scented breath into my face. Smaller shadows, some solemn, others laughing and running, raced past, some with the ghostly horses, others from some other time, after the horses had gone. “I want to catch him,” one whispered.
I stopped, looking around in the normal world as best I could with one eye firmly in the Grey. I was alone on the narrow ramp. I closed my eyes and dropped down into the ghost world, letting my fingers spread and float forward, feeling for the layers of frozen history that laced through the place like rutile in quartz. A cold edge fluttered under my touch and I opened my eyes, peering into the misty place between the worlds, confronted with stacks of ragged time. I pushed on one, tilting it until I could see without falling in.
The ramp was dusty with bits of straw and dirt knocked from the hooves of the dray horses led by young boys. The lower level was now filled with stalls around a central work area where the massive beasts stood to be dressed up in their bits of harness or blankets. Apparently Down Under had once been a stable for the cart horses that had brought the farmers’ goods in to market. But none of these memories of boys was the one I wanted to talk to. I touched another temporacline and pulled it back. . . .
This time it was not the atrium or shops I was seeing, but some other place, its crystallized moment of history displaced by some strong will or association. A large room, packed with cots and people dressed in dirtied white clothes and thick gauze masks who moved among the shivering, miserable patients on the beds. Almost half of the shapes I saw beneath the thin blankets were too small to be adults. One of them retched and turned in its cot, huge fevered eyes catching sight of me. It—I couldn’t tell if the child was a boy or a girl—raised its hand an inch or so off the bed, as if it wanted to touch me, but hadn’t the strength. I walked forward, unable to resist that sad plea, and crouched next to the bed, as incorporeal to the shadows that passed around me as any other phantom.
“Are you an angel?” the child whispered. “I don’t want to die.”
“I can’t stop that,” I said, thinking my heart would break. “This time—your time—is past.”
“My mother already died of the influenza. My sister, too.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Did you take them to heaven? Will I see them?”
One of the nurses had stopped and turned toward the child, staring with wide eyes, stricken but unable to see me. I didn’t know why anyone could see me on the icy plains of a moment’s history—sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t—but I knew nothing I did made any difference. This had happened. Some child had seen a ghost or an angel or just a flicker of desire for comfort given momentary flesh as he or she lay dying in a makeshift ward near the market, the smells of soil and fish, produce and garbage, hay and horses slipping in with the sounds of commerce even under the stench of carbolic acid and vomit and the whispering pleas of the dying.
“You’ll see them there. In heaven,” I replied. What else was there to say?
And it smiled at me, this ghost of a child. Smiled and turned its head aside, breathing softer, softer, and then not at all.
I ripped myself away from the horrible piece of history and dropped a bit, stumbling, onto the atrium floor only feet from where I’d stood a moment—a century?—before. A man caught my arm and steadied me.
“Are you all right?” he asked. He peered at my face. “Are you—? Oh my. You’re not all right at all, are you? C’mon. Come with me.”
This total stranger propped me up with his shoulder and walked me into the magic shop under the ramp, steering me through the displays of toys and tricks, into a corner. He helped me into a chair.
“Sit tight. I’ll be right back.”
In a moment, he returned with a bottle of cold water and a box of tissues. “Here. Are you doing OK now?”
I took the tissues and wiped unexpected tears off my face. “Yeah. I’m OK. I was just . . . upset about something. It’s nothing.”
“It can’t be something and nothing.”
I glanced up at him—a skinny guy in his thirties wearing pressed trousers and a striped shirt under a brocade vest, trendy glasses, and a handlebar mustache that was carefully waxed into a stiff curl on each cheek.
“It was something, but it’s not anything anymore.”
“Did you see it, then?”
“What?”
“Did you see the ghosts?”
Startled, I stared at him. “Ghosts.”
“Yeah, the market is haunted. Sometimes you see kids down here who aren’t actually here anymore. It’s kind of perturbing.”
“Have you seen them?”
“Me? No. I hear them once in a while, when there’s no one around. And once, our display of dollhouse furniture was all rearranged and the glass on one side was broken when there was no one here to break it. But that’s about all. Maybe the occasional levitating stuffed toy, but nothing really amazing. What about you? You seemed really upset.”
“I thought I saw . . . patients—medical patients. Little kids in cots.”
“Oh, there used to be a tuberculosis clinic around here, somewhere. Way back when the market was new. And I heard that the Market Theater was used to hold sick people during the flu epidemic. That would upset anyone—seeing something like that.”
“You believe in ghosts?”
He bit his lip and made a crooked face. “Ehhh . . . I’m not sure. Things happen around here that certainly seem to be unaccountable, and it’s romantic to imagine it’s ghosts. But I haven’t ever seen an apparition per se. And there could always be some other reason things move or make noise or seem . . . kind of weird. We’re on top of the train tunnel, you know. And things have been a little disturbed since they started construction on the Route Ninety-nine tunnel. There have even been a few accidents because of tunnel construction stuff. So maybe it’s not ghosts. Maybe it’s just guys in overalls digging holes.”
“You don’t have to humor me. I
“Oh. Well then. Yeah, the place is practically a ghost hotel.”
I just
I reflected his smile. “Yeah. Apology accepted.” I took his hand. “Harper Blaine.”
“Nice to meet you, Harper. Were you looking for ghosts or for something else? I’ve got a lot of interesting tricks and toys in here.” He picked up a fuzzy, bewinged green thing with a face full of tentacles. “Plush Cthulhu, maybe?”
I shook off the adorably dreadful Lovecraftian horror. “I was actually trying to find a guy who might have worked around here. Jordan Delamar. Someone suggested he might be a busker . . . ?”
“I don’t know him, but maybe. There’s a lot of buskers in the market and they don’t all come every day.”
“How could I find him—or find out if he worked here?”
“Oh, you’d have to ask at the market office. They issue the performers’ badges, so they would have a list of who has a badge, but they’d have no way to tell who was here when. The buskers just set up on the notes and do their thing when they want to and move on to the next note if they want to stay longer. I think the limit’s an hour before they have to move on. They can put out a tip jar or hat or whatever. Some of them sell CDs if they have them.”
“What do you mean ‘they set up on the notes’?”
“The red music notes painted on the ground. There’s one just outside the ramp—you must have seen it, since I don’t hear anyone playing out there—the wall reflects a lot of sound into the market from that location. It’s a favorite spot, since it’s got such great acoustics and plenty of space for a large group. Most of the spots are pretty small—just a one or a two—so the larger groups, like the Andean guys, can’t use them. There are a few spots that are very popular regardless of how big they are and others that aren’t as much, but they all get busy in
