Chapter 10
I don't take the elevator. Instead I opt for the stairs.
Thunder rolls somewhere above the roof, low and heavy.
I descend fast, one hand on the rail, the other closed around the pendant at my throat.
Why am I still wearing the damn thing?
By the time I reach Marian's floor, my breath is ragged. The hallway is dim, the sconces throwing weak amber light across the old carpet. Everything in the Overton feels different at night.
I find Marian's door and knock.
No answer.
I knock again, harder. "Marian."
My voice is too loud in the empty hall.
I lean closer and listen. I can make out rain against distant glass, the electrical hum inside the walls. Somewhere far below, the faint shift of elevator cables.
Then movement. She's in there.
"I know you're home," I say.
Silence.
I knock again, hard enough for the sound to echo down the hall. "Marian, I'm not leaving until you open this door."
Nothing.
I should stop. I'm pounding on the door of a woman I barely know, because I saw something impossible outside my window.
"I need to talk to you about Eleanor."
Still nothing.
Frustration rises first, hot and useless. Then something colder slides in beneath it. I press my forehead against the door and lower my voice.
"Please. Something's happening to me. I think you know what it is. You're the only person here who might understand."
For several seconds, there is only rain.
Then the chain slides back.
The sound is small, but it moves through me like a hand closing around my spine.
The door opens a crack.
Marian peers through the gap, and for a moment I don't recognize her. The woman I met before was severe. Contained. This woman looks like she's been taken apart and put back together wrong. Hair loose around her face. Skin gray. The shadows under her eyes almost bruised.
She looks like she hasn't slept in days.
"What did you see?" she asks.
The question is so direct I forget the speech I prepared.
"I don't know," I say.
Marian studies my face through the gap.
"Yes, you do."
Then she closes the door.
For one awful second, I think she's shut me out.
The locks turn and the door opens.
That’s as much of an invitation as I’m getting as she turns away and shuffles back inside but the door remains open.
I step into Marian’s inner sanctum. Her apartment is a lot smaller than Eleanor’s.
No fancy art or designer furniture. Just a narrow entry, old wood floors, pale walls, and furniture chosen for function.
A sofa. A table. Two lamps. No color except weak lamplight and the gray wash of rain on the windows.
It feels less like a home than a place where someone is serving out a sentence.
Marian locks the door behind me. Deadbolt, chain, and a third lock low on the frame that I never noticed from the hall.
Three locks.
What are you trying to keep out, Marian?
She walks past me into the living room and sits in a wooden chair by the window, arms crossed tight, eyes on the floor. She doesn't offer me a seat. I stand by the sofa.
For a long moment, neither of us speaks.
Then she says, "Everyone loved Eleanor Shaw."
The way she says loved tells me she means something else.
"The art world adored her. The charities sent her Christmas cards. The doormen smiled. Men stood straighter. Women tried to decide whether they wanted to be her or hate her."
She looks up at me.
"You look like her."
That lands harder than I expect.
She leans back. "Your grandmother was famous for her generosity. She gave to charities, funded foundations, smiled at benefit dinners. Everyone thought she was a saint.”
I say nothing.
"I watched a homeless man ask her for money once. Right outside this building. She stopped, opened her purse, handed him cash." Marian's mouth tightens. "Then she leaned in and whispered something to him. I was close enough to hear it."
"What did she say?"
"Go buy yourself some drugs, honey."
The words darken the room.
"Two days later they found him dead of an overdose. In front of the building."
Rain taps the windows, fast and insistent.
"That was Eleanor. Everything warm about her was theater. Underneath it was rot."
The pendant feels cold against my throat.
I look around the apartment again. The emptiness and restraint. The total absence of life in a place someone has clearly lived a long time.
"Why are you the only neighbor I've met?"
Marian lifts her gaze. For the first time, she looks almost impressed.
“You’re finally asking the right questions."
I wait.
