Page 60 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“Not a lot of dead bodies in the twilight,” I said, somewhat weakly. The other lumberjacks had followed him out, and we formed an unsteady processional line as we turned to walk back toward the city.

Nothing had changed about the route, even down to Mr. Miller and his rake, but when we approached the city itself, I saw how muchthathad changed. The buildings looked older, the architecture rougher, like they had been put together by people who were only concerned with function, and had never considered that form might matter. The roads were unpaved, save for the Rainbow Road, and the people looked as rough as their surroundings. The modern splashes were fewer, and more subdued; despite their brighter colors, they looked almost hidden in the scene, like they were trying to evade notice.

“Welcome to the Clearing,” said the short lumberjack. “This is the oldest version of Portland that’s remembered enough to appear in the twilight. Not much in the way of booze here, but plenty of fights, if that’s your thing. Doctor’s this way.”

“Do you only have the one?”

“Not that much call for doctoring when everyone around you is already dead,” he said.

I considered that as we walked into the city proper and down a side lane that couldn’t be called a street by even the most charitable interpretation. Everything around us looked like it was made of wood, and I didn’t recognize the layout of the streets at all. That, at least, made sense: like so many other cities, Portland had a bad case of burning down at one point, and the municipal authorities had been able to rebuild with a little more intent than their original semi-organic settlement.

We stopped at a small office with a shingle outside that read DECLANMARK, DOCTOR OFPHYSIC.

The short lumberjack stepped forward and knocked. A moment later, the door swung open and a headless body in a white coat stepped out.

“Can’t talk when you don’t have a mouth, doc,” said the lumberjack. “We have Miss Mary here, and she has a corpse that needs some doctoring done.”

I stepped forward in turn, to address the figure, who I presumed to be a Dullahan. The headless spirits dwell mostly in the starlight, but some of them settle in the twilight. It made sense for a Dullahan with medical aspirations to set up shop to treat the things that actuallydolive here, in the lands of the dead—things like beán sidhe and the washers at the well, creatures that were born down in the midnight and move freely through all the levels of our world.

“My name is Mary Dunlavy,” I said, and gestured to Jane. “This was Jane Price. She was shot by men who placed a tracking charm in the bullet, and I pulled her body into the twilight to keep those men from finding the signal and using it to close in on the rest of my family.”

The doctor held up a finger, signaling for me to hold on, then turned and went back inside. When he came back, he was holding his head, which looked perfectly normal, dark-haired and bespectacled, except for the part where it wasn’t attached to a body. “Are you telling me the family you haunt is aware of your presence?” he asked. “I know there aren’t rules as such dictating how human ghosts interact with the living, but that seems a bit unwise, if you ask me.”

“I’m a caretaker,” I said.

He frowned, then snapped the fingers of his free hand. “Dunlavy,” he said. “Of course. You’re the crossroads escapee. We were all very impressed when we heard what you’d accomplished. Bring the girl inside. I’ll get the tracker out.”

“Thank you,” I said, and stepped through the door, John behind me with Jane. “I want to take her home so she can be properly buried, and that means I need her body to be untraceable.”

The office was almost a stock photo out of a western movie, with shelves of equipment and odd fluids lining the walls, a framed diploma, and a large polished wood table covered by a white sheet. “I hate it when we shift to the Clearing,” he muttered, motioning for John to put Jane on the table. “All my good equipment is in Stumptown.” He set his head on the stump of his neck, turning to face me. “I can remove the tracker for you, if you don’t mind the small matter of my fee.”

“How much do you charge?” I asked.

“For post-death surgery on someone this freshly deceased? A kidney,” he said. “She’s been gone too long to be an organ donor, and it’s not like she’ll miss it at this point. It’ll just be one additional incision.”

Bartering with someone else’s body seemed wrong; bartering with Jane’s body seemed even worse. At the same time, he was right, and she wasn’t going to miss the kidney. The real deciding factor, though, was that he was a Dullahan; he wouldn’t give the kidney to anyone else. It wouldn’t exist to be passed on. “All right,” I said.

He smiled—a perfectly normal expression that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a human face—and took a tray of instruments down from one of the shelves. “I’ll understand if you don’t want to watch this,” he said. “I wouldn’t, if this had been a friend of mine.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said, even as the lumberjacks who’d followed me in mumbled that they’d wait on the porch and filed back out of the office, leaving me alone with the doctor and the corpse.

“All right.” He picked up a scalpel and a small set of forceps, and bent over the body.

What followed doesn’t bear description. But true to his word, removing a kidney was only one additional incision, which he made with quick efficiency, and digging the bullet out of her chest only took him a minute. It would have been quicker, but the bullet had fragmented upon entry, and he needed to find the pieces in order to be sure the actual tracker had been removed. There was no point in taking her back without doing what we’d come here for.

He dropped the tracker into a tray, and slipped the kidney into his mouth, swallowing without bothering to chew. I watched the whole thing. When her brother asked me what had happened while we were in the lands of the dead, I needed to be able to answer him with complete honesty. Finally, Dr. Mark turned to face me.

“She’s ready for you,” he said. “Do you want me to put the bullet fragments into a bag?”

“Please.” Odds were good the transition into the twilight had been enough to short out the tracker, rendering it nicely inert, but on the off chance that it hadn’t, I was going to take the damn thing and throw it into the sea. Leaving it here wouldn’t do any good.

He picked up the pieces, dropping them into a plastic baggie entirely out of time with the things around it, and offered it to me. I took it with a nod, tucking it into my pocket.

“Thank you again,” I said.

“It’s not often I get to operate on human bodies, alive or dead,” he said. “If you have another one, please, feel free to bring it by.”

“I will.”

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