Spirits in the Wires

  “But she could be trouble?” Holly asks.

  Robert just smiles. “Anybody can be trouble. You haven’t figured that out yet?”

  “Well, we’ve got enough to do with the trouble we already have,” I say as I get up from the table again. “I’m not going to go looking for more.”

  “Good advice to remember,” Robert says. “Though not always so easy to put into practice. The world has a habit of deciding that kind of thing for us.”

  I nod, then look at Geordie. “Do you want to come back to the apartment while I pick up some gear?”

  “Sure,” he says, rising from his seat.

  I know him well enough to see he’s still got something worrying at him.

  “What’re you thinking about?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “I was just wondering who told Saskia that the Wordwood site might be in the spiritworld.”

  I hesitate for a moment, then say, “My shadow.”

  “Your shadow.”

  A world of unspoken commentary wakes in his eyes. We’ve been through this before. It’s just another trip down all those roads where I believe things and he doesn’t. But he doesn’t say anything. Maybe he’s finally coming around to actually believing the things that so many of our circle of friends have experienced, himself included.

  “Now that’s interesting,” Robert says. “You don’t meet many folks that have a working relationship with their shadow.”

  “I wouldn’t call it a working relationship,” I tell him. “She pretty much comes and goes as she pleases.”

  “Well, what do you expect, you being the one that threw her out and all?”

  “What are you talking about?” Holly asks.

  “I’ll tell you later,” Geordie says.

  I study Robert for a moment. There’s something in the way he was defending my shadow that tells me he’s had his own experiences with the phenomenon. I’m curious about it, naturally—truth is, I’m curious about everything to do with the bluesman—but now’s not the time to get into any of it.

  “You guys need anything in the way of gear?” I ask instead.

  Bojo shakes his head. “I travel light.”

  “I don’t go anywhere without my girl,” Robert says, running a hand down the neck of his Gibson. “Otherwise, you could say the same for me.”

  “Does she have a name?” Bojo asks. “Your guitar?”

  “Everything’s got a name,” Robert replies, “but she’s never told me hers and I haven’t asked.”

  Bojo nodded. “Among my people, the instruments all have names. But I think they’re given to them by their players.”

  “I don’t go around handing out names. Things have got enough personality of their own without my hanging another tag on them that they’ve got to live up to.”

  “How about you?” I ask Raul. “Anything we can get for you?”

  “I’ve got everything I need except for food and water,” he says, “and Holly says we can get that at a grocery store down the street while you’re gone. But I wouldn’t mind a knapsack to carry my stuff in. All I brought was a carry-on for the plane.”

  “I’ve got a spare,” I tell him, then I turn to Geordie. “We should get going.”

  “We’ll be ready to go when you get back,” Bojo says.

  I nod. I know why he’s with us—it’s obvious that he’s got a thing for Holly. But Robert’s still a mystery.

  “Why are you helping us?” I find myself asking before I can leave.

  Robert smiles. “I don’t know. I guess it’s for the same reasons that always get me into trouble. Curiosity, plain and simple. I get this need to find out what a thing is. I have to know how it all turns out.”

  I suppose that’s as good a reason as any. I know I’ve stepped into a hundred situations because of my own insatiable curiosity.

  “Well, I want you to know we’re grateful,” I say.

  “Tell me that again if we survive this trip.”

  Aaran

  “I haven’t felt like that since high school,” Aaran said.

  He and Suzi were waiting in the lobby of the hotel while Estie and the others checked in at the front desk, then went up to their rooms to drop off their luggage and change. They sat side by side on a fat leather couch in the lobby, an island of stillness as the hotel staff and guests bustled around them.

  “I can barely remember high school,” Suzi said.

  Aaran laughed. “That’s all I can remember some days. It set the tone for the rest of my life.”

  She glanced at him. “What do you mean?”

  “You remember the fat, pimply kid with the Coke bottle glasses that no one ever wanted to talk to?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m the grown-up version of him. You may not see him when you look at me, but he’s still sitting there inside me.”

  Now it was her turn to laugh.

  “That’s funny,” she said. “I was your typical popular cheerleader type—you know, most likely to succeed and all that.”

  “Why’s that funny?”

  “Well, look at us now. You’re a big success and I’m living on the street.” She touched his arm. “But don’t take what happened back there too hard. You did the right thing and they know it.”

  “I suppose.”

  “And they didn’t all hate you. What’s his name—Christy. He stood up for you.”

  “Yeah. That really surprised me. I used to see him a fair amount before he started going out with Saskia. We got along pretty well, but I always thought he was just sucking up to me to make sure his books would get a good review. Now I’m beginning to realize that he’s actually a decent guy. I mean, his girlfriend’s one of these disappeared. I doubt I’d be as fair-minded about all of this if I were in his shoes.”

  “Hopefully, this’ll all be over soon,” Suzi said. “Estie and her friends seem really smart. I’m sure they’ll figure it out once we get to Hart’s apartment.”

  “If I can get us in.”

