Page 47 of Installment Immortality

Jonah wasn’t a house haunting, however strange and misplaced. He was a homestead that had been stopped from fully forming. “For what?” he demanded, lower lip jutting.

“They didn’t just tear your childhood home down because they wanted the land, did they?” He looked away. I pushed on. “They tore it down because it was a ruin.”

“There was a fever,” he said, going paler still, red spots beginning to appear livid on his cheeks and temples. The pox crusted over almost immediately, seeming to almost glow against his skin. “It ran through the whole house, and everybody died. Mother was first, and then my sisters, and then the baby, and then Father and me. I was the last to go.” He shot me a hard, challenging look. “I didn’t want to go.”

“Most people don’t,” I said. “When you died, were any of them waiting for you? You mentioned Martha and Agnes—were they your sisters?”

“No,” he said, almost sullenly. “They came later. Mother’s ghost was still in the house when I died, trying to wake up the baby, but the baby wouldn’t wake up. The baby was like a doll made of rotten dough.”

“I’m sorry.” That happened sometimes, with dead parents who were immediately predeceased by infants, or to people who died in childbirth. The babies didn’t have enough connection to the world to leave any sort of unfinished business, and they didn’t linger, but their parents couldn’t let them go. So they conjured false babies for themselves out of ectoplasm and need, and they never woke up, and they never cried or fussed or needed anything again.

Thereareinfant ghosts, but they’re rare and specialized, and almost never happen when there are loving parents anywhere nearby, living or dead.

“For a little while, we were all right,” said Jonah. “Mother missed the girls, but I liked having her attention almost all to myself. And then one day, she tripped—she was a ghost, I don’t understand how she could trip—and she dropped the baby. And when it hit the ground, it burst, like a rotten egg. What came out wasn’t blood or meat or even maggots. It was just slime and stinking. Mother looked at it, and said, ‘Is that how it is,’ and then she was gone, and I was alone. The house fell apart all around me foryears, until the day the men came with their hammers and pulled it down for pieces.”

I nodded. “I think I understand now.”

“That’s great,” he said, in a flat tone. “How about you explain for me?”

“You know how there are different kinds of ghost?” I asked.

He nodded vigorously. “Yes. I’m just a ghost, no special kind. I haunted my house and now I haunt the city hall, and that’s all I need or want to do, ever.”

“Well, buddy, you’re not just a ghost. You’re what we call a homestead. You may have heard the term ‘caddis fly’ used for what you are. You’re the ghost of a personanda place. Normally a homestead happens when there’s a fire, or a flood, or something else that destroys a house without giving the occupants time to escape. For you, because you were so young and your whole family died of a sickness circulating inside the house, you took longer to form than most would.”

“So?”

“So if you’d been all the way formed when the living tore down your house, it would have appeared here with you, in the twilight, and you would have been bound here, not in the land of the living. You should never have been stranded there for so long. That isn’t how this is supposed to work.”

There must have been some sort of system once, older ghosts telling new ones what they were becoming and what their existences were going to be going forward. I thought back to when I’d been newly dead and trying to figure things out. A few of the other crossroads ghosts had made excuses and opportunities to come and speak with me under the watchful eyes of our mutual owner, explaining how things were going to work for me as best as they could. They’d been mostly correct in the beginning, until Fran hired me to sit for Alice and things started to get weird. Fresh ghosts are malleable, as Jonah was demonstrating.

He glowered at me. “What are you trying to say?”

“That half of your haunting is missing. You should have had the time to carry your house down into the twilight with you, and you didn’t, and I’m sorry. But also we’re getting away from the point here, and I’m definitely dead.” I flickered again, returning to my modern clothing. “I came to the city hall area looking for ghosts who hadn’t been caught by the ghost hunters yet. I’m here to stop them.”

“Why didn’t you say so to begin with?” asked Jonah. “I can take you to the others. Come on.”

He offered me his hand. After a moment of hesitation, I took it.

We disappeared.

Eleven

“Original sin isn’t real. There’s only so much time you have to spend apologizing for the crimes of people you never knew. At the end of the day, you’re only really responsible for yourself.”

—Enid Healy

Worcester, Massachusetts, in what looks like a basement, because that’s not uncomfortable after what happened in England or anything

WE REAPPEARED IN THE DAYLIGHT, into a dimness that made that label seem more ill-fitting than ever. We were standing in a small, cluttered basement, surrounded by cardboard boxes and the omnipresent scent of something gently molding in the corners of the room. A single overhead bulb cast stark white light throughout the room, its brilliance coaxing sharp-edged shadows out of everything it touched.

And everywhere I looked, there were ghosts.

There were at least a dozen of them sitting on the boxes, all different types of haunt, ghosts that should never have coexisted. Jonah let go of my hand and waved to the room, motioning for the ones who had started to stand and tense to calm themselves.

“It’s all right everyone, she’s with me,” he said. “Everyone, this is Mary. Mary, this is everyone.”

“Uh, hi,” I said, raising one hand in a brief wave.

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