Spirits in the Wires (19 page)

“She really just … disappeared into your computer?”
Holly asked when Christy finished his story.

The part about Saskia's disappearance had come early on, but Holly was still trying to get her head around the idea of it. Even with the pixie infestation that she and Dick had experienced, not to mention living with the hob for the past two years since then, what had happened to Saskia and Benny still seemed impossible.

But Christy nodded. “Like she never existed.”

Holly heard the catch in his voice and reached out across the table to put her hand on his.

“We'll get her back,” she said. “Saskia and Benny and all of them.”

She knew they were just words, but sometimes people needed words, even when the promise held in them couldn't necessarily be fulfilled.

They were sitting around in her apartment—just as she'd sat with Dick and Bojo earlier, except the tinker had been replaced by the Riddell brothers, and they were in the kitchen rather than the living room. She got up now to make a second pot of coffee and pulled out a tin of day-old, homemade scones that were still fresh enough to serve to company if you slathered them with jam. The coffee went quickly, but no one seemed to have much appetite.

There was a restlessness in the air—a need to be doing something,
anything,
but no one knew what. The only one who appeared to be immune was Geordie, but Geordie was always able to put a calm face on things. As Jilly would say, “It's just this gift he has.” But Christy kept opening the screen door and standing out on the fire escape to have a cigarette, and Dick was wearing a path in the floor between the kitchen and the front room windows that overlooked the street, though what he was expecting or looking for he didn't say.

Holly was feeling a bit jittery herself. It looked like she and Dick had come
so
close to getting pulled into the computer themselves. If Dick hadn't accidentally broken their Internet connection, not to mention her monitor …

Don't think about it, she told herself and poured herself another half-cup of coffee.

“So they're all coming?” she asked. “Estie and Tip and all?”

“Apparently,” Geordie said. “Do you still have that old computer stored away somewhere?”

Holly looked to Dick, but he was in the front room again.

“I think so,” she said. “Dick'd know better.”

Geordie stirred at the sound of the hob's name and looked around. Holly knew exactly what was happening to him: magical being that Dick was, his existence kept slipping Geordie's mind, the way it did for most people. You'd forget, then you'd hear his name or see him again and you'd wonder how you'd ever forgotten.

“It's okay,” she told him. “Dick has that effect on pretty much everybody until you get to really know him.”

Geordie nodded. “That's what Christy keeps telling me. But it's still disconcerting when it's actually happening to you. Makes you wonder what else you're missing.”

“Who's missing what?” Christy asked, coming in after having another cigarette.

Geordie shrugged. “Me. Missing all the hidden things in the world.”

“It's not your fault,” Christy said. “You just don't have the trick of it yet, that's all. You need to immerse yourself in—”

He broke off as Dick came running back into the room.

“The tinker's back,” Dick said. “And he's brought a friend.”

“Tinker?” Christy asked.

“He's that fellow taking care of Meran's place,” Holly said. “I told you about him.”

They heard the buzzer ring in the store downstairs, followed by a knock on the door. Holly stood up.

“I'll get that,” she said.

She was happy that none of the others had come down with her because she immediately started to blush at the warm smile Bojo gave her when she unlocked the door and let them in. His companion was a dapper black man with a relaxed look about him, belied only by his penetrating eyes. He was easily as striking as Bojo, though his neat suit and fedora were a far cry from the tinker's more Bohemian look, and he carried a battered guitar case in his left hand. He took off his hat, tucking it under his arm when he came into the store.

“You'll be Holly,” he said, offering her his hand. “I'm Robert Lonnie.”

They shook hands, then Holly stepped aside to let them by. She closed the door behind them and locked it again. When she turned, Bojo laid a hand on her shoulder and gave it a squeeze.

Be still my heart, Holly thought.

“I told you I'd be back,” Bojo said. “With help in tow and all. Robert here—”

“Doesn't know much about anything when it comes to computers,” Robert broke in, “but he's seen a thing or two that doesn't make sense in this world.” He paused, then smiled. “He also hates it when people talk in the third person about themselves, so I'm going to stop right about now.”

