Then she charged the door and somehow raced through its aperture. Her arms were opened wide, as if to give Schermerhorn a hug, but it was her opposite Loretta who caught her, and took the first bite. The rest helped. They pulled her apart. Unsocial creatures, none voluntarily shared.
The building smoldered. Chips of plaster fell, and the door rocked inside its frame. Francis Galton was the next to race through the opening. The same fate greeted him. This time it was Schermerhorn who caught him. The dark, spiderlike Schermerhorn she’d met upon Jayne’s death, who’d consumed his human counterpart and had lived here ever since, guiding The Breviary’s hand.
“Run!” Evvie Waugh exclaimed, then beat his way backward through the crowd with Edgardo’s cane. Some followed him, others followed Loretta.
The shadow creatures pushed against the opening but so far could only lure the tenants inside, and couldn’t yet break free.
Audrey could not help but look. Behind the monsters was a red-sunned world with dirt instead of grass and air thick as ashes. Her shadow twin was hunched, with hard features and narrow, ungenerous eyes.
She realized she’d seen this thing before, only back then, she hadn’t recognized it. Hinton, 1992.
“We’ve got to break the door,” Saraub said, as the tenants scurried down the hall or else flung themselves inside the door. He lifted the rebar with one of his broken arms. His own shadow self retained his features but stood only as tall as a child. A stunted thing, it sucked its thumb.
“No, it’ll collapse before it can open,” she told him. “We just have to get out.”
He grimaced. “I have to take it down,” he said, and she understood that what he meant was, every second it stands is an abomination.
Another tenant screamed as she walked through the door. And another. She didn’t hear the sound of smacking lips, or grunts. Even these would have marked a human kind of delight.
The floor beneath them buckled. Saraub advanced too slowly. She took the rebar from him. “Let me.”
As she approached the door, she thought about what she’d forgotten in Hinton. Bloody-necked, she’d escaped her mother’s knife and bent down over the hole to help dig. One clump of dirt, another. And then, a face. Frantic, she’d clawed more dirt and so had Betty, until they’d unearthed the thing.
Black-eyed Audrey Lucas had peered back at them. Human-sized, a grown woman aged before her time, it had scritch-scratched with fingers worn to bones against the floor it was trapped beneath. Though she hadn’t recognized it as her twin, in her drunken horror, she’d screamed.
It was Betty who’d stabbed it with her knife. First slitting its throat, then cutting off its head. It was then that the red ants had swelled up from the ground and filled the kitchen while Audrey and her mother had stomped. They’d chewed flesh and blood and bones, until every last bit of the monster was gone.
By the time the ants had finished, she’d forgotten. Maybe it had been too terrible. Maybe it was a secret humans weren’t meant to know.
The red ants were not the imaginary symptom of madness, like she’d always believed. They were the gatekeepers that kept the shadow world and the hopeful world separate. Her mother, attuned to both places, had heard Audrey’s monster that day and murdered it. And then she’d fled, to escape her own monster.
Audrey swung the rebar. Hard. One hit was all it took because she knew that the top left corner of the frame was the weakest part. The trapped things wailed in fury as the frame crashed down. The cruciform handle tumbled end to end.
She and Saraub backed away. Together, they scrambled down the hall. Behind them, ants swarmed the room. Wood chips, boxes, the air mattress, the ivories, torn old clothes, they chewed and chewed. Gnawing, gnawing, until all remnants of the door were gone.
They stumbled down the hall, where the rest of The Breviary’s wild-eyed tenants wandered, aimless. Thick smoke filled the air. By now their bodies were so deformed that they looked identical to their shadow selves. Before she and Saraub started down the stairs, Audrey glanced back once. The entire den was squirming with red.
They gave up trying to limp down the steps, and instead got down on their bottoms and slid. The building creaked and moaned like wheezing breaths. Three more flights—the lobby. At the front doors, they found two police officers in blue uniforms, and behind that, a fire truck. She and Saraub slowed,