gristle caught in its wires leaned against the piano. After looking at these things, her gaze returned to its original object: the door.
Since she’d left this morning, someone had taken it out of the closet and propped it against the wall behind the piano. It was bigger than when she’d last seen it, before Nebraska. All the loose extra boxes had been taped to its now six-foot-by-eight-foot body, and its handle had been fitted with the hot-water handle from her bathtub. Four rounded spokes like a cross with the letter H in the center.
But the faucet wasn’t the most perverse part of all this. Nor the magically appearing rebar with its gristle, nor the door that she’d clearly improved upon during the night, nor even the realization, as she mapped the distances between apartments and elevator in her mind, that Loretta hadn’t been startled at all. She’d jumped because Audrey had caught her leaving 14B, where she’d pulled the door from the closet and deposited a rebar. Probably, she’d been the one to put Clara’s sweat suit and glasses in the bureau while Audrey had been out of town, too.
But no, that wasn’t the worst. The worst was this: at the door’s center were two overlapping piles of wet, green mash shaped like oblong wings. They were adhered to the cardboard by tiny, prickling spines. She didn’t want to think it. Oh, how she hoped it was not true. But she remembered now, as if from a dream, what Schermerhorn had told her last night as she’d worked: you have to make your door with things you love, or it will never open.
Her sore pricked fingers suddenly made sense. “Oh, Wolverine, I’m so sorry.”
She saw now how she’d failed. It was the same old tune that had played her whole life though she only realized it now. The Breviary was haunted. The tenants were in on it, perhaps even possessed by it. From the moment she’d set foot in this building, she’d been in danger. She wasn’t crazy and never had been. Just damaged, like everybody else in the world. She’d known these things all along, just like she’d known twenty years ago that she had to leave Betty and start a life of her own. But she’d never trusted herself enough to follow those instincts, and because of that, she’d made a lot of really stupid mistakes.
It was time to leave this place and never look back.
That was when the wall she was leaning against began to hum. The low pitch carried a syncopation that sounded like Schermerhorn’s voice: Audrey, it whispered.
She did not take stock, or wait for another word, or wonder if she was imagining, or even search for her shoes. She ran for the door. Her third step, she tripped over the air mattress, then crab-walked backward out of the den.
The floors and walls hummed soft and soothing. The tickle diffused through her skin, up her bloodstream, and into her chest and mind, where it woke the wriggling worm. Shhh, Audrey. Don’t leave us, he chided. Stop running away for once in your life. The accent wasn’t British like she’d thought, just old-fashioned and sophisticated, like he’d been educated on the Continent in the 1840s.
She moved fast. And then the floors rumbled: Audrey, darling. This time it wasn’t just Schermerhorn, but Clara, the children (Keith! Olivia! Kurt! Deirdre!), Loretta Parker, Martin Hearst, Evvie Waugh, and Francis Galton. The other tenants, dead and living, too. All different pitches, so dissonant as to be harmonious, but none quite human. It reminded her of the summertime language of locusts.
She scooted faster. Vibrations roared through the floor, met the tips of her fingers and traveled back to her chest. Hot and terrible. The worm chewed. She felt it climb up her gut and expand in her chest, wriggling.
And then, in the den, projector lights flickered. Against the cardboard door, a black-and-white film still shone. The picture showed a split-level ranch house and broken picket fence. A blond man and pretty woman with long, dark hair and dimples. They held a mewing infant in their arms.
Audrey stopped to look. The image shook slightly, but she knew what it contained. Her family before it got broken. Audrey, a voice called through the walls and floors and even the air of 14B, only this time, its sound offered comfort. Tears came to her eyes. This time it was Betty.
“Momma?” Audrey asked. The black-and-white image zoomed in on the woman and child. The man