The key went into the lock and turned as if it had been oiled that morning. Lauren thought it probably had.
Warmth hit her in the face. Not much warmth, but after Galena Street it felt like opening an oven, and with it came a smell she had not smelled since she was a girl, since her grandmother's basement on Idaho Street: coal smoke and hot iron and wet ash and dust. She stepped in and pulled the door shut behind her, and stood in the dark at the bottom of the stairs with her eyelashes melting.
When her eyes adjusted, there was a little light. The power, of course, was off. The light came from the boiler. It stood in the middle of the room, a squat black iron beast the size of a Volkswagen, built up of thick cast-iron sections bolted together like slices of a loaf, with AMERICAN RADIATOR COMPANY — IDEAL cast in raised letters across the front, and a heavy fire door with a little mica window in it, and through the mica a dull orange glow. Pipes as thick as her arm, wrapped in crumbling asbestos, went up out of it into the ceiling. On the side of it was a pressure gauge with a cracked glass face, and below that, a vertical glass tube about a foot long, set between two brass fittings, with water in it. The water was a little below the middle. On the floor along one wall was a heap of coal under the chute, and beside it a stack of folded burlap sacks, a shovel, an iron poker, and a steel bucket full of gray ashes. On an upturned crate beside a kitchen chair there was a coffee can of matches, a flashlight, and a school composition book with a marbled cover.
Lauren picked up the composition book and opened it to the first page. In the same brown copperplate as the tag on the key, somebody had written:
BOILER. 1983. NOV. 18. First night back. 10 PM 6 shovels glass 1/2. 4 AM 5 shovels glass 1/3 fed water 2 min.
And under that, page after page, night after night, in the same careful hand: the time, the shovels, the glass, the water. Nov. 22. Nov. 30. Tomo bad night. Gave him my coat. Dec. 4. Twenty below. Banked hard. Glass 1/2. Arvo says pipes knocking 3rd floor, closed valve. Dec. 11. Corky 8 sacks $32. Dec. 16. Corky 10 sacks, would not take money, made him. Dec. 18. Cough bad. Dec. 19. 10 PM 6 shovels glass 1/2.
The last entry was that morning. Dec. 20, 4 AM. 6 shovels. Glass 1/3. Fed water 3 min. The crack is worse. The handwriting at the end of it went loose and wandering, like someone writing on a moving train.
There was a dark stain on the concrete floor under the boiler, and a slow drip coming from between two of the sections near the bottom, plink, into a roasting pan someone had set under it, and the roasting pan was nearly full. There was a rag tied around the crack. There was a thin copper pipe that came out of the wall and ran along the floor to the bottom of the boiler, with a brass valve on it that had a wheel handle the size of a saucer, and someone had painted a stripe of white paint across the wheel so you could see which way it was turned.
Lauren stood with the composition book in her hands and listened. Above her, through the ceiling, faint as something in another house, she could hear a radio playing. And voices.