I scrambled out of bed and yanked on clothes, clumsy with the dress and flat shoes so unfamiliar compared to my trusty jeans and boots. “Where is he? What’s wrong?” I demanded, wishing I could grab her and make her stop her paranormal pacing. I tried to catch her, but she passed through my hands, even in the Grey, as if she weren’t there.
But she wasn’t. I was in the presence of the impossible: the crisis apparition of a ghost—a woman long dead.
“Amélia!” I shouted at her, exerting my will to force her to pay attention to me, even at a great distance. It made my body ache as if I’d been crushed in a vise. “Amélia, listen to me. Where is he? Where is Carlos?”
Carmo.
“What is that?”
But she was too upset to answer in a way that helped me. I grabbed Quinton’s laptop off the floor and opened a search window, typing in the word as fast as I could and hoping I’d spelled it right.
The Carmo Convent was one of the structures that had remained in ruins after the quake—the broken vaults of the soaring medieval church I’d seen from Rossio. Directions on the map showed the fastest route was to head for Rossio and then go past it, westbound, to the Santa Justa Lift—whatever that was. It was now ten o’clock and the lift closed at eleven. I’d have to run.
EIGHTEEN
I ran into Quinton walking up the stairs with a tray of food as I went leaping down. The tray toppled, spilling food everywhere.
“I’m sorry!” I called as I ran past. “Carlos is in trouble. I have to find him.”
Quinton turned and followed me. “I’ll come with you.”
“No. Stay here in case I miss him or something else goes wrong. I’ll call the house phone if I need help. Don’t leave until I do!”
I rocketed down the stairs, sounding like a troop of cavalry on the move. Although I’d spent a large part of the day in a car, it was better than the coffin. My legs didn’t protest my movement as they had before, though my lungs, working overtime from anxiety, were less easygoing. Since I’d done most of the route in the daylight only the morning before, I had no trouble most of the way and turned left onto the Rua de Santa Justa one long block before Praça da Figueira. The blocks were narrower east to west, but there were still seven to go and ahead was the improbable sight of a slender, illuminated, Neo-Gothic tower rising into the air out of the middle of the road.
The city was still warm, though cooler in the night breeze off the river, and there were people strolling the streets of the Baixa after dinner, or just going out for a late evening’s entertainment. A few heated arguments colored the air as I passed bars and late-night cafés. I heard the words “dragão,” “Sebastião,” “Montijo,” and “O Desejado,” but the words, while familiar, didn’t stop me. Even the debaters paused and stared as I ran past, panting, and skittered up to the doors of the tower only fifteen minutes after leaving the house below the castle.
It was the lift, Elevador de Santa Justa, not just some mad tower out of an Edwardian science fiction story. White-painted ironwork and cement pretending to be Gothic traceries rose seven stories from the steps of black-and-white tile, connecting to an elevated walkway that stretched toward the hill where the dark bulk of the Carmo Convent loomed, casting a Grey pall cold enough to make me shiver. I had no idea what had prompted the people of Lisbon to erect an elevator in the middle of a street, but the steep rise behind it made the hills of Alfama insignificant and I thanked the lunatic impulse that had put it here.
The operator at one of the two doors raised his eyebrows at me and asked for a ticket. Out of breath, I tried to explain why I didn’t have one and how badly I needed to get up to the top. He sighed and pointed at a ticket-vending machine, much like the ones we’d used in the metro.
I bought a ticket and was just able to squeeze into the next lift. I barely had a chance to notice the well-rubbed woodwork and brass fittings of the car’s interior as it rose to the top of the tower. I was thankful to be so close to the doors when they opened that I could bolt from the crowd that had ridden up with me and run down the metal walkway decorated with the lacy shadows of delicate ironwork railings and chain-link safety mesh.
The walkway led directly toward the ruins of the Gothic church. I ran forward, over a steel bridge and under an age-stained flying buttress, into an alley lined on one side in the standing stones of the ruins, and on the other with a plastered wall of lipstick red. In my hurry, I could see no breaks, no doors, so I kept on down the narrow, tiled alley, just ahead of the rest of the passengers from the lift as I slowed in the nauseating chill of the church’s endless memory of wrack and ruin.
I stepped out from an iron gateway into the lighted square ahead. Surrounded with fern-leafed jacaranda trees and filled with the memory of soldiers carrying rifles with red carnations protruding from the barrels, the square lay before me, heavy in icy Grey mist. In my eyes, the shadow of the convent ruins ran across the tiled square like a spreading black pool of blood. The restored parts of the building beside what was now a museum had shed much of their grim memory in constant use, but the wreck remained, more virulent now for some fresh horror that leaked out from behind the bright red doors and empty windows.
The doors were locked. The museum had closed at six, well before sunset, yet I knew Carlos was somewhere on the other side. The charming square on my side of the building was far too busy for me to call out for him without drawing unwanted attention to myself. But Amélia was here, more visible and present than she had been at the house. She stood at the corner of the building beside the alley I’d passed through and beckoned me closer.
I walked back to her, my legs feeling rubbery from exertion and alarm.
“How do I reach him?”
She pointed down the alley and I, shivering with a sudden sweat, walked back into the shadow of the ruins. At the point where the metal walkway diverged to swing out around the building as the ground dropped away on the steep side of the hill facing the Santa Justa Lift, a smaller red door huddled under a pointed Gothic arch. It was almost twelve feet below the walkway and I saw no way to get to it but to jump, which I didn’t feel very good about. But if the door was there, there must once have been a way to get to it. If I could find the right temporacline, I should be able to walk through the door in the past to emerge inside the ruined church in the present. I slipped into the Grey and started searching for the right slice of frozen time.
In the silver-film mist of the Grey, the earthquake’s shuddering, rumbling discord dominated everything and though I ran my hands over the razor edge of temporaclines, the only one I could lay hold of was the worst—All Saints’ Day of 1755. Shivering with dread, I slipped into the glassy memory of the past.
I plummeted down and hit the ground in front of the door with a jarring impact. I’d always wondered what would happen if I moved from one time to another at a different physical level, and I now knew that the ground and buildings remained as solid in the memory of time as they were in normal life. I crumpled and rolled as the earthquake shook the ground, heaving chunks of the paving up as other sections sank. Colored glass from the windows and white stone from the walls and flying buttresses showered from the height of the buckling building as men in brown monastic robes and white mantles ran from it, carrying whatever holy objects they could rescue. Most of them didn’t acknowledge me, but passed around or through me—here, I was the ghost. One paused to stare at my sudden appearance. I stood up and began to fight the tide of monks and occasional nuns who rushed out from the church like water down a sluice. The one man seemed on the point of stopping me, but he had no free hand, busy as he was, clutching a huge, jeweled book to his chest.