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

knew so many people in common, you’d have thought we’d have run into each other a lot sooner than we did.
    Something similar happened with Christy, though in his case I’d actually seen him around before. I just hadn’t known who he was.
    The way we met, I was walking down Lee Street and saw Geordie at a table on the patio of the Rusty Lion with some fellow whose face I couldn’t see because his back was to me. By the time I realized who it was, it was too late to retreat because Geordie’d already seen me. I made myself go up to their table to say hello.
    You see, I’d already noticed Christy and been attracted to him long before we actually met. The first time was at a poetry reading. I spied him across the room and there was something about him that I liked enough to almost give up my promise of not trying to connect with people at those things. But then I saw that he was with Aaran and a woman—that I didn’t get along with either—who worked for another paper. If they were his friends, I didn’t want to be one myself.
    I noticed him from time to time in the neighbourhood after that, usually on his own, but never put it together that this brother Geordie often talked about was the same person as this attractive stranger with his bad taste in friends.
    Turns out I was wrong about the friends. Christy has impeccable taste in them, not least because he dislikes Aaran about as much as I do, though not for all the same reasons.
    Once we got that out of the way, one thing led to another and … well, that’s how I came to be where I am now, living with Christy.
    I’ve learned to turn down my shine enough to get along in a crowd when I want to, but the price I paid for that is losing the voice in my head. And when I lost it, I lost my connection to whatever that big voodoo spirit in cyberspace might have been. I don’t dream about flying over circuit boards anymore. I don’t dream about pixels and streaming bands of electricity or any of that. Most of the time all those ideas just seem like some crazy notion I once had.
    But I don’t trust this flesh I’m wearing, either.
    I don’t trust the experiences that fill my head because they only date back to when I first appeared in this world. Like I said, I can follow a computer and paper trail tracing my background—where I was born, grew up, went to school—but I still can’t recall any of it.
    So, sometimes I still think that there used to be something else in my head, some vast world of information—or at least a connection to the spirit that people surfing on the Net can access as the Wordwood. Or perhaps it’s still there, but I’m cut off from it.
    I guess I’m not really sure of anything, except I know I’m in this world now. And I know I can count on Christy to stand by me.
    Most days that’s enough.

Christiana
    It was different for me,
    The first time I opened my eyes I knew exactly what I was: all the excess baggage that Christy didn’t want. How does he put it in his journal?
    â€¦
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 shadow.
    I know. It sounds desperately grim. But it wasn’t all bad. Because the things that people think they don’t want aren’t necessarily negative. Remember, they’re just little kids at the time. Their personalities are still only beginning to form. And all of this is happening on an instinctive, almost cellular level. It’s not like they’re actually thinking any of it through.
    Anyway, in my case …
    Even as a little boy, Christy shut people out. That let me be open.
    He was often so bloody serious—because he didn’t trust people enough to relax around them, I suppose—and that let me be cheerful.
    He didn’t