Spiritwalk (28 page)

When he set her down, she saw the owls all around them, staring. But not at them. She clutched the trunk of the tree and looked down at what had caught their attention.

On the path where they’d been standing just moments ago, an enormous wild boar had burst from the undergrowth. It circled around, snorting and grunting, sharp hooves tearing up the ground. The coarse bristles of its hide varied from a blackish brown to a light yellow gray. It stood almost three feet high, five feet long and had to weigh close to four hundred pounds.

Sara began to shake as she imagined how long they would have survived if it had caught them on the ground.

“Ha!” Pukwudji called down to it. “Can’t catch us, hey!”

She turned to find the
honochen’o’keh
sitting on his heels, tiny feet precariously balanced on the branch as he bounced up and down, shaking a finger at the enraged creature below them. That just made Sara hug the trunk more tightly.

“I... I thought you said the forest liked you,” she said finally.

Pukwudji nodded. “It does.”

“But then—”

“That’s not part of the forest,” he said. “It’s an angry thought.”

Sara looked down at the boar. It was butting its head against their tree now, little pig eyes glaring up at them. She could feel the force of its attack vibrating through the tree trunk.

An angry thought. Right.

“Whose angry thought?” she asked.

Pukwudji shrugged. “Don’t know. The forest is filled with a mix of them, some friendly, some not so much so.”

Sara thought about the sounds she’d heard as they’d been following the path. Rustling and whispers and giggles. These were... thoughts?

“He’s going now,” Pukwudji said.

Sara glanced down again. Sure enough, the boar had given up on them and plunged into the undergrowth on the far side of the path. Somehow she’d thought it would have been more tenacious in its pursuit of them. She followed its progress mostly by sound. Her adrenaline rush began to fade as distance swallowed the immediacy of the boar’s passage, leaving her feeling weak and not quite all in her body.

Get hold of yourself, she thought.

Shen
.

Gather the spirit inside. Focus.

“Let’s go down now,” Pukwudji added.

Sara hung on to the tree as he reached for her.

“Ah... don’t you think we should, you know, give it a few more minutes? Just in case it decides to come back?”

“He won’t be back,” Pukwudji said. “See, the
memegwesi
have chased him away.”

Her gaze followed his pointing finger. What looked like three little green-skinned children were dancing and laughing on the path where the boar had been just moments ago. When they spied her looking at them, they all put their hands to their mouths and, stifling giggles, ran off into the undergrowth, following the trail that the boar had forced through the dense vegetation. Unlike the boar, their passage was silent.

For a long moment Sara just stared at where they’d been.

“The forest’s a lively place tonight,” she said finally, attempting, but not quite succeeding, to keep her tone light.

Maybe too lively, she added to herself.

“The forest is always lively,” Pukwudji agreed.

“But not like this.”

He laughed. “Always like this. You just don’t always choose to
see
, hey?”

They made their descent back down to the path, this time with Sara clinging to Pukwudji’s back. She didn’t feel a whole lot more dignified, but it was better than being carted around over his shoulder like so much baggage. The ground felt blessedly firm underfoot. The night seemed very still around them, almost silent, Then there was a sound like a sudden wind, but it was only the owls taking flight. They left their perches and flew off in the direction that Pukwudji was leading her.

Another couple of minutes’ walking showed Sara the owls’ new perch—the eaves and gables of Tamson House. She stared at the huge structure, relief flaring in her until she realized that it was much darker than it should be. What lights there were seemed dim. And there was no sound coming from beyond the bulk of the House where the city should be. That was when her troubled gaze settled on the trees—monstrous cousins of the forest through which they’d just come, except their upper branches poked through the roof of the House itself.

“The forest...” she began.

“Has come visiting,” Pukwudji said, not at all alarmed by the sight.

Sara sighed. Naturally he’d view the House as the intruder, rather than the trees. But then she realized that the House
was
intruding. That was why she couldn’t hear the city, or see the glare of its lights from beyond the roof of the House. The trees hadn’t come to the House; the House had been pulled into the forest—just as it had that time when they were having all the trouble with Tom Hengwr. Except this time the contents of the House hadn’t shifted to another outer shell set in some convenient glade; this time they’d been transported to an outer shell that the forest had reclaimed.

