Welcome to Fear City, page 14
Without thinking, Sylvie frantically waved at her friends, pointing to her room and to Gary’s and miming picking up the receiver. They bolted over the couch, landing with ungainly thuds on the ground—even graceful Marybeth tripped over her own feet. Jessie Baby ran after one girl, then after the other, then she went to get a squeaky toy.
Marz picked up the receiver in Sylvie’s room, and Marybeth picked up Gary’s. Sylvie hoped Marilyn wouldn’t notice the sounds, but she was talking right over them.
“Yup. She lived a couple houses down from me on Bushwick Ave. I used to walk by that house—the house where the first set of murders happened—all the time. We called it the Dutch house, or just The Mansion. It was abandoned up until that family moved in. We all thought it was haunted.”
She knew Marz had to stop herself from interjecting then, as there was a funny rustling sound on the line. Sylvie laughed enough to cover for it. “Duh. An abandoned mansion? Guaranteed haunted.”
“We were half-disappointed when people actually moved into it. Anyway, about Rynn. I always had a sitter as a little kid, but she was the last one. She had a little sister, too, who would sometimes watch me instead. Her name was Avis. I probably wouldn’t even remember them if it weren’t for, y’know, what happened. We stayed with my grandparents for a month after Rynn’s family died.”
“What was she like?”
“She let me get away with anything. Sometimes she took me with her to see her friends. I had stars in my eyes around all these high school kids. Before that family moved into the Dutch house, she would take me out there and pick wildflowers and tell spooky stories. Rynn had these notions from her grandma, I remember, about the wildflowers. That they were good luck against evil. But we never went inside or anything. Not until someone bought it and Rynn started dating that boy. She took me over there once more after that and I finally got to go in. I must have been nine.”
“You met those people?” Sylvie knew she didn’t know much about Marilyn’s life, but this was like finding out she was a Russian sleeper agent or had gone to the moon.
“Only the one time. Before you ask, I don’t remember them. I was more interested in going to the house. It was this grand old Colonial mansion, but it wasn’t in good shape. It smelled weird, I remember. Moldy. I think they’d only just moved in, so that’s probably why. After everything happened, nobody bought that place again. But when we got older, my friends and I would sneak out there and—look around.” Sylvie caught the pause and every unmentioned thing in it.
“What was it like?”
“Creepy as shit!” Marilyn laughed again. “The fact that I knew Rynn made it creepier to me, I’m sure. I never told my friends that, though. I don’t know why.”
“Did you ever see anything out there?”
Marilyn paused, a much more pronounced one this time, and Sylvie worried she was coming off insensitive.
“It’s hard to remember what was real and what we just kinda made up to scare ourselves. See, after the murders happened, people started leaving that block for good. It made the houses vulnerable, y’know, to vandalism and bored kids like us. By the time I was thirteen or fourteen, no one had been in that house in three or four years, and no one was vandalizing the other houses anymore, either. I think that made it eerier than anything else.”
“Someone said no one lives on that block anymore.”
“I couldn’t say what it’s like these days. I imagine landlords torched all the buildings by now.” She sighed heavily into the receiver. “But back when we were there, you wouldn’t see anybody, not anybody at all, not even a squatter or a stray cat. Darkest block in the city, and I mean that literally. There was one working streetlamp and it would buzz on and off. And no one ever came by when we—don’t do what I did, but we would light a little fire in the yard and just crawl all over the place, go into the house, all kinds of stuff you just shouldn’t do. It’s dangerous. Probably full of black mold and broken floorboards. But not even the police ever came by, which of course was the real appeal. It was like walking into space. You could do anything out there, absolutely anything, and no one would notice.”
Marilyn laughed, once. “Which means you could break your neck and no one would notice that, either. Stupid, stupid stuff, girl. Don’t do what we did. But yeah, we did see things we thought were ghosts. Except we were always there at night, and we were always up to something, so I don’t really trust my memory. We thought we were smart little shits. Grown adults at fourteen. Well, my mother sure thought I was. Ha!”
