by John Saul
Caroline Fleming and Frank Oberholzer exchanged a glance, but neither of them said anything. Then they were inside the apartment, and for a moment Caroline felt utterly disoriented, as if they’d stepped through the wrong door, into the wrong entry hall. Yet even as the strange feeling passed over her, she realized she wasn’t in the wrong apartment at all: everything was still there, exactly as it had been two days ago. The table that stood by the door to Tony’s study, the enormous grandfather clock, the umbrella stand by the front door—it was all still there.
Yet everything seemed to have aged.
The finish on the table was cracked and peeling.
The grandfather clock had stopped, even though its weights were still halfway up its case.
The brass of the umbrella stand, burnished to a mirror sheen only two days ago, was dulled with a greenish patina, as if neither polish nor cloth had touched it in decades.
Everywhere, doors stood open, and in every room it was the same—paint was peeling, finishes had dulled, upholstery was faded and threadbare.
And everywhere, the smell of death.
Feeling almost dizzy, Caroline took a step further into the entry hall. “I—I don’t understand,” she said as they moved deeper into the apartment. Her eyes uncomprehendingly took in one crumbling room after another. “It isn’t possible—what’s happened to everything?”
“I don’t know,” Frank Oberholzer replied, his eyes scanning the derelict rooms. “When I was here yesterday . . .” His voice trailed off, and he shook his head. “Let’s go upstairs.”
The upstairs rooms were in the same condition as the rest of the apartment. Everything was there, but except for the few things Caroline herself had brought in—the children’s furniture from the old apartment on 76th Street, and the things they’d bought, it had all appeared to age into decrepitude overnight.
In Ryan’s room, they stared up at the ceiling of his closet, and when the detective climbed the shelves the same way Ryan had, he was able to raise the cedar planks just as the boy had described.
Together, they went back to the first floor, and at the foot of the stairs Oberholzer finally spoke again. “Show me the passage in your husband’s study,” he said.
Steeling herself, Caroline led Oberholzer into Tony’s study. The wallpaper was as stained as if it had been there for a century, and the hardwood floor had lost its luster. The leather on the furniture was cracked and fading, the veneers on the desk had split and were starting to peel.
The desk! Caroline ran to it, and began jerking the drawers open. And there it was—the album! She snatched it up and opened it.
Empty—the pages stripped of their photographs, the black paper crumbling under her touch.
The checkbook and packets of photographs were gone.
But the closet was still there, and when she opened it, she saw the wooden panel at the back. The panel that slid aside to reveal the room in which she’d found Laurie lying on a gurney surrounded by the chattering harpies who had been her neighbors, hovering over her daughter as if they were about to devour her. “There,” she breathed, pointing to the back wall of the closet. “It slides to the left.” Oberholzer moved past her into the closet, and began examining the panel. “There’s a place on the right where you can get hold of it,” Caroline told him. “Then you push in on the left side, and pull.” Oberholzer felt around for a moment, and finally Caroline edged in front of him. “I’ll show you.” A second later her fingers found the indentation.
She pressed on the opposite edge of the paneling.
And the panel slid aside.
She felt her mind reel as she gazed at the room where she’d found Laurie surrounded by nearly everyone who lived in The Rockwell. Suddenly they were all there again, staring at her. And Tony was there too, coming toward her, and—
“Steady,” Oberholzer said. His hand tightened on her elbow, and the vision faded away as quickly as it had risen out of her memory. But even with it gone, even looking at the now-empty chamber that was hidden behind Anthony Fleming’s study, she shook her head.
“I can’t go in,” she breathed. “Please don’t make me.”
Oberholzer hesitated, then nodded. “It’s gonna be okay,” he said. “We’ll find them. Believe me, Mrs. Fleming, we’ll find them all.”
But even as he spoke the words, Caroline knew he didn’t believe them any more than she did. Whoever Anthony Fleming had been—whoever any of them had been—she knew that Frank Oberholzer would never find them. But she also knew that even though they had vanished, they were not gone.
Somewhere, sometime, they would reappear.
And at midnight a child would hear their voices whispering once again.
Their voices would whisper, and they would begin to feed.
EPILOGUE
“This is crazy, Mother,” Caroline heard Laurie say, her voice as clear as if she were sitting next to Caroline rather than back home in New York. “Why are you doing this? You’re not going to find anything.”
Caroline gazed out at the scenery beyond the train window as she wondered if there were any answer at all that would satisfy Laurie. Probably not—she still had a perfect memory of the expressions on her children’s faces when she told them what she was going to do. It was the ‘Mom’s really lost it this time’ expression that she’d seen more and more frequently over the last few months, and every single day during the two weeks since she’d announced that she was going to Romania. “Jeez, Mom,” Ryan had groaned after he and his sister had exchanged one of those looks that constantly pass between children once they realize they know much more about everything than their parents ever could. “Romania? It sounds like some dumb Dracula movie! Why can’t you just leave it alone? If we can get over it, why can’t you?”
