Charles de Lint - Spirits in the Wires

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SPIRITS IN THE WIRES by Charles de Lint

SPIRITS IN THE

WIRES

Charles de Lint

This one’s for my long-time pal

Rodger Turner

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SPIRITS IN THE WIRES by Charles de Lint

Break the bowl—

instead of regret,

fall back into

the potter’s hands

and be reborn.

—SASKIA MADDING

“Falling” (Spirits and Ghosts, 2000)

Author’s Note

The impetus to write this book, and the title as well, was sparked by some offhand remarks

made by my friend Richard Kunz concerning how, with the ever-growing prevalence of

technology in the world, some of the spirits of fairy tale and folklore have probably already

left the woodlands and other pastoral settings to take up residence in the wires that seem to

connect us to everything: telephone, cable, electricity. No doubt they’re in the satellite feeds

as well.

I’d touched on this in some previous short stories (such as “Saskia,” which you can find in

my collection Moonlight and Vines, and “Pixel Pixies,” in the more recent Tapping the Dream

Tree collection), but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to explore it at a longer

length. So finally I put aside the plans I had for the next novel I was going to write and

jumped happily into this one instead, even though it will be the second novel in a row to

feature my regular repertory company of Newford characters taking their turn on the main

stage, rather than going about their lives in the background of the books as they usually do.

Considering the origins of Spirits in the Wires, I should first thank Richard for those

conversations, not forgetting his wife, Mardelle, who is not only a friend, but who has also

done such a fine job of copyediting on a number of my books—those would be the ones

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SPIRITS IN THE WIRES by Charles de Lint

without typos and the like.

I’d also like to thank:

Rodger Turner for great heaps of technical advice (with the usual caveat that any screw-ups

are my fault, not his);

my coterie of friends, family and well-wishers (too numerous to name—you know who you

are), without whom writing these books would be a far lonelier proposition;

my editors Gordon Van Gelder, Jo Fletcher, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Sharyn November,

and Terri Windling, all of whom are friends more than business associates;

Cat Eldridge, David Tamulevich, and the handful of readers who continue to send such

wonderful music my way, as well as all the amazing musicians who, through the years, have

kept my brain fertile and my spirits lifted with their music;

and last, but never least, Mary Ann for her love, comfort, and support; for the music in her

heart and the poetry in her soul; for her astute reader’s eye and red pen, and her sharp

negotiating skills. And you know what? She’s wilder than me.

If any of you are on the Internet, come visit my home page at www.charlesdelint.com

—Charles de Lint

Ottawa, Autumn 2002

Extract from the journals of

Christy Riddell

According to Jung, at around the age of six or seven we separate and then hide away the parts of ourselves

that don’t seem acceptable, that don’t fit in the world around us. Those unacceptable parts that we secret

away become our shadows.

I remember reading somewhere that it can be a useful exercise to visualize the person our shadow would be if

it could step out into the light. So I tried it. It didn’t work immediately. For a long time, I was simply

talking to myself. Then, when I did get a response, it was only a spirit voice I heard in my head. It could just

as easily have been my own. But over time, my shadow took on more physical attributes, in the way that a

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SPIRITS IN THE WIRES by Charles de Lint

story grows clearer and more pertinent as you add and take away words, molding its final shape.

Not surprisingly, my shadow proved to be the opposite of who I am in so many ways. Bolder, wiser, with a

better memory and a penchant for dressing up with costumes, masks, or simply formal wear. A cocktail dress

in a raspberry patch. A green man mask in a winter field. She’s short, where I’m tall. Dark-skinned, where

I’m light. Red-haired, where mine’s dark. A girl to my boy, and now a woman as I’m a man.

If she has a name, she’s never told me it. If she has an existence outside the times we’re together, she has yet

to divulge it either. Naturally, I’m curious about where she goes, but she doesn’t like being asked questions

and I’ve learned not to press her, because when I do, she simply goes away.

Sometimes I worry about her existence. I get anxieties about schizophrenia and carefully study myself for

other symptoms. But if she’s a delusion, it’s singular, and otherwise I seem to be as normal as anyone else,

which is to say, confused by the barrage of input and stimuli with which the modern world besets us, and

trying to make do. Who was it that said she’s always trying to understand the big picture, but the trouble is,

the picture just keeps getting bigger? Ani DiFranco. I think.

Mostly I don’t get too analytical about it—something I picked up from her, I suppose, since left to my own

devices, I can worry the smallest detail to death.

We have long conversations, usually late at night, when the badgering clouds swallow the stars and the

darkness is most profound. Most of the time I can’t see her, but I can hear her voice. I like to think we’re

friends; even if we don’t agree about details, we can usually find common ground on how we’d like things to

be.

FIRST MEETING

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SPIRITS IN THE WIRES by Charles de Lint

Don’t make of us

more than what we are,

she said.

We hold no great secret…

—SASKIA MADDING,

“Arabesque” (Moths and Wasps, 1997)

Christiana Tree

“I feel as if I should know you,” Saskia Madding says as she approaches my chair.

