Echo City Read online

  "It's a city," Taliesin said. "A different sort than you're used to, but a city nonetheless."

  The fire escape ended in an iron ladder. We jumped off the lowest rung to a red-cobbled sidewalk littered with oak and maple leaves. I looked up at the building rearing above us, its rough brick facade stained with Industrial Revolution coal smoke. There was nothing like this along Central Park—in real New York, anyway.

  But the lack of Fifth Avenue was even more disconcerting. In the New York I know, Central Park lay within a rectangle of wide, busy streets. From the high-rise towers surrounding the park, you crossed the street to the broad sidewalks and low decorative walls along the park's boundary. But here, we went straight from building to sidewalk to park. There must be streets elsewhere—I could hear the distant honking of horns, the thrum of engines—but here the park was the residents' backyard.

  And no border wall stood between me and a tangle of huge trees that faded quickly to shade and darkness. Central Park, I knew, was no forest primeval, but rather a rich person's illusion of such, built during the mid-1800s after razing the poor and working-class neighborhoods that had stood there before. But this Central Park looked like it had changed little since the last Ice Age, as if the city had grown up around it, rather than tearing down houses and evicting poverty-stricken immigrants so that the city planners could build a fictitious wilderness.

  Perhaps in this place, the illusion was reality.

  It looked like we'd come out in the middle of a festival. Although it wasn't dark yet—I guessed by the quality of light it was late afternoon or the very beginnings of evening—artificial light flooded the sidewalk and chased away any hint of shadow. I saw both gaslamp and electric street lights, densely spaced along the edge of the trees, and glowing paper lanterns were everywhere, carried by a good half of the pedestrians or simply dangling from tree branches or the backs of park benches. There were bonfires at the edge of the woods, with people passing bottles or toasting marshmallows.

  The crowd was amazingly eclectic; they wore everything from expensive business suits to beggars' rags and Civil War uniforms. Some rode horses while others glided along on skateboards. Most were slightly transparent.

  "They're shadows of people from the real New York," I guessed.

  Taliesin nodded with a smile. "Though you'll go further, and find it easier to get along here, if you think of this place as no less real than the other New York. Which way do you want to go?"

  "You're the guide," I said. "You show me."

  This answer seemed to please him, and he offered me his arm. I took it.

  "You will find Shadow New York easy to navigate if you're able to let go of a few preconceptions," Taliesin said. "Such as the belief that Shadow New York is laid out in the same fashion as the New York you came from, or that every part of it is always in the same place."

  "I don't see how it can help being confusing if things move around," I said.

  Taliesin laughed. "The most important thing to remember is that Shadow New York is made of ideas. In a very real sense, the city itself is an idea. So the easiest way to navigate is by way of similar ideas, places that feel similar or were born from a similar impulse. You can walk straight from Greenwich Village in the '60s to Harlem in the '20s, for example, or from Stonewall to the 1863 draft riots, should you want to."

  I stopped walking. "Wait. There's time travel too?"

  "Ideas are not anchored in time," Taliesin said. "Or in place. Though some locations are more stable than others. Central Park is one of a handful of places that's adjacent to almost everywhere, which is why Seth lives here."

  I rubbed my temples. I could tell that this place was going to give my rational brain a king-sized headache—unless, like Taliesin had said, I could just let go and roll with the crazy. It didn't help that I kept thinking of questions that were probably just going to make my headache worse.

  "Why is it fall here when it's summer in the real—in the other New York?" I asked. "Or is that one of those things that's hard to explain?"

  "It's not hard to explain at all," Taliesin said, catching a scarlet-edged maple leaf as it spun slowly to the ground. "Autumn is a liminal time, the year captured on the verge of change; and New York is a liminal city, a gateway as well as a destination. Remember, this place is an idea of New York; it's a version of New York that is more New York than the city itself."

  I blinked at him.

  Taliesin reached over and tucked the maple leaf behind my ear. "Just enjoy the sights."

