Hambly, Barbara Night's Edge 1 Night's Edge

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heart pounding and her breath coming fast.
There's something weird going on here and I think you'd better come down&
Maddie dumped out her costume bag, shoved her big flashlight into it and a pack of spare batteries.
Two balls of string and a sharp folding knife, from the apartment's utility drawer, at the thought of those
dark mazes of little halls on the upper floors. The household hammer and a pry bar that could double as a
club. What else?
Garlic? Silver bullets? Cold iron? A crucifix? She slung the bag over her shoulder, headed for the
subway.
Love you&
She saw Phil acrossTwenty-ninth Street , coming out of as she had suspected the all-night liquor
store where there was a phone. Even at that distance she recognized the tall, angular shape, the way he
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walked. She called "Phil!" without even considering what she'd do or say if it wasn't him; he stopped and
turned.
"Maddie!"
She crunched through a clotted drift of snow and dirt piled up at the curb, dashed across the icy street.
At this hour there was almost no one abroad even on the avenues, let alone in this slightly run-down
block. A few dim streetlights glittered on the ice-slick pavement, and turned Phil's breath into a cloud of
diamonds. When he caught her in his arms when he kissed her, quick and hard and relieved, on the
lips, and when she returned both the embrace and the kiss it felt like something they'd been doing for
years.
"Jesus, am I glad to see you& "
"Where is she?"
"I don't know." He fumbled in his pocket for the lobby key as they walked the last few yards to the
door. The reconverted lofts and boutiques and the emporia hawking Korean electronics, which had
taken over the old brick factory buildings, were shut down and dark. Dingy utility lights made a yellowish
square of the ; Owl's window behind an iron grille. The service ways and alleys between the buildings
were slabs of primordial night, and the cold defeated even the faint pong of old garbage and backed-up
drains that seemed to be ground into the very fabric ofManhattan . Between the angular outlines of
towering walls, black cloud made a matte nothingness of the sky.
"She stayed after Darth Irving's advanced class tonight and asked if I'd play for her. I said yes and went
up to my studio to get a cup of coffee Tessa had un plugged and washed out the office pot when she
went off work before class. When I came back to the big studio she was gone. Her bag was there, so I
waited& "
He let them into the gray little coffin of the front hall, locked the door and bolted it behind them, led her
past Quincy the caretaker's empty booth and up the stairs.
As she ascended that first long flight two floors past the ground-floor shops' storerooms Maddie
found herself wondering if the door ontoTwenty-ninth Street was the same as it had always been. If that
had been the entrance by which all those Russian, Jewish and Cuban girls had gone into the building
every day, to work at Pinnacle Ready-Made.
She thought of them, girls who these days would be - the little green-hairedGothettes going in groups to
the Village to get butterflies tattooed on their hips, or hooking up their laptops to do their NYU
homework at Starbucks. Saw them in her mind, hugging faded shawls around themselves and gathering
up their long, flammable skirts to hurry past the sixth floor, praying Mr. Glendower wouldn't step out of
his office just then and say,
Come in here. I want to see you.
"I went through this whole building," Phil said. "Quincy'dleft by then, and I've been trying to reach him all
night. No answer. I called for her yelled up and ; down those creepy hallways. Turned on every light
and tried every doorknob in the place, looked in the men's rooms and the ladies& everywhere. Her key
to the front door was in her bag, she couldn't have got out."
"No" said Maddie. "No, I don't think she did."
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They crossed through the Dance Loft's seedy front office, stepped into the fluorescent blaze of the big
studio, the glare of the lights off its walls of minors all the more shocking after the gloom elsewhere.
According to Diana's e-mail the third floor had been a silk warehouse in January 1908. In the winter of
1962 it had contained three or four "to-the-trade" showrooms for wholesalers in artificial flowers and
feathers, where a girl named Hannah Sears had worked& and where her purse, coat and galoshes had
been found one morning, with the key to the locked downstairs lobby door lying on top of them.
Looking up, Maddie could see where one of the partition walls had been removed, a rough band like a
welt in the wall above the line of the mirrors, painted over a dozen times.
"Phil," said Maddie, "I would rather say anything in the world to you other than this." She looked up at
him, with his dark rough hair falling forward into nig eyes and his shirt half-unbuttoned under his pea coat;
the face that was already so familiar to her, so much a part of her thoughts. She was very aware that she
had the choice to sayCall the cops-they'll be able to put a trace on her if she left the city&
It would be the rational and sensible thing to do.
And it would mean Phil wouldn't look at her as he'd looked at her last night, sitting on the floor of the
kitchen, when she'd spoken of the narrow stairway leading up from the sixth floor, the stairway that he
claimed didn't exist.
Whoisthisnutball ? And why am I wasting my time talking to her?
And nobody could say she hadn't done her best. Only she knew that the police had been called in when
Maria Diaz had disappeared in 1956, and VeraRosenfeldt in 1972, and littleMoongirl in 1967& and for
others as well.
See where he fits into your life, Diana had said.Not where you can fit yourself into his.
Which included, she supposed, his idea of how the universe was supposed to work.
She took a deep breath. "Tessa isn't the only woman to disappear in this building," she said, and told
him, as quickly and in as few words as she could, the content of Diana's e-mail. "Now, people disappear
inNew York all the time," she said. "I have no idea what the statistics are for any single building, chosen
at random, for people who're last seen in it and never heard from again. Sometime when we're free, I'll [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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