Spirits in the Wires (18 page)

“Having worked in retail,” Geordie says, “it makes sense to me. I can't believe the things that customers will assume.”

I'm peering through the door as we talk.

“Here she comes,” I say.

We both step back while Holly unlocks the door and opens it wide enough to look out at us. She's barefoot, dressed in a fluffy coral terrycloth robe held closed at the neck with one hand, her hair mussed, her eyes sleepy behind her glasses as she peers at us through the crack.

“Christy,” she says, looking from me to my brother. “Geordie.”

Geordie nods. “Hi, Holly.”

“What do you get when you've got double the Riddells?” she asks.

I smile. “I'll bite. What do you get?”

She blinks then shrugs. “I thought I had a joke going somewhere but I'm too sleepy to find the punch line. What time is it anyway?”

“Going on six.”

“And
what
are you doing here?”

“We need to talk and your phone seems to be out of order.”

“I unplugged it earlier.” She gives me a considering look, the sleepiness in her eyes starting to fade. “So what couldn't wait until a decent hour?”

“It's about Benny,” I say.

“Benny… ?
My
Benny?”

I nod. “There's been some trouble with him and the Wordwood.”

I don't recognize the look that crosses her face—not until later when she tells me about her own evening's adventures. For now, she opens the door wider and steps back.

“You'd better come in,” she says.

If Christiana's in this place,
I can't find her.

First I fall into a black void—it's like that moment between when I lost my body and got into the phone lines, just before I willed myself to the number that Christiana gave me when I first met her in the Beanery Cafe. It was only last night, but it already feels like a lifetime ago.

That void seemed to draw every molecule of my essence toward … something. I'm not sure what. A cage, a trap, a place from which there would be no escape. I didn't know what it was, only what it would do to me. It manifested itself as a tiny, invisible maelstrom that I could sense was no bigger than a pinpoint, but it had the inexorable tow that lies at the heart of a black hole. Those dense remnants of a supernova can swallow millions of tons of matter every second. If I'd let myself go, I would have immediately vanished into that maelstrom and been lost forever.

This void is the exact opposite. It's just as overwhelming, but here every piece and particle that makes me who I am is being pulled in a hundred thousand different directions. If I let myself go here, I'll never be able to find all those pieces and put myself together again.

Maybe I'm in the heart of that black hole this time. Maybe I'm already lost.

I can't accept that.

I won't accept that.

I do what I did the last time. I search for a pulse, a wave, some kind of energy in motion that I can latch onto. Something I can focus on that will get me out of here, though that's not the only reason I focus with such determination. I need to escape this place, but I also know that the very act of concentrating so intensely upon release will help keep me in one piece, giving my efforts a two-fold purpose.

There are no clues to time's passage so I've no idea how long I'm lost in this utter darkness, searching for a way out, fighting the tearing pull that yanks at me from every direction. Maybe there is no way out. Maybe this is what death means for someone like me, born in pixels and data. Maybe I should stop fighting; just let myself go and return to the anonymity where the spirit that inhabits the Wordwood site found me before it brought me into physical existence.

There's no pain involved in my struggle. How can I feel pain when I don't have a body? There's only this mental panic that doesn't even feel real because there are no physical symptoms to back it up. But the strain on my spirit is slowly eroding my will to survive.

I'm so tired.

I'm so close to letting go.

But then I hear—no, what am I saying? I don't have ears. I can't hear anything. I become
aware
of this humming. It's long and narrow, like a thin wire of sound, cutting though the darkness.

It's there.

No, there.

No,
there.

I fling a net of my thoughts towards it, wrapping myself around the invisible drone of its passage through this place.

And suddenly there's motion. I realize that there must be air here, because sound couldn't exist without it. The droning sound wave is putting pressure on the air, like ripples in water, and I'm riding the rise and fall of its passage. I'm a part of the variations it causes in the atmosphere, staying with it as it turns into an electrical sound signal where the voltage varies at the same rate that the original drone created its ripples in the air. And I'm still a part of it as voltage converts into binary numbers, a bewildering flicker of on-off electrical pulses that change so quickly it's impossible to focus on a string of them, never mind one.

