by Riley Sager
The elevator isn’t stopped on the tenth floor. Honestly, I didn’t expect it to be. Still, I had hoped that maybe, possibly it would be there waiting for us. A stroke of good fortune in a life devoid of it. Instead, I’m forced to pound the down button and wait.
But waiting isn’t easy.
Not with the alarm still bouncing off the walls and the strobe lights flaring and smoke still rolling up the steps and Nick now God knows where. I keep coughing and my eyes keep watering, although now it might be real tears and not from the smoke. Fear clangs in my skull. Louder than the alarm.
When the elevator finally arrives, I push Greta inside, close the grate, press the button for the lobby. With a rattle and a shudder, we start to descend.
The smoke is heavier on the ninth floor.
And still worse on the eighth.
We keep descending into plumes far thicker and darker than on the floors above, blowing through the elevator cage in choking drafts. When we reach the seventh floor, it’s clear that this is the source of the fire. The smoke here is sharper, stabbing the inside of my throat.
Through the smoke, I see firefighters coming and going along the seventh-floor hall with firehoses that have been carried up the steps so that they spiral around the elevator shaft like pythons.
Just when we’re about to move past the seventh floor, I hear something other than the elevator’s hum and the shrieking fire alarm and clomp of firefighter boots on the stairs. It’s a sharp bark, followed by the skitter of claws on tile. A furry blur darts past the elevator.
I slam the emergency-stop button. The elevator comes to a quick, quivering halt as Greta gives me a fearful look.
“What are you doing?”
“There’s a dog,” I say, the words riding on the back of another cough. “I think it’s Rufus.”
The terrified part of my brain tells me to ignore him, that Rufus will be fine, that I should focus on getting Greta to safety. But then Rufus barks again, and the noise pierces my heart. He sounds almost as scared as I am. Which is why I pull open the grate. After that comes the thin-barred door, which is more stubborn than it looks. It takes both hands and an extra-hard tug to pry it open.
The elevator itself has stopped three feet below the landing, forcing me to pull myself up onto the seventh floor. I then crawl along the floor to evade the smoke—another of those things-to-do-in-a-fire facts I never thought I’d use.
While crawling, I cough out Rufus’s name, the sound lost in all the noise. I peer through the smoke, trying in vain to catch another glimpse of him. He’s so small and the smoke is so thick and my eyes are pouring tears. Through that watery haze, I see firefighters stomping into 7C, their voices muffled under helmets and face masks. Through the open apartment door comes a hot glow.
Flames.
Pulsing and bright and painting the hallway a hypnotic orange-yellow.
I climb to my feet, drawn to it. I’m no longer afraid. All I feel now is intense curiosity.
I take a step down the hall, coughing again as I go.
“Jules,” Greta calls from the elevator. “Grab the dog and let’s get out of here.”
I ignore her and take another step. Although I suspect I have no choice at all in the matter. I’m being compelled.
I keep walking until there’s a noticeable warmth on my face. The heat of the flames caressing my skin.
I close my eyes against the smoke.
I take a breath, sucking it in until I start to cough. Rough, heaving ones that make my body convulse.
Dizzy from the smoke, I experience a jolting moment during which I have no idea where I am, why I’m here, what the fuck I was just doing. But then I hear a bark behind me and I whirl around, spotting a familiar shape hurtling through the smoke.
Rufus.
Panicked and lost.
Him and me both.
Blindly, I drop to the floor again and lurch forward before he can zip past me. I then pull him into my arms, Rufus barking and struggling and pawing my chest in agitation. Rather than crawl back to the elevator, I inch forward on my behind, scooting awkwardly until I reach it. Carefully, I drop the three feet back into the cage and, clutching Rufus in one hand, slam the grate shut with the other. Beside me, Greta shoots me a startled, fearful look before hitting the down button.
Lower we go, into the bottom half of the Bartholomew, the smoke getting lighter the farther we descend. By the time we reach the lobby, it’s been reduced to a light haze. That doesn’t stop me from coughing. Or wheezing when I’m not coughing.
