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seeking a studio to rent to teach dance less than a month after she'd found Sandy a furnished room and
helped him move his stuff there& That sense of uncleanness. Of ugliness. Of energies that screamed at
her,Don't come in here&
Only she'd needed a place to teach a class, if she were going to make her rent Like the little Jewish and
Russian and Cuban girls who'd gone up and down the stairs each day to a factory floor they knew was a
fire-trap, to work for a man who summoned them into his office under threat of blacklist, she did what
she needed to do to survive.
And as she relaxed her mind, she felt those early feelings of dread sharpen and crystallize, as if the veils
that shrouded and blurred them were being drawn, one by one, aside.
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She heard no voices, and saw no shadows, but she was very conscious of those girls now, slipping along
the hall in twos and threes with their shawls wrapped around them in the cold, their long hair braided up
to keep it out of the machines. Names flickered through her mind and were gone.
She put out her hand, fingers spread as Diana had taught her, and brought it slowly close to the wall. She
felt the energy at once, like the prickly horror of ants crawling on her skin. It took all her will not to jerk
her hand away.
He was here. He was here everywhere in the building, as if his mind had spread Like fungal fibers
through the old brick that underlay all those layers of wallpaper and paint. Not living, but holding on to
the living world, to the material pleasures and power that all his life he had refused to give up. A psychic
monster that fed on what it could get.
Maddie walked forward slowly, following the fast-streaming energy along the wall. "There was a lobby
here," she whispered through lips that felt numb, "outside the office door." She could see it, as if she'd
visited the place in a dream. The stairway had continued up, where that wall now was. Farther down the
main hall the energy ceased, turned cold. Unwinding the string behind her she entered one of the smaller
halls, she was dimly aware of the blue chalk X at the corner and of Phil walking behind her, the flashlight
in one hand and the pry bar in the other. He seemed barely more than a shadow to her, half unreal.
More real, a thousand times, was the sense of vile consciousness, the anger that seemed to vibrate the
air. He was muttering, snarling like a caged dog, that hoarse, thick voice that had spoken to her ten nights
ago at the foot of the stairway. He was somewhere just out of clear hearing, savage, furious, but she
could smell his sweaty woolen suit, his expensive cologne, the brandy on his breath and the cigar smoke
that permeated his flesh and his hair. His need for women, for power, for domination over those too
weak to fight back was a second stench, deeper than the first.
She turned a corner and then another, the string trailing from her fingers: Office doors, then another little
hallway branching off toward a suite, but she knew where the stairway lay. She turned right again and
was conscious that the hallway and all the floor behind her was dark, though she didn't know just when
the lights had gone out.
The glow of the flashlight touched the stairway. Narrow, barely wider than her shoulders, wooden steps
splintery and dirty, walls stained.
She could hear Glendower talking now. Hear him cursing.Uppity women& come here organizing&
man can do what he wants to with his property. Mind your own business. I'll get you& You little tramps
don't like it, you go someplace else and work. Lazy foreigners, steal me blind, spend all your time
sneaking cigarettes in the toilets while I'm paying you to work&
Vile whisperings, chewed over and fermented for nearly a century. Resentment and rage, and under
them the red strength of a soul that absorbs power from the pain of others. The death of others.
"He's up there," Maddie whispered, and put her hand on the fouled paint of the wall. "Tessa?"
And out of the darkness above the darkness at the top of a stairway that had been destroyed
ninety-five years before came the stifled wail of a terrified girl.
Maddie put her foot on the lowest step, and the blast of rage that pounded down on her from the
darkness was like the physical force of an explosion.Get out of here! Get out of here, goddamn
do-gooder hag! Rob a man of what's his! Tell a man what he can do on his own property, with his own
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girls!
Nearly a hundred years ago to the day, the thing in the darkness above her had died, and in dying had
swallowed up the strength of those who had perished with it in the inferno. As she climbed the steps,
Maddie could feel those from whom that life force had been taken, the walls around her twittering, like
trapped birds. Russian, Spanish, Yiddish, Italian fragments of horror and pain. A warm hand closed on
her wrist, reassuring and strong. "Whatisit?" breathed Phil. "This wasn't here& "
Maddie's mouth felt like she'd had an injection of lidocaine at the dentist. "It's the world he created," she
mumbled. "The world that still exists in his mind& "
Pain stabbed at her, so sudden that she staggered. With the pain was a horrible and frightening sensation
she'd never felt before, but she knew at once what it was: a cold grip twisting at her mind, seeking to tear
her soul free of her brain. She gasped, turned her hand in Phil's and clutched at his fingers "Hold me&
"
His arms were around her, supporting her as the steps' seemed to tip under her feet, or else there was
something thrusting at her, shoving her, trying to knock her back down the inky slot of the stairway. A
voice was shouting in her ears, black thunder that shook the walls around them, and under it Phil's voice,
"I've got you, baby, I'm here& "
And like a wind-whirled bird, somewhere came Tessa's cry, "Maddie& !"
The pain ceased with a suddenness that made her gasp. The shouting ended in silence like the fall of an
ax. But as Maddie led the, way, stumbling, up the last few stairs, she felt the darkness taking shape
above them, waiting for them, drawing in on itself. Preparing another blow.
The world at the top of the stairs was the world that had been theGlendowerBuilding before the fire,
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