So then the leviathan …
Intellectually, I remember his sheer enormity, but my memory calls up a figure in the twenty-foot range. Still improbable. But not the sheer impossibility that I clambered up and stuck with a knife …
I see the hellhound blade, lying on the carpet.
And then I remember my companions.
I turn around, but I’m alone. Saskia and Jackson are both gone, like they were never here. Librarius is gone, too, but I see a heap of cloth where I remembered him lying before the world went white on me and everything changed yet again.
I walk over and toe the fabric with my foot. It’s his clothing. Mixed up in the folds of cloth are the straps I used to tie him up.
I guess he got taken apart after all.
I can’t say I’m sorry, but what does that mean for Saskia and Jackson? And if they got taken apart, too, then where are their clothes? And why am I still here?
It’s so quiet in this place that every sound I make echoes loudly—the shuffle of my feet on the carpet, the sound of my breathing. I don’t know why I should worry about it. It’s not like anybody’s going to come along and shush me. Then I hear voices. Somebody—a bunch of somebodies—are approaching. It takes me a moment to figure out what direction they’re coming from.
I wonder if I should hide, but then it’s too late and I realize it doesn’t matter anyway, because I recognize them. It’s Christy and the tinker and three other people I don’t know—the ones that were also there when I got the hellhound knife from the tinker. They all look pretty much as bewildered as I’m feeling and stop dead when they see me.
I figure I must look a sight, but then I remember that the blood’s all gone.
Did any of that even happen? Was there a lake and a leviathan? Did I actually kill him?
I remember the blood fountaining from the wound and my stomach does a little flip.
Then I remember something else, how this strange sensation swelled inside me as the leviathan died. Something shifted in me. Changed me. But I’m not sure exactly what. I just feel different. I’m aware of every cell in my body, from my skin to the blood in the marrow of my bones.
Christy and the others have started walking toward me again. They stop a half-dozen feet away.
“Christiana,” Christy says. He pauses. “Is it okay if I call you that?”
I have to smile. Trust him to keep a sense of propriety, even in the midst of all of this. He’s wanted a name for me forever, but I never wanted to give him that box to put me in. I guess the tinker must have told him. It doesn’t seem to matter anymore.
I might have been born as his shadow, but for all I don’t know or understand, I do know that I’m my own person and have been since I stepped out of him, this seven-year-old tomboy shadow that got taken under the wing of a ball with arms and legs all those years ago. He can’t put me in a box, except for one that he carries in his own head. It’s not going to change who I am inside of me. He can’t know me any more than I know him, except for the things we tell each other, and the trust we have to hold on to to believe that what we’re saying is true.
The only box I can be in now is the one I make for myself.
“Sure,” I tell him. “You can call me that.”
“Are you okay?”
I nod. “How about you guys?”
Now it’s his turn to nod.
“Have you seen anybody else?” I ask.
They shake their heads. We’re doing real good in the nonverbal communication department here. But I don’t blame them. Something like this is so big that it’s hard to get your mind around it. I don’t know if you ever can.
“Who else was here?” the tinker asks.
At the sound of his voice, I find myself remembering his name. Bojo, short for Borrible Jones. He had this really funny story about why his father gave him that name.
“Saskia was with me,” I say. “And this guy named Jackson.”
Christy and one of the guys with him both speak at the same time.
“Saskia was here?” Christy says.
“Jackson?” the other one says. “Jackson Hart?”
I nod a yes to both of them and then we do a quick catch up on how Saskia and Jackson and I got here, on who they all are and what brought them.
I give Aaran a hard look, trying to see the monster in him that Saskia told me about, but he’s wearing a congenial mask and it’s not slipping.
Christy smokes a cigarette, his hands shaking a little while he lights it. It must be hard for him to have been so close to her and then lose her again. He seems pretty messed up, but I don’t know what to tell him. There’s nothing I can tell him.
Raul asks after some friend of his, but all I can say is that I never saw him. At least, not that I know. He could have been one of the ghosts I saw when I first got here, the ones with voices like radio static.
I find Suzi fascinating. She’s got the same energy as Saskia, except she’s … I don’t know. Edgier. I think of the story Saskia told me, about how hard it was for her to fit into the world at first. To assimilate herself with all of its complexities. That’s what’s different with Suzi. She’s not as integrated with the world as Saskia is now.
Bojo’s been along for the ride, like me, but he hasn’t come close to seeing what I’ve seen. Doing what I had to do.
“So this librarian,” he asks, then pauses. “He actually called himself Librarius?”
I nod.
“He was the one that caused all the trouble?”
“Not the virus, but otherwise, yes. Though to be fair, I don’t think he meant it to get so out of hand.”
“Do you believe it happened the way he said it did?”
I nod. I don’t explain how I was ready to beat the information out of him. It’s not something I’m particularly proud of. I don’t mean my threatening him. I mean that I was completely ready to go through with actually hurting him if I had to.
“And the Wordwood spirit,” Bojo goes on. “He was really a … leviathan?”
“I think he still is,” I say.
