Echo City

by Layla Lawlor

  "I don't expect a big shiny building full of paid employees. I just want to find someone my roommate can talk to who won't think she's crazy when she tells them a tentacle monster tried to eat her."

  "Maybe she could just talk to us, if that would help?" Irmingard suggested. "We wouldn't mind meeting her. If you like her, she's probably nice."

  "Have you asked Muirin?" Millie asked.

  "I haven't even seen Muirin all week. I don't suppose you guys have heard from her?"

  Millie shook her head. "Ah," she said. "Here we are."

  She left the path, such as it was, and pushed through the weeds to a crumbling concrete wall as high as my waist. I couldn't tell what it had originally been part of.

  "Here's a useful thing, if you don't already know it." Irmingard pointed low on the graffiti-covered wall. Among the penises and phone numbers, she indicated a little chalk drawing of an old-fashioned key, the iconic sort with a circle and a line and small dangling teeth. "Doors are often marked. It won't always be a sign like that, but it will usually be something to do with passing from one place to another. Look for symbols of doors and windows, bridges, things of that nature."

  Behind the wall was a rusty access cover made of ancient-looking diamond plate steel. A bright new padlock secured its flaking hasp. "Private, you'll notice," Millie said, flashing me a quick smile and shaking out her keys. "At least as much as I can make it. This won't take us to Harlem, but it's nearby; we can get there easily." The padlock opened, and she added, "This is a one-way gate, so we won't be able to get back this way. But I know several exits that come out around here."

  The three of us climbed down into the dark space under the trapdoor, a concrete-lined utilidor about four feet deep. My bruised hip had healed completely—as one useful side effect of the sword, I heal faster than normal—so I was able to do it easily, though I had to crouch uncomfortably at the bottom. Irmingard was the only one of us who could stand up. I scuffed my hand through a dusty clot of trash and dead leaves along the verge where wall met floor. The floor was bone-dry, but obviously there had been past flooding, judging by the debris and the white watermarks on the walls.

  I helped Millie pull the trapdoor back into place. There were a few inches of play between the sheet of steel and its concrete setting; Millie snaked a hand through this gap to click the padlock back into place. We were in near-total darkness for a moment, until Millie turned on a penlight attached to her keychain. Cupping it in her hand, she slid her fingers along the wall and detached a chunk of concrete to expose a black recess within. "Ah," she murmured in satisfaction, "still there."

  She pulled out a long bundle wrapped in heavy plastic, and unwrapped a huge, double-barreled, sawed-off shotgun. I'd thought Fresca's shotgun was intimidating, but this thing looked like an elephant gun.

  "I thought you said it was safe."

  Millie grinned and slung it over her shoulder, awkwardly kneeling under the low ceiling. "I said it's safe as long as you take sensible precautions. This is one of those precautions. I'll be handling our security detail, since Irmingard fancies herself a housewife—"

  "I'm a kobold; I can't fight," Irmingard said a bit snippishly. Clearly it was a longstanding disagreement between them. "We're nesters, not explorers. It's not in us."

  "Uh-huh. I've seen you kick guys three times your size in the balls, so quit it with the biological-destiny bullshit."

  "Sneak attacks from behind are a different story," Irmingard said. "We're good at that."

  "You're a person. People can learn to do whatever they want. To be whatever they want." Millie rolled her eyes at Irmingard and gestured with the penlight. "Shall we?"

  The downward-sloping, dead black utility corridor gave my nascent claustrophobia a sharp tweak, but almost immediately the ceiling lifted until we could walk comfortably, and another couple of minutes brought us into a corridor lit with bright fluorescent strips. Millie pushed open a steel door. There was an art gallery on the other side.

  It wasn't any of the famous ones, just a little private gallery. A stark, simple space—white walls, polished hardwood floor—showcased a small collection of abstract canvases and sculptures made from curving, unpainted steel. Seth would have felt right at home here.

  Most of the people wandering around were very faint ghosts, stepping slowly from one painting to another, and occasionally, to my discomfort, walking through each other. One woman in a chic gray pantsuit, more solid than the rest, glanced at us and then turned back to the canvases; clearly we interested her less than the art display. Personally, I thought I'd be a bit less blasé if I saw three dust-covered ruffians, one of them toting a giant shotgun, wander into an art gallery, but maybe that happens every day in Shadow New York.

