Page 4 of Installment Immortality

One

“With the cost of childcare these days, I’m surprised more people aren’t trying to get their houses haunted. Who cares if the walls bleed, as long as someone’s got the kid.”

—Jane Harrington-Price

A small survivalist compound about an hour’s drive east of Portland, Oregon

Now

ALL RIGHT,THIS IS WHEREI recap. Because we’re dealing with five generations of family history here, and that’s a lot, even when you’ve been there from the beginning. I can’t count on anyone having been here from the beginning anymore, myself included, so I’ll give you the basic shape of things and hope that will be enough to ground you in this glorious ghost story already in progress:

My name is Mary Dunlavy and I’m a perfectly human, perfectly ordinary teenager. I was sixteen in 1939 and I’m still sixteen today, which would be impossible if not for the small and slightly unsettling fact that I was sixteen when I died. Ghosts don’t age the way the living do. We can change and grow as people, if we’re willing to make the effort, but whatever age we are when our clocks get stopped is the age we’re going to be forever. Sixteen then, sixteen now, sixteen in another hundred years, assuming I’m still haunting my preferred patch of humanity.

Oh, yeah—ghosts are real. Hope that’s not too much of ashock, since you’re here, but it’s surprising what people can and can’t accept. I’ve met folks who were fine with the idea of shapeshifting shark-people living in the waters off Hawaii, but flipped their lids when they found out that some people treat the various laws of physics as negotiable. People who were cool with sorcerers but got big upset about the psychic ambush predator wasps from another dimension. And plenty of people who accepted everything they learned about the cryptid world, but didn’t want to admit that hauntings were real. The human mind needs a few limits it can believe are absolute if it wants to stay stable, and “ghosts” is a surprisingly frequent barrier. Which isn’t one that can really linger long if we’re going to have a productive relationship.

So: I died when I was sixteen, in a hit-and-run accident involving someone who never even realized what had happened. By the time I realized I could go looking for the guy, it was too late; he had shuffled off his own mortal coil, blissfully unaware that he’d committed vehicular manslaughter, and he didn’t hang around to haunt the joint. I never got to confront him. Even “him” is a big assumption, since women could drive even back when I died: it’s just that I know it was a truck that did me in, and in the 1930s, in rural Michigan, most trucks were driven by men. Sexism can help you narrow the field, when you know how to apply it.

I died, and was immediately recruited into the service of an eldritch entity that we knew as “the crossroads,” an invader from outside this version of reality that had replaced Earth’s natural anima mundi and was happily playing parasite, making deals with people who asked for them and gradually destroying the magical skin of the world. It was my job to advocate for the people who came to the crossroads looking to make a deal, whether it be for fame, fortune, eternal youth, or something even less pleasant. I was never the best, which suited the crossroads well; they didn’t want their petitioners to be discouraged. Hard to chew people up and spit them out whena meddling ghost can convince them not to deal with you in the first place.

Most crossroads ghosts gradually lost their humanity, fading more and more into the sort of amoral unpleasantness made manifest in the crossroads themselves. It was part of why they didn’t last. Once a ghost had been too reduced to their nastier impulses, they couldn’t do their job anymore, and the crossroads would devour them. I got lucky.

I got a babysitting gig.

I had posted the flyers while I was still alive, little advertisements offering my services to anyone who needed them. “Give your kid to an unlicensed teenager and I promise to give them back alive in exchange for money when you’re done doing whatever it is you needed to do!” Leaving children alone with someone who’s barely more than a child themselves sounds like a criminal activity, but is actually an essential part of keeping those kids alive while also holding a job, or doing the grocery shopping, or just not losing your goddamn mind in small-town Michigan. And it worked! I’d been on my way home from a babysitting job when I had my fatal run-in with the truck that killed me.

Because the crossroads had claimed me before anyone knew that I was dead and let me go home to my father with nothing to indicate that I no longer had a heartbeat, my flyers were all still up even after my body had cooled.

Enter Frances Healy.

