Spirits in the Wires (11 page)

She set Snippet back in her bed in the front display window and looked around for Dick—not directly, but out of the corner of her eye. Dick had this trick where he could sit so still, he as much as became invisible to people. Even Holly wasn't completely immune to it and she'd known him for ages now, though once she caught a glimpse of him from the corner of her eye, she could hold him in sight thereafter. Strangers simply didn't register his presence.

This time she found him curled up in the club chair that stood at the end of one of the bookcases, reading, of course.

“Dick,” she said. “Come and look at this.”

He put down his book and joined her behind the desk—as usual, making it obvious how reluctant he was to be this close to the computer. Holly took off her glasses and gave them a quick cleaning on her shirt tails. Making room for Dick in front of the monitor, she put them on again and looked over his shoulder. The dot on her screen was still growing bigger.

Dick appeared to be mesmerized by it. He started to reach a hand toward the monitor.

“What do you think it is?” Holly asked. “Because I'll tell you, it's giving me the creeps and I don't know why.”

Her voice made him start and he pulled his hand away from the screen as though he'd been about to put it on a hot stove burner.

“Dick?”

He gave her a worried look that made her uneasiness grow.

“Oh, this is bad, Mistress Holly,” he said.

He dropped to the floor, scrabbling around in the nest of wires that were clustered around the power bar under the desk. Behind them, Holly could hear Snippet growling from her bed in the window.

“Which cord is it?” Dick muttered.

“Which cord is what?”

Holly glanced at the monitor to see that the black dot filled almost two thirds of the screen now. When Dick looked up and followed her gaze, he grabbed the power bar itself and gave it a wild yank. The computer went dead. The monitor, now blank, tottered on the edge of the desk—pulled off-balance because its power cord was still plugged into the bar in Dick's hand. Holly made a grab for the monitor, but she was too late. It fell to the floor, its cheap plastic casing exploding on impact.

Snippet bounded out of the window and circled the broken monitor, barking and growling at it.

Dick stood up again, still holding the power bar. His big eyes had gone bigger than ever, his lips forming an “O.” He turned to Holly with such a woebegone look on his face that she wanted to bend down and give him a hug. But though Dick was small, she knew better than to try to comfort him as she might a child. He was older than her. A lot older. How much, she couldn't begin to guess. Yet there was still a childlike innocence about him, especially in moments such as this.

“I… I didn't mean …”

“It's okay,” she told him.

The monitor was broken now and its tumble off the desk couldn't be taken back. There was no point in making Dick feel worse about it.

“What was happening?” she asked. “Why did you have to kill the power to the computer so quickly?”

Dick let the power bar drop to the floor.

“There … there was something trying to get out,” he explained.

“What kind of something?”

Having once had that gang of pixies come flooding out of her monitor, Holly wasn't about to argue the impossibility of something else trying to get out as well.

“I don't know for sure,” Dick said. “Not exactly bad. But wild. And hungry for … something.”

“Like the pixies.”

He shook his head. “Whatever this was, it was far bigger and stronger than a pixie.” He turned to her. “It had me charmed as sure as a snake can charm a bird, Mistress Holly. If you hadn't spoken up and broken the spell… I don't know what would have happened. But nothing good. I can tell you that.”

“But it's gone now?”

“I think so. I don't feel it anymore—do you?”

Holly shook her head. “But I didn't feel anything in the first place. Just a kind of uneasiness. Snippet, come here!” she added, calling to where the dog was still growling at the monitor.

“I think maybe you shouldn't use your computer for awhile,” Dick said.

Holly nodded, not bothering to mention that, without a monitor, she couldn't anyway. Dick was only just starting to look a little less distraught about having broken it in the first place.

Snippet stood expectantly at her feet. Sitting down, Holly patted her lap and the little dog jumped up.

“This something you're talking about,” she said to Dick, soothing Snippet with a scratch behind the ear. “It's loose in the Net, isn't it? Like the pixies were.”

“Except if it gets free …”

“We're in bigger trouble than we were then. Okay. So we stay off the Net. What about phone lines? Do you think it'd be safe to make a call?”

“You could try.”

Holly reached for the phone. She felt nervous picking up the receiver, then stupid for feeling nervous, but that didn't stop the uneasiness. She held the receiver so that both she and Dick could listen to the dial tone.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“I don't sense anything—not like I did when the computer was on-line.”

“Okay, then,” Holly said and she began to punch in a number. “Time to call in an exorcist—or at least the closest to one that I know.”

I've really been caught up
with a new book these days that's got me doing research into the mysteries inhabiting the World Wide Web: everything from spirits and ghosts to the new urban legends that have grown up around the use of computers—especially when they're connected to each other through the Internet and e-mail.

Jilly says I should call it
Spirits in the Wires,
but that doesn't strike me as accurate enough for my purposes. I don't see spirits haunting the hardware—the circuits and wiring, the actual technology—so much as using the hardware to get around. They ride the software, cables, and telephone lines, and make homes for themselves in the spaces that lie in between the various computers that the technology connects. Science fiction writers call those territories cyberspace, but I think of it all as a kind of voodoo.
Les invisibles
finding a more contemporary host to ride.

