Spiritwalk (32 page)

She’d been hearing about him from Blue and Esmeralda ever since she’d moved to the House, Now, finally, she was getting the chance to meet him.

That he had died some seven years ago didn’t seem odd. Not in this place. Not in this forest. Not after having been aware of his presence in the House for the past couple of years. What was odd was finally seeing him in the flesh, one hand stroking his beard, the intensity of his gaze lightened by a flickering twinkle that lay in the back of his gray eyes.

“People are always looking for me,” he said. “And then, when they find me, they’re not always pleased.”

Emma smiled. “I’m not scared,” she said. “Blue’s told me all about you. He said you can get spacey, but you’re certainly not dangerous.”

“It’s not that I’m a physical threat,” he said.

I guess not, Emma thought, taking in his small frame. He looked to be in his fifties and though he didn’t seem particularly frail, he wasn’t exactly Arnold Schwarzenegger either.

“Then what is it about you that bothers people?” she asked.

“I tell them things they don’t want to hear.”

“Like... ?”

He smiled. “Through what you perceive to be a quirk of fate, but which was, in fact, inevitable, you acquired a gift that allows you communion with what most would believe to be the supernatural. Though there are many who hunger desperately for such a gift, you deny it. You have been shown, not once but many times, how it can not only enrich your life, but allow you the opportunity to leave the world a better place than it was when you were born into it, yet you refuse it.”

Emma shifted uncomfortably as he spoke. The hint of humor had disappeared from his eyes. His gaze seemed to impale her with its ferocity.

“I...” she began.

“Your attitude bespeaks not only immaturity, but a grave irresponsibility. What you do belittles not only you, but the gift itself.”

What he was saying struck too close to home.

“I don’t even know what it is,” she said. “I don’t understand it!”

He had absolutely no sympathy for her.

“You haven’t tried to learn.”

“But I have. It’s just that whenever I talk to Esmeralda about it, my head starts to spin and I get sick to my stomach.”

“That’s only fear,” he said.

“I’m not like you and her,” Emma said. “I don’t get off on all of this weird stuff. I didn’t ask for anybody to give me anything.”

He shook his head. “That’s not true. You called to the spirits of this world, time and again; you walked in the forest and spoke their names. Season by season, you paid homage to mysteries, great and small.”

Emma looked at him like he was insane, but then she realized what he was talking about. It was when she was in her teens. When she and Esmeralda were corresponding. When the well of creativity that first started her drawing seemed bottomless and the sketches and paintings came alive under her fingers with almost no conscious effort or thought.

She used to walk in the woods and fields around her parents’ house and literally talk to the trees as though they could understand her. She’d feel the touch of a breeze on her cheek and call out a greeting to Esmeralda, for wasn’t Esmeralda the Westlin Wind, just as she was the Lady of Autumn, who carried the heart of the season in her breast?

“I was just a kid then,” she said.

“The spirits don’t judge a being by its age, only by its integrity.”

“You’re not being fair!” Emma told him. She was only just holding back tears. “I’m not a dishonest person.”

But he only looked at her.

“I’m not.”

“You share your feelings with others?” he asked. “You don’t hurt those you love with your silences?”

“I... I...”

The torrent broke from inside her. She wept, head bowed, face in her hands. He made no move to comfort her, only waited until the tears ebbed, the torrent subsided.

“I... try...” she finally said in a small voice.

She looked up and saw, through a tear-blurred gaze, that he was grinning at her.

“Do you see?” he asked.

“See?”

“What I meant. No one likes to hear what I have to say.”

Anger arose like a dark cloud in her at the smug tone of his voice.

“You bastard!” she cried, her voice still husky from her tears. “This is all some big joke to you, isn’t it?”

“To ignore humor is to view the world with only one eye.”

“You’re not Jamie. You’re not at all like Blue said you were.”

His features went suddenly serious. “Understand this, Emma Fenn. The Otherworld changes people. Without a strong sense of self, or of purpose, it will transform you into your deepest desires or fears.”

It wasn’t so much what he said as how he said it that cut through Emma’s anger, eroding its hold on her. An uneasy feeling stole through her.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Half the world is night,” he told her. “Do you understand what I mean by that?”

Emma nodded. “That’s because of the way the earth turns on its axis. It’s always night somewhere..... “

Her voice trailed off as he shook his head.

“No. It’s nothing so simple, yet it’s the most basic truth you could ever learn. A hard truth.” He tapped his chest. “Inside us lies every possibility that is available to a sentient being. Every darkness, every light. It is the choices we make that decide who or what we will be.

“On your world, they speak of one’s environment, how it affects individuals in their formative years. Your family, your friends, your social standing, your schooling... they all shape and mold you into the person that you become. By the time you gain an awareness of the process, you’ve already
become
who you will be. It’s only those with a great strength of will, and a vigorous awareness of self, who can change themselves.

“Do you follow me so far?”

Emma slowly nodded.

“In the Otherworld, this is accentuated. If they abide here too long, the weak-willed go mad; even a strong personality can have his or her strengths undermined, can be made weak and so be affected.”

“I don’t understand why you’re telling me this.”

“I’ve a twofold purpose,” he replied. “The first is to warn you that you and those who have come with you to this realm are in danger—from themselves as much as from the influences of the Otherworld. The second is to explain what it is that makes your gift so important. Because of the understanding—the insight—that it allows you, you are capable of helping those who turned to the night by showing them their options. Not in words, not by long tedious explanations or manipulations, but by simply making them aware.”

“But the trees...” Emma began.

They didn’t talk to her about this. They simply whispered a sense of mystery to her.

“Places can be affected in a similar fashion. Have you never felt uncomfortable for no good reason in one place, yet perfectly fine in another?”

She nodded, waiting for him to go on, but he fell silent once more.

