Tapping the Dream Tree (26 page)

I lean my head on my folded arms, the light from the screen washing over me.

After a while, I get up and go walking again. This time I'm checking out the bums and winos, roaming through the Tombs, going into the squats that people have made in all those abandoned warehouses and tenements. I find every kind of loser. The lost, the hopeless, the walking dead.

Judy's right. We can't let it continue. Susan Green has to be stopped. The missing girl has to be found before she winds up dead like us. If she's not already dead.

Only how do you choose somebody empty enough that it wouldn't matter if you borrowed their body to kill a freak? How do you know that they couldn't be redeemed, if they just got the right break?

And there'll be two of them now. Green and whoever she's found herself for a partner.

I still don't know what I'm going to do when I find them, but I go looking for them all the same.

By the time I find the girl, it's too late.

It's closing in on three
A.M.,
my own personal witching hour, and Green and her new freak friend have already had their fun. They're cleaning themselves up in another room. This time they picked one of the old abandoned buildings on the edge of the Tombs—far enough away from anybody who cares that no one would have investigated the girl's screams, if they'd even heard them. Green and her friend must have brought her here after I made my own sweep through the area earlier. From the gas cans standing by the door, I figure they're planning to torch the place once they're ready to leave.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised to find Judy sitting in the room with the dead girl. She looks up when I come in, all the hurt and pain in the world gathered in her eyes.

“Look at her,” Judy says.

I don't want to. Not again. One look was enough.

“We could've stopped this,” she adds.

She's being kind. What she really means is I could have stopped it.

I drift back into the other room where Green and her partner are giggling as they clean themselves off. They're both in their underwear, sloshing water over each other. Their clothes never got near the blood. They'd left them piled neatly by the door near the gas cans.

No, I think. They don't deserve to live. They don't have one redeeming quality between the pair of them …

I have one of those moments then, when everything shrinks down to a pinpoint of sharp focus. And I know what to do.

I don't know why it never occurred to either Judy or me before. We didn't need to find anybody else. All the losers we needed were right here in the room with me.

I step into the guy. Judy explained it to me, but hearing it's one thing, doing it is another. Nothing could have prepared me for the sensation of getting into his skin. His body folds around me like wet, oily phlegm, hot and yielding, and I want to get out of there so bad it hurts. I never felt Judy when she rode me, but this guy fights my presence. There was never much subtlety about me when I was alive and I guess it carried over now that I'm dead. I bear down hard, backing him into a corner of his head where all he can do is watch.

“Jesus,” Green says, giving me/her partner a weird look. “What's the matter with you?”

“Nothing,” I tell her. I don't recognize the voice coming out of the mouth I'm using.

“Well, then why're you looking so weird?”

I don't want to talk, so I hit her. I hate the way it feels. Like I've become my old man.

She goes down, scrabbling across the floor to get away from me. But I'm quicker. I land on her back and hold her down with the weight of my borrowed body. When she tries to buck me off, I grab her hair and whack her head against the floor, stunning her. It gives me enough time to rip the arms off her freak friend's shirt and tie her up, legs and arms.

Judy comes into the room as I'm emptying the first of the gas cans over Green, over the floor, splashing it on the wall. For a moment she doesn't get it, but then she sees something in the guy's eyes—a piece of me, I guess, and she nods.

I throw the empty can into a corner, open another. This one I start to pour over myself.

“The girl,” Judy says.

I give her a blank look.

“Don't let her body burn with them,” she tells me.

I go into the other room. This time I've got a body. I retch at what they did to her. Tears blind my eyes as I pick her up as gently as I can and carry her outside. Then I go back inside.

I find the lighter in the guy's pants.

“Say good-bye,” I tell him as I set us on fire.

I haven't seen Judy since that night.

While I'm hoping she was finally able to travel on to wherever it is we get to go when our lives in this world are done, I doubt it played out that way. We had good reasons for killing them, I guess, but the way we did it isn't the sort of thing that wins you any kind of eternal peace.

Hell, right now I'd settle for oblivion.

I pray for it.

Judy said she'd let me go when Green was dead, and I'm sure she did, loosed that hold she had on me and set me free. But I can't travel on. There doesn't seem to be a place for me to go on to. I think we're locked into what we've done now—real ghosts, just like in the stories. She's probably haunting the place where she died. As for me, I can't seem to leave this place.

I don't move. I don't really think except to replay that night in my head.

I sit on the stoop of an abandoned tenement in the Tombs …

Staring across the street at the charred rubble of the building I burned down.

Listening to the screams of Green and her partner ring in my head.

Waiting for oblivion to finally come.

But like Judy said. If I had to do it over, even if I knew it meant damning myself like this, I'd probably do the same thing again.

Only when Mistress Holly had retired
to her apartment above the store would Dick Bobbins peep out from behind the furnace where he'd spent the day dreaming and drowsing and reading the books he borrowed from the shelves upstairs. He would carefully check the basement for unexpected visitors and listen for a telltale floorboard to creak from above. Only when he was very very sure that the mistress, and especially her little dog, had both, indeed, gone upstairs, would he creep all the way out of his hidden hobhole.

