Spirits in the Wires

by Charles de Lint

  She studied him again. “So you weren’t trying to figure how to get into my pants? Maybe offer me a shower and a meal back at your place in exchange for a fuck and a blowjob?”

  She was turning him on, but he didn’t let it show.

  “I’ll admit the thought crossed my mind,” he said. “I mean the part about giving you the chance to clean up and have a good meal.”

  “Well, you can just—”

  “But I wasn’t going to,” he went on, cutting her off, “because as soon as the thought came to mind, I realized exactly what it would sound like, and I didn’t want to insult you or make you feel bad. I figure you’ve got it tough enough as it is without having to worry about my intentions.”

  “Yeah, right. As if—”

  “I would have just given you some money,” he lied, “but I don’t think I’ve even got a quarter in my pocket at the moment.” He added in a rueful smile. “Spent a bit too much last night and I haven’t had the chance to hit a bank machine.”

  She shook her head. “Man, you sound almost genuine.”

  “Look,” Aaran said. “I should just go.”

  But she put a hand on his arm as he was turning away. If she hadn’t, he would have found another excuse to dawdle.

  “So you’re a book editor,” she said, dropping her hand.

  He nodded. “For The Daily Journal. Though I actually edit the book pages—you know, reviews, author features, that sort of thing. Not the books themselves.”

  “And you’re not some old guy with a thing for young little street girls?”

  “Hey, I’m not that old.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, I guess you’re not.”

  “I should go,” he said. “If I’ve got some money the next time I see you, I’ll—”

  “Wait,” she said. “Look, it’s rough. I’ve been fighting off straight guys with hard-ons for the past few months that I’ve been on the street. And all the classy businesswomen just sneer at me—when I even register at all.”

  He nodded to show he was listening.

  “Thing is,” she went on, “I haven’t had a decent meal in ages and I’m dying for a shower. I’d go to the shelter, but the last time I was there I almost got my face cut by some butch top thinking I was hitting on her sweet young thing. So …”

  Aaran waited.

  “So you’re on the level? You’re really just offering me a chance to clean up and get something to eat?”

  “Nothing’s going to happen that you don’t want to have happen,” Aaran assured her. “You can even get a good night’s sleep—though I’m really going to insist that you have that shower first. But I’ll make up a bed for you on the sofa.”

  She gave a short laugh. “Yeah, I guess I’m not exactly debutante material right now.”

  “You’re fine,” Aaran said. “You’ve just had a few bad breaks.”

  “So …” She had to swallow, before going on. “If your offer’s still open …”

  “Of course it is.”

  She hesitated a moment longer, then turned to pick up her duffel bag from where it was lying against the door.

  “Let me get that for you,” Aaran said.

  He knew she was nervous. He knew she wanted to take this at face value and was determined not to have to pay for it with her body. But he had faith in his ability to sweet-talk anybody into anything. He could maintain a charming face for an evening. It was the long-term that always undermined his relationships. Like anything longer than a weekend.

  The only thing that worried him was that flash of disquiet he’d felt when he’d first seen her. Because it hadn’t gone away. Though it hadn’t gotten any stronger, either, which he couldn’t say for his hunger to hold her, to feel her hands on him …

  He figured he had a right to feel on edge. The last time he’d felt this combination of intense attraction and vague unease had been with Saskia, and look where that had gotten him. But he’d be cool this time. Besides, it was probably just nerves from this business with Jackson. Or the worry about her age.

  “So, are you from the city?” he asked as they walked along. He carried her duffel bag slung over a shoulder and maintained a body’s distance between her and himself.

  She shook her head. “I don’t think I’m from anywhere, we moved around so much when I was a kid. …”

  Holly

  Holly woke with a start to find that she’d dozed off right there at the kitchen table. She wondered if anyone had noticed.

