“Let’s see if we can find out what’s going on,” she said.
She started for the-ballroom, pausing when Pukwudji didn’t follow.
“Aren’t you coming?”
He shook his head. “Herok’a and buildings—that’s not for me.”
“But—”
“I’m a secret,” Pukwudji said. “Your secret, the forest’s secret. It’s not for them to know, hey?”
“Blue’ll be in there,” Sara tried. “You know him.”
But Pukwudji simply took a side step and was gone.
I’ll wait for you here, she heard him say, his voice tickling in her mind, rather than physically heard.
Sara looked at the spot where he’d vanished, waiting to see if he’d change his mind, then sighed and continued on to the ballroom on her own. Though she tried to ignore them, she was all too aware of the owls following her progress from the eaves above with their silent, round-eyed gaze.
4
“I’ve been here before,” Blue said. “In this situation.”
Judy cocked an eyebrow, waiting for him to elaborate.
The two of them were sitting on the small stage at one end of the ballroom with Esmeralda, waiting for the rest of the House’s residents and guests to arrive so that they could decide what they would do from this point. The latter had been arriving steadily by ones and twos over the past few minutes. They gathered in small groups in various parts of the cavernous room, their mood ranging from operating on automatic pilot to delight at their predicament.
The Pagan Party, Blue noted, were the happiest, once they got over the initial shock.
Esmeralda was sitting on the piano bench, picking out a few desultory bars of some sonata. Rachmaninoff’s No. 2, Blue decided, recognizing the familiar tempo change from the second movement. She looked up as Blue spoke, fingers stilling on the keys.
“You mean that business a few years ago with Tom Hengwr?” she asked.
“I told you about that?”
Esmeralda shook her head. “Actually, Sara did.”
“Well, I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about,” Judy said.
She was handling the whole situation well, Blue thought. A hell of a lot better than some. Over by the double doors that led into the ballroom, a couple of would-be poets were trying to comfort a third of their number who was crouched on the floor, arms wrapped around his legs, a wide-eyed look of panic in his eyes, limbs shaking as if from palsy.
The good thing was that no one had been physically hurt. A small miracle, considering the damage he’d seen in some of the rooms.
“Earth to Blue,” Judy said. “Come in, Blue.”
“Well, there was this guy,” he began, turning his attention back to Judy.
Esmeralda switched to Chopin as Blue gave a brief rundown on the previous time Tamson House had gone world-hopping. The music played a gentle counterpoint to his story and Blue found himself falling into its rhythm as he spoke, appreciating its presence. Somehow it made the weirdness of his story easier to relate. But more important, he realized, the quiet piano-playing was having a soothing effect on the various and sundry occupants of the House who’d just happened to be present in the building when it shifted into the Otherworld.
“You could’ve warned me,” Judy said when he was done. She shot him a quick smile to show that she wasn’t being too serious. “I mean, this kind of thing’ll play hell on business. Guy’ll come looking for his bike that I’ve been working on and not only is the bike gone, but the whole frigging House. What’s he going to think?”
“Maybe it’ll remind him of that joke about the magician who went downtown and turned into a restaurant,” Esmeralda said.
Judy laughed. “Yeah, right.”
“The music I can take,” Blue said, “but not the bad jokes.”
Esmeralda only shrugged and pretended to flick the ashes from an imaginary cigar.
“So Jamie,” Judy went on after a few moments. “He died... right?”
Blue nodded.
“Only he’s still here... kind of like a ghost?”
“He’s part of the House,” Esmeralda said, taking over from Blue. “Think of him as a guardian spirit.”
“So where’s he gone now?” Judy asked.
Esmeralda looked down at the keyboard. Her hair fell forward, hiding her face. Strands moved, as though touched by a breeze that only they could feel. She played her fingers lightly over the keys, only just brushing their smooth ivory surfaces. Her touch was so soft that not one hammer came in contact with a string.
“I wish we knew,” Blue said.
5
It had been odd at first, thinking he was dead, then slowly coming back to awareness.
Body lost; gone forever the flesh and bone and the heartbeat that sent blood pulsing through every artery and vein. Sensations were stimulated through other means of awareness now.
They were ghostly impressions in the beginning. Confusing ones. A hundred different views, as though he had an eye in every part of his body. A thousand sounds, as though he had an ear for each eye. A hundred thousand scents, as though each pore had acquired its own olfactory organ.
It wasn’t until his father spoke that he knew what he’d become.
It’s yours to guard now, James. Cherish the burden.
It.
Tamson House.
He’d become the House.
He wasn’t just a ghost, haunting the maze of its halls and rooms. He was the House. Alive in its wood and glass and stone. Its walls were his ears. Its windows, his eyes. He was aware of every minute occurrence that happened within the scope of its rooms and towers and halls.
He thought he’d go insane.
