Audrey’s Door Read online

  Sarah Langan

  Audrey’s Door

  For my parents, good eggs,

  carrying on the good fight.

  Then she goes pale, and her body shrivels up. her glance is sideways and her teeth are black; her nipples drip with poisonous green bile, and venom from her dinner coats her tongue; she only smiles at the sight of another’s grief, nor does she know, disturbed by wakeful cares, the benefits of slumber; when she beholds another’s joy, she falls into decay, and rips down only to be ripped apart, herself the punishment for being her.

  Ovid, on Envy, Metamorphoses

  Translation by Charles Martin

  W.H. Norton and Company, 2005

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Part I

  The Seduction

  Harlem Hills Triumph!

  1

  The Tenant

  2

  Her Black Holes (She Glimpsed Something Better Before It Drifted Out to Sea)

  3

  All the Pretty Young Things in the Dark

  4

  Going Gently Into That Good Night (Iniquitous Darlings)

  5

  The Piano Has Been Drinking

  Part II

  The Walking Wounded

  Auld Lang Syne in the New Breviary

  6

  She’s Thirsty Because Her Neck Never Stopped Bleeding

  7

  Home Keeps Changing

  8

  Everything Old Is New Again (Rats!)

  9

  The Business of Grief

  10

  You Like Me? You Really Like Me!

  11

  This Petty Pace from Day to Day

  12

  Girls’ Night Out (Everybody Screws Up, Sometimes)

  13

  Humans Raised as Cows!

  14

  We Pick Our Own Families

  15

  Children’s Hour

  16

  Howard Hughes Flew Planes Too, You Know

  Part III

  You Can’t Go Home Again

  A Letter to the Editor

  Another Dodo Tries to Fly

  17

  I’ve Always Lived With You

  18

  Sweet Air

  19

  Your Black Wings Are Showing

  20

  The Hull

  21

  Where Do They Go When The Light Leaves Their Eyes?

  22

  Icarus’ Wings Burned Black

  23

  Madhouses Always Have Broken Teeth

  Part IV

  The Spaces in Between (Holes)

  Weekly Police Blotter

  24

  Audrey Makes Five!

  25

  The Worm Turns

  26

  Some People Burn Their Own Wings

  27

  Islands Collide

  28

  For Whom The Bell Tolls

  29

  Lambs Taste Better Than Pigs

  30

  I Hate You!

  31

  Do Black Sheep Dream?

  32

  Baby’s Breath

  33

  Bones Break All the Time

  Part V

  Audrey’s Door

  Not a Case for the Psychic Friends Network

  Fire on the Fifteenth Floor

  34

  The Sound a Trap Makes as It Closes, I: Backward and Forward, the Same Thing Happens

  35

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

  36

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

  37

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

  38

  The Sound a Trap Makes as It Closes, V: Build the Door

  39

  Vesuvius

  40

  Old Scars Protect Against New Ones

  41

  The Breviary

  42

  Doesn’t Every Generation Inherit Debt?

  43

  The Red Ants Will Carry Away Even the Last of Your Line

  44

  I Weary of the Sun, and Wish the State of the World Were Now Undone

  45

  Let Me In

  46

  The Tenants

  47

  What You Love Is the Same as What You Hate

  48

  Mother

  Epilogue

  Flight

  Dratted Upper West Side Inferno

  We Are All Architects

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Sarah Langan

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  Modern haunted-house stories build on a rich tradition. While writing Audrey’s Door, I was particularly inspired by Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House, Stephen King’s The Shining, Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, Roland Topor’s The Tenant, the films of Roman Polanski, and Edward Rob Ellis’ The Epic of New York City: A Narrative History. I hope I did right by these guys, and by New York, the city that stole my heart.

  Sarah Langan

  September 18, 2008

  Part I

  The Seduction

  Harlem Hills Triumph!

  October 22, 1861

  Delight! At dusk on October 20th, the doors to Manhattan’s newest luxury apartment building, The Breviary, opened at last. Coal giant and primary financier Martin Hearst cut the ribbon to riotous applause. The teeming crowd’s cheers resounded across both rivers, and were even heard by this office down in Times Square. Despite The Breviary’s slanting Chaotic Naturalist architecture, independent engineers agree that the stately monolith is sound, and will stand for centuries to come.

  The event raised a new standard in both architecture and society balls, which one can only hope Washington Square will answer with verve. After the ribbon cutting, guests reposed their mourning over this terrible war against brothers and waltzed inside the main lobby until dawn. In attendance were the future occupants of the building, its unkempt architect, Edgar Schermerhorn, two Union generals, three senators, and celebrities such as Claire Red-grave, Barry Sullivan, Fanny Price, and Hannibal Hamlin. Libations and decadent hors d’oeuvres floated on silver trays like river flowers, and the event was crowned by a sunrise marksman’s contest on the building’s roof. The worse for rum, not even Major General Winthrop hit a bull’s-eye, though tragically, one of Hearst’s Negroes took a bullet to the knee. The party broke at dawn. Guests watched the great building from the backs of their carriages. I do not think I was alone in waving it, and that perfect evening, farewell.

