Some of our neighbors kept to themselves, but even if they were inclined only to grunt when I said hello and to avoid eye contact, I knew their faces and their names. I was no less inquisitive than I was imaginative. That August, I knew only fourteen apartments were rented, and all three on the highest level were currently for lease.
At each floor, the door to that hallway featured a foot-square window, so that as you approached it, you could see whether someone was about to open it from the other side. When I stood tiptoe, I could see through that pane into the sixth-floor hall, where Fiona Cassidy just then entered 6-C.
Maybe she was considering renting and Mr. Smaller had given her a key so she could tour the unit, but I figured such a maybe was as thin as a human hair. The superintendent always accompanied potential tenants and never let them have a key until he had received the first month’s rent with a security deposit.
Mr. Smaller was a jack of all trades, capable of repairing any of the building’s systems, but he was an eccentric, a believer in all sorts of conspiracies. He once told me that I should trust no one, “not even God, in fact especially not God, because He wouldn’t have given us life and made us a whole world to live it in if He didn’t want something big and terrible in return.”
Carrying the juju eyeball in a bag, I stepped silently along the hallway to 6-C. The door stood half open.
I knew that I should be cautious, that the wisest thing I could do would be to leave at once, return to our apartment, and engage both locks. I had seen Fiona Cassidy dead, however, if only in a dream, and the woman on the stairs had been no ghost. I felt that I should warn her, although I doubted that she would believe a scrawny boy who, in our first encounter, gaped at her as though he must be a simpleton.
Through the open door, I saw a shabby vestibule with yellowed and peeling wallpaper. Beyond lay an unfurnished room carpeted in cracked linoleum, its ash-gray walls streaked with rusty stains.
The city hadn’t fallen silent again; the old building issued its endless settling noises, and the discordant symphony of the busy world outside penetrated its windows. But I couldn’t hear any sound particular to the apartment, no footsteps, no closing of a door, no voice.
Although I was not a reckless boy, I crossed the threshold, dismayed by my boldness but compelled as if some powerful spell of mortal curiosity had been cast upon me. The lowering sky must have grown darker even in the short time since I had left the alleyway, because when I proceeded from the vestibule into the living room, the light at the windows wasn’t just cheerless but steely with storm threat.
To the right lay a dining area and an open door through which I could see a portion of the kitchen. To the left, shadows as soft as crêpe de Chine swagged a windowless hallway.
With no windows open for ventilation, the air was warm and heavy and stale, woven through with old cooking odors and the reek of cat urine and the sourness of cigarette smoke that had condensed into a thin yellow film on many surfaces.
The linoleum looked as if it must be brittle and would crackle underfoot. Instead it proved to be unpleasantly spongy, as if webbed with mold, and I made hardly a sound as I went to the kitchen door and dared to look beyond. No one.
On the farther side of the living room, the hallway served a bathroom and four small bedrooms without furniture. In one of the latter, I discovered a sleeping bag beside which stood a large canvas satchel.
All of the closet doors had been standing open, perhaps as a less-than-adequate precaution against mildew growing and sporing while the apartment had remained unoccupied. I didn’t believe I had overlooked any corner in which Fiona Cassidy could have hidden.
The bottom sash of the single bedroom window had been raised. A feeble influx of air couldn’t stir the greasy, threadbare draperies.
Surely the young woman had not bunked here the previous night only to leap to her death in the morning. Nevertheless, with some dread, I ventured to the window and leaned out and peered down into the serviceway. No dead girl sprawled below.
If my dream ever proved in fact to be predictive, her fate was to be murdered, not to leave this world by suicide.
Turning from the window, I expected to find her behind me, but she wasn’t waiting there. Heart knocking, mouth dry, wondering again at my uncharacteristic audacity, I returned to the half-open front door and stepped into the sixth-floor hallway without encountering anyone—though I suspected that my intrusion had not gone unnoticed and that there would be a price to pay for having followed the girl across that threshold.
As I reached the stairwell but before I entered it, I heard the door to Apartment 6-C slam shut. I looked back. No one. Either the door had been closed by a draft or … Or what? Was I to suppose that Fiona Cassidy had flown, not fallen, out of that open window to elude me and had flown back in after I’d gone? Even my spacious imagination could make no room for that possibility. And there had been no draft.
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