The Shoe on Six

There are only a few things you can do in the dark to make a man believe you went one way when you went the other, and I knew all of them.

I'd tried the others. I'd tried hiding, which works for exactly as long as the man is patient. I'd tried running straight, which works until he has a radio. I'd tried screaming, once, and learned what that costs. What I had not tried, until that night, was the oldest trick in the world, the one every child knows from hide-and-seek: leave a door open so they stop looking for the closed ones.

I pushed down on the bar of the twelfth-floor fire door.

It moved. It was heavier than it looked, and the hinges had a thin metallic groan in them that I had memorized the first time through and learned to trust. If you lift on the handle as you push, the groan goes away. I lifted. The door swung inward three inches on a column of dead black air, and I felt my mother's body go rigid beside me, because on the stairs below us a boot had come down on the first step of the flight.

Seven steps, I thought. Six.

I pulled her through. It's strange what I remember, even now. The cold of the twelfth-floor corridor on my face. My mother's breath, stuttering, through her teeth. The soft tick of the door closer on its arm as the heavy door began to swing back against its spring, and the thin slap of my hand catching it before it could latch.

I couldn't let it close. If it closed it would make the sound.

I couldn't leave it wide open, either. If it were wide open, it would look like what it was: a door somebody had gone through in a hurry.

I did the thing in between. I eased it shut until the gap was exactly one finger wide, the width of a person who had passed through and had not had time to see that the latch didn't catch, and I fished in my coat pocket for what I'd put there on the way out, a folded index card from my vocabulary stack, stiff and square. I slid it into the gap between the latch tongue and the plate. It held. The door stood there, a hair open, pulled by its own spring against a bit of cardstock. It looked, in the dark, like nothing at all.

It looked like the door of somebody in a hurry.

"This way," I breathed, and my mother took my hand.

…

The twelfth-floor corridor was the same as ours, exactly, as if the building had been stamped out of a single mold. The same gray-green carpet. The same beige doors with their brass numerals, 1201 through 1210. The same stale warmth under the cold that came out of unventilated apartments where a hundred people had been breathing all night. The same smell of old cooking oil and carpet glue.

But there is a thing that nobody tells you about an old building in the dark. It has a throat.

I could feel it now. The long gray tunnel went away from us in front of my face and I knew it ran a hundred and eighty feet to the far end, where the second stairwell was, the east stair, the one that nobody used, the one that had been closed for repairs for a month and whose door the building manager had never remembered to lock. I knew that because I had gone through it once.

"We run?" my mother whispered.

"We walk. Fast. On the edge of the carpet." I put my hand against the wall. "If you run, your shoes slap. Walk on your toes. Keep one hand on the wall, and don't stop, no matter what you hear."

"What am I going to hear?"

"Me, telling you to keep going."

We went.

I have thought about that corridor in the hundred nights since, in the way you think about a thing that nearly broke you and instead taught you a language. It was the longest walk I have ever taken. We moved on the balls of our feet, in the black, with our shoulders brushing the wall, past door after door after door. A line of tiny pinholes of light showed under one of them, a battery night-light glowing blue under the crack of 1206, and it struck me with a shock that someone was in there, a person, a child maybe, asleep under a plastic moon, breathing, not knowing. My mother stopped. I felt it through her hand. She turned her head to the door as if she'd heard her name.

"Mom," I said, so softly I wasn't sure she'd hear. "Not yet. I promise. Not yet."

She came on.

At the far end there was a door. I felt for it with my fingertips and found cold metal and the long bar. I laid my palm against the steel, and I did not push. I stood with my cheek against the cold paint and listened to what was behind us.

Back at the west stair, thirty yards away, I heard the groan of the fire door as someone's hand pushed it open. I heard a pause. A cough, loud and wet. A man's voice, muttering. The faint scrape of a boot on carpet, and a long, slow, considering silence, like a hunter stopping at a broken twig.

"Door's open," said Lyle, to nobody. "She's gone in here."

Yes, I thought. Yes. Come in. Go through all of it.

"Radio," said Lyle. A crackle. "They went on twelve. I'm checking the units."

I pushed the bar.

The east fire door opened on its oiled hinges without a sound. I stepped through, pulling my mother after me, and eased it shut behind us until the latch made a whisper, so quiet that a person would have had to be standing next to it to hear. We stood on the landing of the east stairwell, and I let out my breath for the first time in two minutes.

The air here was different. It was a little less dead. There was a slit window at the turn of the stairs, tall and narrow, a vertical rectangle of glass in the concrete, and through it, from very far away, came a gray glimmer that was not light but the memory of light: the lamps on the highway beyond the ridge, thrown against the clouds. It was enough to show shapes. The banister, the stairs, my mother's face.

I saw it clearly, then. I wish I hadn't.

She was looking at me.

She wasn't looking the way she'd looked in the hall, with that tired, anxious, patient face. She was looking at me the way you look at a person you've known all your life who has just spoken in a language you didn't know she had. There was wonder in it, and dread, and a sort of reeling vertigo. Her hair was stuck to her forehead with sweat. Her mouth was a little open. And under all of it, in the wide dark centers of her eyes, I saw what I'd always been afraid I would see.

She was afraid of me.

Not of what I knew. Of me. Of the thing that had come out of her thirteen-year-old daughter, on a night she'd gone to bed thinking nothing was wrong.

"Don't," I said.

"I didn't say anything."

"Don't look at me like that." I heard my voice crack. "I know. I know how it—I'll tell you everything. But we have to go."

