Spiritwalk (3 page)

Pushing those feelings away, he concentrated on the bike, on the wind in his face and the asphalt unrolling underneath him, but it was hard to ignore her, hanging on to him as if he was her anchor in a world gone strange. No name. No identity. He could see how that’d screw you up. But sometimes, he thought, it could be a blessing. It all depended on what you’d been. Who you’d hurt, and how bad. And maybe how bad you were hurting yourself.

They crossed a bridge in Hull, over the Ottawa River into downtown Ottawa. The hour was late and there was little traffic, so he just took Bank Street all the way down to the Glebe. At Patterson Avenue, he turned left, gunning the bike up the quiet street to O’Connor. There was a control button for a garage door on O’Connor, mounted on the Harley’s handlebars. Blue thumbed it as he turned onto O’Connor, and the door slid open. A moment later he was parking the bike alongside four others and killing the engine. The door closed automatically behind them, rolling smoothing on its rollers.

“Well, here we are, Button,” Blue said. “End of the line.”

His passenger got off and stood uncertainly beside the Harley. Blue removed his helmet, then helped Button with hers. In the light of the garage they got their first good look at each other. Button spotted the small gold earrings in each of Blue’s ears. She seemed less nervous now. Their gazes met and Blue saw that something in his eyes seemed to satisfy her that she was in safe hands.

“I don’t know about calling you Button,” he said as he looked at her. “It’s not that you aren’t cute as a...” And then he noticed something else—she wasn’t casting a shadow. He kept the shock from his face as she spoke.

“I like the name,” she told him. She swayed slightly and put a hand to the seat of the Harley to keep her balance.

He couldn’t stop staring at the floor where his own shadow lay across the cement where hers should have been. Keep it cool, he told himself. But this was some weird shit.

“Tired?” he asked, keeping his voice level.

She nodded. “What is this place?”

“Just the garage where I keep my bikes and tools. The place belongs to friends of mine and I’m just sort of looking after it...” The strangeness of finding her, of the bone disc and her lack of a shadow, dissolved under a flood of memory. He couldn’t stop the look of pain that crossed his features. “On a permanent basis, looks like. Come on. I’ll show you where you can crash.”

He led her out of the garage into a long hallway that just seemed to go on forever.

“It’s huge,” Button said.

Blue nodded. “Takes up a whole block. It’s called Tamson House after... after the guy that owned it. But he’s been—”

Button stumbled and Blue put an arm around her to help keep her on her feet. He was just as happy not going into why things were the way they were. He glanced back at his lone shadow following them up the hall, half surprised that there was any substance to her at all. He thought of the late-night movies he loved. Vampires didn’t cast a shadow—not in the old Hammer flicks anyway—but he told himself to can that shit. Besides, it was reflections in a mirror, not shadows. And you didn’t find vampires flaked out on the side of the Gatineau Parkway. You didn’t find vampires, period, except when he thought of some of the weird shit he
had
seen go down....

With Button leaning heavily against him, he took her upstairs to one of the bedrooms and tucked her in, dressed as she was. All he took off were her running shoes. She was asleep before he drew the comforter up to her chin.

Blue sighed as he looked down at her. He put his hand in his pocket and withdrew the small bone disc she’d been clutching when he’d found her. No shadow. No memories. Something was brewing, no doubt about that. He wondered if bringing her here had been such a good idea. He couldn’t have just left her there, but after what happened the last time he saw one of these little bone discs...

He sighed again. There was going to be shit to pay, no doubt about it. Trouble was, he didn’t know if he was up to it—not on his own.

“But what’ve you got to lose this time?” he asked softly. The room swallowed the words and Button stirred in her sleep. What with one thing and another, he’d pretty well lost it all before.

Shoving the disc back into his jeans, he left the room, closing the door softly behind him. A few doors down the hall, he turned in to what had been Jamie’s study—the room they’d called the Postman’s Room after the mailman who’d hung out there all through one long mail strike. Jamie’s computer sat on the desk, the green screen glowing like a cyclops’s eye in the dark room. A small green cursor pulsed in one corner. Jamie had called the computer Memoria, but Blue had another name for it.

There were no messages on the screen as Blue sat down in front of it.

