by Sarah Langan
The tenants peered into 14B through drilled peepholes in 14A and 14C, or else listened with their ears pressed against the walls. In 3A, Benjamin Borrell put down the cigarette he’d been pressing into his forearm, and smiled. In 8C, Elaine Alexander turned down the volume on her favorite soap, General Hospital, and kissed the poster she’d tacked to her wall of Luke and Laura. In 14D, Evvie Waugh lay down on the floor, and beat his arms and legs against the wood until he bled. In 10B, Penelope Falco shaved her head, then her eyebrows, then plucked her lashes, so when the door opened, she’d appear newly born. Her speech finished, Loretta Parker danced in time with Schermerhorn’s piano music, her porcelain feet click-clacking.
The Breviary watched. Happy for the first time since Martin Hearst threw open its eyes over 150 years ago. Its purpose was finally manifest. It would house the door that destroyed mankind.
42
Doesn’t Every Generation Inherit Debt?
Tuesday evening, Saraub waved his mother good-bye, and sat back in the Craftmatic. Flicked the bed remote down and up, down and up. Perused the cable channels. He’d refused today’s Vicodin, which suddenly made ESPN’s greatest hits a lot less interesting.
He was getting released tomorrow. These seven days of rest had been good for his soul. He’d been working hard for a long time, and it had been nice, for once, to have nothing to do, and not even e-mail to check. He used the plastic prong the nurse had given him to lift the bedside phone. Dialed the first three digits of Audrey’s number. Hung up. Enough was enough. She knew where to find him; obviously, she just didn’t want to.
His agent had called this morning and told him that Bob Stern at Sunshine had been fired. “What does that mean?” Saraub asked.
“I don’t know. How would I know? It means finish the movie and find out.”
So that was the plan. He’d finish the movie. And after that movie, he’d make another one. And another one. He’d decided that when he got out of here, he’d leave his studio apartment and move out of Manhattan. He’d find a place in the boroughs where there was space to breathe, with or without Audrey Lucas.
His lunch had come with a free copy of the New York Post, and he swiveled his hands inside their plaster to leaf through the pages. The headlines were all bleak. Stocks down. Fraud on Wall Street on the rise. A precarious future predicted for social security and Medicare, now that the baby boomers’ health was failing. A line from an economist caught his eye: “This generation has inherited an enormous debt, and I can’t believe that it will survive the weight. Indeed, what we may be witnessing is not a recession but the end of an empire.”
He thought about that, and he decided that the economist was wrong. Every generation faces its own extinction, and for that generation, it always feels like the end of the world. But somehow, for thousands of years, life has gone on, and even gotten better. Despite the wars and stupid decisions, the racism and despots, people have gotten better, too.
Just then, the phone rang. It took some maneuvering, but he managed to lift the receiver in time. “Hello?”
“Yeees?” a woman’s high-pitched voice asked.
“Uh, yes.”
“Is this Bobby?”
“Saraub. I think you have the wrong number.”
“Oh, no. I mean that other name. That’s what I mean. Audrey’s gentleman?”
He grabbed the remote, but his fingers couldn’t press the mute button, so instead he cricked his neck tighter against his shoulder, so he could hear better. “That’s right. Is something wrong?”
“Yes. She’s not feeling herself, and she wanted me to call you and ask you to come over. Don’t bring anyone. You know how she is—so private.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“510 West 110th Street, #14B. Buh-bye!” she shouted, like maybe he was deaf, then hung up.
Saraub held the phone in his hand. What the hell? He thought about Nebraska and the way he’d left her while she’d slept. He realized that his anger had clouded his judgment. She was a little nutty, but she wasn’t cruel. There could be only one reason she hadn’t called or visited upon hearing he’d been in a plane accident: something was very wrong.
He pressed the call button for his nurse and started looking for his pants.
43
The Red Ants Will Carry Away Even the Last of Your Line
Martin Hearst lay broken and unmoving at the top of a garbage heap. Red ants swarmed his skin. It seemed fitting that his family had made its fortune out of digging holes, and he would meet his end inside one, too.
