Spirits in the Wires

by Charles de Lint

  “So what do we do?” he asks.

  “I don’t know where to start.”

  “You could talk to Joe.”

  Joseph Crazy Dog’s a friend of Jilly’s who, by Jilly’s accounts, spends most of his time in the spirit lands that lie just beyond the borders of the world that the rest of us live in. According to her, that’s where he’s originally from—not the Kickaha rez like everybody thinks.

  “He’s not exactly a techno kind of guy,” I say.

  “What about the professor?”

  Ah, the professor. Bramley Dapple. Taught at Butler U. for years, retired now. My compadre in exploring the mysteries of the world—Don Juan to my Castaneda. He was the first adult I met that took this interest of mine seriously. He used to teach art history, but his heart was always in mythology and folklore. “They should teach Mystery 101,” he used to say. “The real things. Fairies and spirits, ghosts and hobgoblins and all. It’s a parallel history to what’s actually taught, but no less pertinent.”

  “He’s even less computer literate than I am,” I say. “I mean, he writes on a computer, uses the Internet for research and belongs to god knows how many obscure and arcane discussion groups, but he doesn’t understand the hardware any better than I do. And don’t get me started on him and software. I’ve never met anyone so incapable of doing a simple install the way he is. Anyway, according to him, computers and the Internet are a necessary evil that he’s only using by sufferance.”

  “But what about the stuff you’ve been researching lately? Doesn’t that intrigue him?”

  “He doesn’t believe it’s relevant. Or … real. Or at least not as real as the oral tradition of folklore and stories.”

  I’ve been trying to avoid paying any attention to my desk and the computer lying in pieces on top of it. Whenever I do, the loss just hits me so hard that my chest gets tight and feels like it’s going to implode. But I glance at it now, then back to Geordie.

  “I guess what I need is access to another computer. Maybe someone in one of my newsgroups can help me.”

  “I’ve got that laptop that Amy lent me,” Geordie says.

  “Does it have a modem?”

  He nods. “But I don’t know how fast it is. I only use it for e-mail.”

  “It’ll do. Is it at the loft?”

  He gives me another nod.

  Geordie’s apartment is actually our friend Jilly’s old studio. He’s subletting it from her because the crash that left her in a wheelchair also makes it impossible for her to navigate the stairs. The building has no elevator.

  It’s funny. He’s been staying at Jilly’s loft for almost a year now, but none of us think of it as his place. It’s still “Jilly’s,” or “the loft”—even though she’s been staying at the professor’s house for all this time. She’s a long way from being able to navigate stairs, so Geordie moved in when he got back from L.A. When you step inside, you can hardly tell that he’s been living there as long as he has. There are a few instruments scattered around, some of his books and clothes, but otherwise it’s pretty much the same as when Jilly was living there. Except it’s neater. And the fairy paintings are all gone.

  “Do you want to come over and use it?” he asks.

  My gaze tracks back to the part of the room where Saskia disappeared and the vise closes in on my chest again. I know she’s not going to simply pop back into existence. I can feel her absence and it’s total. But at the same time, I don’t know that she isn’t going to pop back, either. Once you entered the world of the impossible, how can you say anything’s unequivocally this or that?

  Geordie stands up.

  “Let me get the laptop and bring it back here,” he says.

  I give him a grateful look. He’s gone before I can even get out of the chair. I stand by the front door for a moment, feeling completely adrift in the waves of loneliness and despair that wash over me, then slowly make my way back into the kitchen. I pour myself some more coffee. I light another cigarette. I try to empty my mind of everything, but that doesn’t work so well. Worries and fears and half-made plans bounce around in my head until it feels like a pinball machine.

  Mostly I just wait.

  Christiana

  I’m not aware of falling. Of losing my grip on the phone. Of how long I lie there in the grass that carpets my little meadow apartment, my mind a blank slate. Big time tabula rasa. Like all I really am is a shadow— a shadow cast on the ground and you can make anything of me you want, depending on how and where you shine the light.

 

  The sound of my name pulls me back from the empty place into which I fell. It goes echoing and echoing through this black void where I’m floating until I finally make the connection.

  Christiana. That’s me.

  I use my name like a line to pull myself out of the dark.

  The sunlight is harsh on my eyes, making them water, and it seems to take forever to sit up, twice that for the world to stop spinning.

