Quinton narrowed his eyes. “OK… But what if I can’t see you?”
“Let’s find out,” I said, pushing one of the planes of time and sliding onto it.
I slipped sideways into another version of the alley. There were two young men in cloth caps and knee-length trousers who paid me no attention as they sprinted along, darting in and out of doorways and yelling to the proprietors something I couldn’t quite hear. I followed one of them a few feet before I heard a sharp whistle blast behind me.
I whirled and was caught in a flood of policemen who poured into the doorways just as a lot of civilians tried to surge out of those same openings. The noise was deafening and the two groups clashed, yelling. But none noticed me.
I slid back out of the fragment of time and found myself closer to the opposite end of the alley than when I’d started. Quinton was a few steps away, wide-eyed.
“What happened?” I asked. “Are we all right?”
“Yeah, but you were pretty hard to see. If I hadn’t known to look for you, I might have dismissed you as a shadow in this light. Where did you go?”
“When. Looked like sometime during Prohibition. Not the period I need. We may have to go down below.”
“There’s not much access on this block. Some places, the underground’s been cut off or is in use. This is one of those bits. What else can you find up here?”
“Not sure. Let me look around a bit more.”
I reached for the fluttering edges of time and eased into them, pushing and shoving, looking for an indication I’d found the right time period. No luck in that alley. We moved on to another and I tried again.
I found a slab of 1949 that smelled of dust and dry red dirt, and I stepped into a street still littered with debris from the earthquake. The silvery shape of the hotel across from my office had rained ghost bricks onto the sidewalk and a handful of workmen’s shadows were shoving them into piles with what looked like bristleless push brooms. A lighted sign from another business lay where it had crashed from its moorings. I started forward, feeling a sort of push against my body as if I was walking against the current of a river. Time was intractable there and I knew it would resist any efforts by me to do anything.
I walked past the workmen, who didn’t acknowledge me, and looked around. The street was busy enough with the memories of people cleaning up, but I doubted any of them would be much help even if they could see me. I went on toward Occidental, looking for the ghost of one of the street people who might be more aware of me than the shades of solid citizens. A building stood where most of Occidental Park was in my time—rather it slumped there, decrepit and broken backed, clearly destined for demolition. I stopped, startled to see the old place.
A ghostly dog ran to me and barked, putting its front paws out and its rump up, tail wagging. A cloud of birds erupted from the shattered roof of the building.
One of the workmen called to the dog and finally came to drag it away from me by the collar, but he never saw me at all, berating the dog for its strange behavior as they moved away.
Seeing a phantom man in shabby clothes at the end of the block, I walked across the littered street and down the sidewalk toward him. He also didn’t see me, but I followed him a while, growing a little more tired with every step against the inflexibility of time. He stopped to talk to three other rough-clad male ghosts at the corner where Waterfall Garden Park would stand someday. One of the men lifted his head to look at me, though his gaze was a bit unfocused.
I walked close to him.
“Hi,” I tried.
He hadn’t been that old, but he had the worn and weary demeanor of the prematurely aged. He nodded to me and said, “Ma’am.” His fellows ignored him as they carried on their memory of a conversation.
I wasn’t quite sure how this would work. I’d never tried questioning a ghost in his own environment before. Would he be aware that he wasn’t alive? That things had happened after this moment in which we stood?
“I’m trying to find out if anyone’s been hurt down here.”
“Here? In the skid?”
I nodded. “Yes. After the earthquake but not by the earthquake.”
“Y’mean Chuck-o.”
“Was he hurt?”
“Killed.”
“What killed him?”
“Something chewed him up and spit him back.” The ghost pointed to the southwest.
“Down by the cowboy store. This morning… or when it was.” He looked confused.
“When it was. When was it? Not sure…”
“How long ago was the earthquake?” I asked. He seemed to be aware of time as more than one point simultaneously, but not too good at dealing with it.
He looked happier with a simple question. “Quake was two days ago. And Chuck was found today.”
“All right,” I said. “Do you know now or will you know what killed him?”
His face pinched in thought for a minute. Then he replied, “No. But not something human. Not a dog, either. Or falling bricks.”
“How are you sure of that?”
He snorted. “How do you know water is wet? I just know.”
I nodded, feeling drained. “Thanks.”
He returned my nod and fell back into his conversation as if I wasn’t there.
I walked back to a less conspicuous location—I hoped—and slipped back out of the fragment of time. I emerged in a different alley and saw Quinton nearby, watching me.
“Its hard to keep up with you in there,” he said.
“Really? It seems like I’m struggling to move an inch at time. I would have thought I’d be easy to follow.”
“You don’t move fast, but you move through the edges of things and it’s hard to see you. Sometimes you disappeared into walls, but you’d show up again in a second or two.”
“Hm…” I mumbled, thinking. I’d had some earlier clues that I got a bit incorporeal on this side of the Grey, but I wasn’t sure how much. I was too tired to muck around with the idea, though.
“Did you find anything?” Quinton asked.
“Huh?” I shook myself back to attention. “Not a lot. A tramp in 1949 who said a man named Chuck was killed near the old Duncan and Sons—the cowboy store, he called it. Sounded like the same cause, but he didn’t know anything. And I saw the building that used to stand where Oxy Park is. I don’t know why it seemed odd to see it…”
It was getting later and I felt I’d discovered nothing new about the immediate problem.
“We should get going. There’s nothing else accessible here.”
It was already getting dark under the snowy clouds, so we stopped for lunch—I was ravenous from my exertions in the layers of time—and finished up our exploration of the ground level. Then we descended into the tunnels beneath the sidewalks and alleys in the bricks, and I slid and slipped in and out of fractured time.
The area under Occidental Avenue was thick with memories and with the spectral flames of the fire, but most of the shades I saw there were mere recordings with no ability to answer me. We went up and down the blocks under the street until one ghost caught my eye. I tried to get a better look, but she darted down the alley gallery into which Quinton and I had first dropped with Blue Jay. It felt like weeks ago.
Here, the layers of time were less disarrayed, and I thought I could stay within the current confines of the alley if I pursued the ghost into her own plane of time.
“Keep an eye on me,” I ordered Quinton as I riffled the edges of time, looking for a glimpse of the face I’d spotted.
“Got your back,” he said as I pushed into the bright shock of ghostly summer and slid into the silver fragment of time.
The place wasn’t empty in the cold sunshine of a long-past summer evening. A thin crowd of incorporeal men walked along the mud-floored alley that even in the memory of heat and dry weather stank of waste and spilled alcohol and a seasalt odor of something that had died in the mud long ago. The men wore the rough working clothes of lumberjacks and miners, and they peered into odd little lean-tos built against the backs of the new brick and stone buildings that soared out of the pit of the half-built sidewalks. A few thin girl ghosts sat beside the blanket-covered doorways of the shacks at the bottom of the buildings.