Audrey’s Door (5 page)
Authors: Sarah Langan
Hot Guy pressed his ear against the plaster and listened. Then he ran his piano-string-greased hands up and down the walls, as if feeling for a vibration. She thought about tiny fists and pictured the monster, Clara DeLea, crawling across the apartment one night and sneaking up on her children while they slumbered. Her knees would have left an imprint on the old carpet. A slightly darker hue, where she’d pressed the nylon the wrong way. Or worse. Maybe, like a witch, she’d crawled along the walls, and her greasy, bloated body had left snail trails that hadn’t been washed clean but instead painted white. They were coming through that paint now, psychic residue, in the form of this mover’s dirty paws.
Audrey pointed. “You’re making a mess!”
Startled, Hot Guy dropped his hands. His smears were everywhere. Nobody looked angry. Just uncomfortable. She tried to think of an explanation:
I’m feeling a little fragile…I just broke up with my boyfriend…Of course it’s haunted. A woman slaughtered her four children here!
Hot Guy looked like he was going to say something, but the boss interrupted him. “Look at what you did to the nice lady’s wall, you mucker! Go get a rag.”
When they were done, she handed them each a ten-dollar tip. “Don’t listen to these numbskulls,” Boss Guy said, pointing his thumbs at his accomplices. He waited until Audrey cracked a smile, then added, “You know the magic formula, don’t you, sweetheart? If you want to be happy here, you will.”
“Thanks. I’ll make sure to tap my ruby slippers,” she said, regretting her rudeness even as she spoke.
Boss Guy raised a puzzled eyebrow. “Uh, yeah,” he said, and left without another word.
It didn’t occur to her until after they were gone, that when she’d first arrived, she’d opened all the doors along the hall. But when the bulb went out, they’d all been closed.
So, who had closed them?
Going Gently Into That Good Night (Iniquitous Darlings)
T
he first thing she did was situate the cactus. It went on the turret’s ledge in the den, where at least some sunlight filtered. It was Saraub who’d named him. About a month after she moved to his place on York Avenue, he’d written “Wolverine” in neat, black pen on a swatch of masking tape, and stuck it to the side of the orange planter. “Little guy needs a name,” he’d told her, like he’d been worried about the prickly member of their family for a while now and had finally done something about it.
With Wolverine securely placed, she painted the far walls in both bedrooms. She’d decided to go with Calvin Klein metallic white; cheerful, but not ridiculous. After that, she hung her drafts along the hall. Most were sketches of the mourning garden above the Parkside Plaza office building on 59
th
Street that she’d been working on since she’d started at Vesuvius. It was
coming along more slowly than anyone had anticipated, which nobody at the office was happy about. Tomorrow morning was the next status report, and she wasn’t looking forward to it. There was the distinct possibility that heads would roll, or at least shamble to the unemployment line.
After unpacking, she camped out on an air mattress in the den and flipped to the TBS Classic Television Marathon. Somebody was still paying the cable bill, which was handy, if unsettling. Clara had killed her family in July.
Out the turret window, couples and large groups scurried toward their destinations. A crowd spilled out of the Columbia hangout The Hungarian Pastry Shop, where grad students carved oh-so-deep aphorisms (“God is dead!” “Let the river run, let all the dreamers take the nation!” “I text: therefore I am” “Rick Wormwood Will Light Your Fire!”) into the pine tables. She was too high up to hear their laughter, but she could see their distant smiles. She looked at her watch: 7:30 on a crisp fall Sunday night. The kind of night so alive that you can almost hear the city’s beating heart down in Times Square. Here she was, all moved in.
And it was very quiet.
Living with Saraub, she’d gotten used to low-level background chatter whenever she was home. He talked on the phone with Los Angeles a lot. Producers, agents, studio executives, secretaries, and crazy people, who tended to encompass all of the previous. For as long as she’d known him, he’d been trying to get financing for his documentary about the privatization of natural resources,
Maginot Lines.
Last she’d heard, he was close. But that was Hollywood, he’d once explained. Even the shoeshine guy thinks he’s close to a green light. He paid the rent by directing commercials freelance. I
New York was his biggest account. He’d been doing it for years now, and
the thrill had worn off, but they both agreed that it was significantly better than shoveling coal.
She repositioned Wolverine. This time his name tag faced east. A stained-glass bird caught her attention. Its red eyes were disproportionately small, beady. “You’re weird,” she told it. “No offense.”
