Spirits in the Wires (6 page)

But I did mature mentally and emotionally much more quickly than he did.

That can't be helped when you spend most of your time in the borderlands where there's always something to learn. Not to mention that the spirit world lies just beyond the borderlands, and in the spirit world, anything you can possibly imagine and then some exists in one corner or another.

I also think that—remember I told you how some piece of the borderlands helps give a shadow her substance? I think it also allows you to acquire and understand knowledge more readily. It's not that you're smarter. That connection just allows you to assimilate things more easily. And you have access to more information and experience than the one that casts you off does, because you have three worlds to explore, instead of only one.

Plus, in some parts of the spirit world, time moves differently than it does here. Strictly speaking, I suppose I'm a lot older than Christy anyway because of living in some of the Rip Van Winkle folds of the spirit world, where the passing of a year is no more than the length of a day here.

And I was certainly sexually active a lot earlier than him. Truth to tell, by the time I was in what would have passed for my teens, I was pretty much an incorrigible wanton. I wanted to try everything.

I'm way more choosy about who I sleep with now.

“Why were you waiting for me?” I asked Mumbo one day after we'd known each other for a few years.

She was showing me how to braid sweetgrass into a strong, sweet-smelling rope. I don't know why. She was forever telling me about stuff and teaching me how to do things that seemed to have no relevance at the time, but proved to be useful later. So maybe at some point in the future, knowing how to make a grass rope was going to come in handy.

“You know,” I added. “That first time I crossed over.”

“It's what I do,” was all she said. “I teach shadows.”

Like that was all there was to it. But you know me—well, I suppose you don't, or we wouldn't be here talking. But I'll worry at a thing forever until I figure out what it is or how it works. Someone told me once, “Curiosity may have killed the cat, but I'll bet she had a really interesting life up until then.” I'm like that cat. I do have a really interesting life.

Still do, because I'm not dead yet.

There's always something going on in the borderlands. Between storybook characters, faerie, spirits and shadows, there's no time to be bored. Instead, you just appreciate any time you might get on your own.

You'd like the place I have there. I should take you sometime.

It's this little meadow the size of a loft apartment that I plucked out of a summer day—that's a trick Mumbo showed me. You choose it like you'd call up a memory snapshot, except it's got a physical presence that you can store away in a fold of space where the borderlands meet this world. You can visit it whenever you want and it just stays there, hidden away, forever unchanging.

I've got this meadow decked out like an apartment. I have a dresser and a wardrobe at one end where the birch trees lean up against a stand of cedars. Sofa and easy chairs, with a Turkish carpet between them, at the other end, under the apple tree. A coffee table and a floor lamp, though I don't need it because it's always light there—morning light, when the day's still fresh and anything's possible.

There are chests and bookcases all over the place because I'm a serious packrat and collect any and everything. My bed's tucked away in a shaded hollow under the cedars. I hang things from the branches of all the trees— ribbons and pictures and prisms. Whatever catches my fancy.

Christy wonders what my life is like when I'm not with him. He says, “Isn't that what we always wonder about those close to us? What are they doing when we're not together? What are they thinking?”

I know it bothers him that I don't appear to have the same curiosity about him—he doesn't know that I still go walkabout in his journals at night when he's sleeping.

But as you can see, I don't live a life seeped in ancient mystery and wonder the way he thinks I do. I have an adventurous life, a lively one, and I certainly rub elbows with all sorts of amazing people and beings, but I'm just an ordinary girl. Oh, don't smile. I am. An ordinary girl in extraordinary circumstances.

I was at a party once, in Hinterdale—that's this place on the far side of wherever. In the otherworld, you know?

You'd have to see this place to believe it. Imagine one of those old fairy tale castles, up on a mountaintop, deep forests spilling from near the base of its stone walls all the way down into the valley below. It doesn't have a moat, but it has the towers like spires and a grand hall as big as a football field. Or at least it feels that way. But the best thing about it is that there's this enormous tree growing right in the middle of that field-sized hall—an ancient oak that's I don't know how many hundreds of years old.

I guess what I like the most about it is the fact that it's indoors. Like my meadow apartment's outdoors. They're just off-kilter enough to make me feel comfortable.

I can't remember whose party it was—the castle's sort of a communal place with people coming and going all the time—but there must have been at least a thousand people still there after midnight, every kind of person you can imagine. Faeries, shadows, Eadar, ordinary folks who've learned how to stray over into the borderlands. Everybody was in costume.

What was I? A blue-masked highwayman—high way lady? Whatever. I had the three-cornered hat, the knee-high boots, breeches and ruffled shirt under a riding jacket, a pistol as long as my forearm except it wasn't real.

Anyway, I was sitting with Maxie Rose in a window seat that overlooked the courtyard outside and we got to talking about the meaning of life—which, let me tell you, is an even bigger question in the borderlands than it is here—and all the other sorts of things you find yourself talking about at that time of night.

“What I don't get,” Maxie was saying, “is how people keep trying to come up with these theories to unify all the various myths and folk tales you find in the world. I mean, I know there are correlations between the folklore of different cultures, but really. Half the point of mystery and magics is their inconsistent and often contradictory nature. We live in a world of arbitrary satisfactions and mayhem. Why should Faerie be any different?”

