by Jim Aikin

* * * *

For more than thirty years, Jim Aikin has written about music technology for Keyboard and other leading music magazines. He is the author of Power Tools for Synthesizer Programming, as well as two novels—Walk the Moons Road and The Wall at the Edge of the World. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, F&SF, and elsewhere. For more information visit his personal website, www.musicwords.net and his blog at midiguru.wordpress.com. In his first story for us in twenty-three years, Jim takes a haunting look at some mysterious characters who may soon be...

“The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”—William Faulkner

By the time she turned forty, Joan had mostly managed to forget that when she was young she had seen ghosts. She had thrust the ectoplasmic intrusions that roiled her childhood into a big old trunk in the back of her brain, had locked the trunk and thrown away the key.

But then Uncle Frederick died and left her the antique store.

She had never been close to Uncle Frederick, though they lived less than twenty miles apart. He was her mother’s brother, and was too wedded in spirit to the inexplicable and pointless enthusiasms that had infected and ultimately shredded her parents’ lives. Her parents had grown up in the sixties. Mom read Tarot cards, played the flute while sitting cross-legged on the floor, and changed her name twice because her guru told her to. Daddy made origami sculpture, fetishistically and inexpertly, and sold it with indifferent success at an endless string of grimy street fairs. Crushed and mutilated birds and frogs made of folded yellow and purple paper littered the floor of Joan’s childhood.

She far preferred Uncle Ray, her father’s brother. Uncle Ray had inherited the same obsessive gene, but turned it to better use: He taught high-school math. At fifteen, weary of moving from one cramped, noisy apartment to another, weary of her parents’ penniless, stoned friends and their droning reminiscences of long-ago Grateful Dead concerts, Joan stormily divorced her parents and stomped off to live with Uncle Ray and his brood, where she cheerfully slept on a futon on the living room floor until she went away to college. She learned trig and then calculus sitting at Uncle Ray’s kitchen table, ignoring Aunt Mary’s diffident, though unceasing, attempts to interest her in cooking. At college she majored in math. She became a computer programmer.

Somewhere along in there, the ghosts tapered off. Maybe they sensed that she really didn’t want them hanging around, or maybe something had changed in her that made her less receptive.

When she was little, she hadn’t known they were ghosts. They didn’t shriek or walk through walls, though they did appear and disappear with alarming insouciance. Only gradually did it dawn on her that she was seeing people nobody else could see. The woman with the burned hand, for instance, or the old man mowing his lawn day after day, and the lawn standing up just as long behind the mower as in front of it. Sometimes they spoke to her, but not in the normal way—”Hello, little girl.” It was as if she had turned on the TV in the middle of a show and was being treated to random scraps of dialogue. “I killed my brother,” a young black man said to her. That scared her, but he didn’t look so much scary as just sad and lost. She knew he was a ghost because she always saw him at the same street corner, and he always said the same thing. Sometimes the ghosts would ask her questions, and if she replied they would look puzzled, as if that wasn’t what they were expecting (hoping?) to hear. Mostly, though, they just ignored her and went about their business, whatever that was.

When Mom found out about the ghosts, they became a Big Deal. At the age of eight, Joan was expected to lead séances. But she couldn’t summon ghosts; they came and went according to their own whims, and not very often at that. The séances were a flop. Her mother seemed to take this as a personal affront, as if either Joan or the ghosts (or both, conspiring) were hoarding some Ultimate Truth rather than share it with her.

The séances stopped, but her mother never stopped pestering her to know what the ghosts had said. Every spectral utterance, no matter how banal, was poked and prodded in an effort to force it to reveal its veiled cosmic import. After a while Joan started making stuff up and claiming a ghost had said it. When her mother caught on (and that didn’t happen for several years), it turned into a kind of game. “Did they really say that? Really? Or is it something you made up? Joanie, tell me the truth, now.”

Maybe the ghosts had gone away because she started lying about them. That was a thought. Only now they were back, and the antique store was to blame. It attracted them.