But he learned to cope. Just as men and women learned to sift through the confusing barrage of stimuli that assaulted their senses every moment of every day and focus on only one or two details, just as their bodies carried on their life functions without the necessity for direct attention from the consciousness, so he learned to be particular as to what he focused upon.
Sanity returned. He allowed the residents their privacy.
And he found a place to store the core of what made him who he was—a spark of identity that he kept separate and nurtured so that he would always be Jamie, still individual, not just the ghostly spirit of the House in its entirety. His father had done the same, he realized, when he found residual memories of Nathan Tamson’s presence in the observatory. That part of the House had been his father’s choice as to where he would maintain his individuality; just as Jamie’s grandfather Anthony had chosen Sara’s Tower in his own time of ghostly custodianship.
Jamie chose Memoria—the computer mainframe that had become so much a part of his life in the last years that he was flesh and blood. He had been an Arcanologist then—a self-coined word to accompany another that he’d also created to describe his life’s work: Arcanology, the study of secrets. As time passed, he discovered he could maintain that work in his present state, though due to the limitations that were inherent in lacking a physical body, it wasn’t an easy task. And it wasn’t the same.
But this new life-after-death could never be the same as the life he’d left behind. Survival of the mind, of his identity, was a godsend—he couldn’t deny it—but there were things he missed with an intensity that sometimes had the madness that had plagued his first few weeks in his new existence come licking at the corners of his mind once again.
The lack of physical sensation was one of the worst.
He could feel the sun, the wind, the rain on the roof and walls of the House, but those tactile impressions couldn’t begin to compete with the memory of sun-warmed skin and the wind in his face, the glory of a summer rainstorm when he would stand on the porch, the rain splattering against the legs of his pants, dampening the cloth, the air crackling with energy, being half-blinded by flares of lightning, deafened by thunder. Or skating on the canal on a winter’s day when the air was so cold your breath froze, the sun like diamon
ds on the ice, every sense and thought shocked into exaggeration....
Being alive.
How could anything compete with life?
Running a close second to the loss of physical sensation, he felt the lack of the exchange of ideas that had filled so many of his days in his earlier existence. Through Memoria, he could communicate with Blue and others. He had access to all the material he’d entered into the computer’s memory banks before he’d died. Blue and, later, Ginny read articles to him from more recent journals. But none of that was—could—be the same, either.
What he had really missed was the voluminous correspondence he’d maintained with like-minded individuals in every part of the world. He couldn’t write to them, because for all practical intents and purposes, he was dead.
It was Esmeralda who’d found a solution to that—a solution so simple he wondered that he’d never thought of it himself. With her help, he created John Morley, a “close and dear friend of Jamie Tams” who took it upon himself to get in touch with all of Jamie’s old correspondents. New—for them—friendships blossomed, and soon “John Morley” had as voluminous a correspondence as ever Jamie’d had. John Morley began to contribute to the same journals that Jamie once had, and if anyone noticed the similarity in writing style between Jamie’s previous work and that of his friend, no mention was made of it that he ever saw.
Esmeralda was also the one who’d seen to the transfer of the Library’s more pertinent texts into his memory banks. She spent long hours talking with him, playing chess or Go, sometimes just sitting in his study and reading, knowing that her company—her awareness of him and his particular needs—was more comforting than any verbal communication.
He appreciated the part Esmeralda had come to play in his life—appreciated it more than he could ever hope to convey to her. His only regret in their relationship—was that what defined humanity? he wondered sometimes; our apparent need for regrets and guilt?—was that it wasn’t Sara playing this role in his life. This didn’t in any way diminish his feelings for Esmeralda; he just missed Sara.
Before his death, it had always been he and Sara, paired against the world. But while she spent time with him whenever she returned to the House, he knew she was uncomfortable with their new relationship. It wasn’t real to her. No matter how much they could talk of old times, he knew that she still viewed him as a stranger; a familiar stranger, perhaps, like an old friend one hasn’t seen for a very long time, the distance of years lying between now and the familiar memories of then, but a stranger all the same.
She’d suffered the hardest with his death; but rather than coming to accept his ghostly return as Blue had, every time she was with him he could see a deep sorrow well in her eyes. Though she would never admit it, he was sure that it was her inability to come to terms with the present turn their relationship had taken that sent her into the Otherworld, more than any other reason.
Those who hadn’t known him before his death—or those like Esmeralda who’d been gone so long, or were so matter-of-fact when it came to what smacked so strongly of the supernatural—were nonplussed with his present state. But Sara...
It was because of her that he began to concentrate his studies on the Otherworld. He pored over all of its aspects, the myths and legends, the rumors he read, the facts that Esmeralda could share with him. He concentrated on how its borders related to this world. How one crossed over. How the journey could be made without a physical body.
It was the latter which proved to be his undoing.
He’d practiced reaching out from the House, stretching his spirit from where it was bound to the building, outward and inward, for the Otherworld lay in either direction, depending on one’s perception of it. And as he practiced, he realized it was possible. He could reach out, not just to view, but to step out, as it were, of the body that the House had become, like a spirit traveling beyond the confines of its flesh-and-bone body. It could be done.
