Audrey’s Door

by Sarah Langan

  “Itwasssyou?” she asked lashless Marty as a pair of uniformed cops got off the elevator. “You hurt my best friend?”

  Marty blinked his slits. His grip on her arm tightened until it pinched, and she knew. It was him. The man who was so good and kind and full of promise that Jayne had been afraid to say his name. She looked up at him now, and saw that in his vanity, he’d lined under his eyes with brown pencil, and his fake hair was slick with pomade. Jayne. Poor Jayne. She’d trusted too much.

  The EMTs were the first to leave 14E. They wheeled Jayne out on a gurney with a white sheet over her body. One of her saddle shoes stuck out. Its sole was broken, and her feet were geisha-tiny. Audrey would have cried, but her chest hurt too much.

  After asking some questions of the tenants, the uniformed cops were the first to leave. It happened so fast, and she was shaking so hard, sweating, too, that she didn’t think to speak or even try to stop them.

  “I can’t believe this. Can you believe this?” one of the tenants asked.

  “She was always so quiet. I had no idea,” Loretta answered.

  “—Kept to herself, mostly,” Evvie added.

  “—Poor girl!” Galton said as he clapped his hands together, unable to contain his jubilation.

  The last to leave were the detectives—a man and woman dressed in brown suits a few sizes too tight, like they’d bought them when they got their promotions and hadn’t upgraded since.

  “Her name was Jayne Young. Her family came from Salt Lake City. Like we told you, Loretta found her and called 911,” Marty told them. “That’s all I know.”

  “Terrible,” Loretta chimed in. “She left her door open and the light on. I didn’t even have to go inside.”

  “The killer,” Audrey said. Marty and Loretta squeezed her arms. The feeling was a sphygmomanometer’s sleeve, tightening.

  “Killer?” the male detective asked. He had black hair that was gray at the temples, and he looked tired, like he’d been woken from a sound sleep and was still debating whether he gave a shit about the dead girl in the poodle skirt.

  “Them. All of them. Got inside her. Mader do it. Sacrifice, so their door would open,” Audrey panted.

  The man came closer, and Audrey saw he didn’t believe. He was looking at her the way people used to look at Betty; with narrowed eyes and poker faces. “How did they do that? Because it looks like she hung herself,” he said.

  Audrey blinked. She thought she felt a tear roll, but her cheeks were numb. The left side of her chest throbbed, and she wondered if the injection that the kind-looking old man had given her might induce a heart attack.

  “Do you know something?” he asked.

  “They do,” she said.

  He looked Audrey up and down, from soiled blue sweat suit to blood-crusted bare feet. “Would you like to come to a hospital?” he asked. Then he turned to the other detective. “Donna? Why don’t you call another van for this nice lady?”

  She winced. Nice lady—code for crazy. That van wasn’t going to a hospital, it was going to Bellevue. She realized then that these detectives were in on it. So were the EMTs. Everybody in the whole world, including Saraub, was in on it. A genuine gaslight, just to drive her mad. They’d done the same to Betty. Jayne wasn’t even dead. The tenants had paid her off. All fun and games for the idle rich.

  She took a breath. The floor was spinning. The walls were slanted. Nothing in this entire building made sense!

  Donna opened her phone. She sounded cheerful, like maybe she got a commission for every lonely woman she helped lock up. “A van—”

  Audrey interrupted. “No docore. I’maset…” She bit her lip. “She was my friend.”

  “You sure?” the man asked.

  “She’s my niece. Too many vodka tonics,” Loretta said, then clapped her hands together. “Back to Betty Ford for you!”

  The detective waited for Audrey to answer.

  “I’ma sore,” she said.

  He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a business card. Audrey’s eyes were so bleary that she couldn’t read the number or title, only the name: AIDAN MCGIL-LICUDDY. “Well, when you’re feeling better, if you think of anything you want to tell me, give me a call.”

  Aidan and Donna got on the elevator. The tenants closed in around her. More than twenty now. At least thirty. Loretta’s eyelids blinked over opaque cataracts. The wise, gray-haired man pulled out his needle, and masked Francis straightened her arm. Another shot. Fluid sloshed. The left side of her chest cramped like a charley horse.

