Spirits in the Wires (36 page)

He does something with his hands, some kind of ritualistic motion in the air in front of him, or maybe he's just touching controls we can't see. Whatever it is that he does, our surroundings change again, only this time it's as fast as you might snap your fingers. There's no gradual change from forest to this new place we find ourselves in. We're just
here.

Saskia breathes in my head.

No kidding.

We're in a library, an enormous chamber filled with shelves and shelves of books, a chamber that is so vast that I can't see an end to it, no matter which way I look. Everything is lit with a diffused version of the blue-gold light I've come to associate with the Wordwood, but I can't see a source for the light. The bookshelves tower up until they disappear into shadow. The top shelves are only accessible from rolling ladders that are so tall I can't imagine climbing up one and I have a good head for heights. There's carpeting underfoot, an Oriental pattern that, if handwoven, would take centuries to make by an army of carpet-makers.

I turn to Librarius and he looks like flesh and blood now. The soft light touches him, like it touches everything, but he's no longer made of light himself. Saskia's body is still at my feet. I look to where Jackson had been hanging from that tree, but he's in a leather club chair now, his arms and legs strapped and buckled to it so that he can't get up. His mouth is no longer full of leaves, but he doesn't say anything. He just sits there, looking scared, but a little angry, too. I don't blame him.

“Where's the spirit?” I ask, turning back to Librarius.

“This way,” he says.

He starts off down one of the corridors between the bookshelves, pausing when I don't immediately follow.

“What's the matter?” he asks.

“I don't want to leave my friend just lying here.”

He gives a slow nod and does something with his hands again, manipulating the air. Saskia's body and the chair that Jackson's sitting in float up, hovering a few inches from the carpet. I take an experimental step and Saskia's body keeps pace, floating beside me.

Librarius turns and sets off once more and this time I follow him, Saskia's body at my side, Jackson's chair trailing along behind.

Saskia says, referring to the librarian.

His own, or the spirit's?

I suppose not.

After a number of twists and turns through the maze of bookshelves, we come out into a cavernous space—it might even
be
a cavern for all I know. It's hard to tell because the diffuse lighting doesn't really allow you to get a real sense of distance. I just know we're on the shore of something. A river. A lake. Maybe even an ocean. It's hard to tell. The water stretches away from us, disappearing into shadow.

On our left, the bookcases march up to the shore. On the right, there's a jumble of rock that goes right into the water. Then I realize it's not rock. That enormous shape is a body, its lower torso and legs submerged in the water. I hear Jackson make a soft choking sound behind me when it registers for him. I can barely breathe myself, but I try not to let it show.

Instead, I walk boldly up to the body.

Saskia says in my head.

There's the usual warning in how she uses my name, but what does she think I'm going to do?

I just want a closer look,
I tell her.

I walk up to the head, Librarius keeping pace with me. I can't believe the size of the body. The head alone is as big as a city bus.

I just about die when one enormous eye opens and looks at me.

From the moment that Geordie,
wearing a thin veneer of politeness over his hostility, had led them down to the basement, Aaran hadn't been able to take his gaze from the wall. That was another world he could see through the shimmer. A real, honest-to-God other world. Even after their experience in Jackson's apartment, and given the evidence of his own two eyes, it still seemed too improbable to be real. But there it was all the same. So amazing, but at the same time, so ordinary as well. As though every Newford basement had a portal to another world in one of its walls.

He almost smiled at the idea.

Maybe they did. Maybe there was one in the basement of his own building. He wouldn't know. He'd only been down there a few times, and only so far as his storage locker. Past the lockers, there could be anything.

The portal continued to distract him as they all brought each other up to date, Christy and Suzi doing most of the talking. But he did tear his attention away from it later, when the discussion arose as to what to do next. He was surprised to find Christy not only defending Suzi, but allowing the two of them to join the group going into the otherworld. That required more than a little trust on Christy's part, and Christy was the one they had to win over, because the others appeared to be following his lead.

Considering how Aaran had treated Christy over the years—more to the point, considering how he was directly responsible for Saskia's disappearance—Aaran thought it was awfully big of him. He wasn't sure if the situation were reversed, that he'd have been able to do the same. Certainly not before he met Suzi and she did whatever it was that she'd done to him to make him see himself and the world in a different light.

