Spirits in the Wires (47 page)

Holly picked herself
up from the dirt, moving gingerly. It took her a long moment to remember where she was and what had happened. Her body still held an echoing tremor of the blast. Her mouth was full of dust and stars flashed in her eyes, blinding her. There was a ringing in her ears and her whole body felt bruised, although the bruising seemed to be on the inside
of
her skin. But after a brief spell of dizziness, the stars finally faded and she was able to find her glasses. She put them on and looked around.

Not far from her, Legba was already standing up, brushing dust from his suit with a gloved hand. When he bent lower to get at a patch on the pant legs below his knees, the sleeve of his jacket rode up. Holly's eyes widened. Instead of an arm, there were only bones there, held together by she didn't know what.

I didn't see that, Holly thought and she turned away. But she couldn't forget that he'd taken her hand earlier. It had certainly
felt
real.

On the other side of her, Geordie was helping Mother Crone stand. Little Hazel sat in the middle of the path, her legs splayed in front of her, her eyes unfocused and a confused expression on her pixie features. Past them, Robert was using the sleeve of his jacket to clean the dust from his guitar. He looked up and caught her gaze.

“She's taken quite the beating this trip,” he said. “Between a hellhound's knife and a handful of new cracks from this fall, we're talking some serious repairs.”

Holly nodded, not knowing what to say. She felt guilty about what had happened to his guitar, but the guitar was the least of their worries. She felt guilty about everything. Except for Legba, everybody was here because of her. Not to mention Christy and the others, trapped in the Wordwood.

She finally let her gaze go to where the wall of mist had been veiling their view of the Wordwood's forest.

It was different now. Completely opaque. She had no idea what that meant, but it couldn't be good.

“What… what happened?” she asked as she got to her feet.

Mother Crone shook her head. “It's changed,” she said. “But how, or from what, I have no idea.”

She turned her attention to Hazel, stroking the little twig girl's locks of Rasta vines until Hazel finally blinked and came back from wherever the blast had sent her.

“I can tell you how it's changed,” Legba said. “The leviathan's left his physical shape and swelled to fill the world behind the mist. He's that world and it's him. There's no place for a gateway spirit in there now because there'll be no going in or out anymore.”

“Making it useless for you,” Robert said.

Legba shot him a quick humourless smile. He gave his sleeve a last brush—

Don't think of what's under the cloth, Holly told herself. Or better yet, what's
not
under it.

—and picked up his cane.

“I doubt I will see any of you again,” he said. His gaze went to Robert. “Except for you, of course. We'll meet at least once more.”

He touched the brim of his hat with gloved fingers, tapped his cane in the dirt, then stepped away, disappearing. Holly blinked in surprise.

“What did he mean by that?” Geordie asked.

Robert shrugged. “Oh, you know these old spirits. They like to be cryptic.”

Holly didn't bother trying to work that out. There was only one thing that concerned her at the moment.

“Can you tell what happened to our friends that were inside?” she asked Mother Crone.

The seer had trouble meeting her gaze.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I can sense the leviathan, but nothing more.”

“So they're all … gone …”

An enormous ache filled Holly as the realization hit home. All those people who had disappeared. Christy and the others …

Their deaths opened a deep pit in her chest and she didn't know if she'd be able to stop herself from falling in. She didn't know that she could bear the weight of this much sorrow.

“I don't know,” Mother Crone replied, her voice gentle with sympathy. “It's like Legba said. It's impossible to reach inside and see anymore. I can't ignore the leviathan—he has such an enormous presence—but nothing else is clear.”

“But…” Geordie had to clear his throat before he could continue. The anguish in his features was too much a mirror of what Holly was feeling and she had to look away. “The danger you were talking about earlier … ?”

“That, at least, has passed.”

