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.

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.