  The detectives closed the iron elevator gate behind them with a crash. It was then that she realized her mistake. “Waaaait!” she rasped. But by then, it was too late.

  35

  The Sound a Trap Makes as It Closes, II: A Little Insulin Never Killed Anybody!

  The tenants closed in around her. Cold hands and loose skin. Her feet weren’t touching the floor anymore. She felt herself being carried back into 14B. “Soooop,” she moaned, as they walked the fifty-foot hall. Their hands were soft, as if they’d never washed a dish or lifted a bag of groceries. But like a game of light as a feather, there were so many of them that they each only needed their fingers to hoist her up over their heads. “No. Peeeease, no.”

  Into the dark den to find rippling bits of clothes and chopped cardboard and Wolverine, all laced with her blood. Tiny red ants circled the hole in the floor. “I’m-get-you,” she said. “Even if I have come back an haunt-you.”

  “My dear,” Loretta answered. “We’d be delighted!” They laid her on the floor next to the air mattress. Her feet felt cold and stiff, like ice. So did her hands. She was shivering even though she was sweaty and hot. Loretta and Marty stood over her, while behind, the rest cleared the smashed old door from the room, then piled more moving boxes in its place. To her left, someone returned the grisly rebar to the side of the piano, along with a shiny red toolbox.

  “We can’t have you calling Romeo!” a man in a blue Armani suit from the early 1960s announced, then shoved her cell phone into his pocket, while an old woman unplugged her laptop and packed it under her arm, and another collected her soiled pants and shoes, so her only clothing was Clara’s sweat suit.

  Marty held her wrist with shaking fingers while looking at his watch. She was convulsing now, and she didn’t dare take a deep breath. Her chest felt like it might split open.

  “How much did you give her?” he called into the crowd.

  “Nobody ever died from a little insulin. I take it every day,” a woman with coarse, dyed-black hair and more gold necklaces than 1980s Mr. T. answered. Marty pumped the plastic mattress with air, then helped Audrey on top of it.

  “Oh, stop touching the girls, you dirty old man,” Loretta teased.

  “Hear, hear, Marty Hearst! Don’t play with the girls; you don’t know where they’ve been!” Evvie Waugh shrieked, then slapped Marty on the ass with Edgardo’s cane. The sound was sharp, nearly wet, as if it had cut open Marty’s thin-skinned ass: Whhhack!

  Marty grimaced. Tears gathered in the corners of his eyes. Loretta clapped. “Hear! Hear!” And then the rest were clapping, too.

  In the commotion, Franics’ mask came loose. Audrey gasped. His face was badly scarred. Something had broken the bridge between his nostrils, and it had healed wrong. One side was closed over with skin, and the other had opened up too wide. His left eye was missing, and its socket swelled with infection. It was as if the man had smashed his own face through a window, and then, instead of cleaning it or going to an emergency room, had covered it with gauze and never looked at it again, even while it itched and festered.

  “Monsters,” Audrey whispered, as the others looked upon his gore, and laughed, clapping all the harder.

  “Boo!” Francis shouted, then peered down at Audrey as she convulsed: “BOO!” The tenants kept clapping, only they were jeering, too. Galton leaped across the den, waltzing with an imaginary partner. “BOO!”

  In the commotion, Marty leaned too close
. She flinched, thinking he might kiss her. Instead, he rubbed his lips against her ear and whispered so fast that she had to replay his words a few times before she understood them. “HoldonOkayHoldon!”

  Then he stood and announced to the others, “Someone get her a blanket. She’s gone into hypoglycemic shock.”

  Audrey closed her eyes. Her heart clenched and unclenched. She tried to think of calming memories, to slow down its beating. Her old apartment with Saraub. His hands on the back of her neck. The rooftop design of the Parkside Plaza.

  “What-sa matta with her? Why doesn’t she have blankets? Is this another homeless?” the woman holding her laptop asked. “The homeless never work, they’re too stupid.”

