Page 84 of Installment Immortality

Maybe a littletoowell, as those early Covenant members realized they really liked being the ones who got to decide who lived and who died. Everything that’s happened since then has been the continuation of that first fight. So who wins? Who gets to say “okay, we’ve hit each other enough, it’s time to put down the rocks and start treating each other with some basic decency”? Is there an expiration date on striking back?

What Chloe and Nathaniel had done was unforgivable. They were acting as they’d been taught, and lashing out in pain. Heitor had just been trying to find his sister; Benedita had just been trying to survive outside of a spirit jar, unaware that she was leading the Covenant to her fellow dead. Even Amelia, who I desperately wanted to blame for everything that had happened tonight, was just trying to preserve her species. Everyone had a reason for hurting people. And at this point, I was just about ready to say that we were starting over, clean slate, no more revenge, no more graves.

I inched along the hall, finally finding myself at the top of a narrow flight of stairs, and descended to the first floor one step at a time, trying not to get distracted by the sound of Elsie’s heartbeat or the feeling of her lungs expanding. I didn’t remember those things being so noticeable when I’d been alive. Her legs were getting weak from the blood loss. I caught us against the wall before we could fall down, pausing for a moment while I tried to catch my breath. I just needed to breathe. Why was that so hard?

Because I was using someone else’s lungs, in a body that desperately needed medical attention, and that was making things more difficult than they had to be. Naturally. Gripping the bannister firmly, I started down the stairs.

I was halfway down when the screaming started.

I sped up as much as I dared. Any faster and we’d go sprawling. With the injury in her shoulder, Elsie couldn’t take too much more. Falling down like that could knock me clean out of her and leave her defenseless against the formerly jarred dead.

Who were nowhere to be seen right now, and were probably off causing the screaming. I reached the bottom of the stairs and tested my balance before letting go of the bannister, continuing to movetowardthe sound of people being horrifically tortured. I reached the living room, and stopped in my tracks.

When I was a kid, before she got sick, my mother liked to do little science experiments with me, saying they would encourage me to have a playful mind and a generous approach to the universe. I think she just liked an excuse to make messes and blame them on the kid. Regardless, one of my favorites was something she called “hurricane in a jar.” It was soap, water, and food coloring, and the way the soap and the water pushed against each other would make it swirl and spin like a for-real hurricane. Little me found it endlessly enchanting.

The live-action version that had taken over the front room was somewhat less enthralling. Solid walls of smoke and fog ringed the room, patchworked in all the different shades of spirit, spinning wildly enough that they were generating a for-real wind. The darker patches were the more powerful ones, I realized, the ones who had managed to steal some poltergeist abilities from their pain; they were throwing papers and small objects into the air, where they were buffeted and flung around by the force of the storm. Banjo-in-Arthur was standing just on the other side of the wall, head cocked to the side, looking like he’d never seen anything more fascinating. I moved forward a bit to see what he saw, and promptly gagged.

Living reactions are inconvenient things. I never saw anyone in real danger of dying before I was dead myself, with none of thoseunfortunate hormones or reflexes to make a corpse more than an abstract complication. Even when I’d found Enid melted on her own kitchen floor, I hadn’t thrown up. But now, bile was burning the back of Elsie’s throat and her stomach was lurching, literally moving inside me from the force of the muscular contractions caused by her disgust.

The man from the van—whose name I still didn’t know—was hanging in the middle of the room easily a foot and a half off the ground, arms out at his sides like he was auditioning for the role of Scarecrow in a very modern production ofThe Wizard of Oz.His toes were pointed straight down at the floor. Not a natural position until you considered that he might not have a choice in the matter. The swirling smoke was thicker around him, the hands of a hundred furious, scrambled ghosts holding him captive.

“Ididn’t— You can’t— Letme go!” he shouted.

“Mmm, no,” said Banjo. “The kids are angry. They don’t like bein’ bottled like so much cheap gin, and they really don’t like being stacked up in the attic for later. You shouldn’t have gone messing with the dead.”

“The world belongs to theliving,” snarled the man, right before the dead who were suspending him ripped his eyes out of his head with a wet sucking sound and threw them to the hurricane. He howled. The eyes bobbed along on the smoky tide, held aloft by the anger of the dead, spraying blood and vitreous humors on the walls.

“Try again?” suggested Banjo.

“Go tohell,” said the man, somehow still forming words.

“Oh, buddy, you’re already there.” Banjo snapped Arthur’s fingers, and theghosts— Therereally isn’t a pleasant way to say this, or a non-graphic way to describe it. Theypeeledthe man. They began with the skin on his face, grasping his eyelids and the flesh under his eyes, and then they ripped it off with a vast, bloody tearing sound, exposing the raw muscle beneath. He howled.

They kept going. They ripped his clothing away, and then the skin that had been concealed beneath it, flensing him with the sharp little knives of their substance, until there was nothing left but a hanging, rotating side of meat that dripped unspeakable fluids and was still, somehow, managing to gibber and howl.

Banjo smiled. “That’s better,” he said. “Should have been a little nicer, mister. Wouldn’t have saved you, but maybe then we’d have let you die. Now where are those little brats you’re working for?”

I blinked, taking my eyes away from the rotating horror long enough to glance around the room. Heitor’s corpse was gone. So were Nathaniel and Chloe.

“House isn’t that big,” I said. “We can find them.”

Banjo made a noncommittal sound that I took as assent. I started moving toward the hallway entrance.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“To find them.” And to find a phone, if I could. Elsie and Arthur didn’t have theirs, and I’d seen nothing to indicate that the house had a landline. People like to talk about the convenience of cellphones, the way they’ve opened up the world. Reach people when they’re on the road! Map your way to your destination! They never mention how much harder they make it to call for help when you’re abducted by asshole ghost hunters and can’t stop possessing the girl you used to babysit for unless you want her to get skinned alive by pissed-off ghosts who have good reasons to be mad but shouldn’t use them as excuses to hurt her.

Banjo turned to watch us go, frowning the whole time. He thought I was up to something, I was sure of it, and to be fair, I was; if I could find a phone, I was going to call Michigan and ask Alice to send Sarah to help us. She couldn’t be around Arthur-in-Artie because she built him and it hurt to see him walking around not truly knowing himself, or her. Well, maybe Banjo-in-Arthur would be a different story. We’d just turn him into a nesting dollof one person on top of another, stacking them like bricks until she could stand to be in the same room.

And then, when we were out of this situation, she could go home, and she and Arthur could go back to avoiding each other. Simple. Anything that would let me get Elsie out of this house and to someone who could help her. A normal hospital was out of the question. Lilu blood is even more potent than their pheromones. She’d start a sex riot if we took her to a normal human hospital, and the nearest cryptid hospital I knew of was in New York. With the amount of blood she was losing, there was no way she’d make it there alive.

The bedrooms were empty. I moved onward, finally reaching the garage, and pressed my ear against the door. I heard rustling from the other side. The door wasn’t locked. I opened it and stepped through.

My grip on Elsie wavered as we crossed the threshold, but she grabbed hold of me and held me where I was. Interesting. The ward couldn’t keep me out, because I wasn’t a disembodied spirit, but if she hadn’t been willing to help me maintain my possession, I would havebecomea disembodied spirit, and she would have stepped into the garage without me.

It made me wonder what would happen if Banjo tried to come into the garage. Nothing he was going to enjoy, I was sure, but as I wasn’t sure how close to the surface Arthur was at this point, I didn’t want to risk him trying to step through, coming dislodged, and leaving Arthur’s body to drop to the floor, possibly unconscious, definitely defenseless.

This was all too complicated, and I didn’t like it.

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