Because I’m your mother, she’d wanted to say. I’ll never forget, and I’ll keep searching until I find Anthony Fleming and know exactly what happened! But when she’d answered him, she’d made certain to temper her words. “If this doesn’t pan out, I’ll give up,” she’d promised. And maybe she would. Laurie would be starting college next fall, and Ryan his last year of high school. For them, what had happened five years ago was already starting to seem like ancient history. But there hadn’t been a day in those five years when Caroline hadn’t thought about the events that had unfolded after their father had died. Even when the horror that Anthony Fleming had brought into their lives was not at the forefront of her mind, it was lurking somewhere in her subconscious. Sometimes it manifested itself in small ways: since that fateful day when Irene Delamond had sat down next to her in Central Park, she had found herself turning away from strangers, especially strangers that showed any interest at all in her children.
More often the horror was there in far larger ways, such as the fear she still felt about leaving her children alone, even for a few minutes. That was the hardest thing she’d had to conquer when she’d finally decided to make this trip, leaving the children to be looked after by Mark Noble and Kevin Barnes. That, too, had earned her a scornful rolling of the eyes. “It’s not like we’re babies,” Ryan had protested. “We’ll be fine by ourselves.”
“But I won’t be,” Caroline had insisted. “So you’ll stay with Kevin and Mark, and that’s that.”
The attention of the city, of course, had inevitably shifted away from the sudden disappearance of everyone who had lived in The Rockwell—even the police had given up the search. “It’s as if they never existed at all,” Frank Oberholzer had told her the last time she’d spoken to him.
“What do you mean, never existed?” she’d said. “They were there—I knew them. I married one of them, for God’s sake. You talked to them!”
Oberholzer nodded. “And I have no idea who they were, where they came from, or where they went. Except for the Albions, there’s nothing.”
“But you found something about them?” she pressed, her voice reflecting her eagerness to find any scrap that might finally let her know the truth of what had happened. But the h
ope in her voice was crushed as quickly as it had arisen.
“Only that the real Max Albion died forty-seven years ago in Kansas, age four. And the wife’s maiden name, according to the marriage certificate, was Alicia Osborn. There’s one who died fifty years ago in Iowa, age three months. Copies of both those kids’ birth certificates were sent to Fleming’s office on 53rd within a couple of weeks of each other. And that was nearly twenty-five years ago. It gave them enough of a background to get them past the foster care people. But for the rest—including Fleming—there are no birth records, no social security records, no voting records, no driver’s licenses, no nothing.”
“But that’s not possible, is it?” Caroline protested. “I mean, they owned their apartments—”
“There aren’t any records of any of them ever either owning or renting apartments in The Rockwell,” Oberholzer broke in. “In fact, nothing in The Rockwell has ever changed hands—a Romanian corporation built it and still owns it.”
“Romanian?” Caroline echoed. “But that used to be part of the USSR. How could—”
Once again, Oberholzer answered her question before she’d finished asking it. “Everything’s paid out of a Swiss bank. And I mean everything—taxes, maintenance, utilities, the works. Nobody in that building ever paid directly for anything.”
Caroline shook her head. “That’s not true—Irene Delamond gave me a check—”
“On an account that traces back to the same Swiss bank. They all had checking accounts and they all had credit cards, but all of it traces back to that one bank, and—needless to say—they’re invoking Swiss banking law. When you get right down to it . . .” His voice trailed off, and then he grunted in disgust. “When you get right down to it, I just don’t know.”
And that had been the end of it.
As weeks had turned into months, and months into years, the story had slowly faded from the city’s consciousness, though a couple of the tabloids still tried to revive it now and then, especially around Halloween.
And The Rockwell still stood empty, year after year. For the first year, Caroline had refused even to get close enough to the building to see it. Indeed, when the city had been blanketed by an early snow the very day after everyone in the building had vanished, Caroline’s first impulse had been to get out of the city entirely, to move away to someplace where it was warm, and she knew no one, and there would be no memories.
No memories for her, or for Ryan, or for Laurie.
“That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,” Kevin Barnes had said when she’d told him what she was thinking of doing. “You can’t run away from memories, no matter how hard you try. And what are you going to do? At least here you have a job, and a place to stay, and friends.” He’d gone on to catalog everything else she would be leaving behind, and by the time he’d finished, she’d all but abandoned the idea. Still, as the winter closed in with even more snow and cold than that first storm had presaged, Caroline had wondered more than once whether she shouldn’t change her mind again. But as Laurie had regained her strength and both she and Ryan had returned to school, they had all begun to settle into a pattern that, even if not what she might have wished for, was at least giving a structure to their life.
She found an apartment on the East Side, closer to the shop, one that at the beginning she could barely manage to support on the money she was making at Antiques By Claire. But all through that first fall and into the winter, her business had grown, and though at first it had been nothing more than the morbid curiosity of a certain class of women whose motivation was more to milk her for gossip about The Rockwell than to seek advice on decorating, it was her skill that kept bringing her new customers even after that first interest in the mystery died down.
Finally, two years ago, Caroline found herself walking across the park to stand at the corner of 70th and Central Park West to gaze at the building whose denizens had nearly cost her children their lives.
