Viewed through the tiny LCD screen of the camera, the courtyard seemed… small. Small and gray. The moonlight robbed the scene of much of its natural colors, but it left its own hues in their place. The camera washed everything out. Laurie made a point of turning around in a slow circle to capture all four corners, letting it play over the iron balcony and the trees and the shrubs and the bench. The girl slipped out of the way of the lens so lightly and naturally that Laurie hadn’t even noticed she’d moved. Probably a good idea.

They were trespassing, after all. Laurie supposed that she herself was also contributing to the delinquency of a minor, or something like that.

“How old are you?” she asked, turning the camera upwards to get a visual record of an ornate cornice supported by scrolled corbels at the top of the wall. Tiny petrified faces leered down at her from between the supports, stone grotesqueries with tongues sticking out of contorted faces. She played the camera back and forth over them, zooming in on one. As unsatisfying as the camera’s view was, she couldn’t see the faces at all with her naked eyes… they were recessed in shadow.

“Three hundred and seventeen years old,” the girl said.

“What?”

“That’s how old they are,” the girl said. “They’re older than the building, but not the courtyard. They were brought over from Spain. See how every third one has its mouth open wider? Those ones are gargoyles.”

“You mean, they function as waterspouts,” Laurie said, getting a close-up of one of the gape-mouthed ones. “I do know something about architecture. So I guess you really are a guide.”

“Sometimes,” the girl said.

“What did you mean, they aren’t older than the courtyard?” Laurie asked. “Was the whole set-up brought over from Spain?”

“No, it was always here,” the girl said.

“So how can it be older than the building?”

“Because it was always here,” the girl repeated.

She couldn’t have said what had motivated her to close her eyes, but it felt right to her… she didn’t want to walk into somebody’s private patio, she wanted to step into a whole separate world. Laurie had spent her whole life… the important years, anyway, since she’d grown up and become more self-aware… looking for something meaningful, something special, something she couldn’t hope to find back home in Iowa.

She shifted forward a bit, wanting to make certain that she was completely past the threshold before she took a look around. She turned her head, too… she wanted to take it all in at once, in a single, slow sweep, starting from a corner that hadn’t been visible from the passageway. She wasn’t consciously planning all this, but that was how she’d seen it in her head.

She opened her eyes… for a moment, she thought somebody must have turned on a light, the moon seemed so bright. But then, she had closed her eyes in a dark space and then stepped out into it. In any case, her vision seemed perfectly adjusted to take in the scene with a sort of surreal hyper clarity. The individual bricks in the building, the cracks in the wooden parts, the spreading moss, the bird bath, the tiny stone bench with the statue of a pig-tailed girl on it, the hardy shrubs, the bare branches of the trees… she took it all in.

There were leaves on the ground, left where they had fallen… undisturbed by either wind or rake, unbroken. Her guide had been right: this place was untouched. Pristine, almost primeval. Though the whole tableau was man-made, she had a feeling like a cave explorer delving into a chamber where no human had ever walked, discovering an ecosystem that had not been disturbed in millennia.

It was silly, of course… all in her head. No. She brushed that thought aside. She wanted this, wanted to see something.

Slowly, the statue turned its head.

That was all… little mentions here and there as a side example of various social trends and social ills, but it was never the focus of anything. Once she’d started paying attention, she had seen the city used as an example of so many things that it seemed plausible that it was every city. Her digging on the net had revealed that Jericho was a proven bellwether almost on par with Vigo County, Indiana or Peoria, Illinois, but little attention was paid to this.

There were nicer, more charming places for the networks to send reporters to take the pulse of the nation than Jericho.

The fact that Jericho was so much like other cities could have explained… or explained away… the lack of interest it attracted at a national level. There was just nothing special about it. It didn’t stand out. It was always an example, never the exemplar. But those words stayed with her: Jericho is every city. Its name still caused her to stop in her tracks and listen whenever she heard it, no matter how trivial the mention.

