Possession

EIGHT

It was twelve blocks to the market Hill Climb if I continued on the waterfront. I’m not usually bothered by that sort of distance, but it was nearly five o’clock and while the summer sun might linger, the 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 everybody. You tell ’em Mae sent you,” she added with a gleeful cackle.

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 plumb sure of it,” she said, turning away, cackling and fading from my sight.

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-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 do believe in ghosts.”

“Oh. Well then. Yeah, the place is practically a ghost hotel.”

I just looked at him. He glanced aside, giving a rueful smile. “Really. You work here long enough, you start to believe in the strange.” He looked back at me and offered his hand. “Hey, I’m Derek Russell. I didn’t mean to tease you. Sorry. Apology accepted?”

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 the summer.”

So that’s what the red note on the ground had been. It certainly explained why it was not only rife with memories and spirits but right on a ley line—music and the Grey have a lot in common and strong emotions and powerful actions are always associated with ley lines. “What did you mean ‘a one or a two’? Is that a measure of popularity or priority or something?”

“Oh no. There are numbers painted in yellow indicating how many can work on that location. Any performer can work any location solo, but bigger groups can only work where the number is the same or higher than their group size.”

“Clever.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“But what stops the buskers from just wedging in as many people as they can?”

“Aside from the fire marshal? It’s not practical in a lot of spots even if it looks big enough. You want to slow traffic, but not stop it. Most of the buskers are good about sharing and keeping the spaces clean and not overloading the area. There are always a few who don’t play well with others, but they don’t last.”

“Do you know a lot of the buskers?”

“Not so many. I don’t have an assistant most of the time, so I don’t get to go out of the shop much to meet folks. Andy’s here today, or I wouldn’t have been out there to catch you.”

“Oh. And thank you for that. Do you know if any of the buskers have been injured in the past . . . six months or so?”

Russell shrugged. “I’m afraid I really don’t. You’d have to ask them. They’d know. A lot of them will have gone for the day by now—though they might move down to the waterfront until it gets dark.”

“Is there anyplace they hang out?” I asked.

“Oh . . . I’m not sure. If you’re looking for someone, your best bet would be to ask at the market office, or just start asking the buskers at the notes. Someone will know, eventually.”

A high-pitched whistling cut through the air of the shop. Russell looked toward it. “Oh . . . damn. I have to go find out what Andy’s broken this time. I’m sorry to bunk off. Are you OK now?”

I smiled and stood up, offering the tissues and water bottle back to him. “I’m fine. Thanks, Derek.”

He took the tissues, but waved the water bottle away. “You keep that. And good luck with your search. If you ever need a magic trick or a stuffed elder god, drop back by. OK?”

“OK.”

I suspect he was just as glad to see me go—spooky women who believe in ghosts can be bad for business.

I got out of the shop and up into the market proper without being sucked back into visions of the past, though I was rushed and bumped by torrents of ghosts, including more children and gruffer adults who seemed preoccupied and confused, even for the dead. I chose the longer route out of Down Under, coming up the stairs on the west side of the building that overlooked Western Avenue, rather than braving the ramp again.