Each measurement is changed into a 16-bit number.

Coded into digital sound.

And now I know where I am.

No, not
where
I am, but
what
I'm in. I'm somewhere in a computer processor. Or I'm a part of a signal travelling between processors. I'm back in the digital womb where I was born, except this time I'm aware of being here. I know who I am. I don't know what I am, but I know who.

And now I have hope of finding a way out. It won't be easy. The digital domain is immense. The bits that make it up aren't simply patterns stored in one computer any more. With Internet connections, they can cross vast distances, lodging in distant processors and memory stores. Millions of computers communicate with each other throughout the world. I could be anywhere.

But machines operate on logic. I may be lost, but if I can figure out how to access HyperText Transfer Protocol, I can direct this signal I'm hitching a ride on to take me where I need to go.

I visualize the URL in my mind.

www.thewordwood.com

That's where all of this started—my trying to contact the pixelated spirit that brought me into this world. That's where
I
started, in the domain it carved out for itself from the World Wide Web. So that's where I need to return. I don't just need answers anymore. I need my body back. The spirit gave it to me once. I'll have to convince it to give it to me again.

I put all my concentration into the Wordwood's site.

I can't be sure, but I think I detect a slight variation in the signal's passage. I concentrate harder.

Time passes—in a confusing blur now, I'm moving so fast. But it's no easier to judge how long I'm riding on the back of this digital signal than it was trying to measure how long I was floating in the earlier darkness.

Then suddenly my awareness explodes with a dazzling array of strings of blue-white light. I'm flying at immeasurable speeds over a bewildering grid work of crisscrossing lines. It's circuitry, I realize, only viewed not from a physical viewpoint, but in terms of the energy it emits.

The signal takes me faster. Faster.

I focus harder on the Wordwood's URL, but I can't muster the strength to hold onto it anymore. I can't hold onto anything. No matter how much I try, how determined I am, everything slips away and my consciousness is gone again. …

“Wait a minute,” Bojo said.

Staring into the muzzle of the enormous handgun pointed at his face, all Bojo seemed able to do was hold his hands out in front of him, palms forward. He wasn't sure if it would look like he was hoping to stop a bullet with his hands, or showing that he was unarmed and presented no danger. It didn't matter. Just so long as the man didn't shoot.

It was hot in the diner, with a close smell in the air—a mix of old grease from the kitchen and whatever had been used to clean the countertop, tables and floor. But under that was a faint, pleasant scent, like a fruity cologne smelling of apples and roses. Or maybe lilacs with a hint of citrus. Whenever Bojo thought he recognized it, the scent shifted into something else.

He tried to muster up a smile, but it was hard. His mouth was dry and he swallowed hard as he considered the best way to frame an explanation of what he was doing here. It turned out he didn't need to.

“You're no hellhound,” the man said, lowering his arm.

“No,” Bojo agreed. Whatever a hellhound was. “I'm just a simple tinker who's come looking for advice.”

The man smiled. “Advice. I should see about getting myself a column, maybe have it syndicated.”

He got up from his booth and shifted the revolver from his right hand to his left.

“I'm Robert Lonnie,” he added, offering his free hand.

Bojo shook hands with him, noting that for all his slender frame and his long, delicate fingers, Robert had a firm grip—more like that of a man who worked with his hands, than the besuited gangster dandy he appeared to be.

“Pleased to meet you,” he said. “I'm Borrible Jones, but most people call me Bojo.”

Robert's eyebrows lifted. “Unusual name to give a kid.”

“Well, the story is that when the midwife lifted me up, my father took one look at this bloody baby, wailing its lungs out and dripping all over the floor, and he said, That's horrible.' Except he had a speech impediment, so it came out, ‘Bat's borrible.' For some reason, the name stuck. I suppose it didn't help that I wasn't a very well-behaved child.”

Robert regarded him for a long moment, amusement flickering in his eyes.

“Have a seat,” he finally said, motioning to the side of the booth he'd just vacated.

He sat down beside the guitar, laying his revolver on the table between them.