He’d studied the history of this building for years. For instance, Edgar Schermerhorn was his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s first cousin. If not for that kinship, The Breviary’s strange design would never have gotten funding. In 1932, The Breviary was nearly sold by its shareholders after an eruption of suicides, but spared by one dissenting vote: his great-great-grandfather: Martin Hearst III. In Marty’s lifetime, the building’s foundation had finally begun to buckle, top down. There was a reason no one had lived on the fifteenth floor: since the fire ten years ago, the plaster under the copper roof had caved in.
Martin Hearst the First: The Civil War newspapers joked that the name was fitting, one letter off from a heart. The stories about him passed down over the generations had become legend. A hardened, self-made man with no patience for the meek, who took what he wanted, and from his neighbors inspired awe. By the time Marty VII was born one hundred years later, the legend was a God.
During the Gilded reign of Martin Hearst II, The Breviary thrived. Crystal chandeliers sparkled, mahogany wood shone, glass gleamed; even the copper roof defied its atmosphere, and for decades stayed the color of freshly minted pennies. The children of The Breviary’s elite attended the same summer camps and private schools, shared governesses, and married each other, too. The address became fashionable, and as the building’s population swelled, they broke up apartments, smaller and smaller. Twelve bedrooms became six, then four, and finally, two. And if sometimes, the lights flickered, or the doors flew open, such happenings served only to enhance The Breviary’s charm.
The third generation started new businesses that brought them to the West Coast or the oil fields of Texas. They intended to return, but never did. The rest inherited family fortunes or found local occupation as bankers, Broadway actors, writers, sculptors, critics, and gossip columnists. They were the first to indulge in the rituals of Chaotic Naturalism: sacrificed animals, séances, dream sharing, scholarship in the occult.
The flapper generation cast aside petty drudgery and perfected the art of the ball. Then one morning over coffee and sodium bicarbonate to soothe the barking dogs that had bitten them the night before, they read about the unfathomable Great Depression. Companies were sold. Family names lost luster. Patriarchs jumped out windows or sold heirloom jewels. They married each other, no longer because the outside world was not good enough but because no one else would understand the humbled majesty of their roots.
Sixth generation. The Harlem address lost its bucolic luster. The tenants talked fondly of the golden years and mourned their lost comforts: summer houses, ski lodges, years abroad in Rome. They saved their pennies, Ziplocked leftovers, hemmed their clothes and passed them down to their children. At night, they imagined the disappointed ghosts of their ancestors whispering abuse in their slumbering ears. They avoided sunlight; it burned their fair skin. They didn’t like the jarring sound of street traffic, either. Or the sight of poverty because they knew it was contagious.
Marty remembered the parties back then. His kid-sized double-breasted suit; peeking out from behind his mother’s legs to watch dapper men and women trade barbs and cocktails like the last sophisticates hiding from a barbaric world. Monday nights, a rotating group of families had served spirits in their apartments, gatherings that had ended in lamp shades on heads, shared bedmates, words of unforgivable cruelty, and children of unknown paternity. By the arrival of the seventh generation, the place had e
choed with emptiness, and the laughter was resentful. The tenants had turned on one another, because there was no one left to blame.
It happened so slowly that at first, none of them noticed. The walls hummed. The stained-glass birds and mosaics sometimes took flight. The hallways constricted like throats. Hinges creaked. Nightmares flew loose from their authors and inhabited the building like cold air.
Finally, the last of The Breviary’s line ascended: the seventh generation. The building emptied. By then, more had died within its walls than lived there. The ghosts, echoes of the past, Breviary tricks, even a few genuine trapped souls, walked the halls. Tenants auctioned off the last trappings of their legacies: diamond broaches, Chanel suits, and Tiffany lamps. No longer just a home, The Breviary became their sanctuary. They loved it the way men born to captivity love their masters: reluctantly and with self-loathing. With their last pennies, they paid doctors to score their faces.
