vendors at the Pike Place Market didn’t. Everything but the restaurants and bars would be closed by seven and I’d burn up thirty to forty minutes if I hoofed it. Parking and traffic would both be terrible, so I took a bus. Seattle’s mass transit is adequate in downtown, so it didn’t take long and I got to the market with about two hours to spend looking for wheels or ashes or whatever Cannie Trimble had been alluding to.
The market used to be one of my favorite parts of Seattle. The old buildings, the crooked little streets and alleys, the bustle, the people, the mix of old and new, residents and tourists, farmers and artists all charmed me —until I became a Greywalker. Now those layers of time and human occupation so densely packed make it a churning sea of Grey that I cannot ignore or travel through with alacrity. It’s about as haunted as a place can get without being a battlefield or a hospital. People have lived, died, loved, hated, and committed politics all over the area, and that sort of activity tends to leave memories that play on as ghosts. It’s also as twisty and layered as a rabbit warren, which adds to the difficulty of getting around even with the clearest of senses, and mine were currently slightly impaired. Walking into the market was, for me, like walking into the noisiest, most crowded party ever, where half the guests ignored me while stepping on my feet and shouting in my ears anyhow. The incorporeal dead and their ice shards of history pushed into me, turning summer into winter and bringing a fog of silvered vision and darting, colored light. I couldn’t sink into the Grey to avoid the worst of the mess, since I needed to talk to living people as much or more than to ghosts—not to mention that I was pretty deeply submersed anyway. I plowed deeper into the market, threading past bodies that breathed heat as well as those that didn’t, feeling them nudge and push and grasp. I kept my bag tucked tight against my side to fend off living pickpockets, and hoped nothing less human was going to run its light fingers through my stuff, either.
Pike Place Market is actually a collection of buildings that house shops and stalls coming off Pike Avenue and turning onto Pike Place and Post Alley for several cramped and colorful blocks as dense as a box of bricks. Originally it was a true farmers’ market—a place where local farmers, ranchers, and fishermen could bring their fresh goods in the morning and go home with empty baskets and heavy wallets in the afternoon. Now it was as much a collection of permanent shops and restaurants as it was day stalls. Shop owners, day vendors, artists, craftspeople, and entertainers catered to the tourists as well as the locals in a cacophony of pitches, catcalls, and music, carried on the smell of fresh fish, hot grease, new bread, garbage, and sweat.
I wasn’t sure where to start looking for “the boy who played,” or for ashes and wheels, but I knew I couldn’t canvass every vendor and shop clerk. There are always a few people who’ve been around forever and know everyone—local characters like Artis the Spoonman and the guys who throw fish—I just had to find one who might be able to tell me if there was a connection between the market and Jordan Delamar—which was a far more pressing problem than cryptic references uttered by a lonely spirit on the waterfront.
I made my way toward the pig. Everyone starts at Rachel, so I figured I would, too, since metal and glass often cancel a bit of my Grey vision. The life-sized bronze piggy bank is supposedly a dead ringer for a real pig that used to live on Whidbey Island—though how that connected to the market, I’d never been sure. But there stands Rachel the Pig—steadfastly collecting money for the Pike Place Market Foundation—come hell or high water or runaway taxicabs like the one that nearly knocked the quarter-ton metal porker over a couple of years ago. Seattle’s eccentric metal structures seem to have a magnetic attraction for out-of-control vehicles. But the pig was on its hefty bronze feet as usual at the outside corner of Pike Avenue and Pike Place, in front of City Fish—home of flung fillets and slung salmon.
I felt a little dizzy negotiating the heavy tide of Grey that my one overly sensitive eye saw slightly out of sync with the other. I stumbled a little as I reached the pig, missing the short curb in the ghostly mist around my feet. I turned, catching my balance as I took a step backward and bumped into the piggy bank.
“Careful there, dear. You’ll give that poor piggy a bruise with that skinny butt of yours.”
