Chapter 17
The city at night feels very different from the daytime version.
The darkness concentrates the light into pools. Lit windows stand out against the black, each one a small stage.
I face the window as the thunder moves somewhere to the north. As the rain begins again, I sweep the binoculars across the skyline.
A man in a sixth-floor kitchen, cooking something that requires his complete attention. He stirs and tastes and adjusts the seasoning. I wonder how many people eat their dinner alone in this beautiful but isolating city.
A woman on the fourteenth floor folds laundry on her bed, her movements practiced and automatic, her eyes on something I can't see. Television, probably. The blue flicker of it at the edge of the window.
Another window offers a glimpse of a very different life. A couple sits at a dining table, wine glasses between them, laughing at something. I bite my lips, gripped by a pang of loneliness.
Then I find the other couple.
They’re on the eighth floor, the building directly east, warm light spilling from the large window.
They're kissing. The woman pulls the man closer, her hands moving, and I watch with rapt fascination. A faint smile touches my lips. Something hungry in it.
I catch myself.
Guiltily lower the binoculars. Hey, I’m not some weirdo voyeur. Or at least that’s what I try to tell myself.
I stand at the window and look at my reflection in the dark glass.
I raise the binoculars again. The couple's window is dark now, curtains drawn.
"Someone found the bedroom," I say to the empty apartment.
My next movie is to sweep the binoculars upward… and freeze.
She's standing on the rooftop of the building directly north. Motionless in the rain. Tall and wire-thin, her posture unmistakable even at this distance in this light.
It’s Marian. And she is looking directly at me.
The contact lands like something physical. I grip the binoculars until my hands ache, and I don't look away.
The next moment Marian steps off the roof.
The specter drops below the parapet line and vanishes into the darkness.
I don't breathe.
Another shape peels from the darkness at the parapet's edge. Massive, crouched along the parapet. The grotesque.
Rainwater streams down its dark skin. The wings are folded tight against its back, the elongated head lowered. It crouches on the edge, perfectly still.
Watching. Patient. Present in a way that presses through the thirty stories of open air between us and the glass of the binoculars.
My voice comes out smaller than I intend.
"What are you? What do you want from me?"
Lightning flashes, and the world goes white.
And in the single searing instant of total illumination, the grotesque's head snaps upward, and what I see is not a reptilian beast.
I’m looking at my face!
My features edged and distorted in the stone. The thing has my eyes, my mouth, my face. Lips twisted in silent anguish as if I was trapped inside the stone creature, trying to press my way out.
I cry out at the horrific vision and drop the binoculars.
They hit the floor.
I back away from the window, terror-stricken.
I reach up and touch my face, making sure it’s still there, that I’m still me.
I look at Eleanor's portrait.
She looks back with her measuring expression, the pendant at her throat, absolute certainty in her posture.
I touch the crucifix at my own throat. Wrap my fingers around it and whisper a prayer under my breath.
For the first time since I traded Eleanor's pendant for it, I'm grateful for the weight of it. For what it represents. An act of resistance against the darkness that is closing in on me.
I let it go. Pick up the binoculars from the floor. Raise them with shaky hands.
The parapet is empty. The rain runs down the stone in rivulets and there is nothing there. No grotesque, no face in the stone. Nothing but the ordinary darkness and the rhythm of the nighttime city going on behind it.
Thunder detonates overhead.
I grab Eleanor's jacket.
And flee this cursed apartment.