Spirits in the Wires (16 page)

But my relief is fleeting.

“But that doesn't mean I have the first clue as to what's going on,” she adds.

The grin that was starting to pull at my lips dies.

“So what do we do?” I say.

I pull another cigarette out of the pack and frown. It's almost empty.

“Well, to start with,” she says, “we can compare our stories. I was online with Benny—Benjamin Davis. Do you know who he is?”

Now that Estie's made the connection to Holly for me, various conversations Holly and I have had about the Wordwood are coming back to me.

“He's another of the cofounders,” I say.

“Right. I keep in touch with him more than the others. No real reason. Maybe just because I've known him the longest, or because he's like me: more of a techie than the rest.”

“I know how that goes.”

“Anyway,” she says. “We were just trying out some new software for our Web cameras, chatting to each other through instant messaging while we screwed around with the settings. Then we got sidetracked by this e-mail we got from Tip about the Wordwood.”

She doesn't stop to explain who Tip is, but I remember Holly talking about him. She means Tom Pace, another of the founders.

“Neither Benny nor I have much to do with it anymore … not since, you know.”

“It became sentient.”

She gives a nervous laugh. “I guess that's one way of putting it. Anyway, we didn't even know that the site had been down, so Benny decides to go have a look. He aims his browser at the Wordwood, but we still have our Web cameras on.”

She goes on to describe the images the Web camera put on her monitor's screen, how he has this puzzled look and leans closer to the screen then suddenly jumps back. She gets a glimpse of this gush of black liquid issuing from something in front of him. Sees him fall into it. He goes down, out of camera range, and then nothing. He doesn't get back up. Frantically, she sends him an instant message, then an e-mail. No answer. Finally she phones him and gets his boyfriend Raul on the line.

Raul's in a total panic. The story she manages to get out of him, and that she now relates to me, is pretty much the same as what Geordie and I have been hearing on CNN from the few eyewitnesses that reporters have managed to track down: black goop pouring out of the monitor in an impossible flood, enveloping the victim, then slowly dissolving away to leave not a trace.

I don't want to get into Saskia's origins—not even with one of the Word-wood's founders. Maybe especially not with one. So I make like it happened pretty much the same way for Saskia as it did for Estie's friend Benny.

“How's something like that even possible?” Estie says. I can hear the strain in her voice. She's feeling the same shock I did when Saskia was taken away. “What could that stuff be?”

“I think it must be a kind of ectoplasm,” I say.

“You know, I've heard that term before, but when I think about it, I really have no idea what it means.”

“In spiritualist terms, it's this thick, sticky substance that supposedly flows out of the body of a medium to produce … I guess you could say manifestations. Living forms that usually have some relationship to the spirit being called up.”

There's a pause and then she says, “Do you buy this?”

“I've seen stranger things.”

She gives that nervous laugh again. “Yeah, I keep forgetting who I'm talking to. We were all surprised to have a celebrity like you show up on our newsgroup.”

“I'm no celebrity,” I say.

“Well, you've got a higher public profile that all the rest of us put together.” There's another pause. “So who was having the seance?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, isn't that where you'd find a medium?”

“I suppose the medium could be the computer,” I tell her. “Or perhaps even the Internet.”

“And the spirit that got called up is whatever took over the Wordwood way back when?”

“Who knows? Until we can get more information, it's all just speculation.”

“So what happens to the people that get taken?” she asks.

“I don't know. I figure that what happened was a flare-up of some sort, though what could have caused it is anybody's guess. Whoever happened to be trying to log onto the Wordwood at that instant got caught up in it and taken away.”

“Taken where?”

I'm slow in responding. It's just now occurring to me that the flare-up could well have been caused by Saskia's trying to get in touch with the spirit of the Wordwood. Something as simple as a spiritual short-out brought about when creation and creator come into unexpected contact. Like when wires cross, except here it was spirits in the wires.

“I don't know that either,” I finally tell her. “I'd say the spiritworld, but I don't know that technological spirits would exist in the same world as fairies and goblins.”

Now it's her turn to be quiet.

“Are you still there?” I ask after a few moments.

“Yeah. I was just thinking. Growing up, I was never much of a one for fairy tales and such. But ever since that business with the Wordwood taking on a life of its own, I've just known that there's something lurking in cyberspace. Not just whatever took over the Wordwood site, but other spirits, too. Maybe lots of them. Which is weird, when you think about it. Because cyberspace doesn't really exist. It's more just a concept that we created. A label for us to put on what goes on when the vast nets of data crisscross over the wires and in the computers that house Web sites.

“It's something we made up. So I guess we made up these spirits, too.”

“Maybe,” I say. “There's certainly a line of thinking that believes that gods and fairies and the things that go bump in the night exist only because we believe in them. That we created them to explain the confusing mystery of the world.”

“But you don't,” she says.

“Not entirely, no. I think some of the mysteries of the world can be explained that way, but not all of them. Not even most of them.”

“This is so frigging weird.”

“Uh-huh.” I wait a heartbeat, then ask, “How come you never talk about this kind of thing in the newsgroup?”

“Have you ever noticed how you
can't
really talk about it on-line?” she says. “I know people who have tried. They've written articles, or even just done like you said. Talked about it in newsgroups, or tried to start new ones. But those spirits are jealous of their privacy. You watch. By six or seven this morning, CNN's coverage isn't going to even talk about the computer connection anymore.”

“You're probably right. The human mind is very good at forgetting what it can't explain.”

“I'm not saying it will be people, forgetting in order to hang onto their sanity,” she says. “Those spirits don't let it happen.”