  “—I thought we told Edgardo no dirty girls. Didn’t we say that? An architect. A career girl, no attachments. That’s what we said,” Evvie answered.

  Audrey drifted, closing her eyes. Chest clenching, she couldn’t catch her breath.

  “—And what did he bring us? A psycho or something? Isn’t her mother in the loony bin? She gives me the craziest fucking nightmares!”

  “—I like them. I haven’t been to the Film Forum in thirty years. Nobody here ever dreams anything new.”

  “—I’m glad Edgardo’s gone. I didn’t care for his accent. I only like Castilian Spanish. Besides, we should get Irish to clean,” the doctor with the kind face announced.

  “—It’ll work this time. I could tell the second she took the tour. The Breviary likes her.” This from Evvie.

  “—Shaddup! It likes me better than any of you!” Loretta shrilled.

  And then, something heavy on Audrey’s chest. It was soft and relieved her shivering. Jayne’s pink comforter.

  “—Do you think it’ll work this time, smarty Marty?”

  “Yeah, smarty Marty! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” Loretta screeched.

  Marty cleared his throat. She recognized his voice without having to look because it was ripe with contempt. What was more remarkable, they knew it, and didn’t care. From the way they interrupted and shouted, not one of them held another in regard. They’d known each other since they were children. Half of them were probably siblings or at least distant cousins. It occurred to her that after more than eighty years in the same building, without ever having kids or getting jobs, they played the role of children, and The Breviary their parents, in the oldest dysfunctional family in New York.

  “She knows what she’s doing,” Marty said. “The Breviary could get inside the others, but it was like using a pencil to build a house. The tools weren’t right. Even when they offered a sacrifice, they couldn’t get their doors to open. She will.”

  “Who will she sacrifice?” Evvie asked.

  “Romeo!” Loretta cried. “I knew I liked that darkie!”

  “It’s all about proper tools,” Marty muttered. He sounded like he might be near tears. “None of us were equipped. Not even Jayne. Just this one.”

  “You’re the tool, Marty Hearst,” somebody shouted, and they all started hooting again. The sound grew distant as they headed back down the hall.

  “—Where’s my Mr. Frisky? Mr. Frisky!” Loretta asked.

  “—I could kill that stupid cat…” This from Evvie.

  “Im nadda tool. You cant useme. Not gonna kill my boyfriend I’ll kill you!” Audrey mumbled, but by now they were too far away to hear.

  “—My apartment is so full of red ants I had to move up to 14A. When are we getting a new super?” Now Galton.

  “—I ate your goddamned Frisky, and Toto too,” Evvie announced.

  Their voices trailed. The last to leave turned out the lights, and everything in 14B went dark.

  36

  The Sound a Trap Makes as It Closes, III: Light Through the Keyhole

  At first, she chewed her lip to keep from falling asleep. Tasted salt. Tried to frighten herself by imagining Schermerhorn with her in the room. Knew logically that she had to escape but did not feel the urgency. Shaking too hard. Too tired: her chest was a tightened fist.

  Insulin. She wasn’t diabetic, and two hypodermics of the stuff didn’t sound safe. What propelled her was the possibility that she might die. With some of the larger strips of her own torn clothes, she tied her kneecap into place to keep it from floating. She blacked out a few times as she tightened the cloth, but the insulin dulled the pain, and she finished the job.

  Hands pulling, legs bent, then straightening, like a frog trying to swim on dry land, she dragged herself out of the den and down the dark hall. The pain in her knee was bad enough that she wished she had the strength to cut it off.

  The floors began to hum. Momma? a child’s voice called. Is that you?

  “Stop,” she whispered as she took another lunge.

  In the bathroom, she heard the tub faucet glug. “Please, no,” she said as the hall floor, at once carpeted and bare, soaked her (Clara’s) sweatpants with bathwater.

  Too tired to keep going, she stayed on the ground for a while. Twenty minutes. Kept her hands down over her head so she didn’t have to see, and pretended it was quiet. When the shaking relented, and her heart muscles loosened enough for breath to come and go without a fight, she tried again. Crawled five more feet. Then took another break. Counted back from fifty. Wasn’t ready. Counted back from one hundred, and started crawling again.