  Dick had gone to his room earlier—to lie down, he’d said, but Holly knew he was reading. Reading and tidying were the two things that sustained the hob, especially when he was feeling stressed. Christy was gone as well—probably out onto the fire escape for another cigarette. Bojo smiled at her when she looked in his direction. He’d noticed that she’d dropped off there for a moment and that made her blush again, pleased that he paid attention, but annoyed with herself for acting like some young schoolgirl around him. Robert and Geordie hadn’t, however, and she tuned in to what they were saying.

  “… are true?” Geordie asked.

  “How many?” Robert shrugged. “Depends on which stories you’re talking about. I’d say not so many.” He smiled. “But enough to keep some people’s lips flapping.”

  Holly liked the cadence of his voice. Set against the soft melody he seemed to draw without thinking from his guitar, it lent the air of an old ballad or blues song to everything he said. She looked over the top of her glasses at the clock on the wall above the stove. It was almost nine. They’d already set up her old computer on the dining room table, after first clearing away tottering piles of books and magazines. She and Dick invariably took their meals in the kitchen.

  Almost nine. In a few hours, Estie and the others would be here. For now, all they could do was worry and wait.

  “But you know,” Robert went on, “if you stick around long enough, there’s always bound to be stories. Trick for someone like me who doesn’t care for the limelight is to keep to the shadows. When you’re not easy to see, and harder to find, people tend to forget there was some puzzle about you.”

  “Out of sight, out of mind,” Holly said, joining the conversation. Maybe it would keep her awake.

  Robert nodded. “Though it’s more than that. We’ve all got something in our heads, like a dial on an old radio set, that lets us turn down the memories of things we see that don’t make sense. Some of us turn them down and only remember them at times when we’re alone. Maybe it’s in the quiet of the night, when we’re lying in bed, looking for sleep, and we hear a creak we can’t place. Or maybe it’s when we’re walking by a boneyard. Others are so good with that, they can dial those memories right out of their heads.”

  “So the story about the crossroads … ?” Geordie began.

  Robert’s smile widened. “Is one that just won’t go away.”

  “But was it you who—”

  “Oh, I’ve been to a crossroads or two in my time,” Robert said. “I’d say they were overrated. Mysteries often are.”

  “Except when they’re not,” Bojo said.

  Robert just laughed.

  “So, have you ever run into anything like this before?” Geordie asked.

  Both Robert and Bojo shook their heads.

  “But there’s a thousand things I’ve never heard of in this world,” Robert said. “And a thousand more for each and every one of them. Some days just about everything can surprise me.”

  Geordie nodded. “But this still seems new. I’ve listened to Christy and Jilly and the prof go on and on about stuff like this. But not like this, if you know what I mean.”

  “I suppose I do. So let me put it this way: Whatever spirit we’re dealing with here is unfamiliar, but the disappearances aren’t.”

  “They’re not?”

  “Nope. You go back through history and you’ll find a long list of large groups of people disappearing overnight. Armies in China. The Aztec,civilizations. Ships in the Bermuda Triangle. Indian tribes in
the American southwest. A village in New England. Another in Scotland.”

  They were all staring at him now. Robert laid his hand upon the strings of his Gibson, stilling its sound.

  “See,” he said, “the thing is this, spirits—certain spirits—thrive on attention. Some swell up with prayers and rituals. Others have to find more dramatic ways to get us to be mindful to them. I don’t have an explanation for where the people they take go, or even why the spirits take them, but it’s happened before.”

  Geordie glanced at the kitchen door. They could see Christy leaning on the railing, still smoking.

  “Do they ever come back?” he asked.

  Robert hesitated a moment, then shook his head. He waited a few beats, then began another twelve-bar blues progression, fingers so light on the strings that they didn’t so much hear the music as sense its presence.

  The bluesman’s final words lay heavy on all of them.

  Holly sighed, closing her eyes again, head propped by her arms. Why couldn’t he just have lied? Left them some hope.

