Spirits in the Wires (15 page)

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.

“I can see that.”

I can
feel
it. All the little hairs on my arms and at the nape of my neck are standing straight up.

The dark clouds are rolling in fast, turning what was already twilight into something that's even closer to night. The wind's picking up and there's a sound under its bluster. It takes me a moment to figure out what it reminds me of. Then I have it. Static. Like there was on the telephone line just before Saskia came into my head. Except this time it's not coming to me through the phone. It's all around us. We're in the middle of it.

I lift my gaze to the horizon where the clouds are darkest. The light's poor, making details hard to pick out, but I find if I look hard, the landscape flickers. Distant mountains, clouds, the horizon. One moment they're in sharp focus, the next they're a pulsing storm of pixels, then they firm up again.

Maybe Saskia's right, I find myself thinking. Maybe this really is the Wordwood. Or maybe we've been pulled into some cyber realm where the Wordwood exists and everything has different rules from the ones we know.

Maybe coming out here wasn't such a good idea.

I see a sheet of rain coming across the fields toward us, darker than any water I've seen before. I consider a hasty retreat. I know, I know. I said I like to face the darkness. But there's a right time and a wrong time to make a stand. Like if someone's got a gun in your face, it's not a good time to crack wise. And if the world falls apart and you find yourself in a place like this—real, not real, can't make up its mind—it only makes sense to fall back to firmer ground and rethink the situation.

I start to turn. Too late.

The wall of rain's right on us. Not water. Something else. Heavier, thicker. Like oil.

It hits me and pounds me into the ground.

I try to stand. I can't even get to my knees.

The impact of the black rain drives me down and keeps me there.

I feel myself losing my grip on consciousness again. I find myself thinking that I'm beginning to make a real habit of this fainting business, but then—

I thought that losing my body
the way I did was the most awful thing I could experience. I was wrong. This is worse. Way worse. I can't bear to be so helpless—an ineffectual spirit locked in Christiana's head, while my faceless enemy pounds her into the ground.

And there's nothing I can do to stop it.

It's my fault this is happening to her. All my fault.

She's gone now. I can't find even a spark of her consciousness anywhere inside this body we're sharing. The black rain continues to beat on her limp body and I can only pray that it's battered her into unconsciousness. That she's not dead.

But if she's not already dead, she soon will be. The rain turns to an oily goop on the ground, forming puddles around her that rapidly grow into a small pond of the thick liquid. When she collapsed, it was into a small hollow in the field. It's shallow, but deep enough for her to drown if the level of the goop rises much more.

I try to take control of her slack limbs, but it doesn't seem to matter that she's unconscious and unable to use them herself. I'm still just a passenger and nothing will move for me. Not even an eyelid. I focus on the task like I've never focused on anything before, but all my effort is of no more use than trying to stop a river overflowing its banks with only your hands.

The rain keeps pouring down and the little pond around Christiana continues to rise. If this keeps up …

I don't want to think about it, but it's all I can think about.

Until, through the oily film that covers her eyes, I see a blur of movement.

There are shapes moving in the black rain. Human figures, but they're like Spielberg aliens—all smooth, without edges.

I redouble my efforts to take control of Christiana's limbs with about as much success as before, which is none.

The oily water keeps rising. It comes up to her mouth. Her nose. The figures are all around us now, leaning closer with strange blurred features. I scream in Christiana's mind, trying to rouse her. Trying to move her. But it's no use. She won't wake and I can't move her. There's nothing I can do except sit inside her head while she drowns.

The liquid pours into her nostrils, into her mouth, down her throat, filling her lungs.

And then I go into the same black space I guess she did.

It's only been three-quarters or an hour,
but it feels like a week before Geordie finally returns with Amy's laptop. He doesn't have a carrying case for it, so he brings it in his backpack.

“The battery's kind of wonky,” he says as he sets the old machine on my desk. “So you have to run it off the power cord.”

Which, happily, he remembered to bring along. I give the machine a quick look-over. It's a 386—still running Windows 3.1, Geordie tells me— but it has a PCMCIA modem card so that I can get on the Internet and the processor should be plenty fast enough for what I need it to do. All I want to do is send some e-mail.

While Geordie was gone, I smoked I don't know how many more cigarettes. But I also cleaned up the mess in the study, picking up all the various bits and pieces of my computer and stowing them in a cardboard box that I grabbed from the recycling container on the back balcony. I wasn't able to do much with the top of the desk. The scratches and burn marks needed more than a sponge or cloth to clean up, but they were the least of my worries.

As I worked, all I could think about was Saskia. She's all I can think about.