“There've been some complications since you left,” Holly told Bojo.

“You and Dick are okay?”

Holly nodded. “We're fine. But—well, you should just come upstairs and I'll let the others fill you in.”

She started for the stairs to her apartment, pausing when only Bojo followed.

“Aren't you coming, Mr. Lonnie?”

“It's Robert,” he said, looking up briefly before his gaze tracked through the store, settling on the desk again.

“Are you looking for something?” Holly asked.

Robert shook his head. He continued to study the desk for a long moment, then finally turned and joined them at the foot of the stairs.

“I was just taking in a sense of this place,” he said. “Getting a feel for things. Something almost came through here tonight—from the other side, I mean.”

Holly nodded. “If Dick hadn't been as quick as he was, we could've been sucked away just like all those other people.”

“What other people?” Bojo asked.

The question was repeated in Robert's eyes.

“That's what I was trying to tell you,” Holly said. “It's not just me and my weird little computer woes anymore. But Christy can tell you more.”

“Lead on,” Robert told her at the same time as Bojo asked, “Who's Christy?”

“Christy Riddell,” Holly said over her shoulder as she started up the stairs. “He and his brother Geordie lost someone to a computer last night and there have been other disappearances, too. Apparently it's been on the news and everything. Christy thinks it's all tied to the Wordwood site.”

“Wordwood,” Robert said, repeating it as though he was tasting the way the two words came together into one.

Before Holly could explain more, they were upstairs and she was too busy introducing everybody. Geordie and Robert had already met, though only in passing. Everybody else needed an introduction. Robert appeared to be particularly delighted to meet Dick.

“I've never met one of the little people before,” he said, then paused. “Do you mind being called that?”

Dick shook his head. “Oh, no, sir. You've been calling us that for hundreds of years now, just like we've been calling you big folk, or tall folk.”

“Well, I'm very pleased to make your acquaintance,” Robert told him.

“Borrible,” Christy said to Bojo. “That's an unusual name. I'm a bit of a collector of names and I've never come across it before. Is it a given name?”

Bojo nodded. “It comes from the time before we became a travelling people. We lived in a mountainous area of our homeland and when the traders first came to our villages, they referred to us as aboriginals. Later, when relationships became more acrimonious between us, they started to call us horribles instead. My father, apparently, decided that we should reclaim the term and replace its negative associations with positive ones. So he changed his name to Borrible and named me the same. I'm told he hoped that I'd name my firstborn son the same, but I don't have a cruel streak in me.”

Holly shot him a hurt look, disappointed to find out that he'd lied to her, but Robert only laughed.

“Sounds like you've got a different story for everyone you meet,” he said.

Bojo shrugged. “Depends on how you look at it. Somewhere, some-when, each of those stories is true.”

“I don't understand,” Holly said.

“It's how the tinkers circumvent time,” Robert explained. “Travelling in and out of worlds, they have many lives, rather than just one. It makes it hard for the years to catch up with them.”

“Is this true?” Holly asked.

“My Aunt Meran notwithstanding, we're a restless people. Few of us settle down the way she and Cerin have.”

“Though,” Geordie put in, “the pair of them are still away touring for half the year or more.”

Bojo gave a slow nod. “I hadn't thought of it like that.”

There was a brief lull in the conversation then. Christy went out onto the fire escape for another cigarette. Dick got up as well.

“What do you keep looking for out there?” Holly asked him.

This time he had an answer.

“Pixies,” he said over his shoulder.

Bojo poured himself and Robert another coffee, the others declining when he offered the pot to them. Robert took his mug and returned to the chair in the corner. He slipped his guitar out of its case and began to noodle on the strings, the unconnected notes finally falling into a simple twelve-bar blues.

“From the residue I sensed downstairs,” Robert said when Christy and Dick had both returned to the kitchen, his voice following the rhythm of the music, “and with what I've been hearing now, I think Bojo is right. This is a deep magic, but it's not an old one.”

“Does that mean there's nothing we can do?” Holly asked.