Greta stays quiet, unwilling to look at me. God, she must think I’m insane. I’d think the same thing if I didn’t know the reasons behind my recklessness.
As we leave the elevator and make our way across the lobby, we encounter a trio of EMTs on their way into the building. With them is a stretcher, its wheeled legs folded. One of them looks my way, a question in her eyes.
I manage a nod. One that says, We’re okay.
They move on, heading up the stairs. We go in the other direction, following the hoses that stretch from the front door. Me and Greta and Rufus. All of us cradled together as we step outside to a street painted red by the siren lights of two fire trucks and an ambulance stopped at the curb. The block itself has been closed to traffic, allowing people, many of them members of the media, to gather in the middle of Central Park West.
As soon as we hit the sidewalk, reporters push forward.
Camera lights swing our way, blindingly bright.
A dozen flashbulbs pop like firecrackers.
A reporter shouts a question that I can’t hear because the fire alarm has set my ears ringing.
Rufus, as irritated as I am, barks. This draws Marianne Duncan out of the milling crowd. She’s dressed like Norma Desmond. Flowing caftan, turban, cat’s-eye sunglasses. Her face is smeared with cold cream.
“Rufus?”
She rushes toward me and lifts Rufus from my arms.
“My baby! I was so worried about you.” To me, she says, “The alarm was going off and there was smoke and Rufus got spooked and jumped out of my arms. I wanted to look for him, but a fireman told me I had to keep moving.”
She’s started to cry. Streaks appear in the cold cream, plowed by tears.
“Thank you,” she says. “Thank you, thank you!”
I can only muster a nod. I’m too dazed by the sirens and flashbulbs and smoke that continues to roll like a storm cloud in my lungs.
I leave Greta with Marianne and gently push my way through the crowd. It’s easy to differentiate residents of the Bartholomew from the onlookers. They’re the ones in their nightclothes. I spot Dylan in just a pair of pajama bottoms and sneakers, looking impervious to the cold. Leslie Evelyn wears a black kimono, which swishes gracefully as she and Nick do a head count of residents.
When EMTs emerge with Mr. Leonard strapped to the stretcher and his face covered by an oxygen mask, the crowd breaks into applause. Upon hearing them, Mr. Leonard gives a weak thumbs-up.
By then I’m pulling away from the crowd, on the other side of Central Park West. I walk north a block, putting more distance between me and the Bartholomew. I drop onto a bench and sit with my back to the stone wall bordering Central Park.
I cough one last time.
Then I allow myself to weep.
NOW
Dr. Wagner looks surprised, and rightly so. His expression is similar to his voice—passivity masking alarm.
“Escaped?”
“That’s what I said.”
I don’t mean to be this standoffish. Dr. Wagner has done nothing wrong. But I’m not ready to trust anyone at the moment. A by-product of living at the Bartholomew for a few days.
“I want to talk to the police,” I say. “And Chloe.”
“Chloe?”
“My best friend.”
“We can call her,” Dr. Wagner says. “Do you have her number?”
“On my phone.”
“I’ll have Bernard look through you
r things and find the number.”
I let out a relieved sigh. “Thank you.”
“I’m curious,” the doctor says. “How long have you lived at the Bartholomew?”
I like the doctor’s word choice. Lived. Past tense.
“Five days.”
“And you felt like you were in danger there?”
“Not at first. But yes. Eventually.”
I look to the wall behind Dr. Wagner, at the askew Monet. I’ve seen the painting before, although I can’t remember what it’s called. Probably Blue Bridge Over Waterlilies, because that’s what it depicts. It’s pretty. From my position on the bed, I can see the graceful curve of the bridge as it arcs over the lily pads and blooms in the water below. But I know that looking at it from another viewpoint would yield a vastly different result. The lines of the bridge wouldn’t look quite so clean. The lilies would widen into indistinct splotches of paint. If I were to get up close, the painting would probably look downright ugly.
