One floor up, it’s more of the same. I leave the baked goods at 4A, B, and C. But
as I’m heading away from 4D, the door swings open.
“Young lady,” comes a voice.
I turn to see a vast woman filling the door frame like bread in a loaf pan, holding
the small, cellophaned muffin.
“What is your name? And what is this adorable little treat?” she asks. The muffin
looks like an egg, nested in her palm.
“Mackenzie,” I say, stepping forward. “Mackenzie Bishop. My family just moved in to
3F, and we’re renovating the coffee shop on the ground floor.”
“Well, lovely to meet you, Mackenzie,” she says, engulfing my hand with hers. She
is made up of low tones and bells and the sound of ripping fabric. “My name is Ms.
Angelli.”
“Nice to meet you.” I slide my hand free as politely as possible.
And then I hear it. A sound that makes my skin crawl. A faint meow behind the wall
that is Ms. Angelli, just before a clearly desperate cat finds a crack somewhere near
the woman’s feet and squeezes through, tumbling out into the hall. I jump back.
“Jezzie,” scorns Ms. Angelli. “Jezzie, come back here.” The cat is small and black,
and stands just out of reach, gauging its owner. And then it turns to look at me.
I hate cats.
Or really, I just hate
touching
them. I hate touching any animal, for that matter. Animals are like people but fifty
times worse—all id, no ego; all emotion, no rational thought—which makes them a bomb
of sensory input wrapped in fur.
Ms. Angelli frees herself from the doorway and nearly stumbles forward onto Jezzie,
who promptly flees toward me. I shrink back, putting the basket of muffins between
us.
“Bad kitty,” I growl.
“Oh, she’s a lover, my Jezzie.” Ms. Angelli bends to fetch the cat, which is now pretending
to be dead, or is paralyzed by fear, and I get a glimpse of the apartment behind her.
Every inch is covered with antiques. My first thought is,
Why
would anyone have so much stuff?
“You like old things,” I say.
“Oh, yes,” she says, straightening. “I’m a collector.” Jezzie is now tucked under
her arm like a clutch purse. “A bit of an artifact historian,” she says. “And what
about you, Mackenzie—do you like old things?”
Like
is the wrong word. They’re
useful
, since they’re more likely to have memories than new things.
“I like the Coronado,” I say. “That counts as an old thing, right?”
“Indeed. A wonderful old place. Been around more than a century, if you can believe
it. Full of history, the Coronado.”
“You must know all about it, then.”
Ms. Angelli fidgets. “Ah, a place like this, no one can know everything. Bits and
pieces, really, rumors and tales…” She trails off.
“Really?” I brighten. “Anything unusual?” And then, worried my enthusiasm is a little
too strong, I add, “My friend is convinced a place like this has to have a few ghosts,
skeletons, secrets.”
Ms. Angelli frowns and sets Jezzie back in the apartment, and locks the door.
“I’m sorry,” she says abruptly. “You caught me on my way out. I’ve got an appraisal
in the city.”
“Oh,” I fumble. “Well, maybe we could talk more, some other time?”
“Some other time,” she echoes, setting off down the hall at a surprising pace.
I watch her go. She clearly knows
something
. It never really occurred to me that someone would know and not want to share. Maybe
I should stick to reading walls. At least they can’t refuse to answer.
My footsteps echo on the concrete stairs as I ascend to the fifth floor, where not
a single person appears to be home. I leave a trail of muffins in my wake. Is this
place empty? Or just unfriendly? I’m already reaching for the stairwell door at the
other end of the hall when it swings open abruptly and I run straight into a body.
I stumble back, steadying myself against the wall, but I’m not fast enough to save
the muffins.
I cringe and wait for the sound of the basket tumbling, but it never comes. When I
look up, a guy is standing there, the basket safely cradled in his arms. Spiked hair
and a slanted smile. My pulse skips.
The third-floor lurker from last night.
“Sorry about that,” he says, passing me the basket. “No harm, no foul?”
“Yeah,” I say, straightening. “Sure.”
He holds out his hand. “Wesley Ayers,” he says, waiting for me to shake.
