archway lettered Lost Knowledge—Travel. She turned back to Maddie. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right. It was worth it to learn something I never knew about—uh—monolithic construction techniques of the Ancient World.” Maddie wrapped her scarf back around her neck, covering the blue-and-silver Pakistani necklaces she wore when she taught dance, the strange-shaped Berber crosses that were said to protect one “in the four corners of the world.” Though not a believer in magic amulets, Maddie wore them, anyway. In New York you needed all the help you could get.