She swallowed. She nodded. She put out her hand and I took it, and for a second we both stood there with our hands clasped like two children about to cross a street. Then I turned, and started down.

…

Eleven. Ten. Nine.

I had been counting since the twelfth floor, though I didn't count the steps. I counted the flights, and the seconds between them, and a number in my head that I'd learned and could never now unlearn: four minutes, forty seconds. That was the interval between the moment Lyle Cobb had reached the twelfth floor on the first night and the moment he'd gotten to the ground floor on his way back. It was the window. It was the only advantage that I had.

We took the stairs two at a time. I had my hand on the rail and my mother had hers on my shoulder, and our feet came down together on every step, an uneven, hollow, muffled drumming that sounded to me like the beat of a very large heart. She stumbled at the bottom of the ninth-floor flight. Her bad slipper had come half off, and her heel met the edge of a stair, and I heard the soft grunt as the shock went up through her ankle. She went down on one knee. I didn't stop to let her rest. I pulled her up by the hand, hard, and I heard her whimper with the pain of it and bite down on the sound.

"I'm sorry," I said, running. "I'm sorry. Don't stop."

"Okay."

"Please don't stop."

"I'm not," she gasped.

Above us, a long way up, there was a bang. The unmistakable flat slam of a steel door thrown back against a wall. It was the door on the twelfth floor, the east one, the one we had shut so carefully. I felt it travel down the shaft as a soft vibration through the rail. A second later came the sound I had been waiting for: the pounding of boots, hard and fast and unmistakably urgent, the sound of two grown men throwing away the last of their caution.

"Down!" someone shouted. "She's on the east stairs!"

"I'm coming," came Lyle's voice, ragged with the cough. "Jesus. Wait for me."

We ran.

I don't remember the next flights. I remember a long narrow tunnel of black air with a thread of gray at the center. I remember my mother's breath beside me, harsh as a saw. I remember the rail, cold and wet, burning my palm. I remember, somewhere around the seventh floor, a single flash of terror so large that it nearly knocked me off my feet, a cold white thought that said you've got the numbers wrong this time. It's faster. They're faster. You aren't going to make it.

I turned my head. I looked back at her once.

I couldn't stop myself. In the gray from the window I saw my mother's face, white, streaming, pinched with agony, her eyes fixed on me with the trust of a child who has been told that the next step will not be the last. She was holding my hand so tightly that I had lost the feeling in my fingers. She was running on a swollen ankle in a ridiculous slipper. She was doing it for me.

I can't lose her, I thought. Not again. I can't watch it again.

I looked ahead. I looked at the landing at the bottom of the flight we were on, and the stenciled number on the green wall. 7. Beyond it, one more flight down, was a half-landing, and a turn, and a door.

It was the door to the sixth floor.

And I knew what I had to do.

I let go of my mother's hand. I stooped. I tore at the laces of my right sneaker, which I had not had time to tie, and which came away in my fist, a small damp gray shoe with a rubber toe, with the shape of my foot still in it. I held it up in the pale glimmer from the window. It looked absurd. It looked like what it was: the left-behind shoe of a child who had gone through a door in a panic.

"June, what—"

"Hold on."

I ran down the last flight. I laid the shoe on the concrete in front of the sixth-floor fire door, on its side, with the toe pointing in. I took one of the tiny sparkly stickers from my notebook, a cat in a spacesuit, and stuck it to the sole, where it caught the gray light. I pushed the door open an inch, the same trick, a finger's width, and I let it hang there on its spring.

Here, I thought. We went through here. We went into the sixth-floor hall. Look for us.

Then I took my mother's hand and ran on in my one sock.

Above us the boots hit the ninth-floor landing, and I heard Lyle's cough, and I heard the other man's curse, and the two of them came crashing down through the dark with the noise of cattle.

We reached the bottom of the seventh-floor flight. I heard, faintly, behind us and above, the scuff of a stop on the landing, the sound of a man pulling up short.

"Shoe on six," somebody said.

It was a flat, ugly, delighted voice. I heard it clearly, and I felt my own heart leap. "There's a shoe on six. Door's open. They went in."

"Then get in there!"

A door banged. Men went in. The pounding stopped, and a muffled shouting began, a voice calling a name down a corridor, Ostrander, Ostrander, followed by the sound of a lot of doors being tried. The sixth-floor hall, with its forty rooms, its mazes of closets, its rubbish chute and laundry nooks. It would take them four minutes. It would take them five if they were cautious.

I didn't stop. I took the rest of the stairs three at a time, in my one sneaker and my one stocking, with my mother stumbling after me. Five. Four. Three. Two. The numbers flew up out of the dark like white birds. And then there was no more stairwell. There was a landing with no more stairs going down, and a small square window at the level of my face, and a heavy gray door with a bar across the center and a little printed sign above it. LOBBY.

Beyond it was the street.

I put my hand on the bar. It didn't move. I pushed, and felt it resist, a slight, dull, rubbery drag that did not belong, and I looked down.

Someone had wrapped the handle in tape.

It was thick black electrical tape, layer after layer of it, wound around the bar and the doorframe and the metal lip of the lock plate in a tight, neat, intricate spiral. It glistened in the faint gray. It had been done by someone who knew what he was doing. He'd taken his time.

Above us, in the dark, the shouting had stopped. There was a silence of three heartbeats, of men standing in an empty hallway and doing arithmetic. Then a door banged open, and the pounding came again, boots hurtling down the east stair in a disordered, furious rush, two men and then a third, with a wet cough in the middle of them like a saw.