The combination of the masonry buildings and the pit made me think I had to be in a time after the fire but before they covered the sidewalks, so I must have been in the reconstruction—about when the deaths had first started. I knew they’d raised the street level to accommodate modern plumbing and get the roads above the high-tide mark, and I’d seen the original first floors of the buildings near Quinton’s bunker, but it hadn’t occurred to me until I was standing in it that the sidewalks and alleys had lain below the street for a while, forming canyons around every block until whenever the new sidewalks had been built to connect the new street level to… I glanced up and saw fancy doorways complete with lintels and footings just hanging from the sides of the buildings one floor above me, waiting for the sidewalks to come to them like sand washed seasonally onto a rocky beach.
This alley deep in the lava beds had become a row of cribs—cheap bunks for the lowest class of prostitutes to turn their trade in. Men too poor, too vicious, or too low-down to go to one of the many famed and infamous brothels of Seattle trawled this sunken, ghastly place for the most pitiful and desperate women, hidden from disapproving middle-class eyes by the sheer walls of the rising roads and stone buildings. I felt a little sickened. If one of the ghostly girls had any free will, then I’d found a possible witness right at the source. I’d have to talk to her—I couldn’t back away from the job because I found the setting distasteful—but I did wish I didn’t have to know this place.
One of the men stopped to bargain with one of the girls—a tiny Asian who looked about sixteen. The girl didn’t seem frightened of the bigger white man in his rough clothes, just tired, and she nodded to him and they went into the lean-to behind them. I felt a flush of anger and disgust and had to remind myself that this was the past and there was nothing I could do to change it.
I’d noticed that the ghosts who could interact usually wanted to—almost seemed compelled to, as if the opportunity to break their endless routine of memory was like a flame to a proverbial moth. They had come to me in the recent past for help; now I’d come to them. I didn’t like manipulating them, but I would do what I had to to get the information I needed.
I looked around and saw one of the young prostitutes flinch, startled at seeing me. She was the girl I’d spotted earlier, I was sure. I darted down the alley to the crib the girl was edging into and stopped a few feet in front of her, trying to catch her eye.
“Don’t go. I won’t hurt you, I just want to talk to you.”
The girl shook her head, twin black braids flying outward, and stepped backward farther. She was wearing a thin, ragged calico dress that brushed over her bare feet. I looked harder at her. She was Native American and I was a strangelooking towering white woman in an alley full of ethnic child prostitutes. I shouldn’t have been surprised she was intimidated.
I squatted down, smothering a wince, in the stinking memory of the unfinished alleyway, bringing my head down below hers. I was appalled at how young she looked—twelve, maybe? None of the men or other girls in the alley took notice of me—one of the men stepped right through me, raising a hard shiver on my back.
The girl backed up to the edge of the entry flap. “No, spirit, go. I should not talk to you.”
I put out my hands, palms up, resting on my knees, so she could see I didn’t have anything in them to hide. “I need your help.”
She made a face. “What help?” she spat. She feared I was trying to trick her—I’d seen that in the living often enough.
“I’m trying to find… a creature. A monster that shouldn’t be here. I want to make it go away. It hurts people—kills them. It killed people here, now.”
The girl jerked back a little farther. “A zeqwa?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. It’s a monster.”
“A monster,” the girl said, nodding and shuffling a little closer. Her English was accented and clumsy. “A zeqwa.” She shook her head with exasperated pity and squatted down in front of me. “Foolish spirit, you. Many zeqwa. Some eat children.” All right, so a monster was a zeqwa and there were a lot of different kinds. Which one was I looking for?
“Some do,” I agreed. “This one eats anyone it can find. It can chew through rocks and it catches people and it eats some of them and some it… makes walk after death. Do you know about it?”
She shook her head. “Not eating or making the walker. But I see Sistu in the water and on the land. I see him in the…” She waved her hand to indicate the depth of the alley and the enclosing buildings. “In this place.”
“What is Sistu? What kind of zeqwa?” I asked, knowing I was frowning with interest and the growing throb in my bent knee and hoping I wasn’t frightening her.
“Monster. A…” She made a motion with both hands that I couldn’t quite understand. Seeing my confusion, she stuck a finger in the mud and made a long, sinuous line and hissed.
“A snake,” I said.
“Bigger than snake!” she snapped. “Big as you stand.”
“A serpent… a sea serpent?”
“Yes! But he comes on the land, too. Three heads. One like a snake on each end, one like a man in the middle. Many, many teeth. Very hungry, very strong. His blood can turn you to stone. His stare make you freeze. I see Sistu in the dark here below.”
“Where did he come from? Where does he live?”
The girl shook her head. “He lives in the pool. He come from the water.” Then she looked over my shoulder and I felt the presence of a ghost nearly on top of me.
I stood, turning and stepping aside as the ghost of a man in work clothes stopped where I’d been crouching. He held out his hand, the phantom sun sending a spark from the coins in it.
The girl ghost stood up and took the coins, looking at them suspiciously. Then, smiling mechanically, she let the man follow her into the crib. As the curtain over the doorway fell, I saw her expression became unseeing and blank as the fragment of time curled on itself in the repetition of her endless loop of memory.
I backed away before I reached out, grabbing for the edges of the temporacline, and slid out of the slice of history, gritting my teeth against impotent fury, frustration, and the grinding ache of old injuries.
I stumbled back into the haunted corridor beneath the street and bumped into Quinton. I could feel the tension in my jaw as I brushed past him. “Get me out of here.”
“What happened?” he asked, catching up to me in a few strides and then passing me to lead the way out.
“I found the ghost of a child prostitute—Indian. She said she saw a zeqwa—a monster—called Sistu about the time of the first deaths.”
“Is it the one we’re looking for?”
“I don’t know. The timing’s right, but she said it’s a sea serpent of some kind with three heads.”
“And you don’t think a three-headed sea serpent is very likely to have done this?”
I felt myself growling and stopped to take a deep breath—or three—and calm down. “I don’t know. Her description doesn’t make sense to me. She must have been twelve! A kid!”
He put his hands on my shoulders. “Shh… Harper. She was a kid, but you can’t do anything about that. Not now. Let’s find out about this monster. Then we’ll have something more to go on. Now, be stealthy or someone may catch us coming up from here.”
I stifled myself and limped after Quinton.
I’d managed to avoid any dire filth this time, so we got a table in Zeitgeist Coffee. We cleaned up and sat down to figure out what to do next.