Page 20 of Installment Immortality

Seeing them like this—comfortable and domestic, not running for their lives or struggling to claw what fragments of joy they could out of a world where the clock was rapidly running out on them—healed something in my heart that I hadn’t known was still wounded. I smiled.

“I promise,” I said, and blew Alice a kiss, and was gone.

Five

“I sometimes wonder what it’s like for the ordinary dead. One minute they’re part of the world as everybody knows it, and the next they’re trapped on the outside, learning how much of everything they ever knew was a lie. It’s got to be an enormous shock to the system. I still wish they’d leave me alone, though.”

—Laura Campbell

Once again in Oregon, this time appearing in the kitchen of a small house in the city proper

JANE HAD ALWAYS HAD Acomplicated relationship with food. As one of the only members of her family not to choose fieldwork as a primary occupation, she’d been worried about gaining weight and not being able to handle the rare trips she actuallydidmake into the field, resulting in a life spent counting calories and looking for low-fat substitutions in her meals. I’ll give her this much: she never intentionally forced her flirtations with toxic diet culture on her children. While they might not have been able to find potato chips and candy in the pantry on a regular basis, she didn’t scold them when they brought those things home, or try to convince them to eat the same way she did.

Her complicated relationship with food had extended to her kitchen, which was basically always spotless. A dish would barelyhave time to hit the sink before it was washed, dried, and put back in the cabinet where it belonged. As I appeared in what had previously been Jane’s kitchen, the absolute proof of her death struck me even harder than the funeral pictures.

The sink was mounded with dishes, piled high enough that the threat of a cascade was impossible to ignore. A few pieces of flatware had already fallen on the floor, and I paused to pick them up and place them gently on the unnervingly sticky counter before taking a closer look around.

The trash can and recycling bin were both in a state similar to the sink, so full they threatened to overflow, while the compost bin was empty, devoid of the fruit cores and vegetable scraps I would have expected. The lights were off and the air was oddly stale, like no one had been lingering here for longer than it took to run in, grab something, and run away again for quite some time. Open boxes of sugared cereal and Pop-Tarts sat on the counter, next to a full flat of Coke cans. The message couldn’t have been clearer if it had actually been written on the whiteboard on the fridge: Jane didn’t live here anymore. Jane’s rules were no longer in effect.

I would have to rethink my normal “if there are no children in the house, always appear in the kitchen” approach to visiting the house after this. I shook my head and left the room, heading for the living room.

The house in Portland that Jane had shared with her husband and children was smaller than the compound outside the city, but so were some chain grocery stores. It was still respectably sized, large enough for both kids to have their own rooms while they were growing up, while Ted and Jane each had an office for their own use. Artie had moved downstairs to the basement as soon as he turned eighteen, preferring the isolation of his own level of the house to the comfort of a bedroom that didn’t also contain the washer and dryer. Elsie and Jane had promptly split his originalbedroom down the middle, using it for Elsie’s art studio and Jane’s overflow document storage.

Because the house was smaller, it had always had a more reliably lived-in feel to it, rather than feeling vaguely like a large hotel complex that was only half in use at any given time. That feeling wasn’t here anymore.

The hall was dark, the air thick enough with dust that I started to get annoyed on Jane’s behalf. She deserved better than to inherit the old cliché of “the woman does all the housework,” and while she’d been alive, that had never particularly struck me as the case. She and Ted both kept the house tidy, and as the children got older, I’d helped in teaching them how to clean up after themselves. Artie had been doing his own laundry since he was nine, and hadn’t even allowed me to help him fold it and put it away in years. And Elsie didn’t let anyone into her room for any reason short of “the world is actively on fire and you have the only extinguisher.”

Not that she’d ever been able to keep me out. Being able to walk through walls has its perks.

Frowning, I followed the hall to the living room, finding it empty, and turned to head upstairs to the second floor. That was usually where Ted could be found, if he was home. He and Jane had both worked out of their offices, her as a cryptid social worker—not a position that paid in any formal or legal sense, but which kept her more than busy enough to justify making it a full-time career—and him as a human social worker, which was an amusing inversion, given that she was (mostly) human, and he was a full-blooded Lilu. Somehow, it worked for them, like being a step removed from the species they were trying to support made it easier for them to see the answers.

