Revenant

THREE

I was in a tiny courtyard facing iron gates across an expanse of cobbles. A car no bigger than a shoe was parked on the cobbles to my left next to a small fountain in the shape of a leonine face mounted to the tiled wall of the courtyard. The fountain looked slightly surprised to see me as water dribbled out of its oval mouth into the small basin of carved stone beneath it. I waved at it and walked over to unlatch the gates and let myself into the street. I used the key to lock the gates behind me—the ironwork looked like the vines of Sleeping Beauty’s castle, closing out the world from a secret realm within. I took note of the number carved into the stone above the gateway and started down the steep, stone-paved street. I tried to tuck my things into my skirt pockets, but the keys were too large to stay securely in the shallow spaces. I put them into the purse and folded Rafa’s map into my pocket instead.

At a bend in the street, I paused to read the street’s name off a tiled plaque on a wall. I checked the map, turned to continue on my way, and found myself looking out at a sea of red-tiled roofs and hidden courtyards, tumbling in a maze of streets down the slope toward a wide band of glittering water that must have been the Tagus River. For a moment I just stood there and stared at it. The hill was so steep that the houses were almost like terraces in a photo of Asian rice paddies, each little bastion bounded by its own short sweep of walls that fell sharp and straight down to the next. The angles were all higgledy-piggledy and random, like the honeycomb of disturbed bees. And they were old . . . so old that the narrow, twisted streets thronged with more of the dead than the living—the dead of centuries stretching back so far, I couldn’t even guess the eras. They climbed, ran, strolled, and urged their beasts of burden through the stone-paved passages, between tall houses real and ghostly, their collective voices twining into the noise of the Grid as a song both beautiful and sad that coiled through the twisted streets like fog. The houses they passed, current and not, were mostly plastered in cream, red, blue, and yellow, the colors faded and peeling from the unremitting sun. The rest were covered in tiles glazed with repeating geometric patterns that crazed the eye, broken by symmetrical ranks of windows with small iron balconies strung with drying laundry, or piled with flower boxes drooping red and purple blossoms over their filigreed metal sides. Here and there, the ghost of an older house or a terraced Moorish garden of tiled fountains and orange trees hung over another, but the overlay of phantom buildings was rare—at least from the outside.

I couldn’t afford to stand and stare, but it was a hard sight to turn from, so unlike anything American. I had to keep an eye on my feet as I continued down the road, the twisting slope so long and precipitous that it made the Counterbalance up Queen Anne Avenue North in Seattle look like a speed bump. I was glad it wasn’t raining, as it would have been at home. The dust in the road was dry and tamped down too much to make the sidewalks of laid flat stones slippery with grit. All stone and plaster, wood and iron, Alfama was old the way things in the Americas never are.

I wended my way down until I passed through an arch in a wall and out into a sort of arrow-shaped intersection of two narrow streets shaded with trees. A sign on the wall to my left gave information about the Castelo de São Jorge, which now lay behind me. I could no longer see the river and I wasn’t sure which direction I was facing. I looked at Rafa’s map and recognized the switchback hard on my right where the pedestrian path doubled back on itself, past a row of shops, and downward to a flatter bit of road. My shins and knees ached from the activity after so many hours of lying still.

I rounded the corner and the river reappeared as an aqua ribbon that seemed to float above the end of the street as if the paving rolled down into it. It didn’t. The street turned abruptly after a block—though “block” was a complete misnomer here—and I turned to my right with it and continued.

The route was necessarily twisted and longer than the distance point to point, but with a few more turns and a walk past a small triangular plaza created by the high, pink-painted embankments that held up the streets, I was into much flatter streets that first went down and then rose gently upward again, turning away from the river. The architecture changed from the close-packed old houses of Alfama and its yellow stone walls to broader, younger buildings with flat fronts and stone pediments—a sort of plain-Jane version of Baroque.

The road was covered in tarmac now instead of cobbles, but the sidewalks were still paved in small squares of pale stone. The farther I walked, the wider the doors and windows of the buildings became, evolving slowly toward the eighteenth century and away from the medieval maze of the castle’s hill. This road was mostly shops at street level. Ground-floor frontages were more frequently of dressed stone than painted plaster, though the tiling continued in fits. One front I passed had a vibrantly glazed tile mural of fish and seaweed. Signs from the simple to the slick hung over doorways, businesses as divergent as a sleek contemporary furniture retailer side by side with hole-in-the-wall taverns and shops selling medicines and herbs.

I tired to puzzle out some of the words as I passed, some like the Spanish I had grown up with in Southern California, but many more utterly meaningless. English words stood out in odd places, “snack bar” and “seaside” jostling with words like “malhas.” I wondered what a “mundo das malhas” was. “World of Sweaters,” judging by the window display—an item I wasn’t feeling much use for at that moment, even on the shady side street that was busy with the cold spirits of merchants and farmers driving goods to some long-gone marketplace.