The bluesman shook his head. “On the contrary, the fact that it's not an old spirit works in our favour. It'll be less experienced and that means we'll have a better chance to get it to do what we want—so long as we do it right. But we're going to need some way to start up a conversation with it.”

“Without a monitor, the store's computer isn't going to be much use,” Holly said. “But if we can find my old one …”

This time when she looked at Dick, he was still in the room.

“It's still in the basement,” he said. “Behind all those boxes of
National Geographic.
”

“So, should we set it up?” Holly asked.

Robert nodded. “But since it doesn't seem like any of us is particularly computer-adept, we should probably wait for your friends before we try to use it. When you're working a mojo like this, you pretty much only have the one chance to get it right. Spirits learn fast. We won't get a second shot.”

“But we do have a chance?” Christy said.

“Oh, yeah,” Robert told him. “People always have a chance. Only trouble is, once we get that thing we need so bad, it doesn't always work out the way we thought it would.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

Robert slipped from the Eb blues pattern he was playing into a minor key.

“Come on now,” he said, his gaze mild as it lifted from the Gibson's strings and settled on Christy's features. “I know who you are. You've studied on this for years. Don't tell me you can't be surprised anymore.”

“I don't understand,” Holly said.

“What he means,” Bojo explained, “is that some spirits just have it in their nature to play unfair. Maybe you asked for wealth. So you find you've got a cave full of treasure stashed away somewhere safe. Except you're sitting on Death Row and there's nothing you can do to get to it.”

Holly glanced at Dick and the hob gave her an unhappy nod.

“It's true, Mistress Holly,” he said. “Some of the old ones delight in thinking up new ways to keep their word but at the same time make it impossible for you to benefit.”

“I've still got to try,” Christy said.

“ ‘Course we've got to try,” Robert said. “We've just got to step up to this with our thinking caps on. Figure out what the spirit wants. Figure out how we can guarantee we get what
we
want with no strings attached.”

“But you're telling us it'll be hard,” Geordie said.

Robert nodded. “Oh, yeah. It'll be hard. But hard doesn't mean impossible.”

One of the great side benefits
of being the newspaper's book editor, so far as Aaran was concerned, was that he got an endless supply of freebies. And it wasn't only books and galleys that got packed away in his briefcase every day to be taken home. Because he made a point of writing reviews for other parts of the entertainment section, he got to cherry pick all the various promotional items that arrived at the paper. Prereleases of new CDs, videos, and DVDs. T-shirts, stickers, mugs, shooter glasses, watches, posters … whatever a company might use to promote their product.

It was a running joke at the office that Aaran would take home anything. What they didn't know was that he made a tidy little profit on the side, selling the various items on eBay, or to a few select record and book shops in Crowsea. Like he'd actually ever wear an Eminem T-shirt, or put a signed poster of Mariah Carey up in his living room. Or drink his morning coffee from a mug with the characters from
The Simpsons
printed on the side.

He also got to snap up tickets to concerts, films, and shows, which was what had brought him out to the Standish Hall last night for a concert by the Australian country singer Kasey Chambers. She was obviously a huge success with the sold-out crowd that had filled the 3000-seat concert hall, though Aaran couldn't understand why. He just didn't like this kind of music—alt-country, Americana, whatever you wanted to call it. But attending the odd dud concert such as this—or at least the first twenty minutes or so of the headliner's set, which was invariably enough for him to write a review—was the price he paid for also being able to score front-row Elton John tickets.

He sat now in his study, face and hands tinted blue from the glow of his computer screen as he composed his review of the show. He restrained himself from being too nasty—the entertainment editor had a different philosophy from Aaran's own in the book pages and preferred her reviewers to focus on the positive elements of what was being covered—but he couldn't resist slipping in a few digs about Australia, a country he'd never visited but instinctively disliked, and the idea that Chambers could have any sort of real experience on which to base her songs of heartbreak and country life.

And really, what was with the twang in her voice? Chambers should take a page from real country artists like Shania Twain, or Faith Hill's more recent work.