  As though he’d read her mind, Robert added, “But like I told Christy earlier, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do our best to find them and bring them back.”

  “But—”

  “Just because something’s never been done before, doesn’t mean it can’t be done. There’s always got to be a first time.”

  Suzanne Cnancey

  Coming tack to some stranger’s apartment to have a shower wasn’t high on Suzi’s list of things she would do. But so far, this wasn’t so bad. Aaran was easy to talk to. He might be a little flirty—she could see his interest every time he looked at her—but he hadn’t actually hit on her yet. And god, she’d needed a shower.

  She came out of the bathroom now, hair tousled and still wet, wearing an oversized Heather Nova T-shirt under a terrycloth bathrobe. Aaran told her she could keep the T-shirt—”you wouldn’t believe how much merchandise shows up in the office every week.” The dirty clothes she’d been wearing and that were in her duffel bag were all in Aaran’s washing machine.

  It was a little bit like heaven.

  Aaran came out of the kitchen with a cup of tea for her. “I thought we’d eat in, considering you don’t have anything to wear.”

  “That’s cool,” she told him.

  “An omelet sound good?”

  She smiled. “You guys and your bachelor food. I think cooking eggs is hardwired into you from birth.”

  “We could have something else.”

  “No, I love eggs.” She took a sip of her tea. “Say, would you mind if I checked my e-mail while you’re cooking?”

  He gave her a look of surprise.

  “Yes,” she said. “Street people have e-mail. All we need is a Hotmail account and a couple of bucks for one of the Internet cafes. Hell, some public libraries even offer access for free.”

  “Of course. The machine’s over in the corner there.”

  Suzi turned and saw the slim notebook computer sitting closed on a beautiful antique writing desk in a corner of the room. The desk appeared to be mahogany, with turned legs and little slots for envelopes at the back of the desk’s surface.

  “Would you mind connecting to the Net for me?” she asked. “I don’t want to screw anything up on your machine. Don’t worry,” she added when she saw him looking a little anxious. “I’ll be fine once I’m in a browser. It’s just that every machine seems to be a little different in how it connects.”

  “No problem,” he said.

  She followed him over to the desk and watched as he went through the protocols. Finally he double-clicked on the Explorer icon and the browser window came up to fill the screen.

  “There you go,” he said, standing up.

  She took the seat. “Thanks.”

  She typed in the Hotmail URL and Aaran went back into the kitchen. While she was waiting for the page to come up, she glanced at the kitchen door, then quickly checked the “Favorites” drop-down menu, scanning the sites he’d bookmarked.

  Okay, she thought. This was another good sign. No porn or weird sex sites. No “My Favorite Serial Killers” Web sites bookmarked.

  Maybe he really was on the level. That’d be a first. But she’d been so dirty and was still so hungry, that she’d had to take the chance. People just didn’t much care in this city, and Sundays were the worst for panhandling.

  She’d actually been looking forward to this weekend. The week had been rough, but she’d done well in the Market on Saturday, cadging enough money to splurge on two nights at the hostel with enough left over for a laundry and a couple of decent meals. If she stuck to the soup and sandwich specials at the donut shop, that is. It would have left her nothing to start out the week, but at least she’d have been clean, well-rested, and fed. She would have been able to spend most of Monday applying for jobs before she’d have to start panhandling again.

  Everything would have been fine except her good fortune hadn’t gone unnoticed. On her way to the donut shop, a couple of guys dragged her into an alleyway. The knife one of them stuck in her face had her digging in her pocket and handing over the handful of small bills and change she’d managed to collect through the day. The one without the knife took the money. The one with the knife gave her an ugly little grin, then punched her in the stomach with his free hand.

  She stumbled back into some garbage cans, lost her balance, and fell to the ground. By the time she got up, they were gone.

  She supposed she was lucky they hadn’t done worse. Really beat the crap out of her, say. Or even raped her. But she didn’t feel lucky last night, huddled in a doorway, stomach sore and growling with hunger. And she hadn’t felt lucky this morning, either.