“People just need to make sense of things,” I said.

“Oh, please. Sense is the last thing most of us need, though I suppose it does keep me pretty and alive.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She shrugged. “It's how Eadar stay potent. You know
here.
We teach sense to the shadows.”

Maxie was an old friend of mine, a green-eyed, pink-haired gamine, not quite as tall as me, with a penchant for bright-coloured clothes, clunky boots and endless conversation. Tonight she was dressed as a punk ballerina. Her tutu was the same shocking pink as her hair and her leggings were fishnets that looked as though they'd lost an argument with a shark, they were so torn and tattered. Big black Doc Martens on her feet. Truth is, her costume wasn't much of a stretch from her usual wear, except normally she didn't wear the Zorro mask—a black scarf with eyeholes cut in it.

She was always full of life, always so
present
that it was easy to forget that she'd been born as a minor character in an obscure chapbook that had been mostly unread in its author's lifetime and forgotten thereafter. Since Eadar—such as she was—depend on their existence by the potency of the belief in their existence, it never made any sense to me that she would continue to be as vibrant and lively as she was. From all I know of them, she should have faded away a long time ago.

“Teaching,” I repeated, my mind going back to that day I'd asked Mumbo why she'd been waiting for me the first time I'd crossed over. “Like Mumbo did with me?”

Maxie nodded.

“And doing that makes you stay real?”

Maxie grinned. “I always said you were a quick study.”

“Are there a lot of you doing that?”

“Oh, sure. Mumbo and Clarey Wise. Fenritty. Jason Truelad. Me. Whenever you see an Eadar who's
particularly
present, it's either because they were born in a story that was really popular—so lots of people believe in them and keep them real—or they're connecting with shadows.”

“So Mumbo wasn't there to help me. She was only there to help herself.”

“No, no, no,” Maxie said. “It doesn't work like that. You really have to care about your shadows. Lots of Eadar don't even like them. I mean, think about it. You shadows show up in the borderlands, snotty little toddlers full of new life but without a clue, most of you with a chip on your shoulder and the last thing you want is advice from anybody.”

“I wasn't snotty,” I told her.

She grinned. “Says you. Regardless, it can be so frustrating teaching some of you how to get along. I can't imagine anyone getting into it unless they really, truly loved the work. The fact that it keeps us real is a side-benefit. Or at least it is now. I can't answer for the first Eadar who figured out that the relationship benefits them as much as the shadows under their care.”

“I never knew.”

“Lots of people don't. Lots of
Eadar
don't, which, when you think about it, is being really dumb. They just piss and moan and fade away. But like I said, if it's not something you feel comfortable doing, it's better that you don't try.”

“But why shadows? What makes us so important to you?”

Maxie shrugged. “I don't know. For some reason your belief is really potent. All it takes is one of you to keep us
here.
”

Isn't that a kick? One shadow, cast off and all, is equal, at least in this particular case, to all the readers of some bestseller.

The first time I met Christy?

I can't remember the exact when of it, but I remember the where. And the look on his face. He can be so cute, don't you think? You know, when something really catches him off-guard.

So what I did was, when I saw him out on one of those late night rambles of his, I followed along until I got a sense of where he was going then slipped on ahead of him. By the time he stepped onto the Kelly Street Bridge, I was already there, leaning on the stone balustrade and gazing down into the water. It was a lovely night, late summer, the sky clear above and full of stars. There was a bit of a wind and the moon was just coming up over the Tombs.

I listened to his footsteps, timing it so that I looked up just when he was getting close.

He started to give me a nod, the way you do when you meet someone out on a walk like this, but then he stopped and gave me a confused look. You know—he thought he knew me, but he didn't.

“Need some directions?” I asked.

I knew that my voice was just going to add to the off-kilter sense of familiarity he was feeling.

“No,” he said. “You … I feel like I should know you.”

“I'll bet you use that line on all the girls,” I said, smiling when it called up a blush.

“No… I mean…”

I relented. “I know what you meant. You should know me. I'm the voice in the shadows.”

I saw understanding dawn in his eyes and he got that look I was talking about, so cute.

“But… how can you be real?”

“Who says I'm real?”

Okay, so I was being a little mean. But I guess I still had some issues with him at that time, like how he cast me off when we were only seven years old.

He leaned against the balustrade, looking like he really needed its support.

“Relax,” I said. “You're not going crazy.”

“Easy for you to say.”

I was going to reach out and touch his arm, just to reassure him, but something made me stop, I'm not sure what.

“I just thought we should meet,” I said instead. “Rather than you sitting in your reading chair and me talking to you from the shadows. That's starting to get really old.”

He was studying my features as I spoke.

“I've seen you before,” he said. “How can I have seen you before?”

“Remember when you first started to keep your journals?”

He nodded. “And sometimes I dreamed that I woke and there was this red-haired girl sitting at my desk, reading them.”

“That was moi.”

“You've been around
that
long?”

“I've been around since you were seven and cast me off.”

“I didn't know I was casting you off,” he said. “I didn't even know about shadows until a couple of years ago when I came across that reference to them in a book about Jung.”

“I know.”

A cab went by, slowing as it neared us to see if we might be a fare, then accelerating again when we looked away.

“Did it hurt?” he asked.

“Did what hurt?”