Now you’re my conscience?
No, you’re right. I shouldn’t be taking it out on you. Or him.
“So why’s the spirit of the Wordwood mad at you?” I ask, gentling my voice.
He’s shaking his head again.
“You know, it figures,” he says. “Forests have creeped me out for years, so naturally, if I’m going to piss off a god, it’d have to be one that lives in a forest. Even if it’s a metaphorical forest. Though weird as this place is, it feels pretty real.”
“Jackson,” I say, trying to get him back on track. “It’s not a god. It’s just a spirit. Yes, they can be powerful, but they’re only another kind of being, like the difference between, oh, a bear and a gnat. No, that’s another bad analogy,” I quickly add when I see the stricken look on his face.
Help me here, Saskia.
Yeah, right. Have you met any of the really old—
she says, cutting me off.
So I tell him, and sure enough, Saskia’s right. I can see him relax a little.
“Maybe I can just explain to it how it was all a mistake,” he says. “Well, not exactly a mistake, but I didn’t have a choice.”
“I need for you to back up a little here,” I say. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“This,” he says, waving a hand. “It’s all my fault.”
“Maybe you should start at the beginning,” I say.
So he tells us the whole sorry tale of hacking into this bank’s computer, how Aaran Goldstein blackmailed him into sending a virus to the site. How he was haunted by visions of this forest, hearing a static-y wind. How he kept losing chunks of time until one day he lost the world and ended up here.
We listen to it pretty much without interruption, except for the first time he mentions Aaran.
Is this the same guy that—
“Is he here?” I ask aloud.
“Who, Aaran? I doubt it. I don’t think he spends much time on the computer. And especially not the Wordwood site. I mean, why would he want me to take it down, if he did? I figure it’s mostly a bookish lot that got pulled over. Librarians. Avid readers.”
Saskia says.
Something had to get him started as a book editor.
Yeah, well, Goldstein isn’t exactly one of Christy’s favorite people.
I’m just saying there’s a lot we don’t know about him—you know, why he is the way he is.
I’m not. I’m just trying to get a full picture.
Jackson has no idea about the conversation going on in my head, so he’s just been talking away.
“What did you say?” I ask.
“I was just saying that the few people I have talked to since I got here were all on their computers, trying to access the Wordwood site when … whatever happened went down.”
I nod and he goes on, telling us about how he sent an e-mail to the site’s Webmaster—”I guess I was talking to the spirit itself, right?”—explaining what he’d done and how it could be fixed.
“But right after that… boom. Here we are.”
There’s so much loss in her voice that I start to feel bad about the way I was talking about Goldstein earlier. I really wasn’t trying to defend him, but I can see how she might take it that way.
When we get all of this sorted out, I tell her, we’ll find a way to make him pay.
But now it’s her turn to be the voice of reason.
she says.
We don’t have to do anything ourselves. We can just tell the Wordwood spirit where it can find him.
“Jesus,” Jackson says, distracting us from our own silent conversation. “You know what’s happening here?”
My sympathies are more with Jackson than Goldstein in this mess, but after listening to his story, I’m not feeling particularly charitable to either of them.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “You were playing show-off computer nerd and you screwed a whole bunch of people.”
“No. I mean, that’s true. But he forced me to do it.”
“You could have said no.”
“And gone to jail.”
“I’m just saying you had a choice.”
I see in his eyes that he knows this all too well. That it’s been eating at him ever since he got here. Not just because of what’s happened to him, but because of how many other people have been hurt as well.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” I say.
He shrugs. “Why not? It’s true.”
“Okay. It’s true. But we need to move on now. You were saying something about knowing what’s going on?”
It takes him a moment to shift gears, but then he nods. “It’s just that, if the Wordwood is a being rather than a Web site, then my virus hit it like a disease. I wrote it to screw up all the HTML links in the site. But if it hit a person—or at least a being of some sort—then what it’s doing is playing havoc with their metabolism. It’s not letting the various parts of its body communicate with each other. At the very least, it’s not going to be able to form a coherent thought—or at least not one that has any correlation to anything else it happens to know.”
Probably.
“How does this helps us?” I ask.
“I don’t know. But maybe if I can access a computer …” He looks around himself and his excitement dies. “What am I saying? We’re inside a damn computer.”
He bends down and tears up a handful of the words we burrowed in to hide from the sliders. I get a flash of that binary code he was talking about earlier—zeros and ones flashing by at an incredible rate, almost too fast to see.
“What we really need,” I tell him, “is to find some of these other people. Or … have you seen anything that could be the place where the spirit would be staying?”
He sighs and looks deeper into the woods.
“There are the ruins,” he says.
“Ruins? What kind of ruins? And where are they?”
“Deeper in the forest. It looks like the foundation of some old building, but all that’s left of it is the fieldstone base on which it was built. The only weird thing there is the glass coffin with the girl in it.”