As she glanced to her right, her gaze was caught by the lights of the ballroom that spilled from its leaded-pane windows out onto the transformed garden. She could see the movement of people inside. Hopefully Blue and Esmeralda were there. With answers to make some sense out of all this.

“Let’s see if we can find out what’s going on,” she said.

She started for the-ballroom, pausing when Pukwudji didn’t follow.

“Aren’t you coming?”

He shook his head. “
Herok’a
and buildings—that’s not for me.”

“But—”

“I’m a secret,” Pukwudji said. “Your secret, the forest’s secret. It’s not for them to know, hey?”

“Blue’ll be in there,” Sara tried. “You know him.”

But Pukwudji simply took a side step and was gone.

I’ll wait for you here
, she heard him say, his voice tickling in her mind, rather than physically heard.

Sara looked at the spot where he’d vanished, waiting to see if he’d change his mind, then sighed and continued on to the ballroom on her own. Though she tried to ignore them, she was all too aware of the owls following her progress from the eaves above with their silent, round-eyed gaze.

4

“I’ve been here before,” Blue said. “In this situation.”

Judy cocked an eyebrow, waiting for him to elaborate.

The two of them were sitting on the small stage at one end of the ballroom with Esmeralda, waiting for the rest of the House’s residents and guests to arrive so that they could decide what they would do from this point. The latter had been arriving steadily by ones and twos over the past few minutes. They gathered in small groups in various parts of the cavernous room, their mood ranging from operating on automatic pilot to delight at their predicament.

The Pagan Party, Blue noted, were the happiest, once they got over the initial shock.

Esmeralda was sitting on the piano bench, picking out a few desultory bars of some sonata. Rachmaninoff’s No. 2, Blue decided, recognizing the familiar tempo change from the second movement. She looked up as Blue spoke, fingers stilling on the keys.

“You mean that business a few years ago with Tom Hengwr?” she asked.

“I told you about that?”

Esmeralda shook her head. “Actually, Sara did.”

“Well, I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about,” Judy said.

She was handling the whole situation well, Blue thought. A hell of a lot better than some. Over by the double doors that led into the ballroom, a couple of would-be poets were trying to comfort a third of their number who was crouched on the floor, arms wrapped around his legs, a wide-eyed look of panic in his eyes, limbs shaking as if from palsy.

The good thing was that no one had been physically hurt. A small miracle, considering the damage he’d seen in some of the rooms.

“Earth to Blue,” Judy said. “Come in, Blue.”

“Well, there was this guy,” he began, turning his attention back to Judy.

Esmeralda switched to Chopin as Blue gave a brief rundown on the previous time Tamson House had gone world-hopping. The music played a gentle counterpoint to his story and Blue found himself falling into its rhythm as he spoke, appreciating its presence. Somehow it made the weirdness of his story easier to relate. But more important, he realized, the quiet piano-playing was having a soothing effect on the various and sundry occupants of the House who’d just happened to be present in the building when it shifted into the Otherworld.

“You could’ve warned me,” Judy said when he was done. She shot him a quick smile to show that she wasn’t being too serious. “I mean, this kind of thing’ll play hell on business. Guy’ll come looking for his bike that I’ve been working on and not only is the bike gone, but the whole frigging House. What’s he going to think?”

“Maybe it’ll remind him of that joke about the magician who went downtown and turned into a restaurant,” Esmeralda said.

Judy laughed. “Yeah, right.”

“The music I can take,” Blue said, “but not the bad jokes.”

Esmeralda only shrugged and pretended to flick the ashes from an imaginary cigar.

“So Jamie,” Judy went on after a few moments. “He died... right?”

Blue nodded.

“Only he’s still here... kind of like a ghost?”

“He’s part of the House,” Esmeralda said, taking over from Blue. “Think of him as a guardian spirit.”

“So where’s he gone now?” Judy asked.

Esmeralda looked down at the keyboard. Her hair fell forward, hiding her face. Strands moved, as though touched by a breeze that only they could feel. She played her fingers lightly over the keys, only just brushing their smooth ivory surfaces. Her touch was so soft that not one hammer came in contact with a string.

