The girl’s voice sounded very sad, very small as she said that… she sounded at once completely empty and yet also full of woe.

What does a wind blow, Laurie thought to herself, if it blows no good?

Bad?

That seemed less than poetic, somehow. Evil? Evil was something that people did. Unfortunate things could happen, terrible things… but they weren’t evil.

So what did the east wind blow for people, if it blew no one good?

Bad luck, maybe. Misfortune. Sorrow.

“Woe,” Laurie said. “Your name is Woe. Is that… that’s your name.” She had almost asked if she was right, but of course, that wasn’t the point of the exercise. “I name you Woe. You seem very woeful to me.”

The girl nodded solemnly, gravely.

“Is that a good name for you?” Laurie asked her.

“It works,” the girl said.

Laurie waited for her to say something more, or to do something, but the girl just stood there, statue-still.

“So… now what?” Laurie asked.

“Do you still not know?”

“I don’t know anything,” Laurie said again.

“Well.. what do you want to do?”

“I want to do something exciting,” Laurie said. “Something magical.”

It hit her as she said this that she had been doing something that could fit that description since she first wandered into the maze of courtyards. It just hadn’t been quite what she’d expected, and she hadn’t reacted to it the way she’d always imagined that she would if she encountered something wondrous and inexplicable.

The problem was that even if the world was a strange and magical place, she herself was neither strange nor magical. She was simply herself: ordinary and somewhat prone to fear.

“No, strike that,” she said. “I want to be someone exciting. I want to be someone magical. Someone like you.”

“Someone like me?” Woe repeated.

“Well, not exactly you,” Laurie said. She didn’t say “someone a little happier.” That seemed rude. “But magical, like you.”

“You want to be a witch?”

“Well, then,” the girl said to Laurie, “I guess you know what you have to do, then.”

“What?” Laurie asked. “What do I have to do?”

“Oh… I thought you knew,” the girl said. She sounded disappointed.

“Look, I don’t know anything,” Laurie said.

Her voice was getting louder, less controlled. It echoed off the walls of the buildings around them. It wasn’t that she was no longer at all concerned by the thought that she might be discovered trespassing in somebody’s courtyard. It was simply that other emotions were rising up within her, conflicting with that anxiety.

“Well… that’s the first thing,” the girl said.

“What’s the first thing?”

“Knowing nothing,” the girl said.

“Is this a philosopher thing?” Laurie asked her.

“I think over here, they’re called sorcerers,” the girl said. “I’m pretty sure I heard that somewhere. I don’t know, though… and that’s what’s important. It’s the first magic.”

“Not knowing things… is magic?”

“Of course,” the girl said. “But I don’t have to tell you this. You said: it’s like there’s a door, and there could be anything behind it. As long as you don’t know, anyway. As soon as you find out…” She stuck out a closed fist, then turned it over and opened it, revealing… nothing. “Poof. Nothing. Or not anything terribly interesting anyway.”

“What’s your name?” Laurie asked.

“It could be anything,” the girl said.

“What is it, though?”

“It could be… Eurus,” the girl said. She enunciated the “eu” sound very clearly.

“That sounds Greek,” Laurie said. “It also sounds like a boy’s name. But that’s not your name, is it? It could be your name, but so could anything.”

The girl nodded.

“Name me,” she said.

“Is this a test?” Laurie asked.

“It could be.”

“What happens if I fail it?” Laurie asked.

“Anything could happen,” the girl said. “You don’t know.”

“This is a magic thing, isn’t it?” Laurie asked. “Naming.”

“You don’t know?” the girl prodded her.

“Then I guess it is.”

Laurie had always had an active imagination as a youngster. She’d believed in Santa Claus for a few years longer than most of the children she shared classes with, because she’d never questioned the impossibilities. Her mind had been quite agile enough to deal with the utter contradictions posed by such a being’s existence.

When a book… even the most ridiculous children’s book… presented itself as a story that had really truly happened, she had always been willing to take it at is word.

Even when it didn’t, young Laurie had tended to suspect that maybe it had really happened somewhere, at some time.

She’d believed in monsters, too. Under the bed. Inside the closet. Under porches, after one Halloween prank from her brother. Even knowing his hand had grabbed her, she still believed there could be monsters.

That child had grown into a sucker… no other word for it… for urban legends and tall tales. Eventually, she’d come to accept that Bloody Mary wouldn’t come no matter what you did in front of a mirror in a dark room. She’d never tried it, if only because by the time she wasn’t terrified by the thought of doing so, she’d already resigned herself to the fact that it and all the other stories she’d heard and collected and breathlessly repeated were just that: stories.

She’d never grown out of her fascination with them, though, and in time she’d acquired a more mature taste. Parapsychology. It was a real thing. Colleges gave degrees for it. There were no ghosts dragging people down to hell, but there were hauntings. They’d been reported, studied, verified. There were unexplained phenomena. Nothing too big and obvious and flashy, of course, but that was probably what kept it unexplained.

Her mature fascination had led her to this, but now, standing out in the cold and paralyzed with fear and indecision, she wondered if she’d really grown up, or had she only painted a grown-up veneer over her childhood fears?

It was time to be methodical, Laurie decided. She couldn’t manage to keep calm, she may or may not have been edging slowly away from rationality, but if she could be methodical about what she was doing, that would as good as faking those other things. She headed back through the arched and lantern-lit passage towards the first courtyard… or the courtyard that was very much like the first one, except for not having an outlet onto the street. She looked around it very carefully, verifying that there was no outlet except the one that led to the long courtyard with the lighted fountain and the balcony with the open door. There wasn’t. She looked very carefully around that courtyard, making sure there wasn’t another arched passageway with lanterns and a grate on the ground and a puddle. There wasn’t. So far, so good.

Except there should have been, there had to be, because she’d walked from the first courtyard to this one…

She pushed that thought away. Either her situation was irrational, or she was. All she could do was stay methodical. There were only two exits from where she was: the one she’d checked, and the far end. The courtyard it opened into had two exits, too, which she had not yet fully explored. All she had to do was pick a method and stick with it, like… take every right turn she came to, until she came to a dead end.

Dead end, her mind shrieked. Dead and ended. Ended in death.

If she came to one, of course, it was a simple matter of backtracking.

That had been real simple so far.

And if all else failed, she’d call for help from the people inside the balcony door.

If she was allowed to find her way back to it.

Or at any other window or door she found that showed sins of life.

Signs of habitation were not necessarily signs of life.

She could always consider a different method.