  “Think positively,” she said. “It’s always better to put out positive energy. Otherwise you’re just going to attract bad luck.”

  Aaran smiled. “This from the woman who doesn’t believe any of this is possible in the first place.”

  “You believe it’s real, don’t you?” Suzi asked. “I mean Web sites with spirits and other worlds and everything?”

  Aaran shrugged. “The evidence has moved way over to the ‘hard not to believe’ side of the scale for me.”

  “Then I do, too.”

  Holly

  “I feel like I’m in the middle of some Looney Toons cartoon,” Holly said to Christy.

  She’d come downstairs with the Riddell brothers as they left the store. Geordie had already gone ahead to the car.

  “But you know this stuff is real,” Christy said.

  Holly gave a slow nod. She bent down and picked up Snippet as the terrier tried to slip past Christy’s feet and have an impromptu solo walk.

  “But that doesn’t make it feel any less weird,” she said. She hesitated for a moment, then added, “You were awfully nice to Aaran, all things considered.”

  “Don’t make more of it than it was,” Christy said. “I wanted to know what he could tell us, and he wasn’t going to tell us anything if we treated him the way he deserves to be treated. And while it turns out it wasn’t a lot, well ...” He shrugged. “We’re further ahead knowing about Jackson Hart and this virus than we were before Aaran showed up.”

  “And it might even be useful—if Estie and the others can figure something out.” She paused for a moment, then added, “You don’t think you should wait to see if they can?”

  Christy shook his head. “I don’t know how much time we have, but in my heart, I can feel it running out on us.”

  “You’ll be careful.”

  He smiled. “You can count on it.” He waited a beat, then added, “And I’ll make sure Bojo is, too.”

  Holly couldn’t stop herself from blushing.

&nbs
p; “I hardly even know him,” she managed to say.

  Christy bumped a feather-light fist against her chin. “Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get the chance to know him better.”

  He leaned over and gave her a quick peck on the cheek, then he was out the door. Holly closed it behind him and engaged the lock. Her gaze fell on what was left of the store’s computer. Even if they managed to succeed at stopping the Wordwood spirit and were able to get all those missing people back, she didn’t know how she was ever going to use the machine again.

  Shadows in the Wordwood

  Skin spun off,

  stripped of

  flesh and bone,

  spirit singing,

  free at last.

  Come my turn

  to take the journey,

  will there be anything

  left of me

  to go on ?

  —SASKIA MADDING,

  “Death Is for the Living”

  (Spirits and Ghosts, 2000)

  Christiana

  I come slowly out of this second blackout of mine, drifting from complete unconsciousness into a dreamy state where I’m not fully aware of my body. I’m not sure that I even have one. Whatever I am is floating through a meadow, dotted with trees, that sits on the edge of a dark forest, but it’s a confusing place because everything is made of words.

  The grass and wildflowers are narrow phrases, swaying in the wind, punctuated with blossoms whose wordy petals radiate from clusters of vowels. The trees are thick paragraphs, dense with description, that lighten into shorter sentences and finally simply words as they follow the natural progression of trunk to branch to twig to leaf. Small verbs and nouns scamper along the branches or in amongst the roots of the trees. Others sit in the topmost branches, trilling sweet wordsongs, or soar by on wings of poetry.

  It’s all very strange, but I’m completely accepting of it, the way you are in a dream. My spirits are buoyant and light.

  I don’t know how long I’m in this place, but after awhile it starts to drift away—or I drift away from it. A sharp pang of disappointment goes through me. I felt safe and happy there, even with some of those darker stories I spied hiding in the shadows under the trees where the forest of legends and fairy tales began in earnest.

  But then I feel a tingling in my limbs. I realize I have limbs. I have a body again. I hear one last trilling song from a small yellow-breasted verb perched high in a paragraphing oak—

  Catch as catch as catch as can!

  —before it’s all gone and I’m waking up.

  When I open my eyes, the world’s spinning. I imagine all these faces crowded close, peering down at me, blurred and colourless. But when the spinning stops, the faces are still there, still blurred and leeched of colour. There’s no colour anywhere, which is a real shock after the brightly-hued world of words I’ve just left behind.

  I sit up and see that the faces are attached to bodies as ill-defined as the out-of-focus features on the heads above them. They drift away from me whenever I turn to look at a particular group, the ones not in my view taking the opportunity to crowd closer behind me.

  “Back off!” I tell them.

  I get to my knees, waving my hands at them. They do what I tell them and give me some space, watching me from a distance. The effort of chasing them off makes me dizzy, but I force myself to put one foot on the ground and push up until I’m standing, though swaying would be a better description of what I’m doing.

  “I mean it,” I say as the ghostly figures begin to move closer again.

  That’s when I realize that I still have my colour. I lift one hand, then the other. They’re the same coppery brown they always are. I look down at my sweater and jeans. I’m far more here than the ghost people are. I’m far more here than the place itself is. The pale rose of my sweater, the faded blue of my jeans, the scuffed brown leather of my walking shoes—they all vibrate with presence and colour.