Once the decision to go ahead with their journey into the otherworld was made, people began lifting their packs and moving toward the portal.

We didn't bring anything, Aaran realized. No extra clothes, no food or water. Nothing.

He was about to ask Suzi if she was okay being so unprepared for the trip when Holly approached them with a pack in her hand. She offered it to them.

“What's this?” he asked.

Holly shrugged. “I kept thinking that I'd wait until the last moment and then talk Christy into letting me join them, so I packed some stuff. Nothing that'll fit you, but Suzi should find things she can wear. There's also some bottled water, a first aid kit and matches, and some food.”

“You sure you don't want to come?” Suzi asked.

Holly shook her head. “After seeing those guys that came for Robert… nope, I don't think so. I'm happy to stay here and hold the fort.”

Aaran took the pack. “Thanks.”

“Just bring them back. Saskia, my friends. Everybody.”

“We'll do our best.”

Holly fixed him with a serious look.

“And you'd better not be playing a game here,” she told him. “Because if you are and you screw things up, I will personally—”

Suzi put her hand on Holly's arm. “No games,” she said. “We want this to end as much as you do.”

“Right. Of course, you do. I'm sorry. It's just…”

“Really hard,” Suzi said.

Holly nodded. “I love those guys. If they're gone for good … I just don't know what I'll do.”

“We'll bring them back,” Suzi assured her.

You can't know that, Aaran thought, so why make the promise? He saw that knowledge in Holly's eyes, too, but he also saw how the promise helped, so he added his own to it.

“We won't come back until we do,” he told her.

The others were waiting for them on the far side of the portal—three poorly-defined shapes seen through the shimmer. Suzi took his hand as they were about to step through.

“Nervous?” she asked.

Aaran nodded. “Guess this is old hat for you.”

“I wish it was. I feel like I'm going to pee my pants.”

Then, before she could lose her nerve, she stepped ahead, into the wall, into the shimmer of the portal. Every inch of Aaran's skin shrunk from the contact as they went through. But there was nothing there—only a thickening of the air—and then they were on the other side. Vertigo hit Aaran hard. Nausea rose up and he would have stumbled if Bojo hadn't caught his arm.

“It doesn't last,” the tinker said. “Here, sit on this rock for a moment and put your head between your legs.”

Aaran gave a dull nod and allowed himself to be led over to a jumble of rocks under a large old tree of some kind. He dropped his head between his legs when all he really wanted to do was lie down in the dirt. But Bojo had told the truth. The feeling went quickly away leaving only a slight queasiness in its wake. When he was able to look up he saw that Raul still looked a little ill, too, but the other three appeared unaffected.

“Apparently it doesn't hit everybody the same way,” Suzi said.

She had the decency to look a little guilty as she offered him a hand up.

“And some people not at all,” he muttered.

“What can I say? It's all in the constitution.”

Aaran gave her a weak smile and looked around. So this was the other-world. It didn't look a whole lot different from the landscape north of the city. Big fields. Mountains in the distance. A forest, mostly evergreens, to his right. When he turned the other way, the view was only a variation on what he'd already seen.

Two paths joined each other in the place where they were standing— dirt trails leading off as far as he could see in four different directions. The tree above was some kind of oak, he decided.

“It's not what I expected,” he said.

“It changes,” Bojo said. “That's probably the most disconcerting thing about the otherworld. One moment you're in a place like this, the next you're braving a winter storm on a tundra. The transitions can be that abrupt, or as gradual as they are in the consensual world.”

Aaran gave a slow nod.

“Now, this is the most important thing you need to know for the moment,” the tinker went on. “I can't emphasize this enough. Don't leave the path. It might change underfoot, it may seem to be taking you in the opposite direction than you want to go, but whatever you do, stay on it.” He pointed to the open field in front of them. “You might be thinking, how can I get lost over there, well, trust me in this. You can and you will if you stray.”

Aaran wasn't so sure it was as serious as Bojo was making it out to be, but he wasn't going to argue. Then he had a sudden thought. He looked around again.

“The portal,” he said. “It's gone.”

A sudden panic made his chest go tight. How were they going to get back?

“It's not gone,” Bojo assured him.