“They call it a Peacemaker,” he said when he saw Bojo's gaze settle on the large handgun. “A single-action Colt, .44 caliber. But the only peace it makes is if you shoot the person that's troubling you. My daddy took it from a dead man who'd been considering a lynching before his own premature demise.”

Bojo wasn't sure he'd heard that right.

“They still lynch people around here?” he asked.

“Oh, that was a long time ago—another part of history that folks'd sooner forget, though it's hard when it's your own people that were hanging like strange fruit from trees and lampposts.”

Bojo's gaze had adjusted enough to the bad lighting in the diner that he was able to see the something in Robert's eyes that said he'd been around for generations—not the way tinkers circumvented time, by stepping through worlds, but simply by living through the years, ageless.

As the knowledge came to Bojo, he saw a smile pull at one corner of Robert's mouth, as though the bluesman could read his mind. Robert picked up the Gibson and began to pluck a slow walking blues from its strings, right-hand thumb keeping the bass rhythm, those long fingers of his left hand travelling the fingerboard like the legs of a spider.

“So what's this advice you need?” he asked.

“It's kind of a long story.”

“One thing I've got plenty of is time,” Robert assured him.

“I guess you would,” Bojo said.

That crooked smile stayed on Robert's lips. He didn't speak, but a simple hammer-on on the bass string, followed by a bluesy slide of notes on the high E, seemed to say, Why don't you tell me this story of yours?

So Bojo started in, beginning with the telephone message that had brought him around to Holly's store and finishing with what he'd sensed on the streets on his way to finding Robert here in this diner. The guitar laid a counterpoint rhythm to the cadence of his voice, making Bojo feel as though he was delivering a talking blues rather than simply telling a story.

“And the advice you need is … ?” Robert asked when Bojo's voice trailed off.

He made the high strings call a quizzical note while the bass line continued, faint but keeping the rhythm.

“Because I've got to tell you,” Robert said, “I don't know the first thing about computers or the spirits that might be sitting there somewhere inside them. What do they call those places—virtual worlds?”

Bojo shook his head. “No, those are the ones that aren't real.”

“Depends where you stand, I suppose. Probably real to those living in them.”

“I suppose.”

“The way I see it,” Robert went on, the guitar continuing to play a counter rhythm to the flow of his voice, “is maybe what you've got here is more like the Native take on things. See, with my people there's always a lot of trading going on when it comes to the spirits. Baptist minister or gris-gris man, everybody's trying to cut themselves a bargain, doesn't matter if they're figuring out how to get into heaven or working on some piece of hoodoo. But for the Indians it's more like a tree. You see the trunk and foliage, but all the important stuffs going on underground, out of sight.”

“A tree.”

Robert smiled. “I just mean things are hidden. That there's more sitting in front of you than you can see. It's not like an onion where you've got to peel back layers to see what's going on. Or even like those Russian dolls where each one's got itself a smaller one inside. It's more you see the one thing, but there's a whole invisible world going on behind it. One you don't even know is there, never mind being able to see it.”

Bojo nodded to show he understood.

“‘Course maybe we're talking words here,” Robert went on. “They have to use words to tell the computers what to do, right?”

“I think they call it code,” Bojo said, remembering what Holly had told him about it. “Programming languages.”

“Which is still words and words … well, words are an old magic that goes right back to the first days. The ones they're using for their computers are just that old magic dressed up in some new technological jacket.” He paused for a moment, the guitar still playing. “There's a lot of people believe that the universe was created with just a word, but I guess you know that.”

“Like the Word of God in the Bible,” Bojo said.

It was something he'd heard about, but he was hazy on the details.

“Right,” Robert said. “Logos. Though Christianity's not the first religion, and I doubt it's going to be the last, to slip that bit of old history into its stories about how we all came to be. You know how it usually goes?”

Robert didn't wait for an answer. The music from his guitar shifted into a minor key.

