“Okay,” I say after a moment. “But let’s at least check out the source by more conventional means first.”
I get up and cross the room to my desk, starting up the computer. The machine’s up and running by the time Saskia joins me. She stands behind my chair, hands on my shoulders. I click on my dial-up icon, the modem dials the number, and soon we’re listening to the familiar squawk and buzz of the computer connecting to my ISP.
After I open Explorer and enter the Wordwood’s URL, the error message I’ve been getting all week comes up in my browser window. I start to close my connection.
“What’s that?” Saskia says.
She leans over my shoulder, the point of her index finger going to a small black dot that’s appeared in the middle of my browser window. I have this flash of premonition, but before I can stop her, her fingertip touches the screen.
Have you ever seen a firecracker fuse burn? That’s what it’s like with her, except the detonation comes first. There’s this flash of—I don’t know what. Like an electrical discharge. It blows me off my chair, against the wall, and knocks the breath out of me. But I can still see what’s happening to her from where I’m lying.
A flare of white hot light runs up her finger, her hand, her arm, her shoulder, travelling the length of her body. Like a fuse. But instead of leaving behind a string of ash, it leaves behind a pixelated version of her, like she’s no longer solid and I can see all the molecules of her body. It’s like the difference in seeing a painting, then seeing a photo of it in a newspaper where it’s made up of thousands of little dots of colour.
I try to scramble to my feet, but my limbs are numbed and jellied and they won’t hold me.
Saskia gives me a look—a haunting, desperate look. Then the computer just shatters and collapses into itself. One moment the monitor and keyboard are on my desk, the tower on the floor beside it, the next they’re just the heaps of broken plastic, circuitry, and wiring.
Saskia reaches for me. But it isn’t Saskia anymore. It’s this human shape made up of thousands of flickering tiny pellets of shadow and light.
I call her name, try again to get to my feet. I hear a telephone dialing, as though somewhere in the wreckage of my computer the modem’s trying to reconnect to my ISP. Then Saskia’s gone and the room is so still the silence hurts.
I manage to crawl to where she’d been standing, stupidly patting the floor as though she’s hidden on the carpet like a fallen pin or paperclip. But there’s nothing there. She’s gone. Swallowed back into the Internet from which I’d only half-believed she’d been born. Swallowed back into the Wordwood, and I don’t have the slightest idea how to get her back.
The loss of her swells through me like a tsunami, threatening to tear me apart, and all I can do is press my forehead against the carpet where, only a moment ago, she was standing.
Christiana
I’m pretending to sleep when the phone rings.
I suppose that sounds odd—not the phone ringing, but my pretending to sleep. The thing is, I don’t need to sleep, or even eat, but I do both anyway. It’s one of the first things Mumbo taught me when I strayed over into the borderlands.
“It will help make you feel normal,” she told me. “And if you feel normal—if you act and appear normal—then other people won’t treat you differently.”
I didn’t think it was so important then, but being treated like a freak gets old fast. So I learned to eat and drink. And while I don’t need the sustenance, I love the flavours that tickle across my taste buds when I do partake. A basil and tomato sandwich. Hot Mexican salsa. Squash soup. Strong coffee. A glass of red wine.
And more rarely, I sleep.
When I do, I think I actually am sleeping, because sometimes when I close my eyes, I go away. Time vanishes into the same black hole it does for people whose bodies require them to sleep. And sometimes, when I’m in that black hole of sleep, I dream.
That’s what’s happening when the phone starts to ring. I feel thickheaded and confused as the beep-beep of the cell phone pulls me out of a confusing melange of images and sensations. Traces linger in my head as I look for the phone. Something to do with monkeys having a high tea and the Vegas Elvis, sweaters being worn backwards and flying—no I can’t fly, though I’d dearly love to be able to. Even the talent to shapechange into a bird would be welcome.
The monkeys were humming an off-key rendition of a Beatles song— “Strawberry Fields,” I think—and Elvis was ignoring them as he dipped a deep-fried scone into his tea. I remember being fascinated by the oily film that formed on the surface of his tea and trying to figure out why. When he took the scone out, it made this sound like a truck backing up.
But it was only the phone.
I finally spot it across the meadow, lying on the fat arm of the club chair where I tossed my clothes before going to sleep. Getting out of bed, I shuffle barefoot across the grass to the chair, wondering who it could possibly be. I hardly ever get calls on it because only a handful of people know the number. Maxie. Tom Stone—the only lover I ever managed to stay good friends with. Mumbo—though she never calls. And now Saskia.
I pick the phone up, find the “on” button, and lift the phone to my ear. It takes me a moment to recognize the odd sound I’m hearing. It’s like a bad recording of wind blowing through the topmost branches of a forest—rasping and harsh, full of pops and crackling.
“Hello?” I say.
“…”
The response is so faint I’m not sure I actually heard anything.
“Hello?” I try again. “Is anybody there?”
The voice comes to me as though from a radio station that’s not quite tuned in. Raspy, unrecognizable.
“Please …”
I press the phone more closely to my ear, as though that’s going to make the voice louder.