The same can be said of certain places. The closer you get to them, the uglier they become.
That’s what the Bartholomew is like.
“You felt like you were in danger, so you fled,” the doctor says.
“Escaped,” I remind him.
“Why did you feel the need to do that?”
I sink back into the pillows. I’m going to have to tell him everything, even though that might not be the best idea. This time, it’s not a matter of trust. With each minute that passes, I get the sense that Dr. Wagner only wants to help.
So the question isn’t how much to tell him.
It’s how much I think he’ll believe.
“The place is haunted. By its past. So many bad things have happened there. So much dark history. It fills the place.”
Dr. Wagner’s brow lifts. “Fills it?”
“Like smoke,” I say. “And I’ve breathed it in.”
THREE DAYS EARLIER
21
I wake just after seven to the same sound I heard my first night here.
The noise that’s not a noise.
Although this time I no longer think someone’s inside the apartment, I’m still curious about what it could be. Every place has its own distinct sounds. Creaking steps and humming fridges and windows that rattle when the wind rushes against it at just the right angle. The key is to find them and identify them. Once you know what they are, they’re less likely to bother you.
So I force myself out of bed, shivering in a bedroom made frigid by windows that had gaped open all night. A necessity after the fire. It made the whole place smell like a hotel room in which the previous occupant had smoked a carton of cigarettes.
Padding downstairs in bare feet and flimsy nightclothes, I stop every so often to listen—really listen—to the sounds of the apartment. I hear noises aplenty, but nothing that matches the noise. That specific sound had suddenly vanished.
In the kitchen, I find my phone sitting on the counter, blaring out the ring tone specifically reserved for Chloe. Worrisome, considering the two of us had instituted a no-calls-until-coffee rule back when we roomed together in college.
“I haven’t had my coffee yet,” I say upon answering.
“The rule doesn’t apply when a fire is involved,” Chloe says. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. The fire wasn’t nearly as bad as it seemed.”
The blaze itself was confined to 7C, Mr. Leonard’s apartment. It turns out the heart palpitations Nick told me about earlier had returned. Rather than call 911, as Nick strongly recommended, Mr. Leonard ignored the warning signs. Later, while he was cooking himself a late-night dinner, a heart attack arrived. His fourth.
The fire started when Mr. Leonard dropped the pot holder in his hands when the coronary struck. It landed on the stovetop, where it quickly ignited. The fire spread from there, eventually encompassing much of the kitchen while Mr. Leonard crawled to the door in an attempt to get help. He lost consciousness just as the door swung open, fanning the flames in the kitchen and sending gusts of smoke into the upper floors of the Bartholomew.
It was Leslie Evelyn, also a seventh-floor resident, who ended up calling 911. She had smelled the smoke, went into the hall to check, and saw the plumes rolling from Mr. Leonard’s open door. Because of her quick thinking, the rest of the Bartholomew remained mostly unscathed. Just water damage in the seventh-floor hallway and slight smoke damage on the hallway walls of the seventh, eighth, and ninth floors.
I learned all this once residents were allowed back in their apartments two hours later. Because the elevator can fit only so many people at a time and no one was in the mood to take the stairs, a gossipy crowd formed in the lobby. Some of them I recognized. Most of them I didn’t. All of them, save for Nick, Dylan, and myself, were well past sixty.
“I meant emotionally,” Chloe says.
A slightly different story. Although I’ve calmed down since last night, a faint anxiety lingers, just as stubborn as the traces of smoke inside the Bartholomew.
“It was intense,” I say. “And scary. And I can’t say I slept very well, but I’m fine. This was nothing like what happened at my house. How did you find out about it?”
“The newspaper,” Chloe says. “Your picture’s on the front page.”
I groan. “How bad do I look?”
“Like the chimney sweep from Mary Poppins.” I hear the tap of fingers on a computer keyboard, followed by a mouse click. “I just sent you something.”
