The first time I opened my eyes, I was this scruffy little girl in a raggedy black dress, skin the colour of a frappuccino, eyes the blue of cornflowers, red hair falling in a spill of tangles and snarls to my shoulders. I was in the field behind the Riddell house. I sat up and looked at the window that was Christy and Geordie’s bedroom. Paddy, their older brother, was already in juvie.
I knew who they were. I knew everything Christy knew up until the moment he cast me off. After that our lives were separate and we had our own experiences, although I still knew a lot more about him than he did of me.
He didn’t even remember casting me out. That came years later, when he was reading about shadows in some book and decided to try to call his own back to him.
But I remembered. And I knew him. I’d follow him around sometimes, until I got bored. But I always came back, fascinated by this boy who once was me. Or I was once him. Whatever.
When he started keeping a journal, I pored over the various volumes, sitting at the shabby little desk beside his bed, reading and rereading what he’d written, trying to understand who he was, and how he was so different from me.
He woke once or twice to see me there. I’d look back at him, not saying a word. Closing the book, I’d return it to its drawer, turn off the desk light, and let myself fade back into the borderlands. I’d read later in his journal how he thought he’d only been dreaming.
But that first night I didn’t go into the house. I was too mad at him for casting me out of the life we’d had together.
How dare he? How dare he just cast me off. Like he was putting out the trash. Like I was the trash. I’d show him what trash was.
Little fists clenched, I took a step toward the house, planning I don’t know what—throw a rock through his window, maybe—but I accidentally stumbled out of this world and into the borderlands.
Where Mumbo was waiting for me.
Remember how easily distracted you could be as a kid? Oh, sorry. I guess you don’t. Well, take my word for it. You can be in a high temper one moment, laughing your head off the next.
So I stood there, blinking in this twilit world that I’d suddenly found myself in, too surprised to be angry anymore. I can’t tell you how I knew I’d stepped from one world to another, I just did. The air was different. The light was different. The biggest clue, I guess, was how the Riddell house at the far end of the field that I’d been walking toward wasn’t there anymore.
I suppose I might have gotten scared, though I’ve never scared easily, except that was when Mumbo showed up.
I watched this brown ball come bouncing across the meadow toward me. When she stopped herself with her little spindly limbs and I saw her face, the big kind eyes twinkling, the easy smile so welcoming, I clapped my hands and grinned back.
“Hello, little girl,” the brown bail said.
“You can talk.”
“Of course I can talk.”
“I’ve never heard a ball talk before.”
“There are a thousand things and more that you have yet to experience,” she said. “If you spend less time being surprised by them, you’ll have more time to appreciate them.”
“Are you going to be my friend?” I asked.
“I hope so. And your teacher, too, if you’d like. My name’s Mumbo.”
“I’m Christy,” I said, then realized that wasn’t true anymore, so I quickly amended it to “Anna,” taking the first name that popped into my head.
Anna was a girl in Christy’s class at school that he was sweet on at the time. Actually, Christy was always sweet on some girl or another—a serial romantic, that boy of ours. Or at least he was until he met you. But he’d never do much. Just give them moony looks and write poems that he never gave to them.
“It’s nice to meet you, Christiana,” Mumbo said.
I almost corrected her, but then I decided I liked the way it sounded. It was a new name, but it still had history.
“What kind of things are you going to teach me?” I asked.
I was a little nervous. Seven years of being part of Christy had taught me not to trust grown-ups. I knew Mumbo was a ball, and all of this was like out of some storybook, but she still had a bit of the sound of a grownup about her when she spoke.
“Whatever you want to learn,” she said. “We could start with my showing you how to move back and forth between the worlds. That’s a very handy trick for a shadow.”
“What’s a shadow?” I asked.
I could tell from the way she said the word that she meant something different from what a light casts. But as soon as she started to explain, I realized I already knew. It was me. Cast out of Christy.
Not everybody has a shadow the way Christy describes it in his journal.
Wait. That’s not right. What I meant to say was that while everybody has a shadow, not everyone has access to the person that shadow might be become.
First you have to call the shadow to you.
Some children do this naturally and never recognize these invisible companions and friends as ever having been a part of them. And most of those children put aside their shadows once they grow up so the poor creatures are rejected twice. Those that do remember, or learn about us somehow, are often surprised at who they find. I know Christy was.
At first he thought he might be going mad because I only came to him as a voice. I’m not sure why I did that. I think it was probably nervousness on my part. I wanted him to like me—I was a sort of twin, after all, and I’d long since gotten over being mad at him for casting me out of him—but I wasn’t sure he would since, after all, I was all those parts of himself that he’d put aside.
Being born from the cast-off bits of someone else’s personality isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Because just like the people we echo, we go on after the split. We have the same capacity for growth and change as they do. We may begin life as evil, or clumsy, or outgoing, but we can learn to become good, or agile, or shy.
And I shouldn’t have worried about Christy’s reaction to me when we finally met in the flesh. He proved to be quite taken with me, half in love at first, though I’ve learned that isn’t so surprising in situations such as this. It’s also why shadows are drawn to those who cast them off, no matter what the difference is between them: You’re meeting your other half, your missing half. In many cases, the changes you go through make you more alike, rather than less. Perhaps we teach each other the best parts of ourselves.
After his initial infatuation, Christy and I settled into more of a sibling relationship. He treats me as the older and wiser of the two of us, the one who understands Mystery because I live in it, because my very origins are so extraordinary. I don’t feel that way. I learn as much from him, but I let him keep his misconceptions. Let’s face it, a girl likes to be mysterious, doesn’t matter if she’s human or a shadow.
What’s life like for a shadow? I don’t need to eat or drink, but I love good food and a fine wine. I don’t need to sleep either, but I still enjoy luxuriating under the sheets or spending the whole morning just lying in bed when the rest of the world is up and about its business.
And sometimes when I close my eyes and pretend to sleep, I actually dream.
I’m not doing such a good job of this. I should be explaining things in a more linear fashion—the way you did—but my brain doesn’t work that way. Another difference between Christy and me, I guess. He’s so logical, working everything through from start to expected finish, while I flit about like a moth attracted to any light with a strong enough flicker.
So where was I?
Right. Growing up as a shadow.
I grew more quickly than Christy. It wasn’t just a matter of girls maturing sooner. Shadows can choose their age. We can’t change our specific looks—I mean, I can’t suddenly appear in front of you as a cat or a dog— but we can appear to be whatever age we want to be and that’s a handy thing.
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.
Spirits in the Wires Page 5
