The same goes for Raul who’s here for his lover Benny.
Suzi can’t do it because she hasn’t got a strong enough connection to the consensual world yet, and no connection at all to the spiritworld.
As for Aaran, not knowing his history, you’d think he was a good man. But I can’t forget what Saskia’s told me about him. How could he possibly be trusted for something this important?
That leaves only Bojo and me.
And it’s obvious who it has to be. Bojo’s far more of an innocent bystander than I am. He only got pulled into this because he likes Holly and wanted to help her. I started out the same, wanting to help Saskia figure out who she was, but then I started messing around like I always do. Breaking Saskia’s glass coffin. Busting Librarius. Freeing the leviathan from his prison of flesh.
But the most important difference between Bojo and me is that he’s not a shadow.
He’s real.
And I’m not, no matter what I try to tell myself.
I mean, think about it. The truth has been sitting there right from when I was that little seven-year-old girl cast off from Christy, and Mumbo came along to show me the ropes. She was teaching me to how to pass for human.
I hate to give up my independence, but really, who’s got the least to lose? Except for Suzi, at least the others stuck in here with me are all real. And Suzi’s too newborn to be of any use to the Wordwood spirit, for all that she looks like she’s in her twenties. I’m the only one of the two of us with the right kind of connection to the outside world.
After coming to my—admittedly reluctant—decision, my head fills with directions on how the others can leave the Wordwood and what I need to do here once they’re gone. It’s like the leviathan’s monitoring my thoughts and isn’t that creepy.
You know, I say. If we’re going to have any kind of a decent working relationship, the first thing we need to do is work out some boundaries. It’s bad enough I’m going to be stuck here like this. The least you can do is allow me a little privacy. Because really, nobody likes—
I don’t get to finish. As suddenly as I found myself unable to move and ended up wherever it is I am, it all goes away, and just like that, I’m back in my body.
My eyes feel dry and I blink. I see Bojo making the sign of horns, thumb holding down his two middle fingers, the remaining two standing straight out. It’s a tinker’s ward against bad luck. The others just look the same way I feel: stunned.
“Wow,” Christy says after a moment, Mr. Words reduced to the vocabulary of a doper.
Aaran gives a slow nod. He looks around at each of us, gaze finally settling on me.
“Was that… was that him?” he asks. “The Wordwood spirit?”
Suzi answers before I can. “I think so. It must have been. But it didn’t feel like the spirit I knew …”
“He was right inside my head,” Raul says. “No, he was totally a part of me, but separate at the same time.”
That’s when I realize that everybody’s had the same experience as me. Good. It makes what I have to do easier.
“That was the leviathan,” I say. “And I take it you all know what has to be done?”
Raul nods. “Someone has to stay behind, or he … what? Implodes? Did I get that right?”
“Pretty much,” I tell him. I look at the others. “And you all learned how to leave?”
Christy finally finds his voice. “We open a door back to our world—” He starts to shape the spell with his fingers, but stops before the sequence of finger movement is complete. “—staying focused on where we want to go while we’re doing it.”
“But who stays?” Raul asks.
“That’s easy,” I say. “It’s going to be me.”
I see the looks that cross their features: relief that someone else has stepped forward, which then shifts into guilt. Christy’s the first to argue the point.
“Why does it have to be you?” he asks.
“Because I’ve got the least to lose,” I tell him. “I might as well be here as in my little hidey-hole in the borderlands. Being here’s not going to make that big a change in my lifestyle.”
“Bullshit,” Christy says. “You’re the original free spirit. This’d kill you.”
He’s right. It might. But I’m not about to admit that. Not till they’re gone and the deal’s done.
“No, I should do it,” Suzi says. “I don’t have a life to lose—not a real one, at least. All the memories in my head were put there, except for what’s happened in the past day or so.”
“And that’s the problem,” I tell her. “You don’t have a strong enough anchor to the consensual world. A day or so in here, on your own with the leviathan, and you could completely lose what little connection you have.”
“Not if I stayed with her,” Aaran says.
She gives him a warm look. I can’t tell from Christy’s expression if he trusts Aaran or not, but I still don’t.
“Or I can stay on my own,” Aaran adds. “After all, what’s happening here is my fault.”
“I’ll give you that,” I tell him. “But do you have the background or stamina for this kind of thing?”
He shrugs. “I could ask the same of you. I know books.”
“This isn’t going to be about books.”
“No, but it will be about spending a lot of time in this place and it looks like the only distraction will be the books. My whole life’s been about books.” He glances at Christy. “Even if I could never write one worth a damn.” He turns back to me. “And as for stamina, none of us know how well we’ll do until we give it a try. Unless you’ve done this kind of thing before?”
“Yeah, right.”
He nods. “So there you go. I should be the one that stays.”
“No,” I say. “I’m doing it and I’m not arguing about it anymore. Like I said, I’ve got the least to lose.”
“What about me?” Bojo says.
I shake my head. “You’ve got something to go back to—or at least the potential for something, which is more than I’ll ever have.”