  "This is SoHo, somewhere around 1997," Millie said. "Harlem—the Harlem you want, I mean—is just a couple of crossings from here."

  "I'd like to stop at Greenwich Village first, so I'm not carrying the envelope around with me. And I want to see if Taliesin's okay." I hesitated, realizing that I wasn't entirely sure when Taliesin had taken me. "Uh, it's a bookstore called Paradox Used Books. I think it was the early 1960s."

  "Gwyn's place?" Millie said. "Yeah, I know when that is."

  We stepped out of the building's foyer into a street that might be in SoHo, for all I knew, but definitely wasn't the modern SoHo of the gallery. The buildings around us were warehouses with imposing soot-stained facades, and the air reeked of burning trash and horse manure, along with the crisp autumn smell that I'd come to associate with Shadow New York. Horse-drawn wagons clattered past. Unlike the places Taliesin had taken me, this was not brightly lit at all, and I found myself glancing nervously at the dark facades of the buildings under the roiling sunset sky.

  Millie walked with a short, clipped stride, relaxed but alert. She looked very much in her element here, a hunter strolling through an urban forest. Irmingard, in contrast, stayed so close to us that I occasionally tripped over her.

  Millie's steps slowed, and she began examining the buildings carefully. After a little while, she opened a plain service door set into a smoke-stained wall. Behind it was a short flight of concrete stairs. We climbed them, and stepped through the door at the top onto a sidewalk alongside a wide, access-controlled highway. Big, square-nosed cars zipped past us behind a chain-link fence, and I guessed by the look of the cars that we were now in the 1970s, a disconcerting contrast with the muddy, 19th-century street we'd just left behind. On the far side of the highway, an industrial wasteland of factories and depressing-looking residential buildings stretched onward for miles, with small, paved basketball courts and not a tree in sight. The slowly rotating aurora sky seemed brighter by contrast with our colorless surroundings.

  People on the sidewalk passed us without sparing us a glance. All of them were transparent, men in coveralls or jeans, women in headscarves toting grocery bags. In one of the basketball courts, a teenage kid was shooting hoops—although, when I watched for a moment, I realized that it was the same set of motions, the same shot, over and over.

  "What's it like to be them?" I asked.

  Irmingard was the one who answered. "Repetitive. Poor souls. For most of them, it's like being a ghost. They simply go through the motions of whatever they did in life, with no idea that anything has changed, no ability to comprehend their circumstances or relate to anyone around them."

  Her experience with ghosts was obviously very different from mine. Muirin had also told me that ghosts tend to fade after their death, but I'd also been told the opposite, or at least had it suggested to me that other fates were possible. And so far Drew seemed to be just as stubborn, abrasive, and full of opinions as he had been in life.

  "But they're not ghosts, are they?" I said. "I mean, not real ghosts—the shades of people who were once alive."

  Millie shook her head. "No. Ghosts are different. These people ..."

  "They're echoes," Irmingard said. "Impressions left on reality, like a thumbprint in clay. They'
re no more real than a photograph."

  Yet some of them seemed so real, I thought. As real as Drew—as real as any living person. Lily-Bell certainly had when I'd met her.

  In fantasy novels, there always seemed to be a wise mentor to lay out the magical rules for the main character with perfect accuracy and clarity. In real life, it was more like asking someone to tell you about politics or religion. It was messy and complicated; everyone you asked told you a different thing.

  We followed the fence for a block or two before Millie led us into an abandoned factory. There was no one about, though I glimpsed flickers of spectral workers out of the corner of my eye. A door that looked like it ought to lead into an office led instead to the empty living room of an unoccupied house. From there we went out the door in the normal way, into a neighborhood that reminded me vaguely of the Chicago suburb where I'd grown up, rows of postwar houses on tidy little lots.

  "I have no idea how anyone finds their way around this place," I murmured to Irmingard.

  She giggled. "You have to have a knack for it, I think. Millie has the knack. So does Taliesin."