The store was called Station House Antiques. It was housed in an old building that had once, when the town was much smaller, been an actual functioning train station. The train line had been moved down by the bay before World War II, and the rails torn out. New streets had been laid down when the freeway came, leaving the former station perched in isolated and rapidly fading nineteenth-century small-town civic architecture grandeur on an awkwardly shaped lot with inadequate parking.

The main room was large, high-ceilinged, and crammed with tables, shelves, and display cases. Every available surface, not omitting the walls, was overflowing with merchandise. Faded brown photos in plain frames, a butter churn, cavalry swords, a dressmaker’s dummy, a model merry-go-round made of painted tin. Hundreds of pieces of china and glass, some chipped and some pristine, no two alike. Tattered magazines, silver pepper mills, stuffed birds perched in an ornate cage, four or five assorted umbrella stands. The light from the street acquired a patina of dust as it passed through the broad front window, and quickly lost itself among the crooked aisles. Smaller side rooms were packed with dark, heavy furniture and used books.

As a young adult, pursuing her lackluster career in Silicon Valley, Joan was only hazily aware that Uncle Frederick had ventured into the antiques business. Before that he had owned a bicycle shop, which went broke. She had visited the antique store exactly once, and found the teetering stacks of tarnished junk depressing and a little creepy. Having gone to some lengths to unencumber herself of the baggage of the past, she couldn’t fathom why anyone would want to surround themselves with old stuff. She hadn’t seen any ghosts on that visit, but looking back on it, her urge to get out of the place quickly might have been a clue that they were hovering nearby, dreaming about her.

At thirty, goaded by long-submerged urges, she had swum up out of the depths of database code maintenance long enough to get married, to an individual she now referred to exclusively as “that asshole.” Six years later she learned, because he didn’t try very hard to hide it, that that asshole was sleeping with his admin. He had also caught herpes from the admin, and bestowed it on Joan as a little amorous gift.

After he trudged off, padded so thickly in injured dignity that her screams of rage had no chance to penetrate, she went through the apartment with furious energy, seizing and removing any item that was even faintly stained by its former nearness to that asshole. She hauled down to the dumpster the pictures he had bought for the walls, the plates he had eaten off of, even the tins of shoe polish he had left under the bathroom sink. She was left with an almost bare apartment. The wind blew through uncurtained windows, and there was no past to weigh her down. Except for the herpes, of course.

And then the company she worked for got acquisitioned and downsized, and she got laid off. The severance package dwindled, and all the programming jobs were moving offshore. But within days after she gave notice on the apartment and started looking around in a gloomy, half-hearted way for a roommate situation, Uncle Frederick providentially died.

Like her parents, and like Uncle Ray and Aunt Mary, Uncle Frederick had lived his life from month to month, never managing to scrape together more than a few dollars in savings. But he had owned the antique store outright, and he left it to her.

Her first thought was to sell the store. But until she found another job, a steady source of income, however meager, would be better than a big lump of money that she would eventually burn through. Anyway, she had mastered the intricacies of Fortran, Pascal, C++, Java, and Python. How hard could it be to learn antiques?

There was a room in the back of the store—Uncle Frederick had used it as an office, as had the station master in years gone by—that had a functioning bathroom. She cleared out the back room, set up housekeeping, and went into business as a full-time purveyor of fine antiquities and collectible memorabilia. She pored through antiques trade journals, scoured the websites where aficionados aired their passions and prejudices, staked out auctions and estate sales. Business was never good, but some months she actually had enough extra in the cash drawer to treat herself to a play in San Francisco or a weekend at Tahoe.

The ghosts didn’t arrive at the store all in a rush. Maybe it took them a while to notice where she was hanging out, or maybe they were there all along but it was a while before she started to see them.

The first whisper that something might be awry came from the ungovernable inventory. Uncle Frederick had never kept a written inventory that she could find. Either he had stored the cost and likely value of ten thousand things in his head, or he was just a poor excuse for a businessman. Joan suspected the latter. Until she knew what she had in stock, acquiring more stuff would only embroil her in costly mistakes. So she did what any computer professional would do: She set up a database on her laptop.

