Page 23 of Installment Immortality

“Meaning they—the anima mundi—decided that if they have a job that needs doing and a ghost without a proper job, they may as well combine the two, and they want me to go to the East Coast to make the Covenant stop dicking with the ghosts there.”

“The anima mundi is sending a ghost to stop ghost hunters.”

“Yup. Who better to figure out what’s going on?”

“I don’t know. Anyone the Covenant can’t stuff into a spirit jar as soon as they realize you’re there to stop them?”

That was a pretty good point that I hadn’t really taken the time to consider, preoccupied as I’d been with charging full steam ahead. “That’s why I’m here,” I said. “I wanted to get some living people who were willing to come with me and be my hands while we figured this out. Where better to start than with my family? At least you’re all halfway trained for this sort of thing.”

Arthur’s mouth twisted in an uncomfortable way. “Trained, sure. Does it count when you weren’t the one who got the training, you just halfway remember it happening?”

“I think so,” I said. “It’s not like anyone has field experience in this sort of thing.”

“But you didn’t come here to talk to me,” he said. “No one comes here to talk to me. I make them too uncomfortable.”

“You don’t make me uncomfortable,” I lied. I’m a babysitter. I have a lot of experience at telling necessary lies to my charges.

Arthur shook his head. “I do,” he said. “I wish I didn’t, but I do. It’s all right, Mary. You can admit how I make you feel.”

“You make me sad, not uncomfortable,” I said. “I hate seeing you suffer.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t be looking at me.” He lay back down and rolled over, so that his back was to me.

It would have been hard for a dismissal to be much clearer. I sighed. “Okay, Arthur,” I said. “But I’ll check in before I leave, and I really do want you to feel better.”

“I’ll feel better when I’m dead, and then we’ll have something in common,” he said, not looking back toward me. “We’ll both have died twice.”

I shook my head and moved to climb the stairs—the normal, substantial way this time—to the basement door.

I hadn’t really been expecting Artie—or Arthur—to help me. He’d never been a fan of fieldwork, and he was clearly dealing with a lot on a psychological level, which made a lot of sense. If not for the mouse mentioning him, I might have come and gone without seeing him at all. I felt a little bad about that, and kept feeling bad as I continued up the stairs to the second floor and down the hallway to Elsie’s closed bedroom door.

The mice said she was off watching roller derby practice, but my vague sense of her location didn’t agree. It told me she was here in this house for me to find, and when push comes to shove, I’ll still choose my own instincts over the word of a religious rodent.

Elsie’s door was painted a pleasant shade of Barbie pink that didn’t go with the rest of the hallway, and patterned with cotton candy clouds that I remembered her painting in her junior year of high school, sitting there and patiently dabbing them on, one brushstroke at a time. Jane hated it so much. She hated that Elsie had a pink door, she hated that it clashed with everything else, and she hated that her daughter couldn’t be placated with a nice eggshell that would still have stood out, but not quite as boldly.

I paused with my hand raised to knock, blinking back tears that didn’t actually exist but still stung my eyes. If I let them fall,they would get my cheeks and blouse wet, just like real tears, but they’d vanish as soon as they tried to fall to the floor. There are limits to my interaction with the world of the living. I am a discrete creature, and all I can leave behind are footprints.

Finally, I knocked.

“Goaway,Arthur!” yelled Elsie. “I’m not in the mood.”

“It’s not Arthur,” I called back. “It’s me. May I come in?”

There was a long pause before Elsie’s voice, now closer to the door, said, “I know you’re not really Mary, because Mary’s gone. Whatever you are, you do an excellent Mary impression. Now go away.”

“Elsinore, come on. I’m not in the mood,” I said, peevishly, and stuck my head through the door.

Elsie’s room was as cluttered and pink as it had always been, with the bed drowning in a pile of pillows and plush toys that she’d been collecting and refining since preschool. Elsie herself was also as cluttered and pink as she’d ever been, standing off to the side of the door with a machete in her hand. When she saw my head appear through the door, she screamed and brought it down across my neck in a hard arc.

The world glitched, going gray for a moment, and Elsie screamed again as my head fell off and hit the floor.

Six

“Life is a tragedy and death is a comedy, and the reverse is also true.”

—Apple Tanaka

The bedroom of Elsinore Harrington-Price, trying to deal with the fact that I’ve just been decapitated

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