Asimov's SF, December 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  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. Pr
obably 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 o
ut 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?”