Chapter 24
The Overton rises above the rain-soaked city like something that has been waiting for me to come home.
Lightning flickers across its upper floors, turning the dark stone white for a fraction of a second. The spires appear and vanish. The iron balconies shine black. High above, along the rooftop parapet, something seems to shift against the storm.
I stop on the sidewalk and look up.
For one impossible instant, I think I see the grotesque crouching on the roof. Then the darkness envelops the roofline again.
Rain runs down my face, under my collar, into my eyes. I wipe it away with the palm of my hand and keep walking.
The shattered pendant rests against my chest, cold and jagged beneath my wet shirt. Every step makes the broken silver eye press into my skin. I am terrified. The fear has become almost physical, but I keep going, my feet moving with a will of their own.
I push through the Overton’s front door.
The lobby is empty. Still.
My wet footsteps echo across the marble as I cross toward the elevator. The old chandeliers glow dimly overhead, their light softened by dust and age. Beyond the glass doors, the storm smears the city into silver streaks and black shapes.
I press the elevator button. The circle lights up beneath my finger. Far above, the old machinery groans to life. That’s when I hear him.
Not a word at first. Just the faint scrape of movement from the far corner of the lobby.
I turn.
The superintendent sits alone in the shadows near his ground-floor apartment. I almost can’t make him out at first. A bottle dangles loosely from his hand.
The door to his apartment stands open behind him. Inside, a news anchor’s face flickers on a television screen. A glimpse of a world pretending to be normal.
The super watches me with hollow eyes.
“Marian’s dead,” he says.
My body goes very still.
I don’t answer.
The elevator continues its slow descent somewhere inside the walls.
The super lifts the bottle, misses his mouth the first time, then manages a drink. Vodka, I think. Something cheap and strong enough to flatten a man who wants to forget.
“She always knew this place would get her eventually,” he says. “Talked about it for years. Said the building would take her.”
My hand closes around the pendant.
“You knew,” I say.
His eyes move to mine.
For a second, he looks almost offended. Then he laughs. It is not a good sound.
“I knew enough.”
“Enough for what?”
“Enough to keep my mouth shut.”
The elevator cables hum behind the closed doors.
The super’s face looks gray in the lobby light, older than it did when I first arrived. Or maybe I only see him clearly now.
“Your grandmother was smart,” he says. “Real smart. At first it was people nobody would miss. The old. The sick. The ones who lived alone. People whose mail could pile up for a week before anyone wondered why.”
Rain ticks against the lobby glass.
“Then it was whoever got in her way.”
The casualness of it makes something in me recoil.
“She bought you,” I say.
His jaw tightens.
“She paid on time.”
The elevator is getting closer now. I can hear it descending through the shaft, the old car rattling floor by floor toward the lobby.
The super’s hand trembles around the bottle.
“You think I liked it?”
“I think you learned to live with it.”
The elevator arrives with a strained metallic sigh. The doors rumble open.
For a moment, I don’t move. The empty elevator waits behind me, lit by weak yellow light. The super sits in the lobby shadows with his bottle and his guilt and whatever is left of his soul.
“You’re as much of a monster as my grandmother was,” I say.
His face darkens.
“Nothing I could’ve done about it, you hear me?”
I step into the elevator.
“Nothing?” I ask.
The doors begin to close.
His voice rises, angry now, desperate.
“You don’t know what it was like!”
The doors shut, cutting him off. The elevator starts upward.
Cables strain overhead, walls trembling around me. The floor numbers glow weakly above the doors, one after another, the light behind each number dim and jaundiced.
I stand alone in the center of the metal box with the broken pendant against my chest.
My breath sounds loud in the enclosed space.
I try to slow it.
In through the nose, out through the mouth. Like my mother taught me when I was a child and fear was still something I believed adults could fix.
My mother.
The thought comes so suddenly that it hurts.
I take out my phone. My thumb taps the photo gallery, and there she is.
Margaret Shaw before the sickness. Before the hospital rooms and the pill bottles and the thin hands and the brave smiles that fooled no one.
The first picture is old, soft at the edges. Me at six years old in a Halloween costume, face painted crookedly, plastic pumpkin bucket in one hand. My mother kneels beside me, one arm around my waist, smiling like she is trying to protect the whole world by holding me close enough.
I scroll.
Birthdays. School photos. A trip to the beach where I’m missing a front tooth and she’s laughing at something outside the frame. Christmas morning. A photo taken at the zoo. A church picnic I barely remember.
She is beside me in every picture. Protective. Watchful. Always close.
The elevator groans upward.
I scroll farther. Teenage years now.
The photos change before I do. My mother still beside me, but the space between us has widened. My smile gets tighter, hers gets more careful. Forced pictures outside school events. Holidays where I am leaning away from her without realizing it. My jaw set, her eyes tired.
All those years, I thought she was controlling me. Keeping me small and scared, keeping me from the life I wanted. Now I see something else in her face. Not control. Fear.
She knew what Eleanor was. Or enough of it. Enough to run and hide me. Enough to build our whole life around distance from this building, this bloodline, this thing that had been waiting above the city longer than I’ve been alive.
I scroll again.
The final photos are harder.
My mother older, a lot thinner. A scarf over her hair, hospital light flattening her face. Still smiling for me because that is what mothers do when they are dying and their daughters are not ready.
The last picture stops me.
The two of us outside the hospital.
She is painfully thin, one hand resting against my arm. I’m smiling too brightly, trying to pretend we’re just leaving a doctor’s appointment and not walking through the last months of her life.
I look at her face. At the effort in it. At the love. My eyes burn.
“I gave you such a hard time,” I whisper.
The elevator keeps climbing.
“And all you ever tried to do was keep me safe.”
My voice breaks on the last word.
I hold the phone tighter, as if I can take strength from the image.
The elevator creaks, the lights flicker. The floor indicator stutters between numbers, and the elevator jerks.
That’s when the lights go out, bathing the lift in darkness.
I fumble for my phone.
My thumb slips on the wet screen.
“Come on,” I whisper.
The flashlight clicks on, white light fills the elevator, and Marian stands inches behind me.
Her face is bone white. Her eyes are open and dead.
Blood runs from the ruin of her throat in thick black streams, soaking the front of her nightgown.
Her head sits wrong on her shoulders, as if someone placed it there quickly and without care, like it could fall off any second.
She leans close enough that I feel cold breath touch my ear.
“We’re waiting for you,” she whispers.
I scream.
The phone falls from my hand, hits the elevator floor, and the flashlight goes out.
Darkness closes around me again.
Laughter fills the elevator.
Not quite Marian’s voice. It doesn’t even sound like a single voice. It’s more layered, multiple voices blending together, moving in the dark around me, above me, inside the walls. It rises until I clap both hands over my ears, but that does nothing. The laughter is already in my head.
Then the lights snap back on.
I’m alone.
The elevator hums as if nothing happened.
My phone lies facedown near my feet.
I stare at the empty space behind me. The mirrored wall reflects only my own face, white and wet and terrified, the broken pendant dark against my chest.
I bend slowly, pick up the phone, and force myself to breathe.
The elevator continues upward.
One floor. Then another. Finally the car slows. A bell dings, and the doors slide open. Darkness waits on the other side.