  The building boasts every amenity imaginable, from water closets to gas-powered lights, and its future residents represent the finest families in America. What’s more, its westward slant and unique design outwit its mundane brownstone cousins, heralding a style all New York’s own. We deserve such a landmark—Manhattan is a Post Road way station between the wealthy South and Boston’s aristocracy no more. We are the ascendant new America—hardworking, intelligent, and free.

  From The New York Herald

  1

  The Tenant

  Fate.

  Audrey Lucas found the apartment through an online ad in The Village Voice. The real-estate section was updated on Tuesday afternoons, and she checked it as soon as three o’clock rolled around, just like she’d checked it last week, and the week before that, too. She’d seen twelve places this month, and not one of them had been fit for a dog. They’d had showers in their kitchens, paint peeling from walls, urine-stained carpets (pets or people?
), and, once, the red chalk outline of a fat guy’s body. She’d almost given up and started calling real-estate brokers in Queens when—bingo!—today’s search brought up a match:

  Morningside Heights Charmer. Landmark Building. Large, Pre-War 2br. City Views, EIK, $999. Priced to go!!! Call owner: (212) 747–4854. No Brokers, plz.

  Her hand hovered over the phone’s receiver. There had to be a catch. $999 was too good to be true. You couldn’t share a fifth-floor walk-up for that price in this city. Still, she grinned: Prewar, baby! She dialed the number, and couldn’t believe her luck when a man with an upper-crust British accent got on the line and told her the apartment was still available.

  “An architect? What a lovely career. I dabbled in it myself once upon a time. Come straightaway, dear. I’ll arrange a viewing,” he said. His voice sounded old-timey, like a Harold Arlen song (“Let’s Get Crazy; Let’s Fall in Love!”), and she was charmed.

  She prairie dogged up from her cubicle to avoid the sightline of her boss, Jill Sidenschwandt, and the rest of the Parkside Plaza team, then ducked out the back stairs to the street and was on her way. The #1 Train was flooded again, so she grabbed a taxi from West Broadway. On the passenger-seat television panel, Liz Smith reported the latest news on Donald Trump’s toupee. Made from mink fur, apparently.

  Twenty minutes after leaving SoHo, her cabbie let her out at 110th Street, where she wondered if she’d transcribed the wrong address: 510 was too good to be true. Its fifteen stories were sooty limestone brick, each with intricate latticework, curlicues, and gargoyled ledges upon which sky-rat pigeons, and even real birds, cooed. Like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, only less leaning, it slanted west toward the Hudson River. Its green copper roof converged neatly into a tidy spire that scratched a crooked hole through the September sky.

  She squinted in disbelief. The building’s details indicated a type of architecture that didn’t exist anymore. Or at least, the textbooks said it didn’t exist. Her grin spread slowly, like dawn, and lit up her entire face: but maybe the textbooks were wrong.

  To the right of the main entrance, she found the cornerstone: THE BREVIARY, 1861. The name was familiar—she’d read about it someplace. Her smile broke into a short laugh, and she pressed her fingers inside the crevices of its limestone skin, just to make sure this building was the real deal.

  …And it was. Holy cow.

  Chaotic Naturalism. She’d studied it in graduate school. Daydreamed about it, and in doodles, tried to make it work, not just in theory, but in application. But she’d never imagined she’d see the genuine item.

  Back in the 1850s, a whole fleet of Chaotic Naturalist structures were erected, mostly in eastern Europe. Houses, libraries, city halls—from the lithographs she’d seen, they’d all been gorgeous. They’d also been unsound. Their foundations hadn’t stood flush to the ground, so their support beams never settled right, and over time they’d collapsed. At least a hundred people, probably closer to an unreported 250, had died within their crumbling walls. Some instantly, as roofs had caved; others slowly, trapped in basements like miners, hoping their next breath would not be their last.

  True to the Chaotic Naturalist philosophy, The Breviary’s floors differed in height from one story to the next, and its walls didn’t intersect at right angles but were either obtuse or acute. The gargoyles weren’t evenly spaced but appeared at random intervals, like flowers on a vine. Inside buildings like this, dropped marbles rolled in all directions, and the furniture warped, so once a couch lived in a particular space for a few years, you couldn’t move it, or it crumbled.

  Supposedly, the last of these buildings had been condemned in 1929. And yet, here was The Breviary. Ten thousand tons of cement and steel, and not a single right angle. How on earth had it survived?