An old-fashioned-looking yellow tram clanged its bell and rattled along the tracks in the street past me as I stepped out into a large public square shrouded in the memory of several past buildings that had disappeared long ago to leave the acre or so in the middle nearly empty. One of these buildings was a Victorian monstrosity that reminded me a little, in kind more than style, of London’s Smithfield Market. Another was a much older building I couldn’t peg. A bronze statue of someone I took to be a soldier or a statesman was riding his bronze horse on a huge white stone plinth beside a tree off to the side of the square’s central expanse of white and gray stone tiles. There was no tarmac or road paint here. Every street and sidewalk surface was paved in the black or white stone squares, right down to the lane markers and pedestrian crossing lines. I turned right and paused, looking in the window of the World of . . . whatever, sweating a little from the change of exertion and the heat rising in the nearly shadeless square. The buildings facing the square were much more formal than the areas I’d already walked through, the shops giving off a higher-class sheen. This was saying quite a bit, since the last few blocks had been increasingly swanky in the modern era, in spite of being more working-class in the lingering past.

A sign placed high on the wall at the corner told me I was at Praça da Figueira. I looked at Rafa’s map again, having almost missed my destination because she’d drawn a tiny picture of the statue, but not the square it was standing in. The drawing was very good and even caught the way the plume on the rider’s head seemed to be flowing in the wind of his movement. The address I wanted was number seven. According to the map, it was somewhere on the long expanse of Baroque buildings facing the horse’s backside, but there wasn’t anything that instantly stood out to my sight as likely to be a doll hospital.

The openness of the square made me a little nervous about meeting Quinton here. There was no way to approach any of the shops, restaurants, or hotels without being in the open, and while the businesses on the square were moderately busy and traffic was heavy enough to qualify as the run-up to what passed for rush hour in Lisbon, it wasn’t exactly New York or Los Angeles busy. The cars, buses, and trams were more of a problem than the people, since the sidewalks had little raised curb to speak of and pedestrians were separated from the vehicular traffic by upright metal posts about hip high, placed every five feet or so along the white sidewalk edge.

As I stood at the corner, I saw a small car swoop around a bus by hiking its two closest wheels up on the edge of the curb where there weren’t any uprights and drive half up on the sidewalk, honking its horn like a frustrated goose before bolting back into traffic to a cacophony of other horns and outraged curses from some of the pedestrians. Not all the pedestrians seemed upset or even surprised, however, even as they scattered away from the pushy little car. Two older women wearing black dresses simply stepped aside, watched the disturbance, and shook their heads. Then they shrugged, and walked on, their shopping bags hanging limply off their arms as they chattered to each other, heads turned inward.

I went into the sweater shop, buying time and hoping to get a better look at the area without being too conspicuous. The air-conditioning was on and I shivered in the sudden cool. An attractive middle-aged woman wished me bom dia and seemed to be offering assistance, but I wasn’t sure. She might have been asking if I liked cashmere socks for all I knew. I apologized for my lack of Portuguese, and she replied in unhalting English in the same not-quite-Spanish accent Rafa had.

“Oh, are you American?”

“I’m from Connecticut,” I replied, picking a state at random.

She seemed puzzled. “That is in the United States?”

“It’s on the East Coast, near New York.”

“Oh! Yes, I know New York. You will have beautiful autumn leaves soon. Perhaps you’ll want a warm shawl to take home,” she said, turning her hand gracefully toward a rack hung with folded lengths of knitted silk and wool, some so intricate and fine that they looked like lace.

“They’re lovely, but, in fact, I’m lost.”

She seemed disappointed but rallied a smile anyhow. “Perhaps I can help you with that. What place were you looking for?”

“The doll hospital.”

Her smile broadened, showing teeth that were clean and white, but more crooked than most Americans’—I’d noticed that our dental fetish doesn’t extend much past Canada. “Ah! O Hospital de Bonecas! It is on the north side, near the Nestlé kiosk—the blue ice-cream bar.” She walked me outside and pointed up the square to the small blue lump of a prefab vendor’s booth with a yellow post sticking out of its roof at an angle. I’d thought it was a newsstand, but I could just make out the word NESTLÉ on the post—which I supposed to be the stick of a blue-wrapped frozen dessert. The bright little building sat just inside the pedestrian bollards, almost daring cars or buses to swipe it. “The hospital’s door is just behind the kiosk,” the clerk said, “past A Coutada—the hunting shop—and next to the jeweler in the building with the tiles.”

“Thank you,” I said, giving her a smile since I had nothing else.

She returned a smile and a slight shrug. “De nada. I hope you enjoy it.”

I thanked her and walked up the arcade in the general direction she’d pointed, since it would have been suicidal to try to cross the street diagonally with the current traffic. In the empty center I could see the black shade of the now-gone market building hanging over the large shape of the older building, which seemed to heave and fall apart like a time-lapse film, over and over, accompanied by the rumbling and shrieking of destruction and the sobbing of mourners. Having grown up in Southern California, I knew the sound of an earthquake when I heard it, even at accelerated speed. I remembered Carlos saying that Lisbon had experienced a devastating quake in the mid-eighteenth century and it had been partially his doing. If this shadowy disaster film was part of that, it was far worse than what my imagination had originally conjured. The ancient building collapsed into rubble in minutes, crushing people inside and tumbling stones into the street to kill still more. Then great waves of seawater rolled over the wreckage and away again, leaving everything that remained to be engulfed in sudden flames that turned the water to steam. The conflagration spread from other buildings up the road, sprouting from broken gas lamps. The dead and their shattered homes burned while more people screamed and ran and died, until the horror faded into smoke and the loop of disaster began again, spinning forward the history of devastation in minutes before my appalled gaze. I shook myself and kept walking—it wouldn’t do to call attention by gawking at nothing. I hoped we wouldn’t be staying long in Lisbon.