I’d rather not, but I don’t want to be rude. The basket’s in my right hand, so I hold
out my left awkwardly. When he takes it, the sounds rattle in my ears, through my
head, deafening. Wesley is made like a rock band, drums and bass and interludes of
breaking glass. I try to block out the roar, to push back, but that only makes it
worse. And then, instead of shaking my hand, he gives a theatrical bow and brushes
his lips against my knuckles, and I can’t breathe. Not in a pleasant, butterflies-and-crushes
way. I literally cannot breathe around the shattering sound and the bricklike beat.
My cheeks flush hot, and the frown must have made its way onto my face, because he
laughs, misreading my discomfort, and lets go, taking all the noise and pressure with
him.
“What?” he says. “That’s custom, you know. Right to right, handshake. Left to right,
kiss. I thought it was an invitation.”
“No,” I say curtly. “Not exactly.” The world is quiet again, but I’m still thrown
off and having trouble hiding it. I shuffle past him toward the stairs, but he turns
to face me, his back to the hall.
“Ms. Angelli, in Four D,” he continues. “She always expects a kiss. It’s hard with
all the rings she wears.” He holds up his left hand, wiggles his fingers. He’s got
a few of his own.
“Wes!” calls a young voice from an open doorway halfway down the hall. A small, strawberry-blond
head pops out of 5C. I want to be annoyed that she didn’t answer when I knocked, but
I’m still resisting the urge to sit down on the checkered carpet. Wesley makes a point
of ignoring her, his attention trained on me. Up close I can confirm that his light
brown eyes are ringed with eyeliner.
“What were you doing in the hall last night?” I ask, trying to bury my unease. His
expression is blank, so I add, “The third-floor hall. It was late.”
“It wasn’t
that
late,” he says with a shrug. “Half the cafés in the city were still open.”
“Then why weren’t you in one of them?” I ask.
He smirks. “I like the third floor. It’s so…yellow.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s yellow.” He reaches out and taps the wallpaper with a painted black nail. “Seventh
is purple. Sixth is blue. Fifth”—he gestures around us—“is clearly red.”
I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s clearly any color.
“Fourth is green,” he continues. “Third is yellow. Like your bandana. Retro. Nice.”
I bring a hand up to my hair. “What’s second?” I ask.
“It’s somewhere between brown and orange. Ghastly.”
I almost laugh. “They all look a bit gray to me.”
“Give it time,” he says. “So, you just move in? Or do you enjoy roaming the halls
of apartment buildings, hocking”—he peers into the basket—“baked goods?”
“Wes,”
the girl says again, stamping her foot, but he ignores her pointedly, winking at
me. The girl’s face reddens, and she disappears into the apartment. A moment later
she emerges, weapon in hand.
She sends the book spinning through the air with impressive aim, and I must have blinked,
or missed something, because the next minute, Wesley’s hand has come up and the book
is resting in it. And he’s still smiling at me.
“Be right there, Jill.”
He brushes the book off and lets it fall to his side while he peers into the muffin
basket. “This basket nearly killed me. I feel I deserve compensation.” His hand is
already digging through the cellophane, past ribbons and tags.
“Help yourself,” I say. “You live here, then?”
“Can’t say that I do—Oooooh, blueberry.” He lifts a muffin and reads the label. “So
you are a Bishop, I presume.”
“Mackenzie Bishop,” I say. “Three F.”
“Nice to meet you, Mackenzie,” he says, tossing the muffin into the air a few times.
“What brings you to this crumbling castle?”
“My mother. She’s on a mission to renovate the café.”
“You sound so enthused,” he says.
“It’s just old…”
That’s enough sharing,
warns a voice in my head.
One dark eyebrow arches. “Afraid of spiders? Dust? Ghosts?”
“No. Those things don’t worry me.”
Everything is loud here, like you.
His smile is teasing, but his eyes are sincere. “Then what?”
I’m spared by Jill, who emerges with another book. Part of me wants to see this Wesley
try to stave off a second blow while holding a book and a blueberry muffin, but he
turns away, conceding.
“All right, all right, I’m coming, brat.” He tosses the first book back to Jill, who
fumbles it. And then he casts one last look at me with his crooked smile. “Thanks
for the muffin, Mac.” He just met me and he’s already using a nickname. I’d kick his
ass, but there’s a slight affection to the way he says it, and for some reason I don’t
mind.
“See you around.”
