Spirits in the Wires

by Charles de Lint

  Bojo settled into an easy sprawl on the sofa, reminding Holly of a cat, the way he could so quickly look as though he’d been relaxing there for hours. Dick perched on the other end of the sofa, holding his mug in both hands. Though he appeared to be using it to warm himself, it hadn’t been refilled yet. Holly made some more tea, then pulled a chair over from the dining room table and sat down herself. Snippet, after following Holly from room to room as she made the tea, settled now under Holly’s chair, curling up in a ball with her head turned so that she could watch Bojo.

  “So you’re having pixie trouble,” Bojo said.

  Holly shook her head. “Had. Do you know much about pixies?”

  “Well, that depends. They’re like a kind of bodach, aren’t they? But malicious rather than tricksey.”

  Holly had no idea what a bodach was, but Dick was nodding in agreement.

  “All their fun’s mean,” he said. “I’ve never heard of one with a kind thought or doing a kind deed.”

  “Whereas a bodach can be quite friendly—like a brownie or you hobs. At least that’s what they’re like where I’m from.”

  Holly was good at picking things up out of context and felt she was safe in assuming that a bodach was yet another kind of little fairy man. But the conversation between Dick and the stranger made her wonder where it was that such knowledge was so common.

  “Where exactly are you from?” she asked.

  “Where? Everywhere and nowhere. We were always travelling, and I still do. We Kelledys have always been a travelling people.”

  “You’re tinkers, aren’t you?” Dick said. “Like in Ireland.”

  Bojo shook his head. “We’re tinkers, but of an older tribe than the Irish.”

  “But you said your name was Jones,” Holly said.

  “It is. Kelledy’s a tribal name, used by most of us. But my mam was a Jones when Aunt Jen adopted us, and I stay a Jones in her memory.”

  Holly had a hundred more questions. Even the normally shy Dick appeared to be bubbling with curiosity for a change. But before either of them could speak, Bojo sat up a little straighter. He took a sip of his whiskey, regarded the pair of them for a long moment, then said, “Tell me about the pixies.”

  So Holly did, with Dick filling in the bits she left out. And when they were done with that story, they moved on to what had happened earlier in the evening.

  “I guess we just got spooked,” Holly said when they got to the end of that story. “After the business with the pixies and all, I mean. You wouldn’t believe the havoc they created around here in just one night.”

  “Oh, I can imagine,” Bojo said.

  “So you have seen them before.”

  He shook his head. “Only the messes they’ve left behind. And I’ve heard the stones, of course.”

  Like that was the sort of thing that ordinary people talked about around the water cooler. The weather, the stock market, pixies … Not that she could ever imagine Bojo standing around a water cooler or holding any sort of a regular job. Though she supposed he must. Everybody had to do something for a living.

  “I think you were wise to be careful,” Bojo said, making Holly bring her thoughts back to the matter at hand. “I smelled the otherworld as soon as I stepped into the store, and it wasn’t because of you, Master Hob.”

  “Oh, it was a spirit, all right,” Dick said. “All set to come popping out of the screen. Old and dark and powerful.”

  Bojo shook his head. “Powerful, yes. But I sensed something young. Something new. Something the world has never seen before.”

  “Is that good or bad?” Holly asked.

  “I don’t know that it’s either. Most spirits are like the weather, neither good nor bad. They simply are. They live their lives without concern for us. We’re the ones to complain about a storm blowing down our barn, a drought ruining our crops.”

  So, Holly thought, still looking for clues about her visitor. If he was using farms as analogies, maybe he was from a rural background.

  “But they’re not all like that,” Dick said.

  “No,” Bojo agreed. “There are also a number that delight to interfere in the lives of the likes of you and me. And unfortunately, they’re usually … the less pleasant of their kind.”

  “But what do they want?” Holly asked.

  Bojo shrugged. “Who can tell? Sometimes we’re simply in the way, and they deal with us the way we would a gnat—brushing us away, squishing us between their fingers. Sometimes they’re hungry.”

  Holly didn’t like the sound of that at all.

  “They want to eat us?”

  “It’s more a matter of the spirit,” Bojo said. “You know, our life energy. Some spirits consider it sustenance.”

  This was getting worse by the minute.

  “Can you help us?” she asked. “Is there anything we can do to get it out of the Internet and back to wherever it came from?”

  Bojo had some more of his whiskey.

  “I know next to nothing about computers,” he said. “But I do know spirits. The first question we need to ask ourselves is, did it, in fact, come from somewhere else, or is it native to the Internet?”

  “What do you mean?” Holly said.

  She glanced at Dick and saw her own confusion mirrored in his face.

  “Well, from what I understand,” Bojo said, “the Internet is much like a realm unto itself. Would that be a fair assessment?”

  “I guess …”

  “Then it would seem logical that it would have its own life forms and spirits.”

  “But we’re talking about a place that doesn’t exist except as code in the files of a service provider’s computers. Bits and bytes. It’s nothing tangible.”