I glanced to the left and saw a stout woman in a voluminous purple skirt and a hat made from parts of beer cans crocheted together with bright red yarn. Her hair stuck out from beneath the hat in gray tufts, brushing the shoulders of her blouse, which was covered in pins bearing racy slogans such as I USED TO BE SNOW WHITE, BUT I DRIFTED. She was giving me a sly smile.
“Early in the day for celebrating, isn’t it?” she asked.
Seattle is known for its passive-aggressive friendliness, so I was a little taken aback. Then the woman laughed. “Oh, there, I’m just yanking your chain, girl! You looked so serious, I thought you needed a good poke in the funny bone. You only live once, you know, but if you do it right that should be more than enough. Now, what’s making you so grumpy-faced? Anything I can do to help?”
“I’m trying to find out about a guy who might have worked around here or had some connection to the market recently. . . .”
“There’s a lot of people working here and hanging around. What’s his name?”
“Jordan Delamar.”
She shook her head. “Not ringing a bell, but I haven’t been around much in a while and I don’t know all the new folks. What’s he do?”
“I’m not sure. I think he might be ‘the boy who played’ if that means anything. . . .”
“Played what? Because a boy who plays might be one of the kids down in the ramp, or it might be one of the buskers, or—if we’re lucky—he might be a playboy and carry us off to his Playboy Mansion. I bet you’d be quite a bunny, honey.” She laughed at her joke.
“I don’t think I’d fit in very well,” I replied. “I’m not polite and subservient. I’m more the poking-things-with- a-stick type.”
She laughed again. “Well, that makes two of us, sweetie! I’ll tell you what—you try the ramp, and if that doesn’t work out, try the buskers. They know
I nodded, a touch overwhelmed but willing to take the suggestion, since it was all I had at the moment. “All right.”
She grinned, but it faded quickly and she peered at me. “You do that. But just one thing, Miss Pokes- Things-with-Sticks—can you tell me what I’m doing here? I haven’t been around in such a long time and yet . . . here I am again.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know. Where have you been until now?”
“Dead, honey. I’m
She’d seemed pretty solid for a ghost—solid enough that I hadn’t been certain right up until the end of the interview. I had a feeling I should have gotten a joke, there, but I hadn’t. I hoped I’d figure it out eventually— unresolved questions always bug me.
I had to ask around to find it, but it turned out “the ramp” was an actual ramp inside the area of lower shops. That section of the market starts about fifty feet below on Western Avenue across from the Pike Hill Climb and spreads up the cliff like some kind of wooden vine to the original shopping area at the top of the bluff. The market folks call that section “Down Under.” Since I was so close, I headed downstairs first, plunging through the flood of ghosts and the tipping icebergs of temporaclines.
At the stair landing is a doorway to the washrooms on one side and the hallways of the shops on the other, but no ramp, so I went down farther. At the bottom I came out onto an open area that connected the market buildings on my side with the former LaSalle Hotel building on the other and a staircase in between that walks down to Western Avenue. There was a large red musical note with a yellow number painted on the ground in front of a mural of the market. I’d seen these signs around the market, but wasn’t sure what they were for, and whatever this one was meant for, it wasn’t in use at the moment—at least not by anyone alive, though the red spot was so deeply awash in ghost-stuff that it was difficult to see with my left eye. Layers of memory lay over the spot, crystal-strewn with shards of temporaclines enclosed in a wide blue net of light. Peering through the Grey sideways I saw a ley line as bright as Las Vegas shooting straight through the site and arrowing for the Hill Climb below. Whatever happened on that red note, it was magical. Reluctantly, I turned away from it and headed into the building, looking for the ramp.
I found it in a moment, just inside the market building on my right: a narrow wooden way between two sets of shops that dropped steeply to the next floor and led into a crooked labyrinth of passages to a large atrium over the main hub of Down Under. Stepping onto the ramp I smelled hay and horse dung and could hear the jingle and stamp of long-gone horses in harness. Large shadow shapes brushed past me, whickering and blowing wet, oat-