Sylvie didn’t know what to say. She knew she was born during Marilyn’s freshman year of high school, and hearing that she had been hanging out where Rynn was shot and a family murdered gave Sylvie marrow-deep creeps. That was too close. That made the Hell’s Kitchen Enigma too coincidental to be a coincidence at all.
“I’ll just say that I’m glad they tore it down.”
“What do you think happened to Rynn?”
Marilyn blew out a gust of air. “Not a damn clue, honestly. I never thought about it much. I didn’t know it had happened at the time. One morning I woke up and Mom helped me pack an overnight bag and it was off to grandma and grandpa’s. They lived in this cool house in Ditmas Park. Mom’s childhood paid for that, probably. Anyway, I never got a new sitter, so I didn’t really care a fig. When I was a little older, maybe eleven or twelve, kids at school would whisper about it. Sometimes people said they saw her around. A lot of people were convinced she killed her family. Some people thought that man faked his own death and came back for Rynn. She lived through a lot of shots—”
“Five. And he had a shotgun. Who survives that?” asked Sylvie.
“No one. So people thought they had to be exaggerating in the papers. Maybe the dad had mob connections and bought reporters off.”
Sylvie didn’t hear it on the line, but she saw Marybeth stick her head out of the door and mouth, “See!”
Oblivious to it, Marilyn kept talking. “It gets pretty silly. Some of the rumors I heard were over the top. I think the two events were essentially unrelated.”
“But that’s a serious case of bad luck, isn’t it?”
“Worst I’ve heard of! Probably someone saw the address in the papers, saw they lived in a big house, and things got outta hand.”
“They were rich?”
“Not rich. They just lived in a big old Bushwick Ave house. I think her family inherited it or something. I remember my mom talking about that. They had some old connection to a German brewing family, but there was no brewery or money left by then.”
Another German brewing family. Or maybe it was the same one. Sylvie couldn’t remember the name from the article, but Bushwick had once been full of families like that.
“If people thought she was rich, maybe they meant to ransom her. Maybe they got caught in the act and killed everyone. Leave no witnesses, that sorta deal.”
“I think that’s the most likely explanation,” agreed Marilyn. “She was pretty high profile, at least locally. So, y’know, not some big conspiracy.”
“They really never found her?”
“Not that I know. But I’ll go into the archives, anyway, just to check. You’ve got my curiosity piqued, too.”
“I still can’t believe you knew her,” said Sylvie.
“Imagine how I felt when you brought it up! I haven’t thought about Rynn in years. Now I’ve got the heebie-jeebies.”
“Sorry. If it helps, so do I.”
Marilyn laughed a little, then paused as though she was considering something. Sylvie waited.
“Look, I’ll tell you one last thing. It won’t help your heebie-jeebies, but … That year after the shooting and before Rynn disappeared—I saw her out a couple times and she wouldn’t even look at me. Like she didn’t know who I was. The second time it happened, I went and cried to my mom, and she said Rynn was a lost soul. And if my mom thinks that, God knows how bad it must be.”
“Do you know anything about that year before she disappeared? Other than that?”
“Not really. Like I said, some of the rumors were really out there. But basically it was like she fell in with a bad crowd. But who could really blame her for acting out? Look at what she went through.”
“I really don’t understand how she recovered.”
“It’s possible she never really did.”
When they hung up a few minutes later, winding the conversation down to how’s dance and how’s work, and Marilyn hoping she wouldn’t be too scared on her date tonight, Marz and Marybeth ran out of the bedrooms and all three girls looked at each other and yelled.
“Oh, my God!”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“That’s no coincidence.”
Sylvie started shaking her head before Marz had finished speaking. “Oh, don’t even say that.”
“It’s a coincidence. Don’t listen to her,” said Marybeth.
Marz was frowning, though, apparently not relishing the creep factor at all. “I feel like you should go out there and look around, but at the same time, I don’t want you snooping at someplace cursed.”
