Audrey's Door

The Breviary, the haunted apartment building from AUDREY’S DOOR, was based on a real Manhattan building on 125th Street and Fifth Avenue. Its designer was a man named Edgar Schermerhorn, who was, indeed, a follower of Chaotic Naturalism. He drew the plans for thirteen turn-of-the-century New York buildings, which he called his apostles. Each had a makeshift altar in its lobby, and all could be described as Gaudi-esqe. The Breviary was the seventh apostle, and stood the longest before it crumbled from internal decay. Its last occupants, a coven of destitute senior citizens who’d lost their investments in the stock market crash of the 1970s, refused to abandon it when the bulldozers arrived. Though The Breviary was thoroughly searched, they hid in dumbwaiters and secret passageways. Authorities and family members assumed they’d died in the rubble, but it was only in 2005 that DNA evidence verified their charred bones, and the cases closed. What was strange, however, was that the human bones were contaminated with insect DNA. Scientists blamed improper sample collection after the initial dynamite demolition.

I had studied Chaotic Naturalism a little in college, and when I read the article about the insect DNA, a fact mentioned only in passing, it started me wondering: What if that coven, hiding within the walls of so fraught a building, found a passageway to the world they worshiped? What if the door opened, only instead of going through it, something uninvited came out?

It’s not so much the fact of a place, but its architecture that gives it personality. And it’s hard to imagine a less humane building than The Breviary, or any of the Apostles. People say they’re like Gaudis, but really, they’re the opposite. Where Gaudi fashioned his curves and arches on nature (the conch, the human torso, a flower’s stamen), Schermerhorn took these same aspects of beauty and defiled them. He hated nature, and he hated his maker, for having created the imperfect. Chaotic Naturalists worship everything that insults God, from self-indulgence to self-loathing. They despise the human soul. In my mind, their heroes were the opposite of flesh—hard and unfeeling. Without loyalty, or even the self-interest to perpetuate their own species. Insects.

Sources:
“DNA Evidence Revisited,” The New York Times, December 8, 2005.
“Manhattan’s Last Grand Dame takes a Powder,” New York Post, June 14, 1976
A History of the Thirteen Apostles, by Ivan Reitman, Carroll and Graff, 1929