  She remembered happier days, even as Clara’s children gurgled. She thought about the itchy wool bedspread that Saraub loved, and the crumb-ridden remote control lodged within their futon’s deep fold. The time she and her mother had robbed the 7-Eleven of Slurpies and hot dogs, then eaten them in the back of the Chevy. On an empty stomach, Ball Park Cheese Dogs make the best meal in the world. Of her work, and her desk, and the view from the top floor of Vesuvius, and all those pretty things she’d planned to build inside New York’s holes.

  In her mind, she was already scooting down the emergency-exit stairs on her bottom. Crawling out the lobby, unseen. Calling the cops on these fuckers and incriminating them for Jayne’s murder. The hope was a bubble in her stomach, self-contained, unsinkable. That was all she needed, to make it those last five feet.

  There was light through the keyhole. Light! Oh, how she loved light! She wanted to live so badly. To feel wet grass with bare feet, and build cities. To marry Saraub, and fill their house in Yonkers with children, and grandchildren, and tire swings. She wanted to run from here so fast that she flew.

  She counted back from three, then ten, then twenty. With a grunt, pushed her feet against the slanted floor, and stood. Her knee screamed. “Ooooowwwwww,” she whispered, as tears rolled, and her nerves came to life—a pinching, throbbing suit of skin. Still, she clasped the gilded wood trim, then the glass knob. Breathing fast but quiet, she twisted the handle. It did not turn. She pulled it. Pushed it. But no. It was locked from the outside.

  She looked out the peephole. A black eye with a thin layer of cataract peered back at her. Then the figure stepped away, and she saw that it was Loretta Parker. She waved her index finger back and forth.

  “Dirty girl!”

  37

  The Sound a Trap Makes as It Closes, IV: Katabasis

  Days passed. The sun rose, then set, then rose, like a stop-motion camera. When she was thirsty, she slurped water from the sink. When she was hungry, she rationed the leftover Chinese food she’d ordered with Jayne, and when that was gone, just like back in Hinton, she got weaker.

  The pile of boxes got smaller. The door got bigger. The humming walls lulled her into a place between sleep and waking life, where around one corner there was a pretty house in Yonkers, and around another there was Schermerhorn, leaning over a tub full of sleeping cherubs while his ghost wife, Clara, screamed.

  The thing in her stomach filled the crevices of her body. When she looked in the bathroom mirror, she didn’t see her own reflection. Only a black-eyed silhouette that did not quite stand erect. So she broke the mirror, and even broke the chrome toaster, too.

  Hours, days, or maybe weeks later, Ma
rtin and Loretta returned. Wearing their dusty wool suit and Claudette Colbert silk, they were a mad couple in frayed finery, like ghosts from the Titanic.

  Marty carried a sandwich and glass of red juice on an antique pewter plate. He bent down and placed it at her bare, crusted feet. She didn’t remember how they’d gotten here, whether she’d been sleeping or awake. She didn’t know for how long they’d been standing over her, either.

  “I don’t know why we’re bothering. We’re not gonna keep her for a pet,” Loretta groused, as Marty set down the plate. Her sausage-tight gown was slit down the ass, revealing soiled satin panties full of holes.

  Audrey smelled the food. Her mouth watered. She peeled back the bread. Tuna and stale mayonnaise. It had been left out, so its sides were yellowed. Still, she took a bite. It was the best sandwich she’d ever tasted. Her eyes shone with gratitude. Her stomach gurgled, and for few seconds, stopped hurting. She ate slowly, chewing every bite again and again, to make sure it stayed down. The flavors—salt, tuna, sugar, fat—were so crisp that they snapped. And then, something sharp. She bit hard. The temporary crown in the back of her mouth broke in half.

  “Ah! Wha—?” she cried, just as Martin coughed, and her tongue traced the outline of the thing that he’d sneaked into her food.

  “What? There something in that? Martin did you put something in that?” Loretta whined as he bent forward to inflate the deflated mattress she’d been sleeping in and whispered in her ear quick and pleading with rancid dog breath: “Please!”