as in the room to me. The hallways, the dusty stair carpets wore new garments of brilliant, nearly intangible foliage. They were no longer dark, for each leaf had its own pale and different light. Once in a while I saw things not quite so pretty. There was a giggling thing that scuttled back and forth on the third floor landing. It was a little indistinct, but it looked a great deal like Barrel-head Brogan, a shanty-Irish bum who’d returned from a warehouse robbery a year or so ago, only to shoot himself accidentally with his own gun. I wasn’t sorry.
Down on the first floor, on the bottom step, I saw two youngsters sitting. The girl had her head on the boy’s shoulder, and he had his arms around her, and I could see the banister through them. I stopped to listen. Their voices were faint, and seemed to come from a long way away.
He said, “There’s one way out.”
She said, “Don’t talk that way, Tommy!”
“What else can we do? I’ve loved you for three years, and we still can’t get married. No money, no hope—no nothing. Sure, if we did do it, I just
know
we’d always be together. Always and always—”
After a long time she said, “All right, Tommy. You get a gun, like you said.” She suddenly pulled him even closer. “Oh, Tommy, are you sure we’ll always be together just like this?”
“Always,” he whispered, and kissed her. “Just like this.”
Then there was a long silence, while neither moved. Suddenly they were as I had first seen them, and he said:
“There’s only one way out.”
And she said, “Don’t talk that way, Tommy!”
And he said, “What else can we do? I’ve loved you for three years—” It went on like that, over and over and over.
I felt lousy. I went on out into the street.
It began to filter through to me what had happened. The man in the shop had called it a “talent.” I couldn’t be crazy, could I? I didn’t
feel
crazy. The draught from the bottle had opened my eyes on a new world. What was this world?
It was a thing peopled by ghosts. There they were—storybook ghosts, and regular haunts, and poor damned souls—all the fixings of a storied supernatural, all the things we have heard about and loudly disbelieved and secretly wonder about. So what? What had it all to do with me?
As the days slid by, I wondered less about my new, strange surroundings, and gave more and more thought to that question. I had bought—or been given—a talent. I could see ghosts. I could see all parts of a ghostly world, even the vegetation that grew in it. That was perfectly reasonable—the trees and birds and fungi and flowers. A ghost world is a world as we know it, and a world as we know it must have vegetation. Yes, I could see them. But they couldn’t see me!
O.K.; what could I get out of it? I couldn’t talk about it or write about it because I wouldn’t be believed; and besides, I had this thing exclusive, as far as I knew; why cut a lot of other people in on it?
On what, though?
No, unless I could get a steer from somewhere, there was no percentage in it for me that I could see. And then, about six days after I took that eye-opener, I remembered the one place where I might get that steer.
The Shottle Bop!
I was on Sixth Avenue at the time, trying to find something in a five-and-dime that Ginny might like. She couldn’t touch anything I brought her but she enjoyed things she could look at—picture books and such. By getting her a little book of photographs of trains sincethe “DeWitt Clinton,” and asking her which of them was like ones she had seen, I found out approximately how long it was she’d been there. Nearly eighteen years. Anyway, I got my bright idea and headed for Tenth Avenue and the Shottle Bop. I’d ask that old man—he’d tell me. And when I got to Twenty-first Street, I stopped and stared. Facing me was a blank wall. The whole side of the block was void of people. There was no sign of a shop.
I stood there for a full two minutes
Anne Williams, Vivian Head
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