I didn't know what to do with the debris from the computer so I put the box beside my desk. I realized that I couldn't throw it out just yet. I have this weird idea that since Saskia disappeared into the machine just before it exploded, she's still tied to it somehow. If I throw it out, it'll be like throwing her out. I know. It makes no sense. But nothing about the night makes any sense.

“Thanks for going to get this,” I tell my brother.

“No problem.”

He sits in the extra straight-backed chair near my desk, watching as I finish setting up the laptop and plug it in. I pick up the phone cord that I used with my own computer, but the end got melted, so I go looking for a fresh one. Finally I give up and take the cord off the phone in the bedroom.

“It's kind of weird out there,” Geordie says as I make the final connection. “On the streets, I mean.”

I lift my head to look at him. “What do you mean ‘weird'?”

He shrugs. “I don't know. There's just a feeling in the air. Like the shadows are too dark and …” He gives me an uneasy smile. “And maybe there's things moving in them.”

“What did you see?”

“I didn't see anything. It was just a feeling. Like this is about more than Saskia.”

I'd never took that into account. Considering Saskia's claims concerning her origin, I simply assumed this was about her.

“Why don't you check the news,” I say, “while I try to get a couple of messages out.”

“As if it'd be on CNN.”

“So try the local stations first.”

“Christy,” he says. “I can't count the number of weird things that happen in this city, but when was the last time you saw a mention of any of them on the news?”

I just give him a look.

“Okay,” he says. “I guess it can't hurt to check it out.”

I go back to what I'm doing. Now that the hardware's all connected, I boot up the laptop and wait forever for this old version of Windows to load and give me the Desktop screen. Then I go searching for Geordie's e-mail program. Once I find it, I make a note of his sending and receiving protocols. I replace them with my own and I'm ready to go.

I don't remember the e-mail addresses of all my regular correspondents—it's like putting numbers into the automatic dial-up directory of your telephone. You get so used to simply pushing a button that your memory doesn't retain the actual numbers anymore. But I do remember the addresses of the newsgroups. The hard part is figuring out just what to say. I start typing.

I don't really know where to begin …

I keep it simple and don't get too specific. I don't mention Saskia's origins or how she got swallowed by the computer. Instead I talk about the Wordwood and ask if anyone's experienced any oddities with the Web site. I hesitate, then clarify that by adding:

… oddities with the Web site that cause actual physical anomalies in your real world environment.

I finish up by asking anyone who might have experienced anything along those lines to contact me and put my phone number under my name at the end of the message. Lighting up yet another cigarette, I read it back to myself. There's so much more I could say, but I want to leave this clear enough that someone with a genuine experience will contact me, yet vague enough that I don't get inundated with calls from the cranks on those same newsgroups. Satisfied, I queue it up.

Now comes the part that I've been worrying about ever since Geordie went out to get the laptop: connecting to the Internet again. I don't know what to expect, but I'll tell you this. The first hint of anything weird and I'm just pulling the phone jack out of the computer, never mind shutting down the connection.

But I needn't have worried. Everything acts the way it's supposed to. Dial-up, connect. I hit send and watch the progress bar as the e-mails go off into the pixelated ether.

I'm shutting down the e-mail and Internet connection when Geordie comes back into the room with an expression on his face that I can't read.

“You have to come see this,” he says.

“See what?”

“It's on CNN. Saskia's not the only one that's disappeared into a computer. “

“What?”

“Just come look at this,” he says and leaves the room again.

I turn off the laptop and follow him into the living room. We sit side-by-side on the sofa watching the calm, perfectly-coifed anchorperson coordinate her own commentary with cuts to correspondents in various parts of North America and abroad. There's live footage, of course, but it consists mostly of the exteriors of various houses and apartment buildings that look perfectly normal except for the police cars and emergency vehicles parked outside.

While all the incidents happened at approximately the same time—and also, not coincidentally, I'm sure, at the same time that Saskia disappeared—it took the authorities a while to realize that the rash of 911 calls were connected.

“The count of those missing now stands at one hundred eighty-six,” the blonde anchorperson is saying. “Authorities believe that the final figure will be much higher, as the information they have to date doesn't take into account those living alone with no one to report their disappearance.”

There's no actual mention of
www.thewordwood.com
. I can't decide if they're keeping that under wraps, or if they simply don't know. From the footage of the interior of one of the disappeared's homes, it must be the latter. There's a camera pan across a study and the brief glimpse I get of the computer shows that it's a mess. Not shattered like mine did, but it's dripping some kind of black oily goop. The emergency workers in the room are wearing bio-hazard containment suits, giving the video an even more surreal quality.

The reportage cuts to a woman being interviewed outside of her home. As she starts talking about this flood of thick black oil pouring out of her husband's computer screen, I turn to Geordie.