The words come out of my mouth without me even thinking about what I’m saying. But as soon as I do, I realize I’m right. I don’t know how I know. I just do.
“When those friends of yours,” I say, looking at Christy—I’m working it through as I speak. “When they were making the Wordwood site, either something they did drew him into it, or there was something about it that just appealed to him. So he came … across, I guess. From wherever the leviathan exist.”
“Like Isabelle’s numena,” he says. When I nod, he looks at the others,explaining. “A friend of ours has this … gift that lets her paintings literally come to life.”
“Are you talking about Isabelle Copley?” Aaran asks.
Christy nods.
“So all those weird abstracts she does … ?”
“No, this was before them,” Christy says. “When she was doing stuff like Jilly used to do. Fantastical creatures and portraits.”
“So they just stepped off the canvas?” Aaran says. He holds up his hand as Christy starts to answer. “I’m not arguing,” he adds. “After everything I’ve seen recently, nothing much can surprise me anymore.”
“They didn’t step off the canvas,” Christy says. “What happened was that as she painted, spirits were drawn to inhabit the same shapes as what had been depicted in the final versions of Isabelle’s paintings. They were separate from the paintings, but still connected to them.”
“Connected how?” Aaran asks.
“You remember the big fire on the island when her studio burned down? When she lost all her studio and all that art?”
Aaran nods.
“The numena died when their paintings went up in flames,” Christy says. “They all died, except for the few whose paintings weren’t at the studio.”
The look Aaran gets really makes me wonder about the things Saskia had to say about him. There’s so much honest empathy and distress coming from him—it
’s nothing like you’d expect a freak to be feeling.
“Jesus,” he says. “So when she switched to abstracts…”
“It was so that she wouldn’t be responsible for any more numena deaths,” Christy says.
“I get it,” I say then. “So, if Holly and her friends brought a leviathan across in the same way, then whatever happened to the Web site, also affected him.”
“Except,” Raul says, “I thought you said that a leviathan couldn’t take on a physical presence.”
“I didn’t think so either,” I tell him. “And maybe he still can’t. Look what happened to him when Librarius forced him into a shape.”
“But if he’s the Wordwood—”
“Except,” I break in, “it’s not really physical either, is it? I mean, we’re standing inside it, but it’s really just digital information.”
“I guess,” Raul says, but he doesn’t look convinced. Or maybe he’s just confused. I know I am.
“Who knows, really?” I say after a moment. “I don’t want to say any-thing’s possible, but I’ve seen enough things in the spiritworld to know that whether or not something actually exists isn’t a question that comes to mind. If it’s in front of you, you believe. And think about it. There’s so much that we don’t know about the consensual world—you know, the one we all came from. You have to multiply that a thousandfold when it comes to spirits and this world.”
We all stop to digest that for a moment. I’m thinking of Mumbo and how quickly it didn’t seem weird to have a ball with arms and legs to be my friend. How I still don’t think it’s weird. She’s not this freak. She’s just Mumbo.
“So it—he’s still here?” Bojo asks, bringing us back to the question of the leviathan.
“I can feel him,” I say. “Can’t you?”
Except for Suzi, they all shake their heads.
“I feel something,” she says. “But it’s not the same as it was before.”
“Maybe that’s because Librarius was the one who gave you a shape and then put you out into the world.”
“I guess,” she says.
But she doesn’t sound sure. Or maybe it’s that she doesn’t want that to be the case. I can’t say I blame her. Given a choice, I’d much rather be thinking of the leviathan as my daddy than to know I’d been put into the world by some freak like the gateway spirit that called himself Librarius.
“Can we talk to him?” Christy asks. “I mean, the spirit of the Word-wood. Can we ask him what happened to the people that disappeared?”
What he really means is, how can we find Saskia?, and I’m with him on that. The trouble is …
“I don’t know,” I have to tell him.
“Maybe we need to be connected through a modem,” Raul says. “Well, that’s how it worked before,” he adds, when we all look at him.
“So,” Suzi says. “Anyone bring a laptop?
I can tell she’s joking. How would you dial up to a server here? What would you plug the phone jack into? Unless you had a cordless connection, you wouldn’t be getting on-line, and I doubt there are any communication satellites floating around in the skies beyond the vaulted ceilings of this library.
“Maybe there’s some ritual that will work just as well,” Bojo says.
He looks at me, like I’d know, but I can only shrug.
“Maybe,” I tell him. “Or maybe we just need to open our thoughts to him.”
I see Aaran shaking his head.
“What?” I ask him.
“Nothing,” he says. “I’m just not going to be any help if you start getting into the woo-woo stuff, that’s all. No offense.”
I have to smile. “I know what you mean,” I tell him.
“But you’re …”
“A shadow. Yeah. I know. But Christy’s the one who puts all that stuff up on a pedestal. I just take it on a day-by-day basis.”
I’m about to expand on that when I get distracted. I lift my head. I thought I heard something, but I’m not sure what. Then I realize that I’m still hearing it except it’s not so much a sound—or just a sound—as a feeling. A pressure inside me. The more I concentrate on it, the less I can tell if it’s something in me, trying to get out, or something outside of me, trying to get in.
