Spiritwalk

by Charles de Lint

  “Your attitude bespeaks not only immaturity, but a grave irresponsibility. What you do belittles not only you, but the gift itself.”

  What he was saying struck too close to home.

  “I don’t even know what it is,” she said. “I don’t understand it!”

  He had absolutely no sympathy for her.

  “You haven’t tried to learn.”

  “But I have. It’s just that whenever I talk to Esmeralda about it, my head starts to spin and I get sick to my stomach.”

  “That’s only fear,” he said.

  “I’m not like you and her,” Emma said. “I don’t get off on all of this weird stuff. I didn’t ask for anybody to give me anything.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not true. You called to the spirits of this world, time and again; you walked in the forest and spoke their names. Season by season, you paid homage to mysteries, great and small.”

  Emma looked at him like he was insane, but then she realized what he was talking about. It was when she was in her teens. When she and Esmeralda were corresponding. When the well of creativity that first started her drawing seemed bottomless and the sketches and paintings came alive under her fingers with almost no conscious effort or thought.

  She used to walk in the woods and fields around her parents’ house and literally talk to the trees as though they could understand her. She’d feel the touch of a breeze on her cheek and call out a greeting to Esmeralda, for wasn’t Esmeralda the Westlin Wind, just as she was the Lady of Autumn, who carried the heart of the season in her breast?

  “I was just a kid then,” she said.

  “The spirits don’t judge a being by its age, only by its integrity.”

  “You’re not being fair!” Emma told him. She was only just holding back tears. “I’m not a dishonest person.”

  But he only looked at her.

  “I’m not.”

  “You share your feelings with others?” he asked. “You don’t hurt those you love with your silences?”

  “I... I...”

  The torrent broke from inside her. She wept, head bowed, face in her hands. He made no move to comfort her, only waited until the tears ebbed, the torrent subsided.

  “I... try...” she finally said in a small voice.

  She looked up and saw, through a tear-blurred gaze, that he was grinning at her.

  “Do you see?” he asked.

  “See?”

  “What I meant. No one likes to hear what I have to say.”

  Anger arose like a dark cloud in her at the smug tone of his voice.

  “You bastard!” she cried, her voice still husky from her tears. “This is all some big joke to you, isn’t it?”

  “To ignore humor is to view the world with only one eye.”

  “You’re not Jamie. You’re not at all like Blue said you were.”

  His features went suddenly serious. “Understand this, Emma Fenn. The Otherworld changes people. Without a strong sense of self, or of purpose, it will transform you into your deepest desires or fears.”

  It wasn’t so much what he said as how he said it that cut through Emma’s anger, eroding its hold on her. An uneasy feeling stole through her.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Half the world is night,” he told her. “Do you understand what I mean by that?”

  Emma nodded. “That’s because of the way the earth turns on its axis. It’s always night somewhere..... “

  Her voice trailed off as he shook his head.

  “No. It’s nothing so simple, yet it’s the most basic truth you could ever learn. A hard truth.” He tapped his chest. “Inside us lies every possibility that is available to a sentient being. Every darkness, every light. It is the choices we make that decide who or what we will be.

  “On your world, they speak of one’s environment, how it affects individuals in their formative years. Your family, your friends, your social standing, your schooling... they all shape and mold you into the person that you become. By the time you gain an awareness of the process, you’ve already become who you will be. It’s only those with a great strength of will, and a vigorous awareness of self, who can change themselves.

  “Do you follow me so far?”

  Emma slowly nodded.

  “In the Otherworld, this is accentuated. If they abide here too long, the weak-willed go mad; even a strong personality can have his or her strengths undermined, can be made weak and so be affected.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re telling me this.”

  “I’ve a twofold purpose,” he replied. “The first is to warn you that you and those who have come with you to this realm are in danger—from themselves as much as from the influences of the Otherworld. The second is to explain what it is that makes your gift so important. Because of the understanding—the insight—that it allows you, you are capable of helping those who turned to the night by showing them their options. Not in words, not by long tedious explanations or manipulations, but by simply making them aware.”

  “But the trees...” Emma began.

  They didn’t talk to her about this. They simply whispered a sense of mystery to her.

  “Places can be affected in a similar fashion. Have you never felt uncomfortable for no good reason in one place, yet perfectly fine in another?”

  She nodded, waiting for him to go on, but he fell silent once more.

  “So,” she said finally. “I’m supposed to be some kind of do-gooder, running around saving people and places from themselves? Is that what you’re saying?”

  He shook his head. “No. You are a vessel into which the potential to help has been poured. No one—no person of your world, no spirit of this world—can make you be what you’re not or what you don’t wish to be.”

  Emma sighed. “I... I’m just not much good at that kind of thing. My own life is screwed up enough without my thinking I can tell people how to live theirs.”

