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

course, they screwed it all up.
    The Girl walked back out to the living room. She set the Pop-Tart and coffee on a side table and plopped cross-legged onto the burgundy recliner with the tear hidden in back. She reached behind her and selected a volume from the big maple bookcase that displayed the round jelly-glass stain, exactly like the one that had journeyed with them when she and the companion now walled off from her recollection had come from Hurley, Minnesota, when she was small.
    The book was a tattered leather copy of Little Women. The Girl knew it well; her mother had read this book to her, and that unremembered other had, too, and she’d read it many times herself. She flipped through it. All the pages were there, and all the words.
    Not so with many of the other works on the shelf, she knew. They might hold only half the words, or a third of the pages might be blank, or the cover a blur.
    She drew out another book, a dark blue one with a gold dragon on the spine, and the title A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder. She had not inspected this one before. With mild curiosity, she blew the dust off and opened it, saw scrawled in a childish hand on the inside front cover, “This Book Belongs to Agnes Hilliard Wu.”
    The frontispiece showed a group of mustached and bearded men in animated conversation around a table, with the caption “The Doctor was evidently discoursing upon a favorite topic.” She fanned the pages. The words seemed intact, set whole. Agnes Wu must have cherished this book; must still, wherever she might be. There were other books on the shelves inscribed to Agnes, books in a lilting text that the Girl recognized (although she could not have said precisely how) as Thai; she wondered if Agnes Wu, whoever she was, might once have lived in that fantasy place.
    The Regulator clock on the wall chimed the half hour—seven-thirty. The Girl returned the book to its place on the shelf, uncurled and stood.
    Beyond her apartment, the city waited, and her regular classes, and the School of American Ballet.
    The train on its track, circling.
     
    The Girl emerged from her fourth-floor walk-up out onto the street, dressed in her school grays, the book bag with its toe-shoe insignia slung over her shoulder. The morning was bright and mild, with none of the weight of humidity nor razor chill she associated with so many of her days in Manhattan. Unseen, the robins and skylarks trilled their songs, and strangers bustled about on the brownstone street as if they were actually going somewhere.
    Eighty-first looked exactly right; the streets she most often walked on were always as she remembered them. Some of the other streets were complete, too—maybe St. Ives or Monteiro or the others knew them. But sometimes she’d turn a corner and be back on the street she was on before, or it would just be fog.
    Outside her place, the Girl passed the cherry tree within its circle of vertical iron bars, a prisoner of Eighty-first Street. It blossomed even in captivity.
    As she strode toward Columbus and St. Augustine Middle School, a gentle wind detached some of the blossoms from the tree and they pursued her, floated about her like a scene from Madame Butterfly. She caught one in her hand and ran it along her lips, her cheek; it felt like her own soft skin.
    Joggers loped past her and kids strolled bantering in easy, laughing conversation. The Girl knew by now not to try to speak to them. People looked real, too, but they wouldn’t engage her in conversation; they were like extras in a movie.
    Every now and then, though, someone would talk to her, and then she knew they were really real, or at least connected to someone who was.
    The Girl slowed as she came to Mr. Lungo’s home. It was the familiar curlicued Victorian wedding cake of a house she remembered. But really, with its warped and weathered shingles, its peeling paint, listing fenceposts and wild devil grass, it was more like Miss Havisham’s ruin of a