did Betty’s frozen grin. “Get out while you can, Lamb,” she said as she squeezed. Only her fingers were red with blood, and now, so was Audrey’s crotch.
“No. It’s not after me, only you,” Audrey tried to say, but her words got garbled. Her throat hurt. Bad. Something wet. She felt her neck with her fingers. Red.
Still bleeding, she broke down and began to cry. In her dream, and in real life, too. The sound carried through 14B’s air shafts, and halls, and even the elevator. Through the vibrations in the walls, it roused sleeping and vigilant tenants alike. A weeping, desperate sound that made their hearts flutter in carnal delight. Down below, in the theatre, the black-eyed audience grinned.
Scritch-scratch! The sound was close. A tiny hole in the closet door near the eyehook appeared, and a long, pale finger reached through it. The latch came undone.
The ants swarmed Audrey’s ankles. Pins and needles on fire. “I’m thirsty. Someone cut my throat,” she gasped as she cried.
Betty loosened her hold on Audrey’s crotch. A red, broken thing. “Better run, Lamb. It’s a bad place, where you live.”
Audrey traced the curving, open wound on her throat. “It never healed,” she said. I’m still bleeding.”
“Better run, Lamb.”
Audrey backed away from the hole. Betty stayed. The man burst from the closet. Betty lurched as the red army riddled her skin from the inside out. She didn’t scream, though the sound was high-pitched and hysterical. Even as the insects bit, and her face swelled unrecognizably like a dry thing left too long in water, Betty Lucas laughed. The audience laughed, too.
Audrey turned to run. The man in the three-piece suit caught her by the shoulders.
“You’re stuck to something, my dear,” he told her. “A tumor. Let me get that for you,” he said. Then he raised his finger, which he’d whittled to a sharp bone point, and sliced her throat open.
She jerked in her sleep, and stopped breathing. Everything got quiet, except the television in 14B, which turned on and off and on again, like the fluttering eyes of a large animal. Across the screen the late-night movie read:
Audrey Lucas: thiS is YOur Life.
7
Home Keeps Changing
Great to finally talk to you, too, Bob!” Saraub Ramesh enthused into the mouthpiece of his cell phone. Reception was terrible, but at least he sounded less nervous than he felt, due mostly to a serious hangover. Thread-sized sparks of lightning flickered across his eyeballs, like he could see his own blood circulating there. He’d been dry-heaving half the night, and only remembered fragments of what had happened before that: a pole dancer, somebody sucking on his ear and making it sticky. God, he really hoped that meant she’d been gnawing on a mouthful of taffy. After that, there’d been a piano, and an apartment building with slanted floors and cockeyed windows. He remembered Audrey looking out from a crooked doorway, seeming small and alone, like the first time he’d met her in front of the Film Forum.
She’d been pacing beneath the marquee that day, and he’d noticed that she looked both prettier and older than the online photo she’d posted. High, chiseled cheekbones, and heavy circles under her eyes from either drugs or an obsessive personality. After he got to know her, he’d learned: both.
He’d loitered near the side of the building before approaching, because it was his nature to watch. She’d worn flats and wool trousers instead of belly jeans and sparkling eye glitter, which had made him wonder if she was the last woman in New York who dressed like a grown-up. She’d held her arms crossed around her chest and taken deep breaths, as if reminding herself to remain calm.
From the second he’d clicked on her profile, he’d understood that there was a story in her, the girl from the Midwest who’d started her life fresh after thirty years. Left her family and friends behind, to worship the glittering man-eater called Manhattan. From her hunched shoulders and the pinched guardedness of her expression, he’d understood that she was a wounded person. But still standing. Still carrying on. He’d never lived much, except through the eyes of a camera, and he admired people who had.
Seeing her there, he’d known that if he started talking to her, he’d never stop. Good-bye to Tonia, who’d never read a book for pleasure, and expected him to start working for the family business as soon as they got hitched, and build her a mansion in Jersey. Good-bye to his family,