“So,” she said finally. “I’m supposed to be some kind of do-gooder, running around saving people and places from themselves? Is that what you’re saying?”

He shook his head. “No. You are a vessel into which the potential to help has been poured. No one—no person of your world, no spirit of this world—can make you be what you’re not or what you don’t wish to be.”

Emma sighed. “I... I’m just not much good at that kind of thing. My own life is screwed up enough without my thinking I can tell people how to live theirs.”

“It isn’t necessary for you to confront each person on an individual basis. Can you remember how you felt when you
were
communicating through your artwork? Not just the sense of completion, but the sense of rightness—the sense that you had brought to life something that could live beyond your sphere of being, that held in it far more potential than you ever realized you were imbuing in the work?”

Emma shifted uncomfortably. It had been so long since she’d felt good about anything she did. But thinking back to those days, she could remember—not so much what she had lost, as that she had lost... something.

“Vaguely,” she said finally.

“And were you ever moved or changed by the creative work of another?”

“Oh, sure. But—” She paused. “I see.”

“Good.”

“And the places?” she asked then.

“You can only do what you can when you find yourself in a place that requires your help.”

“I still don’t think I can do it.”

He smiled. “You don’t have to.”

Emma just looked at him. After this huge pep talk in which she’d learned far more about the Autumn Gift than she’d ever thought she could—learned and not been scared of the knowledge—he was now telling her that none of it mattered?

“I don’t get it,” she said.

“You can leave it behind—here in the Otherworld. Return it to those who gifted you with it in the first place.”

Emma looked at the cathedraling trees that encircled the glen and wondered if he meant them.

“Just like that?” she asked.

“No. But I could show you. It’s not an entirely... arduous procedure.”

Emma’s eyes narrowed, suspicion flaring in her. There’d been those who’d tried to tear the gift from her. Was he just trying a different approach to reach the same goal?

“What’s in it for you?” she asked, wondering why she even cared.

Because wasn’t this what she wanted—to be free of the damned thing? To be free of influences—the gifts, those of the people around her....

“I want nothing from you,” he said, then added, “no, that’s not entirely true. I do require your help, but in an unrelated matter.”

“Which is?”

“Tamson House. It needs rescuing.”

Emma looked at him, not sure she’d heard him correctly. “Come again?”

“Tamson House stands at a crossroads between the worlds. It is our entrance to your world, your entrance to ours. There are very few such places still extant in your world, and fewer still so... pure. Why do you think it is the gathering place of so many creative individuals?”

That was true, Emma thought. She might not get much inspiration in it, but it certainly drew more than its share of artists, musicians and writers, not to mention those who were interested in the paranormal or the old-religion people that Blue called the Pagan Party.

“There is a certain man in your world,” he went on, “who... covets the House’s power. He has been sick for a very long time—a special kind of sickness: other people simply don’t exist in his worldview. He isn’t alone in this illness, but in him it has become an art in amorality. He means to use the power of the House to rejuvenate himself.”

“But isn’t that kind of what everybody does there?” Emma said. “Esmeralda always talks about how it’s a haven, that it gives people a chance to open themselves up that they’d never get outside its walls and then the House fills them with its energy.”

“True, but they return as much as they take. This man will take it all and give nothing back. When he is done, Tamson House will be a building like any other—a little larger perhaps, but it will have lost its bond with the Mystery. And the man—an amoral such as he will be capable of great harm once he has taken the potency of Tamson House’s spirit into his own.

“Normally the House’s guardian is there to deal with such a situation. Tamson House is not a place which suffers the mean-spirited lightly.”

That much Emma knew. She’d overheard more than once in its halls people talking about how the House seemed to take care of itself. Bad things just didn’t seem to happen in it. She’d even felt a sense of that herself, though she’d never really thought about it until just this moment.

“With the House’s guardian gone,” her companion went on, “the House lies helpless. And this man... he has already begun to feed.”

Something bothered Emma about what he was telling her, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

“You must find a way back to where the House stands in your world; then you must find and stop this man.”

That brought her out of her reverie.

“What—me?”

He shrugged. “Whoever will do it. Your friend Blue perhaps?”

“Why don’t you do it your—” she began, but then she had it. Now she knew what had been troubling her. “You’re supposed to be the guardian,” she went on. “Why don’t you just stop it?”

“I can’t get through. I’ve tried. The man was expecting my interference and set up certain... safeguards to ensure that I would be unable to stop him.”

Emma studied him for a long moment. “You’re not Jamie Tams,” she said.

This time she spoke from logic, rather than anger.

“I never said I was.”

“But you never said you weren’t either. And you look just like him.”

“I wanted to appear in a shape that would seem nonthreatening to you, yet one you might also hear out.”

“So what do you really look like?” she asked, not really sure she wanted to know.

“That’s not important.”

“Okay. Just tell me who you are.”

“Someone you wouldn’t trust if you knew.”

“I don’t trust you now.”

“You’d trust me less if you had my name,” he said.

“But you still expect me to help you?”

“You’re not just helping me; you’ll be helping yourself... and your friends.”

“How do I know that?”

The only answer he gave was a shrug. She tried to stare him down, but he returned her gaze with just a hint of laughter in the back of his eyes. The worst thing about all of this, she realized, was that—God knew why—but she
did
trust him. Maybe it was because he’d managed to articulate things for her that she’d never been able to grasp before. Esmeralda had tried often enough, but for some reason, the words just weren’t there for her to use.

“I’ll have to talk to the others,” she said finally.

He nodded. “Just remember, time’s running out. Every hour you stay here is that much more dangerous for many of those who accompanied you to this place. And every hour, our enemy grows stronger.”

“Okay. But I still have to talk to the others.”

“Do what you must.”

“What’s this man’s name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, where can we find him?”