But a task that had at first seemed merely monumental soon slipped through her fingers entirely.

Not simply because of the size of the store—there were five downstairs rooms, plus the upstairs gallery—or the difficulty in categorizing nearly unique items. Maybe, she told herself, it was because it was so easy to get sleepy on a warm afternoon and miss something. She would list all of the items on the long narrow table by the west wall, filling in the fields for Type, Condition, Description, Price, and Table/Case/Shelf, working in what she was sure was a meticulous and methodical manner, but a few days later her eye would be caught by some striking piece on the table, and she would think, “Now, I don’t remember that. Is that in the inventory?” And when she looked in the database, sure enough, there was no fluted porcelain pitcher with pink flowers and twining vines listed on that table. Nor anywhere else in the store, if the database was to be believed. Yet there it was.

How many ukuleles were hanging on the north wall of the east room? She didn’t exactly know. The database said six, but when she went to look, there might be seven. Or only six, but their descriptions might not, if you got a flashlight and peered between the strings to inspect the labels on the inside, quite match what was entered in the computer.

She could see at least four possible explanations. First, there might be something wrong with the database software. Being a computer professional, she investigated that possibility methodically, and ruled it out. Second, someone might be altering the database when she wasn’t around. But she was alone in the store most of the time, the laptop wasn’t even connected to the internet most of the time, and the database was password-protected, so no hacker could possibly be fiddling with the data—not that anyone would want to. Third, there might be something seriously awry with her inventory methods. But Joan was not a scatterbrain. Fourth, things might be somehow magically appearing and disappearing in the store when she wasn’t looking. And that was obviously impossible too.

If it had just been things disappearing, that would be due to shoplifters or burglars. But why would a burglar break in at night (without tripping the alarm) and put an extra Victorian brooch in the jewelry case?

Even before Joan saw the girl, she had started to think maybe the store was infested with ghosts. It was as if the past was not quite dead and buried here, as if history slept fitfully in its bed and tumbled the blankets into knots.

She came upon the girl in the upstairs gallery, just at sunset. The gallery was a narrow floor space above the main room from which you could look down over a railing and see a labyrinth of tables, shelves, and glass-topped counters that looked, depending on the light, not unlike an aerial photo of the ruins of Pompeii. A rainstorm had been pounding all afternoon, and it occurred to Joan (tardily) that she ought to make sure the upstairs windows were securely closed. She hadn’t turned on the overheads, so the gallery was dim, and rain thrummed on the roof.

The girl was no more than ten years old. Her dress was long and faded, and she was wearing, of all things, a bonnet. She looked at Joan beseechingly. “Can you help, ma’am? My mama, she’s took awful sick.”

Questions crowded in—how did you get in here? Why are you dressed like that? But those weren’t the most urgent concern. “Sick? Where is she?”

“In the back of the wagon, ma’am. She was burnin’ up with fever, but now she’s cold, and she won’t wake up, no matter how I shake her and call to her.”

“The wagon? You mean a station wagon? Where is it parked? I’ll call 911.” Joan flipped out her cell phone, fumbled, and dropped it. It skittered under a table, and she had to grope for it. When she straightened up and turned around, the girl was gone. The hair on the back of Joan’s neck crinkled, and she moaned aloud. How stupid not to have seen it at once! The girl was a ghost. Hoping she was wrong, Joan ran up and down the gallery, calling, “Hello? Hello? Where are you? Is anybody there?” But no, she wasn’t wrong.

If she hadn’t been living in the station, she would have closed up shop for a few days—or possibly forever—so as to duck the whole problem. She didn’t want ghosts in her life. But she did live there.

The shelves next to where the girl had appeared were a repository for pewter mugs and tableware, much of it dating back to the Gold Rush. Over the next few days, when not overcome by depression and inertia, Joan read up on the Gold Rush. Many of the wagon trains, she learned, had been overtaken by cholera. Imagine a girl whose mother is lying in the back of the wagon, dead of cholera. It wasn’t hard to see how that awful feeling of helplessness might imprint itself on a pewter mug and show up, out of the blue, on a rainy afternoon a hundred fifty years later. At least it was a workable theory. Joan didn’t actually know whether ghosts were stray bits of emotion that had gotten imprinted on physical objects, or whether they were ... something else entirely.