“Way I heard it,” Robert says, “is that this one word that jump-started the world became a language and that language started up a conversation that gives everything its shape and meaning—a conversation that's still going on to this day. The trouble is, over time, that original language went and fragmented into a thousand thousand variations and dialects. Before you know it, none of us can really speak to each other anymore. Animals, plants, people, the dirt under our feet—everything has a different language now. Hell, these days we can't even be sure that some word we use is even close to what it means to the person we're talking to.

“But bits and pieces of that original language still remain. Some of those old words. And we're talking powerful mojo here.”

Bojo nodded. “I remember Meran talking to me about that. I think she even knows some of those old words.”

“Everybody's got a few of them floating around in the old parts of their minds—the places inside them where instincts still work and the soul spends its time. Most of them just don't know it, which is probably a good thing. You speak one of those words and things … change.”

“You know any of those words?” Bojo asked.

“Only one. It's what keeps the hellhounds circling around, but they never can quite find me.”

Bojo nodded. He wanted to ask about these hellhounds Robert kept mentioning, but his years on the road had taught him that you didn't ask after personal information, you only took it when it was offered. So instead he sat there on the other side of the booth and listened to the music his companion pulled out of that old Gibson. It had shifted back into a major key, but when exactly that had happened, Bojo hadn't noticed.

“So I take it you like this girl,” Robert said after a few moments.

His fingers never stopped their spiderwalk up and down the neck of his guitar, his right hand pulling the notes.

“What do you mean?”

Robert smiled. “Well, for someone you just up and met, you seem pretty fixed on wanting to make a good impression. You know, save the day, have her in your arms when the story's done.”

“It's not like that.”

“Every time a mention of her comes up, your heartbeat tells me different.”

Bojo shrugged. “Can you help us?” he asked, wanting to steer the conversation back to something that might be useful.

“Don't know that you want my help, exactly,” Robert said.

“Why's that?”

Robert shrugged. “Trouble's always got an eye out for me—it's why I keep a low profile. I come along to your friend's store and I could be bringing more problems than we're trying to solve.”

“You mean these helldogs you keep talking about.”

“Hellhounds,” Robert said. “And they're not necessarily dogs. They come in all shapes and sizes. The only thing they have in common is their interest in me.”

Since Robert had started the personal questions by asking how he felt about Holly, Bojo thought maybe he could satisfy some of his own curiosity without appearing impolite.

“Why are they chasing you?” he asked.

Robert smiled. “You might say we had us an altercation. That was a time ago, but there's some that don't know the meaning of either forgive or forget.”

“Old spirits.”

Robert nodded.

“Well,” Bojo said, “I think the ones we're talking about here are new ones. Technological spirits, I suppose we could call them.”

“Unless it's old spirits wearing new clothes.” Before Bojo could comment, Robert added, “But you're right. It doesn't feel like it, does it? Because that's the thing about spirits—they get more set in their ways than we do.”

“Maybe because they've been at it a lot longer.”

“Could be,” Robert agreed. “So will you help?”

“How about if the most I promise is that I'll come along and have a look-see?”

They took a cab up to Holly's store, the two of them sitting in the back with the guitar in its case on the seat between them. Bojo hadn't seen where the handgun had gone. One moment it was on the table in the diner, the next it wasn't, and the classic cut of Robert's suit didn't sport any new bulges to show where it might have been hidden. For all Bojo knew, it could be under the fedora that Robert had put on before they left the diner, locking the door behind them.

“I know this store your friend owns,” Robert said as the cab took them north. “Though I don't think I ever went in. I'm not much of a book reader.”

“Me, neither.”

“But there used to be a coffee shop I liked a few doors down. I spent many a morning sitting in there, drinking my coffee and looking out the window. I'd read the papers, play a few tunes.”

“What made you stop?”

Robert shrugged. “It got to be a pattern and I try to keep patterns out of my life.”

“Because of the hellhounds.”

“Partly. Partly I just don't like to acquire habits. And then that coffee shop went all upscale on me. I don't blame Joe—Joe Lapegna, the guy who owns the place. He saw which way the wind was blowing and had to stay competitive, what with all the high-end cafes coming into town and all.”

He looked out the window as the cab turned onto Holly's street.

“Guess what I'm trying to say,” he said, “is that I miss the place.”