Page 35 of Aftermarket Afterlife

—Jane Harrington-Price

Inside a somewhat damaged carnival tent surrounded by a bloodbath, just outside of Boise, Idaho

ICOULD HEARALICErampaging around the outside of the tent as I reappeared inside, and a horrifying, inhuman screech as Sam leapt down from the Ferris wheel to join her. With Sarah holding the remaining Covenant members stationary, it seemed almost unfair to pit them against two of our nastiest physical fighters, but only almost.

I didn’t know how Leonard had been able to break free of her control for as long as he had, and I honestly wasn’t sure it mattered anymore. I manifested in the tent to find Annie on her knees and wreathed in flame, so bright it hurt my eyes. She was kneeling over Jane, who wasn’t shying away from the heat, not even as Annie pressed burning hands against her chest, trying to stem the blood. Jane wasn’t moving.

Jane wasn’t in my head anymore, either. She had dropped out of the shining mental map that I normally had of the entire family, leaving a blank space behind, with nothing to fill it but the sound of silence, like the wind blowing through a graveyard. Silence has a sound. That may seem like folk-music lyrical bullshit, but it’s truer than it sounds. Normal silence is shallow. You can break it with a hit. This was deep and thick, as sticky as molasses and twice as likely to drag me down. Eternity was on the other side of this silence, and if I didn’t break out of it soon, I was going to get a closer look than I had ever wanted.

What is a babysitter when her charges are dead and gone? A parent who loses a child is expected to grieve. Was I?

I walked toward Annie, grief causing me to lose my hold on my carefully modernized image. My clothes moved back in time by a decade with every step, until I was wearing the skirt and jacket I’d had on when I died, out of date and out of place and very, very young. Only my hair didn’t change back to what it used to be. Ghosts like Rose, who consciously chose to change their hair, can shift it around; people like me can’t. I was a blonde when I was alive, and I have white hair now, because I got it from the crossroads. There’s no changing back when I didn’t change for myself.

“Annie,” I said. The fire on her hands went out, but she still kept pressing down on Jane’s chest, the blood now visible around her splayed fingers, clearly trying to perform some form of CPR. Jane didn’t move. “Annie.”

“He shot her.” She raised her face toward me, burning tears rolling down her cheeks. She was crying fire. Actual tears would have evaporated from the heat before they could fall. It was as terrifying as it was terrible. “He just...We were...The gunfire had stopped, and we were starting to get off the ground so we could go and see what was...what was happening, and then Leonard was in the doorway again and he...heshother!”

That was the shot we’d seen him fire. Either his aim was very good or he had managed to get very lucky; from the blood on Jane’s shirt and the placement of the scorch marks left by Annie’s hand, he had managed to catch her to the left of her sternum, a single shot that would have nicked her heart at the very least, if it hadn’t pierced it outright. Fran’s pistol was on the ground by Jane’s outstretched hand, having fallen with her, and I could only hope that she had been the one to fire the shot that knocked that bastard down.

Jane’s eyes were open, and she hadn’t blinked once since I came back into the tent. The sound of gunshots and flesh being struck had faded from outside, replaced by Alice howling, the primal, shattered misery of an animal that had just seen its child die.

“Annie, can you put out the fire?”

Annie blinked like she didn’t understand what I was saying. I reached my hand toward her, and she took it, flames flickering out as she got back to her feet. Only the burning tears remained, rivulets of lava trickling down her face to drop, sizzling, to the ground. The hard-packed earth wasn’t giving them any purchase, and she had thus far failed to set the tent ablaze. Hopefully, she would keep it that way.

“I’ll be right back,” I told her, urgently. “If Alice, or Sam and Sarah, come looking for me, tell them I’ll beright back.”

I waited until she nodded slowly, eyes dull and confused, then dropped down into the twilight.

Earth’s reality is sort of like an onion. There are layers to it. Virtually everyone who’s alive shares one layer, commonly referred to as the daylight—much like the layers of the ocean, which are named for how much light gets through, the layers of reality are named for how much sun gets through. Using names connected to the sun means there’s no cultural value attached to them, no misunderstandings that attach themselves to words like “heaven” or “hell.” Those places exist, but they’re neighborhoods, not levels.