For a short time, Marty got out. He sublet a studio in the West Village that he hoped to make permanent. But the rents were raised, and striking out on his own in a new city would have opened too much possibility for failure. He moved back to The Breve, and the elevator doors as they shut had sounded like those of a cage.
Benjamin Borrell in 3A was the first to build a door. Francis Galton came next. After that, 11E. He painted the turret window cadmium red, then tried to walk through it, and fell to his death. 9B followed. Then 8C. Soon, all of them built doors. Even Martin tried his hand at it: he ground all the notes he’d taken researching The Breviary’s history into mash and added paste, but without a frame, it hadn’t held. In the comfort of their fading privilege, the tenants had lost the knowledge of how to build. It was lost on most of them, save Martin Hearst, that even the blackbirds trapped in glass were sometimes free.
At its height, The Breviary had housed 742 occupants. By the time Audrey Lucas signed her lease, there were fifty-three people living there, and two-thirds of the apartments were vacant. It had been Marty’s idea to rent out the fourteenth floor to single women and see what developed. Clara had come closest—for a brief time, at least, something had peered back at them through the cracks. Just as quickly, her door had crumbled. It was then that the red ants arrived. They’d broken out from beneath the floor and swarmed the felled door, gnawing all the evidence that remained. Those ants had infested the building ever since. He’d regretted the drowned children and had wanted to call off the whole thing, but by then Loretta had been calling the shots.
Next was Jayne. A flighty, nervous thing. Bursting with life. He’d assumed she’d agreed to spend time with him out of pity, or because she needed money. Not that he had any. Two weeks ago she’d taken him on his first walk through Riverside Park. The city had changed so much since he was a boy.
She hadn’t been affected like Clara or Audrey. Each morning they’d expected not to see her rise for work, or giggle her hellos as the elevator descended, floor to floor. Waving with glee like a ray of sunshine at each and every tenant. But each morning, there she was. Three months, and all she’d suffered was a few nightmares.
Turned out, it just took longer. After she sprained her leg and Audrey left, they’d locked her inside 14E. She held out for seven days before finally building her door.
He still remembered her shock when he’d come to her room with the others. She’d been on her way to her first solo act at The Laugh Factory, and he’d promised to escort her. Saddle shoes and poodle skirt, she’d fought as they’d filled her apartment. High-kicking the air, she’d bitten Francis, kicked Evvie, even dispatched a right hook to Loretta. And then she’d noticed that Marty was among them. Her shoulders had slumped in submission as she’d asked, “Marty? You, too?”
He visited one more time, at Loretta and Evvie’s request. Her hall was dark, and there had been something in there with them, watching. Black-eyed and slithering with rounded, insectile joints, it hadn’t seemed as if it belonged in this world. Worse than a ghost. Not human, like a ghost. He’d realized for the first time that this door and perhaps The Breviary itself, were mistakes.
Jayne had shuffled out from the dark. Black eyes. Vacant. But that’s what happens when the soul is devoured. In her hands, she’d held the dirty rebar. It was only then that he’d understood; The Breviary needed a sacrifice. Something loved. He’d long wondered why Loretta and the rest had not objected to the time he spent with Jayne. Now he knew: he was that sacrifice.
She’d limped toward him on a wounded leg, dragging the rebar behind her.
“I’ve been in error,” he’d said while Jayne approached: click-clack-shhp. Only, it hadn’t been Jayne. There was nothing about that husk that he’d loved.
Click-clack-shhp. The sound had been terrible. Snot-nosed and heaving, he’d backed his way down the hall, until he got to the exit. But the door was locked from the outside. Loretta. Evvie. The rest of them, too. His betraying family, whom he’d known the better part of eight decades. They’d locked him in here with this thing.
Click-clack-shhp.
She’d cornered him as he wept. Black-eyed. Bared teeth. Hunched back, like her bones had rounded. She’d pressed her mouth against his ear in that way he’d once found so charming, and pinned him against the door with both arms. He’d closed his eyes, expecting a bite, but instead, she smashed the lock so that it broke. Her delicate hand came back disfigured, the knuckles jagged so that they’d hung loosely inside her skin. “Get out,” she’d said.