She tried reading up on ghosts, but found it too difficult to pan nuggets out of the tons of black sand. Most of the self-proclaimed authorities plainly knew less than she did. Which was almost nothing.

Not a week later she came out of the lumber room, which was what she called the room full of old furniture, to find a man standing at the counter. She hadn’t heard the bell at the shop door jingle. The man was wearing a long soiled coat that had once been gray and a three-cornered hat from beneath which a greasy ponytail curled down his back. Her nose informed her that he hadn’t bathed in weeks. He was fingering a flintlock pistol in an engrossed way, as if he had a quite practical interest in its workmanship. The glass-fronted cabinet—she glanced across the room—in which she kept the early firearms was always kept locked, but now its door yawned wide.

“I’ve a need for this pistol,” he said without preamble. “I should like to buy it, thankee.” His voice was a gravelly croak.

“Yes, of course,” she said. “It’s—here, let me see the price tag.” She reached for the pistol. She was close enough now to see that it wasn’t one she remembered. The lock and barrel were almost free of rust. Also, there wasn’t any price tag.

He pulled it back so she couldn’t touch it, and glared at her distrustfully. Beneath dark, tangled brows he had the glittering eyes of a hawk. He slapped a coin on the counter. “This be enough?”

The coin was the size of a silver dollar, but yellow. The sun-bright circle almost gleamed with its own light. “I’d have to look it up,” she said, stammering. “I think I have a catalog. Wait here while I find it.” She had to go around behind a bookcase to haul out the carton of coin catalogs. Probably counterfeit, she said to herself. He’s on his way to a costume party. Where he’ll win first prize.

When she emerged with the catalog, the frontiersman was gone, and the pistol with him. Again, the front bell hadn’t rung. But the coin remained. It turned out to be a gold doubloon—not rare, but in shockingly good condition. And not provably counterfeit, though eyebrows were raised because of its lack of provenance. The property tax bill was due in less than a month, and she paid it by selling that one coin.

The frontiersman’s rank odor lingered in the shop for days. Sometimes she thought she could still smell it. More likely it was just the dodgy plumbing, but all the same she felt obscurely irritated. The girl had disappeared before she could do anything to help her, or even try, but she couldn’t quite get rid of the frontiersman even after he was gone.

After the frontiersman, the ghosts began showing up more often. The weeping woman, the blind soldier, the golden-haired toddler eating an ice cream cone, the angry old man who thumped up and down the aisle with his walker. They never showed up when customers were in the store, only when she was alone. She tried ignoring them, tried shouting at them, tried chatting with them. They were impervious.

One of the very nice things about Ted was that he wasn’t a ghost. She met him at a party some friends had invited her to. She had been only too glad to get out of the store for an evening. Ted was up from LA, where he was in accounting with a movie studio. In spite of his superficial physical resemblance to that asshole, she liked him at once. He kept fit by rock climbing, didn’t smoke or do drugs, and wasn’t a Scientologist or a Republican. On their second date she mentioned in an offhand way (it was kind of a test) that she had been named after Joan Baez, and he had never even heard of Joan Baez. That was when she decided to sleep with him.

Ted wanted her to move to LA and live with him and probably get married eventually. The herpes didn’t faze him. The only slight impediment to their impending bliss was that she would have to sell the antique store in order to move. By that time the ghosts were showing up almost daily, and she was overjoyed at the prospect of being rid of them. True, they might follow her to LA, but somehow she doubted it. In LA she might expect to see an occasional unicorn, or a centaur, or tiny winged people who left sparkly trails as they flew, but surely she would be able to shut the door forever on her crew of self-absorbed and gloomy shades.

