ghost.
“Have you ever approached him?” I asked at one point.
Sam shook her head. “No. I just watch him walk. I’ve never even talked about him to anybody else.” That made me feel good. “You know, I can’t help but feel that he’s waiting for something, or someone. Isn’t that the way it usually works in ghost stories?”
“This isn’t a ghost story,” I said.
“But we didn’t imagine it, did we? Not both of us at the same time?”
“I don’t know.”
But I knew someone who probably did. Jilly. She was into every sort of strange happening, taking all kinds of odd things seriously. I could remember her telling me that Bramley Dapple—one of her professors at Butler U. and a friend of my brother’s—was really a wizard who had a brownskinned goblin for a valet, but the best thing I remembered about her was her talking about that scene in Disney’s
“That’s how they do it,” she’d said. “Just like that.”
And if you walked with her at night and a dog started to howl—if no other dog picked it up, then she’d pass it on. She could mimic any dog’s bark or howl so perfectly it was uncanny. It could also be embarrassing, because she didn’t care who was around or what kinds of looks she got. It was the message that had to be passed on that was important.
When I told Sam about Jilly, she smiled, but there wasn’t any mockery in her smile. Emboldened, I related the ultimatum that Jilly had given me this afternoon.
Sam laughed aloud. “filly sounds like my kind of person,” she said. “I’d like to meet her.”
When it started to get late, I collected my clothes and changed in the bathroom. I didn’t want to start anything, not yet, not this soon, and I knew that Sam felt the same way, though neither of us had spoken of it. She kissed me at the door, a long warm kiss that had me buzzing again.
“Come see me tomorrow?” she asked. “At the store?”
“Just try and keep me away,” I replied.
I gave the old tom on the porch a pat and whistled all the way home to my own place on the other side of Crowsea.
Jilly’s studio was its usual organized mess. It was an open loftlike affair that occupied half of the second floor of a fourstory brown brick building on Yoors Street where Foxville’s low rentals mingle with Crowsea’s shops and older houses. One half of the studio was taken up with a Murphy bed that was never folded back into the wall, a pair of battered sofas, a small kitchenette, storage cabinets and a tiny boxlike bathroom obviously designed with dwarves in mind.
Her easel stood in the other half of the studio, by the window where it could catch the morning sun.
All around it were stacks of sketchbooks, newspapers, unused canvases and art books. Finished canvases leaned face front, five to ten deep, against the back wall. Tubes of paint covered the tops of old wooden orange crates—the new ones lying in neat piles like logs by a fireplace, the used ones in a haphazard scatter, closer to hand. Brushes sat waiting to be used in mason jars. Others were in liquid waiting to be cleaned. Still more, their brushes stiff with dried paint, lay here and there on the floor like discarded pickup-sticks.
The room smelled of oil paint and turpentine. In the corner furthest from the window was a lifesized fabric mache sculpture of an artist at work that bore an uncanny likeness to Jilly herself, complete with Walkman, one paintbrush in hand, another sticking out of its mouth. When I got there that morning, Jilly was at her new canvas, face scrunched up as she concentrated. There was already paint in her hair. On the windowsill behind her a small ghetto blaster was playing a Bach fugue, the piano notes spilling across the room like a light rain. Jilly looked up as I came in, a frown changing liquidly into a smile as she took in the foolish look on my face.
“I should have thought of this weeks ago,” she said. “You look like the cat who finally caught the mouse. Did you have a good time?”
“The best.”
Leaving my fiddle by the door, I moved around behind her so that I could see what she was working on. Sketched out on the white canvas was a Crowsea street scene. I recognized the cornerMcKennitt and Lee. I’d played there from time to time, mostly in the spring. Lately a rockabilly band called the Broken Hearts had taken over the spot.
“Well?” Jilly prompted.
“Well what?”
“Aren’t you going to give me all the lovely sordid details?”
I nodded at the painting. She’d already started to work in the background with oils.
“Are you putting in the Hearts?” I asked.
Jilly jabbed at me with her paint brush, leaving a smudge the color of a Crowsea red brick tenement on my jean jacket.
“I’ll thump you if you don’t spill it all, Geordie, me lad. Just watch if I don’t.”
She was liable to do just that, so I sat down on the ledge behind her and talked while she painted.
We shared a pot of her cowboy coffee, which was what Jilly called the foul brew she made from used coffee grounds. I took two spoons of sugar to my usual one, just to cut back on the bitter taste it left in my throat. Still, beggars couldn’t be choosers. That morning I didn’t even have used coffee grounds at my own place.
“I like ghost stories,” she said when I was finished telling her about my evening. She’d finished roughing out the buildings by now and bent closer to the canvas to start working on some of the finer details before she lost the last of the morning light.
“Was it real?” I asked.
“That depends. Bramley says—”
“I know, I know,” I said, breaking in.
If it wasn’t Ply telling me some weird story about him, it was my brother. What Jilly liked best about him was his theory of consensual reality, the idea that things exist
“But think about it,” Jilly went on. “Sam sees a ghost—maybe because she expects to see one—and you see the same ghost because you care about her, so you’re willing to agree that there’s one there where she says it will be.”
“Say it’s not that, then what could it be?”
“Any number of things. A timeslip—a bit of the past slipping into the present. It could be a restless spirit with unfinished business. From what you say Sam’s told you, though, I’d guess that it’s a case of a timeskip.”
She turned to grin at me, which let me know that the word was one of her own coining. I gave her a dutifully admiring look, then asked, “A what?”
“A timeskip. It’s like a broken record, you know? It just keeps playing the same bit over and over again, only unlike the record it needs something specific to cue it in.”
“Like rain.”
“Exactly.” She gave me a sudden sharp look. “This isn’t for one of your brother’s stories, is it?”
My brother Christy collects odd tales just like Jilly does, only he writes them down. I’ve heard some grand arguments between the two of them comparing the superior qualities of the oral versus written traditions.
“I haven’t seen Christy in weeks,” I said.
“All right, then.”
“So how do you go about handling this sort of thing?” I asked. “Sam thinks he’s waiting for something.”
Jilly nodded. “For someone to lift the tone arm of time.” At the pained look on my face, she added,
“Well, have you got a better analogy?”
I admitted that I didn’t. “But how do you do that? Do you just go over and talk to him, or grab him, or what?”
“Any and all might work. But you have to be careful about that kind of thing.”
“How so?”
“Well,” Jilly said, turning from the canvas to give me a serious look, “sometimes a ghost like that can drag you back to whenever it is that he’s from and you’ll be trapped in his time. Or you might end up taking his place in
