Don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic…

Laurie thought these words to herself frantically over and over again, before realizing that doing this was pretty much a recipe for panic, if not a concise definition of it.

I went the wrong way, she thought. I got turned around and again and stumbled into an almost identical courtyard that’s exactly like the first one except for not having an exit to the street.

Of course that attempt to be reasonable struck her as being completely and ridiculously unreasonable as soon as she’d finished it. It was already weird that there were so many otherwise enclosed courtyards opening onto each other when they were each different, each showing individual styles and touches… the idea that two of them that weren’t directly connected to one another would be so very alike just made the whole thing even harder to credit.

It was strange to her that in her reading on the hidden courtyards of Jericho, she’d never heard about any of them linked together…. but she realized she wasn’t trapped. There were doors that opened into the buildings. They were probably locked, and even if they weren’t, most of them probably they led into place she had even less business being that were dark and probably run down, but not all the buildings were abandoned.

In fact, she realized to her profound relief, she knew one of them was occupied and that the occupants were very likely home and awake.

She headed back into the courtyard where the balcony had the open door, planning out what she would say: Hey, can someone help me? I’m afraid I’m a little lost…

Okay, it would sound weird, but when their backyard was a maze they were probably used to dealing with lost people, people who wandered in and couldn’t find the way out. People looking for a shortcut late at night, or people who were curious about what was behind an iron gate that was left unlocked.

Lost people…

Laurie stepped out from beneath the archway and immediately turned left to head back down the sidewalk, towards better lit streets. She stopped in her tracks when she realized she was looking at a wall an aged and moss-covered wall a short distance ahead.

Even though there are few things less actually startling to be startled by when you are walking at a moderate pace than a wall some distance away, she let out a little yelp, as she was still quite keyed up from thinking spooky thoughts.

While she caught her breath and mentally commanded her heart to behave more reasonably, she turned and looked around, thinking she must have wandered down the wrong covered alley… had there been more than one? There must have been, because she was in another courtyard now. This one was longer and narrower across. It had a fountain that was still undrained and running despite the early freeze a few nights before. It burbled away. A soft orange electric light under the water made the narrow space seem less spooky than it might have been, especially considering that Laurie had not at all expected to stumble into it.

On the second floor and third floors of the buildings surrounding the open space, there were a few dim lights on. A sliding door stood open behind a wrought iron railing, a gauzy curtain moving slightly with the air. It seemed this space was not as abandoned as the other one had been. She decided not to linger, and also not to retreat back to where she wasn’t supposed to be, in case somebody was watching. There was a gap in the wall at the end of the courtyard farthest from where she’d come out, a space between two buildings. Laurie figured that this courtyard was simply not completely enclosed. She headed for that opening thinking she’d find herself on the street within a block of where Marnie had left her company.

Instead, she found a third courtyard.

From the moment she’d made up her mind to come to Jericho, Laurie had worked to prepare herself for anything from disappointment to exultation to outright terror. It had been disappointment that she’d worked on the hardest… the idea that she’d waste her vacation time and her savings on traveling to a strange city and then having nothing happen had seemed so eminently possible. She’d told herself she wouldn’t be too greedy or too skeptical, that even if she stood in a courtyard or a graveyard or an abandoned building at night and nothing happened outwardly she’d accept the experience of being there and be satisfied.

She probably could have, too. Many people are better at justifying a disappointing purchase to themselves than they are admitting it was a waste.

What she hadn’t been prepared for was such a pure anti-climax. It made her whole trip seem like some lame shaggy dog story. Something had happened, something fleeting and real, but mostly fleeting… she hadn’t realized it until it was over. She’d come all the way to the east coast for that?

“Hello?” she said again, just to be sure. She thought about calling the girl’s name, but then she realized she hadn’t caught it. “Is this some sort of a joke?”

In voicing the possibility, she almost convinced herself it was… after all, it seemed so possible. People didn’t just vanish like ghosts.