But the store didn’t sell, and didn’t sell, and didn’t sell. The problem wasn’t that it was haunted; she wasn’t about to disclose that to anyone, not even Ted. No, the shortage of parking was the sticking point—that, and the marginal value of the inventory, and the exorbitant cost of renovating the building to rip out the termite damage and bring the restrooms up to code. After two years on the market, there had been not a whisper of genuine interest. Her agent had gotten lazy about returning her calls, and Ted’s weekend flights up from LA were getting spaced further apart.

And then one morning as she sat beside the cash register, watching the dust motes drift lazily across a stray beam of sunlight that had bounced off of something in the street and zigzagged in the front window by mistake, the bell above the door jingled and Mr. and Mrs. Behrens came in. They came down the central aisle slowly, turning this way and that. People who came into Station House Antiques usually reacted that way. The newcomers were both in their forties, well dressed, no more than middle height. The woman had mouse-brown hair and a washed-out complexion. The man was pudgy, cheeks florid, hair receding, and wore wire-rimmed glasses. They took their time working their way back through the store to the counter, their eyes wandering, snagging, being tugged free, snagging again. “We saw your listing on the internet,” the man said. His English was only faintly accented, but even before they introduced themselves Joan had pegged them as probably German. “Can you tell us, is the property still available?”

By that time, she had forgotten placing the ad in the online marketplace. Figured she was doomed to spend the rest of her life swaddled in layers of cobwebs behind the counter of Station House Antiques.

“Yes, it’s still available,” she said. “I’ve had a couple of offers”—a lie—”but my agent felt we could do better.” The agent who no longer even bothered to return her phone calls.

“May we take a look around?”

She twisted the key in the cash register. “Better yet, I’ll show you around.”

“I am Ludwig Behrens,” the man said. “This is my wife Anna.” He extended his hand and all but clicked his heels together. The light from the window glinted flat off of his spectacles, turning his eyes to round white slices of radish. “Have you owned it long?”

“No, not really. My uncle left it to me four years ago, in his will. At the time I knew almost nothing about antiques. Are you in the trade yourselves?” She ushered them through the low door into the lumber room. Massive furniture crowded in on them.

“In a small way. We have been looking for a retail opportunity since arriving in this country last summer.”

“Something with enough floor space that we can be creative,” Mrs. Behrens said, gazing around the lumber room with something like discomfort.

“Of course it doesn’t look as large on the inside as it is,” Joan said, “on account of the amount of stock. If you look at the numbers for the square footage, it’s actually quite impressive. This used to be a real functioning train station. The tracks were torn out years ago, when the railway line was relocated down by the bay. The building is an official landmark, so you have to maintain the exterior, but there are no restrictions if you want to remodel the inside. Let me show you the upstairs gallery.” And steer you away from the rusted plumbing.

While she was ushering the Behrenses into the used-book room, her cell phone chirped. She flipped it out, saw that it was Ted. “Hi, sweetie. I’m busy right now. Can I call you back?”

“Busy?”

“I’m showing the station to some folks who are interested in possibly buying it.”

“Wow! That is great news, hon. Call me later.”

She could tell Ted was on the freeway because of the traffic noise. With a sudden fierceness she ached to be there beside him, riding in his Beemer in the land of golden sun, where palm trees swayed like frowzy-topped sentinels above a thousand blue swimming pools, instead of stuck in a mouldering train station in the hills west of San Jose.

Twenty minutes later, Mr. and Mrs. Behrens were back at the counter beside the cash register. The plumbing hadn’t sent them rocketing out the door. “And of course you’ll want to inspect the books,” she said. “I’ll have to arrange that with my accountant.” Her accountant was the laptop, but they didn’t need to know that.

“Oh, I don’t think that will be necessary,” Mrs. Behrens said. “We will plan to change the nature of the business ever so slightly. A downstairs tea room here, and Navajo pottery, and some things imported from Europe. It’s really quite charming. But there are other possibilities on our list. Perhaps you will see us again.”

Joan ushered them to the front door. “Auf wiedersehen,” she said wistfully, waving.