But with success so close at hand, his father’s voice would reverberate in his mind.
It’s yours to guard now, James.
And it was true. The House did need to be guarded. It was a center of power, a crossroads between the worlds. A place where magic lay deep in every stone and plank and tile of its making. And there were always those who yearned to breach its defenses, to take its power and invest it in themselves. Dissipating it upon their own concerns, rather than allowing it to continue its cyclic pattern of maintaining a community—building and residents, each fueling the other with solace and comfort, riddles and questions, understanding and always mystery.
It did need to be protected. Jamie saw how his father, and grandfather before him, had utilized their strange relationship with the building to keep it a haven of open-mindedness and learning. Those with destructive impulses could be turned away. Hermetic scholars following their left-handed paths might seek to tap into the lifespring of the House’s energy source—the garden, the ancient wood it hoarded in its memory—but such psychic assaults were rare and they, too, could be turned aside. The House had the strength; it only needed one such as Jamie or his ancestors for its focus.
It’s yours to guard now, James. Cherish the burden.
Guard it he did, but it was a burden. For he wanted to reach out—to Sara. Wanted her to understand that for all the alienness of his present situation, he was still her uncle, still the Jamie she’d always known, and she was still his Sairey. It didn’t have to change. They’d been given a gift; he’d cheated death. What they could have between them would be different, but it would still be meaningful. The magic didn’t have to die.
If she could just understand that, then he would be content.
He would put away regrets and guilt.
He would do his best not to yearn for what he couldn’t have, but concentrate instead on what he did.
So he continued to reach for the Otherworld, to reach for her. And one day he stretched far enough so that all connections binding him to the House snapped and his spirit went sailing off into those uncharted realms.
It didn’t go at all as he’d expected.
The Otherworld was not one place, but a hundred thousand places and times, all overlapping, one over the other like the layers of an onion. From his present point of view, and with his inexperience, he found it impossible to focus on any one world, little say find Sara in it. His senses overloaded with a surfeit of images and impressions. He had no body, not even a center from which to define his focus as he could with Memoria in the House, so what came to him, came from every side and direction.
There was no up, no down. No east, no west. No past, no future. No left, no right. Here it was all now, and here, seething and roiling, a chaotic stew from which he found it impossible to extricate himself.
He realized two things at that moment: he was hopelessly lost, and he’d failed his charge by leaving the House unprotected. And worse, he could sense that someone... something was already taking advantage of his failure.
One small tenuous thread still connected him to Memoria. It was less a physical presence, more just a memory, or a hope of a memory. It wasn’t enough to show him how to return, to let him pull himself back. All he could do was send a warning back.
The message he sent was complex, a string of ideas and thoughts all bound together in what he’d learned, what he’d been, encapsulated as best he could in one brief flare of communication. But what reached the other end of the thread linking him to what he’d lost become distilled in its passage into—
The symbol upon the Weirdin disc of the Forest.
A ghostly cloak to carry a message of warning.
Then the apocalyptic stew in which he swirled and spun simply tugged his spirit apart and scattered the pieces into a hundred thousand Otherworlds.
6
Julianne wasn’t ready to become part of the crowd that was gathering in the ballroom. Not yet. She told Cal to go ahead, she’d catch up with him later, and while it was apparent that he didn’t wa
nt to leave her—because he honestly didn’t feel it was safe, she realized, rather than for his usual reasons for being with her—he did as she asked. Finally alone, she opened one of the House’s many front doors. Stepping outside, she let the night swallow her.
The paved width of an inner-city residential street should have been laid out before her. But O’Connor Street was gone, and with it the houses on its far side, the streetlights, the sound of traffic, the city itself....
There was only the forest—the primal forest that had thrust itself into the House with its giant trees that were no more than the tips of fingers when compared to the forest’s immense bulk as a whole. The trees were like redwoods—cathedral huge, enormous, stately and secret, resonant with mystery. They beckoned to her, almost audibly calling her name as they had from the first moment she’d looked out the window to find the city gone. Her body trembled. She ached to step away under their boughs, but then oddly enough she found herself thinking about Cal and the immediacy of the forest’s pull on her was diminished.
Something had happened to Cal when the forest entered the House. Not the same kind of something that she had experienced, but he’d sustained an epiphany as intense as her own sudden validation of the miraculous depths that lay behind the world. They’d each undergone a personal shift of perception that changed their world. For her, Mystery had been transformed from intuitive belief, secreted within herself, to tangible reality, while he...
When she considered how he’d looked at her in the hallway after they had left the Birkentree Room, how he’d spoken to her, she realized that his shift in perception had encompassed a simpler, though no less profound, change in how he viewed the world. He’d been looking at her as a person, first, rather than as a body he lusted after. He’d realized how their relationship had been colored by the game he’d been playing and he’d been... embarrassed. Perhaps even shamed.