Ghosts might, though.

She shivered at the thought. What else did you call it, though, when you were talking to somebody in a “spooky” place and then they just up and disappeared? A lot of the hauntings Laurie had read about had only mentioned odd sights and sounds, feelings of “presence”… it was only in older stories, wider-circulated and of a more questionable provenance, that she encountered the ghostly hitchhikers, the helpful strangers who couldn’t be found, and other such persons.

Viewed that way, it seemed like this experience should be more than enough for her.

Was it?

No.

“Wait, what?” Laurie said, wheeling around to look at the girl, inadvertently pointing the camera at her for a second as she pulled it away from her face. “Oh… I get it. Because the courtyard’s just empty space, they didn’t have to ‘build it’, per se, so it was always here.”

“What?” the girl asked.

“The courtyard is just the empty space they built around, so it was ‘always here’,” Laurie said. “Right?”

“I suppose,” the girl said. “But if the courtyard is just empty space, why did you want to come here and see it?”

“Well, I mean… it’s a joke.”

“Oh,” the girl said. She wrinkled her nose. “It’s not very funny.”

Laurie stared at her.

“What?” the girl asked.

“It’s your joke,” Laurie said.

“Oh. I don’t think I’m very good at telling jokes, then.”

“I guess not,” Laurie said, and she began filming again. “What else can you tell me about this place?”

“What have I told you so far?”

“That the stone faces were brought over from Spain,” Laurie said.

“Were they?” the girl asked.

“You said they were,” Laurie said. “Gah, what are you even doing here… are you just jerking me around?”

“You mean like, pulling on your strings?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“I don’t think so,” the girl said. “I haven’t done that for a while. But just to be sure, why are you here?”

“Me?” Laurie said, playing the camera over the walls again. “I’m here because… I don’t know. I want to see something, to do something… something interesting, something unusual, something… transcendent, maybe. I don’t know.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Because my life has always been boring, but I don’t want to believe that the whole world is that way?” Laurie said. “I read about the paranormal, I hear about other people having encounters, but I never do. Just once, I wanted to see something fantastic… if not that, then at least unusual and hard to explain. You know?”

There was no response.

Laurie let out a yelp, which she quickly stifled… the last thing she wanted was to be caught trespassing… though she wasn’t at all sure if that was the worst thing that could happen. The figure said nothing, did not rise or even move anything beyond its head, which it cocked sideways, one messy pigtail drooping against its shoulder, and gradually Laurie became aware that it wasn’t a statue but a girl. Why had she ever thought otherwise? Perhaps because she hadn’t expected to find anyone sitting in the hidden garden at night… because she had expected statues, because the girl had been so still, and because the meager allotment of moonlight which lit up the courtyard robbed the scene of most of its color.

“Hi… hi,” Laurie stammered. “Um, are you a friend of Marnie’s?”

“Marnie doesn’t have friends,” the girl said. She kicked her legs… her feet were covered with striped stockings, but bereft of shoes. “Not really. She uses and is used in turn. One day, she’ll be all used up and… poof.”

“Poof?” Laurie repeated.

“The end of the magic act,” the girl said. “The grand finale.”

“What’s that?”

“The lady vanishes.”

Laurie shivered.

“But you know her?” Laurie said. “Did she send you here?”

“Where?”

“Here,” Laurie said. “She brought me here, but she wouldn’t come in… were you here waiting for me?”

The girl thought about it a bit, then nodded rather solemnly.

“Oh,” Laurie said. “That’s… nice.”

Before, she would have sworn up and down that she would rather have had a guide to help her in her late-night exploration, but now she wasn’t so sure. She quickly fished her camera out of her bag… not only would it give her a record of her exploration, it would help her focus on her surroundings… what she was there for, not the girl.

“Have you seen my shoes?” the girl asked conversationally.

“No, are they nice?”

“I don’t know,” the girl said. “I haven’t seen them, either.”