  “And yet the pixies have managed to find a way to travel in that realm. And then there’s the whole matter of the Wordwood and the spirit you said had come to inhabit it.”

  Holly gave a slow nod. “I guess that’s what makes me feel I have to do something. We—my friends and I—created the Wordwood. If it somehow gained sentience through what we did, then we’re responsible for that as well.”

  “So the other question we need to answer is this,” Bojo said. “Has the Wordwood gone feral, or is it under attack itself?”

  “When you put it like that … it sounds so insane.”

  Bojo nodded. “It’s a long way from anything I understand, too. But we’ll just have to do what we can. There are people who should be able to help us. It’s only a matter of tracking them down and seeing what they know.”

  “And I’ll do the same with Sarah and the others that were in on the Wordwood from the start.” She paused for a moment, then added, “I’m really glad you came along. My friends might know a lot about computers, but when it comes to the other stuff, we’re in way over our heads. This sort of thing is too weird to deal with on our own and with Meran out of town … I guess I just want to say thanks. Really.”

  “I couldn’t very well walk away, leaving the friend of my cousin to face this on her own.” He held up his glass and added, “You wouldn’t have any more of this lovely whiskey, would you?”

  Holly went to fetch the bottle and poured a splash into each of their cups, this time forgoing the tea in hers and Dick’s.

  “I feel good about this,” she said. “Like we have a real chance to beat this thing.”

  Bojo smiled. “We can only try.”

  They clinked their glasses together in a toast.

  Holly was still smiling when she came back upstairs from letting Bojo out. She said goodnight to a somewhat bleary-eyed Dick and scooping up Snippet, went into her room. She paused for a moment, then went and unplugged her phone. She doubted anything would come across an ordinary phone line—and after all, she’d used it without any problem earlier to leave the message on Meran’s machine—but why take chances?

  Christy

  There’s nothing in the research I’ve been doing on the Web to explain what’s happened to Saskia. That’s not so surprisi
ng, I suppose, since there’s also nothing to explain the mystery of her origin—something I’m not even remotely questioning now. The only big question for me now is, how do I get her back?

  I still can’t believe she’s gone.

  I’ve spent the past hour torn between despair and determination and not really able to do a lot about either. All my notes were on the computer that’s now lying in pieces all over my desk and on the floor below it—a war zone, in miniature. I have backups of everything on Zip discs—multiple backups, since I’m as organized about that as I am about everything, especially after the time Sophie managed to crash my computer and I did lose a few weeks of work. But I don’t have a computer to access the discs.

  I need another computer.

  I need Saskia back.

  I need help.

  But it’s almost three A.M. Who am I going to call at this hour—especially with the story I’ve got to tell? Where are the Ghostbusters when you really need them?

  I’ve got a long list of like-minded colleagues and friends, but their expertise lies mostly in the more traditional forms of the paranormal and folklore, and many of them have less access to modern conveniences—like a phone—than I do. There’s also my new network of research sources on the Web—folks I’ve only met electronically through newsgroups—but I need a working computer to contact any of them. The worst thing is that, at this point in time, I’m the only one I know who’s pulled together so many disparate threads of techno rumour, folklore, and gossip, and tried to find a correlation between them all.

  I’m my own best expert and I don’t have a clue what to do next.

  I could call Jilly. She’s been playing with the professor’s computer since her accident, poking around with her usual intuitive sense that lets her home in on things strange and different, but I hate to bother her while she’s still recovering. It’s been over a year now since the accident, but she still tires quickly and needs her rest. And besides, much as I love her, she’s a bit too scattershot for the kind of focus I need right now. Not to mention that she’s even less technologically inclined than I was before I got into this current research. She knows how to turn the computer on and go on-line. She can use a Web browser and e-mail. She’s been playing with a paint program that Wendy installed on the machine for her. But she hasn’t a clue how any of it actually works. So she’s out, too.

  Anybody else is just going to think I’m crazy.

  I decide on my brother Geordie. He’ll still think I’m crazy, but at least he’ll listen because of Saskia. Not only did he first introduce her to me, but he knows as well as I do that it’s because of her that he and I have been a lot more successful at keeping the lines of communication open between us.

  It’s not that we didn’t talk before Saskia came into my life. We just didn’t talk about anything important. We were going through the motions of being brothers, desperate to not have our relationship be as screwed up as it is with the rest of our family, but not having the first clue how to go about it with any real success. Honesty was missing from the equation. Along with an inability to express the fact that, even after all we’ve been through—or maybe because of it, since we at least came out of our messed up childhoods relatively intact—we really cared about each other.

  That’s something we never got to do with our older brother Paddy. He died in prison. They say he hung himself, and all the evidence points towards it, but all these years later, it’s still hard to believe. Of the three of us, I always thought he was the most resilient. The one who’d carry on and make something of himself. Instead he ended up in jail and died there. Just goes to show how little you can know about someone supposedly so close to you.

  I’m still a wreck when Geordie arrives at my door. In the time between calling him and his arrival, I’ve been to the corner store and bought a pack of smokes. He gives the smoldering cigarette in my hand a look, but to his credit, he doesn’t say anything. He knows I’d given quitting another shot— six months and counting this time. He also knows I have to be pretty messed up to have started up again.

