Page 49 of Installment Immortality

They didn’t have a face. Or rather, they had a face, because everything with a head has a face, but it didn’t have any of the features a face should have. Where their features should have been there was nothing but an expanse of smooth, evenly tanned skin, unbroken. There weren’t even divots to imply the presence of eyes or mouth or other such anatomical standards. I still got the feeling they were looking at me when they turned in my direction, head tilting first up and then down as they took my measure.

“Hey,” they said. They didn’t have a mouth, and speaking didn’t change that, but the sound still seemed to come from where their mouth should have been. “I’m Aoi.”

I stared. Impolite, sure. Understandable, also sure.

The figure’s featureless face rippled and became a mirror of my own, even down to the little scar on my left cheek where I’d run into the corner of the kitchen table at the age of four. I’d bled all over the kitchen floor, and Daddy had laughed himself silly at all the fuss, and Mama had yelled at him for being insensitive, saying a scar on my face might make it harder for me to find a good husband, and I’d grown up with a weirdly mixed feeling about it, especially since it was barely visible most of the time.

But there it was, on the face of a stranger, attached to features I recognized and had no desire to share. The mirrored eyelashes and eyebrows were as white as my own, while the figure’s own hair remained black. They smiled at me with my own lips.

“Hello, caretaker,” they said. Their voice was a curious mix of the one they’d used before, with its bland Mid-Atlantic accent, and my own, still Michigan to the core. “You look surprised to see me. Am I scaring you?”

“No,” I said, recovering my composure as best as I could. “I just didn’t anticipate this multicultural a group of haunts in a New England town, that’s all.”

“We’re right next to Boston, sweetheart,” said Benedita, dryly. “We’re as diverse as it gets. You want a good international haunting, you come to Worcester.”

“Cool,” I said. “Still, noppera-bo aren’t even common in Japan. You can forgive me for being a little thrown when I see one in Massachusetts.”

The stranger used my face to look disappointed. “Aw. I wanted to shock you. It’s only fun when I can shock you.”

“Sorry.” I shrugged. “As we’ve already established, I spent a long time serving the crossroads. That means they could send me all over the world, and they loved sending me to places where I didn’t speak the local language. It meant they could show off the fact that within their boundaries, all languages were the same language, and that language was the language of demanding. They called me to answer the needs of their petitioners, and I went. A few of the people I helped negotiate for became noppera-bo after they died.” In the seventies, asking for beauty had been very common. Noppera-bo most frequently rose when they had felt invisible in life, or when they’d been unusually passionately focused on their appearances. I couldn’t tell which one Aoi had been, and honestly, it didn’t much matter either way. They were dead no matter how you sliced it.

Aoi sulked, which remained eerie when done with my own face. Benedita kicked them in the ankle.

“Stop messing her about and show her the hunters,” she said. “She wants to see them, and maybe she can find them. From there, she either gets rid of them or they waste some time taking care of someone we don’t care about. Either way, we win.”

Aoi scoffed and rolled my eyes before their face began to melt and morph again, leaving mine mercifully behind. First, it settled into the face of a sharp-boned man, pointed chin, long nose, and wide-set, rounded eyes. Color bled into their eyebrows and lashes, turning them a sandy, nondescript brown, and the change flowed further down their throat, producing an Adam’s apple where none had been before.

“We call this one ‘the boss,’” they said, voice once again becoming a blend of their own and the face they were wearing. Unsurprisingly, their accent morphed with it, turning British, even if diluted by the mixture.

“Right,” I said. Their current face wasn’t one I’d seen before, and despite the resemblance, wasn’t the Covenant team lead I’d met when we were all in New Gravesend, Maine: Leonard Cunningham either wasn’t hanging around here or wasn’t in charge of this group after all the failure. Honestly, if his legacy in the Covenant was failure after failure, I wouldn’t be upset about that. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

Aoi’s face shifted again, this time turning feminine but retaining the same basic coloration. They looked enough like the prior face for the two to have been siblings, and both of them looked enough like Leonard that if I hadn’t seen him before, I could have believed theywerehim.

The third face was male, darker-skinned, with brows and lashes a few shades darker than Benedita’s hair. Benedita made an unhappy sound and looked away.

“Someone you know?” I asked.

“Drop it, crossroads bitch,” she replied.

That felt like a sore spot I shouldn’t palpate until I was willing to deal with the consequences. I looked back to Aoi, whose face was morphing again, remaining masculine but scrawny and pale, with dark brown lashes and brows. They shook their head, and the changes faded, their natural featureless state reasserting itself.

“That’s all I’ve seen,” they said, voice back to its default state. “I didn’t hang around when they started bottling my friends.”

“Understandably,” I said. “Thank you for what you’ve been able to show me. It’s going to be a huge help.” Annie’s report on her time in the Covenant had included every name she could dredge out of the depths of her memory. She’d mentioned Leonard, but also his two siblings, Chloe and Nathaniel. I was pretty sure those were the first two faces Aoi had shown me. The other two were unfamiliar, but I’d know them soon enough. That was the whole point of my coming to town, after all.

I straightened. “Where can I find them?”

“This time of night, probably near the city hall,” Aoi said. “They know they’ve missed at least one ghost, and they’re not going to rest until they catch him. Do you know why they’re doing this?”

“Like I said, revenge. Are you aware of the Ocean Lady?”

Aoi shook their head. For not having a face, they were remarkably easy to read, having learned to compensate for their lack of expression with body language and positioning. “Never heard the name.”

“It’s an old term for the Old Atlantic Highway, which used to be the longest continuous road in North America,” I said. “When the road was broken up and functionally killed, it relocated to the twilight, where it became self-aware, took on female pronouns, and ascended to the rank of goddess. That is the super short, condensed version, and no, I can’t really unpack it much further than that, but the Ocean Lady is part of why I’m here. She’s the patronand residence of the current Queen of the Routewitches, Apple, who asked me to come and see what was going on around here.”

“Okay,” said Benedita. “Your point?”

“My point is that Apple, through the Ocean Lady, knows some of what these Covenant fucks are doing with the ghosts they capture,” I said. “They’re stuffing them into spirit jars filled with salt and iron and other spirit-shredding devices, and they’re torturing the dead to turn them into weapons. And the more ghosts the Covenant removes, the stronger all the remaining ghosts get, until every one of us becomes a ticking time bomb.”

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