  So she’d taken the chance with Aaran and it looked like it was paying off. Hell, she might even take him up on the offer of his sofa for the night.

  She took another sip of her tea as she logged onto her Yahoo account. There were a handful of new messages, but they were all spam. Still nothing from Marie.

  Suzi sighed. She’d been so hoping to be able to open the lines of communication with her little sister again, but it had been almost three months now since that terrible day, and Marie still wouldn’t respond to either phone calls or e-mail. Suzi wondered if they’d ever talk again.

  She could understand Marie being upset. Traumatized even. The two of them had been sitting around the kitchen in the house Suzi had shared with her husband—so far as she was concerned, her ex-husband—Darryl. Darryl had been drinking that evening. Nothing hard, but he’d gone through the six-pack that had been in the fridge. When he came in looking for another beer and found they were all gone, he’d flown into a rage.

  That had been new. Not his anger, but the fact that he wasn’t controlling it in front of Marie. He was usually so careful when there was anyone else around and he knew Marie adored him, so he seemed to take special care when she was present. But not that day. That day he’d backhanded Suzi so hard, he knocked her off her chair. When she started to get up, he hit her again. Swore at her. Swore at Marie when she started to cry. Told her she’d get the same if she didn’t shut up, which only made Marie cry harder.

  He took a step toward her, hand lifted, but Suzi’d managed to get in between him and her little sister. She took the blow. And something snapped inside her. Her fear and weakness shattered, and she was surprised to find courage waiting for her. Or maybe he’d just pushed her so far that she was past being afraid or feeling weak. She just didn’t care anymore. Or maybe it was for Marie, to protect her little sister from the monster that her husband had become.

  Whatever it was, he read something in her face that made him back away. He gave her one long look, the promise of pain to come lying in his eyes, then he stormed out the front door, slamming it behind him.

  Suzi had turned to Marie then, wanting to comfort her. But Marie pushed her away.

  “How could you?” she’d cried. “What did you do to him?”

  And then she fled herself. O
ut the back door.

  Suzi had stood for a long time in the kitchen, leaning heavily against the kitchen counter before she’d finally picked up the phone. She started to dial 911, but then slowly cradled the receiver. She made her way into the bedroom. Every breath she took made her wince. She’d taken the old duffel bag that had accompanied her on many a camping trip and stuffed it with a few essentials. Took the grocery money. Then she left, too.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d left her husband. But it was the first time it stuck. The first time the old love she’d felt for him hadn’t managed to smooth over her hurts and anger. The love was finally gone.

  But so was any support she should have received. She didn’t know what Darryl had told their friends and her parents—or maybe it was Marie who had talked to Mom and Dad—but overnight she seemed to have become a pariah in their eyes.

  So she set aside enough money for meals and a couple of nights in a motel, then took a bus as far as what was left would take her. Which is how she ended up in Newford, basically broke and all too soon living on the streets. Funny how fast that could happen. Funny how prospective employers could read your desperation no matter how well you thought you’d hidden it.

  Pimps tried to recruit her, but she’d managed to keep them at bay. She could have worked in a strip club, but she preferred the indignity of panhandling to dancing naked to a room full of Darryls.

  She rubbed her face, then pinched the bridge of her nose with her forefingers.

  Her gaze remained on the computer screen, but she hadn’t really seen it for quite a few minutes now. She was focused on some far-off, unseen summation of her life that scrolled by in her mind’s eye.

  It was odd, how distanced she felt from it all. Had three months on the street already made her that hard? It seemed so easy to look at the story of her life as though it belonged to someone else, as though she was hearing about it, rather than having lived it herself. Is this what she had to pay to be strong enough to be free? She was happy that she’d proved resilient enough to make it on her own—even just living hand-to-mouth the way she did at the moment—but had to wonder at the cost.