The seer took Hazel's hand. She looked as though she was about to add something more, but Robert caught her attention. Holly turned to see him cocking his head. What now? she was about to ask, not sure she could bear anything else. Not sure she even cared. But then she heard it, too. It was like in the basement of the store—the sound of a distant howling. She was surprised to discover that she could still feel afraid for herself with all that had been lost.

“I really thought he'd give me a little bit of grace,” Robert said.

“Legba's rarely generous,” Mother Crone said.

“Tell me about it.”

“Those are the hellhounds, aren't they?” Geordie asked.

Robert nodded.

“But I thought you dealt with them.”

“I dealt with one batch of them, but the otherworld's thick with crossroads spirits, looking to cut their own deal with the
loa.
There will always be more.”

He slipped the strap of his guitar over his shoulder and let the instrument hang at his back.

“They'll follow me,” he said. “But that doesn't mean you should still be here when they arrive.”

Holly looked down the path. She had a long view, but while she could still hear the howling, there was nothing in sight yet.

“What will you do?” she asked.

“Don't worry about me,” Robert told her. “I'll be fine. I'm an old hand at this game.”

Then, just as Legba had done, he stepped away and disappeared. Here one moment, gone the next.

“He's right,” Mother Crone said. “We should go.”

“But our friends …” Holly began.

“There was nothing we could do for them before,” the seer told her, “and even less now. They've either escaped or … or not.”

Holly turned to look at the wall of mist. Nothing had changed. It was still impossible to see through.

“Come,” Mother Crone said.

She held Hazel by one hand and took Holly's hand with the other.

“Stay close to us,” she told Geordie.

“Can … can you just take us back to my store?” Holly asked.

Mother Crone nodded. “Keep an image of it clear in your mind.”

“I'll try.”

Holly looked back at the wall once more, trying not to think of their friends trapped or dead behind it, unable to think of anything but.

The sound of howling rose up, closer now.

“I'd rather not have to confront those hellhounds,” Mother Crone said.

Holly wanted to say, “Right,” or “Of course,” but she couldn't seem to shape the words properly, so she simply nodded.

Mother Crone repeated what she'd done back in the mall, lifting her hands above her head and bringing them down with a sweeping arm-wide motion on either side of her body. The air went iridescent when her hands came together and then they were looking through a shimmering portal. They could see the bookstore, lit only by the streetlight coming through the front window.

“Is this the place?” Mother Crone asked, taking Hazel and Holly's hands once more.

“That's it,” Geordie said when Holly still couldn't speak.

Her grief was unbearable.

She let Mother Crone lead her and Hazel through, Geordie following close behind. The portal closed behind them as silently as it had opened, and with it, all their hopes of ever seeing their friends alive again.

I was pretty sure I was dead
when I went sliding off the shoulder of the leviathan and that flare of white light blinded me. I remember thinking it was a version of the light you sometimes hear people talk about, the one they see at the end of some tunnel when they're dying. It starts out like a dot, burning far in the distance. They're rising up to and falling into it at the same time. Then they finally disappear right into it and everything goes white.

I don't know. I didn't see a tunnel. But I was falling, spilling right off the leviathan's giant shoulder, and everything did go white.

And then I came back.

I'm completely disoriented at first and become aware of things all jumbled out of their order of importance:

I realize the blood's all gone. I was drenched in it, but there's not a drop on me now.

I have a really sore shoulder, like I landed on it when I fell from the leviathan.

The lake is gone.

The
leviathan
is gone.

The library … the library is different. I sit up and look around. The rows of bookcases still go on forever, but I can see a tall, vaulted ceiling now, with chandelier lights hanging at regular intervals. Carpets with an Oriental pattern run on forever, up one corridor, down another. The rows of bookcases are broken by various little reading islands made up of two or three leather club chairs with ottomans, reading lamps, and side tables.

I look back to where the lake had been. I get up slowly and walk to the bookcase that's right where the shore should be. When I touch the bookcase, it's solid. I pull a book off the shelf, flip through a few pages, then replace it. Same deal. The books are real.

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.”