Magic Time: Ghostlands by Robert Charles Wilson, Marc Scott Zicree Read Free Book Online

illumination to cast the room in noir starkness. The Marvin the Martian clock stood sentinel by the bedside, the covers tossed aside as if another had just awoken from unquiet dreams, too, and momentarily stepped away.
    But it wasn’t so, the Girl knew. There was no one else here. But there should be, a part of her memory insisted. She should not be alone. He had promised her she wouldn’t be alone.
    She continued on to the bathroom, where she showered and dried and did her morning things.
    She looked at herself in the mirror, just like her mirror, the silvering coming away in the upper left and lower right corners. Her hair was dark and her eyes were dark—not blue at all, though strangely somehow she felt they should be blue—and her skin was smooth and pink, and her bare feet were planted solidly on the cracked blue tile.
    What could possibly be wrong about that?
    Her Danskin leotard and tights hung from the hook on the back of the door and she drew them on, feeling their snug familiarity with the subtle curve and flare of her body. She picked up the Grishko slippers from where they lay curled beside the cabinet and slid them onto artfully callused feet.
    She glided out into the still, silent living room and switched on the television, turned the volume low. It shouldn’t be working, she told herself in some dim back part of her mind—as she told herself every time she turned it on—but it glowed to life as always. Sometimes it showed TV series or movies she knew well, remembered from when she was little, or from more recent times. On other occasions, it displayed a puzzling multicolored snow or revealed disturbing abstract patterns.
    But mostly it broadcast snatches of scenes the Girl couldn’t place—disjointed moments in vibrant color or scratchy black-and-white, some in English but many in languages that sounded like they might be Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, French. These she classified as being derived from Sakamoto or Sanrio, Monteiro or St. Ives, without clearly understanding what those names meant, or from where she summoned them.
    The early daylight sun shone through the slats of the window blinds, painting the walls and the Girl with shadows like prison bars. She folded back the faded area rug, ran through her regimen of stretches. Then she assumed first position before the large practice mirror, went through her variations and barre work, felt the call and response of finely tuned muscle and sinew.
    Once these motions had been primal to her, almost the totality of her past, present and future.
    But now they were just something to do to fill the time, on the track of remembered action, like a train that returned you to where you started.
    And beneath everything, like a low vibration just below the threshold of sound, the sense of wrongness, humming in the marrow of her bones, in the helixes within her cells.
    Completing her routine in due course, the Girl ventured into the kitchen, nuked the coffee in its WNET pledge mug in the microwave. The level of instant coffee in the Sanka jar was always the same as she spooned it out, and the strawberry Pop-Tart always the last as she withdrew it from the box in the freezer and popped it in the toaster.
    Is it live or is it Memorex? The Girl couldn’t quite place who had told her of the commercial with the old lady jazz singer breaking a glass with her voice—only that it had been someone with a twin, someone who had had something horribly wrong with him. But the Girl herself had never seen the commercial, and—despite the melancholy variety of programming on the set now—it never appeared.
    She remembered, too, the story someone—she had trouble remembering who—had read her when she was little (but not too little to comprehend it) by that bearded guy who had written for Star Trek, in which strange creatures appeared at night and rebuilt an exact duplicate of the entire world for the next day, so you would think it was all the same.
    But invariably, of