Web searches had been complicated by the sheer number of places called Jericho… there were two in Vermont alone. Somehow it had always been obvious right away when somebody was talking about the Jericho, her Jericho.

Serious paranormal investigators ignored Jericho the same as everybody else did. There were no electromagnetic anomalies, no unexplained video footage, no thermal images showing inexplicable hot spots or cold spots or room temperature spots. Nothing that one could hold up as something like scientific evidence.

Yet scattered here and there were the odd reports, the eerie stories, and the unverified personal accounts that crept in about all haunted places. Familiar stories: ghostly presences, phantom hitchhikers, black dogs, people disappearing, things vanishing from one spot and appearing in another, strange shops that couldn’t be found by day. Stories told everywhere, universal myths… but for Jericho, myth seemed to be the most real thing she could find.

Two women stood in front of one of the iron gates. One of them was a college-age girl with light brown hair and a powder blue tote bag, in which she had a digital camcorder, a battered copy of the architectural magazine, and print outs from websites with names like “Haunted America”.

She hadn’t been able to find a lot of information about strange things in Jericho on the web, and most of what was there was on amateur websites that were rarely updated and poorly designed… the most popular urban legend site didn’t mention it once.

“So this is it?” the woman asked her guide, a somewhat older woman with dark hair.

“Yeah, this is it,” she said. She gave the iron gate a push and it swung slightly inward. “Lock’s busted. Building’s empty.”

“Are you coming in?”

“No,” she said. “There’s nothing in there I need right now. I don’t go poking around dead spots for fun.”

“Dead spots?” the girl asked.

“Yeah… you ever play ping pong?”

“A little, in college. There was a table in the basement of the dorm.”

“An old one?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Was it all warped and cracked?”

“Yeah,” she said. “There was this one spot that if the ball hit, it wouldn’t bounce right, it would just kind of… stop, and then roll off to the side.”

“A dead spot,” the woman said. “You get those in older tables. Ping pong’s a game of physics… predictable interactions of cause and effect. Then the table starts to warp, and you get spots where the assumptions that normally govern the game stop working. Dead spots.”

Just for a second, the cold night seemed to run a little colder.

“Are… are you coming in?” the girl asked.

“Nah,” the woman said. “If you’re smart, you won’t stick around too long, either. This city’s been getting weird lately. Restless and weird.”

“Yeah, that’s why I’m here,” the girl said. “I actually like weird things.”

“Well, bless your heart.”

A writer for a noted architectural journal once wrote “Jericho is every city.” She had been writing about the incredible diversity of building forms found within its boundaries. The article did not attract a lot of attention, and the writer was shortly thereafter let go. Not for any reason that could be connected to the piece in question, naturally, though she was never able to interest any other publications in her work on the same subject. The national consciousness of America never dwelled on Jericho easily or for long.

She’d had a point, though. The city now called Jericho was among the older in a young country, and its buildings spanned three centuries’ worth of styles. A lot of its residents saw only the grim and gray industrial center of the east and the glass skyscrapers and art deco towers of the west, but these were simply the most recent imprints, like the top layer of an archeological site: a city built over the ruins of a half dozen other cities.

If one looked in the right places, one could find great big Victorian dollhouses, gothic cathedrals, neoclassical monuments, soulless postmodern cubes, and more. There had been a time in the early eighteen hundreds when a vogue sprung up among the wealthy for Mediterranean-style buildings more commonly seen in warmer climes, buildings built around elaborate Spanish courtyards with fountains, statues, and greenery.

These days, many of these buildings still stand. Centuries old, many of them have been refurbished multiple times without much care or attention to historical detail. From the outside, they might not seem any different from the apartment buildings they rub shoulders with. The difference remains in the secret heart of them, the hidden gardens.

If you walk down the street past a big arched passage set in the side of a drab building, closed off with an iron gate and you look through it and catch a glimpse of a splashing fountain or a bronze satyr, congratulations, you’ve found one.