“That's not what happened to Saskia,” I say.

He nods. “But there's no way it's not connected.”

“No question,” I agree.

“So we should tell someone,” he adds.

“What for?”

“So that it doesn't happen to anyone else who tries to log on to the Word wood.”

I shake my head. “I'm pretty sure we don't have to worry about that.”

“But—”

“Weren't you listening to what they were saying?” I ask, nodding at the TV. “It all happened around the same time. I'm guessing it was a spike of … I don't know, some kind of energy or whatever. It happened, now it's done.”

“We don't know that. If we can save other lives by—”

“Nobody's dead,” I tell him, needing to believe it myself. “They were taken away to … well, I don't know that either. Someplace else. And if we let the ‘proper authorities' deal with it, we'll never get Saskia or any of them back. They'll just screw it up.”

“We can't take that chance.”

I sigh. “Okay, I'll prove it,” I tell him.

I get up and go back into the study where I boot up the laptop again.

“What are you doing?” Geordie asks.

“We're going to run a test. If nothing happens, we keep the Wordwood connection to ourselves. If it looks like there's going to be a problem, I'll pull the plug and we phone the police or whoever will listen to us.”

When the Desktop shows up on the screen, I double-click on the Internet connection icon.

“Wait a minute,” Geordie says. “Amy only loaned that to me. If you blow it up she's going to kill me.”

“Nothing's going to get blown up.”

The connection's made and I start up the Internet browser, an old version of Netscape.

“This is just being stupid,” Geordie says. “It's too dangerous.”

“I know what I'm doing,” I tell him as I type in the Wordwood's URL. “If that dot shows up, I'll unplug it so fast it'll make your head spin.”

“My head's already spinning.”

I hit return and the browser goes searching for the Wordwood.

“We're going to end up sucked away into wherever along with the rest of them,” Geordie says.

I think about that. Think about how Saskia was stolen away. I've gone over it a million times, how I could have forestalled all of it if I just hadn't suggested we go on-line to check with the Wordwood. But no. I had all the answers.

Turns out I didn't have any.

“Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing,” I say.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“We can't just—”

“Too late,” I tell him. “We're already there.”

The familiar “This page cannot be displayed” dialogue comes up on the screen. I realize I'm holding my breath as I wait for the black dot to reappear, but the seconds tick away into a minute, two, three. Nothing changes.

I close the page and take the computer off-line.

“You see?” I say as I shut it down. “It's just a dead link again.”

“You really think you can figure this thing out?” Geordie asks.

“Not by myself. But with the right input from some of the others in my newsgroups, we've got a fighting chance.”

“And if that doesn't work?”

“I don't want to think about that right now,” I say. “Let's try to keep a positive spin on things.”

“But—”

“Please?”

He nods and we go back into the living room. I light another cigarette. Geordie makes some more coffee and we watch the TV, where all the experts fumble to make sense of what's going on. What I find most interesting is how everybody avoids any consideration of the supernatural being involved. Reporters, police and government spokespeople, the experts. None of them bring it up. They're postulating terrorist biological attacks, bizarre cult conspiracies, anything but what actually happened.

We're still watching TV when the phone rings. Geordie lowers the sound with the remote.

“Is this Christy Riddell?” a woman's voice asks after I say hello.

“Yes. And you are … ?”

“It's Estie. From the alt-mythology-computers newsgroup. Is your computer still on-line?”

“No, but I don't think it matters. I figure it was a one-time anomaly. I've been back on-line since … since the incident and all I get is the dead link.”

There's a moment of silence, then I hear her take a steadying breath.

“Okay,” she says finally. “Do you want me to go first or do you want to tell me what happened to you?”

“Have you got your TV on?” I ask.

“No. Why?”

“Maybe you should have a look at what's on CNN.”

I figure she's on a roam phone as I can hear her moving around, probably from one room to another. I hear her TV come on—it sounds like a commercial until she punches in the channel number for CNN, and I get a tinny echo through the phone's receiver of what's playing on low volume on the TV set in my living room.

“Oh my god,” she says after a minute or so. “This is worse than I thought.”

I give her a moment to digest what she's seeing, though a moment isn't going to be nearly enough. At least it hasn't been for me.

“Tell me what happened,” I say.

There's a long pause, where all I can hear from the receiver is the sound of her TV set coming over the line.

“My name's Sarah Taylor,” she says finally.

I know that name and say as much, though I can't remember where I know it from.

“We have a mutual friend,” she says. “Holly Rue.”

“Wait a minute.” I start to make the connections. “Does that mean you're—”

“Yes. I'm one of the original founders of the Wordwood.”

I get this immediate sense of relief. She'll know what to do. We're going to get Saskia and all those other people back.