Chapter 9
I turn the corner and almost immediately take note of the creepy old man. He’s standing in front of the Overton, on the opposite sidewalk, looking up at the building.
The man is rail thin and dressed entirely in black. Clothes grimy enough to suggest he either lives on the street or is very close to it. His skin is sun-burnished, pulled tight over sharp features, his age impossible to place. Thirty. Fifty. Somewhere in between.
He isn’t doing anything. Just standing there. Then he looks at me.
He eyes me with a disturbing, unflinching intensity that catches me off guard and makes me look away first.
I push through the Overton’s front door, cross the lobby to the elevator, and press the button. While I wait, I turn slightly and look back through the lobby glass.
The weird man in black is still there. He hasn’t moved. But his gaze has traveled upward now. He is staring at the top of the building, giving it the same focused attention he turned on me. What is he looking at?
Who are you kidding, kid. You know the answer.
The elevator arrives with a ding that makes me flinch.
I step inside, press the top-floor button, and look back one more time.
He’s gone.
The doors close.
By evening, the storm that has been pressing down on the city all day finally breaks.
The first rumble of thunder comes while I’m sitting at Eleanor’s desk with my laptop open and my earbuds in. Outside the windows, the sky shifts from gray to a bruised purple.
I’ve been researching for two hours.
The screen in front of me is a collage of stone and shadow.
Gargoyles from cathedrals across Europe, ancient carvings weathered into expressions that stopped being decorative centuries ago, if they ever were.
Notre Dame. Cologne. Prague. Edinburgh. A dozen other cities where people built things meant to last and put monsters on them to watch from above.
“Medieval legend holds that gargoyles are condemned souls intercepted on their way to Hell,” the podcast says in my earbuds. Outside, the first drops of rain begin to streak the glass. “Placed upon churches as warnings to the living. Renounce sin or join them.”
I scroll deeper into an article titled Demons in the Sky or Grotesque Guardian Angels? The Cursed History of Gargoyles.
The images get harder to look at.
I keep looking.
Some are reptilian, scaled and winged, the medieval imagination given stone form. Others are almost human, faces stretched into permanent anguish, as if something living was caught in the moment of becoming stone.
I stop on one.
Its mouth hangs open in a silent scream. The jaw wrenched too far down, the eyes showing too much white. Whoever carved it knew a thing or two about suffering.
Thunder rolls closer.
I look up.
The windows are black now, rain coming harder, city lights smeared through the wet glass. My reflection floats in the lower pane—pale face, expression haunted, Eleanor’s pendant around my neck.
I notice it with a small shock.
I don’t remember putting it on again.
I look back at the screen. Then at the windows.
Twice in the last ten minutes, I’ve looked up because something in my peripheral vision suggested movement outside. Twice I found only rain and dark.
The third time, I get up.
I cross to the window and stand close enough for my breath to fog the glass.
Rain sheets down the building’s face. The street thirty floors below is slick with reflected light. The building directly across, its windows mostly black at this hour, sits in the wet darkness and gives nothing back.
My phone buzzes.
PAUL CALLING.
I answer through the earbuds.
“Hey.”
“Hey. Sorry about earlier. The gargoyle comment was?—”
“It’s fine. I’ve had a weird day.”
I stay at the window while we talk.
He asks what I’m doing.
“Research.”
“What kind?”
“Take a wild guess.”
I move into the kitchen for a glass of water, watching through the open doorway as the laptop throws pale light across Eleanor’s desk, gargoyles dominating the screen.
Once I make my way back into the living room, the rain intensifies.
I glance at the window again. Across the street, the darkness seems to shift and part, almost as if some giant shadow was passing through the darkness.
Stop it, you’re losing it.
“Learn anything interesting?” Paul asks.
“The word gargoyle comes from an old word for throat,” I say, eyes fixed on the building across the street. “Technically, they were just rain drains. The decorative ones, the demonic ones, those are grotesques. Different thing.”
“So is our rooftop killer a grotesque or a gargoyle?”
I don’t answer.
I’m trying to decide whether what I’m seeing is a shape or only the suggestion of one. Whether my eyes are finding patterns in rain-dark stone or if something is gliding through the rainy darkness outside these windows.
“You said you had something,” I say.
His tone changes.
“My contact at the precinct came through. Both victims were cross-referenced in another file.”
A pause.
“The Eleanor Shaw murder investigation.”
I go still.
“First victim was Steve Burrow. Artist. Owned a gallery in SoHo. Eleanor was there the night she died. Bought one of his pieces. Police questioned him.”
“And the second?”
“Malcolm Shuster. Homeless. He was at the scene when the cops arrived, Eleanor’s blood on him. They brought him in as a possible suspect. City cameras cleared him.”
I stand at the window and let the pieces lock into place.
The gallery owner who sold Eleanor a piece of art the night she died.
The homeless man who watched her die.
Both dead within a week.
Both found on rooftops.
“The victims were the last two people to see my grandmother alive,” I say.
“It could be coincidence.”
“No. It’s not.”
Lightning fills the sky.
For one white fraction of a second, I see my reflection in the glass.
And behind it?—
Behind me?—
Something enormous.
A massive winged shadow.
There.
Then gone.
Thunder follows hard enough to shake the window.
“Sara?” Paul says.
I don’t turn around.
I stand at the glass, breathing carefully.
“Sara?”
“I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Tomorrow, Paul.”
I end the call.
The apartment is very quiet. Slowly, I turn toward Eleanor’s living room. The laptop on the desk, gargoyle images still scrolling. The fancy bar cart in the corner, its bottles amber and gold in the lamplight. The art on the walls throwing strange shapes as lightning flickers through the windows.
I look at the bar cart for a long moment. Tempted to help myself to a drink.
Then I go to the window instead.
Take in the rain-slicked city. I stand with my forehead almost touching the glass and search the ledges, the parapets, the architectural details.
I find only stone.
CRACK.
The impact is violent and immediate.
Something hits the glass six inches from my face and sends me stumbling backward into the coffee table, my heart detonating.
My eyes find the smashed pigeon on the narrow ledge.
A smear of red marks the glass where it hit. A thin spiderweb crack runs outward from the point of impact.
I grip the table and breathe.
Look at the blood. The crack. The dead bird, its wings bent at wrong angles.
Lightning splits the sky and the city goes white.
And in that single frozen instant of illumination, I see it.
On the ledge of the building directly across the street. At my exact eye level.
The grotesque. Reptilian wings folded tight. Birdlike head raised. Blank stone eyes looking directly into my window.
At me.
The lightning dies. Thunder rolls through the walls.
I don’t move. I don’t breathe. I stand in Eleanor’s living room and wait.
The next lightning comes.
The ledge across the street is empty.
The grotesque is gone. No evidence anything was ever perched there thirty stories above the street.
I look at the crack in the glass. The dead pigeon. My hands.
They are not shaking and that is the most surprising part. Then something shifts inside me.
I turn from the window.
And move.