She’s been darting glances in my direction from across the café for about fifteen minutes

now and I was wondering when she’d finally come over.

I saw her when I first came in, sitting to the right of the door at a window table, nursing a

tall cup of chai tea. She’d been writing in a small, leather-bound book, fountain pen in one

hand, the other holding back the spill of blonde hair that would otherwise fall into her eyes.

She looked up when I came in and showed no sign of recognition, but since then she’s been

studying me whenever she thinks I’m not paying attention to her.

“You do know me,” I tell her. “I’m pieces of your boyfriend—the ones he didn’t want when

he was a kid.”

She gives me a puzzled look, though I can see a kind of understanding start up in the back

of those pretty, sea-blue eyes of hers.

“You—are you the woman in his journals?” she asks. “The one he calls Mystery?”

I smile. “That’s me. The shadow of himself.”

“I didn’t…”

“Know I was real?” I finish for her when her voice trails off.

She shakes her head. “No. I just didn’t expect to ever see you in a place like this.”

“I like coffee.”

“I meant someplace so mundane.”

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SPIRITS IN THE WIRES by Charles de Lint

“Ah. So you’ve made note of all those romantic flights of fancy he puts in those journals of

his.” I close my eyes, shuffling through pages of memory until I find one of them. “ ‘I can

see her standing among the brambles and thorns of some half-forgotten hedgerow in a green

bridal dress, her red hair set aflame by the setting sun, her eyes dark with mysteries and

stories, a wooden hare’s mask dangling from one languid hand. This is how I always see her.

In the hidden and secret places, her business there incomprehensible yet obviously perfectly

suited to her curious, evasive nature.’”

I get a smile from Saskia, but I don’t know if it’s from the passage I’ve quoted, or because

I’m mimicking Christy’s voice as I repeat the words.

“That’s a new one,” she says. “He hasn’t read it to me yet.”

“You wait for him to read them to you?”

“Of course. I would never go prying…” She pauses and gives me a considering look. “When

do you read them?”

I shrug. “Oh, you know. Whenever. I don’t really sleep, so sometimes when I get bored late

at night I come by and sit in his study for awhile to read what he’s been thinking about

lately.”

“You’re as bad as the crow girls.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Mmm.” She studies me for a moment before adding, “You don’t read my journals do you?”

I muster a properly offended look, though it’s not that I wouldn’t. I just haven’t. Yet.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “Of course you wouldn’t. We don’t have the same connection as you

and Christy do.”

“Does that connection bother you?”

She shakes her head. “That would be like being bothered by his having Geordie for a

brother. You’re more like family—albeit the twin sister who only comes creeping by to visit

in the middle of the night when we’re both asleep.”

I shrug, but I don’t apologize.

“I’m only his shadow,” I say.

She studies me again, those sea-blue eyes of hers looking deep into mine.

“I don’t think so,” she says. “You’re real now.”

That makes me smile.

“As real as I am, anyway,” she adds.

My smile fades as I see the troubled look that comes over her. I forget that her own exotic

origins are no more than a dream to her most of the time—a dream that makes her

uncomfortable, uneasy in her skin. I wish I hadn’t reminded her of it, but she puts it away

and brings the conversation back to me.

“Why won’t you tell Christy your name?” she asks.

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SPIRITS IN THE WIRES by Charles de Lint

“Because that would let him put me in a box labeled ‘This is Christiana’ and I don’t want to

be locked into who he thinks I am. The way he writes about me is bad enough. If he had a

name to go with it he might be able to fix it so that I could never change and grow.”

“He does like his routines,” she says.

I nod. “His picture’s in the dictionary, right beside the word.”

We share a moment’s silence, then she cocks her a head, just a little.

“So your name’s Christiana?” she asks.

“I call myself Christiana Tree.”

That brings back a genuine smile.

“So that would make you Miss Tree,” she says.

I’m impressed at how quickly she got it as I offer her my hand.

“In the flesh,” I tell her. “Pleased to meet you.”

“But that’s only what you call yourself,” she says as she shakes my hand.

“We all have our secrets.”

“Or we wouldn’t be mysteries.”

“That, too.”

She’s been sitting on her haunches beside the easy chair I commandeered as soon as I’d

picked up my coffee and sticky-bun from the counter, leaning her arms on one of the chair’s

fat arms. There’s another chair nearby, occupied by a boy in his late teens with blue hair and

razor-thin features. He’s been listening to his Walkman loud enough for me to identify the

music as rap, though I can’t make out any words, and flipping through one of the café’s

freebie newspapers while he drinks his coffee. He gets up now and I give a vague wave to

the vacant chair with my hand.

“Why don’t you get more comfortable,” I say to Saskia.

She nods. “Just let me get my stuff.”

Some office drone in a tailored business suit, tie loose, top shirt button undone, approaches

the chair while Saskia collects her things. I put my scuffed brown leather work boots up on

its cushions and give him a sugar and icicle smile—you know, it looks sweet, but there’s a

chill in it. He’s like a cat as he casually steers himself off through the tables and takes a

hardback chair at one of the small counters that enclose the café’s various rustic wooden

support beams, making it look like that’s what he was aiming for all along.