  “So what happened?” he asks as he comes in.

  I close the door behind him and follow him into the kitchen. I’ve already got a pot of coffee brewing. That’s what the Riddells do when there’s a crisis. Head for the kitchen and make coffee.

  I don’t know how to start, so I pour us each a mug of the coffee and bring them over to the table where he’s already sitting. I light a new cigarette from the stub of the old one and grind the butt out in the saucer I’m using for an ashtray.

  “Did you have a fight?” Geordie asks.

  All I told him over the phone was that Saskia was gone and I didn’t know if she’d ever be back. He didn’t ask any questions. He just said, “I’ll be right over.” But I know what he’s thinking.

  My therapist used to call the way our relationships fall apart a self-fulfilling prophecy that was rooted in low self-esteem—yet one more holdover from our childhood, where nothing we could do was right, or good enough. Geordie and I both have this problem with women: We set our sights too high—or at least on women we perceive as too good for us. It’s like we need the pedestals and can only yearn after the impossible women. In school it was the prom queens and cheerleaders who had no time for kids like us, hicks bussed in from the country. And we just carried that misconception along with us after high school.

  We weren’t completely pathetic. But even when we did find some special woman who wanted to be with us, in the end, they always left—often under weird circumstances.

  For Geordie there was Sam, pure cheerleader material, but also smart and hip. She fell into the past one day—literally. She got swallowed into the early part of the century so that we weren’t even born by the time she died in her new life. Then there was Tanya, a movie star with a one-time drug problem. Geordie was there for her when she could have slipped back into her old junkie ways, got her on her feet and back doing what she loved to do: making movies. He even moved to L.A. to be with her, but in the end, she wasn’t there for him.

  Of course everybody knows he should be with Jilly, he’s been carrying a torch for her forever and they’d be a perfect couple, but he waited too long on that and now she’s with Daniel.

  Before Saskia, I wasn’t doing much better. The archetypal Christy Rid-dell romance was with a woman named Tallulah. I called her Tally. Everything was perfect, except she turned out to be the literal spirit of the city. She left me because she said the city was getting to be too hard, so she needed to be hard, too, to survive. Loving me was making her too soft.

  Of the three of us, only Paddy had normal relationships—at least so far as we could tell. “Yeah, and look where that got him,” I said to the therapist when she brought that up. She just shook her head and asked me, did I want to talk about that?

  “No, it was nothing like that,” I tell Geordie now. “We don’t fight.”

  “Then what? There has to be some reason that she just up and left you.”

  “I don’t know how to tell you this,” I say. “You’re going to think I’m putting you on.”

  The way I did when we were kids, always talking about fairies and the Wolfman and what-have-you like they were real—because I knew it’d get a rise out of him. It only got worse when I came to understand that there really is more to the world than what we can normally see. Not that he hasn’t had a few brushes with the inexplicable himself, but that kind of thing always seems to wash off of him the way water does from a bird’s wing.

  “Just tell me,” he says.

  So I clear my throat and do as he asks.

  I don’t look at him while I’m talking. I don’t want to see his reaction. I just want to get through it—get it all said before I have to deal with the disbelief that’ll be plain on his face.

  I wish I could be writing this down. That’s what my writing really is— therapy. Doesn’t matter if it’s my journals, my occasional forays into fiction, or the volumes of case studies and o
ral collections bound for the “Isn’t life strange?” section of the bookstore. When I write something down, it starts to make sense for me. It doesn’t solve my problems. But at least I start to understand them.

  “Jesus,” he says when I’m done.

  “Look,” I start, but he gets up and leaves the table.

  I think he’s heading for the apartment door, that he’s walking out on me and my weird take on life, once and for all. But he heads for my study instead. He stands there in the doorway and looks at the wreckage of my computer. I wait in the hall behind him, smoking yet another cigarette, staring at the back of his head, the set of his shoulders.

  “She told me about that connection she had with the Wordwood,” he says, not turning around. “I can’t remember where we were, but it was after the two of you had moved in together. She said the same thing you did tonight—that I wouldn’t believe her.”

  “And did you?”

  Geordie shakes his head. He moves over to the desk, touches the wreckage of the computer with trailing fingers. Finally he turns to me.

  “She didn’t seem completely convinced herself,” he adds.

  “You don’t have to explain,” I say. “The further she got from being ‘born,’ the less real that connection felt to her as well.”

  “It was just so weird.”

  “I know.”

  I look around for somewhere to put the long ash at the end of my cigarette and settle on tapping it into my free hand.

  “And now?” I ask.

  He sighs. “What possible reason could you have to lie to me about something like that?”

  “I wish I was making it up.”

  I return to the kitchen to butt out my cigarette and get another. When I return to the study, I bring the saucer with me. Geordie’s sitting in the chair Saskia occupied a couple of hours ago. I take the other one, but we don’t tap our feet against each other on the ottoman like I did with her.