Melissa Lawrence, the entertainment editor, would probably edit out the digs, since she was a fan of Australia in general and Chambers's music in particular, but at least Aaran got the satisfaction of bringing her blood pressure up a notch or two. Especially since she hadn't been able to attend the show last night, which was how he got the job. It was never a bad thing to have people owe you favours.

The real highlight of last night's concert hadn't been the music, but a conversation he'd overheard while waiting in line to get into the Standish Hall. He'd recognized the pair standing ahead of him to be a couple of Saskia's friends and couldn't hold back a grin as he listened to them lament the fact that the Wordwood site was still down. He'd been very tempted to tap them on the shoulder and brag about the part he'd played in bringing its collapse, but common sense prevailed.

There was no point in making a scene.

Some of the people in that crowd of Saskia's were very high-strung and argumentative. It seemed to be one of the prerequisites of being an artist. That celebrated creative temperament.

When he was finished writing the review, he saved it on a disk then shut down his machine. Pocketing the disk, he set off for the newspaper's offices. He could as easily have e-mailed it to Melissa, but this was Sunday, when the Arts & Living offices would be pretty much empty, which made it a perfect time to go rooting about in the week's new promotional arrivals to see if there was anything he might have missed.

The office was a hubbub of conversation when Aaran stepped out of the elevator. Clusters of the newspaper's employees gathered around various desks, caught up in animated conversations, or sat in front of their monitors, fingers tapping on their keyboards. CNN was on the television set in the corner, but from where he stood, Aaran couldn't make out what its earnest news anchors were discussing. Either some big story had broken, or something had happened to one of the staff. His coworkers never got this interested in much else.

Big story, he decided when he spied a few of the hard news guys working at their terminals. Chuck Tremaine. Barbara Haley. Rob Watley. You never saw any of them in the office on a weekend unless there was a story well worth their time. And then, as though to confirm his suspicions, his gaze went to the glass windows of Kathleen Winter's office. There was a meeting underway in the news editor's office with a half-dozen production people sitting or standing around her desk. Which probably meant she was shooting for an extra edition and needed to work out the logistics.

“What's going on?” Aaran asked of the three reporters talking around the desk closest to the elevator doors.

Harold Cole turned to him. “Christ, Goldstein,” he said. “Are you living in a cave? CNN's been running the story for hours.”

Aaran shrugged. “I was out late last night and didn't turn on the TV this morning.”

“So was she good?”

That was Mark Sakers, fresh out of journalism school and always eager to hear Aaran's stories of sexual conquest. Aaran never disappointed him, even if he had to make the stories up.

“They're always good,” he told Mark, before turning back to Harold. “Seriously, what's up?”

“CNN's calling them ‘the disappeared'—which should piss off anyone who lost relatives to South American dictators. But I suppose it's as descriptive a term as any, seeing how a few hundred people just up and vanished from their homes last night.”

“What do you mean ‘vanished'?”

“As in gone without a trace,” George Hooper said. He was the third of the reporters standing around Harold's desk, an old hippie with his grey hair tied back in a ponytail. “There one moment, gone the next.”

“But… how's that even possible?”

George smiled. “It's not—hence the big story.”

“How many people are we talking about here?” Aaran asked.

When Harold turned to look at the television set, Aaran's gaze followed, but he couldn't make anything out beyond the blonde anchor looking into the camera with her patented serious expression.

“I think it was just tipping three-fifty,” Harold said. “The last time I looked.”

“All from the city?” Aaran asked.

George shook his head. “From all over the country, and abroad, too.”

“We lost one of the nerd squad,” Mark put in. “Disappeared right out of his apartment last night. Very
X-Files.
”

Aaran got an eerie feeling in the pit of his stomach.

“Who was it?” he asked, though he was pretty sure he already knew. It just came to him in a flash, the way a good phrase did when he was writing a review.

“Jackson Hart,” Mark said. “Did you know him?”

Aaran shook his head. “Just to see him around the office. What did you mean about it being very
X-Files?”