Saskia returns. She drops her jacket on the back of the chair, puts her knapsack on the floor,

and settles down, tea in hand.

“So, what were you writing?” I ask.

She shrugs. “This and that. I just like playing with words. Sometimes they become something

—a journal entry, a poem. Sometimes I’m just following words to see where they go.”

“And where do they go?”

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SPIRITS IN THE WIRES by Charles de Lint

“Anyplace and everyplace.”

She pauses for a moment and has a sip of her tea, sets the cup down on the low table

between us. Later I realize she was just deciding whether to go on and tell me what she now

does.

“You know, we’re like words,” she says. “You and me. We’re like ghost words.”

I have to smile. I’m beginning to understand why Christy cares about her the way he does.

She’s a sweet, pretty blonde, but she doesn’t fit into any sort of a tidy descriptive package.

Her thinking’s all over the place, from serious to whimsical, or even some combination of

the two. I think I just might have a poke through her journals the next time I’m in their

apartment and they’re both asleep. I’d like to know more about her—not just what she has

to say, but what she thinks when there’s nobody supposed to be listening.

“Okay,” I say. “I’ll bite. What are ghost words?”

“They’re words that don’t really exist. They come about through the mistakes of editors and

printers and bad proofreaders, and while they seem like they should mean something, they

don’t. Like ‘cablin’ for ‘cabin,’ say.”

I see what she means.

“I like that word,” I tell her. “Cablin. Maybe I should appropriate it and give it a meaning.”

Saskia gives a slow nod. “You see? That’s how we’re like ghost words. People can

appropriate us and give us meanings, too.”

I know she’s talking about our anomalous origins—how because of them, we could be

victim to that sort of thing—but I don’t agree.

“That happens to everybody,” I tell her. “It happens whenever someone decides what

someone is like instead of finding out for real.”

“I suppose.”

“You’re thinking about all of this too much.”

“I can’t seem to stop thinking about it.”

I study her for a long moment. It’s worrying her, this whole idea of what’s real and what

isn’t, like how you came into this world is more important than what you do once you’re

here.

“What’s the first thing you remember?” I ask.

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SPIRITS IN THE WIRES by Charles de Lint

HOW WE WERE

BORN

Words are like a corridor;

put enough of them in a line

and who knows where

they will take you.

—SASKIA MADDING,

“Corridor” (Mirrors, 1995)

Saskia Madding

I remember opening my eyes and—

You know how if you blow up an electronic image too much, you don’t have a picture

anymore? When you push the image that far, all you really have left is a pixelated fog, a

screen full of tiny coloured squares that don’t form a recognizable pattern, never mind an

image.

That was the first thing I saw.

I opened my eyes and I couldn’t focus on anything. A hundred thousand million dots of

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SPIRITS IN THE WIRES by Charles de Lint

colour and light filled my vision. I stared hard, trying to make sense of them, and slowly they

started to come together, forming recognizable objects. A dresser. A cedar chest. An

armchair with clothes draped over the arms and back. A closed wooden door. A poster from

the Newford Museum of Art advertising a retrospective of Vincent Rushkin’s work. Close

by my head on the night table was an unlit candle in a brass holder, and a leather-bound

book with a pattern of pussywillows stamped into the leather, a fountain pen lying on top of

it.

It was all familiar, but I knew I’d never seen it before. Just as I myself was familiar, but I

didn’t know who I really was. I knew my name. I knew there was a computer and paper trail

tracing my background—where I was born, grew up, went to school—but I couldn’t actually

recall any of it. The details of the experiences, I mean. The sounds, the smells, the tactile

impressions associated with them. All I knew were the bare bones of cold facts.

I studied the explosion of pigeons in the painting they’d used in the poster for the Rushkin

show and tried to make sense of how I could be in my own bedroom, but have no sense of

where it was or how I got here or anything that had happened to me before I opened my

eyes at that moment.

And I was strangely calm.

I knew I shouldn’t be. Somewhere a part of me was registering the fact that none of this was

right—neither the where and how of where I’d found myself upon waking, nor my reaction

to it.

I had the strongest sense of being temporary. A shadow cast by a light that was about to

move or be turned off. An image in a film that the camera had lingered up on before moving

on.

I held one of my hands up in front of my eyes, then the other. I sat up and looked at the

reflection of the woman in the mirror on the back of the dresser.

Me.

A stranger.

But I knew every inch of that face—the blue eyes, the shape of the nose and lips, the way

the blonde hair fell in a sleepy tangle on either side of it.

I swung my feet to the floor and stood up. I pulled the flannel nightie I was wearing over my

head and faced the mirror again.

I knew this body as well.

Me.

Still a stranger.

I sat down on the edge of the bed. Plucking the nightie from the floor, I hugged it to my

chest.

An odd notion came into my head. I had a sudden impression of some other place, a

pixelated realm that lay somewhere in cyberspace—that mysterious borderland of electrons

and data pulses that exists in between all the computers that make up the World Wide Web.

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