The Children(27)

Regina replied immediately.

Call me.



Guin’s sense of obligation, usually no more than a nagging irritant, crystallized in a flash to rage. She stabbed her phone three times with an index finger—N, o, send—then shoved it to the bottom of her bag.

For a block or two she walked blindly, shoulder checking the strangers who packed the sweating sidewalks. Then she turned sharply and made her way to the train.

By the time it pulled in she was stuporous with heat. Half the car’s lights were out, the other half pushed greenly against her closed eyelids. Its cold rattling lulled her. She thought, half dreaming, of the sinuous undertrain, making its mammalian circuits beneath the skin of the Ninth City. Then a woman slammed a Foodtown bag onto the seat beside her and Guin returned, startled, to the G train.

A few more stops in the refrigerator chill, then back into the fragrant heat of Brooklyn. Her path to the bus stop was jammed with vendors selling phone cases, mangoes sliced cleanly off the pit, perfumes with handwritten labels reading MIDNIGHT MAGIC or NO. 7 LADY. It was the dead center of the afternoon. The bus, when it came, carried one other passenger, a man perspiring through the thin cotton of his undershirt. He held a tiny radio in his hands, the Andrews Sisters trilling from its speaker. Their voices slipped through the open windows and tinseled the summer air.

Her dad had a fondness for that kind of stuff. A small-town Welshman raised by sentimental women, fattened on a narrow cut of American culture. Guin dabbed at her melted eyeliner and tuned it out.

When she stepped down into Red Hook the air had changed. It was muted, animated by a deeper kind of motion. Though she stood blocks from shore it felt less cityish than like a village by the sea. Maybe it was the animal in her, sensing the water.

On her phone’s map the building that would house Ennis’s show was a long yellow box, riding alongside a bland blue inlet of the Gowanus Canal. In life it was an irregular concrete castle fronting water the exact greeny black of old bronze. Its hide was striated by age and the elements into an ombré of earth colors: ocher and tobacco and pale goldenrod.

The building looked hyperreal, pressed flat against heavy sky. It was massive, its scale alone enough to unnerve her as she circled it on foot, noting its entrances, its many windows, their glass nacreous with filth and the lowering sun.

This was the place. But she saw no preparations in play, no sign that an exhibition would open here in under a week. The building might’ve stood untouched for the last fifty years. Was Candy lying about the location? Was the show even real?

The Gowanus threw glitter in her eyes as she turned away to consider it. No, she decided, and yes. She had reason not to underestimate what Ennis could do.

Guin circled the building a second time, trying its doors. Grimy, locked, one inaccessible behind a rusted rebar X hammered into the concrete, like something out of a zombie movie. Peering into the window above it, she saw—not movement. The sense of it. An aqueous shifting behind the glass, some ancient material caught in a draft. She watched a little longer before moving on.

Turning the building’s final corner, Guin was just in time to see the first door she’d tried swinging shut. She broke into a run, but it closed before she could get there. Cursing, she drove a shoulder against it.

This time it opened, smooth as Vaseline.

Guin hovered at the threshold, heart beating quickly under the cup of her hand. Ennis could be inside. He could be right there. Two decades of unspoken things gathered on her tongue, sharp as a lemon drop. She didn’t call out. When she could see well enough, she stepped through and let the door close softly behind her.

The building’s first floor was one massive high-ceilinged room. Dust frosted the windowsills, drop cloths made tormented shapes on the floor. Concrete support columns as wide as her own wingspan stood at intervals around the room, crusted with salt stains.

There was no sign of anyone. Not a footprint on the dirty floor. But: drifting like music through the gloom, the unmistakable odor of fresh paint.

Guin breached the grand space, looking for the source. For cans and rollers, a stretch of glistening wall, any sign of work or habitation. She saw nothing, heard nothing, as she walked the ghost factory. At the far wall a stairwell door was held open by a brick. Sun bled through the opening in a murky wedge, and by its light Guin thought she could see something on the walls. Not a flat wash of new paint, an image. She squinted, edging closer.

From the floor above came the sound of footsteps.

Guin froze for half a second, then sprinted to the stairwell. Whoever was up there had to be hearing her, thumping up the metal stairs. Maybe she was an idiot. They could be a squatter. An addict looking for copper wire, something to salvage and sell. At best a teenager seeking a moody hideaway in which to write poetry about decay. She kept climbing anyway, then charged through the door to the second floor.

It was darker here. She just made out an elegant curved ceiling that could’ve been part of an old railroad station, lined on either side by flaking struts. A massive furnace covered the bulk of the western wall, like a pipe organ in a church.

What had been made in this place? Guin couldn’t begin to guess. All that emerged as she paced the room was a persistent sense of wrong, caught like an itch in the building’s bones. It set her teeth to humming.

Then something slid out of the dark.

She tensed. But it was only an insect. A honeybee, moving toward her in a lazy sine wave. Fat as Queen Mab, legs hanging loose beneath its furred abdomen.