“I wish we knew,” Blue said.

5

It had been odd at first, thinking he was dead, then slowly coming back to awareness.

Body lost; gone forever the flesh and bone and the heartbeat that sent blood pulsing through every artery and vein. Sensations were stimulated through other means of awareness now.

They were ghostly impressions in the beginning. Confusing ones. A hundred different views, as though he had an eye in every part of his body. A thousand sounds, as though he had an ear for each eye. A hundred thousand scents, as though each pore had acquired its own olfactory organ.

It wasn’t until his father spoke that he knew what he’d become.

It’s yours to guard now
,
James
.
Cherish the burden
.

It.

Tamson House.

He’d
become
the House.

He wasn’t just a ghost, haunting the maze of its halls and rooms. He was the House. Alive in its wood and glass and stone. Its walls were his ears. Its windows, his eyes. He was aware of every minute occurrence that happened within the scope of its rooms and towers and halls.

He thought he’d go insane.

But he learned to cope. Just as men and women learned to sift through the confusing barrage of stimuli that assaulted their senses every moment of every day and focus on only one or two details, just as their bodies carried on their life functions without the necessity for direct attention from the consciousness, so he learned to be particular as to what he focused upon.

Sanity returned. He allowed the residents their privacy.

And he found a place to store the core of what made him who he was—a spark of identity that he kept separate and nurtured so that he would always be Jamie, still individual, not just the ghostly spirit of the House in its entirety. His father had done the same, he realized, when he found residual memories of Nathan Tamson’s presence in the observatory. That part of the House had been his father’s choice as to where he would maintain his individuality; just as Jamie’s grandfather Anthony had chosen Sara’s Tower in his own time of ghostly custodianship.

Jamie chose Memoria—the computer mainframe that had become so much a part of his life in the last years that he was flesh and blood. He had been an Arcanologist then—a self-coined word to accompany another that he’d also created to describe his life’s work: Arcanology, the study of secrets. As time passed, he discovered he could maintain that work in his present state, though due to the limitations that were inherent in lacking a physical body, it wasn’t an easy task. And it wasn’t the same.

But this new life-after-death could
never
be the same as the life he’d left behind. Survival of the mind, of his identity, was a godsend—he couldn’t deny it—but there were things he missed with an intensity that sometimes had the madness that had plagued his first few weeks in his new existence come licking at the corners of his mind once again.

The lack of physical sensation was one of the worst.

He could feel the sun, the wind, the rain on the roof and walls of the House, but those tactile impressions couldn’t begin to compete with the memory of sun-warmed skin and the wind in his face, the glory of a summer rainstorm when he would stand on the porch, the rain splattering against the legs of his pants, dampening the cloth, the air crackling with energy, being half-blinded by flares of lightning, deafened by thunder. Or skating on the canal on a winter’s day when the air was so cold your breath froze, the sun like diamonds on the ice, every sense and thought shocked into exaggeration....

Being
alive
.

How could anything compete with life?

Running a close second to the loss of physical sensation, he felt the lack of the exchange of ideas that had filled so many of his days in his earlier existence. Through Memoria, he could communicate with Blue and others. He had access to all the material he’d entered into the computer’s memory banks before he’d died. Blue and, later, Ginny read articles to him from more recent journals. But none of that was—
could
—
be
the same, either.

What he had really missed was the voluminous correspondence he’d maintained with like-minded individuals in every part of the world. He couldn’t write to them, because for all practical intents and purposes, he was dead.

It was Esmeralda who’d found a solution to that—a solution so simple he wondered that he’d never thought of it himself. With her help, he created John Morley, a “close and dear friend of Jamie Tams” who took it upon himself to get in touch with all of Jamie’s old correspondents. New—for them—friendships blossomed, and soon “John Morley” had as voluminous a correspondence as ever Jamie’d had. John Morley began to contribute to the same journals that Jamie once had, and if anyone noticed the similarity in writing style between Jamie’s previous work and that of his friend, no mention was made of it that he ever saw.