Her hands were spattered with paint, and she chewed on the cuticle of her left index finger. It tasted, well, metallic.
What was Saraub doing now? Had his mother set him up with another Indian dial-a-bride? Was he getting drunk every night alone? Or maybe his best friend Daniel, who never slept with the same woman twice because he didn’t want her getting clingy, was taking him to strip clubs.
Did something bad happen here?
The mover had asked…How had he known?
She wished she had a little hash. Make that a lot of hash. Old school, three fatties a night back in Nebraska hash. Instead, she turned up the volume on the television—where
Sex and the City’
s Carrie Bradshaw was explaining why sleeping with strangers is awesome, and sat Indian style on the inflated AeroBed, with her laptop balanced between her knees. Somebody close by had a wireless account (BettyBoop!), so she Googled “Remaining examples of Chaotic Naturalism.”
On the television, Carrie wore a washcloth for a dress and wondered whether men liked freckles. Online, the first entry that popped was a reprinted Cambridge University psychology thesis in a critical journal called
Extrapolation:
Diary of the Dead: Casualties of Chaotic Naturalism
She moaned. Oh, crud. Seriously? She wanted to shut the laptop, but now that she’d seen the link, there was no turning back. Its ominous title would fuel her night
mares unless she investigated. She clicked on it. The article was written in 1924, by a graduate student who’d trained under Carl Jung. She skimmed the introduction, which espoused the merits of alchemy, and started on page two:
—ravings of madmen.
Edgar Schermerhorn’s religion, Chaotic Naturalism, waned more than a decade ago, and only a scant few of his buildings remain. Most people don’t know that he was originally an architect, and did not found his cult until after reading Darwin’s
On The Origin of Species.
His theory was founded on the notion that the human mind had evolved into a pattern recognition machine: man perceives cause and effect, and from this, extrapolates reason. For example, plants grow from seeds. This fact is now obvious, but back in 1000
B.C
., the idea that wheat could be harvested triggered the Neolithic Revolution and transformed civilization from nomadic to agrarian. Because of pattern recognition, society emerged. Humans transcended their biology and ceased to be animals.
But Schermerhorn believed that the human mind was overactive. It miscategorized, and forced patterns where they didn’t exist. For example, natural observations assume that time is linear—Humpty Dumpty can’t be uncracked, and returned to the wall—but such narrow perceptions don’t account for Yeats’ widening gyre, alchemy, particle-wave duality, or time travel.
In the stead of realism, Chaotic Naturalists’ followers embraced chaos, which they reflected in their breeding practices (like good eugenicists, they abandoned or drowned imperfect newborns); the families they raised (most were bigamists, and it was not illegal for siblings to marry one another); and the buildings they designed (Schermerhorn had many disciples). In eastern Eu
rope, they were hailed as visionaries, and even here in America, they achieved a brief celebrity. It wasn’t until the 1880s that their membership dwindled as their buildings crumbled one by one, and popular religious leaders of the Second Great Awakening proclaimed that they deserved it, for having made an enemy of God.
There were twenty-six true Chaotic Naturalist edifices all told.
Schermerhorn honed his craft, then returned to America with what he thought was a perfect design. Like the modern Gaudis in Barcelona, they were modeled after nature, not Euclidian geometry. But unlike Gaudi, they borrowed from the snails’ spiral, the winged bivalve, the honeysuckle vine, and then broke apart these natural patterns into a disjointed mishmash, as if to prove that not even God held providence over man.
The buildings’ tenants were self-selected crews who tended toward emotional instability. With so many neurotic personalities housed under one roof, they fomented each other’s afflictions, unleashing the anima and animus. It is Jung’s contention that it was this release of unconscious desires, and not the architecture, that is responsible for the wealth of reported Chaotic Naturalist hauntings.
Jung has stated that the buildings functioned as repositories for their tenants’ repressed desires, and over time, became closed universes unto themselves. Eventually, the tenants’ suppressions became animate, not solely to the dreamer who’d dreamed them but to everyone in the building: the singular psychosis reached the critical mass of collective mania.
Mirroring the structures of the buildings that housed them, the tentants’ thoughts fragmented, and they went mad. Their waking hours degenerated into Byronesque nightmares. Some took refuge in their opium pipes. Others ceased to go to work or care for their children, claiming that all efforts were futile, because the end of the
world was at hand. In many cases, their journal entries started out in pen, and finished in childish, nonsense scrawl.