  Once she got inside the building, her grin spread even wider. The lobby was grand as a ballroom. Cracked Italian mosaics along the floors depicted blackbirds in flight, and a low-hanging crystal chandelier emitted a sallow glow, like an archeologist’s lantern unearthing a deep-sea relic. Dust specked the air, thick and itchy in her nose. The back of the room was elevated, as if it had once been a stage or pulpit, and behind it were randomly placed, art-deco-era stained-glass windows. This building was neglected; run-down; divine. She leaned into its entrance, cold butterflies cramming her chest, and thought, I can see now, why there are wars, and people kill for things.

  At the doorman’s post, she found a slender Hispanic man in blue coveralls whose name tag read EDGARDO. He looked about seventy. “You the lady who wants to see apartment?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “I’m the super!” he announced, then hobbled with the help of a knobby cane toward the old-fashioned, iron-cage elevator without shaking her hand. She followed, thinking for a second that he had told her he was super!

  They stood in silence while the car ascended. The metal dial slowly ticked the floors: one…two…three. She patted her thighs in three-second intervals, to hurry the thing along. If her boss found out she’d left the office, she’d be up some serious shit creek. At Vesuvius, they worked the first-years hardest. She was lucky most nights to get home before The Daily Show.

  Edgardo smiled through brown, chewing-tobacco-stained teeth, so she smiled back. He smelled a little. Like garlic and tuna fish.

  “I working here almost a year,” he said. “I’m only one who takes out garbage and cleans. The rest all lazy. Don’t even flush their own toilets. I fix everything!”

  She nodded, hoping the toilet part was an exaggeration. “That’s great.” The cage wobbled as it ascended, like the cable attaching it to the top of the shaft was shredded to a single, thin wire.

  “Yes. I fix roof and leaks. Exterminate insects—roaches, red ants, everywhere! Everything run-down, but I fix. I am super!” he said.

  “Wow, that’s fantastic,” she told him. She didn’t intend the sarcasm; it just happened.

  Chastened, Edgardo looked down at his penny loafers. He’d sliced the leather wider, to accommodate shiny, matching quarters. There was something inherently tragic about that to her, like watching a Martian try to put on pants both legs at a time: they have no idea.

  “No, really,” she said. “What you do is wonderful. Places like The Breviary get torn down every day, and the world gets worse because of it. People have no respect for quality or history. They’d make houses out of Styrofoam and throw them away every week if they could.”

  The elevator creaked past the fifth floor, where she spied dirty beige carpet that might once have been white. “Yes! True! What I do is important!” Edgardo announced, then used their newfound connection as an opportunity to check her out. He started at her black ballet flats, moved on to the legs of her loose wool trousers, and worked his way up.

  When people first met Audrey Lucas, they were reminded of 1930s Hollywood glamour; lovely and unadorned, with a pointed chin, long, bumped nose, and cheekbones sharp enough to cut rocks. She was pretty but awkward. She kept her arms crossed in conversations to keep people from standing too close, and she tended to shrink in crowds, making herself invisible, because she’d learned from experience that the world was cruel. She’d been working such long hours that the skin under her eyes appeared smeared with charcoal, and her pale cheeks had lost their rosy bloom. Still, the few and brave who took the time to get to know her unearthed their reward. She was smart, and funny, and kind. When she trusted the people around her enough to smile, the sight was lovely, and just a little heartbreaking.

  If her life worked out okay, and she found happiness, the pinched angles of her body would soften. By her forties, she’d blossom into a stunning beauty. If her life worked out badly, those angles would calcify into stone, and she would become small, and bitter, and angry.

  Edgardo’s entire neck craned as his eyes grazed the v-neck of Audrey’s loose blouse, her small breasts, hunched shoulders, and at last, her stark, green eyes. When he was done, his gaze settled on her bare, scarred-up fingers. Then he winked,
to let her know he liked what he saw.

  She frowned. She was thirty-five years old, with a good job and a decent head on her shoulders. Still, when she spotted strangers looking for that ring, she felt…exposed.

  The elevator passed the seventh floor. The red hallway carpet was littered with empty champagne flutes and confetti. A Monday night party? Edgardo smiled. She hid her hands in the pockets of her green, army-surplus peacoat, and imagined poking his eyes into pools of goo.

  Edgardo shook his head, to let her know she’d gotten the wrong idea. “My daughter looks like you.”

  She raised an eyebrow, and he continued. “Really! She does! She’s in Alaska. I visit her in the summer, but the winter”—he mimed being blown down by a gust of wind—“too cold!”

  She shrugged. She’d never met a happy family, and wasn’t quite sure she believed in them. They sounded as kosher as Scientology Aliens or leprechauns.

  Edgardo waited for her response. She had none. After a few silent seconds, he flinched. The entire wrinkled right side of his face seized like a stroke patient’s, then went smooth again. She realized right then, that he was lying. Maybe he didn’t have a daughter, or else, they didn’t get along. Maybe he was an ex-con, and had gone to Rikers Island for setting her on fire. Whatever the story, he was lying. She could sympathize. Sometimes you tell people what you think they want to hear, only you’re not so good at figuring people out, so you never get it quite right.