Two days later, they were back. Ludwig Behrens slipped a hand into his coat pocket and drew out a piece of paper. “We have, in the interim, inspected a number of properties, and yours is still under consideration. If it’s still available?”

“I’ve shown it a couple of times this week”—another lie—”but there are no other offers on the table, no.”

“Good, good.” Ludwig Behrens straightened his spectacles and peered at the piece of paper. “We have made a list of questions, the dimensions of various rooms and so forth. We have brought a tape measure. Would it trouble you if we were to undertake a detailed inspection?”

After measuring and sketching for an hour, they had a low-voiced conference, their heads bent together, Joan carefully giving them privacy. Then came questions about zoning and parking and the prevalence of earthquakes, which always seemed to arouse morbid fascination in foreigners, and then another conference. At last Ludwig Behrens strode toward her and stuck out his hand for her to shake. “My wife and I have decided. It is very suitable. But we do not want the stock, I think, except for perhaps a few items to be specified later. I assume you will find another dealer who will take the remainder off your hands.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Good. We shall instruct our agent to draw up an offer. Would it be convenient if he were to present it to you this afternoon?”

When they were gone, she tried to call Ted, but his voicemail picked it up. She left half of an exuberant message and then hung up in mid-sentence when she realized she was babbling.

The door jingled again. An old woman, purse clutched in both hands, advanced into the shop hesitantly. “I was just about to close for lunch,” Joan said. But if the woman bought something, it was one less thing she’d have to pack up and try to sell to another dealer. “Can I help you? Are you looking for anything in particular?”

“I don’t quite know,” the old woman said, sounding puzzled, as if perhaps she had been, but now couldn’t remember what it was. “No, my eye was just caught as I was passing by. I must have been down this street a hundred times, and I don’t remember ever seeing your store before. That happens when you get old, you know. You think you’re paying attention, when you’re not. Things jump out at you, and you think, ‘Wherever did that come from?’“ She gazed around in awe. “Antiques! My goodness, what a trove!” Her face was spotted and deeply lined, her hair silver and sparse, her stockings thick and sensible. She set one foot in front of the other laboriously, as if her hips were arthritic. “I’m practically an antique myself,” she said with a pinch of pride. “Can you guess how old I am? I’m ninety-three. Ninety-three. When I was born, Woodrow Wilson was president. Can you believe that?”

“I have some Wilson memorabilia,” Joan said.

“Oh, I don’t care anything about that. He was a dreadful racist, apart from anything else.” The old woman craned her neck to peer at some fussily clothed dolls on a high shelf, but then swayed a little and seemed to have trouble catching her breath. “My goodness.” She looked around, spotted a high-backed chair, and sank into it. “Oh, dear. I felt quite faint for a moment there. Could I trouble you for a glass of water?”

“Are you all right? Should I call 911?”

“Oh, please don’t. They always make such a fuss. Just the water will be fine.” Between sips, she said, “I was having a—a discussion with my daughter this morning, and I believe it tired me out more than I realized. Which is odd, you know, because we didn’t argue. I’m finished with all that. Finally. For years I’ve tried to help her.” Sip. “All my life, it seems. And she always ends up as badly off as before, if not worse. At long last I’ve accepted that. All of it, including my own part in it. I felt quite kindly disposed toward her, when we spoke today. I told her I forgave her, and I do.” Sip. “What I didn’t tell her—I don’t know that it would have served any purpose—was that I also forgave myself. Looking back on it, I don’t believe I could have done a single thing any differently. There’s something very freeing about understanding that. Today I don’t believe I’d change a single thing about my entire life. It’s all been perfect, perfect, even the parts that at the time seemed quite horrid. I expect you don’t understand. You will, one day.”

She set the glass on a table at her elbow and looked around. “Is that a gramophone? My goodness, look at that! I haven’t seen one since—oh, since the forties. And you have records! I must look at them.” She stood up, a little unsteadily—Joan was afraid for a moment she was going to have to catch her—and tottered over to the gramophone, an old hand-cranked model with a large bell. Three or four records were sitting beside it, and she picked up the top one. “Louis Armstrong—’King Porter Stomp.’ We used to dance to this, when I was a girl. It was so jazzy! It made you feel quite alive, dancing to it, sixteen and you knew you’d be young forever. Could I play it? Does the machine work? I’d love to hear it again.”