  Luckily there's never a shortage of things to look at in New York, especially in a version of New York where ghosts from all eras mingled with each other. And the not-so-ghostly as well, such as ourselves. The people around us ran the full gamut from washed-out images that flickered in and out of my perception, to solid and real-looking men and women who said hello to Taliesin or stopped to purchase ice cream, hot nuts, and (of all the weird things) oysters from vendors on the sidewalk. A skateboarding boy wearing strings of shells and absolutely nothing else—except an iPod—surfed past us. We passed a clearing among the trees in which a full symphony orchestra in tuxedos, gathered in front of a bonfire, were playing a spirited rendition of the Nutcracker Suite for an audience consisting of a redheaded girl with a bunch of sheep. The girl didn't seem to be listening, but the sheep definitely were.

  But Shadow New York wasn't devoid of the poverty and inequality of the real city, either. I saw a lot of people in ragged clothes from all eras. Some of them had formed a little tent city on the edge of the trees. Others slept, or begged, or flickered in and out of existence as their realities intersected with ours.

  The buildings that lined the park were extraordinarily diverse, ranging from glass and brick towers like the high-rises around the real Central Park, to tenements and colonial-era cottages and round dome-shaped houses, right down to tents made of grass and hides. We passed a large brick building that just felt cold to me—I didn't know what it was or what sort of dark deeds went on inside, but I kept looking at it over my shoulder even after we passed it, because I couldn't shake the eerie feeling that it was looking back at me and didn't like me much. Outside the building's doors, incongruously cheerful-looking women waved to friends and called out in a language I didn't know—Italian?—before darting inside.

  "Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire," Taliesin told me, and drained the last of his wine. "A hundred and forty-six dead, seventy-one injured, mostly young women, all through their employer's greed and negligence. It's not normally here—at the park, I mean. But it's always somewhere in the city. I've encountered it in many places. I'd walk quickly here; there might be worse buildings around."

  Given the malevolence that I could feel boring into my back, I didn't want to know how much worse buildings around here could get.

  "This might be an excellent time to bid the park farewell, and visit a friend I wanted to introduce you to." Taliesin spun on his heel, handed his wine glass to a passing policeman on a horse—who looked at it in confusion—and caught my hand. "This way. I just need to find a good access point."

  He led me down a sharply angled side street, humming cheerfully under his breath; the song, I realized after a moment, was "Blowin' in the Wind." He stopped in front of a dented metal door set in the grimy wall of a brick building. Before I could ask any questions, he opened it.

  The door looked like it should open onto the building's interior, but instead it opened directly onto a busy street. Taliesin broke off in mid-hum, and offered me his elbow again. "Come, lovely lady."

  We walked out into the 1960s.

  At least, that was what it looked like: walls papered with flyers advertising poetry readings and Joan Baez concerts, women with long, straight center-parted hair and swirling patchwork skirts, bicyclists slaloming among the pedestrians and curvy old-fashioned cars, sidewalk musicians strumming guitars. As in Central Park, it was early evening and brightly lit, a nonstop block party; all the lights were on in the windows of the houses,
and most of the doors had been flung open to spill lamplight across the sidewalks. Pedestrians carried paper lanterns, sparklers, or, in a few cases, ordinary flashlights.

  I was very nearly the only black person in sight.

  "When you mentioned Greenwich Village in the 1960s," I said, "I didn't think you were actually going to take me there."

  Taliesin tossed a few coins into a musician's open guitar case. "I'm an old folk singer myself," he said. "I like the Village. I don't think the modern version is quite as soulless as everyone says, but I still have a soft spot for this era myself."

  Although the Village seemed to be more firmly rooted in a single era than Central Park with its mishmash of decades and styles, members of the bohemian sidewalk crowd still had a disconcerting tendency to go transparent and vanish unexpectedly. I watched a kid in Dickensian orphan's rags appear two steps behind a ghostly woman, snatch her purse and wink out again. "Did he just—"

  "Some people can learn to exploit the unique properties of this place," Taliesin said with a smile.

  "Can you?"

  "If I could, do you think I would've brought you the long way?"

  "Yes," I said after a moment's consideration.

  Taliesin winked at me.