4

Button slept deeply, nesting in the flannel sheet and comforter like a cat. All around her, the vast building that was Tamson House stirred and creaked. At another time, the curious building, the strange bed, the unfamiliar noises might have kept her awake. But tonight they lulled her sleeping mind, allowing a crack in the wall that hid her memories from her to open ever so slightly.

She remembered herself as a teenager and a meeting she had one day with another girl the same age as she was—sixteen going on forty. They bumped into each other as she was coming out of the Classics Bookshop in the National Arts Centre building and the other girl was coming in. Mumbled “excuse me’s” died in their throats as something sparked between their gazes.

Button was an outgoing personality, but it was all surface. She hung around with the other kids at school, doing her best to fit in, though all the while a different set of values from dates and proms and boyfriends filled her head. She read Yeats and Dylan Thomas and K. M. Briggs, paying only lip service to whatever bands were currently popular with her peers. She read the classics and kept a journal instead of a diary. She drew whenever she could—fine-line pen-and-inks, sketches, watercolors, all in the Romantic tradition of Burne-Jones and William Morris. She held animistic beliefs and was positive that everything from the moon and seasons and winds to the trees and mountains and lakes had its own individual personality.

Though she could never explain how she knew it at the time, in that chance encounter, in that other girl’s eyes, she saw a kindred soul looking back into her own gaze,
knowing
just as she
knew
. In that moment a curious relationship was born between the two.

The other girl’s name was Esmeralda Foylan. Her father was Cornish, her mother Spanish, so her name reflected a touch of either culture. They exchanged addresses and phone numbers, but when Button went to call Esmeralda that night, she found herself setting pen to paper instead. She drew an ink sketch of two tousle-haired waifs on an autumn cliff, the wind blowing their tattered clothes tight against their thin bodies. Under it she wrote, “Autumn meets the West Wind on a distant shore,” and mailed that instead of phoning.

Esmeralda didn’t phone either. She wrote poetry and stories, it turned out, and she sent back a letter addressed to “My Lady of Autumn” and went on to tell a story relating to the drawing Button had sent her. She signed it “a Westlin Wind.”

In the years that followed they corresponded regularly—even though they lived in the same city. Button went on to become a commercial artist, while Esmeralda took to university life and lost herself in her studies. They saw each other only two or three time in all those years, and although they got along splendidly, each knew some irretrievably precious thing would be lost if they allowed their relationship to go too far beyond the exchanging of letters.

What they had was a truly Romantic love, unsullied by physical concerns. Neither had leanings toward a lover of the same sex, but what they had went beyond a plantonic relationship. It was something only two women could share, though it had deeper levels than a simple friendship. They were two souls united by some curious bond. To see each other, to do things together, would only bring the relationship down to a mundane level that would steal its magic.

For magic was what it was.

In time they drifted apart, the letters becoming more sporadic, finally one or the other not replying until neither had heard from the other in years. But the magic never died. That spark that flew between them at that first chance meeting lived on, long after the letters stopped. Then one day Button received a card in the mail. The outside was a reproduction of a Rackham print from his illustrations for
Rip Van Winkle
. It showed a raggedy girl, holding a cat, while behind her another figure climbed the boughs of a dead tree that were hung with red blossoms. It reminded Button of the first drawing she’d sent, all those years ago. Inside the card it said:

My dear Autumn friend,

I heard a whisper on a sister Wind. She said the waves have carried a blade of Winter across the seas and its point is aimed for your heart. Oh, beware, dearheart, beware. The knives of Winter are ever cruel. I fear they will cut you deep.

your Westlin Wind

Button stirred restlessly as she slept, remembering, but then her dreams changed from memories to those dreams we all have, dreams that shift and flow like chameleons and have only as much meaning as we wish to put to them. When she woke in the morning, all she retained of them was one word. A name. Esmeralda.

5

Blue’s fingers danced on the keyboard and the words HELLO, JAMIE appeared in green letters on the screen. There was a moment’s pause, as the cursor moved to the next line. Blue rested his chin on his hands and watched the screen as a reply appeared under his greeting.

HELLO, BLUE. BROUGHT HOME A GUEST, DID YOU?

“You ever miss anything?” Blue asked.

NOT WHEN IT HAPPENS IN THE HOUSE, the computer replied.

