Page 46 of Installment Immortality

“Neither,” he said morosely. “I haunt City Hall, most of the time, but there’s been ghost hunters around the area for the last few months, and it’s not safe for me there.”

I turned to look speculatively at the city hall. It was a solid-looking building, and it felt old, but it didn’t feel old enough to have been used as any sort of schoolhouse or hospital wing. Those are the places most likely to be occupied by the ghosts of children—well, those, along with orphanages and mental asylums. But the ghosts you find in orphanages and old asylums don’t tend to be very friendly, and they definitely don’t try to weasel their way into tame sex comedies.

“City Hall? Really?”

“I didn’t die there, if that’s what you’re trying to get at,” said the kid. “My family home used to stand there, and then they knocked it down to build the new city hall because we were all dead and they didn’t think anyone would care about it. Well, I cared. I cared alot.So I moved into their stupid civic building, and I haunted their fancy new halls, and I’ve been haunting them ever since then. Only now it’s all stupid ghost hunters, and I’d be in a jar with Martha and Agnes if I went back there.”

“Do you have a name?” I tried to keep the question as light as I could. Older ghosts don’t always know who they were. Olderghosts who’ve been traumatized somehow—say by having their traditional haunting disrupted by a bunch of ghost-hunting assholes—are even more forgetful.

“Jonah,” he said, and looked at me flatly. “Same question, fun police.”

“Mary,” I said.

To my surprise, he laughed. “Oh, thank the good Lord, you have aname.The last umbramancer who came through here, she called herself ‘Sunbeam,’ like that wasn’t something you’d call a good draft horse. Who names their daughter ‘Sunbeam’? Who thinks the inanimate exists to be mined for nomenclature?”

“Lots of people,” I said. “One of my closest friends is named ‘Rose,’ and she’s from the 1930s. I also know a girl called ‘Apple,’ and she was born in the 1920s, although ‘Apple’ isn’t her given name. We’ve always used nature names for babies. There’s just an arbitrary list we think of as ‘normal,’ and then everything else gets filed under ‘weird.’ I don’t know anyone named ‘Sunbeam,’ and you got one part wrong.”

“Only one, lecture lady?”

I decided to ignore that. Decades spent with a sarcastic, verbose family—they get some of it from me, and some of it from the mice, and regardless, they think mid-conversation lectures are perfectly normal—has left me inclined to lecture when the opportunity arises. I’m not proud of it. That doesn’t make it less true. “I’m not an umbramancer.”

Jonah looked at me disbelievingly. “You can see me, you’re out here at night, and you must have followed the screams the ghost hunters ignore. What else could you be?”

“Dead.”

“Nuh-uh.”

I flickered, reappearing in a dated skirt and blouse I could have worn to school once upon a time. The outfit wasn’t comfortable anymore, not the way it would have been when this was clothingrather than a costume. Time changes everything, even me, in its own terrible ways.

Jonah stared. I crossed my arms.

“Believe me now?”

“Youcan’tbe dead,” he said. “You’re too solid. I can’t see through you at all. Your hair is moving with the wind. My hair doesn’t do that, not even when a really big storm rolls in. The grass is bent where you’re standing.”

I lifted an eyebrow. “You’re observant.”

He shrugged. “I get bored a lot. Watching stuff’s about the only thing I can do where it doesn’t matter that I’m dead and can’t touch anything. I’m really, really good at birdwatching and I don’t have to tell you any of this, because you’re alive and playing a trick on me.”

This was fun, but I needed him to take me seriously and answer my questions, not keep trying to dismiss me as an unwanted representative of the living world. “Could a living person dothis?” I demanded, and lunged forward, grabbing his wrist with one hand, before dropping down into the twilight.

He had time for a single startled squawking sound, and then we were standing on the same brick courtyard, next to the same fountain, under a sky the color of a child’s watercolor painting of the sunset, complete with vacantly smiling sun. I do mean “smiling”—the sun had human features sketched across its gaseous surface and looked like it had been hitting the “special brownies” pretty damn hard, since it was staring off into the distance with unfocused eyes, unblinking. But then, I don’t know how often a sun is supposed to blink.

There were other figures around, in this modified version of Worcester, people walking on sidewalks in the distance, or floating serenely through the sky. One small family was having a picnic on the grass, two adults and two children. One of the children had tentacles in place of arms, long, fleshy things that curledand uncurled as she chased the other child in circles. The adults watched her indulgently.

“She’s going to be a fascinating haunting when she finishes settling,” I said, letting go of Jonah. He sputtered and stumbled backward, away from me. I turned to focus on him, blinking. “What? You never seen the twilight before? This is where you’re supposed to go when you’re not haunting the halls.”

“I— You—How?” He stopped sputtering as he turned and stared at me, betrayal in his eyes. He looked suddenly even paler than he’d been in the lands of the living, washed out and reduced to a sketch on paper.

I blinked, and everything fell into place. “You haven’t been here since they tore your house down, have you?” I asked, making my voice as gentle as I could. He was a scared child, and I was a babysitter; softening my response was easier than I would have expected it to be.

Jonah shook his head. I winced.

“Shit. I should have realized, but all that stuff about moving, like it was voluntary, well, it threw me. They used part of your old house when they built the city hall, didn’t they?”

“No sense in wasting the brick,” he said, voice high and quavering. “So they gathered it up when the wrecking was done, and they built it into the new foundations. They didn’t want to use too much where people could see—it wasn’t the right color—so some of it’s in the courtyard around the fountain, too. That’s why I can go so far.”

“Oh, kiddo, I’m sorry.”

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