Spirits

by Leslie Edens Copeland

  "Thank you for all your help!" I called, as a demon snatched me and held me high in the air. "We appreciate the water and cookies and that you're letting us go!"

  A party of demons flocked around, hoisting Emmett and I. Soon they were bounding across the vast expanse of the cavern, carrying us along with them. We quickly reached the massive tree root that extended all the way from the cavern ceiling to the floor of the Underwood and beyond. The demons dropped us on the stony ground. Emmett wandered over to the place where the giant root entered the cave floor. He studied it with fervent curiosity.

  "I've got to wonder what's below," he said. "Clearly, this thing goes even farther down."

  "Yes, we often wonder too," said the black, shaggy demon Percival, who had led the party. "But we dare not venture too far outside our own realm. It's questionable, in my opinion, whether you'll be able to leave."

  None can escape, said the Nonbook. Still . . .

  "But I got to the surface earlier!" I said. "Although the experience was not pleasant." I broke the last bit of sap off my hair and winced.

  "You are mortal and pure of heart," said Percival. "I have little doubt about you. But for the honored Emmett—" He shook his head, shaggy hair waving back and forth. "I'd be surprised if he makes it out. Only the lightest of demons can get close to the surface and your Emmett carries much kriot."

  "But Plouton said I could leave!" said Emmett. "What does your king say to this?"

  "It is not up to him to decide," said Percival. "Nor to me! The laws of the Underwood will stand, no matter what Plouton says. He agreed to allow you to leave and he won't stand in your way, but he cannot be certain it is possible. He only agreed that you could try."

  "Plouton seemed to think I was pure of heart," said Emmett. "Else why would he agree to allow me to leave?"

  Percival squinted at Emmett's shifting form. "In your current state, you appear to be a saint. But it has not always been so, has it?"

  "No," admitted Emmett. "Although I have locked those memories away. I don't have conscious knowledge of the wrongs I've committed throughout time. But I know it is true that I've committed a great many."

  "You will have to drop your ballast if you wish to cast off," said Percival, poking at Emmett with one of his pointy demon claws. "Let the kriot go. Trust that what is pure about you will carry you to the top. Leave the rest here with us."

  "But!" Emmett's face registered horror. "So many lifetimes! So much experience! So much knowledge!"

  I clasped his hand, trying to stem the rising panic I saw in his eyes. "Perhaps I could carry it."

  "The weight is unimaginable," said Emmett. "This demon is right. It would crush you and it's likely to drag me back down to the depths. I must leave it behind. The history of a hundred lifetimes. I must start over, completely."

  "It won't be totally lost," said Percival. "Trevor and I maintain a library of sorts. We will guard it for you. Should you return, you can use it. But this sort of accumulated baggage belongs here, honored Emmett. It always did."

  "Perhaps you're right," said Emmett, and did I see him wipe away a tear? "Perhaps I should recommend this to all the oldest spirits. Well, here goes."

  He embraced me briefly and before I had a chance to say anything, he lay flat on the rocky floor and gave a great shudder. He kept shaking and shaking, until a pattering sound like rainfall alerted me to the released items. First, a few coins. Then a pile of keys and a stack of books appeared under his body. He levitated up and up, still shaking as the pile grew. And how the pile grew! I'd never seen such a hoard of junk even though I had lived in the middle of one. Soon, Emmett floated half a mile up, still shaking out waves of things: flashes of memories that misted in the air, old scrolls, pens by the bucket load, pets dead and gone, photographs, enough portraits to fill a gallery, and stacks and stacks of books.

  Other things I couldn't identify—words of many languages that misted into nothing. Facial features imprinted in smoke. I saw hundreds of vials, filled with black and red liquids, and over each one, a misty vision of a coffin, a headstone, or a cold, dead face. I saw scenes of battles and struggles, then pair after pair of dancing couples, some in elegant dress, others in simple tunics or rags.

  I marveled at the strangeness of his stores, and gripped tightly at the Nonbook I carried in my sleeve. So much gone and lost. So much, my heart ached, that he did this to be with me.

  After a long interval in ecto-time, Emmett's shaking slowed. The flow of kriot became a trickle, then stopped. He fluttered down off the pile, like a feather falling, his manifestation now onion-skin thin. Had the Underwood contained any breezes, we might have lost him for some time.