“Let… me … in …”
I know enough about the hidden worlds beyond the World As It Is to know that it’s not only vampires that need permission to enter a safe place. And though I also know better, I still find myself saying, “Yes.”
There’s this one dark moment where everything feels wrong. I find myself remembering a conversation I had with Christy once about the odd motivations of the characters in fairy tales, when there even is a motivation.
“Why do they do these things?” I said. “Why does the third son go on what he believes is a doomed quest? Why does the farmer boy want to marry the princess? What could they possibly have in common?”
“Who says they have a choice?” he told me.
That’s what my saying “yes” feels like. Like I had no choice. Like some enchantment came through the phone’s receiver and I had to welcome it into me.
I have time to think of all of that, with the underpinning impression that something’s very wrong. It’s like an accident, where everything’s speeding up and slowing down at the same time. It’s going so slow that you’re aware of every nuance. You have time to replay a conversation, look across the meadow that carpets your living room floor to the fields beyond. But it’s also happening so fast that you can’t even begin to stop it.
There’s no time for me to drop the phone. I can’t take the word back.
Something like an electric shock erupts from the receiver and flashes into my ear. My hair stands upright—all my hair, from the tangle on my head to the tiny ones on my arms. My head fills with the radio static, amplified to such a volume that it’s a hurricane of white noise.
Then everything goes away, me included.
Holly
Dick was miserable.
Holly had tried to cheer him up. She’d taken him with her when she went out to let Snippet do her business and even let him do the honours with the plastic bag after said business was done in the empty lot at the end of the block. When they got back, she let him clean up the mess that the monitor had made when it crashed to the floor. But not even cleaning and tidying seemed to help. So she made him a mug of tea, English Breakfast w
ith a splash of whiskey in it, just the way he liked it. That didn’t seem to help either.
He was convinced the whole business was his fault—though how that could be, he couldn’t explain.
“You saved the day,” she told him for about the tenth time.
They were sitting behind the desk in the store, drinking their tea.
“If it hadn’t been for you,” she went on, “whatever that thing was would have come right out of the monitor and swallowed us both.”
She wasn’t sure if that was exactly the case. She just knew that magical beings were able to step out of the Internet into the real world, as witness their invasion by a gang of vandalizing pixies a year or so ago. So if something dark and scary had been about to pounce forth this evening, Dick really had saved the day. The trouble was, Dick found any number of things dark and scary—from television shows and certain kinds of pies, to the customers that patronized the store. Considering some of the odd birds that came in, Holly could sympathize with the latter.
“But I broke your monitor, Mistress Holly,” Dick said.
“Thereby saving us.”
“But it’s all broken and now you can’t do your work on the computer.”
“Hello? I can’t do any work on it anyway because of creepy things that are just a modem dial-up away, waiting to pounce on us.”
“But still—”
“But still, nothing. You’re a veritable hero and I wish you’d stop feeling otherwise.”
Dick only gave his head a mournful shake and stared into the inch or so of liquid left at the bottom of his cup. Holly sighed. She gave the phone a look, willing it to ring, but it was obstinately silent.
Dick had lent a hand when it came to figuring out a way to get the pixies out of Holly’s neighbourhood and back into the Internet, but he hadn’t been Holly’s main source of help. That had come from a woman named Meran Kelledy, one half of a musical husband-and-wife duo who had been playing for years around the city, when they weren’t touring further afield. Holly had met her the same week that all the trouble with the pixies began, and they’d become friends since then.
She was a lovely woman, attractive and smart. The sort of woman who turned heads as much for her charisma as for her trim figure, dark, wise eyes, and her waterfall of brown hair with its surprising green streaks. Dick seemed to think of her as some sort of faerie royalty and was in awe of her whenever she came by the store, but Holly didn’t see her that way at all. Meran was simply good company, easy to talk to and as normal as anyone else, except she seemed to know an inordinate amount about things magical and folkloric, and how they were presently colliding with the modern technological age.
So it was Meran that Holly called from the store after the computer monitor had smashed on the floor, but no one had picked up at the other end of the line. She’d had to leave a message on the Kelledys’ answering machine.
“What will we do?” Dick said, still not lifting his gaze from the bottom of his mug, although Holly noted that it was now completely empty.
“Replenish our drinks?” she asked. “Or go to bed and see if everything looks the same in the morning?”
“The monitor will still be broken.”
“Yes, I know. I just meant perhaps things will feel different in the morning. We can call some other people and—”
Holly broke off as someone rapped on the glass of the door behind them. Turning, she expected to see Meran. It was something Meran would do—come directly by, rather than return Holly’s earlier phone call. But a stranger stood there under the outdoor light on the other side of the store’s front door. A wonderfully handsome stranger. He looked like Holly’s romantic notions of a Gypsy: dark-eyed, with a tangle of shoulder-length, crow-black hair pushed back from his brow and small gold hoop earrings in each lobe. His baggy white cotton shirt added to the Romany look, even if it was tucked into a pair of ordinary blue jeans.