  Everyone here seemed to know him, women and musicians in particular. Taliesin stopped to chat briefly with someone that I swear might have been a young Bob Dylan, but I didn't get a good look at his face. A woman in a peach-colored pantsuit and love beads gave Taliesin a bottle of beer and offered me one, but I declined; I don't drink that much, and I could still feel the buzz of the wine.

  "It's homebrewed," she said.

  Taliesin took the second bottle along with the first, and kissed her freckled cheek. She offered him a candle with the beer, but he shook his head. "Keep it for yourself. Be safe, love."

  "Is there a holiday going on that I should know about?" I asked, looking around at the crowd with their lanterns and candles, their flashlights and their glo-sticks.

  "Stay in well-lit places," Taliesin said. "That's all. Shadow New York is perfectly safe as long as you keep to crowds of people and plenty of light, which allows for most of the places you might want to go."

  "What happens if you don't?"

  "Tigers eat you," said a passing woman, overhearing me.

  I gave her a look—she already seemed to have forgotten me, and maybe she had, as she slowly faded from solidity to intangibility from one step to the next. Then I looked at Taliesin.

  "She's right," he said, "but there's no need to dwell on that, as long as you keep to the light. There's not much to worry about here. Tigers and shadows, the usual hazards."

  "Light it is," I murmured.

  I was starting to adjust to the kaleidoscope of color wheeling slowly through the bruised-looking sky. It was early evening and autumn, and it would always be. Everywhere there was something to see—record stores, their windows splashed with posters for bands long swallowed by obscurity or legend; bars spilling folk music and jazz and colorful light into the street; cramped bookstores with cats curled up in the window.

  It was to one of the latter that Taliesin led me, down a short flight of stairs to a green-painted door below street level. The small display window, like others we'd passed, was crammed with used and rare books of all descriptions, scuffed paperbacks and old leather-bound beauties side by side. The door stood slightly ajar, and when Taliesin pushed it open, a string of brass bells dangling from the door handle clashed against each other with sleigh-bell jingling.

  I braced myself for another strange transition, but the door opened onto a regular bookstore. Electric light flooded the front of the store, but the cramped, book-stuffed space swallowed it, and the farthest reaches of the store were gone in shadows.

  It was a dream of a bookshop, an explosion of books piled in the aisles, stuffing the shelves, heaped against each other—for all I could tell, the bookshelves might be composed of piled books themselves. I tipped my head sideways to read the spines. Steinbeck and Hemingway, Ursula Le Guin and Richard Wright, T.S. Eliot and H.P. Lovecraft and Fritz Lieber and Tolkien ... "Cool," I murmured, tugging out a beautiful leatherbound edition of The Hobbit.

  "Thank you."

  I straightened quickly. The proprietor smiled at me from behind a battered wooden counter heaped with books. From the look of things, he'd been in the process of sorting them—at least, some were piled in relatively neat-looking stacks—but had gotten sidetracked by the open book in front of him. I peeked as he placed his bookmark. It was a book Fresca had been trying to get me to read, The Raven Boys.

  "Hey, wait a minute," I said. "That definitely wasn't published in the 1960s."

  The proprietor smiled. "I never said everything in here was appropriate for the time period. In fact, we advertise it." He pointed behind me, and I turned to look at his store sign, a discreet 8.5x11 card in the bottom corner of the window. In curvy funhouse 1960s lettering, it read PARADOX USED BOOKS.

  I couldn't help laughing, and Taliesin's friend grinned back. He looked in his late forties, with small bottle-green Lennon glasses and a flowing white silk pirate shirt. His black hair was center-parted and shoulder-length, wiry strands of gray creeping in around the temples.

  Taliesin passed him the second beer bottle that the woman with love beads had given us. "Kay, this is the friend I told you about ...."

  "Gwyn," the bookstore owner said, holding out a long, slim hand to me. Every finger bore one or more rings, simple bands of silver mixed with more elaborate homemade-looking jewelry bearing agates and other semiprecious stones.

  "Gwyn," Taliesin continued smoothly, and was it just my imagination or had there been a hesitation there, a pause to see how his friend would introduce himself? "This is Kay."