He’d reached behind him, and turned the knob. Then slipped through as she’d watched. The look on her face had been a snarl of rage, and he’d known it wasn’t the monster letting him go, but Jayne.
A few hours later, she was dead.
And so he’d resolved to do his best by Audrey, as he should have done for Jayne. He knew now why the tenants wanted this door, when so clearly, the thing on the other side meant harm. Soon, The Breviary would be condemned. They’d be turned out, every one of them. After seven generations of entitlement, the fall from grace was too great to endure. A door works two ways. The maniacs: they didn’t want to unleash anything; they wanted another world in which to hide.
He wasn’t dead, though he soon would be. They’d dragged him down the red-tongued hall. Struck him with their weak fists, then shoved him down the trash chute. He’d heard the crack halfway down. He couldn’t move his arms or legs, and was pretty sure, from the cracking sound it had made halfway down the chute, that he’d snapped his spine.
Amidst the ants, open-eyed Edgardo laid next to him. His coveralls were soiled with coffee grounds. It was Loretta who’d heard him warn the girl, Audrey, through the peephole in her wall. Marty had refused to deal the blow. So it had fallen on Evvie Waugh, the only other one of them strong enough to wield the rebar. A hunting man, he’d taken Edgardo’s cane for a trophy.
Marty’s breath came rasping, and he no longer felt cold, or much of anything at all. The ants converged in a long line across his body, and he thought, for a moment, that he could see the first Martin Hearst, watching him with disappointment now that the last of the line would die with empty hands and a squandered legacy. Dark eyes, a bald crown, and skin sallow from a jaundiced liver. He thought he could see all six dead Hearsts lined up in a row like pallbearers waiting to carry him away with them to the hereafter he deserved. The shadows they cast were not nearly as imposing as he’d imagined, and he felt no shame that he had not lived up to their expectations. Only regret, in what he had not done for himself or Jayne. What a waste, to have lived for wretches such as them.
The ants spread over his chest and got to work, devouring the last of the Hearst line. Before he closed his eyes for good, something else occurred to him, and his smile was bitter. In killing the superintendent, they’d murdered the only person willing to take out their trash.
44
I Weary of the Sun, and Wish the State of the World Were Now Undone
This his happened before. Don’t you remember the ants, and Hinton?
In
her dream, they were Siamese twins again. This version of her mother wasn’t black-and-white, but old and wrinkled. Her dress was a hospital gown that fit her like a sail. She pushed Audrey, hard. They came apart so that they were half-women with split hearts and wounded legs, but both were still breathing.
You live in a bad place, Lamb, Betty said.
She was sleeping because the work had been so hard. The piano had made discordant music as she’d chopped, then sawed. Her arms and legs shivered from muscle exhaustion, even in sleep, and she was so hungry she didn’t remember her name. She thought maybe it was lamb. The kind people eat.
In her dream, she and her mother were sitting on the air mattress, watching the door. On the other side, The Breviary’s true parents waited. Not Schermerhorn, but the thing that had guided his hand and given him the design for those plans. The spiderlike wraith that had followed her down Jayne’s hall. The monster beneath the monster.
She’d tested the door’s slant with the level in her toolbox to make sure that it pointed two degrees west. The tenants had provided her with everything she needed.
Just then severed Betty shook her. “You have to get out of here!”
Audrey looked to her left and saw her cleaved heart. No blood flowed, but only two chambers beat in a quiet lub-dup. “I don’t like moving, you know that. I’m done with motels, Momma.”
“Go now, Lamb. Or it’ll find a way in. It’ll get inside you, like it got inside me.” The woman shook harder, and Audrey’s breath caught in her throat. Betty was old. A skinny collection of bones and wild, white hair whose jagged bangs had recently been cut. On her far side was an IV tree that dripped fluid into her arm while, in the distance, Audrey heard the steady breathing of a respirator like half of this dream was taking place in a hospital. Was this really Betty, and not a trick? Had she somehow reached out through her coma?