  "It's a nomad thing," Millie said, adjusting the shotgun on her back. "Taliesin and I are fellow wanderers. I did my wandering in an airplane, once upon a time, but we're still comrades under the skin."

  "Don't you fly anymore?"

  "I could if I had to," Millie said. "It's just not the same, though."

  Her voice was melancholy. She latched the gate neatly behind us, and we walked down the middle of the street. There were no cars. Every yard was as tidy as if its owner had merely stepped out for a moment, but that just made the lack of visible residents even more eerie.

  "Honestly, there's no trick to it," Millie said. "It's nothing but finding the right doors. Anyone can do it. Mainly the problem is that the place is so huge, and not all of the doors are permanent. If you're not sure of your crossings, you can get into a neighborhood you can't easily get out of."

  "Are there maps?" I asked.

  "Sort of. People have tried. But it's damned tricky to map—how would you even do it? This place isn't easy to render on a two-dimensional sheet of paper. What you get are personal journals full of notes. Someone needs to make an index."

  "Or a Choose Your Own Adventure book," Irmingard said. "'If you go through the door in the alley, turn to page 35.'"

  We entered another yard and this time went around back of the house, where there was a detached garage and a small shed.

  "Hyperlinks?" I suggested. "Could you do it in an app? You know, click on the link for the garage—" which Millie was studying right now "—and the link takes you to the next part of the map for wherever you're going."

  Irmingard's smile became a frown when she turned to look at Millie, who was hesitating in front of the door. "What's wrong?"

  "I don't know. Something's not right." Millie reached cautiously for the doorknob, but jerked her hand away and shook her fingers.

  "Hot?" I said.

  "Cold." Millie rubbed her hand on her jeans, then unslung her shotgun from her shoulder. "Behind me, both of you."

  We obeyed. I wished I'd brought the sword.

  "The last time I came this way," Millie said, "this door opened into a storage room in a Greenwich Village nightclub in 1962."

  Using the sleeve of her jacket as a temporary glove, she twisted the knob and gave the door a quick yank. It swung halfway open, revealing—blackness. Utter, soul-sucking, starless-night blackness. Except it wasn't empty. I had an impression of roiling movement, a sense of colors beyond the edge of vision. Cold washed over me, the same bone-deep cold as the sword.

  Millie kicked the door shut. It slammed with a crash but immediately swung open again, just a few inches. Darkness seeped around the frame like questing tendrils of ink, and then a paw, or maybe a hand, snaked through the gap and sank its claws into the splintered wood of the doorframe. Though covered with short, striped fur, the fingers were recognizably human-shaped, and it was wearing a watch. The fine hairs rose on my arms, and I couldn't tell how much of the sudden chill in my belly was fear, but it was definitely the same cold sensation I got when the sword drew energy from me. My hand went automatically to my hip, where the sword currently wasn't.

  "Into the house," Millie said tightly, backing up and hustling us along with her.

  The kitchen door was locked, a problem Millie solved by kicking it hard enough to send it smashing into the wall. As we slammed it behind us, I glimpsed the garage door standing wide open, blackness pooling on the sill and puddling in front of it like water. The first Tiger lurched its fuzzy, eyebleedingly difficult to look at bulk over the sill, with another one close on its heels.

  "Furniture," Millie snapped at us. "Barricade the door; it might buy us a few minutes." She followed her own advice by tipping over a china cabinet, sending it toppling in a cacophony of broken dishes and shattering glass. Irmingard and I pushed a table against it.

  Part of me quailed in dismay at the fact that we were trashing a stranger's house. The rest of me was busy trying not to freak out. I couldn't stop thinking about that living darkness, and I could still feel the chill in the pit of my belly, even attenuated by distance.

  Siphoning energy, I thought in horror. I'd wondered if the sword could use me up, take out everything before I could make it stop. I still didn't know, but I was pretty sure the Tigers could. And that terrible black nothingness definitely would. It would suck me in, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  "That was the between space?" Irmingard said in a small voice. "I've never seen it before."

  "Hope you don't see it again. Or rather, don't let it see you."

  The light in the kitchen dimmed, as if a cloud had passed over the sun. There was a soft tap on the kitchen door, the scritch of claws.

  "Out the front door?" I asked, halfway there already.

