Nobody's Victims

The Ninth Tenant-3

"We can leave the door open now," said Mrs. Brown.

The little company duly opened the door and peered out. There was nothing to be seen now, but they could all hear the thump of the suitcase hitting the floor, then the rattle of keys, the #4 apartment door opening, footsteps clacking across the hardwood floor and a second thump of the suitcase.

"She’s left the door open," Mrs. Donatello noted.

Then the footsteps returned, coming back down the stairs. The tenants hastily retreated back into Miss Pierce’s apartment, set their ears to the door and their eyes to the crack between the edge and the jamb, jostling silently for position. The footsteps paused, then retreated slowly back up the stairs, accompanied by heavy scrapes and thumps.

Dubcek dared to open the door another six inches and peer out. "Hey," he whispered, almost awed, "She—she’s wrestling that heavy butcher-block table up the stairs—all by herself! She must be… uh, remarkably strong."

"An amateur athlete?" Glimke marveled, reaching for his note-pad. "A would-be Olympic woman weight-lifter? Now there’s a new angle."

"Why did she pick that one?" Mrs. Donatello wondered, wincing at the occasional thwacks of the table against the banisters and walls. "Out of all her furniture…"

They all heard the table being dragged into the center of the vast living room upstairs—and then nothing. They waited, increasingly impatient, as the minutes dragged past.

"We could try going upstairs," Bruno Gallondri suggested. "Her door hasn’t shut, or we’d have heard."

"If she sees us," George added, "We can always say we heard the noise and were coming to help move her stuff in."

"Shhh," Miss Pierce whispered, eyes fixed on the ceiling. "I could swear I heard water… Oh, there. It’s stopped."

Silence again. Dubcek began easing his way out the door to the hall, the Gallondri brothers close behind.

"Shh!" said Miss Pierce again, stretching her wattled neck to listen to the ceiling. "There’s a soft… scraping sort of noise. It’s going… all around the floor up there. What on earth is she doing?"

"Drawing a circle, in chalk," Glimke guessed. "New Age types do that to make a Meditation Space, or whatever."

Faintly, from upstairs, came the sweet chiming of a small bell.

The men by the door looked at each other. Miss Pierce grabbed a water-glass, clambered up on the table and shamelessly listened to the floor above. They all heard what happened next.

"Incipiamus!" rang the voice on the top floor, a much stronger voice than any of them had yet heard from Ms. Hart. "Adeste fideles. Descedant omnes profani. Hic locus sanctus est!"

"That’s not a New Age thing," Glimke gulped.

The words were followed by the sharp slamming of something hard and massive, striking the floor three times. Then came more chanting.

"What the hell is going on up there?" Dubcek asked at large, inching his way out toward the stairs.

"That was Latin," Bruno Gallondri remembered. "Is she trying to exorcise the place? Catholic ritual—"

"She can’t," George reminded him. "Only a priest can do that."

"Wrong Latin," Glimke murmured, recalling his long-past school teaching days. The more he listened, the more he was certain; that wasn’t the soft, sibilant tongue of the old church but the clanging, hard-syllabled, military-style Latin of Golden Age Rome. The implications were disturbing. "I… don’t think she’s a Catholic, George."

"She said she was a—a ‘classical scholar’." Mrs. Donatello turned to Miss Pierce. "How far does that go? What does it get into?"

"I don’t know," Miss Pierce quavered. "Just what was that scandal about, the one that cost her the teaching job?"

"Something about ‘unbecoming conduct’…"

Then a faint breeze brought the smell drifting down the stairwell. The advance party, one at a time, paused to sniff and ponder.

"Incense!" The Gallondris recognized it together. "Not the kind they use in church… It’s like flowers. … Or trees. … Or maybe…"

There was another chant, in yet another language, very long and singsong. Miss Pierce, drawing on her long-vanished schooldays, finally identified it. "Greek! Classical, ancient Attic Greek. She seems to be reciting names…"

"Ancient Greek gods?" Glimke asked. He was beginning to form an idea about Ms. Hart’s odd little ceremony.

"No… goddesses." A strange look spread over Miss Pierce’s face. "Some of them I’ve heard of, some I haven’t. Artemis, Hera, Hecate I recognize—but who’s Djana, or Eurynome?"

"I don’t like this…" muttered Bruno Gallondri, edging toward the relative safety of the wall.

"What is she, a witch or something?" Mrs. Brown whispered.

Nobody answered.

Upstairs, footsteps padded away from the living room. They led into the dining room, followed by a burst of chanting and then the chiming of the bell.

"Not Greek anymore," said Miss Pierce. "I don’t know what it is, but it sounds somewhat like Greek and somewhat like Hebrew. Very strange…"

"Glimke, you’re the one who does history research." Dubcek hurried back into the apartment to clutch urgently at the writer’s arm. "Each language she’s used so far has been older than the last. What’s older than ancient Greek?"

