Page 38 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“It’s not constant anymore,” said Annie. “She’s been learning to control it.”

That was sort of terrifying. I’ve never picked up on what the rest of the family calls “the hum”—a sort of low-grade psychic static that tells them a telepath is nearby. Something about being dead makes it difficult for me.

“I thought that was impossible,” I said.

“That word means something different when it’s applied to Sarah these days,” said Annie, and glanced over to where Alice stood next to Jane. “Is there really nothing you can do?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Maybe before the crossroads went away, it would have been possible, but—”

“But it would have been expensive as hell, and we would have all been sorry,” said Annie. “Yeah. I get it. I— Fuck, Elsie is not going to handle this well.”

“None of us are,” I said. “How far away do you think Bon is by now?”

“A routewitch without anyone else in the car? She could be in Australia.”

“Any chance we can get her back here?”

“I can hike toward the highway until I get cell signal and try calling her,” said Annie. “But Mary, we arenotgoing straight to New York. We have to go home. We have to take...” Her voice broke, and she faltered. “We have to take Aunt Jane home before we can go anywhere else.”

“We should probably find out where else they’ve hit,” I said. “It won’t just have been New York and the carnivals, no matter how much Leonard wanted you.”

“I...” She stopped. “I can call Uncle Drew. He won’t tell anyone that Aunt Jane’s dead, even if I slip and he figures it out. But he may know if anyone else has been attacked.”

No one gets the gossip like a bogeyman. It was a little odd to realize that with Jane gone, Drew was going to be the main source of family information. I sighed and turned toward the tent entrance.

“Where are you going?”

“You try to phone Bon. I’m going to try to summon Rose.” Rose was a lot easier to summon when she was a hitchhiking ghost whose death was, technically, my fault. These days, what with her being in direct service to the gods of the twilight, she can be a little difficult to rouse. Hopefully, the fact that she was still a psychopomp—more of one than I’ll ever be—and a member of a family she’s always been associated with had just died would mean that her attention was already slanted in this direction. Hopefully, she’d come when I called.

Rose and I aren’t close, but we aren’t enemies, and that’s about as good as it gets, given that she’s dead because of me. Sometimes you take what you can get.

I stepped outside. It was late afternoon by this point, and the sky was starting to shift tones, color becoming deeper and richer without actually getting any darker. The world is saturated in the late afternoon. Blood stained the scrubby grass and the outside of the tent, and bodies were scattered around the perimeter, grisly reminders of Alice and Sam’s assault, which would never have been possible it not for Sarah holding them in place.

I still wasn’t sure about the ethical ramifications of her just holding them there while they were torn apart. But then, I’d been on the verge of asking her to have them shoot each other—would that have been any better? Any better at all? The ethics of battle are complicated things, and sometimes self-contradictory.

There was no sign of Sarah. I could see Sam over by the Ferris wheel, scaling the rickety structure with more care than he’d shown when we were in an emergency situation, then descending with the children he’d stowed there, bringing them down one and two at a time. It was a slow process, but every child he brought down was immediately grabbed and whisked away by their parents, who hurried them toward the boneyard without looking back.

A lot of municipalities put up with carnivals and carnie folk on sufferance. They know their citizens could use an entertainment, something to break them out of their daily grind, and carnivals are good for the economy; plenty of people, having decided that carnival food is too expensive, will buy coolers full of snacks and drinks from local shops and load them into their cars, where half of them will go uneaten as the smell of a fresh funnel cake proves impossible for mortal men to resist. Carnies make money, and then they spend money before they move on, and that’s all well and good, but far too many people think it would be better if the carnies spent twice that in bail and then never returned.

When the police inevitably showed up here, it was going to get ugly, fast. These folks were just getting out ahead of the tragedy. I wanted to blame them. I didn’t have the heart. Instead, I took one last look at the devastation around the tent and froze.

Sarah was missing. So was Leonard. Out of all the fallen, his body wasn’t where it had dropped. Had anyone checked to make sure that he was dead? And how had he been able to break Sarah’s control to begin with? It was a question I didn’t want to spend too much time dwelling on, but which would have to be answered eventually.

Shuddering, I walked off along the midway, putting the tent behind me and focusing on the most devastated slice of the carnival. They were going to be years rebuilding, assuming they could rebuild at all. It was possible that this would be the end of the Campbell Family Carnival, and the thought was a knife to the heart, almost unendurable.

It had already been the end of Jane.

Sweet, shy, silly Jane, who never met a wet earthworm she didn’t want to rescue from the pavement, who used to gather snails when she was little, building popsicle stick and cardboard “circuses” for them and making them the stars of their own snail big tops. Jane, who had inherited her mother’s hair and sharp eye for target shooting and inability to let go of a grudge. How were we supposed to go on existing in a world that didn’t have Jane in it anymore? It seemed impossible, but the other option was just as bad, and so it seemed we were going to have no real choice in the matter.

Once I was a reasonable distance away from the tent, I stopped, and let go of solidity, if not the daylight. I stayed exactly where I was, standing on the skin of the land of the living, the wind whistling through my insubstantial bones, a ghost where no ghost belonged. “Rose Marshall,” I said, aloud. “I was responsible for the bargain that eventually killed you. I raised the woman who brought you to a family that could keep you human, even as the afterlife tried to wear your humanity away. I know the town where they buried your bones, for mine are buried there as well, and I have need of you, if you can hear me. You were a hitchhiker once. Hitchhike your way to me.”

I closed my eyes and bowed my head, aware of the moment when my chin touched my chest without actually feeling it. Being insubstantial is more difficult than it sounds. Ghosts in the daylight have three states—solid, not solid, and invisible. Both solid and not solid require focus and effort, because you have to convince the light there’s something to refract off of, while not convincing the air that it can’t go through you. It’s a complicated in-between state, and there are ghosts who never figure it out.

I remained that way long enough that the sounds from the Ferris wheel died down and I started to hear vehicles pulling out of the boneyard, while people moved past me to begin scavenging what had survived from the stalls and games on the midway. The insurance would probably write this off as arson and refuse to pay out; if this wasn’t the end of the show, it would only be because the Campbells had advantages other carnivals didn’t: allies with deep pockets who were willing to pay to keep them on the road and keep the cryptids of North America just a little bit safer. But it wouldn’t be the same. They’d lost rides that had been running for fifty years or more, and they’d lost people, and they’d lost a sliver of the trust that had kept them going for so long.

Everything changes, and not always for the better. I breathed in, smelling only dust; I breathed out, and thought of roses. One rose, in specific, the Graveyard Rose, the Girl in the Green Silk Gown. I was never a haunting, not like Rose was. While she was hitchhiking the backroads of America and spreading her story from one coast to another, I was changing diapers and wiping noses and trying to navigate the changing trends of entertainment for toddlers. So she got a few dozen names, depending on the ways her story spread, while I remained a true phantom. I was just the Babysitter. And that was good enough for me.

“Rose, we need you,” I said, and scowled. “Please don’t make me sing.”

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