Hiyako Miyazuki had moved in to the fabulous old apartment building with RJ knowing that sooner or later she would see the ghost again. And so, on that evening some months before the demons broke free, when she heard the tiny squeak of the small door opening, she set down her iPad and watched without fear as the shining spirit entered the room.

“You’re Carmen Pilar Ortega,” she said. “The one Joseph Grandbanks referred to as ‘Santa.’ The one who helped make this place. Aren’t you?”

“Yes,” the bright spirit nodded, pulling her shawl more formally tight. “I was drawn to this door. I believe that you harbor here something which is much needed. Have no fear that…”

“I trust you. I trust Grandbanks,” Hiyako said simply. “I decided that before I moved in.”

Hiyako spoke to RJ as much as to the ghost. She looked in his eyes and asked him silently to accept these things which she knew, which she had researched, which had become her fascination … but which she had not shared with him.

Things were not perfect. His face edged downward with gentle sadness that she had kept a secret. But he also pulled her closer and smiled welcome at the ghost. Hiyako wondered now why she had never told him of her visits to the library and her fascination with these long-dead good people.

Carmen took a step forward and held out her sweet-smelling hands, palms up. To Hiyako, those hands smelled like dried rose petals on the mantlepiece of an old lady she used to visit.

“There is someone here,” the ghost said slowly, as if she were feeling her way to some truth, “someone who will soon wander these passages between the worlds as freely as a hummingbird flies. You must allow this.”

RJ’s big body shifted like a mother bear placing her mass between her cub and an intruder. Without any other movement, he shielded little Jasmine in the next room. The ghost saw this, glided humbly towards them and knelt at their bedside. Hiyako was distressed but RJ understood that she was showing how little she menaced anybody.

“I do not need to take the child. I need to know that her wanderings will be permitted, encouraged. There is something coming and a child who can walk between the worlds is a gift beyond all measure.”

Hiyako saw his gentle surprise: Jasmine’s wanderings were something he might have to be told to allow? Had he missed something any father should know, that a little girl wondering secret passages on her own was not normal?

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Hiyako asked the practical question, “Will she be safe?”

Carmen did not answer directly. “I passed a door near to yours which felt like a guava just short of ripening. There will be a man or a woman there, one who weaves stories and dreams. That one must be encouraged to tell tales to your child.”

RJ’s eyes became the eyes of a puma. “You didn’t answer the question. Will Jasmine be safe?”

Slowly, the ghost answered, “There is this about the dancing world: you look at it only sideways, while you pretend to look at something else. Sometimes you steal a glimpse in a painted hummingbird, the dancing of bees or the glint of sunlight from unexpected water in a dry riverbed. A child can do this perhaps better than anyone. She will be safer than most.”

Hiyako looked at RJ and they each gave a worried nod.

“Encourage your little one, then. Jasmine? What a lovely name. Encourage her in her wanderings. And even more importantly, and this will be hard for you: do not follow her.”

Hiyako remembered her one trip into the passageways, and the pinched off corner she had found. “Do not try to follow her, even if, and I say if, she is in danger. Be her rock but be her rock here, solidly in this house, in this city.”

The bright spirit grew vague. Hiyako sensed that in her own time this woman could have spoken until the world’s end, squatting as a lady was not allowed to do, clutching the ground with her toes and pushing down roots into the earth. But this was not her time, and she was pushed away by the roarings from autos, from airships so much more raspingly powerful than the graceful fluttery winged things her time had had pictured.

Hiyako willed the music of the shakuhachi into her hands, knowing that if she left the room to go and fetch her instrument, the spirit would be gone before she could return. She willed that music to hold the ghost, a rich sound like a Yaqui flute but less tuneful, less melodious, more full of the rush of wind.

Floating in a place between the Flower world and this, Carmen spoke, her voice spilling like a spring down a red rock hillside and RJ and Hiyako listened, nodding, catching every word. They would quiz each other in the days and nights to come, writing what felt safe to put on paper, working to learn the things they needed to learn without looking too directly at what would surely dodge coyly from their beacon gaze.

“It is in a hole with moist sides, like for planting a rose or a hawthorn. The earth holds it firm. Not gold, not dull hard metal, wasteful as a song where only dried bodies listen. Let her wander and hold her to your heart. In the folds of a thousand papers is a dry hard little fact, a pocket of confusion that the diggers have found and lost again. Down the driest of tunnels a thousand turnings, where the opening gapes and batters, an old goat man like a horned ram and behind him a girl who holds the pipes, ready to claim the salvation with her fingers, she holds in her fingers…” Her voice became a whisper. “Perhaps only dust but perhaps a call.”

The ghost shook herself, exactly like a dog chasing rabbits in dreams, and told them three, clear, practical facts. “When you are her anchor, she can always find her way home. As she gathers strands of the story, it must be woven into a whole. But…” She held up a glimmering hand. “When the story is complete, it must be allowed again to unravel. Only then can the healing come about.”

Then she was gone.