swinging backward toward her neck, and loosening the noose. A prayer, perhaps the Lord’s, begged backward, too.
She’d inserted herself into the dream. This time, instead of letting Loretta Parker distract her, she got off that elevator and knocked on 14E. Jayne’s face peeked out from the rope, eyes bright, just as Audrey’s shadow self appeared in the doorway, catching her friend before it was too late.
The dream withered as the tenants approached. Some walked. Some gimped. Some crawled down the hall. They wore suits and fitted dresses, like the occasion of Jayne’s death was cause for celebration.
“You did this!” she’d cried as she let go of Jayne’s sole and slumped down the side of the wall on her ruined knee. Their man-made faces bent over her. So close their features lost proportion: wide eyes, jutting noses, closed lips, all gargoyle sharp.
“Give it here,” a grainy male voice ordered, and something was passed down the line. The man above her had gray, closely trimmed brows, blue eyes, and yellow, jaundiced scleras. He looked handsome and trustworthy as he lifted the needle. “Help me,” she mouthed. Then came a prick. Her elbow or her forearm? Her nerves were firing off so many impulses, she couldn’t tell. As the cold stuff dripped through her arms, then sloshed its way to her chest, her breath came faster. Her vision blurred and stretched, a movie still pulled taut as skin. She pressed down on her heart as if to calm it as she fainted.
When she woke, a man whose breath smelled like peanut butter was leaning over her. She shuddered and tried to push him away. Then her eyes focused again, and she saw that he was not one of the tenants. Too young by fifty years. His white uniform read: EMERGENCY MEDICAL TECHNICIAN.
Over his shoulder she saw more EMTs dressed in white. Was she in a hospital? A mental institution?
No, there was Jayne. High up, her open skirt like a flower. The EMTs prodded. Jayne’s legs swung in tiny semicircles, and then—clop! Her loose saddle shoe slipped off her toes and landed between Audrey’s knees. Like the poodle skirt, it seemed costume, and Audrey wondered if she’d gotten dressed for her act at The Laugh Factory three days ago, but lost courage when the hour arrived and never made it to the show.
“How many fingers am I holding up?” Peanut Butter asked. He was shining a penlight in her eyes.
She whispered her answer. “It looks like a thumb.”
“Fat hands. Are you okay?”
She nodded, then leaned against the wall and hoisted herself up on what felt like a broken knee. It didn’t hurt as much as she expected. Everything felt far away, like she was a spirit tethered to her body by cobwebs.
More people entered the den. A man and woman in plainclothes polyester suits flashed their badges. “Suicide,” Peanut Butter told them. “We just got here.” Someone shoved the metal ladder aside, while another EMT began to cut Jayne loose from the rope.
The sound was that same creeeeaaak! and Audrey remembered, suddenly, the thing that had been in this hall with her. Spidery bones, guarding the trophy of Jayne’s body.
Jayne’s open, unblinking eyes were fixed upon the long hall. Urine sopped the edges of her doilylike socks. Audrey hopped down the hall as fast as she could, following her own bloody trail, so she wouldn’t have to see the girl as she fell.
A few feet down and to her right was the master bedroom. Family photos of redheads littered the floor. Jayne’s face in all of them was blotted out. Audrey let her eyes focus on the inky smears, juxtaposed against a sea of voluptuous smiles.
Loretta and Marty Hearst, the guy with Parkinson’s, met her halfway down. They scooped their hands under her shoulders and walked with her, little baby steps.
“No,” she said, as she tried to break free, but the slanted floor was spinning.
They took her into the common hallway across from the elevator, where the rest of the tenants waited. More then ten, less then twenty. She started counting, but got confused. Except for Francis Galton, their faces swirled. From ten feet away, she could hear the echo of his breath beneath the porcelain mask.
Her heart pumped fast, and she pressed her hand against it, to rub it calm. Her thoughts circled and sank. Rorschach letters and images merged, then separated. Schermerhorn in his suit, only his arms and legs had multiplied, spiderlike, as he perched upon a pile of metal bones—The