My phone buzzes with an email alert. I open it to see the cover of one of the city’s daily tabloids. Filling two-thirds of the front page is a photograph of the Bartholomew’s front door taken just as I emerged with Greta and Rufus. What a strange sight we are. Me still wearing the rumbled jeans and blouse I’d worn all day and Greta in her nightgown. Both of our faces have been darkened by smoke. By that point Greta had lowered the bandanna, revealing a swath of white skin from nose to chin. Then there’s Rufus, sporting a collar that might be studded with real diamonds. We look like extras from three different movies.
“Who’s the woman with the bandanna?” Chloe asks.
“That would be Greta Manville.”
“The woman who wrote Heart of a Dreamer? You, like, adore that book.”
“I do.”
“Is that her dog?”
“That’s Rufus,” I say. “He belongs to Marianne Duncan.”
“From that soap opera?”
“The very one.”
“What a strange alternate universe you’ve stumbled into,” Chloe says.
I glance again at the image on my phone, rolling my eyes at the awful headline the tabloid came up with.
GARGOYLE CHAR-BROIL:
BLAZE AT THE BARTHOLOMEW
“Wasn’t there anything else to put on the front page? You know, like real news.”
“This is news,” Chloe says. “Remember, Jules, most New Yorkers see the Bartholomew as the closest thing to heaven on earth.”
I move from the kitchen to the sitting room, where I’m greeted by the faces in the wallpaper. A whole army of dark eyes and open mouths. I instantly turn away.
“Trust me, this place is far from perfect.”
“So you read that article I sent you,” Chloe says. “That’s some scary shit, right?”
“It’s more than the article that’s bothering me.”
Concern sneaks into Chloe’s voice. “Did something else happen?”
“Yes,” I say. “Maybe.”
I tell her about meeting Ingrid, our plan to hang out each day, the scream from 11A and Ingrid’s insistence it was nothing. I finish with how Ingrid is now gone and not answering her phone and my suspicions that someone caused her to flee.
Left out are all the worrisome parts, specifically the note and the gun. Hearing about those would prompt Chloe to come to the Bartholomew and drag me from 12A. Which I can’t afford to do. Receiving my latest unemployment check has left me with slightly more than five hundred dollars in my account.
Definitely not enough to help me get back on my feet.
“You need to stop looking for her,” Chloe says, just like I knew she would. “Whatever her reason was for leaving, it’s none of your business.”
“I think she might be in some kind of trouble.”
“Jules, listen to me. If this Ingrid person wanted your help, she would have called you by now. Clearly, she wants to be left alone.”
“There’s no one else looking for her,” I say. “If I vanished, you’d look for me. I don’t think Ingrid has a Chloe in her life. She has no one.”
There’s silence on Chloe’s end. I know what it means—she’s thinking. Choosing her words carefully in an attempt not to upset me. Even so, I know what her response is going to be before she even says it.
“I think this has less to do with Ingrid and more to do with your sister.”
“Of course my sister has something to do with it,” I say. “I stopped looking for her. And now I can’t stop thinking that maybe she’d be here now if I hadn’t given up so easily.”
“Finding Ingrid won’t bring Jane back.”
No, I think, it won’t. But it will mean there’s one less lost girl in the world. One less person who vanished into thin air, never to be seen again.
“I think you should get away from the Bartholomew,” Chloe says. “Just for a few days. Crash at my place this weekend.”
“I can’t.”
“Don’t worry about imposing. Paul is taking me to Vermont for the weekend. He booked it last week, when he thought—”
Chloe leaves the sentence unfinished. I know what she was going to say. Paul booked it when he thought I’d still be crashing on her couch. I’m not offended. They deserve a weekend alone.
“It’s not that,” I say. “I’m not allowed to spend any nights away from the apartment.”
Chloe sighs—a crackling hiss in my ear. “Those fucking rules.”
“No more lectures, please,” I say. “You know I need the money.”
“And you know I’d rather lend you some cash than see you be held prisoner in the Bartholomew.”