  “It isn’t necessary for you to confront each person on an individual basis. Can you remember how you felt when you were communicating through your artwork? Not just the sense of completion, but the sense of rightness—the sense that you had brought to life something that could live beyond your sphere of being, that held in it far more potential than you ever realized you were imbuing in the work?”

  Emma shifted uncomfortably. It had been so long since she’d felt good about anything she did. But thinking back to those days, she could remember—not so much what she had lost, as that she had lost... something.

  “Vaguely,” she said finally.

  “And were you ever moved or changed by the creative work of another?”

  “Oh, sure. But—” She paused. “I see.”

  “Good.”

  “And the places?” she asked then.

  “You can only do what you can when you find yourself in a place that requires your help.”

  “I still don’t think I can do it.”

  He smiled. “You don’t have to.”

  Emma just looked at him. After this huge pep talk in which she’d learned far more about the Autumn Gift than she’d ever thought she could—learned and not been scared of the knowledge—he was now telling her that none of it mattered?

  “I don’t get it,” she said.

  “You can leave it behind—here in the Otherworld. Return it to those who gifted you with it in the first place.”

  Emma looked at the cathedraling trees that encircled the glen and wondered if he meant them.

  “Just like that?” she asked.

  “No. But I could show you. It’s not an entirely... arduous procedure.”

  Emma’s eyes narrowed, suspicion flaring in her. There’d been those who’d tried to tear the gift from her. Was he just trying a different approach to reach the same goal?

  “What’s in it for you?” she asked, wondering why she even cared.

  Because wasn’t this what she wanted—to be free of the damned thing? To be free of influences—the gift
s, those of the people around her....

  “I want nothing from you,” he said, then added, “no, that’s not entirely true. I do require your help, but in an unrelated matter.”

  “Which is?”

  “Tamson House. It needs rescuing.”

  Emma looked at him, not sure she’d heard him correctly. “Come again?”

  “Tamson House stands at a crossroads between the worlds. It is our entrance to your world, your entrance to ours. There are very few such places still extant in your world, and fewer still so... pure. Why do you think it is the gathering place of so many creative individuals?”

  That was true, Emma thought. She might not get much inspiration in it, but it certainly drew more than its share of artists, musicians and writers, not to mention those who were interested in the paranormal or the old-religion people that Blue called the Pagan Party.

  “There is a certain man in your world,” he went on, “who... covets the House’s power. He has been sick for a very long time—a special kind of sickness: other people simply don’t exist in his worldview. He isn’t alone in this illness, but in him it has become an art in amorality. He means to use the power of the House to rejuvenate himself.”

  “But isn’t that kind of what everybody does there?” Emma said. “Esmeralda always talks about how it’s a haven, that it gives people a chance to open themselves up that they’d never get outside its walls and then the House fills them with its energy.”

  “True, but they return as much as they take. This man will take it all and give nothing back. When he is done, Tamson House will be a building like any other—a little larger perhaps, but it will have lost its bond with the Mystery. And the man—an amoral such as he will be capable of great harm once he has taken the potency of Tamson House’s spirit into his own.

  “Normally the House’s guardian is there to deal with such a situation. Tamson House is not a place which suffers the mean-spirited lightly.”

  That much Emma knew. She’d overheard more than once in its halls people talking about how the House seemed to take care of itself. Bad things just didn’t seem to happen in it. She’d even felt a sense of that herself, though she’d never really thought about it until just this moment.

  “With the House’s guardian gone,” her companion went on, “the House lies helpless. And this man... he has already begun to feed.”

  Something bothered Emma about what he was telling her, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

  “You must find a way back to where the House stands in your world; then you must find and stop this man.”

  That brought her out of her reverie.

  “What—me?”

  He shrugged. “Whoever will do it. Your friend Blue perhaps?”

  “Why don’t you do it your—” she began, but then she had it. Now she knew what had been troubling her. “You’re supposed to be the guardian,” she went on. “Why don’t you just stop it?”

  “I can’t get through. I’ve tried. The man was expecting my interference and set up certain... safeguards to ensure that I would be unable to stop him.”

  Emma studied him for a long moment. “You’re not Jamie Tams,” she said.

  This time she spoke from logic, rather than anger.

  “I never said I was.”

  “But you never said you weren’t either. And you look just like him.”

  “I wanted to appear in a shape that would seem nonthreatening to you, yet one you might also hear out.”

  “So what do you really look like?” she asked, not really sure she wanted to know.

  “That’s not important.”

  “Okay. Just tell me who you are.”

  “Someone you wouldn’t trust if you knew.”

  “I don’t trust you now.”

  “You’d trust me less if you had my name,” he said.

  “But you still expect me to help you?”

  “You’re not just helping me; you’ll be helping yourself... and your friends.”

  “How do I know that?”

  The only answer he gave was a shrug. She tried to stare him down, but he returned her gaze with just a hint of laughter in the back of his eyes. The worst thing about all of this, she realized, was that—God knew why—but she did trust him. Maybe it was because he’d managed to articulate things for her that she’d never been able to grasp before. Esmeralda had tried often enough, but for some reason, the words just weren’t there for her to use.

