Spirits in the Wires

by Charles de Lint

  I listened to his footsteps, timing it so that I looked up just when he was getting close.

  He started to give me a nod, the way you do when you meet someone out on a walk like this, but then he stopped and gave me a confused look. You know—he thought he knew me, but he didn’t.

  “Need some directions?” I asked.

  I knew that my voice was just going to add to the off-kilter sense of familiarity he was feeling.

  “No,” he said. “You … I feel like I should know you.”

  “I’ll bet you use that line on all the girls,” I said, smiling when it called up a blush.

  “No… I mean…”

  I relented. “I know what you meant. You should know me. I’m the voice in the shadows.”

  I saw understanding dawn in his eyes and he got that look I was talking about, so cute.

  “But… how can you be real?”

  “Who says I’m real?”

  Okay, so I was being a little mean. But I guess I still had some issues with him at that time, like how he cast me off when we were only seven years old.

  He leaned against the balustrade, looking like he really needed its support.

  “Relax,” I said. “You’re not going crazy.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  I was going to reach out and touch his arm, just to reassure him, but something made me stop, I’m not sure what.

  “I just thought we should meet,” I said instead. “Rather than you sitting in your reading chair and me talking to you from the shadows. That’s starting to get really old.”

  He was studying my features as I spoke.

  “I’ve seen you before,” he said. “How can I have seen you before?”

  “Remember when you first started to keep your journals?”

  He nodded. “And sometimes I dreamed that I woke and there was this red-haired girl sitting at my desk, reading them.”

  “That was moi.”

  “You’ve been around that long?”

  “I’ve been around since you were seven and cast me off.”

  “I didn’t know I was casting you off,” he said. “I didn’t even know about shadows until a couple of years ago when I came across that reference to them in a book about Jung.”

  “I know.”

  A cab went by, slowing as it neared us to see if we might be a fare, then accelerating again when we looked away.

  “Did it hurt?” he asked.

  “Did what hurt?”

  “When you were cast off.”

  “Not physically.”

  He gave a slow nod. “Are you okay now?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. You seem very self-assured. I got that from our conversations. You don’t seem unhappy. Actually, you seem nice.”

  “I am nice.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I know,” I said. “You just figured that all the cast-off bits of you would make some dark and evil psycho twin.”

  “Not exactly that.”

  “But someone the opposite of who you are.”

  He nodded.

  “But you cast me off when you were only seven,” I said. “Lots of what you got rid of were positive traits. And we’ve both grown since then. We’re probably more alike than you’d expect, considering my origins.”

  “So … where do you live? What do you do?”

  I smiled. “You know how you like to write about mysterious things?”

  He gave another nod.

  “Well, I live them,” I said.

  “And you won’t tell me about them because—”

  “Then they wouldn’t be mysterious, would they?”

  We both laughed.

  “But seriously,” he said.

  “Seriously,” I told him, “I live in between.”

  “In between what?”

  “Whatever you can be in between of.”

  He gave a slow nod. “Where magic happens.”

  “Something like that.”

  “So why are you here now?” he asked.

  “I already told you. The whole speaking from the shadows bit was getting old for me. Besides, I thought you’d be interested in us finally meeting.”

  “I am. It’s just…”

  I waited, but I guess for all the words he puts down on paper, he didn’t have any to use right now.

  “Disconcerting,” I said.

  “That’s putting it mildly.”

  “Tell you what,” I said. “Why don’t I just let you deal with this for awhile.”

  He grabbed my arm as I started to turn away and an odd … I don’t know … something went through me. Bigger than a tingle, not quite a shock. He let go so quickly that I knew he’d felt it, too.

  “Do you have to go?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “But I’m going to all the same. It’s not like we won’t meet again.”

  “When? Where? Here? On this bridge?”

  “Wherever,” I told him. “Whenever. Don’t worry. I can always find you.”

  “But. …”

  I let myself fade back into the borderlands.

  I’d been as interested meeting him as he’d appeared to be meeting me, but I felt a little strange, too, and suddenly felt like I needed some space between us. That strange spark that had leapt between us hadn’t been the only indication that there was something going on—just the most apparent.

  “It’s good to keep some distance between yourself and the one who cast you,” Mumbo told me when I asked her about it later.

  We were on the roof of an abandoned factory in the Tombs, looking out at the lights of the city across the Kickaha River. Below us on the rubble-strewn streets, the night people who made this lost part of the city their home were going about their business. Junkies were shooting up. Homeless kids and tramps, even whole families, were picking their squats for the night and settling in. Small packs of teenagers from the suburbs and better parts of town were travelling in small packs, avoiding the bikers and such, while looking for weaker prey they could harass. Business as usual for the Tombs.

  “I kind of felt that I should,” I said. “Except I don’t really know why.”

  Mumbo went into her lecture mode. “The attraction between a shadow and the one who cast her is understandably strong. You were once the same person, so it’s no wonder that you’d be drawn to each other. But spend too much time with him, get too close, and you could be drawn back into him again.”

