Page 24 of Installment Immortality

IBLINKED ASIWATCHEDmy body pitch forward, landing on the bedroom floor in a heap. At least it wasn’t doing that cliched “grope around, looking for your own severed head” routine. That was funny in like, one zombie movie, all the way back in the 1970s. Fifty years later it’s just tired, and I would have been ashamed to be a part of it.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even roll, which made sense: most of the muscles the head uses to move around are located in the neck, and Elsie’s machete had caught me right at the base of the skull, leaving me neatly decapitated and without enough musculature to do more than lay where I was and stare at my own fallen body.

Elsie wasn’t screaming anymore. That was a good start toward opening a reasonable discussion—I hoped. “Hey, Elsie,” I said, my voice coming out a little strained and barely recognizable, due to my lack of vocal cords. Still, I could force air through my remaining esophagus and out my mouth, which still shaped wordsthe way it always had. Accent is a surprising amount of vocal familiarity. “New way of saying hello, huh?”

She looked at me and screamed again. Then her eyes rolled back in her head and she hit the floor with a thump, dropping her machete in the process. Luckily for both of us, it fell harmlessly to one side rather than impaling her.

“Elsie?” I said. “Elsie? You all right over there?”

She didn’t respond, not even to groan. Right. I’d never been decapitated before, and was a little surprised that it had worked, given that I’d only been semi-tangible when I was leaning through the door, but it was neither the worst nor the weirdest thing that had ever happened to me. I tried to think of what might solve the problem, beyond Elsie and a big roll of duct tape, closed my eyes, and dropped myself down into the twilight.

As always, the twilight was the manifestation of the most-loved and treasured aspects of the living area it mirrored. For this part of Portland, that meant it was largely a forest, with a few buildings dotted here and there among the towering trees. There were more buildings in the downtown area, where most of the local ghosts “lived” for lack of a better word: they spent their time and did their business there. It was a large-enough metro area, as cities in the twilight went, to have attracted a Dullahan: Declan Mark, a practicing doctor and dissector of corpses.

Dullahan are strange. They’re not dead, because they were never alive. They arise from somewhere deeper than the twilight. Most people think they’re from the starlight, since they’re nonhuman intelligences. I think they’re from all the way down in the midnight, arising from the level that gives birth to so many human nightmares. I’ve never been friendly enough with one of them to get away with asking.

As I had hoped, I appeared in the twilight back in one piece, although I was now flat on my stomach in the ghost of the loam that had existed here before the house’s foundations were poured.I pushed myself back to my feet and dusted the debris off my stomach before reaching up to cautiously feel my throat. There was no seam in my flesh or other sign that I had just done my best Anne Boleyn impression, which was a pleasant thing to have confirmed. Having never been decapitated before, I hadn’t been sure.

I crossed my arms and firmly nodded my head in my best impression of the titular character fromI Dream of Jeannie,a sitcom almost as old as I am but substantially more dated, and the twilight fell away, leaving me once more standing in Elsie’s bedroom. Where Elsie was still flat on the floor in a dead faint. I checked her pulse. She had one, and she was breathing; both of those were good things, given the alternatives.

Signs of life verified, I picked up her machete and put it gently on the bed, where she wouldn’t flail around and hurt herself as she woke up. With this accomplished, I sat down cross-legged on the floor to wait for her to open her eyes.

It took a while. I had time to mentally review the events of the day, then the events at Penton Hall, and then a full circuit of “Rattlin’ Bog,” from the tree in the bog all the way to the sub-molecular parallel dimension contained in the mote of dust on the feather on a little bird’s wing. I was getting ready to loop the song back in on itself when Elsie groaned and began to stir.

I stopped my silent recitation and held perfectly still, giving her the time to finish waking and sit up. When she did, I raised one hand in a small wave. “Hi,” I said.

Elsie screamed again.

“Catch a bubble, please,” I said, in my most authoritative voice. I was quietly gratified when she promptly snapped her mouth shut, cutting off the scream, and just stared at me. Somehow, despite multiple screams, neither her father nor her brother had come rushing to see what was going on. That was oddly less surprising than the absence of the mice. I would have expected at least part of Elsie’s congregation to come charging in by now.

“It’s time to be calm, friend, and stop yelling,” I said. “Can you do that for me?”

Eyes still wide and glossy with shock, Elsie nodded. I smiled.

“Good girl,” I said. “You can pop your bubble now.”

Elsie exhaled, then asked, quickly, before I could tell her to be quiet again, “Are you really Mary? If you’re not Mary, you need to tell me.”

“I don’t think that’s a rule a hostile spirit is going to listen to, Elsie,” I said patiently. “But yes, I’m really Mary. I’m sorry I was gone for so long. I didn’t mean to be.”

Her mouth dropped open as she stared at me. “I thought you were… Antimony and Sarah took you away, and then they came back without you, and I thought… Don’t youeverdo that again, do you understand me? You’re not allowed to scare me like that!”

“I didn’t mean to scare anyone,” I said. “I was doing what I could to help the family. We needed to stop the Covenant.”

“We still need to stop the Covenant,” she said, grimly. “They’re still out there hurting people. The man who killed my mother is still out there. Blowing up Penton Hall didn’t stop him.”

“No, it wouldn’t have,” I said, quietly. “Elsie, I never told you how sorry I was about what happened.”

“Did you see her at all? After she died? You said she wasn’t coming back, but did you see her, or did you just guess that she was gone when you couldn’t find her?”

“I saw her,” I said, keeping my voice soft. “She didn’t have any unfinished business.”

“She hadme,” said Elsie stridently. “She had herdaughter.Or was I not important enough to stick around for?”

“We’ve talked about the rules that govern ghosts enough that you know that isn’t how any of this works, Elsie,” I said. “If children were enough to bind unquiet spirits to the world, no parents would ever move on to whatever comes next. She didn’t have the kind of unfinished business that would define a haunting, and soshe chose to go, rather than staying and fading into a whisper on the wind and a cold patch in the hall.”

“But I wasn’t ready for her to leave me.”

“No one ever is, baby. I’m dead, and I wasn’t ready for her to leave me, either.”

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