For these aren't new spirits—at least not from what I can tell. They're the same magical beings of the woods and fields and waters wild that first made a journey from their rural origins to more urban settings, and have now moved into the technologies of the future. They'll probably follow us into space.

Not all of them, of course. Just the more adventurous, the strongest— those with the same characteristics that human explorers need when they leave the safety of the Fields We Know to strike out into unknown territories.

I first started keeping notes on these more recent phenomena after I became aware of the anomalies surrounding the Wordwood and Saskia's connection to it. Holly's adventure with the pixies only served to convince me I was on the track of something new and worthwhile of my interest.

It's funny. The more computer literate among my friends have been telling me odd stories about the Internet and new technologies for years, but it's only in past few months that I'm paying attention to them. I almost feel like I'm coming too late into the game, since any number of urban legends have already grown up on the Internet, spreading as quickly as wildfire viruses. Or at least warnings about viruses. But people studied fairies and ghosts for centuries before I took it up and I'm still finding new things to write about. Better late than never.

Considering how much I've always loved legends—urban or ancient— I don't know why I didn't clue into these contemporary changes in folklore and myth sooner. Even when I was a kid I was drawn to this sort of thing. For a long time, cataloguing and tracking the stories that slip between the cracks of fact and history was my only real escape from a boyhood that was otherwise filled with unhappiness and discouragement.

But I guess I have a bit of a Luddite's aversion to technology. When I finally start to use something new, it's already old hat for everybody else. Or at least everybody on the cutting edge. By the time I got a fax machine, everybody else was using e-mail. My tech friends all have cell phones and handheld computers like Palms and iPAQs. I still prefer to use a phone booth if I'm away from home and write in the hardback journal that goes everywhere I do.

But now that I've found the connection to my earlier, more traditional studies of the odd, curious, and just plain strange, I've become completely absorbed by technology and its own particular take on the paranormal. It's all I want to think about and research. So, of course, just as I'm starting to get some real leads on new avenues to explore, a set of galleys shows up from Alan that he says he needs back last week.

Probably the worst thing about the business of being a writer is correcting galleys. These are the typeset page proofs the publisher sends to you for final corrections that are supposed to incorporate all of the corrections and changes that were made during the various editing and copyediting processes. At least it's the worst part for me. I like everything else, from researching and tracking down sources, through the actual writing and editing, to finally sitting in some bookstore and chatting with my readers. But the galleys …

By the time I'm at this point in the procedure, I've seen the words too many times and find myself wanting to change things simply for the sake of having something different to look at. You can't of course. Instead you sit there, bored stiff while you go through the mind-numbing task, trying not to get too cranky.

I'm not very good at the not getting too cranky part. Which, I guess, explains why Saskia's “I'm just dropping by the cafe for an hour or so” earlier in the evening was actually code for “I'm going out for the night; I hope you've finished this by the time I get back.”

I wish I could be, but no such luck. I may not enjoy correcting galleys, but I take the time to do the job right. I'll be at this through next week. So when she gets back to the apartment—close on midnight, by the clock on my bookshelf—I've only got another couple of chapters done.

“How's it coming?” she asks from the door of my study.

“Swimmingly,” I tell her.

“That bad?”

“No, it's just tedious. You know what it's like.”

She nods, having gone through this with her poetry collections and the freelance writing she does.

“But I'm done for today,” I say.

I straighten the stack of loose galley pages I've been working on, tapping them on the top of the desk to get them all aligned, then set them down in a neat stack. I'm terrible about that sort of thing, which is probably why Jilly got me that T-shirt that reads “Is there a hyphen in anal-retentive?” I don't wear it. I keep it folded up with all the other joke T-shirts people give me that I'll probably never wear. And yes, I see the irony in that. But I've always been somewhat of a compulsive tidier. I might have all sorts of books lying around, waiting to be read or put away on the bookshelves, but they're all stacked in orderly piles, often sorted by category and in alphabetical order.

Saskia settles in one of the two club chairs by the bookcases and puts her feet up on the ottoman. I turn off the light on my desk and join her, sitting in the other chair, sharing the ottoman with my own feet.

“So how was your evening?” I ask, tapping a foot against hers.

“Interesting. I met your shadow at the Beanery Cafe.”

“Really? That seems like an odd place to run into her.”

Though when it comes to my shadow, odd is usually the norm. She's the sort of person that you can never figure out what she's thinking, what she'll say, or where you'll meet her next. Even when she's forthcoming, I still usually come away from our conversations wearing a cloud of confusion. It's part of the reason I call her Mystery.

“I know,” Saskia says. “It's weird to think of her hanging out in such a mundane place, isn't it? Though of course she fit right in.”

I have to smile. “She fits in wherever she goes. I think environments adjust themselves to suit her rather than the other way around.”