  “What do you mean back into him?”

  “He will absorb you and it will be like you never were. It’s happened before. It can happen again.”

  Sometimes I’d get curious about the Eadar I met, and I’d go haunting libraries and sneaking into bookstores when they were closed to see what I could find. I was probably most curious about Mumbo and Maxie Rose. It took me awhile, but I finally tracked down the books that they’d first appeared in.

  Maxie’s was particularly hard. There were only fifty made and it was so dreadfully written that their original owners tended to throw them away.

  Oddly enough, the copy I eventually found was in Christy’s library. It was a thirty-page, saddle-stitched chapbook called The Jargon Tripper by Hans Wunschmann and though I managed to read it all the way through twice, I never could figure out what it was supposed to be about. The only character he brought to any semblance of real life in its pages was Maxie and, in the context of the abysmal prose that made up the greater portion of the text, that seemed more by accident.

  I never did find out who the “jargon tripper” of the title was, or what it meant.

  “Did you ever figure out what Wunschmann was trying to say?” I asked Maxie the next time I saw her. “You know, in that story he wrote that you were in.”

  Maxie laughed. “Sure. He was saying, ‘Look at me. I’m pathetic and I can’t write a word, but that’s not going to stop me from being published.’ Though he didn’t say it in so few words.” She grinned at me. “He didn’t have to. All
you had to do was try to read it.”

  “That’s a little harsh.”

  “You did read it, right?”

  “Yeah. But I’m sure he must have been trying to do something good. There must have been something in what he was writing that meant a lot to him if he’d spend all that time writing it and then self-publishing it.”

  “You wish.”

  “Come on, Maxie. At least allow that he gave it his best shot.”

  “Did he?” Maxie said. “And don’t get me wrong. I’ve nothing against self-published books, so it’s not because of that. I just don’t like crap.”

  “But—”

  “And I guess it particularly ticks me off because that’s the story I got born in. It couldn’t be a good book. Oh, no. I had to get born in the literary equivalent of an outhouse.”

  “But he made you,” I said. “You were good in the story. And you’re still here, so there must have been something in what he was doing.”

  Maxie shook her head. “The only reason I’m here is because I’m tenacious and I was damned if I was going to fade away just because I had the bad luck to be born on the pages of some no-talent’s story. I don’t know what I’d have done if I hadn’t discovered I have a gift for teaching shadows. But I would have done something.”

  Some days I really feel bad for the Eadar. It must be so hard to be at the whim of someone else’s muse.

  I also asked Christy about Wunschmann.

  “I still have that?” he said when I showed him the chapbook. “I thought I’d thrown it out years ago.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “Unfortunately. He was this little pissant who was in some of the classes I was taking when I was in Butler U.—always talking, full of big ideas and pronouncements, super critical of everybody. But that little chap-book’s all he ever produced. I remember he used to really be down on me and anyone else who was actually getting stories published.”

  “So you didn’t like him.”

  Christy laughed. “No. Not much.”

  “And the story?”

  “Well, I liked this one character—Mixie, Marsha … ?”

  “MaxieRose.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. She deserved a better writer to tell her story.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe she figured out a way to do it herself.”

  He gave me a funny look, but I didn’t elaborate.

  Mumbo’s was a sweeter story. Or perhaps I should say it was bittersweet. It was certainly better written.

  The only edition was a little hardcover children’s picture book called The Midnight Toyroom that I found in the Crowsea Public Library. The author was a man named Thomas Brigley. The watercolours, done in that turn-of-the-century style of children’s book illustrators like Rackham or Dulac, were by Mary Lamb.

  The book was published in Newford in the late nineteen-twenties to some local success but never really made much of a mark outside of the city. I looked Brigley up in a biographical dictionary, but he didn’t even get a mention. I did find him in The Butler University Guide to Literature in Newford, where he got a fairly lengthy entry. He was a life-long bachelor who worked for a printing company, writing and publishing his books in his spare time, which I guess he had a lot of. Of the thirty-seven books that were published under his by-line, only one was for adults—a nonfiction history of the tram system called Cobblestone Jack, named after a fictional conductor he had telling the history.

  Mary Lamb, his collaborator on all the books, was a librarian who, like Brigley, worked on the books in her spare time. She never married either, which made me figure there was a story in there somewhere, but I couldn’t find anything about them ever having been an item—or what might have stopped them from becoming one—in any of the library’s reference books. I did find pictures of them, including one of the two of them together. They made an attractive couple in that shot, and there was an obvious attraction between them from the way they were looking at each other, so it didn’t make much sense to me.

  I tried tracking Cobblestone Jack down, but unlike Mumbo, he’d faded away a long time ago the way most of Brigley’s other characters had.

  Mumbo only survived because of her connection to shadows like me, but after reading her story, I didn’t understand why she’d needed us.