Every night, he followed the same routine.

Standing on the cement floor, he brushed the sleeves of his drab little jacket and combed his curly brown hair with his fingers. Rubbing his palms briskly together, he plucked last night's borrowed book from his hidey-hole and made his way up the steep basement steps to the store. Standing only two feet high, this might have been an arduous process all on its own, but he was quick and agile, as a hob should be, and in no time at all he'd be standing in among the books, considering where to begin the night's work.

There was dusting and sweeping to do, books to be put away. Lovely books. It didn't matter to Dick if they were serious leather-bound tomes or paperbacks with garish covers. He loved them all, for they were filled with words, and words were magic to this hob. Wise and clever humans had used some marvelous spell to imbue each book with every kind of story and character you could imagine, and many you couldn't. If you knew the key to unlock the words, you could experience them all.

Sometimes Dick would remember a time when he hadn't been able to read. All he could do then was riffle the pages and try to smell the stories out of them. But now, oh now, he was a magician, too, for he could unearth the hidden enchantment in the books anytime he wanted to. They were his nourishment and his joy, weren't they just.

So first he worked, earning his keep. Then he would choose a new book from those that had come into the store while he was in his hobhole, drowsing away the day. Sitting on top of one of the bookcases, he'd read until it got light outside and it was time to return to his hiding place behind the furnace, the book under his arm in case he woke early and wanted to finish the story while he waited for the mistress to go to bed once more.

I hate computers.

Not when they do what they're supposed to. Not even when I'm the one who's made some stupid mistake, like deleting a file I didn't intend to, or exiting one without saving it. I've still got a few of those old war-horse programs on my machine that don't pop up a reminder asking if I want to save the file I was working on.

No, it's when they seem to have a mind of their own. The keyboard freezing for no apparent reason. Getting an error message that you're out of disk space when you know you've got at least a couple of gigs free. Passwords becoming temporarily, and certainly arbitrarily, obsolete. Those and a hundred other, usually minor, but always annoying, irritations.

Sometimes it's enough to make you want to pick up the nearest component of the machine and fling it against the wall.

For all the effort they save, the little tasks that they automate and their wonderful storage capacity, at times like this—when everything's going as wrong as it can go—their benefits can't come close to outweighing their annoyances.

My present situation was partly my own fault. I'd been updating my inventory all afternoon and before saving the file and backing it up, I'd decided to go on the Internet to check some of my competitors' prices. The used book business, which is what I'm in, has probably the most arbitrary pricing in the world. Though I suppose that can be expanded to include any business specializing in collectibles.

I logged on without any trouble and went merrily browsing through listings on the various book search pages, making notes on the particularly interesting items, a few of which I actually had in stock. It wasn't until I tried to exit my browser that the trouble started. My browser wouldn't close and I couldn't switch to another window. Nor could I log off the Internet.

Deciding it had something to do with the page I was on—I know that doesn't make much sense, but I make no pretence to being more than vaguely competent when it comes to knowing how the software actually interfaces with the hardware—I called up the drop-down menu of “My Favorites” and clicked on my own home page. What I got was a fan shrine to pro wrestling star Steve Austin.

I tried again and ended up at a commercial software site.

The third time I was taken to the site of someone named Cindy Margolis—the most downloaded woman on the Internet, according to the
Guinness Book of World Records.
Not on this computer, my dear.

I made another attempt to get off-line, then tried to access my home page again. Each time I found myself in some new outlandish and unrelated site.

Finally I tried one of the links on the last page I'd reached. It was supposed to bring me to Netscape's home page. Instead I found myself on the web site of a real estate company in Santa Fe, looking at a cluster of pictures of the vaguely Spanish-styled houses that they were selling.

I sighed, tried to break my Internet connection for what felt like the hundredth time, but the “Connect To” window still wouldn't come up.

I could have rebooted, of course. That would have gotten me off-line. But it would also mean that I'd lose the whole afternoon's work because, being the stupid woman I was, I hadn't had the foresight to save the stupid file before I went gadding about on the stupid Internet.

“Oh, you stupid machine,” I muttered.

From the front window display where she was napping, I heard Snippet, my Jack Russell terrier, stir. I turned to reassure her that, no, she was still my perfect little dog. When I swiveled my chair to face the computer again, I realized that there was a woman standing on the other side of the counter.

I'd seen her come into the store earlier, but I'd lost track of everything in my one-sided battle of wits with the computer—it having the wits, of course. She was a very striking woman, her dark brown hair falling in Pre-Raphaelite curls that were streaked with green, her eyes both warm and distant, like an odd mix of a perfect summer's day and the mystery you can feel swell up inside you when you look up into the stars on a crisp, clear autumn night. There was something familiar about her, but I couldn't quite place it. She wasn't one of my regulars.

She gave me a sympathetic smile.

“I suppose it was only a matter of time before they got into the computers,” she said.

I blinked. “What?”

“Try putting your sweater on inside out.”

