Page 85 of Installment Immortality

There was another scuffling sound, coming from behind the van. I walked closer, one hand clamped over the wound in Elsie’s shoulder, and called, “Hello? Cunninghams? Don’t you think it’s about time we finished all of this?”

Whoever had the gun didn’t bother looking to see where they were aiming as they stuck their gun around the corner of the van. I ducked. Their shot went over Elsie’s head, embedding itself in the wall. Cautiously, I straightened. “I don’t mean ‘finish it by killing us.’ That isn’t going to happen today. I’m sorry. But this doesn’t have to go on. If you just go back to England and promise not to come to America again, we can let you go. We can let this all be over. Call it equal.”

They killed our mother!

And we killed theirs. Now hush. No one’s leaving happy—I just want us leaving alive.Or not, as the case might be. I wanted the living to stay alive, and the dead to stay dead. I wanted to put things back the way they were supposed to be.

“Screw you!” shrieked Chloe.

I didn’t have time to realize what she was going to do before I heard the back doors of the van slam open, followed by the sound of jars breaking against the concrete floor. I craned Elsie’s neck as I looked in that direction, and saw the field of broken glass behind the van. Smoke rose from the shards, mostly dark gray but some almost black, as Chloe kept on smashing. There was a crash that sounded like it came from inside the van, and Chloe screamed. Nathaniel yelled something frantic and climbed after his sister into the now-rocking van.

Elsie’s body was increasingly unstable from the blood loss, but I managed to run us to the van. “No!” I yelped. “Stop! Don’t do—”

It was too late. There were two more screams from inside the van, both shrill and abruptly cut off, and I came around the end to find an abattoir coating the interior. Chloe and Nathaniel looked more like they had simply popped than anything else, bits of them coating the walls and ceiling in a thin red film.

About a dozen unbroken jars still stood on the shelves.

We were inside a ghost trap of massive proportions, and it was filled to the brim with furiously angry spirits capable of workingtogether to literally explode a living person. The doors and windows could never be opened. We could never let them out of here. We could never leave.

It was easy to convince Elsie’s legs to lower us to the garage floor. Sitting was an incredible relief. So was closing her eyes.

Mary? Are we going to be okay?

I don’t think so, baby.The air around us was thick with ghosts, poking and probing at the edges of my possession. That was a way they might be able to escape from the trap they were still in: if they could unseat me or Banjo, they could walk Elsie and Arthur through the doors. Or they could all try to pile in at once, which was what I suspected had happened to the Cunninghams. Either way, it wasn’t going to end well.

Can’t you go and talk to the anima mundi?

I can’t take a living person into the twilight, Elsie. You know that.

Is the anima mundiinthe twilight? The way Annie talks about it, she went there, when she had to kill the crossroads.

That made me pause. Annie had killed the crossroads by shifting herself physically to the place where they made their bargains, an in-between space that I had been empowered to access, as their representative in the world of the living. And I’d been able to carry her with me, because it hadn’t technically been the land of the dead but was a different sort of land of the living. If we could have layers, why couldn’t they?

Why couldn’t they?

Eyes still closed, I tried to focus on the feeling of shifting that had always accompanied the beginning of a bargain, of making that transition between one place and the next, however dissimilar those places happened to be. I thought about dusty roads and fields of wheat, and when the cold concrete beneath me began to feel like warm asphalt, I exhaled, and opened my eyes.

Twenty-One

“End of the road. Here’s where I get out.”

—Rose Marshall

The realm of the anima mundi, which I wasn’t sure was actually possible, but here we are

MYEYES,NOTELSIE’S.ELSIE’Seyes were still screwed tightly shut. She was sitting beside me on the blacktop, bandaged shoulder covered in blood. That top was beyond all saving. Price women know a hundred ways of getting blood out of fabric, and none of them were going to work here.

The road we were sitting on was as warm as if it were the middle of a summer day, but the sky overhead was bruised with twilight, and a cool wind was blowing through the fields of golden wheat that grew all around us. I pushed myself to my feet, newly aware of the fact that however solid my body felt, it was a dead body: nothing inside it moved or beat or decayed, and that was just fine by me. I was happier in a dead body. That was where I belonged.

“Hey, baby,” I said, turning back toward Elsie and leaning down to offer her my hand. She lifted her head and finally opened her eyes, blinking at me.

“Mary?”

“Yeah. We’re separate again. No more possession.” Nor was itsomething I was ever intending to try again. I could see why it would become addictive for a ghost who had the capability—and I wasn’t sure I wouldhavethe capability when the damage from my time in the spirit jar finished resolving itself. I still felt unsettled deep in my gut, like the substance of my body had been replaced with frozen slush, sloshing around instead of staying solid and pretending to be part of a normal human being.

That’s the afterlife for you. Always coming up with new and exciting ways to make things more complicated than they ought to be. It doesn’t help that we’re all super-specialists, adjusting our approach to our individual hauntings to suit whatever we need them to be. Time, for example. Most ghosts experience it as a nuisance but don’t really feel or experience the passage of time. They don’t get bored the way living people do; they don’t lose track of things; they don’t change. They just live life in the present tense, with nothing mattering more than the moment.

I take care of children, and I’ve never had the luxury of splitting myself off from the forward progression of time. So I was far too aware that we were here, Elsie was injured, and Arthur’s body was still in the possession of a dead man we barely knew.

---