  The Midnight Toyroom is about this girl who loves a boy so much that she has the Toy Fairy change her into a ball so that she can be with him. See, he was from this rich family and her parents were servants, so there was no way they could be together. Weren’t things weird in those days?

  Anyway, he loved the ball and called it Mumbo. Played with it all the time. Only when he got older, he left it out in the woods one day and never thought about it again and there she would have stayed, except the Toy Fairy had allowed her to come alive when no human was watching, so she was able to make her way back to the house. The trouble was, once she got there, she was found by the housekeeper who was packing up all of the boy’s old toys to send to an orphanage, and she put Mumbo in with them. The last picture in the book is of Mumbo sitting on the top of a pile of toys in a cart as it slowly draws away from the boy’s house.

  It was sweet and sad, really well written, and the pictures were beautiful. So I couldn’t understand why it hadn’t been more of a success. Maybe it was the downbeat ending, but it’s not like Hans Christian Andersen didn’t write some downers that were still popular. I mean, have you ever read “The Little Match-Girl” or “The Little Mermaid”?

  When I found Mumbo’s book in the library, it wasn’t even on the shelves anymore. I had to dig it out of the stacks because it hadn’t been taken out in years. No surprise, I suppose, hidden in the back the way it was. But it was still listed on the card index, so if anybody had wanted it, they could have requested it.

  It’s just that nobody did.

  Have I ever had a meaningful relationship? You mean like what you and Christy have? Not really. Like I said, I had a lot of … let’s be poetic and call them dalliances, but nothing long-term. Friendships, yes. Lots of them, some I’ve maintained for years. But to be more intimate …

  I’ve never met anyone in the borderlands or beyond that did it for me, and it’s way too complicated for me to even think about it in this world. I mean, I’d either end up being this oddball curiosity—after I’ve told them what I really am—or I’d have to lie and make up a career, where I live, that kind of thing. It just gets too complicated.

  Although I just got a cell phone that even works in the borderlands— works better there, actually, than it does here, since Maxie showed me how to rewire it so that we tap into the essence of the borderlands to make our calls, instead of having to worry about satellites and phone companies. So I suppose I could give out a number now if I wanted to and just be all mysterious about where I live and how I make a living.

  Oh, don’t smile. So I have this thing about being mysterious. You can blame Christy and his journals for that.

  Sure, I can give you the number. But you have to promise not to give it to Christy.

  No, it’s not just books. Eadar are created out of the imagination, period. It doesn’t have to be words on paper. It can be anything from a painting to a passing daydream, but they’re not like Isabelle’s numena. Eadar depend on belief to exist whereas numena are bound to their painting. The less invested in an Eadar’s creation, and therefore the less belief in it, the quicker they fade. It’s really sad how ephemeral some of them are, no more than ghosts, barely here and then gone. There are parts of the borderlands—those that are closest to the big cities, usually—where Eadar ghosts are as thick as midges on a summer’s day.

  But while they can be sad little sorry creatures, that’s not always the case. Some have so much belief in them that just glow with energy. For me—probably because of Christy’s influence—the really interesting ones come from mythologies.

  In the borderlands, faerie are making a big comeback. And so are earth spirits—you know, earth mothers and antler
ed men. On the down side, so are vampires and other less pleasant creatures. And then there are new ones.

  You know why you keep hearing about Elvis sightings? So many people believe he’s still alive, that he actually is, except now he exists as a very potent Eadar. As more than one, actually. There’s a young, kind of tough one from the early years—though he’s still polite as all get-out. But there are also a couple of others: the smoother one from the films and a kind of pudgy one from the Vegas years.

  You should see it when the three of them get together. You’ve never heard such arguments. But then you’ve never heard such music, either.

  Anyway, you get the picture. Maybe I started my life as the cast-off bits of somebody else, but I’ve made my own way ever since. I grew. I changed. I became somebody that no one else is, or can be, because they don’t have my life. They don’t know the things I know. They don’t know what I’ve felt, what I’ve experienced.

  See, that’s what I figure being real means. If you’re able to adapt, to mature, to become something other than what it seemed you were supposed to be, then you’re real. You’ve got a soul. Because something that’s just a fictional construct, it can’t do that. It can only be what its maker says it is. That’s what’s so sad about the Eadar. They can be as fiercely independent as Maxie Rose, but if Hans Wunschmann decided to write another story about her and changed her personality, or her history, or whatever, those changes would reflect on the Eadar that she’s become and all her personal history as an Eadar wouldn’t matter.

  Continuity’s another big topic of discussion in the borderlands and the lack of it’s why so many Eadar suffer from various personality disorders. If they don’t fade away first. Longevity’s not exactly a big part of most of their lives.

  But that’s not something you or I have to worry about. Our origins might have been outside the norm, but we’ve grown into the skins and souls of real people. We can’t be changed by a few brushstrokes, or bits of new description, or keystrokes.