  "Kay. A pleasure. Any friend of Taliesin's is a friend of mine." Gwyn released my hand and waved around the interior of the bookstore. "I can see you have book-hungry eyes. Look around. Pick something out. It's on the house."

  "Oh, don't say that," I protested. "I'll walk out of here with two shopping bags full of books."

  Taliesin's eyes danced. "I knew you two would like each other."

  "We take trade credit," Gwyn said, "and if Taliesin vouches for you, we can operate on the honor system. Can I trust her?"

  Taliesin tipped his beer to me. "She has an honest heart. An artist's heart."

  "I am an artist," I said.

  Taliesin gave a delighted laugh. "I knew it. I could see it in you."

  "What manner of art do you create?" Gwyn asked.

  He had a slight accent. Maybe British, but not one of the British accents I'd heard on TV, the posh upper-crust one or the cockney "by yer leave, guv" sort. Just a soft gliding of the vowels, a questioning lift at the end of the sentence. Taliesin had the same accent, but not as strong.

  "I'm a painter."

  "What do you paint?" Gwyn asked.

  "Landscapes and things. Uh, I'm a student mostly. I thought maybe I'd go into illustration, but I'm not sure."

  "You're young," Gwyn said. "Very young. You have time to figure it out." He directed a playful glare at Taliesin. "You attract the artists, don't you? The poets and sculptors and bards. Even when you're not trying."

  "They're drawn to my light," Taliesin said, looking cheerful.

  "Drawn to your free beer, more like." Gwyn flicked open a pocketknife and used the blade to crack the lid off the bottle. "Tell you what, Kay. Look around, choose as many books as you'd like, and pay me with a sketch."

  It's never easy for me to draw in front of other people, let alone for other people. Performance anxiety—I always second-guess myself. On the other hand, free books ... and I had a little notebook and pencil stub in my pocket, as always. "A sketch of what?"

  "Whatever you like." Gwyn handed me a folded, crumpled Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bag. "Here. For your books."

  Well. Twist my arm.

  I wandered deeper into the bookstore, while the two of them talked quietly at the fro
nt; I caught enough snatches to know they were talking about the Greenwich Village folk music scene, and then let it wash over me. The bookstore, in TARDIS style, seemed bigger on the inside. Impossibly narrow aisles separated the floor-to-ceiling shelves and free-standing bookstacks; sometimes I had to turn sideways to squeeze through. There was a loose sort of organization, but it reminded me more of neighborhoods in a large city than the strictly regimented genre shelves of a store like Barnes & Noble. Sure, this area was technically devoted to historical fiction, but Robert E. Howard seemed to have gotten in here somehow, as well as quite a lot of books on actual history, and I suppose that having Rosemary Sutcliff shelved together with books on ancient Celtic herb lore made a certain kind of sense.

  I turned a corner with my nose buried in one of the Sutcliffs and bumped into something that moved. "Oh, sorry—" I began before stopping short, because I hadn't stepped on another customer. I'd stepped on a dog.

  To be specific, a white wolfhound with brown ears.

  It was lying between the bookstacks, its lean body stretched out between Science Fiction and a section that seemed to be composed of first-aid and gardening books. It didn't get up when I tripped over its paws, merely raised its head and studied me with dark liquid eyes.

  It had to be either the one I'd seen in the woods, or related to it. I didn't believe in that much coincidence, especially in a world with magic. This one had exactly the same pale blond, shaggy fur as the other, and the same style of slender collar, though its collar was yellow instead of red.

  "Oh, you must have found Arian and Rhosyn," Gwyn's voice said from somewhere out of sight. "They won't hurt you."

  "Arian and—" A cold nose bumped my palm from behind. I stifled an embarrassing squeak. "Oh," I said. "Arian and Rozin, right." I hesitantly patted the newcomer on the head. It wore a green collar. There was clear evidence of regular canine occupation back here—a ragged plaid blanket, a water bowl, and a couple of dog toys.

  "The yellow collar is Rhosyn," Gwyn said from the front of the store. "The green is Arian. Their names mean 'rose' and 'silver' in Cymraeg—Welsh."