Page 87 of Installment Immortality

“What?” I breathed.

“What?” asked Elsie.

The anima mundi smiled Jane’s smile. “I know, it’s a lot to take in. Not every spirit chooses to come back and belong to us, but your mother, when she died and found herself with nothing to bind her to the living world, chose to return to where she had begun. She became a part of us, and we know everything she was, and we know how much she loved you. It was an honor, Elsinore, to be allowed to be your mother. I always knew it wouldn’t last forever. I always knew I’d have to go.” Then, to my surprise, the anima mundi started to cry. “That’s what the mothers in our family do, after all. We leave. I’m so sorry I left you.”

In that moment, I began to understand. The anima mundi wasn’t trying to make light of Elsie’s loss, wasn’t pretending to be Jane. The anima mundiwasJane, or rather, Jane was the anima mundi. This wasn’t just a chance for Elsie to say goodbye.

Elsie’s eyes filled almost immediately with tears, and she embraced the anima mundi, pulling them close to her. “Oh, Mom, no, no, you were an amazing mother. You didn’t leave me, you were taken away from me. There’s a difference. I love you so much. I’m not angry at you because you had to go. It’s not like you had a choice in the matter.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Good girl.” The anima mundi pulled back. “So can you stop being angry at your brother? Please? He didn’t choose to die when he followed Sarah—and you know he’d have followed that girl to the ends of the world and beyond. Hell, he actuallydid.”

“Yeah, and that’s what it took for him to find out she actually loved him,” said Elsie, a bitter chuckle in her tone. “How many years did they spend circling each other like it was nothing, like everybody gets that kind of love justhandedto them? He still loves her, and she won’t even talk to him. It isn’tfair.”

“Life isn’t fair, bun,” said the anima mundi. “Neither is death. Your brother died, and now the man who’s taken his place is dying, and it’s awful, and you can’t stop it.Ican’t stop it. You have to just love him until it’s time to let him go.”

“I’ll try,” said Elsie, voice soft. Then she swayed, catching herself on the anima mundi’s arm. “I’m so tired, Mom. I don’t feel good. I’ve lost a lot of blood. Do you think I can rest now? Is it okay if I rest now?”

“Sure, baby,” said the anima mundi. “Just close your eyes.”

Elsie closed her eyes. The anima mundi raised a hand, and we were inside the little homestead that sat on the edge of the wheat fields, in a bedroom that looked like something out of a frontierliving museum. The anima mundi lowered Elsie onto the bed, where she made a bloody splotch against the blue and white log cabin quilt.

They turned to me once she was down. “Do you have a plan?”

“I think so.”

“Talk quickly.” They pushed their hair back, and they changed with the gesture, abandoning the veil of Jane for their normal shifting mask of aggregate faces. It was soothing to see them the way I thought of them, protein and ever-changing. “She doesn’t have a lot of time.”

That wasn’t encouraging. “I don’t think Arthur does, either,” I said.

“My ability to interfere directly in the land of the living is limited, or I wouldn’t need ghosts as go-betweens,” cautioned the anima mundi.

“Yes, but you can pull ghosts into your presence whenever you want to, can’t you?”

The anima mundi nodded. “I can.”

“Then what I need to ask you to do is reach into the land of the living and pull all the ghosts who are currently trapped in that house through to the farm,” I said.

They blinked. “That’s… an interesting notion.”

“They’re hurt. They’ve been tortured. Many of them probably won’t be safe to send back for a long, long time. They need a place to heal. Can’t you let them have a fallow field or something?”

“Removing them from the lands of the living won’t correct the power imbalance created by their removal.”

“Neither will them killing a few dozen living people when they get out of that house and go rampaging through suburbia. Can you get them out?”

“We can give them space, yes. Come with me.”

They walked out of the room, gesturing for me to follow, and I did, as quickly as I could, although it pained me to leave Elsiebehind. She was my charge. I could still feel her, and I would know if she died. In the moment, it was the best I could do.

The anima mundi led me to a door, opening it to reveal a wide, empty field that looked suspiciously like the one between the old Healy house and the Galway Wood. There was even a barn in the distance, run-down and tattered, holes forming in the roof. They stepped onto the porch, raising their hands high. I stayed in the doorway, sensing that this wasn’t a situation I wanted to walk into the middle of without taking the time to prepare myself.

When they brought their hands down, the field filled with ghosts. Some of them were pale, see-through outlines of human beings; some of them were nothing more than puffs of skidding smoke. A few—a very, very few—had traces of color and solidity.

Two of the more solid-looking ghosts saw the anima mundi and started toward the porch while the rest were still trying to reorient themselves, looking around with confusion or hanging in motionless patches of wind-defying fog. One of them was a man dressed like he came from my time period, complete with slicked-back hair and unreasonably well-defined facial hair. The other was a woman Elsie’s age, who glowed a steady, lambent white that overwhelmed the rest of the color she might have once possessed. She was dressed like my mother used to when I was young, barely a generation ahead of me, prim and proper and perfectly polite.

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