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Very interesting mind, Bodil murmured in my head.

“What the hell are these… people… doing here?”Dad asked tetchily.“You know, this is all I need right now!”The ghost cloud started talking at once, sounding like a great rumble of thunder, which Dad didn’t seem to like any more than I did.“Shut up!Shut up!Shut up!”he yelled, flapping his hat at them.“You all drive me crazy!”

To my surprise, they shut up.Except for one ghost, a very familiar sight in a flowered housecoat and an old trench coat, who was one of the personal spirits, for lack of a better term, that Dad kept close to himself.Although why he did, I’d never been entirely certain.

She was mad as a hatter, only that was being mean to hatters.

The old bag lady, or so she’d been before Dad picked her up somewhere, kept flitting around his head.“I found them,” she sing-songed.“I saw them first.Didn’t I, Buddy?”

I didn’t know who she meant until another form coalesced out of the cloud and drifted downward.Although “drifted” was hella misleading because it made him sound like an angel, which he definitely wasn’t.“Buddy” appeared to be the ghost of something very much non-human, or else the gods had done something far worse to him than to Hansen.

“Augghhh!”Enid scrambled back in horror because he was closest to her, and I guessed she was still seeing the spirit world through Bodil’s mind.“Whatareyou?”

Poltergeist, my brain threw up the word, although I had no idea from where.

“Poltergeist,” Daisy the Bag Lady said, glancing at him.“Oh, stop that,” she snacked him on the slavering snout he’d manifested to go with the rest of the hideous, mutated body.I supposed it was his best attempt at a werewolf, only I’d never seen any that looked like that.

But her rebuke had an effect, and a second later, he morphed back into a pudgy, florid-faced ghost wearing an old-fashioned, three-piece suit that was straining over his not-inconsiderable belly.

“Sorry, m’dear,” he said to Enid.“Forgot I was in character.I used to tread the boards back in my day.But I must say, it’s much easier to get into costume now, eh?”

He elbowed her and was immediately skewered by Æsubrand’s spear.

“Oh, ho, it’s like that, is it?”he asked, winking at him.And floated off the spear as if it was nothing, which, for him, it was.“Understood, understood.”He doffed his homburg.“My apologies, dear lady, I didn’t mean to frighten—”

“Would someone tell me what the hell is going on?”Dad shrieked.

“We found ‘em out by the border in Pigville,” somebody said from the cloud.

“Don’t call it that,” Daisy admonished.

“Then what would you suggest we call it?”Somebody else asked.“When I had my farm, I kept pigs in better conditions than that!”

“I don’t know; it has its charms—”

“What charms?”

“I used to live under a bridge,” she said.“They havewalls.”

“If somebody doesn’t start making sense—” Dad seethed.

“Like I said, we found ‘em in Pigville, only they wasn’t,” the first voice said again.“They was here, on our side, and pretty far in, too.”

“Oh, were they?”Dad seethed, surveying us.“Come to spy on me, have you?You know what I told McIntyre would happen the next time he tried that shit?If you don’t, you’re about to find out!”

“The Hole, the Hole, the Hole,” the cloud started chanting.“Throw them in the—”

“Oh, here now.Is that really necessary?”Buddy asked—too late, as we were already being snatched up and carried off toward another thing that was not supposed to be here at the end of the world, namely a small encampment.Dad had told me once that he’d camped out in the Paths of the Dead, but I hadn’t quite believed him.

I believed him now.

And he wasn’t exactly depriving himself.A much nicer tent than the ones back in Pigville, the kind with multiple rooms, was sitting square in the middle of nothing, along with a folding chair, a long, scarred Formica table, a dorm-style fridge with a spitting talisman on top of it—for power, presumably—and a camp stove.There was also a mountain of magical junk off to one side, some of it still emitting tiny bursts of power, which was soon fighting with other half-dead magical objects, which the cloud began raining down on top of it.

“Not now!”My Father said as junk began bouncing all over the encampment.“Damn it, I’m not picking up after you lot again!”

“What is that?”Enid asked, probably able to feel the power in the mountain from here.

Dad was a garbage man, I told her silently, courtesy of Bodil.He used to decommission stuff like that to harvest whatever remained of its power.