"Eleanor got rid of everyone," she says.
Her voice is flat, practiced, like she's said it to herself a thousand times.
"What do you mean, got rid of?"
"One way or another."
Wind hits the windows hard enough to rattle them. Marian doesn't flinch.
"She bought units when people left. One apartment at a time. The whole building, slowly, became hers."
I think of the Overton's empty halls. The shut doors. The lobby that's too quiet for a building this size. Could Marian be telling the truth?
"You're saying she owns the whole building?"
“Owned it. It’s yours now.”
My thoughts are reeling. I can’t quite wrap my mind around any of this. The scope of it, the insanity and dark implications.
“Why do you hate her so much?” I finally say. “What did Eleanor do to you?"
Marian's eyes stay on the window. For a moment I think she won't answer.
Then: "Men noticed Eleanor."
The sentence sounds almost harmless.
"So did my husband."
The room shifts.
“Frank was a good man. He kept his distance.”
A dark smile plays across her face. “Eleanor didn’t like distance.”
"What happened?"
“She put him under her spell.”
Spell. The word hangs there.
"Whatever she did, Frank became obsessed with her. Not the way men get stupid over beautiful women. This was different. It was like something had been threaded through him and pulled tight. He stopped sleeping. Stopped eating. Stopped hearing me when I spoke. He would stand in the lobby for hours, waiting for her to come home. Like a dog. And when she was done with him, he took a dive from the roof.”
I take it all in, shaken by the story.
“Why didn’t you leave?”
“I tried. Every time I got close, something happened. People backed out. Deals collapsed. One buyer got hit by a cab outside the building. Eventually, I stopped trying.”
Thunder rolls over the building, closer now.
“Why did she keep me around? The answer is simple. Your grandmother enjoyed seeing me suffer. Who was your grandmother? She was an evil monster. A fucking witch.”
The word pulls the air from the room.
I should reject it. Laugh out loud. Tell her grief has made her cruel and superstitious, that beautiful rich women are not witches, buildings are not cursed, and that grotesques do not move.
I wisely hold my tongue.
"Forget I said that,” Marian says, eyes flickering with paranoia, realizing she has perhaps said too much. I guess for a moment she forgot that she was talking to the granddaughter of the witch in question.
Neither of us moves. The rain fills the silence.
"I saw something tonight," I say. "Outside my window."
Marian goes very still.
"You know what it is."
For a long moment, I think she's going to deny it. Order me out. Retreat behind whatever wall she's lived behind all these years.
Instead, her voice drops.
"Eleanor used to call to something. Late at night. When she thought no one was listening."
Her eyes flick toward the ceiling. As if something in the apartment above us might be listening in on our conversation.
"I used to hear Eleanor through the walls," Marian says. "Through the vents. This building carries sound when it wants to."
"Hear her doing what?"
"Reading from that book of hers.”
The room tilts.
I immediately think of the old leather-bound book. The one I found on my first day.
“Night after night," Marian says. "Her voice. Those words. And then horrible things would happen in this building."
Suddenly, a shadow sweeps across Marian’s window.
Huge. Fast. Gone almost before my eyes can shape it.
We both freeze.
Marian turns deathly pale.
I look at the window, take in the rain, darkness and the smeared lights of the city beyond. No sign of any winged monster but it doesn’t matter. The moment was enough to rattle Marian.
"I should never have opened this door," she whispers. "I should never have talked to you."
"Marian, please?—"
"Get out of my home."
"Marian—"
"GET OUT!"
The scream rips out of her, raw and cracked, nothing left in it of the woman who lectured me about Eleanor ten minutes ago.
I back toward the door.
"Out." Quieter this time. Somehow that's worse.
I fumble the door open and step into the hallway.
The door slams. The locks turn, one after another.
I stand in the dark hallway, all alone.
I can't stop seeing the way she looked at me in that final second.
Not like I was the devil.
Like I was my grandmother.