Page 77 of Installment Immortality

Howling, Benedita was sucked inside, and Chloe replaced the lid on the jar, screwing it tightly down before giving the whole thing an experimental shake. The items already lining the bottom of the jar clattered and rattled through the dense fog the jar now contained, which whirled frantically in response. For a moment, Benedita’s face pressed against the glass, drained of color and substance, now made of insubstantial gray mist. Then it was gone, and only the whirling fog remained.

“She wasone of your own,” I said, staring at Chloe. “She wasCovenant.Doesn’t that matter to you people?”

“Timpani was one of our own too, but she chose your side over ours,” said Chloe. “She’s on the footage, too. We know she helped you set the charges. We know she helped to kill our mother. She’s going to pay for what she’s done. You’re all going to pay. You filthy little killers are going to be sorry you ever tangled with the Covenant of St. George.”

Babysitting small humans means having a lot of experience with people whose grasp of cause and effect is faulty at best. For a small child, them pushing a glass vase on the floor doesn’t always mean “I broke the vase.” Sometimes it means “the vase broke,” and removes them from the equation entirely. I stared at Chloe.

“We attacked Penton Hall because your people were attacking us! You came after us in New York, and you sent assassins after members of my family and you attacked an innocent carnival because you thought theymightbe harboring cryptids!”

“I was there,” said Chloe stiffly. “Those people weren’t innocent.”

“Any animal will bite if it’s provoked enough. Isn’t that what you’re trying to do? Bite the hand that hurt you? I’m sorry you lost your mother. Those two people you took tonight lost their mother too. Your brother shot her before we set the charges at Penton. She died protecting strangers, not seeking them out to do them harm. You’re shaming your own mother’s memory.”

“Don’t you talk about my mother,” spat Chloe.

“Or what? You’ve already caught Benedita. Your jar is full, and your brother doesn’t have one. I guess he could shoot me, but I’m already dead, and all he’ll do is hit the wall. I can’t exit your ghost trap, but while I’m inside it, I can still do my best to ruin your plans for me.”

“Sure you can,” said the man from the van, behind me. I turned. He grinned, taking the lid off his own mason jar. “But we can ruin your afterlife first.”

The pull from the open jar was like a vacuum cleaner, yanking me forward harder and harder. I whirled around and grabbedhold of Aoi’s hand, trying my best to hold on. She yelped. I held on harder.

My feet left the floor. I didn’t let go. She leaned back, grabbing the armchair with her free hand, holding us both in place.

The man from the van moved toward me, holding the jar out in front of him, smirking. Aoi’s grip on the chair began to slip, and her copy of my eyes widened, sheer terror flooding her expression.

I’m a caretaker. It’s what I do. And I can’t adopt everyone—my family has to be finite—but that doesn’t mean I want the people who don’t belong to me to suffer. I met Aoi’s eyes and nodded solemnly, and then I let her go.

The vacuum from the spirit jar grabbed me and jerked me backward, through the open mouth of the physical jar itself. I hit the bottom, hard enough to knock the breath I didn’t have out of me, and then the lid was slamming down, and the world narrowed to a field of endless gray, and everything was icy cold and burning at the same time, and I was trapped.

Nineteen

“We owe the dead. We can’t live for them, but we can live remembering what they gave for us to exist as we do, to live. If nothing else, we owe them kindness.”

—Juniper Campbell

Inside a spirit jar, which is an experience I had managed to avoid up until now, and really wish I’d been able to continue avoiding

THE GRAY WAS ALL-ENCOMPASSING,LIGHTLYscented with salt, and painful against my skin. I couldn’t seem to stop myself from breathing, and it felt like every breath scoured the inside of my lungs, bleaching and burning them. A living person could never have been able to fit through the mouth of the jar, but here, inside the glass, it felt like I was more alive than ever. Which didn’t exactly jibe with the swirling clouds of diffuse mist I’d seen in other spirit jars. Maybe the experience of being inside one didn’t synchronize with the experience of looking into one, a voyeur in someone else’s agony?

Speaking of which, I couldn’t see the walls of the jar. No matter where I looked, it was just the endless, stinging gray. Experimentally, I tried to disappear and move myself in a random direction, but nothing happened. Living people can’t disappear and reappear just by thinking about it. It doesn’t work.

I was trying to decide on my next move when the world around began to shake. I spun in place, hunkering down and bending my knees in an effort to keep my balance despite the increasingly vicious shaking of my impossible prison. Inevitably, I failed, and went flying through the air like Dorothy inside the tornado, bits of debris slamming into me from all sides. They stung when they hit, but no worse than the fog.

Until an iron bar as big around as a tree trunk came flying at me, and the wind that held me captive left me no way to dodge out of its path. I braced for impact as best as I could, but wasn’t prepared for the moment when it slammed into my chest and kept going, tearing through me like a butcher’s knife cleaving through a prime roast.

The pain was inconceivable, sharp and bright and agonizing, and I blacked out for a moment.

I blacked out and I was sitting by my mother’s bedside in those long last days, when every minute seemed to last for an hour, and I wished them away as hard and as fast as I could, wanting to be anywhere but there, in that small white room where my mother lay dying, all the miracles of modern medicine unable to do anything but ease her pain. Hospital bills hadn’t been as dear in those days. For all our fears and all our clutching, clawing certainty that this was going to be the end of the world, we’d never been worried about losing the house—or if we had been, my father’s last great act of mercy had been handling the death of his wife without letting his only child fully understand how bad it had become.

I stood, the book I’d been holding open and unread in my lap tumbling to the floor, and my mother turned her face agonizingly toward me, every motion clearly costing her more than she had left to pay. She looked more dead in that bed than I ever had, so pale that she would have seemed bone white if not for the sheets around her, skin drawn taut across her knobby skeleton. The cancer was a hungry beast. It had swallowed every scrap of her, wearing her down to nothing one grain at a time.

This didn’t feel like a memory. I looked around me, and every detail of the hospital room was precisely as it was meant to be, unchanged from the last time I had seen it. So no, this didn’t feel like a memory, didn’t feel like my mind trying to protect itself from the pain by dredging up something even worse to put it into perspective. This felt like real life.

“Mary?” croaked my mother, and my breath caught in my throat.

How could I have thought this was anything other than reality, that my mother was dead and buried and gone, that I was a ghost? Sure, I’d felt like one for weeks, like I was dwindling alongside her, soon to disappear, but that was just a feeling: that wasn’t real. She was here and I was here, and we were both alive, if not well. She was mymother.How could I have dreamt her dead?

A daughter who dreams her mother dead might as well be wishing her mother dead, and a daughter who wishes her mother dead is no daughter at all, just a monster walking around all wrapped up in girl-skin. That explained why my weird fantasy had been so focused on the lives and rights of monsters: I’d been trying to forgive myself for the unforgivable, to rewrite the world so that I didn’t have to blame myself for what I was so blatantly becoming. HowcouldI?

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