Sylvie laughed purely out of shock. “Wow. Marz Hallan doesn’t want to chase down a haunted house.”
Marz flopped back on the sofa and held up one finger, black polish artfully chipped. “First of all, it ain’t there anymore. Second of all, I didn’t really believe in half those other ones. If you go into a haunted house believing, you’re guaranteed to see shit, and I wanted to see something real, not something my brain put there. And last, after that crazy white lady out there, I think you gotta be more careful.”
“But you still think I should go?”
“I don’t,” said Marybeth, who went to the windows and looked out each one of them. Satisfied with whatever she saw (or didn’t see), she dropped into the rocker.
“I don’t want you to go out there, but today proved something’s up, and it feels like the only way to get answers is to go to the source. Carefully.”
Sylvie sighed and sat on one of the kitchen stools. “I don’t want to go out there. I don’t want to solve a mystery. Not this mystery. This one is too awful. And it’s not going to fix what’s happening, either.”
Marz got up and joined her on another stool. “But what if it does? Anyway, wait for Marilyn to find stuff in the archives before you decide anything.”
Sylvie nodded, then groaned and put her head in her arms on the counter. “You’re right. It’s too coincidental to be a coincidence, and I don’t want to know why or how or any of it. I want to go back to being a fluke.”
Sylvie couldn’t explain why it bugged her to know that Marilyn was out there roaming around that property on a timeline where she could have been pregnant with her. It wasn’t because the whole thing was probably irresponsible—she didn’t care about that. It was everything Marilyn didn’t want to go into. It was the fact that Marilyn knew Rynn, and Rynn had disappeared with a trail of bodies behind her.
All these weeks, Sylvie had looked at the girl with sympathy and anguish, but part of her brain was pricking at her now. Fight or flight. A lot of people were convinced she killed her family.
A memory can’t be a lure. A memory can’t be sentient.
She thought of the hands in the doorway. The figure waiting for her in the dark.
That night, it took her hours to fall asleep. She kept her desk lamp on. Sometimes her mind would drift, and she imagined people lining up along the street outside her building, staring up at their windows. Thank God she didn’t have a window in her room.
Without school, going to dance was more and less of a production. A longer commute, but only one bag to carry. The ride uptown in the summer was for reading or shuffling her steps as she slumped against the plastic seats, and on Monday it was no different. Marybeth went with her, but their schedules would soon be diverted. Really soon. The very next day, Marybeth started her summer ballet intensive, and Sylvie was alone, and alone with her thoughts.
The car wasn’t very full. A couple people looked over open subway maps, heads bowed together as they pointed from one line to the next. A man had cracked the window and dropped his cigarette onto the track. A couple girls held the straps and laughed at something one of them had said. An elderly woman held a bag of groceries and clutched a Reader’s Digest.
At West Fourth, several college-aged kids hopped on, not bothering to sit even though there was room.
After West Fourth, there were no stops until Thirty-Fourth Street and the train barreled north. Sylvie lost herself in thoughts of her steps, bouncing her bag on her knees, her hands compulsively gripping the edge of the orange seat. The car she was on was too new to give up its memories, so eventually she stopped trying and folded her hands, instead.
A soft thump caught her attention. The woman across from her had dropped her knit purse and her wallet tumbled over the dirty linoleum. When she failed to pick it back up, Sylvie pulled her eyes up to meet the woman’s face. She was staring at Sylvie, almost unseeing, her expression slack except for how she didn’t blink.
Sylvie stood up. She had nowhere to go but she couldn’t just sit, and when she looked back, the woman still stared at her, head turned now, mouth slightly open as in sleep. Sylvie looked away quickly but in doing so, noticed a man at the pole was staring at her, too.
Over the roar of the train through one of the opened windows, Sylvie thought she heard someone speaking to her. It was a distant, buzzing noise in her head that must have been words, but she couldn’t understand them. Or maybe it was her heart trying to beat its way out from behind her ribs. Escape!
