Page 43 of Installment Immortality

“When the curtain goes up and the lights go down, you don’t worry about what might be waiting in the wings. Stage is yours. Showtime.”

—Frances Brown

Worcester, Massachusetts, waiting for the sun to set

WE’D MANAGED TO PULL INTOWorcester about two hours ahead of dinner, which was going to be spaghetti and garlic bread. Plentiful, easy to expand if more people showed up at the table, and, as long as we didn’t have any gluten or allium allergies, relatively inoffensive. Somehow, I wound up in the kitchen with Ophelia, helping her chop things, while Elsie got a shower and Arthur charged his laptop. For some reason, this didn’t mean just plugging it in and walking away; it meant sitting in the room and staring at it while it powered up. Whatever worked for him, I guess.

I suspected it was at least partially an attempt to reduce outside stimulation while he dug deep into memories that were only technically his own, looking for the moments where people had witnessed Artie doing something spectacular with a computer. This had all been a lot harder on him than he was letting on. Not the erasure and reconstruction—we knew that was difficult. No, the sheer overwhelming stimulation of being out in the world, forminghis own memories of things Artie had never seen or done. It was stretching his brain in ways that would either be amazingly good for him or accelerate the speed with which pieces of his identity dropped off into the void.

There was no way of knowing. But no one had forced him to come along with us on this trip: he’d volunteered, and he was still an adult. Whatever happened next, he’d be the one to deal with the brunt of it.

Ophelia passed me a handful of green onions to be diced into the pot, and fixed me with a stern look. “I wanted to get you alone, ghostie,” she said.

“Um?” I responded, with utmost cleverness.

“What are you really doing here?”

“Really, we’re hunting for the Covenant operatives who’ve moved into your city,” I said. “They’re hunting ghosts, and some of the forces that dwell in the twilight don’t like that very much. They’d like it to stop. I owe some of them some pretty big favors, and so they’ve asked me to deal with it as best I can.”

“And the Lilu?”

“Two of the kids I babysat, all grown up and ready for adventures,” I said. “I needed backup who could carry things and not get sucked into spirit jars if they missed a step, and they were the first ones to volunteer. They’re not here looking for territory or intending to mess with anyone who isn’t already messing with us.”

“Seems to me you just got to town, no one’s had a chance to mess with you yet.”

“Like I said, some of the forces in the twilight don’t like what the Covenant’s been doing. I work for those forces, and that means the Covenant is already messing with me.”

“Technicalities,” said Phee, waving a hand like she could brush my argument away. “That, and a big heaping helping of ‘family sticks together,’ which is why I wanted to talk to you. No one in this house is a combatant. We’re all peaceful people who are luckyenough to pass for human when we need to—which is most of the time, sadly—and we don’t want any trouble following you back here. We’re not suddenly going to agree to take up arms and fight alongside you. If you’re expecting that, you’re going to be very, very disappointed.”

“We’re not,” I said. “I’m going to accomplish as much of this on my own as I can. For the parts that need a living hand, Elsie’s pretty solid in the field. Arthur’s more of a guy-in-the-chair type, but he’s good at that, and I’ve been doing this ghost thing for a long time now. We shouldn’t need any help.”

“That’s encouraging,” said Phee. She began smashing cloves of garlic with the flat of her knife, dicing the resulting mess and tossing it into the pot. “We were all shocked when the Covenant started sniffing around here, and even more shocked when they ignored all signs of us to focus on the ghost population. Do you know what happened?”

“I have a question, first: how did you know who we were?”

“Come now, this is Massachusetts. We’re the ghost-story capital of the United States. If we have a haunting, we know the true story behind it, or close enough to the true story that we don’t sound like total bogans when we try to explain what happened. This is where urban legends are born. You really think I wouldn’t know the last of the caretakers if she turned visible in front of me? Mary Dunham died trying to protect her charges from Bobby Cross, right after he’d made his deal with the crossroads, and she still takes care of their descendants. Meaning the Price family, where a lovely Lilu lad name of Theodore married in a few generations back. Meaning that when I saw a caretaker ghost with two Lilu, I took an educated guess.”

“How did you know I was a caretaker?” I didn’t correct her about my last name. She hadn’t proven yet that she deserved that kind of trust.

She shrugged. “The hair.”

Suddenly self-conscious, I reached up to touch the crown of my head. “What do you mean, the hair?”

“Caretakers aren’t always old, but they always look at least a little old by the standards of their time. Usually that means gray or white hair, no matter what color it was in life. I’m surprised you didn’t wizen up just a bit for good measure. According to the old records, that happens about three-quarters of the time. How are you one of the lucky ones?”

“I don’t know,” I said, gathering my hair over one shoulder and staring at it where it lay, white and frozen, across my fingers. “I… I guess it’s because the family that first employed me had a live-in grandmother and a relatively young mother. I fit in better if I was a teenager than I would have as another old lady.”

More realistically, I had never seen anyone older than around thirty working for the crossroads. If it helped caretakers to seem older than they were, it helped the crossroads if all their interlocutors seemed to be young, naïve, and easily exploited. The two sides of my nature had been in conflict from the very beginning, and for a long time the crossroads had been dominant.

Was I going to start aging now that I was free of the crossroads, or would the fact that my family knew what I was “supposed” to look like keep my clock stopped where it was, where it had been for the last handful of decades? Only time would tell. I found that I wasn’t upset with the idea. Whether I started aging or not, I’d still be a ghostly babysitter, and I’d still have children to care for.

“Why do you call me the last of the caretakers?”

“Because there hasn’t been one since you manifested, and there won’t be another any time soon,” said Phee. “The time of the caretaking ghost is over. Today’s parents likelivingcaretakers for their children, and you only ever manifested among the humans. I’m not sure why.”

Species-specific ghosts have always existed. Caretakers aren’t among them. I frowned. “That’s not right,” I said. “Wadjet have caretakers. So do bogeymen.”

“You’re letting facts get in the way of a good story, and if you knew more about clurichaun, you’d know we don’t tolerate that sort of thing,” she said primly. “But it’s true that there hasn’t been another since you on the human side of things, at least not that I’ve heard anything about. And I would have heard. Nothing happens on this coast that I don’t hear about, and very little happens anywhere else that I miss.”

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