“What?”
“You’d have to see it. It’s like out of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Before you, it was the only piece of colour I’ve seen in this whole place.”
“The coffin’s in colour?”
He shakes his head. “No. The dead girl inside is. Or maybe she’s not dead. Maybe she’s only sleeping. All I know is she doesn’t move. She just lies there with her hands folded on her chest and her eyes closed. You can’t get into the coffin and you can’t wake her up. I’ve tried.”
“Show us,” I say.
I’ve no way to gauge how long we tramp through the woods. The light never changes. Actually, nothing really changes except that the land underfoot rises steadily. It’s a long gentle slope, so it’s not too arduous, but it’s hard to get a sense of where we are, or where we’re going. For all their size and the lack of real undergrowth, the circuit board trees grow too thick to allow for much of a long view.
That plays in our favor when i
t comes to the land leeches. We can’t see them from far off, and they can’t see us. But we can certainly hear them coming.
Twice on the way to the ruins we have to hide from them. The first time we hear that unmistakable sound of their approach, I don’t even wait for Jackson to say a word. I just stop where I am and start digging.
I’ve seen a lot of strange things in my travels through the spiritworld and the borderlands, but these things are definitely the scariest. I think it’s because they appear to be so utterly implacable. I can’t imagine reasoning with them, or outwitting them, which are pretty much the only two tricks in my repertoire when it comes to beings that are much more powerful than me. How would you even talk to something like that in the first place?
So I follow Jackson’s example. I hear them coming and I’m gone, burrowed as deep as I can get into forest floor before their arrival. I’ve seen the smoking slag they’ve left behind when they’re gone. And Jackson tells me he’s seen them absorb ghosts that are too slow to get out of their way. Not for me, thanks.
Anyway, it’s a while before the trees start to thin out and the ground gets steeper. But finally we come out of the forest into an open field. There’s more of that strange wiring here, pretending to be grass and gorse and who knows what kind of weed. As we keep climbing, I look around and see that the forest stretches as far as I can see on all sides. Here and there, other bare peaks rise from the forest.
I try to see them as a pattern, the way you’d expect inside something as logical as a computer, but their placement appears to be completely random. Here a pair close to each other. There three in a cluster. Between them a huge expanse with nothing to break up the forest.
After a good long look on my part, we continue up.
I’m a little worried about those leeches catching us here, out in the open, with nowhere to hide. But I don’t see any of their trails and Jackson assures me that the grass will pull up as easily here as the carpet of metal leaves and crap does in the forest. I believe him, but I have to give it a try anyway. He’s right. Under the layer of wiry grass I peel back, I find more of those dark code words that pass for soil in this place.
When we reach the summit, I take a close look at the stones that make up the ruined walls of the foundation. I can’t tell what they’re made of, but it’s some kind of metal, discoloured and patterned just like field stones would be.
“She’s in there,” Jackson says.
The wall’s too high here for me to look over, so I follow him around to an opening where I guess a window would have been. It’s easy to climb over the sill and jump down onto the vegetation inside. It’s spongy underfoot— like a thick bed of lichen.
The inside of the ruins is broken up into a maze of rooms. Walls marking the boundaries of the rooms and halls, with no roof, no floor or furnishings.
Saskia says as we look back out through the window.
Maybe you did, I say. Before you were born in the consensual world.
Jackson leads the way through the rooms, two right turns, a left, another right, then he stops in the doorway of an enormous room and moves aside. I step by him, my gaze immediately going to the explosion of colour that’s the dead girl he was talking about. Her coffin’s in the center of the room.
For a moment I can’t make out any detail. Seeing this much colour after all these hours of monochrome makes my eyes hurt. It’s like looking directly into the sun. Spots dance in front of my eyes, but they adjust quickly.
It’s right out of a fairy tale scene all right—a blonde woman lying on her back in a glass coffin, hands folded over her stomach—except she’s wearing blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and running shoes, which kind of takes some of the romance out of the image. Then I focus on her face and I’m sure all the blood drains out of my own.
You, I agree.
Sarah “Estie” Taylor
“So what’s the deal with her?” Claudette said.
Estie shrugged. The two of them walked side by side as they made their way down the block to Jackson’s apartment, trailing behind Aaran and Suzi who were in the lead, with Tip in between. It reminded Estie a little of the old days when they’d go wandering through the city, sometimes two or three of them, usually all five of the original Wordwood founders. In those days, they’d been pretty much inseparable.
“Suzi?” she asked.
“Who else?”
“I’ve no idea,” Estie said.
“There’s something off about her. I don’t know exactly what, there’s just something…”
Estie nodded. She knew what Claudette meant, though she wouldn’t have put it exactly that way. For her, Suzi’s presence was more confusing than anything. She understood why she and Tip and Claudette were here— if it wasn’t for them, the Wordwood wouldn’t exist in the first place. And if the Wordwood hadn’t developed this spirit of its own and then gone wrong, Benny and Saskia and all these hundreds of other people would still be safe in their homes, happily surfing the Internet instead of having been kidnapped into some pixelated corner of it.