“Playing the martyr doesn’t become you,” Christy says.
“I’m not playing at anything. Now go. You know how to leave. The leviathan showed you, the same as it did me.”
There’s a long moment of silence. I look at them, one by one, trying to stare them down into agreeing with me. When I get to Christy, I can tell he’s about to start in again, but Aaran interrupts him before he can get the first word out.
“No,” Aaran says. “She’s made her decision. Who are we to argue the sacrifice she’s willing to make? It’s a hard enough thing she’s got to do as it is, without our making it harder by not giving her our support.”
I really don’t see the creep in him that Saskia does. Who knows, maybe he’s changed for real. Whatever. I’m just happy to have someone backing me up. And one by one the others come around.
It’s hardest for Christy, I can tell. He’s torn between wanting to be with Saskia and stopping me from doing this. We’ve always had a weird relationship—I mean, just consider how I came into the world. He probably thinks he’s alone in this endless fascination he has for his shadow twin, but that’s only because I’ve never shared my own curiosity for him. I just go sneaking through his journals and observing him from a distance instead of asking questions the way he does of me.
“You can always e-mail me, care of the Wordwood,” I tell him. Then I smile. “Just think, you’ll finally have a way to contact me whenever you want. Won’t that make a change.”
“But I’ll never see you again.”
“Oh, this gig won’t last forever,” I say.
Everybody knows I’m lying—including him. After all, we all got the same telepathic message from the leviathan. Whoever stays becomes a gateway spirit and there’ll be no coming back from that. For all I know, the change already started for me, back when I fell off the leviathan and into the light. Something happened to me then.
So we won’t be s
eeing each other again.
But he doesn’t call me on it—he knows how stubborn I can be once I make up my mind about something—and neither does anyone else.
“Say hello to Saskia for me,” I say.
He nods. “Thanks for keeping her safe.”
“It was my pleasure,” I tell him and I mean it.
Then we all say our goodbyes and they open a door in the air to take them back into the consensual world—a one-way trip back. I want to look away, but I find I need this one last glimpse of what I’m leaving behind. All I see is some basement. A worktable. Stairs leading up.
I lean closer as they start to step through, one after the other. Then, just as the door’s starting to close, I feel a shove from behind me and I’m falling through, arms flailing for balance.
And the door in the air whispers shut behind me.
This, Too, Shall Pass
Were we always
strangers,
or did we only
learn to become
this way?
—SASKIA MADDING,
“Strangers” (Mirrors, 1995)
Christiana
We land in a tangle of limbs on a cement floor. I suppose I should be grateful that I’m not on the bottom, but all I’m really concerned with is figuring out who gave me the shove and took my place back in the Word-wood. I have my suspicions.
Because I’m on top, it’s easier for me to extract myself from the pile. I do a quick head count. Christy. Raul and Bojo. Suzi.
I was right and I get a little nervous twitch in the pit of my stomach.
It was Aaran.
No wonder he was so helpful and ready to take my side when we were arguing about who should stay. He must have had this planned from the moment the leviathan came into our heads and told us what we needed to do. What one of us needed to do.
And it wasn’t me after all.
I can’t tell what’s stronger: relief that I’m not stuck back there in the Wordwood with the leviathan, or the worry about what Aaran will get up to in there.
Christy and Raul regard me with some confusion, but Bojo and Suzi get it right away.
“Oh, you fool,” Suzi says softly, and I know she’s not talking about me.
“He made his choice,” I say.
I’m feeling a little weird. Do they all feel that way? That I was supposed to be the one to stay behind?
Suzi seems to understand what I’m thinking because she looks right over at me and gives me a half-hearted smile.
“He means well,” she says. “But from everything I’ve come to know about him, he hasn’t had that much experience at playing the good guy. And I don’t know that he’s strong enough to take on something like this. He’s not like you in that way.”
I’ve never been good at compliments so I don’t acknowledge it. But it sure makes me feel better.
“This is going to be hard on you,” I say. “You two had a thing going, didn’t you?”
She shakes her head. “We had the start of something, but I’m not sure what. I like him—I like him a lot, actually—but we met under circumstances that could have gotten in the way of a long-term relationship. You know, once we got past the rush of getting to know each other.”
“Like your being born in the Wordwood.”
“Not to mention his picking me up while I was panhandling.”
“That wouldn’t make a difference,” Christy says. “Not if you care about each other.”
Suzi looks away from me, but not before I see the wet shine in her eyes.
Way to go, Christy, I think. Here we are trying to downplay Suzi’s feelings for Aaran, and you have to come out with something like that. But I know he didn’t mean to make her feel bad. He’s thinking about himself and Saskia, trying to show how this kind of thing can work out. Trouble is, we’re way past the chance of that happening.
“So does anybody know where we are?” I ask.
Adding anything to what we’ve just been talking about is only going to make Suzi feel worse, so I opt to change the subject.
“The basement of Holly’s store,” Bojo says.