  "You'll make it now," said Trevor. "Follow your young mortal protégée up to the surface. She knows where she's going."

  He gestured toward the pile Emmett had left and a dozen denizens of the Underwood converged on it, beginning the task of categorizing and clearing away Emmett's kriot.

  "Something tells me this is not the first time I've left a pile of kriot here," murmured Emmett in a weak voice. He reached out his hand toward the pile, but I took it in mine, and led him instead to the slough tree.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Able's Strong Progeniture

  I leaned without hesitation into the rough surface of the slough tree, drawing Emmett after me. It enveloped us instantly. Going upward—or was it downward?—took on the quality of a dream. As before, the sensation of slow movement overtook me, and I could neither speak nor breathe. Then the visions came.

  My brother Samhain, all spiky hair and creaky leather. My tired little mother Shirleen, and then my friends: Lily, Trenton, and Oskar. How they laughed! My stepfather Bruce, yelling at me, his face getting more and more red as he closed in. I could almost feel his spit on my cheek. Then his face shifted into my father's face. My wonderful father, Able d'Espers, and I was talking to him. We were laughing together, then after the longest time, my head burst up from the surface of the slough tree, I could see the portal field, and I breathed air into my lungs. I was out!

  My arms were still pinned at my sides, but a push from below spilled me out onto the gray grass, oozing with sap and coughing. I grasped Emmett's shoulder when he emerged. Grappling for purchase, I pulled until he, too, drifted out of the slough tree and flapped around like an old sheet on the wind. He hovered over me, terribly white and transparent now that he'd lost his kriot. I sat up and he said, "Oh, my sweet little protégée! My sweet Aether! We did it!"

  He drifted down to me and I held onto him the best I could, my eyes closed. When I opened my eyes, I saw that the sap had not clung to either of us. Somehow, we'd come out of the slough tree squeaky clean. I realized then that my tears were flowing.

  "What is it, Aether?" Emmett sat beside me and draped his insubstantial arm around my shoulders.

  "Those visions—did you get them, Em?" I said.

  "Cruxing visions," said Emmett. "I do not miss that about traveling by slough tree."

  "You mean you've done this before?" I puzzled it over, my eyes taking in the gray portal field and the slough trees of the Disenchanted Forest. When had that been?

  "Ah—yes?" said Emmett, a little unsure. "I think in the early days. The time before. In one of my visions, I traveled to the Celestial Realm."

  "That sounds like an interesting place," I said.

  "Crux it all if I can remember why or what it was like," said Emmett. "I suppose it will have to be an expedition for me, as so many things are." He winked at me.

  "I'd like to visit it," I said, stretching out my arms and running my hands through my hair. "Why did none of the sap get on us?"

  "Oh, I'm sure if you spirit up, unnaturally, that sap problem doesn't happen," said Emmett.

  I gave him an exasperated look. "You've definitely traveled by slough tree before. Tell me what that means, to spirit up."

  "It simply means you need to carry something of substantial ectoplasmic substance with you. It needs to be fairly large. A
bout as large as, say, a pair of pants." Emmett nodded wisely at the sky, the trees, the grass, and then at me.

  I stared at his baggy black pants. "So, your pants saved us from getting all sappy?"

  "Oh, I don't think my pants could take all the credit. There's also the rest of my clothes. And me, myself. I'm certainly large enough and ectoplasmic enough. You should be completely safe from sap if I'm with you, Aether," said Emmett, grinning wildly.

  "All right. I'll take you with me any time I need to claw my way through the inside of one of those horrible ghost trees," I said, almost sighing.

  "That's all I ask." Emmett snuggled up to me, fully satisfied.

  At least we had gotten out of the Underwood. I lay back in the gray grass, reveling in the deadlight above. Joy welled up in me just to be free of that dingy, dark cavern.

  "We escaped the Underwood!" I said. "The Nonbook was wrong!"

  Emmett frowned. "No. It's right."

  "Praise All!" I jumped up. I took his hands in mine and danced him in circles. "Praise All that the Nonbook was wrong, Em!"

  Emmett's face had gone sour and slightly purple. "The Nonbook is not wrong. The Nonbook is never wrong. And you shouldn't praise the All while saying it is, in the same mortal breath. It's very bad crux, Aether, to do that."