My face had to be registering the confusion I was feeling, but she simply continued to smile.

“I know it sounds silly,” she said, “but humor me. Give it a try.”

Anyone in retail knows, you get all kinds. And the secondhand market gets more than its fair share, trust me on that. If there's a loopy person anywhere within a hundred blocks of my store, you can bet they'll eventually find their way inside. The woman standing on the other side of my counter looked harmless enough, if somewhat exotic, but you just never know anymore, do you?

“What have you got to lose?” she asked.

I was about to lose an afternoon's work as things stood, so what was a little pride on top of that?

I stood up and took my sweater off, turned it inside out, and put it back on again.

“Now give it a try,” the woman said.

I called up the “Connected to” window and this time it came up. When I put the cursor on the “Disconnect” button and clicked, I was logged off. I quickly shut down my browser and saved the file I'd been working on all afternoon.

“You're a lifesaver,” I told the woman. “How did you know that would work?” I paused, thought about what I'd just said, what had just happened. “
Why
would that work?”

“I've had some experience with pixies and their like,” she said.

“Pixies,” I repeated. “You think there are pixies in my computer?”

“Hopefully not. If you're lucky, they're still on the Internet and didn't follow you home.”

I gave her a curious look. “You're serious, aren't you?”

“At times,” she said, smiling again. “And this is one of them.”

I thought about one of my friends, an electronic pen pal in Arizona, who has this theory that the first atom bomb detonation forever changed the way that magic would appear in the world. According to him, the spirits live in the wires now instead of the trees. They travel through phone and modem lines, take up residence in computers and appliances where they live on electricity and lord knows what else.

It looked like Richard wasn't alone in his theories, not that I pooh-poohed them myself. I'm part of a collective that originated this electronic database called the Wordwood. After it took on a life of its own, I pretty much keep an open mind about things that most people would consider preposterous.

“I'd like to buy this,” the woman went on.

She held up a trade paperback copy of
The Beggars' Shore
by Zak Mucha.

“Good choice,” I said.

It never surprises me how many truly excellent books end up in the secondary market. Not that I'm complaining—it's what keeps me in business.

“Please take it as thanks for your advice,” I added.

“You're sure?”

I looked down at my computer where my afternoon's work was now safely saved in its file.

“Oh, yes,” I told her.

“Thank you,” she said. Reaching into her pocket, she took out a business card and gave it to me. “Call me if you ever need any other advice along the same lines.”

The business card simply said “The Kelledys” in a large script. Under it were the names “Meran and Cerin” and a phone number. Now I knew why, earlier, she'd seemed familiar. It had just been seeing her here in the store, out of context, that had thrown me.

“I love your music,” I told her. “I've seen you and your husband play several times.”

She gave me another of those kind smiles of hers.

“You can probably turn your sweater around again now,” she said as she left.

Snippet and I watched her walk by the window. I took off my sweater and put it back on properly.

“Time for your walk,” I told Snippet. “But first let me back up this file to a Zip disk.”

That night, after the mistress and her little dog had gone upstairs, Dick Bobbins crept out of his hobhole and made his nightly journey up to the store. He replaced the copy of
The Woods Colt
that he'd been reading, putting it neatly back on the fiction shelf under “W” for Williamson, fetched the duster, and started his work. He finished the “History” and “Local Interest” sections, dusting and straightening the books, and was climbing up onto the “Poetry” shelves near the back of the store when he paused, hearing something from the front of the store.

Reflected in the front window, he could see the glow of the computer's monitor and realized that the machine had turned on by itself. That couldn't be good. A faint giggle spilled out of the computer's speakers, quickly followed by a chorus of other voices, tittering and snickering. That was even less good.

A male face appeared on the screen, looking for all the world as though it could see out of the machine. Behind him other faces appeared, a whole gaggle of little men in green clothes, good-naturedly pushing and shoving each other, whispering and giggling. They were red-haired like the mistress, but there the resemblance ended. Where she was pretty, they were ugly, with short faces, turned-up noses, squinting eyes and pointed ears.

This wasn't good at all, Dick thought, recognizing the pixies for what they were. Everybody knew how you spelled “trouble.” It was P-I-X-Y.

And then they started to clamber out of the screen, which shouldn't have been possible at all, but Dick was a hob and he understood that just because something shouldn't be able to happen, didn't mean it couldn't. Or wouldn't.

“Oh, this is bad,” he said mournfully. “Bad bad bad.”

He gave a quick look up to the ceiling. He had to warn the mistress. But it was already too late. Between one thought and the next, a dozen or more pixies had climbed out of the computer onto her desk, not the one of them taller than his own waist. They began riffling through her papers, using her pens and ruler as swords to poke at each other. Two of them started a pushing match that resulted in a small stack of books falling off the side of the desk. They landed with a bang on the floor.

The sound was so loud that Dick was sure the mistress would come down to investigate, she and her fierce little dog. The pixies all stood like little statues until first one, then another, started to giggle again. When they began to all shove at a bigger stack of books, Dick couldn't wait any longer.

Quick as a monkey, he scurried down to the floor.