Midnight Voices by John Saul

said. “We wish they didn’t, but you can never be sure. You can only do your best. And if you leave, I’ll just have one less person to keep an eye on the kids. They won’t let me replace you—it’s called budget reductions by attrition.” So in the end she’d stayed, and every weekend she’d gone to see the little girl in Bellevue, knowing the child wasn’t even aware of her presence, but praying that her visits might somehow atone for the horror that had befallen the child. But each week it seemed as if the job got harder, and on this morning she was headed to a place she didn’t like at all.
    Stupid,
she told herself as she approached the building at 100 Central Park West.
Everybody else in the city loves this building, and there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s a great old New York apartment house.
Which was, Andrea knew, most of the problem. She just didn’t like ‘great old New York apartment houses,’ not with their clanging steam radiators, and leaky plumbing and antique electrical systems. Andrea had grown up in a nice tract house on Long Island, brand new when she was a year old, and no matter what anyone said about the glories of living in Manhattan, her secret desire was to get married and go right back out to Long Island, where she belonged. But so far that hadn’t happened, and she was starting to suspect that probably it wasn’t going to. The statistics for her age group were against her; in all likelihood she’d wind up one of those pathetic old maids living with three cats in a one-room apartment on her pension from the city. But in the meantime, she’d help as many of the kids as possible. Sighing, she pulled open the door, stepped into the vestibule, and pressed the bell that would summon Rodney, the doorman. A moment later the door opened, and Rodney tilted his head a fraction of an inch.
    “The Albions are expecting you.”
    Andrea returned his nod, and headed for the elevator—a cage that reminded her of a movie she’d once seen, in which Katharine Hepburn had descended in just such a machine, her voice drifting down long before she herself became visible. As the ancient elevator ground slowly toward the seventh floor, Andrea prepared herself to face the Albions.
    She didn’t like them any more than she liked the building.
    And she had no more reason to dislike them than she had to dislike the building.
    Alicia—a woman who seemed to be in her early forties—was waiting at the door. The first time Andrea had met her, she’d felt a faint stirring of memory, as if she’d seen Mrs. Albion somewhere, but couldn’t quite place her. But a few nights later she’d been channel surfing through an empty Saturday evening when she’d come across a rerun of an old family sitcom from the late Fifties or early Sixties. She’d been about to move on to the next channel when she had a feeling of déjà vu strong enough to make her pause. The déjà vu passed almost immediately, but even in its wake there was an eerie familiarity about the show, as if she’d seen it only a day or so before. And then it came to her: Though the actress playing the mother bore no physical resemblance to Alicia Albion, their styles were almost identical. The actress’s carefully plucked eyebrows, her makeup and hairdo—even her clothes—looked exactly like Alicia’s. At first Andrea had been certain she was imagining it, but on her next visit to assess Rebecca Mayhew’s adjustment to living with the Albions, she knew she hadn’t been mistaken at all. Alicia Albion might have just stepped out of the old sitcom.
    Nor was it just Alicia that seemed to have gotten stuck in the past. Everything about the apartment seemed dated—the furniture, the wallpaper—everything—looked old.
    Not antique.
    Just old.
    But Rebecca seemed happy, and even though Andrea felt vaguely uncomfortable in the apartment—okay, downright creepy, if she was honest with herself—she hadn’t been able to find fault with anything