He made a movement with his hands and the portal shimmered back into view. Aaran stepped closer to look back at the basement. Through the shimmer he could see Geordie, Holly and Dick standing by the stairs, talking. Sitting directly in front of them, staring at the wall was Holly's Jack Russell terrier. She barked when she could see them and the others turned around. Bojo waved to them, then let the portal close again.

“Don't worry,” he said. “I can easily find my way back here.”

Aaran nodded, but he made a point of memorizing the look of the tree and the stones that were jumbled under it in case something happened to Bojo and they had to get back on their own. Of course, then they'd still have to figure out how to open the portal.

“How does the portal work?” he asked.

“It's easiest to find a place like this,” Bojo said. “A crossroads—some place where the border between the worlds is thin. And then it's only a matter of concentrating on where you want to be—holding it very clearly in your mind. That's why you need to have been there before. You can't make the same connection with a place you've never been.”

“Which way should we go?” Christy asked.

Bojo stood for a moment, looking either way down the path, his brow furrowing as he concentrated on Aaran wasn't sure what. Every direction looked pretty much the same to him.

“This way,” the tinker said finally, pointing to the right, where the path led toward the evergreen wood. “Robert's music took us past the worlds that lie back there.”

“Any sign of him or the hellhounds?” Christy asked.

Bojo shook his head. “But they'd be many worlds away by now.”

“Can't say I'm unhappy to hear that,” Raul said.

“I hope he'll be okay,” Christy said.

Bojo nodded. “Yeah, me, too.” He shifted the strap of his pack to a more comfortable position. “Time we were going.”

The trip proved to be as disconcerting as Bojo had described. The first time the landscape shifted, all of them except for Bojo stopped dead in their tracks. The fields and distant mountains were suddenly gone and the path they followed now took them along the top of a dune. A beach, with a vast body of water beyond it, lay on the left of the path. To the right was a heath that went on for miles until it disappeared into a haze on the horizon. High in the sky, a solitary hawk moved in slow lazy circles, riding the wind.

“Jesus,” Raul said. “How'd that happen?”

Aaran nodded. The change had come between one step and another.

“The path we're following,” Bojo explained, “takes us through an area where the worlds lie smack up against each other, sometimes even overlapping. Some of them are only a few acres in size, others as large or larger than the consensual world. What makes it confusing is that they shift their positions and sometimes their sizes. That's why the otherworld is impossible to map.”

“And is there a Rip Van Winkle effect?” Christy asked.

“Time does run differently in some of the worlds—faster in some, slower in others. In some, time spirals, so that when you walk one way, it's into the future, another, and you step into the past.”

“What kind of world are we in?” Suzi asked.

“We're not in a world,” Bojo told her, “so much as walking along the edges of them. On this path, time runs the same as it does in the consensual world, perhaps a little faster. We won't return to find a hundred years have gone by, though we might be a little older than we're supposed to be, given the amount of time that will have passed. On the plus side, the air of the otherworld offers a measure of longevity as compensation.”

“What do you mean by that?” Raul asked.

Bojo shrugged. “It can help you live longer.”

“You're kidding.”

“No, but it's not as simple as that. Unless you have the right kind of blood—the right kind of genes, I suppose you would say—staying too long in the otherworld can affect the stability of your mind.”

“Like in the fairy tales,” Christy said. “You come back a poet or a lunatic.”

“Something like that.”

If you come back at all, Aaran added to himself. In some of those same fairy tales, the characters never come back. Or if they do, as soon as their feet touch mortal ground, they crumple away into dust.

The changes in the landscape, especially the abrupt ones, took some getting used to for most of them. Considering all of his previous experience with the otherworld, it didn't surprise Aaran that Bojo wasn't affected. Suzi seemed to take it all in stride, too. Maybe that was because being newborn the way she was, everything felt new to her and she simply accepted the bizarre along with the mundane. But it was harder for the rest of them, even Christy. And that did surprise Aaran.

“But you've been writing about this stuff for years,” Aaran said at one point, when he and Suzi were walking on either side of the writer.

Christy smiled. “You don't really read my books, do you?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“The short story collections are fiction, and yes, there are stories about otherworlds in them, but they don't come from personal experience. They're either based on other people's experiences, which I listened to with the proverbial grain of salt, or they came from my imagination.”