And then Lucy figured out the locks, and there was a little click, and then a sort of a breeze, and the door to the apartment swung open.
You couldn’t tell how big that place was right away. The blinds were drawn and obviously nobody knew where the switches were, so we all stepped tentatively into the gloom. It smelled, too, a sort of funny old people smell, not like someone died in there, but more like camphor, and dried paper, and mothballs. And then somewhere far off, in with the mothballs, there was something else that smelled like old flowers, and jewelry, and France.
“Hey, Mom’s perfume,” I said.
“What?” said Lucy, who had wandered into the next room, looking for a light switch in there.
“Don’t you smell Mom’s perfume?” I asked. It seemed unmistakable to me that that’s what it was, even though she hardly ever wore the stuff because it was so ridiculously expensive. My dad gave it to her on their wedding night, and they could never afford it again so she only wore it once every three years or so when he had an actual job and they got to go to some cocktail party, and we would watch her put her one black dress on, and the clip-on earrings with the sparkles, and the smallest little bit of the most expensive perfume in the world. Who knows if it really was the most expensive in the world, I rather doubt it, but that’s what she told us. Anyway there it was, way back in that huge apartment, lost in with a bunch of mothballs, the smell of my mother when she was happy.
“It’s that perfume. What was the name of that stuff?” I asked, taking another step in. I loved that apartment already, so dark and big and strange, with my mother’s perfume hiding in it like a secret. “Don’t you smell it?”
“No,” said Alison, running her hand up the wall, like a blind person looking for a doorway. “I don’t.”
Maybe I was making it up. There were a lot of smells in there, in the dark. Mostly I think it smelled like time had just stopped. And then Daniel found the light switch, and turned it on, and there was the smallest golden glow from high up near the ceiling, you could barely see anything because the room was so big, but what you could see was, of course, that time actually had stopped there. Somewhere between 1857 and 1960, things had happened and then just somehow stopped happening. The ceiling was high and far away with sealike coves around the corners, and right in the middle of this enormous lake of a ceiling there was the strangest of old chandeliers, glued together out of what looked like iron filings, with things dripping and crawling out of it. It seemed to have been poorly wired, because it only had three working fake-candle 15-watt bulbs, which is why it gave off so little light. And then on the floor there was this mustard-colored shag carpeting, which I believe I have mentioned before, and then there was like one chair, in the corner. It was a pretty big chair, but seriously, it was one chair.
“What a dump,” said Daniel.
“Could we not piss on this before we’ve even seen it, Daniel?” called Lucy, from the kitchen. But she said it friendly, not edgy. She was having a pretty good time, I think.
Alison was not. She kept pawing at the wall. “Is this all the light? There has to be another light switch somewhere,” she said, sounding all worried.
“Here, I’ve got one,” said Lucy, throwing a switch in the kitchen. It didn’t really do much because the kitchen was a whole separate room with a big fat wall in front of it, so then there was just a little doorway-sized window of light that didn’t actually make it very far into the living room, or parlour, whatever you wanted to call this giant space.
“Oh that’s a big help,” said Alison.
“Wow, this kitchen is a mess. You should see this!” yelled Lucy. “Oh God, there’s something growing in here.”
“That’s not funny,” Alison snapped.
“No kidding,” Lucy called back, banging things around in there in a kind of sudden, alarming frenzy. “No kidding, there’s something growing—ick, it’s moving! It’s moving! No wait—never mind, never mind.”
“I am in no mood, Lucy! This is ridiculous. Daniel! Where are you? Tina, where did you go? Where is everybody! Could we all stay in one place please? Daniel.” Alison suddenly sounded like a total nut. It’s something that happens to her, she just gets more and more worked up, and she truly doesn’t know how to stop it once it gets going. No one is quite sure why Daniel married her, as he’s pretty good looking and seriously could have done a lot better. Not that Alison is mean or stupid; she’s just sort of high strung in a way that is definitely trying. Anyway, right about now was when that apartment literally started to drive her crazy. She kept slapping the wall, looking for another light switch, and Daniel was just ignoring how scared she was; he was heading all the way across that gigantic room into the gloom on the other side, where that one chair sat, next to a big hole in the wall. Well, it wasn’t a hole; it was a hallway. But from where we all stood it looked like a hole, and the sloping black shadow that used to be Daniel was about to disappear right down it.
“Daniel, just wait, could you wait please?” Alison yelled, completely panicked now. “I cannot see where you are going!”
“It’s fine, Alison,” he said, sounding like a bastard, just before he disappeared.
“Daniel, WAIT!” she yelled, almost crying now.
“Here, Alison,” I said, and I pulled open one of the blinds.
And then we were all showered with light. This incredible gold and red light shot through the window and hit every wall in that room, making everything glow and move; the sun was going down so the light was cutting through the branches of the bare trees, which were shifting in the wind. So that big old room went from being all weird and dreary to being something else altogether, and it skipped everything in between.
“Wow,” I said.
“Yes, thank you, that’s much better,” Alison nodded, looking around, still anxious as shit. “Although that isn’t going to be much help when the sun is gone.”
“Is it going somewhere?” I asked.
“It’s going down, and then what will you do? Because that chandelier gives off no light whatsoever, it’s worse than useless, all the way up there. You’d think they’d have had some area lamps in a room this size.”
“You’d think they’d have had some furniture in a room this size,” I observed.
“Okay, I don’t know what that stuff is, that’s growing in the kitchen,” Lucy announced, barging into the giant empty parlour, now filled with the light of the dying day. “But it’s kind of disgusting in there. We’re going to have this whole place professionally cleaned before we put it on the market, and even that might not be enough, it might be, oh God, who knows what that stuff is. And it’s everywhere. On the counters, in the closets. Who knows what’s in the refrigerator. I was afraid to look.”
“There’s really something growing?” I asked. Her dire pronouncements were having the opposite effect on me; the worse she made it sound the more I wanted to see it. I slid over to the doorway just to take a peek.
“Is it mold?” Alison asked, her level of panic starting to rev up again. “Because that could ruin everything. This place will be useless, worse than useless, if there’s mold. It costs millions to get rid of that stuff.”
“It doesn’t cost millions,” Lucy countered.
“A