I turned at the corner and crossed the road to the north arcade, keeping my sight on the shop fronts to my right, away from the continuous loop of phantom disaster. I glanced in the window of a restaurant, which only reminded me how long it had been since I’d eaten. The hunting and fishing store was just past the restaurant and several signs for the Pensão Praça da Figueira—which advertised ROOMS! in English, so I assumed it was some kind of hotel.

I overshot the door with the green sign hand-painted on the inside of the glass above that read HOSPITAL DE BONECAS 1830 ERVANÁRIA PORTUGUESA. An old woman dressed in black sat in a chair outside, stitching the neck of a cloth doll together where it had torn at the shoulder and was spitting forth buds of wooly stuffing. She was little more than a shadow under the canvas awning, but to me she was as obvious as if she were still alive. “Você certamente levou muito tempo para chegar aqui,” she muttered, her voice coming slow and creaking. In my head I heard the sentiment, roughly translated as “You took your time getting here.”

I didn’t dare drop toward the Grey to talk to her more easily, but strolled a step backward to look into the window of the jewelry shop next door. “And why do you care?” I muttered in reply. I saw something black and glimmering, far away above the buildings, that soared into the sky and fell back toward earth, leaving trails of Grey like cirrus clouds.

“Much to mend, much to fix. Little time,” the old ghost replied, still watching the fabric between her fingers as she set tiny stitches into the doll’s neck. “Os Magos do Osso.”

I turned my head to give her a more-direct stare, letting my curiosity about the black thing in the sky go. Her words had a ring of memory in them that chimed on words Carlos had used, even though the two phrases sounded nothing alike. “Kostní Mágové,” I said. Bone Mages.

She nodded, not looking up, and faded away.

I took that as my cue to go inside.

The space was narrow and made more so by a large floor-to-ceiling glass case filled with old dolls, miniatures, and toys that seemed to watch me as I entered. Not far back from the door lay a staircase. Signs reading MUSEU and OFICINA PARA RESTAUROS pointed up the stairs. There wasn’t enough room on the ground floor to hide a potted plant in, much less Quinton, so I went up the stairs.

The first room was mostly a shop, with displays of dollhouse miniatures, doll clothes, and a plethora of accessories. It was all high quality—no cheap plastic, mass-produced junk—and a lot of it looked handmade. Layer on layer of ghostly children wandered through the displays. Behind a counter at the back were ceiling-high niches in which sat dozens of dolls and stuffed toys of every description and age, from near-new Barbies to ancient teddy bears and porcelain-headed ladies in fancy dresses. Most of them watched me with phantom eyes.

I walked up another flight of stairs to the hospital itself, where dolls and toys were taken in with loving care by the white-coated staff, who marked a number on the bottoms of their feet or tied a paper tag to the leg to identify them later and then carried them off to be “operated” on at white tables. Glass-fronted drawers held disembodied doll parts: heads, legs, arms, eyes. . . . It gave me the willies.

I was unnerved enough by the dismembered dolls that I jumped when Quinton spoke into my ear. “It’s a little disturbing, isn’t it?”

I whirled to glare at him. He caught me by the shoulders, saying, “God, I missed you,” and kissed me. It was a long, hard kiss that made my already wobbly knees go weak. Quinton had to haul me tight against his body so I wouldn’t slither to the floor and that was not at all disagreeable. Nearby a small child made a sound of disgust, which is the same in any language: “Eww . . .” We both gave the child—a little girl with a mop of short, dark curls—a stern look. She turned away to chase after her mother, saying something in Portuguese that was probably, “Those people are kissing!” because her mother laughed and shot us a curious glance.

Quinton stiffened in my arms, staring for a second at the little girl as she grabbed onto her mother’s hand.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, taking a small step back from him.

Quinton shook himself. “She looks so much like Soraia. . . .”

“Who?”

“My niece. My sister’s daughter. My father kidnapped her.”

“What?” I asked, appalled.

“That was my reaction. I’ll tell you as we go.”

Even angry and a bit shaken, he looked good to me. I hadn’t seen him in months. He’d cut his hair again, so it didn’t quite hit his shoulders, and had trimmed his beard much smaller and narrower, so he managed to look both shaggy and fashionable at the same time. His clothes were a little more fashion-conscious also, but not enough to stand out in a crowd of Europeans. He was carrying a small-brimmed black hat and a smaller version of his usual backpack that looked more like a portfolio or messenger bag.

We went downstairs together and Quinton paused to put on his hat as I slipped outside in the Grey to take a look around. I didn’t see a sign of anything immediately threatening, although the constant replay of Lisbon’s earthquake left me feeling disquieted.