time in The Breviary had made them hive-minded. A few, too drunk to stand, were crawling on their hands and knees. Martin blinked his lashless eyes. He’d neglected his eyeliner, possibly because his Parkinson’s today was especially severe: he couldn’t stop shaking. Then she realized, it wasn’t Parkinson’s. He was terrified.
“My wife is on the other side!” Galton cried. “She says she’s coming back to me.”
“The Breviary promised me a pony,” the woman with heavy gold chains announced. “Only it’s a Pegasus and a unicorn, so I can fly and teleport.”
“You’re an asshole, Sally.” Loretta giggled.
“No, no. It’s hell that’s behind the door,” the good, naked doctor said with a smile, like he was talking about Florida.
“We have no idea what will happen when it opens,” Martin said. “But The Breviary wants it, so we want it, too.”
“And Schermerhorn, what is he?” she asked.
Marty nodded. “He died a long time ago. The Breviary wears his face.”
That was when Loretta pointed at him. “You let her out, didn’t you? Fed her that sandwich even though you know how much I like tuna fish! Oh, Martin. The simpleton redhead scrambled your brain!”
Martin looked down at his worn-out Hickey Freeman suit, circa 1975, and sighed.
“It was him!” Loretta shouted.
They rallied, and drunkenly shoved him down the hall. A slow-motion shuffle all the way out of 14B. She heard a click as they locked her inside, which was soon followed by a low-pitched scream. The sound was cut short, and she knew that Martin, her last ticket out of this madhouse, was dead.
39
Vesuvius
You don’t have an address in your files?” Jill asked. Collier Steadman’s office was a wild assortment of bat-shit nuts. He’d rummaged through street-side trash for his decorative cast-iron plates, which he’d colored over in crayon and used to adorn his file cabinets. Instead of taking photos of his prize-winning terrier poodles, he’d snapped their shadow-images, then blown them up human-sized and hung them along his office walls, so the place looked like a forest of giant poodles.
Collier had been working at Vesuvius since he’d graduated from the Fine Arts Acting Program at Yale, and was now in his fifties. A decade ago, Jill had gone to one of his plays. Ten men who were supposed to represent different aspects of a person’s psyche had shouted at one another on a darkened stage. The denouement came when they’d hurled their own excrement in all directions, which, fortunately for the front row, had turned out to be half-cooked brownie batter.
“Fascinating,” she’d told him the following Monday. “Really brought me to a place I wasn’t expecting to go.”
His eyes got watery with crazy intensity, like he’d decided they were kindred spirits. “Most people can’t handle that kind of emotional honesty. Darling, it’s you and me against the heathens.” As he spoke, the poodles had suddenly loomed too large behind him, like he’d been about to get devoured.
Ever since, Collier had always put her requests at the top of his pile. She hadn’t worked the day after Thanksgiving in ten years. Schlock Jock or not, that secured for him a special place in her heart.
“Have you tried calling her?” he asked. This evening, Collier looked worse for wear. His skin was waxy, and when he’d leaned over to wave her into his office, he’d dipped the bottom of his pink geometric-patterned tie into his coffee. He was working on a new play set to debut in Bushwick, Brooklyn. A reimagining of Our Town with an all-midget cast.
“I’ve tried her cell, but she’s not answering. And the landline I have for her—it’s some guy’s voice on the machine. Her ex-boyfriend, I think. He hasn’t called me back, either. Is it possible she moved?”
Frowning, to let her know what he was doing was against company policy, Collier opened Audrey’s file. “It says here that she’s on 93rd and York. I’ve got the same landline number you do.”
Jill sighed. After coming home from Around the Clock this morning, she and Tom had made breakfast for the boys. Then they’d all gone to a movie, passing popcorn and large sodas down the long line. They’d even taken Markus’ boyfriend Charlie. He’d been grateful as Oliver Twist for the free popcorn, which had prompted her to do something completely un-Jill, and hug him. The slender, nervous boy had hugged her back with all his might, like it was the first time in his life anyone had ever approved of him, which had elicited something even more un-Jill. She’d broken down