I’ve been in the store before, but never down here. There’s something in the air I can’t quite place. A hint of the otherworld that goes beyond the fact that the basement has been used as a place to cross over. Now that I think of it, I got that same feeling upstairs the few times I’ve come into the store. I just put that down to all the books. They’ve always seemed like magic to me. I mean, talk about your doorways into other worlds.
“I need to use the phone,” Raul says. “To call… home …”
That makes Christy perk up. Raul wants to check on his lover Benny. Christy needs to see if Saskia made it back. Because none of us know what happened to all the other people who disappeared into the Wordwood. Did they get away before the white light burned everything away?
We troop up the stairs just in time to see yet another otherworld door open in the middle of the bookstore. Holly and Geordie come through it, along with a tall woman dressed like a skateboarder with a little twig girl by her side. I recognize the woman from revels in Hinterland. Her name’s Galfreya, but I think she calls herself Mother Crone when she’s here in the consensual world.
There’s all sorts of confusion as our two parties meet—which is only heightened when a door opens at the back of the store and a hob and a little yapping Jack Russell terrier are added to the mix. As soon as I see the hob, I realize what that hint of the magic I feel here is. Holly’s got a book-store hob living in her store.
While Holly picks up her dog and tries to calm it down, I catch Gal-freya’s eye. She nods hello and has the same “funny to see you here” look in her eyes that’s probably in my own. Then I do a quick fade into the borderlands and leave them all to sort it out.
I just want to go home, but first I have to check in at Christy’s apartment to make sure that Saskia’s okay.
I don’t know why I assumed that Saskia was back, safe in the apartment she shared with Christy. I just did. So I have a moment’s panic when I slip in— stepping sideways from the borderlands as I always do—and she isn’t there.
I call her name. Soft. Then louder.
My heartbeat becomes a quick thunder in my chest as I go from room to room in the apartment.
The sudden ringing of the phone makes me jump. Christy, looking for Saskia. I don’t pick it up. What could I say to him?
I remember the white flash when I was falling from the leviathan’s shoulder. Had it burned her away?
Then I see clothing scattered on their bed. The jeans and T-shirt she was wearing in the Wordwood the last time I saw her.
She just got cleaned up and went out looking for Christy.
The sense of relief that floods me is almost physical. I find myself sitting on the edge of the bed and reach over to touch the jeans as though to assure myself that they’re real.
I wonder if she knows he went to Holly’s store? Probably not. So, where would she go? Geordie’s place, I decide. Or the professor’s house,where Jilly’s still recuperating from the car crash that took her out of commission last year. I decide to try Geordie’s first because it’s on the way to the professor’s house.
I take another shortcut through the borderlands and step back into the consensual world in the alley behind the apartment, startling an old orange torn with a torn ear. He goes skittering off through a hole in the fence of one of the yards backing onto the other side of the alley, while I walk around to the front. My heart lifts when I see Saskia going up the steps of the building. She jumps when I call her name. A huge grin lights her features when she sees me and she hurries over to give me a hug.
“You made it,” she says as she steps back. “I was so worried about you.”
I nod. “I was worried about you, too.”
“I was just looking for Christy …”
“I figured as much. He’s at Holly’s store.”
She turns to look for the bus stop, but I take he
r arm and walk her back into the alley with me.
“I really have to see him,” she says.
“I know you do. That’s why I’m taking you the quick way.”
I step her into the borderlands, get my bearings, then pop back out with her into the consensual world at the same place I left Holly’s store a few minutes ago. Christy’s on the phone—calling home again, I guess. Everybody else is still talking a mile a minute, except for Bojo, who’s leaning against the front door, a half smile on his lips as he takes it all in.
Saskia turns to me. “You’ll have to teach me that trick.”
“Any time,” I tell her.
Then I leave her to run over to where Christy’s trying to reach her by phone, and I finally get to go home.
Okay, here’s what happened, or at least what I remember and was able to find out later. Some of it’s been confirmed by news reports, back in the consensual world. A lot of it, for obvious reasons, can’t be. The funny thing is what people actually remember, which isn’t a lot. You can still find the original reports of the disappearances in newspaper morgues and on-line, but there isn’t any of the follow-up you’d expect from a story this big. If you were paranoid, you might think it was a government cover-up, or if you know what I know, you might think the leviathan had something to do with it through his on-line resources now that he’s got Aaran on board to make contact with the outside world again.
But people don’t remember. It’s like there was some little blip in reality and now that it’s over, no one’s willing to even think about it anymore. No, that implies choice. What we have here is like it never even happened in the first place.
All those people who disappeared reappeared from wherever they’d originally vanished. At least, I think they all made it back. I know Holly’s friends did, but they don’t remember any more of what happened than anybody else does. Even Jackson’s clueless. I went by to see him and he just stood there in the doorway of his apartment looking at me—the way you do when you’ve opened the door on a stranger and you’re not quite ready to let them in, but you’re still willing to see what they want.