The door to Jane’s office was securely closed when I reached the top of the stairs, and I hesitated for a moment before I walked through it, into the controlled chaos of her workspace.She had always done her best to keep things tidy in there, and she had never once succeeded; see also “taking half the spare room for her file boxes.” Papers have a tendency to cascade, even when they’re not being stored in a house also occupied by a colony of sapient talking rodents. And indeed, one of the shelves above her desk was dedicated to a small village of dollhouses, wood and plastic and surrounded by tiny picket fences, creating an idyllic mouse vacation destination. A hole in the wall behind the largest of the houses showed how they were able to stay so clean. The majority of the mice were in the attic, living their ordinary, messy lives out of the way. I walked over to the shelf, stopped, and cleared my throat.

“And lo, did the Violent Priestess not say, Listen to the Babysitter, For She Is Trying To Keep Everyone Safe? And was it not the commandment, from that day on, that the Babysitter Should Be Heeded at All Costs? Well, hi. I’m the babysitter, and I need to talk to someone.Withouta bunch of shouting or rejoicing. So if somebody could come and check in with me, I’d very much appreciate it. Thanks.”

Any sense of silliness I had about directly addressing unseen rodents had long since been beaten out of me by the reality of life among the Healys. I folded my hands behind my back and leaned back on my heels to wait.

Some ghosts can change size, squeezing themselves into a tiny bottle or the hollow of a tree, or passing seamlessly through a keyhole. Most of the types of ghost who can manage that sort of thing can’t turn fully intangible the way I can—they traded one set of useful skills for another, and if I’m being quite honest, I like my set of useful skills better. Being able to squeeze through a keyhole is never going to top walking through the closed, locked door of the petulant teenager you’re trying to keep in one piece. Still, sometimes, I wish I could make myself small enough tostroll into the network of tunnels and passages that the Aeslin use to get around, meeting with the mice on equal footing.

I had time to contemplate all the reasons that would be convenient before there was a rustling inside the largest dollhouse, a palatial manor that had originally been intended to house Calico Critters dolls and had been gutted and rebuilt for the comfort of the mice. The door opened, and an elderly mouse wearing the raiment of Jane’s priesthood stepped out, leaning heavily on a carved bone staff.

I couldn’t tell what animal the staff had belonged to when it was alive. That was something of a relief. The mice weren’t picky about the bones they used, and would take them from roadkill as readily as they would steal them from the garbage. I know I’m dead and shouldn’t be so sensitive, but it’s hard to have a civil conversation with someone who’s using a piece of a dead cat as a mobility aid.

The priest moved toward the fence around the house, and I amended my impression of its age: this mouse wasn’t just elderly, it wasancient,possibly the oldest mouse I had ever seen still moving under its own power. It stopped at the fence line and bowed to me, whiskers pressed tightly back along the sides of its white-furred, wizened muzzle.

“Greetings to you, o Phantom Priestess, she who walks the Dark Paths of Death in her Divinity,” it squeaked. “You are Welcome Here, in the Protectorate of the Silent Priestess. What brings you forth?”

Was it possible that Ted and the kids had somehow managed to cut the household colony off from the rest of the family mice so completely that they didn’t know why Jane wasn’t coming home? The thought was ludicrous, and yet. So was the concept of a mouse whose divinity had died still being here this long after the funeral. I frowned. “You speak of the Silent Priestess as if she were still here,” I said. “Why do you do that?”

“Because all that is Divine lingers always among the faithful,” said the mouse.

That was a new wrinkle on Aeslin cosmology. I blinked. “You know she’s dead.”

“So are you, Priestess. So is the God of Chosen Isolation. But you have both returned to us, in your ways, and we worship you still, despite all the strangenesses of your presence.”

Great. Had my continued refusal to move on to my final reward finally broken the mice of their ability to understand death?

The mouse leaned back, more toward the ecstatic position I was used to them taking when they got to speak directly with their gods, and said, “Most of the Silent Priestess’s congregation could not solve the Riddle that had been set by her Passing, and followed her into the Silence that was her Domain,” it squeaked. “But some of us were Wiser than that, and understood the Grand Mystery which we had been Presented. We have seen the Truth, and we will Worship Her even unto the very End of Days.”

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