She also understood Aaran’s wanting to atone for the part he’d played in the recent crisis.
But Suzi had no stake in any of this. So far as Estie could tell, she was just tagging along.
“Maybe she feels grateful to Aaran,” she said. “You know, for taking her off the street.”
“She doesn’t look like any street kid I’ve ever seen.”
“Well, she’s had a chance to get cleaned up. …”
“And besides,” Claudette went on. “He’s old enough to be her father.”
Estie smiled. Trust Claudette to zoom in on that. She’d been the worst gossip, back in the old days.
“We don’t know that they’re sleeping together,” she told Claudette. “Not that it’s even any of our business.”
“But still…”
“She could be in her mid-twenties,” Estie said, “and I doubt Aaran’s forty. So it might not be that huge an age gap.”
“Well, if they’re not sleeping together,” Claudette said, “then what is she doing here? I don’t buy her being all super grateful for a meal and a shower.”
“Why not?”
“It’s just weird. And I don’t trust her. I don’t trust him either, mind you, but I really don’t trust her.”
Estie nodded. “I suppose it’s just—you know how sometimes you meet somebody and they’re perfectly okay, but you still don’t click anyway?”
“I guess …”
“Well, that’s probably what this is. For whatever reason, we’re not clicking with her. It doesn’t have to mean anything more than that. There’s enough weird stuff going on without us looking for more.”
“But that’s just it. We weren’t looking. The weirdness came to us and—”
“Shh,” Estie said.
The others had stopped ahead of them and were going up the stairs of a brownstone, indistinguishable from the rest of the buildings on the street, but obviously their destination. Claudette followed them up onto its stoop, but Estie paused on the sidewalk to look up at the sky. There wasn’t a cloud in sight and the sun was almost directly overhead, beating down on the city’s streets. She’d forgotten how hot August could get in Newford. It got hot in Boston, too, but the breezes that came in from the ocean usually kept it from getting too unbearable.
“Are you coming, Estie?” Tip called down from the top of the stairs.
Estie look up and saw that he was holding the door open for her. The others had already gone inside.
“I was just remembering why I moved from Newford. God, it’s hot.”
Tip grinned. “I had The Weather Channel on in my hotel room while we were changing. It’s going up into the nineties today.”
“Still,” she said. “It’s not the heat—”
Tip laughed and they finished in unison: “It’s the humidity.”
&n
bsp; “But if you think this is bad,” he added, “don’t come down to Austin in the summer. There are days it’s still this hot at midnight.”
“So why do you keep inviting me?”
“Can’t beat the music.”
Smiling, she stepped by him and entered the foyer.
It was cooler inside the brownstone, but not by much. The relief Estie felt after first getting out of the sun quickly faded and she found herself wishing that she’d stopped to buy a bottle of water at one of the grocery stores they’d passed. She felt dehydrated and the way they were all crowded together in the narrow hallway outside the landlady’s door wasn’t helping. She shifted the carrying case for her laptop from one shoulder to the other while they waited for the landlady to respond to the knock on her door.
Mrs. Landis surprised her. When Aaran explained that they wanted to access Jackson’s computer in hopes of finding some clues as to where he’d gone, she seemed to take it as an everyday request.
“If you think it will help,” she said. “Only why does it need so many of you?”
The landlady gave Suzi a particularly searching glance as she spoke. Claudette caught Estie’s eye and gave her a “you see?” look. Estie shrugged in response, then returned her attention to the conversation between Aaran and the landlady—or rather the lack thereof.
Mrs. Landis appeared to have caught Aaran off-guard with her simple question.
“We … um …” he began.
“It doesn’t need all of us,” Estie said, jumping in. “I’m the one who knows about computers and Aaran knows Jackson and will be the best one to sort through what we do find. The rest of us can wait outside.”
The landlady shook her head. “No, that’s all right. It’s much too warm for anyone to be sitting out in this hot sun. It’s just … do you really think this will help you find Jackson … ?”
“I sure hope so,” Aaran said. “But we won’t know until we see what’s actually on the computer.”
“Then how could I not let you have a look at it?”
Estie couldn’t remember the last time she’d met someone so trusting. She realized that Mrs. Landis was worried about Jackson and only wanted to help, but Estie was happy all the same that her own landlord back in Boston was the grumpy Mr. Morello, who would barely exchange more than a couple of words with his tenants, never mind someone he didn’t know. It was comforting to know that even if she ended up vanishing herself, there wouldn’t be gangs of strangers traipsing through her apartment. Or at least not until the police were called in.
Spirits in the Wires Page 26
