city had changed so much since he was a boy.
She hadn’t been affected like Clara or Audrey. Each morning they’d expected not to see her rise for work, or giggle her hellos as the elevator descended, floor to floor. Waving with glee like a ray of sunshine at each and every tenant. But each morning, there she was. Three months, and all she’d suffered was a few nightmares.
Turned out, it just took longer. After she sprained her leg and Audrey left, they’d locked her inside 14E. She held out for seven days before finally building her door.
He still remembered her shock when he’d come to her room with the others. She’d been on her way to her first solo act at The Laugh Factory, and he’d promised to escort her. Saddle shoes and poodle skirt, she’d fought as they’d filled her apartment. High-kicking the air, she’d bitten Francis, kicked Evvie, even dispatched a right hook to Loretta. And then she’d noticed that Marty was among them. Her shoulders had slumped in submission as she’d asked, “Marty? You, too?”
He visited one more time, at Loretta and Evvie’s request. Her hall was dark, and there had been something in there with them, watching. Black-eyed and slithering with rounded, insectile joints, it hadn’t seemed as if it belonged in this world. Worse than a ghost. Not human, like a ghost. He’d realized for the first time that this door and perhaps The Breviary itself, were mistakes.
Jayne had shuffled out from the dark. Black eyes. Vacant. But that’s what happens when the soul is devoured. In her hands, she’d held the dirty rebar. It was only then that he’d understood; The Breviary needed a sacrifice. Something loved. He’d long wondered why Loretta and the rest had not objected to the time he spent with Jayne. Now he knew: he was that sacrifice.
She’d limped toward him on a wounded leg, dragging the rebar behind her.
“I’ve been in error,” he’d said while Jayne approached: click-clack-shhp. Only, it hadn’t been Jayne. There was nothing about that husk that he’d loved.
Click-clack-shhp. The sound had been terrible. Snot-nosed and heaving, he’d backed his way down the hall, until he got to the exit. But the door was locked from the outside. Loretta. Evvie. The rest of them, too. His betraying family, whom he’d known the better part of eight decades. They’d locked him in here with this thing.
Click-clack-shhp.
She’d cornered him as he wept. Black-eyed. Bared teeth. Hunched back, like her bones had rounded. She’d pressed her mouth against his ear in that way he’d once found so charming, and pinned him against the door with both arms. He’d closed his eyes, expecting a bite, but instead, she smashed the lock so that it broke. Her delicate hand came back disfigured, the knuckles jagged so that they’d hung loosely inside her skin. “Get out,” she’d said.
He’d reached behind him, and turned the knob. Then slipped through as she’d watched. The look on her face had been a snarl of rage, and he’d known it wasn’t the monster letting him go, but Jayne.
A few hours later, she was dead.
And so he’d resolved to do his best by Audrey, as he should have done for Jayne. He knew now why the tenants wanted this door, when so clearly, the thing on the other side meant harm. Soon, The Breviary would be condemned. They’d be turned out, every one of them. After seven generations of entitlement, the fall from grace was too great to endure. A door works two ways. The maniacs: they didn’t want to unleash anything; they wanted another world in which to hide.
He wasn’t dead, though he soon would be. They’d dragged him down the red-tongued hall. Struck him with their weak fists, then shoved him down the trash chute. He’d heard the crack halfway down. He couldn’t move his arms or legs, and was pretty sure, from the cracking sound it had made halfway down the chute, that he’d snapped his spine.
Amidst the ants, open-eyed Edgardo laid next to him. His coveralls were soiled with coffee grounds. It was Loretta who’d heard him warn the girl, Audrey, through the peephole in her wall. Marty had refused to deal the blow. So it had fallen on Evvie Waugh, the only other one of them strong enough to wield the rebar. A hunting man, he’d taken Edgardo’s cane for a trophy.
Marty’s breath came rasping, and he no longer felt cold, or much of anything at all. The ants converged in a