To explain Fran, I have to explain the Healys. They were come-latelies, a family of immigrants from far-off, exotic England, their accents strange to Michigander ears and their traditions even stranger. Like voluntarily entering the Galway Woods, which every child of Buckley knew not to do. There were monsters in those woods, creatures hidden among the trees, which seemed to shift positions in the night, roots appearing in the middle of previously smooth trails while clearings vanished and the shadows grew beyond control. Enid and Alexander had been the first to arrive, and their son Jonathan had come not long after, born in the town hospital, screaming and wrinkled and already a stranger. He would spend his entire life in Buckley, and he would always be viewed as an intruder of sorts, someone who had come in from the outside.

He’d been a reasonably good-looking man, and his parents were well-liked in the town, for all of their oddities; there was a time when a lot of the local girls had hoped he might decide to solidify his family’s ties to the township by marrying one of them. Instead, he’d gone on a trip out west and come home with a loudmouthed blonde who liked to wear trousers, throw knives, and ride her horse in the Galway Woods. Somehow, even though no other horse would even go near the edge of the trees, Fran’s Rabbit had always been willing to trust her to protect him. He never threw her. Not even once.

Fran had been the one to spot my advertisement on the library bulletin board, and she was the one who came to ring the bell and ask if I’d consider watching her baby daughter. I’d been playing alive in those days, and a living teenager would have been happy for the easy job and extra spending money, so I said yes, of course. Yes, I’d be happy to watch her, and yes, I loved babies, and yes, I had a list of names she could call to check my references.

I’d love to be able to say that I felt something change the first time she handed me her daughter, and maybe I did, but I suspect it was like a crack in a dam: so small and so slight that it was invisible and imperceptible. The damage was done, whether it could be seen or not, and the crossroads had given me permission to care for my family when they claimed me as their own.

Alice was a year old when I met her, pretty as a picture, all golden curls and huge blue eyes and a curiosity strong enough tochange the world. She was just a job like any other in the beginning, and then…

Then everything changed.

Once Fran learned that I was dead, babysitting for Alice had become paradoxically easier. The family was strange in some ways even the town’s biggest gossips had never guessed, and their relationship with the woods went a lot deeper than just walking in the trees. As a normal local sitter, I’d been too likely to turn on them to be trusted with their secrets or allowed inside their house. Once they knew I had secrets of my own to keep, everything changed.

For one thing, I’d started watching Alice at her own house, which was substantially better childproofed and equipped with things to keep her occupied. Including a colony of talking mice that had immediately deified me and worked me into their complicated religious rituals, and if that’s a sentence that has ever existed before, I don’t think I want to know about it.

Johnny and Fran had been out of town, visiting a family of gorgons in Chicago, while Alexander and Enid were enjoying a well-deserved date night at the Red Angel, our local hangout for people who weren’t exactly ordinary. And I had been sitting on the couch in the Healy family living room, watching Alice drag her favorite stuffed jackalope around by one antler. Two of the mice were following her, their eyes bright with doting adoration. An ordinary night, all things considered.

I’d been starting to think about getting up and fixing Alice her dinner when I heard the crossroads calling for me. It wasn’t a sound, exactly, more like a sensation, a prickling itch along the edge of my consciousness, discomfort in a place that shouldn’t have been uncomfortable. I did my best to ignore it, even as itgot louder and louder before finally cutting off, replaced by relief. I sat down next to Alice on the floor, wrapping my arms around her and letting her tell me all about the mice in her short, half-coherent sentences.

I’d had just enough time to relax and think that it was over before the crossroads called again—and this time, when I ignored them, theyyanked.

There are rules to the way the dead can move. In my heyday, I could go from one side of the country to the other in the blink of an eye, answering the call of the crossroads. Distance didn’t matter to them, and I was one of them, free to go wherever I pleased by tunneling through the top levels of the lands of the dead. But I couldn’t carry the living with me. That was outside my power even when I was at my strongest. Holding on to Alice should have been a sufficient anchor to keep me where I was.

Instead, the world had warped around us, and I’d abruptly been sitting on warm concrete under a twilight-stained sky, empty fields all around us, power lines buzzing overhead. Alice was still pressed against my chest, and my brief throb of fear didn’t have time to fully form before she was pushing against me, saying peevishly, “Mary, let go.”

Shocked, I let her go, and she rose and toddled several feet away before plopping down and beginning to roll a rounded rock back and forth, apparently viewing it as a sufficient substitute for her jackalope, which was still back in Buckley.

“Adorable child,” said a buzzing voice from behind me.

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