Joan didn’t actually know whether the gramophone worked. Nobody had ever asked. She fitted the disc onto the turntable and inspected the mechanism uncertainly. “Here, let me do it,” the woman said. She gave the crank a few deft twists and set the needle in the groove.

The tinny, scratchy sound of old-time jazz rang out in the station. “Oh, yes,” the woman said. “Oh, yes.” She took a hesitant dance step, then another. She set her purse on the chair, swung her arms, snapped her fingers.

The beat set Joan’s toe tapping too. She marveled at the lively sound pouring out of the ancient gramophone. The clarinet and trumpet wailed, the bass and drums throbbed as if the band were right here in the room. The very floor was rumbling. The old woman danced down the aisle, skipping, nodding her head. Ninety-three and moving so nimbly?

The rumble got louder. Quite distinctly Joan heard a railroad train pulling into the station—the whistle, the deep chuff of the engine, the hiss of the brakes. The broad double doors at the rear of the room, which had once opened onto the platform, when there was a platform, had been boarded up for years, the windows painted over, but when the old woman reached the doors and touched the latch they swung slowly, ponderously open.

A dazzle of milky light poured in, flooding the room. The woman danced out into the light, the music rippling around her, and her figure was slim, her hair dark, her step light and eager, and she never turned to look back. A conductor cried, “All aboard!” His bell clanged.

Joan moved hesitantly toward the doors, almost blinded by the radiance, trying to see. Something big was out there, and yes, it was a train, and the trumpet leaped and darted around the banjo while the trombone slid and the clarinet trilled, and the woman, young now, stepped up into the train as a spray of flower petals fluttered and swirled white and pink around her, and the conductor’s bell clanged again and there were ghosts beside Joan now, walking with her as she drifted out onto the platform, the old man with the walker, who cast it aside and strode with a firm step, and the Gold Rush girl and the frontiersman, one by one they boarded the train in a gentle blizzard of flower petals, and Joan was in line behind the weeping woman, whose tears now flowed free around a radiant smile, and she reached out to put her hand on the side of the car so she could climb into the train feeling yes of course the joy of this flooding her now forever. But an arm in a dark sleeve reached across in front of her and barred the way, and she looked up, and the conductor’s face was long and pale with bushy white eyebrows, a little like Uncle Frederick’s but not really so very much, and the conductor said, “Not yet. Your time is not yet. Your task is to watch over the station.”

She opened her mouth to wail a protest, it was impossible not to board the train, how could she not? But somehow she stumbled, as if her foot had come down on a step that wasn’t there, and for a moment more she thought the train was starting to move, sliding sideways in front of her, she submerged in the engine’s bone-deep rumble, and then suddenly she wasn’t on the platform at all, she was engulfed in ordinary sunlight, lurch-staggering onto the freeway on-ramp where it cut close behind the store. She was hollow. She had been turned inside out. Head spinning, she nearly sat down on the pavement, but a rusty old pickup truck was bearing down on her at forty miles an hour. It honked, and she leaped sideways to dodge it and fell in the grimy bed of iceplant where it sloped gently up to the back of the station. She sprawled among the wadded candy wrappers, the crushed and mutilated soft-drink cups, and started to cry.

All right, she said, get hold of yourself. What just happened? Feeling unbearably heavy, as if she were wearing the train across her shoulders like a stole, she picked herself up, winced in pain when she put her weight on a twisted ankle, and stared up in blurred confusion at the rear of the station. Thirty feet away, the rear double doors were shut as tight as ever.

Cars whizzed past her, their chrome lancing daggers in the sunlight. It seemed to take all day to walk around the building, limping, staring fixedly at the curb in front of her feet as if she might lose her way. A line from an old song, a spiritual, coiled into her mind like sweet smoke: “Don’t need no ticket, you just get on board.” Was that it?