“This is where it gets good,” George said. “Apparently his landlady heard something dripping outside her apartment door. When she looked in the hall, there was this black goop dripping down the stairs, coming out of the crack under Hart's door. She stepped around it and banged on his door—no answer. So she uses her master key, opens the door, and this flood of the crap comes flowing out.”

“Black goop?”

George shrugged. “Who knows? Anyway, she beats a hasty retreat and calls the cops. No sign of Hart inside—though she swears she heard him up there a few minutes before and he never went out. And then, get this, over the next fifteen minutes or so the goop just fades away like it never was. Now you tell me. If that isn't weird, what is?”

“No kidding,” Aaran said. “I'm still trying to take it all in.”

Not to mention trying to figure out how he'd known it was Jackson that had disappeared. And why he also knew—as clearly, if as inexplicably— that it had something to do with the little blackmail task he'd set Jackson. What, he didn't know. But somehow the disappearances were connected.

“Thing like this,” Harold said. “I'll bet it makes you wish you were a real reporter.”

Aaran gave a slow, distracted nod, not rising to the bait.

“You guys all have assignments?” he asked.

George shook his head. “We're waiting for Winter to finish with the production people to have our meeting with her.”

“Well, good luck with it,” Aaran told them.

He went into Melissa's office. Pulling the disk with the Chambers review out of his pocket, he dropped it on the entertainment editor's desk, then left the office without even bothering to go through the promotional materials that were on the bookcase behind her desk, or piled up in boxes along one wall.

After leaving the paper, Aaran went straight home and switched on his TV. He sat down on the couch, punched in CNN on his remote, and watched the story unfold. To anybody who'd been tuned in to the channel for awhile, this would be the umpteenth repeat of their coverage, but it was all new to Aaran as he watched in disbelief.

The truth was, back at the office, he hadn't really taken his coworkers seriously. While he'd known that there was something major going on— that was obvious—he hadn't really believed it to be some massive disappearance of people, figuring that Harold and the others had just been having him on. All he'd known for sure was that it had something to do with Jackson Hart, and therefore it could possibly be connected to him. How, he wasn't sure. What exactly it was, he hadn't known either, but was willing to wait until he got home rather than make a fool of himself by asking someone else in the office.

But there it was on the screen, and unless CNN had taken a page from Orson Welles and was doing their own version of
The War of the Worlds,
this had really happened.

The disappeared.

According to a little box in the corner of the screen, the number of people confirmed to be missing stood at eight hundred sixty-three, worldwide. Half that number had disappeared from North America.

At least there was nothing about computers, he thought, as the anchor woman completed her update. Nothing to connect any of this to me. It was just coincidence that Jackson Hart was involved. That little frisson of alarm that had made him think it had anything to do with blackmailing Jackson was obviously wrong.

But he still couldn't completely quell the uneasiness that had gripped him ever since he'd heard the news back at the paper. And questions kept rising to jangle his nerves.

Like, what if the authorities were merely withholding the fact that computers had been involved?

That was exactly the kind of thing they'd do, hoping some schmuck would trip himself up by showing he knew more than what was reported in the media. Just asking about it could get you into trouble.

But Aaran still had to know.

He sat awhile longer, staring at the TV but no longer hearing the anchor's voice or seeing what played out on the screen. Finally he shut it off, got his coat and went out again.

Don't do this, Aaran told himself as he made his way to Jackson's apartment.

But he went all the same.

“I've already talked to someone from the
Journal,”
Jackson's landlady said.

She started to hand Aaran back his press I.D., then gave it another look.

“I know you,” she said. “Jackson's talked about you.”

The hand of fear tightened its grip inside Aaran.

“Did he now?” he said, managing to keep his face far calmer than he was feeling.

The landlady nodded. Although he put her age at not much more than his own thirty-eight, she gave him the impression of being older, like someone from his parents' generation rather than his own. It was something in the cut of her skirt and blouse, and those sensible brown shoes. Her makeup and the nondescript styling of her short, already greying hair only added to the impression.