  I stopped dancing. "Sorry, Em. But you've got to admit, it was wrong. C'mon, admit it. We escaped, didn't we?"

  "You'd better stop saying the Nonbook is wrong," Emmett growled. "Things have been known to happen to mortals who say that. And no, we did not escape. So the Nonbook is definitely, definitely not wrong."

  "We're right here, Emmett Fitzhugh!" I said loudly. I pointed at the gray grass below our feet. "Right in the portal field, outside the Underwood. Surely you can't deny that's true!"

  Emmett flickered in and out. For a moment, I thought I'd won the argument, then he burst out, "Yes, we're here, but not because we escaped. Plouton let us go. That's the only reason we made it out."

  "That's semantics," I said. "The Nonbook said no one could escape, but we escaped."

  "We left, Aether. It didn't say no one can leave. The Nonbook is right." He turned his back on me, so transparent, I could see his sulky glower right through him.

  "Okay, okay," I said. Clearly, he wasn't going to budge on this. "I guess technically, in a manner of speaking, the Nonbook is right."

  He was back by my side in an instant, with a transparent but sunny smile. "Isn't it great we escaped, Aether? I'm so glad not to be caught down there."

  I laughed. "Yeah, it's great." I basked in the feeling for a moment. Then my mood darkened.

  "In my visions, I saw Dad but I didn't get any further clues about where he is," I said. "Em—we may have to go back down there to find him."

  "Oh, no!" said Emmett. "I'm not losing any more kriot down there!"

  I contemplated his thin, sheer form. More? Certainly, he had no more to lose.

  "You're right, Em," I said. "I couldn't ask you to. But I could go on my own. Since I'm mortal—and with Plouton's blessing—I can always make it up again."

  Emmett shook his head. "There's another way. Although I don't like to play this card, but under the circumstances . . ."

  He held out his hand and I put my hand into his. Emmett chuckled. "No, I need the Nonbook, Aether." He kissed the back of my hand, leaving tiny sparks behind.

  "Oh!" I said and pulled the Nonbook from my sleeve. The scroll from Plouton fell out with it.

  "There's the message for what's-her-name," I said. "I suppose I'll have to summon her."

  "Yes, I suppose so," said Emmett, not really listening. He pulled a pen out of his ear and scrolled through the parchment of his Nonbook. I touched the pen, amazed.

  "Where'd you get that?" I asked.

  "This old thing? I've had it forever," he said. "Ugh, I hate negation crafting. I inevitably forget to negate everything. I'm a very positive person, you know." He flashed his sunshine smile at me, reducing me to butterflies.

  "Can I help? If it's writing—and I wrote in the Nonbook before," I said.

  I couldn't understand how he still had a pen in his kriot, after what I'd seen in the Underwood. I decided not to stress about it. He'd made it out, after all, and what was one little pen?

  Emmett's eyes flashed with excitement. "Yes, of course! You should do it!" he said. "Aether, the quintessence—write it! Go on! Write what is unwritten!"

  He handed the pen and parchment to me and levitated in a seated position behind me, waiting.

  I took the bulky pen, which appeared to be formed from a reed. A viscous blackish-red ink flowing from the nib. I wondered what to write for only a moment, for I hadn't written in a long time. Inspiration came over me almost at once.

  First, I wrote about my adventurous, brave, and somewhat misguided father, Able Bastyr d'Espers. I wrote all that I knew: his Halloween birth, his orphaned childhood, his wandering youth, the spiritualist bequeathal of the Vic to him, his troubled marriage to a woman frightened of his abilities, and his two talented and hidden children. I wrote of his death at the hands of Bellum and one last adventure: his escape from the clutches of a spirit consort, thanks to his infallible seer son, Samhain d'Espers.

  I paused my writing to take a deep breath, then I continued with what I'd seen in my vision. Able trapped in a room of red rock—I wrote what I'd seen. Then I wrote Able free. He flowed through the wall of his prison, led by visions of his own, and found his way to . . . where should I send him? All's Hold, I decided. It was the most familiar and, Emmett claimed, the safest place in the spirit world.

  Pleased with my narrative, I scanned it over, and then I heard Emmett take a breath. I knew only shock would cause him to do that, but then I gasped too, for a different handwriting had sprung up on the page, under my own. This strange handwriting, in spectral script, yielded to decryption and I read the words.

