Carmen Pilar Ortega lay as still as the dead.

When she had been pulled into the dark building, leaving Joseph Grandbanks and her husband William Seward standing foolish and helpless on the front steps in the San Francisco of 1912, she had been lost. She had flown wildly through the endless tunnels but at last she had calmed herself.

Now she lay still, dreamy eyes staring at nothing. Fina, her old teacher, had warned her when she was a girl that this nighttime traveling she did, this flying in dreams, was a danger to herself and to others. But she had loved the flying dreams. She had even pulled her girlfriends into them when they slept in the big bed, journeying to the far-away sea, which she had never seen with waking eyes.

Now she was older. She had seen the sea: on winter days it was harsh as the guns that had pointed at her before she fled Mexico, in summer it glimmered blue as corn flowers. She had seen the warmer ocean down in Los Angeles and the colder ocean off San Francisco. She had even seen the sea from Mount Tamalpias with its crooked railroad winding to the very top and Grandbanks had promised her a nighttime ride in a gravity car which coasted swishing and silent down the gleaming silver tracks.

But she had not flown in dreams again until this night.

She rose at last and walked hallways that seemed endless. The walls might have been stone or lathe and plaster or they might have been … handwriting? She paused to look. Yes, there were red letters crammed so tightly together that the stories they told could not breathe. How strange!

She tiptoed back to the place where the demons would soon break through, the Breathing Wall. There she felt the rumble of construction machines, the blasting of dynamite. The fools, building a tunnel under Twin Peaks for the trolley cars to go through, would blast open the doorway to the demon world.

She passed on and in time came back to the long string of little brown doors. These were the passages which linked the apartments in the Spanish-style building she had caused to be built. This was good. She was relieved: she could pass back through one of these doors and return to her husband and her dearest friend.

And here was a door just like all the others: dingy and brown – but on the other side something felt right. She turned a little crumbling knob and pulled the door towards her.

The light from the other side poked at her eyes. She winced, squeezed them shut, put a hand in front of her face, pulled her shawl tightly around her. These apartments were still empty, there should be no light here!

She opened shocked eyes onto a disorderly pile of books and papers by a bed which held a sleeping man and a woman who sat in the crook of his big arm, reading from a thing like a glowing book.

It fell limply from her hands and she looked at Carmen, mouth open in awe and fascination.

Overcome with shame, Carmen fled. This was not her time! The empty apartment was now someone’s home and she had burst in like an imperial propietaria!

To doorway after doorway she walked, cocking her head. Little sounds came from within every home.

She had no right to invade these homes. She blushed like a thief even as she caught sounds like little chipped pebbles from riverbeds: a voice raised in question like a pointing finger; the quiet murmur of a knowing husband or a patient grandmother; a gasp of ecstasy like the flame of frosting on her last birthday cake.

She seemed to have traveled to the future. Could she travel into the past as easily? Oh, to see Fina’s fierce and crusty eyes burning at her, to feel the touch of the first man who brought her passion, to sit once more beside the old curandero who had taught her magic as he painted his red flowers and hummingbirds.

And why was she drawn again and again to that one door that felt so right? She had no more right to walk into that home than into any of the others but she found herself listening at that door and longing to open it, knowing some important spirit dwelled therein.

At last she gave in. She opened the door once more, stepped carefully through into a room of deep love, and straightened, a tall wraith with luxurious hair as deep brown as when she was young.

The woman with the peaceful face and the oriental eyes was there, watching her with welcome and without fear. The big man with the long beard had sleepy arms around her again but this time his eyes drifted open and he too looked at her with gentle acceptance.

The woman still held her glowing book thing, some marvel of future machinery. Carmen wished her dear Seward could be here now: he loved machines and gadgets. He had collected dozens of cards which showed the world of the future; they came free in the boxes of his vile French cigars. In them, handsome young men delivered mail from personal flying machines, children in classrooms listened to lessons through earmuffs wired to a central machine and woman read a book whose pages were projections of tiny pictures onto a gleaming screen. Something like the book this woman held.

Carmen saw that her own hands glowed against walls which seemed dim and drab in comparison. This amused her. She was used to healing with her touch and smelling of roses. Now apparently she was a spirit. How should she behave? Surely she had not truly died: there had been no welcoming song from the other world.

To the devil with how a ghost ought to behave. She would act as she always acted and put these good people at ease.

Guessing that the San Franciscan of the future would speak English, she began, “I suppose I am from your past.”

The woman cut her off, saying with awe and reverence, “You’re Carmen.”

Surprised and pleased, Carmen nodded. Who would be displeased to know that the future remembered her with such worship? Ah, well, this certainly made easier what she began to understand she must ask these people for.