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

make friends easily. I could and did.
    But I got his dark baggage, too. A quick temper, because he held his in check. A recklessness, because he didn’t take chances—
    Well, you get the picture. I was the opposite parts of him. Elsewhere in his journals he describes our physical differences:
    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.
    Basically, I opened my eyes to find that I was this seven-year-old girl who knew everything about being a seven-year-old boy, but nothing about being herself.
    I suppose it could have been dangerous for me, trying to make my way through the big bad world all on my own at such a tender age, but it didn’t quite work out that way. For one thing, when a shadow is created … yes, she’s all the unwanted parts of the one who cast her, but she takes an equal amount of … I don’t know … spirit, perhaps, or experience … some kind of essence from the borderlands. So right away, I was this unwanted baggage and something more.
    What are the borderlands?
    Once we started talking to each other, Christy was always asking, “Where do you go when you’re not in this world?”
    I wouldn’t tell him for the longest time—as much because I like to hang on to the “woman of mystery” image he has of me as for any logical reason. But one night when he was going through one of his periodic bouts of self-questioning, I relented.
    â€œTo the fields beyond the fields,” I finally told him, explaining how they lie all around us and inside us.
    What I didn’t explain is that they’re part of the border countries, the fields that lie between this world he knows so well and the otherworld— Fairyland, the spirit world, the dreamlands, call it what you will. That otherworld is what the mystics and poets are always reaching out for, few of them ever realizing that the borderlands in between are a realm all their own and just as magical. They lie thin as gauze in some places—that’s where it’s the easiest to slip through from one world into the other—and broad as the largest continent elsewhere.
    The beings that inhabit this place are sometimes called the Eadar. Most of them were created out of imagination, existing only so long as someone believed in them, though it’s also the place where shadows like me usually go. The Eadar call it Meadhon. The Kickaha call it
ÃbitawehÃakÃ,
the halfway world. I just think of it as the middleworid. The borderlands. But I didn’t get into any of that with Christy.
    What I also didn’t explain is what I was just telling you about how a shadow takes as much of her initial substance from something in the borderlands as it does from the one casting her. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s just from the air itself. Maybe something in the borderland casts another shadow and people like me are born where the two shadows meet. What I do know is that I had an immediate connection to that place and when I first slipped over, I met my guide.
    I say “my guide,” like everybody gets one, but that’s not necessarily the case. I just know there was someone waiting for me when I crossed over.
    Being new to everything, I simply accepted Mumbo at face value. It was only in the years to follow, as I began to acquire a personal history of experience and values, that I thought, isn’t this typical? When other people get spirit guides or totems, they’re mysterious power animals, maybe wise old men or women, like the grandparents you maybe never had.
    I got Mumbo.
    She was basically a mushroom brown sphere the size of a large beach ball with spindly little arms and legs that were folded close to her body when she wasn’t using them to roll herself from one place to another. Much like those Balloon Men that Christy wrote about in his