It stood as it always had, brooding darkly, its turrets etched against the sky, its windows curtained, its stone as black with grime as ever.
Yet even despite its grime, there was none of the look of an abandoned derelict about it. Rather, it appeared to be in some kind of suspended animation, as if whoever lived in it would soon be coming back.
Since that day two years ago, she found herself going back again and again, sometimes only glancing at the building, but sometimes lingering for half an hour or more, gazing at it, trying to fathom what might really have been happening inside its walls. What had happened to those people who had seemingly come from nowhere, and vanished as utterly as if they’d never existed at all.
But they had existed, and they still existed, and as the years had passed, her determination to discover the truth about them had sometimes flagged, but never disappeared.
There had been so little to go on.
A Romanian corporation.
And a man named Anthony Fleming. “Of course he’s got no more background than the rest of them,” Oberholzer had said. “And I’d bet my badge Fleming wasn’t his real name anyway.”
But it was all she had to go on. She’d tried to find out more about the corporation that owned The Rockwell, but gotten no farther than the police. Every letter she’d sent had disappeared as completely as the man she’d married. Finally she’d given up writing letters and hired a lawyer, and it had cost her nearly a thousand dollars in legal fees just to find out that the lawyer could accomplish no more than she.
After that she’d begun haunting the libraries and the bookshops, but had no idea of what she might be looking for, and at last she’d turned to the Internet, spending more hours than she was willing to admit even to herself searching every database she could find for something—anything—that would point her in the right direction.
And finally, two weeks ago, she’d found something.
She’d been at one of the genealogical sites, using its search engine, typing in the last names of the neighbors one by one. The combination she’d been searching was Burton AND Romania. There hadn’t been much, and most of the occurrences of the name used another spelling: Birtin.
By the time she read through half the entries, it had become clear that most of the ‘Birtins’ listed had originally been named something else, but had come from a small town in northern Romania—Birtin—whose simple spelling had apparently been far easier for the clerks at Ellis Island to master than the polysyllabic surnames many of them had received from their fathers. Each name had held a link to a family web site or bulletin board, and Caroline had followed every single link.
Most of them had proved utterly useless—nothing more than genealogical trails that dead-ended at Ellis Island. But near the end of the list she’d found the link that had eventually led her to the train that was now moving slowly north through the mountains of Eastern Europe. That link had connected to a family forum bulletin board that had held a strange message:
The heading was milesovich OR milesovici from birtin? followed by a message:
“I have part of a letter to my great-grandfather, Daniel Milesovich, from his sister-in-law, Ilanya Vlamescu, who lived in a village called Gretzli, outside a town in Romania named Birtin. She wanted to send her son and daughter to America because of something that was making children die. Does anyone know anything about this? It would have been after 1868.”
Caroline had read the message over and over again, telling herself it meant nothing, that it was undoubtedly an outbreak of plague, or smallpox, or influenza, or any of the other epidemics that had swept back and forth across Europe over the centuries.
But it didn’t say plague, or smallpox, or influenza, or any other sickness.
Just something.
She’d left a reply asking for further details, and two days later had received an email from a woman named Marge Danfield, who lived in Anaheim, California. “I don’t know much more,” Mrs. Danfield had written. “The date on the letter is illegible, but my great-grandfather immi
grated in 1868. The letter is in Romanian, and the handwriting isn’t good. I’ve attached a copy of the translation, but I don’t know how accurate it is. Frankly, it sounds like my father’s sister was a little crazy, which wouldn’t surprise me at all—my mother always claimed the Romanian side of my dad’s family must have been Gypsies because they tended to be superstitious about everything. I don’t know much more about my father’s great-great aunt than what’s attached. According to a family bible, she was widowed when her children were babies, and married a man named Vlamescu, who I assume is the ‘Anton’ in the letter. As far as I know she never sent her children, and after this letter, no one ever heard from her again. I’ve also attached a copy of a picture that may be of Ilanya, probably with her second husband, though there is no way of telling for certain. If you find out anything more, I’d be very interested.” After finishing the email, Caroline had turned to the attachment, which held a scanned image of the page of the letter, along with the translation:
. . . Ilie is twelve and Katya thirteen, the age the other children were. The doctor doesn’t know what makes them sick—they start to die . . . six children last year . . . two boys and four girls. . . . Anton says not to worry, but I am frightened. The stories about the graves scare me, and my neighbor says she hears things in the forest at night . . . I have no money, but Ilie is a strong boy and can work hard. . . .
Please, dear brother—I don’t know what to do.
After reading the translation once more, Caroline clicked on the second attachment. An image of an old-fashioned formal portrait appeared, cracked and faded, with a white line across the middle where it had obviously been folded, or perhaps even torn. The woman in the picture looked to be perhaps thirty, and she was standing with her hand on the shoulder of a man a few years older than she, who was seated in an ornately carved wooden chair, large enough that it almost could have been some kind of throne. Behind the couple was an obviously painted backdrop of an outdoor garden, against which the throne-like chair looked ludicrously incongruous. But it was neither the chair nor the backdrop nor even the woman that gripped Caroline’s attention.
