Page 55 of Installment Immortality

“Give it here,” I said, holding up my hands.

My ability to catch is better than my ability to throw, and I’d been assuming he could at least toss a gentle underhand. I was braced. Instead, he threw that roll of gross paper like it was the football at the big game, and it bounced off my arm with a nasty squelching sound.

That was almost better than me catching it. I yelped—half a beat too slow, but he was so busy looking horrified that I was pretty sure he didn’t notice—and pulled my arm to my chest, glaring at him.

“Lookat my sweater!” I said, turning to show him the mucky, oily stain now spreading through the fabric. “Do you feel better now, dick?”

“I—I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess I just got sort of freaked out sitting here in the van all by myself, and then you came along, and you ticked off so many of the ‘might be dead’ boxes, and I… I’m sorry.” He opened the van door. “Come inside, I’ll help you clean that up.”

I looked at him mistrustfully. A real teenage girl would have to have been a fool to get in that van with a strange man. I, however, wasn’t real in the “can be hurt” sense, not anymore. I was a dead teenage girl, and the rules were different for me than they were for anyone with a pulse. After taking what I hoped would read as a long enough pause to consider, I shrugged, said, “Why the hell not?” and walked over to step past him into the van.

Two things immediately jumped out at me. First, in addition to the wall of monitors and blinking electric equipment, therewas a wall of metal shelves bolted into place and loaded down with glass mason jars in a variety of sizes. They contained a wide assortment of objects, nails and railway spikes and bits of broken mirror. That was the unimportant part, because they also held ghosts. Every single one of them was occupied, phantoms beating intangible fists against the glass, mouths open in silent, endless screams.

When you don’t need to breathe, you can keep screaming for a long, long time. Like forever.

The second thing was more subtle, but more alarming. Someone had etched a Mesmer cage into the van’s frame, making the whole thing one big, mobile, ghost-containment unit. Which I was now standing inside.

Fuck.

Thirteen

“Life isn’t all there is. Everything wants to keep existing, even things that have never been alive. Sometimes you just have to let them.”

—Apple Tanaka

Worcester, Massachusetts, in the back of an unmarked van with a man who doesn’t seem to realize how upsetting this is

“SEE ANYTHING?”ASKED THE MAN. He moved to sit in front of the bank of monitors, looking far more relaxed now that we were inside the van. As well he should. He could leave.

And I couldn’t.

Mesmer cages were invented by the spiritualist of the same name, and quickly became popular with umbramancers, who saw them as a way to ward off and contain intrusive spirits. Ghosts are drawn to umbramancers like moths to flame, sometimes with the same self-immolating ends. I remembered how much the general spirit population had harassed Laura before her disappearance, and I couldn’t really blame her for putting up walls to try and buy herself a little peace.

Umbramancers aren’t common. The majority commit suicide before the age of thirty, choosing to pass on into nothingness rather than remain a target for an army of ghosts. But they don’t have a monopoly on Mesmer cages, sadly. And I do mean that“sadly”: this man, this boy, was no umbramancer. He was watching me with the earnest smugness of someone who thought he’d just done something really impressive in front of a cute girl, and I realized he thought I was fixated on the rack of bottled ghosts, not frozen with horror.

Well, that was useful, at the very least.

The Mesmer cage made sense: they contain ghosts. At the end of the day, that’s their primary purpose. And with all those ghosts under glass in here, he had good reason to want to know that they’d be contained if something happened, if there was an accident or an earthquake or whatever. Some of the ghosts barely looked human anymore. They were just agonized, howling faces ringed by the dust kicked up by their panic. That, too, was a bad sign. Ghosts settle shortly after death, taking on whatever form they’re going to inhabit for the length of their afterlife. Not many ghosts settle as poltergeists. These ghosts were demonstrating poltergeist abilities by making the dust hang in the air, and they didn’t even necessarily know that they were doing it.

No wonder the anima mundi had wanted me to get involved. This was horrifying no matter how you looked at it.

“What’s in the jars?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant, like I wasn’t watching human spirits being tortured while I stood inside something that was essentially just a larger jar. I’ve heard stories of ghosts escaping from Mesmer cages by mimicking the living so well that the symbols making up the pattern can’t detect the difference, but I’ve never needed to mimic the living that well. I had no idea whether I’d be able to exit without help, and if I tried and failed, the man who’d invited me inside would realize that he had something more than just a midnight prankster.

“Can’t you see them?” he asked, sounding honestly curious. “I couldn’t at first. Not until Nathaniel started adding iron filings to all the jars. He says it encourages them toward solidity, which doesn’t make sense to me, but then, none of this has made anysense to me, not since the very beginning. You should be able to seesomething.”

I frowned and moved closer to the rack of jars, straining like I was trying to see something that wouldn’t quite come in focus.

One of the jarred ghosts abruptly rushed the glass, mouth hanging open in an agonized howl, bits of salt and iron and broken mirror swirling around it like they were caught in a localized wind storm. I didn’t have to feign my yelp, and I jumped backward. The man from the van was there to catch and steady me, placing one hand on my waist and leaving it there.

“Easy, easy,” he said, like he was trying to soothe a frightened horse. “They can’t hurt you. I told you my friends were ghostbusters. Well, this is where they put the ghosts they catch.”

“I can see them now,” I said, blinking rapidly, as if the shock had suddenly brought all the other spirits into focus. Not all of them were screaming. Some were crying, or huddled on one side of the jar, doing their best to avoid the offending items. The truly agitated ones seemed to have incorporated all those bits and pieces into themselves, becoming the things that hurt them.

Even if I could somehow get them all out of here, they might well be past saving.

That was a problem for later, when I knew how I was gettingmyselfout of here—something I’d need to do soon, since the Covenant stooges inside the city hall were going to figure out eventually that Jonah wasn’t there, and they were chasing a hollow haunting. They might recognize me. They might not. Either way, I didn’t want to deal with them right now. I wanted to get back to Phee’s boardinghouse and tell Elsie and Artie that we were definitely in the right place. I wanted to go to Oregon and ask Annie whether any of these people sounded familiar.

I wanted to go to the King Spa in Palisades Park and spend a few hours scrubbing myself, until I felt like the filth of this whole encounter had been removed from my spectral skin. They’re usedto ghosts at the King Spa. As long as we pay our way and don’t bother the other customers, they don’t make too much of a fuss about the fact that we’re there. I appreciate people who can show the dead that much respect.

---