I look at the others, but it’s as though time has stopped. They’re frozen in place—Christy lifting a hand to brush his hair back from his brow. Aaran turning to say something to Suzi. Her eyes are half-closed, in the middle of a blink. I can’t see Bojo or Raul and that’s when I realize that I can’t move either. All I can see is what’s directly in front of me. All I can hear is that whisper feeling of pressure, a sound that’s not a sound.
This is too weird.
For some reason I don’t panic. I’m pretty sure that the Wordwood spirit is doing this. The leviathan. Librarius told me that before its spirit was contained in the body I killed, the leviathan was everywhere, permeating this place. Maybe he’s trying to contact me.
Hello, I say, shaping the word in my head the way I talked to Saskia when she was in me. Is anybody there?
There’s no response.
But the pressure continues to build.
They say our largest organ is our skin, which I always thought was a bizarre concept, because you don’t really think of your skin as an individual thing, an organ like your heart or your liver. But I believe it now. I can feel every cell and pore of my skin, all at once, trembling like a drum’s membrane in sympathetic vibration to some bigger sound that I can’t actually hear.
It’s an eerie feeling. Like turning a familiar corner, but everything’s changed—not the way it is in the borderlands, where you expect that sort of thing, but how it works in the consensual world, where everything’s locked into what it is by the agreement of a hundred thousand wills.
It’s like I’m tuning in to something, dialing through the static.
Or like something’s tuning in to me.
I remember the shift I felt inside me just before the leviathan died and the white light blinded me. Something changed for me then, but I still don’t know what. I can only recognize that a change occurred and that maybe what’s happening to me right now is a result of that subtle transformation—a transformation so subtle that I can only sense the results. I can’t connect to what it is.
But I don’t want to change. I don’t want to be someone else. Truth is, the idea of it kind of scares me. I remember, growing up, how I’d hear other people wishing they were someone else—and I still overhear that in conversations—but I’ve only ever wanted to be me. Me, with all my faults and scraped knees and bruised heart and all. I know I’ve done some dumb things, and gotten into more trouble than I should have, but those mistakes and escapades helped shape who I am.
And I like who I am. Or was. I don’t feel like I know who I am right now.
Because there’s something else inside me. It’s not like it was with Saskia, a recognizable foreign presence. It’s something that’s not me, but it’s me at the same time, if that makes any sense. It doesn’t to me, but that doesn’t stop it from happening all the same.
At some point—
Moments? Minutes? Hours?
—I find my—
Attention? Gaze?
—turning inward.
I can’t see anything anymore. I feel like I’m floating in water, but under the surface. Encompassed in … I don’t know.
Thick air? Some kind of gel?
I just know it’s peaceful. So serene. I could float here forever and not worry anymore about who I am or if I’ve been changed.
But then the sound that’s not a sound, the pressure, builds inside/outside me again, a choral rhythm that thrums on both sides of my skin, and this time I can sense a sort of communication. It’s not like how you or I talk to each other … with words, in sentences. Instead, I suddenly acquire all this information that I didn’t have before, all at once—like a data dump, Jackson would say—and I understand that—
The leviathan is ch
anged, too.
He’s been damaged by either the virus, or what Librarius did to him— it doesn’t matter how it happened. What matters is that the leviathan is …I’m not sure how to explain it. He’s expanding. That’s what the pressure I feel is. It’s the leviathan, his spirit swelling, pressing against the borders of the Word wood. He needs us—or at least one of us—to stay here and provide an ongoing conduit to the world outside the Wordwood, allowing the pressure building up inside him to dissipate at a regular, steady pace instead of all at once.
Without that conduit, he’ll implode like a black hole, sucking the spiritworld with him into the wormhole the implosion will create. Eventually, the whole of spiritworld will be gone and when that happens, the consensual world, our world, will start to be sucked in along behind it.
Cause and effect, domino-style.
So the leviathan needs to ease the pressure in small amounts through contacts outside of the Wordwood, and he can’t do it himself because he has no connection to either the spiritworld or ours. But those of us trapped in here with him at the moment… we do.
I think of Librarius. It figures. While this wasn’t the case before I freed the leviathan from his fleshy prison, a being like Librarius is now necessary: a gateway spirit, opening lines of communication between the worlds. Librarius was just planning to go about it the opposite way from how it needs to be done. He wanted the attention, the input of the people in the worlds outside the Wordwood to feed him. The leviathan needs to send his own attention out of the Wordwood.
Through one of us.
But I’m not a gateway spirit, I find myself saying. None of us are.
The reply comes, not in words, but I understand it all the same:
Gateway spirits don’t have to be born; they can be made.
He means one of us.
One of us needs to stay.
I run through the options in my mind.
It can’t be Christy—he needs to be with Saskia. He’s been willing to sacrifice everything to see her safe and be with her again. We couldn’t possibly ask this of him.
Spirits in the Wires Page 44