Midnight Voices

“Like this when you got here?” Oberholzer asked, tipping his head toward the door.

The officer nodded. “Nothing’s locked — everything’s standing open. What I want to know is what we’re lookin’ for? Don’t look like anybody’s lived here in years.”

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