“I wish I could do that,” Saskia says. “I feel like it's just the other way for me.”

I give her a puzzled look.

She sighs. “Your shadow and I got talking about where we came from and that reminded me of that first morning I woke up in this world and how hard it was for me to fit in.”

I nod. We've talked about this before.

“And it started me thinking again about who I am and where I came from. If I'm even real.”

“It doesn't matter where you came from,” I tell her. “You're real now.”

“Am I? Isn't part of being real knowing where you came from? I'm like an adopted kid. It doesn't matter how happy your life is, if you don't know your parents—if you don't know
anything
about your origin—you're living with this black hole underlying who you are. And not all the platitudes in the world can make it go away.”

“But you know your origin. You've said you were born in the Word-wood.”

She nods. “And how weird is
that?
How
real
is that? How can a real person be born in a Web site?”

“I don't know. But you're here now.” I touch her arm. “You feel real.”

“Your shadow thinks I should go to the source with my questions,” she says.

“You mean to the Wordwood?”

“Where else?”

“I guess. It seems to answer any question you put to it.” I put my feet down from the ottoman. Sitting up, I look at my computer over on the desk. “I suppose we can see if it's come back on-line again.”

“What do you mean?”

“The site's been down all week.”

Saskia shakes her head wearily. “And I never even knew. What does that say about my so-called connection to it?”

“You said it cut you loose.”

“Or I cut myself loose. But going on-line wasn't exactly what I had in mind. Your shadow says she can take me into the otherworld. That we can find the Wordwood on its own ground.”

“Wait a minute. The Wordwood exists in the otherworld?”

“She seems to think it does.”

“As what? A place? A person?”

Saskia shrugs. “Who knows? Maybe as some combination of both.”

“This is getting too weird.”

“And me being born in a Web site isn't?”

“You know what I mean. The Wordwood's a human construct—the product of software and HTML language. How can it exist in the other-world?”

Saskia just looks at me. “Maybe it doesn't—at least not most of the time. But if it has spirit, then the spiritworld would seem to be the easiest place to find it.”

“Yes, but…”

“It's just a kind of magic,” Saskia says. “The same magic that allowed me to walk in the world, clothed in flesh and bone.”

“I guess …”

Truth is, I'm never one hundred percent certain that Saskia's origin is quite so exotic as she accepts it is. I know that she believes it. And there are days when I believe it, too. All I have to do is to remember how it was when I first met her. She used to be like a walking encyclopedia, able to quote amazing references at the drop of a hat, but not seeming to have had firsthand experience with something so simple as hot chocolate.

But for my all normally ready acceptance that there's more to this world than we can see—than we
expect
to see—I have a cynic living in my head as well as the believer. He's the one who insists that ghosts and spirits are delusions. That what we have here, is all there is. There's more? he asks. Then prove it. Show me.

When I listen to him, I can't imagine a Web site giving birth to a living, breathing human being. For that matter, there are times when Saskia's as much a skeptic as the cynic in my head. But this, apparently, isn't one of them.

“Okay,” I say after a moment. “But let's at least check out the source by more conventional means first.”

I get up and cross the room to my desk, starting up the computer. The machine's up and running by the time Saskia joins me. She stands behind my chair, hands on my shoulders. I click on my dial-up icon, the modem dials the number, and soon we're listening to the familiar squawk and buzz of the computer connecting to my ISP.

After I open Explorer and enter the Wordwood's URL, the error message I've been getting all week comes up in my browser window. I start to close my connection.

“What's that?” Saskia says.

She leans over my shoulder, the point of her index finger going to a small black dot that's appeared in the middle of my browser window. I have this flash of premonition, but before I can stop her, her fingertip touches the screen.

Have you ever seen a firecracker fuse burn? That's what it's like with her, except the detonation comes first. There's this flash of—I don't know what. Like an electrical discharge. It blows me off my chair, against the wall, and knocks the breath out of me. But I can still see what's happening to her from where I'm lying.

A flare of white hot light runs up her finger, her hand, her arm, her shoulder, travelling the length of her body. Like a fuse. But instead of leaving behind a string of ash, it leaves behind a pixelated version of her, like she's no longer solid and I can see all the molecules of her body. It's like the difference in seeing a painting, then seeing a photo of it in a newspaper where it's made up of thousands of little dots of colour.

I try to scramble to my feet, but my limbs are numbed and jellied and they won't hold me.

Saskia gives me a look—a haunting, desperate look. Then the computer just shatters and collapses into itself. One moment the monitor and keyboard are on my desk, the tower on the floor beside it, the next they're just the heaps of broken plastic, circuitry, and wiring.

Saskia reaches for me. But it isn't Saskia anymore. It's this human shape made up of thousands of flickering tiny pellets of shadow and light.

I call her name, try again to get to my feet. I hear a telephone dialing, as though somewhere in the wreckage of my computer the modem's trying to reconnect to my ISP. Then Saskia's gone and the room is so still the silence hurts.