Several moments after the door to 5C has closed, I’m still standing there when the
scratch of letters in my pocket brings me to my senses. I head for the stairs and
pull the paper from my jeans.
Jackson Lerner. 16.
This History is old enough that I can’t afford to put it off. They slip so much faster
the older they get—distress to destruction in a matter of hours; minutes, even. I
get back to the third floor, ditching the basket in the stairwell, and pocket my ring
as I reach the painting of the sea. I pull the key’s cord over my head, wrapping it
several times around my wrist as my eyes adjust to make out the keyhole in the faint
wall crack. I slot the key and turn. A hollow click; the door floats to the surface,
lined in light, and I head back into the forever night of the Narrows.
I close my eyes and press my fingertips against the nearest wall, reaching until I
catch hold of the memories, and behind my eyes the Narrows reappear, bleak and bare
and grayer, but the same. Time rolls away beneath my touch, but the memory sits like
a picture, unchanging, until the History finally flickers in the frame, blink-and-you-miss-it
quick. The first time, I
do
miss it, and I have to drag time to a stop and turn it forward, breathing out slow,
slow, inching frame by frame until I see him. It goes like
empty empty empty
empty empty empty body empty empty
—gotcha. I focus, holding the memory long enough to identify the shape as a teenage
boy in a green hoodie—it must be Jackson—and then I nudge the memory forward and watch
him walk past from right to left, and turn the first corner. Right.
I blink, the Narrows sharpening around me as I pull back from the wall, and follow
Jackson’s path around the corner. Then I start again, repeating the process at each
turn until I close the gap, until I’m nearly walking in his wake. Just as I’m reading
the fourth or fifth wall, I hear
him
, not the muddled sounds of the past but the shuffling steps of a body in the now.
I abandon the memory and track the sound down the hall, whipping around the corner,
where I find myself face-to-face with—
Myself.
Two distorted reflections of my sharp jaw and my yellow bandana pool in the black
that’s spreading across the History’s eyes, eating up the color as he slips.
Jackson Lerner stands there staring at me with his head cocked, a mop of messy reddish
brown hair falling against his cheeks. Beneath his bright green hoodie, he has that
gaunt look boys sometimes get in their teens. Like they’ve been stretched. I take
a small step back.
“What the hell’s going on here?” he snaps, hands stuffed into his jeans. “This some
kind of fun house or something?”
I keep my tone empty, even. “Not really, no.”
“Well, it blows,” he says, a thin layer of bravado masking the fear in his voice.
Fear is dangerous. “I want to get out of here.”
He shifts his weight, as solid as flesh and blood on the stained floor. Well, as solid
as flesh, anyway. Histories don’t bleed. He shifts again, restless, and then his blackening
eyes drift down to my hand, to the place where my key dangles from the cord wrapped
around my wrist. The metal glints.
“You got a key.” Jackson points, gaze following the key’s small, swinging movements.
“Why don’t you just let me out? Huh?”
I can hear the change in tone. Fear twists into anger.
“All right.” Da would tell me to stay steady.
The Histories will slip;
you
can’t afford to.
I glance around at the nearest doors.
But they all have chalk X’s.
“What are you waiting for?” he growls. “I said, let me out.”
“All right,” I say again, sliding back. “I’ll take you to the right door.”
I steal another step away. He doesn’t move.
“Just open this one,” he says, pointing to the nearest outline, X and all.
“I can’t. We need to find one with a white circle and then—”
“Open the damn door!” he yells, lunging for the key around my wrist. I dodge.
“Jackson,” I snap, and the fact that I know his name causes him to pause. I try a
different approach. “You have to tell me where you want to go. These doors all go
to different places. Some don’t even open. And some of them do, but the places they
lead are very bad.”
The anger written across his face fades into frustration, a crease between his shining
eyes, a sadness in his mouth. “I just want to go home.”
“Okay,” I say, letting a small sigh of relief escape. “Let’s go home.”
He hesitates.
“Follow me,” I press. The thought of turning my back on him sends off a slew of warning
lights in my head, but the Narrows are too, well,
narrow
for us to pass through side by side. I turn and walk, searching for a white circle.
I catch sight of one near the end of the hall, and pick up my pace, glancing back
to make sure Jackson is with me.