I would never contest the brilliant Mr. Jung’s conclusions, but in studying the history of Chaotic Naturalism, I’ve found cause to attach some qualifications to his theories.
As we learned from the Freiberg philosophers, it is anathema to his biology for man to embrace chaos. Even if spirits exist (watching us, haunting us, inhabiting alternate universes that subvert time), granting them entrance through the spaces in our minds, or the structure of our homes, and any other doors we might construct, can only result in man’s utter destruction.
Who is to say that the door, once opened, could ever be closed? And in these alternate worlds, what capacity might man inhabit? Witness? King? Or victim, host, slave. Both author (Schermerhorn) and interpreter (Jung) neglected one thing: because of pattern recognition, mankind has learned that kindness and fellowship are in his best interest. Society evolves slowly, through group effort and the education of its children. A world without pattern recognition would be a cruel, inhuman place. Forgive my sentimentality, but without consequences to our actions, there is no love. And without love, man has no echo or memory. He can never be immortal or transcend his own coil. He returns to the slop with the swine.
Happily, few of Schermerhorn’s buildings still stand. Each pile of rubble tells the same wretched story. In Dubrovnik, a woman refused to abandon her seaside, Schermerhorn house with her family, despite the likelihood that it would crumble. She insisted that the walls spoke to her and that she had work yet to do. Her husband, recognizing that she’d lost her wits, removed all the sharp objects from the house and stranded her there, hoping that without food or the means to cook it, she’d
eventually surrender to the city where he’d moved with the children. When he visited two days later, a plume of black smoke frothed from the lopsided chimney. Inside, he found the coal-fire stove burning blue flames, and her head stuffed inside it. He was not at first able to determine how she’d written her epigraph across the side of the house until he saw her right index finger, which was broken and raw. In the absence of a knife or kindling, she’d carved her last words with her own, still attached index finger bone:
“Gol deschis în sfâr°it.”
Translated from Romanian:
The void opens at last.
In Krakow, the Pigeon sisters Gwendolyn and Cecily bludgeoned—
Audrey stopped reading. Something squirmed in her stomach. It felt like a worm. She scrolled past the rest of the text and moved on to the lithographs and black-and-white photos at the end. The first depicted a mansion with its slate roof caved in. The spike of a four-poster bed poked out from the rubble. The caption read: “
While They Were Sleeping at The Orphanage,
Boston, 1887.” There were houses in Romania, Croatia, Poland, Boston, and finally, the last photo: The Breviary.
Her mouth went dry, and her heart double-beat inside her chest. Its limestone was white, and its gargoyles sharply carved. 1900, she guessed, when the world had still been new. The caption read:
Schermerhorn’s Iniquitous Darling. Its foundation is embedded in Harlem’s subterranean granite mountain, so despite its slant and impossible geometry, it is the only Chaotic Naturalist structure expected to stand.
She sat back. Oh, boy. She wasn’t sure what “iniquitous” meant, but she didn’t like the sound. On the television, crazy Carrie Bradshaw decided that some men
like freckles, and some don’t. But she wasn’t going to bother with the men with freckles, because that would be self-destructive, wouldn’t it? Except, she couldn’t help but bother. Really, she was so depressed about it that she couldn’t get out of bed. Why, oh why, didn’t the man she kind-of-almost-loved, like freckles?
Audrey scrolled. In next the photo, a crew of blue bloods posed outside The Breviary, all dressed in three-piece suits and Gibson Girl swan-bill corsets. They smiled for the camera without a care in the world. New York’s party elite. The caption read:
Once the most lavish address in all Manhattan, by the turn of the century, a total of thirty people who’d lived within The Breviary’s walls were committed to insane asylums. They fared better than the seven who were murdered, by their own hands or otherwise.
“Bees knees,” Audrey moaned, then looked left, right, left, right. Okay, one more time: left-right! left-right! On the television, Carrie the idiot called her redheaded friend to commiserate about how they both had freckles, which clearly made them lepers.
Just then, the buzzer rang. She jumped. The buzzer rang again. Saraub?
She looked like crap! Her hair was a mess. The buzzer rang a third time.
Zzzzt-zzzzt!
It sounded like an outdoor bug killer. She smelled under her arms: musky. Good grief, had she even showered today?
Now he wasn’t buzzing. He was knocking. Polite little taps. She jumped up. “Coming!” Then she looked through the peephole, and stopped shivering. “Oh,” she mumbled.