“But—”

“It's something all the hackers know. There are things you just don't talk about on-line. Hell, you can't talk about it on any medium that's connected to computers, which is pretty much every medium we have, except for word-of-mouth or handwriting. Come at it from any other way—anything that touches a computer—and the words, the videos, the whatever you used to try to get the message out just gets erased. I can tell you about chapters disappearing from books. Scenes from documentaries. It's been going on for years.”

“I've come across some of that in my research,” I say.

“But only face-to-face research, right?”

I light yet another cigarette and think about that for a long moment before agreeing with her.

“So where do we go from here?” I ask.

“I've got a flight booked,” she says, “that'll bring me into Newford midmorning tomorrow. Before I leave, I'll try to get Tip and Claudette to fly in as well and meet me at Holly's store. Raul told me he's coming, too. He's enough of a techie that he'll be useful and I know he needs something to get his mind off of what happened to Benny. To feel like he's doing something to bring him back.”

“I know exactly how he feels,” I tell her.

“We could use your help, too. You know more about the whole spirit side of this than any of us.”

“You've got it,” I say. “But what is it that you're planning to do?”

“I don't know exactly. Brainstorm, I guess. I've got this idea that maybe we can start over again with the Wordwood, see if we can't make another connection with the spirit that stepped into it, except this time show that we're benevolent. That we don't mean it any harm. I figured if we do that, we should use Holly's old 386—the one we used to make the Wordwood in the first place.”

“I'd think you'd want to use a faster machine.”

“But what if the magic's in that particular machine?”

I think about all the times I've hung around in Holly's store, sitting behind the desk with her and yakking about books, the computer monitor casting its light on the various papers, magazines, and books scattered about on the surface of the desk.

“She doesn't use that computer any more,” I tell Estie.

“I know that. But I'm pretty sure she's still got the old one stashed away in her basement. You know Holly. When does she throw anything away?”

“Have you checked that she still has it?”

“I was hoping you would. I haven't been able to get in touch with her. I've tried calling her a number of times in the last hour or so, but there doesn't seem to be any phone service at her apartment, and downstairs in the store, the machine just picks up.”

“You don't think something's happened to her?”

“No. Her computer's in the store. If something had happened to her like it did Benny or your friend Saskia, it would've fried the phone wires the way it did at Benny's place. The only reason I was able to get through to Raul was because they have a second line in the house for Raul's business. He imports clothing and furniture from Mexico and wholesales it to stores.”

“I'll go by Holly's as soon as I get off the phone,” I tell her.

I'm starting to feel a little worried about Holly now. Because the thing is, while the one phone cord got wrecked in my study when Saskia disappeared, I didn't lose my phone service. All I had to do was replace the cord to get back on-line and the phone was never out. But to bring that up now with Estie means I'd have to explain about Saskia and why I didn't tell her earlier. I'm still not ready to get into that.

“Great,” Estie says. “I'll see you sometime in the morning—noon at the latest.”

“I'll be there.” I hesitate a moment, then add, “Have you talked to the authorities yet?”

“And tell them what? They'd think I was insane. And if they didn't, they might just lock me away for being one the people who started up the Wordwood in the first place. I won't be able to do anything to stop it from a jail cell.”

“Good point,” I say, as though it hadn't occurred to me.

“And you?” she asks.

“I'll follow your lead in this.”

When I hang up, Geordie gives me a quizzical look so I take him through a much shortened rundown of Estie's side of the conversation.

“I notice you didn't tell her much about what really happened with Saskia,” he says.

“I couldn't.”

“Why not?”

“Because I've got this bad feeling that maybe Saskia was the catalyst for all these disappearances.”

“Oh, come on now,” he says. “Saskia'd never do anything like that.”

“I didn't say she'd do it on purpose. I'm thinking it was more like … I don't know, the computer version of a chemical reaction. Or the way a pin can burst a balloon.”

Geordie's still shaking his head.

“You know the Wordwood was already down before any of this happened?” I say.

“Yeah, but—”

“So something happened to it. Something
changed
it. That being the case, her contacting it could easily have set off a chain reaction.”

“You don't know that.”

I shake my head. “No. But until we
do
know more, what really happened to Saskia's going to stay between you and me. It has to, Geordie.”

“Okay.”

I start to get up, but he grabs my arm.

“Wait a sec',” he says. “You need to see this.”

He turns up the sound as CNN replays some of the interview footage from one of the witnesses.

“All I know,” the middle-aged woman on the screen is saying to the reporter, “is that he was down in the rec room. I don't pay any attention when he's down there, but then I hear this strange burbling sound coming up the stairs. So I get up to go have a—”

Geordie thumbs the “Mute” on the remote, cutting her of in mid-sentence.

“Estie was right,” he says. “It's already starting to happen.”

“I'm not following you.”

“That woman's quote,” Geordie says. “I've heard it a few times now. The first couple of times she said, ‘He was down in the rec room messing around on that stupid computer of his.' But the part about the computer's been cut out now.”

“Are you sure?”

Geordie nods.

I give the TV a worried look.

“Jesus,” I say. “I wish I knew whether this really is the doing of spirits like Estie said, or if the authorities have caused a blackout because they've decided to sit on that information.”

“Well, you could give the police a call,” Geordie says. “Tell them you're this expert on computer myths …”

His voice trails off when he sees the joke's not going anywhere.

“Come on, Christy,” he says. “You can't seriously believe that these spirits can be monitoring all broadcasts, the Internet, satellite feeds, cable …”

“What are computers better at than we are?” I ask. When he shakes his head, I say, “Multitasking and crunching data. They do it as easily, and probably with about as much attention, as you or I breathe.”