believe it. Tried again. Had enough energy, this time, to slam herself against it. Then pulled the key out from her mouth. It didn’t fit.
The steel door was locked.
Could she go back and get the rebar, bash the dead bolt? No, the door was metal. The echo would carry through the trash chute and send the tenants charging.
The stench prevented her from wallowing. She started back. Climbed the stairs. Up one flight. Quiet as a mouse.
She considered making a run for it through the lobby, but with her weak knee she wasn’t fast enough. Better to wait until they were gone and sneak out. So she waited by the fire door as the hours passed. One? Two? No watch by which to tell. The tenants danced and drank. And drank some more. Spilled their booze on the old altar, laughing gaily, maniacally, like the lone survivors of the Third World War.
She counted them: forty-seven. Wondered if any had left their apartment doors open. Remembered—yes!—some of them might have phones. She climbed the stairs. Up, up, up. Thought the best way to start would be on fourteen. Easier to hide if she heard someone coming. She crept up the stairwell to fourteen and saw that her luck was in. The doors all down the row were open.
She started with 14C—Loretta. She walked down its long hall. Slip-slide was the sound her feet made. On her way, she stopped and peered inside the master bedroom. Stacks of china dolls lay on the queen-sized, canopied bed, their cheeks dotted with red circles of blush. Period costume cowgirls, Spanish dancers, Victorians with watching eyes that might goggle closed if you laid them down to sleep. She quick counted seventy-two dolls, which probably meant that they, and not Loretta, slept on a proper bed.
She didn’t see a phone, so she kept walking. Into the den. More dolls. This time they hung from fishing-line nooses nailed to the ceiling. Their bodies made a curtain between the den and hall and she had to push them aside to get through.
In the center of the den, she found a half-built door made out of broken white porcelain that had been glued together and covered with blinking dolls’ eyes. The door was only three feet tall, and pieces of it had fallen and shattered.
Next to that was a pink princess phone. She picked it up. “Huh!” she sucked in a breath of awful surprise. No dial tone, just ringing, and then a message. “The customer needs to contact accounts payable. Thank you…. The customer needs to contact…No emergency services in this area…”
She hung up.
And then, she hadn’t seen. How hadn’t she seen? Loretta was sitting at the turret. Drool caked her chin. Her bare feet were bloody, and beneath them were the crushed porcelain faces of more dolls. “Wrong apartment,” she said, then resumed crushing, like an Italian peasant stomping grapes. “You live in 14B. Don’t forget, stupid.”
Slip-slide. Audrey headed back where she’d come. Into the main hall, the kind old doctor who’d shot her full of insulin now lay on the red carpet, nude. His hand covered his privates like a fig leaf over a statue until he waved at her and revealed the hoary mess. She looked away. Was he there at all, or was she mad?
14D. Evvie Waugh. Slip-slide! The hallway walls were mounted with dead animal heads. Only, they hadn’t been treated with chemicals, and were slowly rotting. The order went like this: moose, bear, badger, panda, bald eagle, gorilla, chimp, and the shrunken African head of a human being. Their skin had all been stuffed, and their eyes replaced with black aggie marbles.
In the middle of the den was a claw-foot tub, in which Evvie, wearing a green velvet dressing robe, reclined with a pile of pillows and a copy of Decline and Fall. The tub was Clara’s, of course. Propped against its side was Edgardo’s cane. So many trophies.
“Wrong apartment. Party isn’t until tomorrow night. 14B. You’re the host of honor,” Evvie pronounced, then returned to his book.
“Thanks,” she mumbled, then turned and started out.
14A. Slip-slide. Down the hall. All the doors open. Everything empty. Everything dingy. Dried, bloody handprints marred the hallway walls. The low ones belonged to a child, but they got bigger the higher they went. It occurred to her that the prints might all belong to the same person, over a span of fifty years.
Slip-slide. Into the den. The walls were adorned with red smiley faces, and she didn’t