There was more to Tamson House than its vast size—secrets an outsider could never guess. Otherworlds bordered the world in which it was originally built by Jamie Tams’s grandfather. Tamson House straddled more than one of them. The spirits of Jamie’s father and grandfather were a part of its essence. When Jamie died—at the end of that war between the druid Thomas Hengwr and his darker half—his spirit had joined those of his forefathers to become a part of the House with them, living in its foundations and walls, seeing through its windows.

Since their return from the Otherworld that last time, Jamie’s spirit had been dominant. It was Blue who discovered that his friend could still speak to him through the computer that sat in the Postman’s Room. That computer was never turned off now.

“There’s something strange about her,” Blue said. “She doesn’t have a shadow.”

The cursor pulsed for a long moment, as though in thought. Then the word ASCIAN appeared on the screen.

Blue typed in ??.

COMES FROM THE LATIN, Jamie replied. TWICE A YEAR IN THE TORRID ZONES, THE SUN IS AT ITS ZENITH AND THE PEOPLE LIVING THERE DON’T CAST A MERIDIAN SHADOW.

“We’re not living in a torrid zone.”

THEN PERHAPS SHE’S A CHANGELING. SOME FAERIE DON’T CAST SHADOWS EITHER.

“And maybe I’m the bogyman,” Blue said. “Come on, Jamie.”

YOU’RE TALKING TO A DEAD MAN, AREN’T YOU?

Blue stared at the screen. There was that. He sighed. Taking out the bone disc that Button had been carrying, he set it on the desk beside the keyboard.

“She was carrying one of those bones,” he said. “Like Hengwr’s Weirdin.”

!?

“Yeah. That’s what I thought, too. This one’s not like the one Sara found. It’s got what looks like a mask on one side and a stick or staff on the other.”

The computer hummed to itself for a moment; then a block of information appeared all at once on the screen.

SECONDARY: FIRST RANK

21. A) THE MASK—PROTECTION, CONCEALMENT, TRANSFORMATION, NONBEING

B) THE WAND—POWER

Blue read the information through, shaking his head. All he knew about the Weirdin was the little he’d heard from Jamie back when Thomas Hengwr was still alive. It was some kind of an oracular device, like the Tarot or the
I Ching
, only it had a druidic origin. It was composed of sixty-one two-sided flat round discs, made of bone, with an image carved on either side. Each image meant something, but knowing how to put it all together was a subtle study that Blue had never had enough interest in to work on.

“What’s all that supposed to mean?” he asked finally.

AT FACE VALUE? Jamie replied.

“Sure.”

IF THE BONE RELATES TO YOUR GUEST, IT MEANS SHE’S EITHER UNDER SOME ENCHANTMENT, OR SHE DOESN’T EXIST BUT WE’RE SUPPOSED TO THINK THAT SHE DOES, OR SHE HAS SOME MEASURE OF POWER. PERHAPS IT ALL RELATES TO HER; PERHAPS NONE OF IT DOES. WHERE DID SHE GET IT?

“She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know who she is, or where she’s from.” In a few brief sentences, Blue described his encounter with Button and what little he knew of her to date.

SHE HAS NO PAST—NO IDENTITY? Jamie asked. KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORLD, BUT NO KNOWLEDGE OF WHERE SHE FITS IN?

“That’s about it,” Blue replied. “So what does it mean, Jamie?”

TROUBLE.

“Yeah. I kind of figured that. But what can we do?”

There was a long pause. The computer made a humming sound that seemed to resonate throughout the House. Finally a response appeared on the screen.

WAIT UNTIL SHE WAKES UP?

Blue leaned back in his chair and rubbed the back of his neck. He hated waiting for anything, but he didn’t suppose he had much choice. He couldn’t just go roust her after putting her to bed an hour or so ago. Who the hell knew what she’d been through before he found her? He remembered the feel of her against him, the guileless look in her eyes...

“Shit,” he muttered. Leaning forward again, he sighed off.

GOOD NIGHT, JAMIE.

Directly under that, the cursor flitted across the screen, leaving behind the words, GOOD NIGHT, BLUE.

Sighing, Blue got up and went to bed. He had the feeling that tomorrow was going to be a long day.

6

The night was almost gone when two men walked down into Central Park from where they’d parked their car on Bank Street. They settled on a bench that gave them a long view of the south side of Tamson House. One of them took out a pack of Export A and shook a cigarette free.