Read Online Spirits in the Wires by Charles De Lint - Free Book Online Page B

magic happens.”
    â€œSomething like that.”
    â€œSo why are you here now?” he asked.
    â€œI already told you. The whole speaking from the shadows bit was getting old for me. Besides, I thought you’d be interested in us finally meeting.”
    â€œI am. It’s just…”
    I waited, but I guess for all the words he puts down on paper, he didn’t have any to use right now.
    â€œDisconcerting,” I said.
    â€œThat’s putting it mildly.”
    â€œTell you what,” I said. “Why don’t I just let you deal with this for awhile.”
    He grabbed my arm as I started to turn away and an odd … I don’t know … something went through me. Bigger than a tingle, not quite a shock. He let go so quickly that I knew he’d felt it, too.
    â€œDo you have to go?” he asked.
    I shook my head. “But I’m going to all the same. It’s not like we won’t meet again.”
    â€œWhen? Where? Here? On this bridge?”
    â€œWherever,” I told him. “Whenever. Don’t worry. I can always find you.”
    â€œBut. …”
    I let myself fade back into the borderlands.
    I’d been as interested meeting him as he’d appeared to be meeting me, but I felt a little strange, too, and suddenly felt like I needed some space between us. That strange spark that had leapt between us hadn’t been the only indication that there was something going on—just the most apparent.
    â€œIt’s good to keep some distance between yourself and the one who cast you,” Mumbo told me when I asked her about it later.
    We were on the roof of an abandoned factory in the Tombs, looking out at the lights of the city across the Kickaha River. Below us on the rubble-strewn streets, the night people who made this lost part of the city their home were going about their business. Junkies were shooting up. Homeless kids and tramps, even whole families, were picking their squats for the night and settling in. Small packs of teenagers from the suburbs and better parts of town were travelling in small packs, avoiding the bikers and such, while looking for weaker prey they could harass. Business as usual for the Tombs.
    â€œI kind of felt that I should,” I said. “Except I don’t really know why.”
    Mumbo went into her lecture mode. “The attraction between a shadow and the one who cast her is understandably strong. You were once the same person, so it’s no wonder that you’d be drawn to each other. But spend too much time with him, get too close, and you could be drawn back into him again.”
    â€œWhat do you mean back into him?”
    â€œHe will absorb you and it will be like you never were. It’s happened before. It can happen again.”
    Sometimes I’d get curious about the Eadar I met, and I’d go haunting libraries and sneaking into bookstores when they were closed to see what I could find. I was probably most curious about Mumbo and Maxie Rose. It took me awhile, but I finally tracked down the books that they’d first appeared in.
    Maxie’s was particularly hard. There were only fifty made and it was so dreadfully written that their original owners tended to throw them away.
    Oddly enough, the copy I eventually found was in Christy’s library. It was a thirty-page, saddle-stitched chapbook called
The Jargon Tripper
by Hans Wunschmann and though I managed to read it all the way through twice, I never could figure out what it was supposed to be about. The only character he brought to any semblance of real life in its pages was Maxie and, in the context of the abysmal prose that made up the greater portion of the text, that seemed more by accident.
    I never did find out who the “jargon tripper” of the title was, or what it meant.
    â€œDid you ever figure out what Wunschmann was trying to say?” I asked Maxie the next time I saw her. “You know, in that story he