  "No! You can't outrun them. Don't even try."

  "This place isn't defensible," Irmingard said. "Too many windows. They'll be inside in a minute."

  "I know. Upstairs."

  We retreated to the second floor. Downstairs I heard glass shatter.

  "There's another door up here," Millie said, glancing inside the bedrooms as we passed them. "In one of the closets. It isn't ideal, but—ah, there! Hurry!"

  It was a little girl's bedroom, with a unicorn bedspread and shelves of stuffed animals. Millie blocked the doorway; her shotgun boomed, and I heard a human-sounding yell from the hallway, rising to a high-pitched snarl. Irmingard wrenched open the yellow-painted door of the closet, and I flinched back as an icy wind blew over us. This wasn't the unnatural cold of the Tigers, just regular cold. Outside the door, a blizzard swirled.

  I hesitated, and Irmingard shoved me, stronger than she looked for someone so tiny. I stumbled forward, my sneakers sinking into ankle-deep snow.

  "Go, go!" Irmingard gasped. "They'll be right behind us."

  "No, they won't," Millie said.

  I looked back, huddling against the icy wind. The door was a block of yellow-and-pink warmth. Millie's shotgun thundered again, and as Irmingard reached out a hand to her, Millie yelled, "Go! I'll be fine! I'll cover you! Catch up later!"

  "You're not doing the stupid last-stand thing!" Irmingard shouted at her. "If you won't think of yourself, think of me and Kay! I don't know this place, and if I can't find a door out, we'll both freeze to death."

  Millie hesitated, then her face twisted in something like anger and she fired one more time before springing backwards through the door to join us. Irmingard slammed it. Suddenly we were alone, with snow swirling around us and the wind biting our faces.

  I couldn't tell where we were, beyond outside in a blizzard. Somewhere industrial, it looked like. Through the shifting curtains of snow, I glimpsed the unlovely fronts of warehouses and factories. On this side, the brightly painted closet door was a double set of rusty metal doors, tagged with spray paint.

  Millie kicked the snow off a stack of scrap lumber pil
ed against the wall and jammed a rusty old crowbar through the doors' double handles. An instant later, the whole thing shuddered and gapped open, as if something had hit it incredibly hard from the other side. Rust flaked into the snow.

  "Go, go, go!" Millie herded us across the street, fumbling more shells into the shotgun. Irmingard reached up and took my icy hand in her small, warm one. The wind cut off suddenly, though snowflakes still swirled past my nose, diverted an inch or two from my face. It felt as if I'd been sealed in an envelope of warm air. The snow was still above my shoes—and almost knee-deep on Irmingard—but it was just a little cold rather than bitterly painful.

  "That's a nice trick," I said, through teeth that still chattered. My ears and cheeks tingled in the sudden warmth.

  "Shielding," Irmingard said. "But I'm not sure how long I can do it. The Tigers got a lot of energy from me. Do you feel all right?"

  I felt a little shaky, a little hungry, but I was used to it from using the sword. "I'm okay."

  Metal shrieked from across the street, and the doors shuddered and bent outward from the inside. That was the last thing I saw before Millie blew the padlock off a door on the building opposite, and we all stumbled into the dark, cavernous interior of some kind of factory.

  It looked abandoned. Arcane shapes of equipment hulked silently around us, and water had frozen into treacherous puddles on the floor. With Irmingard's small hand in mine, I still couldn't feel the cold, but our breath formed white clouds in the air.

  "Where did they come from?" Focusing on details helped me stop thinking about orange paws thrusting out of nothingness, metal doors bending under the assault from the other side. "You said the between space. Is that what's under all of this?"

  Irmingard nodded. "The doors are shortcuts between neighborhoods, linking them together. Otherwise, it's just blackness and Tigers."

  Snatches of an old A.A. Milne poem came back to me. Something about sidewalk cracks and bears. I didn't ask more questions; I didn't want to know.

  "I think I'm going to have to cover your retreat after all," Millie said tensely, positioning her body in the doorway and peering out into the street. "There are doors here, but none nearby. Irmingard, I'll describe to you how to get to the nearest door—it's in an abandoned shipping container two streets over—"