  Well, I guess they would, here in this chiraoscuro world, where everything’s just black and white and the shades of grey that lie in between. Standing here, I jump out like a spot of tinted colour in a black-and-white photograph.

  But that’s not the strangest thing about this place. The setting could be the same as my dream of the word world, except this meadow borders a forest that looks like a sculpture made out of junk metal and old electronic parts: trees, branches, leaves, undergrowth and all. It’s all circuitry and wires and bits of metal and cast-off scraps of god knows what.

  Everything’s like that. I bend down and touch the vegetation underfoot. It looks like its made up of hundreds of tiny wires, soft and pliable like grass would be.

  But I think it’s the lack of colour that gets to me the most.

  I’ve been in colourless worlds before—or ones that were as close to it to make no difference. A lot of the borderlands exist in a perpetual twilight that lays a grey hue over everything. But they’re nothing like this. There’s something in the air here that feels heavy. That makes me feel heavy. Maybe it’s the lack of colour. Maybe it’s all the metal and electronic junk. More likely, it’s those ghostly figures that drift around as easily as mist.

  But if this is one of the strangest places I’ve ever been, it does have this much going for it: it’s still a place. I’m not sure where it is—somewhere in the spiritworld, I suppose—but if I’m here, that means I’m not dead.

  “Is this weird or what?” I say to Saskia.

  There’s no reply in my head and I realize that the slight pressure of her presence is gone.

  That figures. Just when I could really use someone to talk to—if only in my head—she’s found somebody else to inhabit. Or maybe she got left behind when I… when whatever happened to bring me here.

  I try to remember and it slowly comes back to me. The storm that shouldn’t be able to exist. Me going out into it. The black rain beating me to the ground …

  I guess Saskia was right. Maybe I should learn to be a little less headstrong. Can’t see it happening, though. If Mumbo hasn’t been able to convince me after all these years, I doubt anything can.

  I study the ghosts some more, wondering what they want from me. I suppose it could just have been curiosity, the way they were all hovering around me when I was coming to. They don’t seem particularly menacing. In fact, they’re all keeping their distance now. Though they haven’t lost interest in me—not by a long shot. I think the weight of their observation is adding to this heaviness that’s settled over me.

  I thought they were all the same at first, but I can see differences now. Even as out-of-focus as they are, their features are individual when you look at them long enough. Men and women of all races. Teenagers, pensioners, and all the ages in between.

  Since they still haven’t made any threatening moves in my direction, I decide to try open up the lines of communication between us.

  “So,” I call out to the nearest group of them. “What’s this place called?”

  That bunch immediately backs away. I hear an odd sound coming from them which sounds like radio static. It takes me a moment, but after I try another two or three times with other groups, I realize it’s their voices.

  Scratch communication with the natives.

  I look away from them and try to get my bearings. The meadow I’m in is actually the scrub between the forest and a sweep of grasslands that goes all the way to a line of low hills that I can see on the far horizon. There are probably dips and valleys, but from where I’m standing it appears to be one big, flat expanse of open land.

  That direction seems less than promising, so I turn back to the forest. I know I’m probably going to have to go into there, but I’m not looking forward to it. I don’t like the idea of being in such a confined space, not with all those ghostly creatures floating about.

  I fasten onto that word. Ghosts. Maybe I am in some land of the dead. Since I’m so solidly present, I guess I’m still alive. But they could be spirits of the dead. Or lost souls.

&n
bsp; I immediately think of Saskia again.

  Lost soul pretty much sums the state she was in the last time I—I want to say “saw her,” but she had even less physical presence than the ghostly figures I’ve got floating around me here. Could she be one of them? Is that what I’m doing here? She got pulled into this place and I got dragged along with her?

  I call her name. Once, twice, and again. I call as loud as I can, letting my voice ring, but all I succeed in doing is totally scaring off the ghosts that have been watching me. That’s okay. I can live without the weight of their attention.

  I listen hard, hoping for a response, but I don’t get one. I realize that there’s next to no sound here. No birdsong. No wind. Nothing except this faint hum that seems to come out of the ground underfoot.

  I try calling for Saskia some more, keeping it up until my throat gets raspy.

  There’s still no response.

  So I give up. I have a last look at the grasslands, then slowly turn to the forest. I can’t see anything worth my attention in the grasslands, but the forest... the forest could be hiding anything. That’s the trouble as well as a possible solution to my situation, of course. That anything waiting for me under those strange, junk metal trees could just as easily be dangerous as helpful. But I really don’t see that I have a choice beyond standing here like a dummy, doing nothing.

  So. I take a deep breath. I start forward the way you do any journey, big or small. You put one foot in front of the other.

  I get maybe a dozen paces closer when something hits me in the head with enough force to bowl me over and send me sprawling in the wiry grass.I scrabble quickly to one side, moving on all fours, before I turn to see what hit me.

  There’s no one there.

  I lift a hand to my head and feel around through my hair. But there’s no sore spot. There’s no blood. Nothing. Only this pressure in my head. A familiar pressure …