"In the western world? I’m not sure… Mycenae, Egypt, Crete, Sumer, Catal Huyuk—they just discovered that one a few years ago, dates from at least 6000 BC. They had writing, but to the best of my knowledge nobody’s cracked the language yet. There are inscriptions, but nobody knows how to read them." Glimke glanced nervously toward the ceiling. "How the hell could she learn the language when the archeologists haven’t?"

"The other archeologists, you mean," whispered Mrs. Brown.

The footsteps upstairs thudded from room to room, pausing in each for the same chanting and chiming. The smell of incense grew thicker, overpowering.

"Getting damn hot," George Gallondri muttered, easing his way back from the door. His brother followed, tugging open his limp collar.

"More than hot," Mrs. Donatello panted. "Damn! Can’t you feel it?"

The others paused, listening and sniffing in the semi-dark. Mrs. Brown noticed the change. "P-pressure," she gulped. "The air. Feels like a lead weight in here."

"Yes," said Glimke, eyes widening.

"What if…?" Dubcek let his question trail off.

The tenants looked at each other, dismay settling across their faces. Upstairs, Ms. Hart’s footsteps came back into the living room and a new chant hammered through the thickening air: first in the unknown language, then in recognizable Greek, then Latin again. Everyone could hear the words: "Te exorsciso."

"Right, she’s some kind of a witch," gulped George Gallondri. "A real one!"

"Can she do it?" Bruno turned to Glimke, almost pleading. "If she’s into something older than the Church… Can she really exorcise apartment #4?"

"I don’t know," whispered Glimke, wiping sweat off his forehead. The air felt like hot oil. "We know—nobody better—that ghosts are real. Maybe witchcraft is, too. Maybe they’re all of a piece: ghosts, magic, psychic powers…"

"She can’t do that!" Miss Pierce almost cried, skittering down from the table. "They’re our ghosts! She can’t take them away from us! Somebody, do something! We have to stop her! Somebody—"

The sound from upstairs interrupted the appeal. It was a heavy thumping, not footsteps, more like an axe striking the floor. After that came shouted words that they could all understand.

"Come forth, into my circle, all you unclean spirits! Come forth, into my circle, all you ghosts, daemons, demigods, souls of the evil-minded! Come out from the walls, from the floors, from the ceilings. Come out from the storage spaces, from the hidden rooms, from the gaps in the walls, from all space between rooftree and foundation. Come forth from your hiding-places, mortal or immortal, and come into this circle. Come! Come now! As moves my will, so mote it be!"

The words echoed, echoed impossibly.

Sudden darkness squeezed down, dimming out the apartment and the hallway. The air closed in, hot and crushing. The room seemed to close up, like cloth in a rolling-press, forcing everyone out, forward, into the unseen hallway and toward the stairs. Miss Pierce screamed thinly, the sound stretching out to a wavering thread in the ringing distortion of space. Dubcek’s voice could be heard groaning endlessly, like the settling of heavy timbers in the dark.

The tenants stumbled and crawled forward on the uncertain floor, feeling their way blindly, moving because they had no more choice in moving than does the juice burst from the grape in the winepress. Glimke felt the risers of the stairs under his hands and cried helplessly as he pawed his way upward through the dark. He knew where they were going.

Vision resumed ahead, at the end of the corridor: the bright rectangle of an open doorway. They stumbled through it, across polished hardwood boards, over the curved chalk line of a circle’s edge. Beyond the chalk line the intolerable pressure stopped. The tenants tumbled and huddled together in the circle, rubbing their eyes and blinking at the sudden restoration of light. The sobs and whimpers cut off sharply as they saw, all at the same time, what had brought them here.

Beyond the circle stood the butcher’s-block table set with candles, little bowls, a red-filled cup, a smoking incense-burner, a bell, a small bronze statuette of a woman with a flounced skirt and bare breasts and snakes coiled around her outstretched arms. No one could have mistaken the assemblage for anything but an altar.

Beyond the altar stood a very different Ms. Hart. She wore nothing but a flounced skirt, a crown of flowers, the strange butterfly pendant, and bronze snake-shaped bracelets that coiled up her arms. Her skin had been oiled, and gleamed in the candlelight like polished ivory. In her hands she held something that few of them had ever seen, even in a museum, but which somehow all of them could recognize. It was a two-bladed axe, the head made of dark chipped stone, the handle a single piece of age-darkened bone. The shape and spiral markings of the blades exactly matched those of the silver pendant.

"Not a butterfly," Glimke whispered inanely. "It’s not a butterfly at all."

Ms. Hart stood looking down at them for a long moment, a slow and powerful smile spreading across her face. She held out the dull-glittering axe above their heads, and they could see that it was very, very old.

"The haunters!" she laughed. "The true haunters of apartment #4!"

The other tenants cowered on the floor, not daring to move or speak. Glimke managed to form a thought: …"upon what meat…" We fed them! We made it happen! All those Monopoly parties… gossiping, plotting… our own witches’ Sabbath! … But she understood, and did it better… and she’s stronger…

"Get up, you haunters," Hart commanded. "Go out and fetch in my belongings. As of now, this place is mine—and so are you."

As one, shuffling and snuffling, they got up to do their new mistress’ bidding.