Page 82 of Installment Immortality

Elsie blinked, and she was me, and I was she, and this was going to beweird.

Twenty

“Everything hungers for life. Even when it says it doesn’t. It may not know it lies, but it does; everything hungers for life.”

—Apple Tanaka

Inside Elsie, which is sort of like being inside a spirit jar, only squishier

MARY?

Elsie? Oh, Elsie, you’re still here! Can you hear me?

I can hear you. I’m just glad itisyou.

Elsie’s words felt like my own thoughts, just delivered in a slightly different tone of mind, like I was talking to myself. I couldn’t be sure she was actually there to talk to me, or whether she was actually giving her tacit consent for what I’d done by acknowledging that I was the only ghost she would have wanted to possess her. I still felt emotionally compromised and about as solid as well-used cheesecloth, like even the slightest shock would blow me apart.

And I was inside Elsie’s body, which was simultaneously fascinating and deeply,deeplyunpleasant. It was fleshy and squishy and filled with sensations I barely remembered and might never have felt when I’d been alive. And then there was the gunshot wound, which wasdefinitelysomething I’d never felt before. It hurt. Like nothing I had ever experienced, it hurt.

“Motherfucker,” I snarled, clapping Elsie’s hand over the wound once again. It must have fallen when I invaded her, the effort of keeping her blood inside seeming suddenly secondary to experiencing a spiritual takeover. The blood pumped between her fingers, hot and thick and nasty in a visceral way.

Unlike the kids I helped to raise, I had lived a fairly sheltered life, one that didn’t involve a lot of stabbings or gunshots or other opportunities to interact with blood. I didn’t like it.

I also didn’t like the feeling of Elsie’s heartbeat, or the slow shifting of her internal organs. Fun fact I lived my whole life without knowing: there’s a part of the human brain whose only purpose is keeping the person it belongs to from feeling their own organs move, something which happens basically all the damn time. Apparently, naughty ghosts who take over other people’s bodies don’t get to use that piece of brain.

“Hurts, don’t it?” asked the man inside Arthur, without a trace of sympathy. “Gunshots will do that. You the one she wanted me to look for?”

I nodded Elsie’s head. “I’m Mary. The babysitter. Who are you?”

“They called me ‘Banjo’ when I was alive, and that works well enough for me now that I’m dead. Would do me some good to hear you call my name, sweet little thing like you.”

“Okay, um, ew. The body you’re using is this body’sbrother,and I raised both these bodies from infancy, so please don’t make any comments like that.” I glared at him, unwilling to take Elsie’s hand off her shoulder to fold her arms. Managing an open gunshot wound was proving more difficult than I would have expected. “What kind of a name is ‘Banjo’?”

“Mine.” He looked around, then shrugged out of Arthur’s plaid flannel, grabbing it by the collar and ripping it briskly in half. “Come over here, will ya? I know you modern girls have big ideas about boundaries and consent, so I don’t want to lay handson your meat shell without permission, but if we don’t stop that bleeding soon, you’re going to need a new one.”

“Elsie is not just a ‘meat shell,’ and she’s not going todie— Wait. You know how to deal with a gunshot wound?”

“Lady, my name was Banjo DiCola, and if I’d lived a little longer, I would have run the Boston mob. Yeah, I know how to bind a gunshot wound, maybe not as good as a doc would do, but good enough that your pink-haired little princess probably won’t drop dead before we get you out of her.”

“All right,” I said, reluctantly, and walked over to him, letting him guide me to perch on the edge of a nearby steamer trunk. He began to pack and wrap the wound in Elsie’s shoulder, which was a whole new variety of pain that I could have gone my entire afterlife without experiencing. But the tighter he pulled the cloth, the more the stabbing agony was reduced to a throbbing ache, and the more the blood slowed. I realized I wasn’t breathing, having stopped in the face of the pain, and forced myself to start again. Elsie’s body knew what to do, even if I didn’t remember how to breathe.

Ow,complained Elsie.

I know, baby, I’m sorry,I replied, while privately glad that she was aware enough of her own body to feel pain when her gunshot wound was dressed. I was wearing her like a coat, and I didn’t much care for the sensation—or for how addictive I could see it becoming. It was no wonder most ghosts didn’t have the capacity to possess people anymore. It was too effective. Ghosts thatcoulddo thiswoulddo it, constantly, and that would result in the living rising against the dead in a whole new, horrible way. Exorcisms as far as the eye could see.

And we shouldn’t have been able to do this. The extra strength the anima mundi said was floating free while the area’s ghosts were jarred, it was feeding into us, making possession possible. That was good. It meant that when this was all over, I wouldn’tneed to be afraid it was going to happen again. My people would be safe.

Banjo-in-Arthur pulled the makeshift bandage a little tighter and tied it off. “That’s as good as I can do without cutting off circulation completely. You don’t want to lose that arm, do you?”

“No, I’m sure Elsie would prefer to keep it,” I said, flexing it experimentally. The resulting bolt of pain was unpleasant but manageable, especially compared to what it had been before. I turned to look at him. “Now what?”

“Now we unleash hell,” he said, and swept his arm across the nearest shelf, sending jars cascading to the floor, where they broke on impact. Individual plumes of foggy smoke began to fill the air, some hanging where they were, some swirling around us. They varied in shade from white-gray to virtually black. I yelped.

Banjo smirked. “They won’t hurt us,” he said. “Like knows like, and they can tell we’re dead on the inside. But anyone living they find inside this house isn’t going to be so lucky.”

Several smoky plumes dove for the floor, only to bounce off like birds that had run into a closed window. They swirled fast, managing to look pissed off without facial features or heads. Aoi would be proud of them. Banjo scowled.

“They went and put ghost trapsinsidetheir ghost trap? What the hell is wrong with these people?”

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