When he caught her gaze, he gave her a rakish smile and lifted his hand in greeting. Holly felt like melting. She wasn’t the sort to be swayed so easily by a handsome face—she saw at least one good-looking man every day, operating a store that was open to the general public as she did—but something about this stranger had her all flustered and warm. She brought a hand to her hair, all too aware of how the red strands were spilling out every which way from where they’d been gathered in a loose bun at the nape of her neck this morning. She wasn’t wearing any make-up—not even lipstick. And why in god’s name had she changed into a pair of old cut-off jeans and her oldest flannel shirt after the store had closed?
Because, common sense said, as it did its best to quiet the sudden jump in her pulse, she wasn’t expecting visitors. It was late at night. And handsome though the man was, he was still a stranger and it was long past store hours. He could be anyone. He could be dangerous.
Holly was aware of that and more. Still, she put her glasses down on the desk, got up and went to the door all the same.
“Yes?” she asked through the glass. “Can I help you?”
She couldn’t hear a word he said in response, but then she doubted he’d heard her either. It was more a matter of them reading each other’s lips. When she saw his—very full for a man, but not remotely effete, and oh, just look at the lashes above those gorgeous eyes—shape Meran’s name, she happily threw caution to the winds and unlocked the door. Opening it just enough to pop her head out, she caught a strong whiff of apples and cinnamon. God, he even smelled good.
“What were you saying?” she asked.
“I’m taking care of Meran’s place,” the stranger said. “While she and Cerin are out of town.”
“And that brings you here because … ?”
“The message you left on their machine. You sounded pretty upset so I thought I’d come by to see if you needed a hand.”
His voice was perfect, too, warm and resonant. Then she realized what he’d said. Oh god. He’d heard her babbling about pixies and something weird trying to come out of her monitor?
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Only mortified, she thought. But she gave a quick nod.
“So everything’s under control now?”
“Yes. I mean, no. I mean …” She sighed. “How do you know Meran?”
“We’re sort of distant cousins.”
“Sort of?”
“On her husband’s side.”
“So then you’re not really related.”
“Well, in a way I am. To Cerin’s Aunt Jen. But I’m not really blood kin to any of them.” He gave her another one of those rakish smiles. “It’s more of a tribal thing.”
Holly regarded him for a long moment. The only way he could have heard her message was if he was in the Kelledy’s house. And if he was in their house, she supposed he must be trustworthy. Burglars and serial killers didn’t take the time to listen to their victims’ answering machines, did they?
She stepped aside and held the door open for him.
“You might as well come in,” she said. “The least I can do is offer you a cup of tea after coming out all this way at such a late hour.”
“Thank you,” he said.
He looked past her to where Snippet was sitting up, alert, but showing no signs of alarm at the stranger coming in. That he passed whatever test it was that the Jack Russell had for strangers boded well. Snippet was good during the day—you never heard a peep out of her. But once the store was closed for business she became fiercely territorial to anyone she didn’t like, or at least didn’t recognize.
“Hello, dog,” the stranger said.
Holly was surprised to see Snippet’s tail begin to wag. Then she was surprised even more when the stranger’s gaze continued to where Dick was sitting.
“And good evening to you, Master Hob,” he added.
Dick gave him a small nervous nod in response.
“You can see him?” Holly said.
The stranger turned to look at her, eyebrows lifting. “You can’t?”
/> “Of course I can. It’s just that most people …”
She let her voice trail off and covered up the increased awkwardness she was feeling by closing and locking the door once more.
“We’re having tea with whiskey in it,” she said when she turned back to him.
“Sounds perfect,” the stranger said. “Although perhaps I’ll forgo the tea part, if I may. Tea usually keeps me up all night.”
Holly smiled. “I’m Holly,” she said and offered her hand. “Though I guess you already know that from the phone call.”
“Borrible Jones,” he told her.
His grip was firm, his hand callused, both distracting Holly until she realized what he’d said. She couldn’t have heard that right.
“I’m sorry?” she said.
He grinned. “I am, too. But what can you do? My friends call me Bojo.”
“But—”
“The name. I know. There are any number of theories as to its origin. One is that my father was a poet who didn’t like children so he named me to have something to rhyme with ‘horrible.’ Another is that he was too fond of Michael de Larrabeiti’s books.”
Holly gave him a blank look.
“You know,” Bojo said. “The author of the Borrible books? Borribles were these fictional residents of London? Sort of like little feral Peter Pans?”
Holly nodded. “I knew that.”
“Of course you would. You own a bookstore.”
“So you don’t know who your father is?”
“Never met the man,” Bojo said.
“That seems very sad.” Holly’d had a wonderful relationship with her own father until he’d passed away a few years ago. “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too. I’d love to have known what he was thinking.”
“And your mother … ?”
“Would rarely speak of him.”
Holly didn’t know what to say. Finally she settled on, “Let me get you that whiskey.”
She felt she needed a whole tumbler of it herself.
There wasn’t room for all of them behind the desk, so they took their drinks and went upstairs to Holly and Dick’s apartment above the store. There were as many books on shelves, in piles and boxes and hidden under furniture, up here in her living room as there were downstairs. The difference was, these weren’t for sale. At least not yet.