  The forest nymphala, Coçeaux, swaddled Able Bastyr d'Espers in wreaths of visionary sensations before he could fly from her grasp. Able cast about in confusion, but then he found himself shifted from the red rock prison to a place of stone walls. Believing himself in All's Hold, he searched the halls and stairways. Coçeaux came to him there and asked him once again for spirit children—

  "All's crux!" said Emmett from over my shoulder. "Stop her! Quick, give it to me. I'll unwrite it!"

  He set to work, closing one eye and sticking out his tongue as he wrote. I watched his awkward scrawling, bemused. What could be so difficult about negating all his verbs? I was sure I could do it in a heartbeat.

  "There," he said at last. "Ah—Aether? Will you check it over for me? I'd feel better." He handed the pen and scroll back. I took it with relish. I found several mistakes and corrected them. Emmett patted me on the back. His hand had the lightness of a feather.

  "You didn't tell me your father was involved with Coçeaux," he said as I worked.

  "I didn't know. Who is she?" I crossed out a few adverbs, trimming Emmett's puffery. He wrote the same way he spoke—full of elaboration and hot air.

  "Only a fabulously seductive, fabulously dangerous nymphala," said Emmett. "No one of particular import except she's unforgettable, even to me. Nearly inescapable as well, since she's legion and quite good at forming half realities to hold spirits entrapped."

  "She doesn't sound like nobody. Isn't that Plouton's ex?" I said. "Why's she got my father? And how'd she get into my writing?"

  "Well . . . she's got your father because he's an attractive gentleman spirit who doubtless did not know to avoid her. But as to the writing, I don't think that's her. Not her, proper. It's likely one of her shades is doing it." Emmett cleared his throat, rather self-consciously. "You can deliver the message from Plouton now. Write out the message in my Nonbook. Her shades will pick up on it. They'll take it to her."

  I picked up the scroll with Plouton's message. Emmett ripped it open and held it out for me to copy.

  "Just, you know. Paraphrase it," he said.

  It was a
wfully long and so I did my best to shorten Plouton's purple prose into something resembling a coherent missive. I excised the rambling paragraphs that recalled the highlights of their marriage and cutting to the chase, wrote out the key details: Plouton still loved Coçeaux, he missed her terribly, and he wanted her back. He promised to never look at another demon again and if she returned, he would send her to the surface twice a year for a vacation.

  Emmett bobbed up and down in approval, reading over my shoulder. I usually hated it when people did that, but somehow with him, I only felt encouraged. His arms surrounded me and I leaned back into them. Something immediately felt wrong as an icy shiver ran down my neck. A piercing cry, as if from some ancient bird of prey, echoed in my ears. I flailed out in sheer terror, spectricity crackling through my body. I reached for Emmett above me, but his image evaporated like so much mist when I touched it. In its place—a green female visage, pixyish, wise yet youthful, laughed down at me.

  "Emmett!" I screamed in terror and wanted him so badly. There was a whiz and a bang, then I saw stars. Next thing I knew, I lay on my back in the gray grass, my head pounding. Emmett, the real Emmett, cool and insubstantial, lay curled beside me. He groaned and held his head as if it pained him. On my other side sprawled a woman, all in green, also groaning and holding her head.

  "By Bellum," the woman said in a melodious voice. "You pack a wallop." She sat up, recovering from my chocolate milk trick more quickly than most. "Are you his daughter?"

  "If you mean Able d'Espers, then yes," I said. I gave the woman the dirtiest look I could muster.

  "Such children. I encountered his son. What a beautiful boy." Coçeaux—for it must be her—bit her lip, remembering.

  "You stay away from them!" I shouted, feeling my spectricity rise. Emmett sat up quickly and wobbled upward into the air, drawing me unsteadily after him.

  "Aether, you did tell the lovely Coçeaux of Lord Plouton's message, did you not?" he said in a deliberately soft and pleasant voice.

  I gaped at him, for his face had thinned until it was skull-like and his flesh appeared to be burning away. In seconds, he'd taken on his death form. He put his lipless teeth next to my ear. Only the knowledge that he was still Emmett kept me from shrieking and swatting him away.