  “I’ll have to talk to the others,” she said finally.

  He nodded. “Just remember, time’s running out. Every hour you stay here is that much more dangerous for many of those who accompanied you to this place. And every hour, our enemy grows stronger.”

  “Okay. But I still have to talk to the others.”

  “Do what you must.”

  “What’s this man’s name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, where can we find him?”

  “I don’t know. If I could track him, I could reach him, and if I could reach him”—a feral hunger woke in his eyes—“this conversation would be unnecessary.”

  “Except for what you told me about the gift,” Emma said.

  His eyes softened. “Except for that. After, when all of this is done, we will speak of that again. If you choose to leave it here, I can help you.”

  “But you won’t tell me what you get out of helping me.”

  “Not the gift at any rate,” he told her. Laughter spoke in his eyes once more. “I don’t need it. After all, I’m part of what gifted you in the first place.”

  “You’re—”

  “Look!” he cried suddenly, pointing in alarm at the forest behind her.

  There’s nothing there, she told herself. It’s just some stupid trick. But she couldn’t help looking all the same. When she turned back, she was alone in the glade.

  She scrambled to her feet, turning wildly to look in all directions, but he was really gone. That quick. That supernaturally quick.

  A shiver of dread crawled up her spine.

  Well, what did you expect? she asked herself. In this place, being what he said he was.

  I’m part of what gifted you in the first place.

  Was that true? Was any of what he’d told her true?

  Too much of it, she realized.

  The Otherworld changes people. Without a strong sense of self, or of purpose, it will transform you into your deepest desires or fears.

  She took a moment to get her bearings and then hurried back to the House. Passing through the trees, this time she barely noticed them except as obstacles in her way.

  11

  “He’s really gone, isn’t he?” Sara said, looking at the rolltop desk that housed the mainframe of Jamie’s computer.

  Although the Postman’s Room had become Esmeralda’s study and contained the clutter of her work on the desk and side tables, in the stacks of book and papers leaning up against the bookcases, no matter where Sara looked, she was reminded of Jamie. Especially familiar was the oldman hum of the computer, clearing its throat as it searched through its disk drives. She remembered Jamie’s name for it, remembered all his names. Memoria for the computer. Aenigma for his files. Arcanology for his studies.

  Oh, Jamie, she thought.

  A tight feeling grabbed her chest and she had to wipe at her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater. From beside her, in the twin to the club chair in which she was sitting, Esmeralda reached out a hand and laid it gently on Sara’s shoulder. Ohn sat on his haunches, his back leaning against a bookcase. Ginny was at the desk, frowning as she worked the keyboard.

  “There’s no sene of his presence anywhere in the House,” Esmeralda said. “God knows, I’ve searched for some trace of him, but it’s as though he never came back.”

  Died, Sara thought. And then came back. But what was it that had come back? Not really Jamie, she’d believed. There had always been a ghost in the house, a spirit living in it, looking after things like the Hobber
dy Dick from that Briggs story that she’d loved as a little girl. She hadn’t been able to believe it was Jamie, until now. Now that he was gone.

  “But did he leave voluntarily, or was he coerced into doing so?” Ohn asked.

  “I’d say voluntarily,” Esmeralda said. “He’d been talking for some time of finding a way to visit the Otherworlds. I just don’t think he realized what would happen if he deserted the House.”

  Like I deserted him, Sara thought.

  “You believe it followed him?” Ohn asked.

  Esmeralda nodded. “The House must have been drawn into the backwash of his departure. At that point he would have realized that something was wrong, but it seems that there was nothing he could do about it. The Weirdin he left on the screen, the cloak he sent to Sara... these were all he could do to warn us of the danger.”

  Ginny looked away from the computer screen to study the two of them.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “Jamie Tams,” Esmeralda said. “The previous owner of the House.”

  “But he’s supposed to be dead. You’re speaking of him as though he were still alive.”

  “He was,” Esmeralda said. “In a way. His spirit lived in the House; it spoke to us through Memoria.”

  Ginny looked at the computer where the Weirdin symbol still flickered on the screen.

  “I always thought that was just the way you spoke about your software,” she said slowly. “I never took it literally. The way everything here has its own name....”

  “Jamie was real,” Esmeralda said. “More real than many people who have a body to carry them around in the world.”

  Sara shivered. She watched Ginny study Esmeralda’s features, looking for the joke that wasn’t there.

  “I...” Ginny began; then she shook her head and turned back to the computer. “Never mind,” she added and began to work the keys again.

  “How can we... find him?” Sara asked.

  The look in Esmeralda’s eyes lacked her usual confidence.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He could be anywhere. The Otherworlds are scattered through so many temporal as well as spatial layers that I can’t think where to begin. I reach for him—for that individual essence that sets him apart from everyone else—but it’s like he’s everywhere. Or nowhere.”