Suddenly, the woman made a sharp movement and Sylvie jumped, hurrying awkwardly for the farthest set of doors and refusing to look at anyone at all. The thirty blocks between stations had never seemed so long or so claustrophobic. Dark tunnels, bright stations she wished she could escape into, then dark tunnels again. Until, finally, they pulled into Thirty-Fourth Street. Then it was the agonizing seconds until the car came to a stop and the doors finally opened.
She didn’t look to see if she was being followed. She rushed off the platform, her bag thumping against her hip, and wound her way through the packed station, taking the first exit she found without even looking at the street numbers. She pushed against the downward current of commuters heading home from work and careened through knots of shoppers carrying bags from Korvettes and Gimbels and Macy’s.
Sprinting up the stairs to daylight, it was only then that she remembered why she was on the train at all. Dance. She had twenty blocks left and ten minutes to cover them.
Ducking into the doorway of a wig shop, she squatted down to comb through her dance bag, seeking out her wallet. She didn’t have enough money for a cab.
“Come on.”
Something washed over her—not supernatural, but very raw human anger. She didn’t even know what to shake her fist at, where the problem was, and that made her even more desperate. If she had been close enough to walk back home, she would have gone right inside and told her parents and her brother everything about herself, again, but not let up until they realized she wasn’t joking. If they carted her off to the psych ward, so be it. At least Deirdre wouldn’t think she was flaking out on her.
For the full ten minutes, Sylvie ran. She cut through traffic and leapt around people, but it felt like no progress at all. Seventh and Eighth Avenues were clogged beyond reasonable passage, a mess of tourists exiting matinees and curiosity seekers loitering in front of peep shows and porn theatres. Sylvie wasn’t really allowed up here, certainly not on her own, but nothing could have compelled her back onto a train. And it was stupid, because missing dance should be incentive enough, but she couldn’t get the woman’s gaze out of her mind. One day, one of these spaced-out people might have a gun, and then what?
Eventually, sweat collecting on her brow and soaking through her shirt, Sylvie stopped, and gave up, and turned south.
Where her anger ebbed, humiliation attempted to flow in. Class had started. She could see Deirdre’s disappointment, her confusion. She would ask people if they had talked to Sylvie, seen Sylvie. She might even call Sylvie’s home before warm-ups were complete. It’s what she would do, Sylvie supposed.
Waiting for a light, she shut her eyes and willed it out of her brain. Later, later, deal with it later. For now, she had a lot of blocks to cover and time to kill.
She hadn’t seen or talked to Ilan since Friday and the only reason it hadn’t bothered her was because their evening together was a question mark at the end of a blank phrase. He owed her nothing and she wouldn’t know what she wanted, anyway. But she didn’t want to leave it like that, or to leave him alone.
At Twenty-Third Street, she started to feel a little less brave. At Tenth, she couldn’t help holding her breath. The dog was still pretty creepy, regardless of where it ranked compared to all the other bullshit going on. But it wasn’t there. All the dogs were warm and living, all the people occupied with their own thoughts instead of Sylvie. All the memories were quiet. Normal, everything normal. Sylvie just wished she wasn’t so sweaty.
At Ilan’s building, she had to pause for a minute to remember his apartment number (the peeling name outside wasn’t his). As she pushed the buzzer, she briefly wondered where his friend had gone, the one whose name was on the lease. Did that guy know? Seemed a suck-off move not to warn Ilan. And what about the other people in the building or on the block? Why did it bother Ilan more than anyone else?
Seconds passed. Maybe he wasn’t there. She could go home now and not look suspiciously early, but she didn’t want to, so she hit the buzzer again. Finally, a crackling sound responded, and Ilan’s muffled voice fell through the old speaker, “Hello?”
“Good afternoon, sir, I’m selling encyclopedias. Would you like to buy a set?”
There was another muffled noise that may have been a laugh. “Sylvie?”
