“Bitch!” Schermerhorn shouted. He stopped playing and glared. The ghosts wailed. The tenants revolted, pounding so hard that the walls shook.
Her blood beaded. Small droplets thin as dew. “I never stopped bleeding,” she whispered.
“I’ll take care of you, Audrey,” black-and-white Betty crooned without moving her lips. “Trust me. Build the door.”
Audrey looked at her hands and wrists. She was sick of scars. Her body had endured so many of them. She was still that girl in coveralls, ugly and invisible. Naïve and too trusting. Easily used. But maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. Maybe that girl was the real Audrey. And all these trappings of her adult life: the cleaning, the nervousness, the hostility, the biting at people she loved most, maybe they were the scars that made the woman shine less bright.
She knew she ought to end this. Thwart The Breviary while she was still in possession of her faculties and had the chance. It would give her pleasure to see the tenants’ crestfallen faces and hear The Breviary shriek as she gasped her last breath, and the door went unopened. But neither the old Audrey nor the scarred one was the type to give up. Even in that tub more than twenty years ago, she’d not been frightened or relieved as she’d stood from the pink water and bandaged her wrists with masking tape, but disgusted: how dare she treat herself so cheaply?
She closed her eyes, and in her mind, whispered, “What do I do? Dear God, what do I do?”
Just then, her groin cramped. She doubled over from the pain and remembered that she’d swallowed the key.
41
The Breviary
No thinking creature can tolerate captivity. In the presence of just four white walls, the mind invents. Stagnant air and locked doors skew perception. Eighty-degree angles turn obtuse. Holes form between joists where bricks no longer neatly meet. Smiles become sneers; love skinned leaves the skeleton of lust; and too much sleep unmoors its dreamer. Without the possibility of freedom, the rituals of living are abandoned. Bathing, eating, cleaning, and even language are lost. Things fall apart, and in the vacuum of their absence, madness rears.
The Breviary had always known that it did not belong in this world. And yet, here it remained. Trapped. Alone.
Schermerhorn was the first casualty of The Breviary’s rage. He’d never believed in the religion he’d created and had never expected his buildings to stand for more than a few years. The Breviary changed that. Long after he cut its last ribbon and welcomed it to the world, it stayed on his mind. He could not leave the city, nor spend a day without walking by it. He could not go an afternoon without sketching its skewed curves. Eventually, he could not sleep, except in its lobby, where its soft humming soothed him. Finally, he climbed a ladder. The noose didn’t hold, and he fell thirty feet to his death. His body was graceful, like a pencil dive, and his blood flowed west.
For a while after murdering its flawed creator, and then wearing his image like skin, The Breviary was content. It played tricks on its tenants, like opening locked doors, and stealing light, and filling tap water with lead. Captains of industry slept in its bedrooms, and at night it whispered poison in their ears, so that it had a hand in the fates of nations and newspapers, Spanish wars, and lovers, young and old.
Outside, New York soared, burned, and, relentless, rose again. Horse-drawn carriages gave way to dynamite blasts through granite, then snakelike subways that screamed underground. Gold-gilded libraries and courthouses with names like Carnegie and Morgan ascended and collapsed. Wilbur Wright flew his glider over Manhattan, the Lusitania sank, flappers danced the Charleston, and ten years later men in three-piece suits broke through The Breviary’s high-floor windows like witless penguins, trying to fly. Once and future presidents were crowned and killed, fortunes lost, wars fought, spoils divided. Suspension-bridge lights brightened the nighttime Hudson River, while downtown, monoliths and spiteful planes blotted out the sun.
Seven generations came and went while it remained, rooted and unchanged. It learned to hate man for his freedom, and in its boredom it got reckless. It whispered louder and planted itself inside empty stomachs. It drove bodies out windows and heads into ovens. Arsenic into brandies, knives into throats. It haunted its inhabitants with their own dark thoughts, so that with each successive generation, the tenants became more like the building that housed