Inside, the station was blessedly dark and cool. She noticed she was trembling, and shut her eyes and willed the trembling to cease. That didn’t work, so she went and got a drink of water. The gramophone needle was going whicka-whicka-whicka at the center of the disc, so she took it out of the groove. The double doors were still shut, but strewn around them on the floor was a careless scatter of white and pink flower petals, which certainly hadn’t been there before. She went to the doors and touched them, running her hands up and down the rough surface like a blind person. And started to cry again. Out there, just beyond the doors, was an ocean of joy so deep she had never imagined such joy could exist, and she had tasted it, it had filled her, and now it was gone and the doors were sealed shut again. She slid down to the floor and sobbed.

The tears dried up. Sitting on the floor, she saw the store at a new angle. It felt empty, though it was still as packed with antiques as before. There were no ghosts now, that was it. The ghosts had gotten on the train.

She might have sat there all afternoon, but the phone rang. She got up, sniffled a little, and answered. It was the Behrenses’ real estate agent. “I have an offer here for your retail property,” he said, sounding just the right note of suppressed excitement. “I’d like to present it to you and your agent this afternoon. What time would be convenient?”

Her agent. The one she hadn’t spoken to in months. “Well, I’ll have to—” No, wait. She took a breath, and swallowed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “The property is—it’s no longer on the market. There’s been a—I’ve changed my mind. About selling it.”

“If you’ve received a better offer, I can talk to my clients and see if they might be—”

“No, you don’t understand. I’m really not going to sell. I’m going to keep it.”

He took a little convincing. He told her how disappointed Ludwig and Anna would be. He vented a gentle rasp of annoyance, testing whether she could be intimidated into feeling guilty. In the end, he signed off with a breezy assurance that he’d call again in a day or two in case she had reconsidered.

She hung up, sat on her stool by the cash register, and thought about that. He’d call again. She could still change her mind and sell. But if she stayed here, before long more ghosts would be bound to show up, and sooner or later the doors would open again and she could go out on the platform for just a minute and maybe wave to them as the train slid away, and touch the tip of her tongue to a drop of glory. If she sold the store and moved to LA, would she ever find this kind of station again? And where would the ghosts go, when it was shut down?

The old woman had left her purse sitting on the chair near the gramophone. And that was very bad. She might already have been a ghost when she came in, but she hadn’t acted like one. If she had been alive, she was now a missing person, and the police would make inquiries, and when they found the purse they would ask Joan what had happened, and Joan would have to lie, and her lies had never fooled anyone for very long, apart from her mother.

Toss it in a dumpster. Drive down to Gilroy and toss it in a dumpster. And don’t leave fingerprints. But on a whim, she snapped it open. There wasn’t much inside—some Kleenex, keys, a billfold with a few dollars, an opened packet of hearing aid batteries, and a postcard.

It was an old-fashioned picture postcard. On one side was what looked like an Alpine ski lodge, but cupped in summer, perched on the side of a mountain amid a gorgeous spill of trees and flowers. On the other side was a three-cent stamp and a brief message written in blue fountain pen in a flowing hand: “Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here!”

When had postcards cost three cents to mail? The stamp was obviously old. It took Joan ten minutes to find the stamp catalog in the book room. When she saw what the stamp was worth, her mouth got dry. She’d be able to pay last year’s taxes and then replace her sputtering, asthmatic Geo with a new Civic.

She’s still there. You can drop by Station House Antiques and say hello if you’d like, though you probably won’t see any ghosts. They never seem to come out when customers are around. The antiques business is lousy, but once in a while Joan picks up a valuable item that keeps her going for a few months.

She had a repair shop look at the gramophone to make sure it’s in good shape. It’s always kept dusted and polished, and there’s a box of old-time jazz records sitting next to it, in case anybody who drops in wants to play one. Once in a while, somebody does.

And sometimes, when Joan is alone in the store, she puts on “King Porter Stomp.” While it plays, she goes over and presses her ear against the double doors and listens for the train.