  I’ve never fainted before. Somehow I thought it’d be different. You see it in the movies, the damsel swoons and someone’s there to catch her. People flit about and fuss and finally she opens her eyes with a becoming flutter of long lashes and gives the male lead a dreamy look. It’s all so romantic.

  In my case, the ground caught me—luckily the grass is soft and I didn’t whack my head on the end of the bed or something. Coming out of it, I’m disoriented and sweaty. There’s a bad taste in my mouth and my head feels fuzzy, like it’s too full, if that makes any sense. There’s a pressure in between my temples, as though something is shifting or stretching inside my head.

  You know how the first time you sleep with someone new in your bed— doesn’t matter if you’ve made love or you’re just lying there together— you’re very aware of the other person’s presence in what’s normally a solitary place? Every movement they make is exaggerated. Every sound is magnified.

  That’s what this is like.

  And as for romantic feelings, I feel more like crawling into bed and pulling the blankets over my head than making goo-goo eyes at some guy, just saying there was anybody around in the first place.

 

  Scratch that. Somebody’s here. And now I remember how hearing my name brought me out of the dark.

  This time I look around, but there’s no one here. At least no one that I can see. Whoever it is has to be hiding in the trees that border my meadow.

  “Who’s there?” I say.

  But as the words leave my lips, I’ve already matched the voice against the catalogue in my memory. I know who’s speaking to me.

  “Where are you, Saskia?” I ask. “How come I can’t see you?”

  My gaze stops on the cell phone lying in the grass nearby. I remember the phone call that pulled me out of sleep. I remember the blast of white noise that came from the speaker. I remember falling. Nothing else.

  I pick up the phone and bring the speaker to my ear, thinking Saskia’s on the other end of the line. But the phone’s dead. I turn it on and get a dial tone.

 

  I don’t like this at all. Nobody knows how to get to this place. Hardly anybody even knows about it.

  I turn off the phone and look around some more. Wherever Saskia is, she’s doing a good job of hiding.

 

  I’m starting to get a really creepy feeling. I realize that I’m not hearing her voice the way I should be. It’s not coming to me through my ears.

 

  The voice is in my head.

 

  “Get out of my head,” I tell her.

 

  “This isn’t funny.”

  I want to bang my head against the end of my bed or a tree. I can’t physically feel her inside me—there’s just her voice, and the impression of something else, something foreign
in my head—but it’s giving me the major willies having her inside my skin the way she is.

  “I don’t know how you did this, but you’d better just get out.”

 

  “I’m serious.”

 

  “So what? This is some science experiment?”

 

  “Why didn’t you just go into Christy’s head?”

 

  “And there is with me?”

 

  “You were never an illusion.”

 

  I didn’t know what to say to that. There’s a long pause, then she continues.

 

  “You’re not made of pixels,” I say.

 

  “Whatever.”

 

  “But how did you come across the phone lines and into me?”

 

  “Stop saying that,” I tell her.

  Except then I start to wonder, maybe she is just data. Maybe that’s all she’s ever been. Data that got more real as it began to accumulate its own life experiences. Just like a shadow does …

  Even with my own origin in mind, even with all the strange beings I’ve met in the borderlands and beyond, this still feels too crazy. She was too real for that.

  But then I think of myself as real, too, don’t I? What’s the difference between a being created out of shadows, and one created out of data?

  I need to think, but I don’t know where to start. It’s too mondo, big-time bizarre, having her inside me. What’s she doing in me? Going through my memories? Does she have control over my body? Are we sharing it in more ways than one?

  “This is totally freaking me out,” I tell her.

 

  “What can you see … you know, inside me?”

 

  “What do you mean, ‘nothing’?”

 

  “You can’t read my mind? You can’t access my memories?”

 

  Can you hear me if I specifically aim a thought at you like this?

 

  “Welcome to the club.”

 

  “I did.”

  And I don’t know why.

  “What are we going to do?” I ask her.

  Saskia’s silence is all the reply I get. I understand. I don’t have a clue either. How do you fix something like this? Where do you even start? It would sure help to have somebody step up and offer some advice right about now. I mean anything from “I know a good systems analyst who also happens to be a working magician,” to “You must take the cursed ring across the perilous lands and cast it back into the fire from which it was forged,” would put us further ahead than we are at this point.