When humans die, if they’re going to stick around and haunt the living, they appear first on a level called the twilight. Immediately below the daylight, it’s as close to the world of the living as you can get without actually becoming manifest. Most new ghosts don’t have the strength for the daylight, not yet, which is why you don’t hear a lot of stories about murder victims whose ghosts stay standing after their bodies fall down, or phantoms testifying at their killer’s trials.

Seen in the twilight, the area around me was a confused mess, half field at its most verdant and ideal, half Campbell Family Carnival in its heyday. This wasn’t the carnival as I had ever known it—this was Fran’s carnival, the show as it existed before I was born. Everything was bright and new and perfect, and if it was also patched and well loved, there was no contradiction here. What’s loved endures in the twilight.

But not everything leaves an actual ghost. People, especially, can choose whether or not they want to linger unless they die in one of the ways that casts them in a preset role the universe has an interest in seeing filled. Why does the world want white ladies and phantom hitchhikers so much? No idea. Above my paygrade.

I looked frantically around the ghost of the tent. There were carnies there, but no one I recognized; these were people who had died with the show, somewhere on the road, and just chosen to never leave. They traveled with the carnival still, even if they never once stepped into the daylight, and their homely haunting helped to give the show its soul. The Campbell Family Carnival was a living thing, in part because its bones were full of ghosts.

It was still alive, even after the blow it had been dealt by the Covenant. Looking around, I had the sense of something deeply wounded but perhaps not fatally so, something that was doing its best to keep breathing. If they were willing to rebuild, the Carnival would be there to help them.

But I didn’t see Jane. No matter how hard I looked, I didn’t see her. I paused, catching my breath and trying to steady myself. Human ghosts only linger when they have something they need to finish. Maybe she—

I stopped. Human ghosts. Fran was half-Kairos, and even though the bloodline had been diluted, her descendants were never going to be entirely human. I looked down, although directions really didn’t matter here, breathed slowly in through my nose and out through my mouth, anddropped, out of the twilight, into the layer below.

Into the starlight.

If the daylight is the land of the living and the twilight is the land of the human dead, the starlight is where the nonhuman intelligences go. They may have shared the twilight once, before things like the Covenant of St. George made it impossible for most of the Earth’s occupants to feel safe sharing an afterlife with humanity, but these days, if you’re dead and not human, the twilight’s not where you hang out.

If the twilight seemed like a somewhat oversaturated and nostalgic version of the living world, stepping into the starlight was like shifting into the fantasy-novel iteration of the same setting. The carnival tent was gone, replaced by the nacreous shell of a great snail, drilled through with holes to support the poles that had been used to string the trapeze. Trapeze artists swung overhead, their bodies angled to form the proper shapes, their gauzy wings trailing behind them like banners.

Whatever species they had belonged to must have been extinct in the daylight, because I’d never seen anything like them before, and it was difficult not to gawk in the brief instant when wonder knocked the grieving out of me.

But grief is a strong opponent, and I had barely managed to catch my breath before it came surging back, wrapping its arms around me and squeezing tightly enough that if I had still actuallyneededto breathe, the air would have been knocked out of me. The habits of seeming to be alive come with appearing alive, and were easier to disregard here, two layers below the lands of the living. I looked around.

Like the tent above it, the shell was occupied by carnies. Not as many, and all of them in some way visibly inhuman, allowing themselves to walk freely as they could never have done in the daylight. The ground was covered in a film of tiny white flowers with lavender stems and leaves, and the sunlight through the shell gleamed like it had come shining through stained glass. If I went outside the snail, I knew I would see wonders such as I had never imagined, the sort of idealized carnival that could only exist in an afterlife designed by minds that weren’t human and had never wanted to be.

I couldn’t focus on the magic of the starlight. I had to find Jane. I looked around again, searching for anything that seemed out of place, and there, under one of the tables, I spotted a child. She was tiny and blonde, wearing a pleated plaid skirt over black tights, with a white blouse under a brown vest. She had her knees hugged to her chest and her face pressed up against them, and I blinked out, reappearing next to her under the table.

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