Mrs. Benz flicked a switch and grunted when no lights came on. She resignedly pulled out a big red lantern, pumped it several times, struck a match with a yummy gunpowder flare and lit it so it hissed.

With another match her old gas stove went on with a poof. Jasmine realized how hungry she was and settled meekly at the old table with the checkered cloth, ready to be pleased with whatever the old woman set before her but craving Silver Mary’s scones.

She smelled something meaty and at the same time toasty like popcorn. At last the old woman slide a couple of plates on the table with bowls of soup and round lumps of fried bread. Jasmine ate obediently. The food was filling but nothing special; Mrs. Benz was no cook.

She sat across from Jasmine and ate quickly and solidly, chlop chlop. Not like Silver Mary, who ate with solemn joy, or Yako and Popster, who both said “Mmmm” a lot. But like all of them, Mrs. Benz made the table a welcoming place, her spirit embracing the little girl. Her leathery face was soft in the lantern light as her eyes avoided studying Jasmine in spite of her curiosity.

When they finished, Jasmine politely carried the plates to the sink and ran water on them. Then they both sat at the table. The old woman was not one to begin conversations and Jasmine was usually comfortable letting silences go on. But tonight her bright curious fire gleamed gold.

“Your name is Mrs. Benz, right? Or is it Mrs. Brynn? I guess Giles wasn’t sure.”

The old woman showed no surprise and didn’t ask who Giles was. “Benz,” she said. “My husband’s name. He was from Germany. Gare-old Benz.” When she said “Benz,” the “z” sounded like an “s.”

“Was he the man that took the picture?”

Now the woman’s eyebrows did raise. She nodded slowly.

They studied each other. Jasmine was excited to be living in a story that Giles had told, talking to the old woman who had led Giles to the place where the sky ripped open, who had sat glorying in the sun long ago on the day something had cut Cloud Rock out of the world.

Of course she had not heard Giles tell that part of the story. But it was in her head anyway, probably from wandering the corridors. Stories got packed into the walls of that place.

Jasmine was a smart girl, she always had been and her years of wandering the corridors between the worlds had only sharpened her wit. Giles had told her that folk tales from Armenia began with the words, “Once there was and was not…” Now she felt something contradictory and insubstantial about Mrs. Benz, something that was and was not.

She already knew one thing wrong. Mrs. Benz had lost her husband ten years ago and she’d been a “young woman” then. Not every kid Jasmine’s age would have caught that but grownups didn’t get this old in ten years.

But when she thought about that too much, she slipped out of the story.

It was like an old movie projector she’d seen in a museum: the square holes on the film slipped from the toothy wheel that pulled the film through the projector and the story skipped ahead or behind from where she sat carefully.

And when she left the story she drifted back toward that dark corridor where the demons waited.

That was a lot for a little girl, even as brave and magical a little girl as Jasmine, to think about. So she sat very still and focused on her hands. Was the tablecloth rough cotton weave or coated with plastic?

She’d always felt the presence of a guiding spirit in the corridors, long before Tiffany came into the story, a mischievous, magical woman from sometime long ago. She felt that presence now, nodding approval. Giles is a storyteller but so are you, mi hija.

Rough cotton weave, she decided, felt more right, and so it was.

“Could you please tell me about Mr. Benz? About Gare-old?” That felt like the place to probe, like a tongue probing for a missing tooth. When she asked that question, it didn’t feel like the little house with the climbing set outside and the so-so food would just dissolve like ink in water. Years of wandering into people’s lives and having her curiosity welcomed made the question come naturally. The old woman accepted Jasmine as everyone did.

She didn’t say, “How do you know so much?” Her calm surface rippled like Jasmine had thrown a pebble in a dark lake.

There was something she had not told that reporter Robby Baker, that she had not told any of her stern family or even the Navajo Tribal Police when they had questioned her. Something that she would tell a little girl.