  It doesn’t have to be easy. Just some direction.

  I sigh and look off across my friendly little meadow apartment. I remember coming home last night and how comfortable I was, puttering around, reading a little bit, finally going to bed. Now everything feels different. Well, duh. I’ve got somebody else living in my head. But it’s more than that.

  Saskia says.

  “Yeah.”

  I’m too caught up in all of this to really pay attention to what she’s saying. But then it registers. I realize that it is getting dark.

  “This isn’t possible,” I say.

  Like so much else about today is.

 

  “I told you how I made this place. I grabbed a perfect memory and stuck it away in this nook of the borderlands. It only has two faces—a sunny day and a twilight evening, depending on how much light I want. It doesn’t have weather. It can’t change.”

 

  It does to me, too. From the west. I walk toward the western edge of the meadow and step into the trees. There’s really nothing past them. Walk far enough and you’ll simply pop out somewhere else—into whatever place happens to be in your mind at the time, even if it’s only in your subconscious. The only rule seems to be that you have to have been there before, or have a really good image of it from a photograph.

  That’s how most people build their memory holes. There’s a clear demarcation between your private place and all the other places you can access from it. When I made mine, I added views that you’d expect to see from a meadow—rolling hills, forests, some distant mountains. But they’re not really there. And they’re completely static. Like a painting. Like a photo.

  So it’s particularly weird to see storm clouds gathering in the western skies. It’d be like you looking at a landscape on a wall in your home—some beautiful sunny hillside, say—and as you look at it, a storm starts to form in one corner of the picture. It shouldn’t be able to happen.

  But it does. It’s happening here.

  Why am I so surprised? People aren’t supposed to take up residence inside your head, either.

  “I’m getting a bad feeling about this,” I say.

  I feel like I’m reading from the script for some B-movie—a tacky horror flick or an action piece.

  There’s no reply for a long moment, then I hear Saskia say softly in my head,

  “What makes you say that?”

 

  “What makes you so sure it’s the Wordwood?”

 

  “You mean like a virus?”

 

  “How could a computer virus show up like a storm in the borderlands?”

 

  “Don’t start in on that again,” I say, but my heart’s not really in it.

  Maybe she was just data. Maybe she was never real. Maybe I’m not either. It would make sense. Why else would Mumbo always be showing me things to help me pass for normal among real people? The key word here is “pass.” You have to pass for human when you’re not.

  I start to feel a little sick again, and I guess I finally understand why this has all been such a concern for Saskia. I haven�
�t thought about this— really thought about it—in a long, long time. I wish I wasn’t thinking about it now.

  Saskia says.

  It’s so hard to get used to this voice in my head.

  “Why?” I ask her.

 

  “But I’m not made of data. It’s not going to be able to affect me the way it did you.”

 

  “No. We don’t know much about anything. And we’re not going to find out by running away. If this storm is an aspect of whatever it was that took away your body, then it’s the very thing we have to face to get it back.”

 

  “What could be worse?”

  There’s a pause before Saskia replies.

  I laugh. “Maybe I just don’t know any better.”

  But I do. The thing is, when I get into a situation like this, I almost always go forward, into the darkness. I don’t think of it as being brave or foolhardy. It’s just what I do. Because I don’t like hiding. I get scared just like anybody else does. But I refuse to let my fear make me back away. When you do that, the darkness wins.

  I take a step forward, expecting Saskia to try to pull me back. She doesn’t. So she was telling the truth about that. Because I know that she wouldn’t let me do this if she could stop me. But all she’s got is words.

  she says, her nervousness plain in her voice.

  “Don’t worry,” I tell her. “I’m the queen of getting out of trouble.”

  Big words. I’m good with words. Not as good as Christy, but I’ve always got something to say. Trouble is, words aren’t really much of a help right now.

  I keep walking. We’re well past the border of my little memory hole. We should be somewhere else now—in the borderlands, the otherworld, even what the professor calls the World As It Is—except we’re continuing across a field that lies on the other side of the line of trees demarking my memory hole. A field that shouldn’t exist because it’s only an image. But I can feel the grass brush against the bottoms of my jeans. The wind in my face. That invisible crackle in the air of the gathering storm that’s just about upon me.