Page 11

“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

W E ’ D MANAGED TO PULL INTO Worcester 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, forming his 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 lucky enough 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, na?ve, 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 like living caretakers 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.”

“But apparently you missed what’s got the Covenant on ghost patrol,” I said, deadpan. “Just like you missed my surname and why I don’t exactly fit the template for a standard caretaker.”

“Really?” Phee turned toward me, suddenly interested. “What’s your last name, Mary? What’s your real last name?”

“I like ‘Dunham’ well enough. I could roll with that one.”

“No. No, if it’s not the one on your gravestone, I don’t want it.”

“I don’t have a gravestone,” I said. “I was a hit-and-run. I died before Bobby Cross went to the crossroads—long before he went to the crossroads. And I wasn’t a caretaker when I was alive. I babysat for random neighborhood kids because I needed to help my father pay for groceries. I wasn’t particularly attached to any of them until I was already dead.”

“Wait. That’s not how that works. Caretakers happen when someone with a strong protective connection to a child or vulnerable person dies and doesn’t give up their duties. If you died with no one to take care of, you should have moved on to what comes next, immediately.”

“I had my father,” I said, but that was a lie. He’d been alive, and I’d been trying to be a dutiful daughter, to keep him healthy and as happy as he could be in a world without my mother, but I had resented it on some level, hating the fact that I was trapped in our house and our town and a pale parody of the life I’d had when I was alive too. I’d wasted every minute I had among the living trying to make someone else happy, and it had never, ever worked.

It wasn’t until I was already dead and Frances Healy handed Alice to me that I’d finally come to understand what it was to care about someone else without hating them for it, without feeling like they should have been taking care of me instead of me taking care of them. I’d been a child who was never allowed to be a kid, forced to parent my own parents long before I was old enough to understand how wrong it was, and then I’d been a ghost who belonged, utterly, to an eldritch force dedicated solely to causing as much pain as possible. By taking care of the Healys, I’d finally been able to take care of myself.

“And that was enough?” asked Phee.

“No,” I answered. “My father was an angry, bitter man who drank too much because he was more interested in killing himself than he was in staying with the teenage daughter who needed him. I died before he did, and I got hired by Frances Healy to take care of her toddler a little while after my accident. So I guess I did it in the wrong order.”

“But you can’t have done it in the wrong order. It’s not possible.”

“Oh, did you miss the fact that I had two employers? The Healy family hired me to take care of their children after I was already dead, but the crossroads hired me to broker deals for them while I was dying.” I smiled at Phee, lips drawn tight against glossy teeth, and felt my cheeks hollowing out as my appearance slipped from schoolgirl to sepulcher. “I was bleeding out, and the voice of the void spoke to me and offered me a way to stay. I wanted to go. I was ready to go. But my father needed me, and I’d been taught that the best thing I could be was a dutiful daughter, so I stayed. I let the void convince me that it was worth it, that I would do anything that was asked of me.”

Phee stared, speechless for once.

“So I served the crossroads. I did as they asked. I brokered deals, and I helped people sell their souls; I ruined lives. So many lives. I don’t like to talk about it with the people I care for, because none of them realize how much damage I really did when I had the opportunity. They think I’m a good person. I’m not a good person.”

“You’re not Mary Dunham,” said Phee, sounding horrified. “You’re Mary Dunlavy. ”

“So you have heard of me.”

“That can’t be right. Mary Dunlavy serves the crossroads. She’s a demon, a monster, the worst collaborator the world has ever known. No one would allow her near children. Mary Dunham is the caretaker.”

“Mary Dunham doesn’t exist,” I said blandly. “I’m real, she’s not, I’m sorry you got your story confused. I died, the crossroads caught me, the Healys hired me while I was still solidifying, I became a hybrid caretaker–crossroads guardian, and I stayed that way until the destruction of the crossroads set me free. So now I guess I’m just the babysitter, and it’s my job to keep my kids safe, whatever that means.” I leaned over and took an onion from the pile on the counter, beginning to chop it into small, even pieces. “It’s a good thing I like kids, I guess.”

“Are you the reason the Covenant is so interested in ghosts all of a sudden?”

“Good guess,” I said. “They brought the fight to us. North America was supposed to be off-limits for those assholes and their bullshit. Neutral territory if they absolutely refused to stay away. But they decided they needed to start shit and get hit. They hurt two members of my family. Technically, they hurt my entire family, but they killed two. And once they did that, all bets were off. We came up with a plan to take the fight to them, to Penton Hall, where they trained their people. It was only possible because I was able to help. We filled their basement with explosives and set it off before they realized we were there. And somehow they figured out that a ghost was involved, that a ghost was helping their enemies, and they decided that was never going to happen again. They couldn’t find me. They didn’t know who I was. And so they’ve expanded their target profile to cover all the ghosts in North America, even the ones who couldn’t possibly have been responsible for what happened to their training facility.”

“Wow, girl, you really did decide to start shoveling the shit, didn’t you?” asked Phee, dumping a colander of mushrooms into the saucepot. “First you help the crossroads ruin lives for however long, and then when they went away—which, maybe they’ll come back one day, we don’t know—and now you’ve gone and pissed the Covenant off at all the ghosts who didn’t do anything wrong. You just like making enemies, don’t you?”

“The crossroads aren’t coming back,” I said. “Promise.”

Phee raised an eyebrow. “You trying to tell me that you know what happened to the crossroads?”

“You said stories were your ‘thing,’” I said. “I’m not giving you another story for free. Keep my kids safe while I’m out hunting for the Covenant tonight, and I’ll tell you what happened before we move along.”

“Deal,” she said. “But if the Covenant finds their way back here, deal’s off, and I’ll sell you out in a heartbeat.”

“No problem,” I said.

The front door banged open. I turned to look in that direction, resisting the urge to turn invisible. It’s the ghost skill I use the least, in part because it only works when I’m not holding anything that isn’t also made of ghost stuff, whatever that means. I’ve never been entirely sure. Ectoplasm or whatever. My shoes, the contents of my pockets, things I pick up in the starlight, those are all made of the same intangible material as my body, solid when I’m touching them, otherwise not. But the knife I was holding, and the half onion still in my hand, those were living things, made of the same solid material as the rest of the universe.

There was no “real” or “unreal” in this distinction: a knife I stole from the starlight would cut in my hands, and could absolutely be used to dice an onion. But if I turned invisible while I was holding a knife from the lands of the living, it would just become a floating knife, and that wouldn’t exactly be inconspicuous.

Amelia, who had just come in with her arms full of grocery bags, marched across the living room and into the kitchen, where she dropped her bags on the counter. “Mission accomplished,” she announced. She looked at me, nodding a quick acknowledgment, then turned back to Phee. “Where are the new kids?” she asked.

“Why? You going to try to pick up the new girl?” Phee replied. “She was already undressing you with her eyes. I bet you could see the underside of her sheets by the end of the week if you really wanted to give it a go—and if it doesn’t offend Miss Babysitter over here.”

“Ha ha,” I said, waving my knife carelessly in front of me. “Once they hit legal age, I don’t care what they do behind closed doors. It’s not my business. I’ll prevent teen pregnancies, solely because their parents expect it of me, but beyond that, I don’t tell my charges who to get busy with.”

“Nah, I was thinking of the new boy,” said Amelia. “He gives off that shy-but-sexy vibe I like.”

I nearly dropped the knife.

Amelia laughed. “So much for little Miss I Don’t Care. I knew you cared. You have that look about you. I’m not sure when the last time you didn’t care about something was. You’re a serial carer.”

“Guilty,” I said. “Look, if you’re going to flirt with Arthur, there’s something you should—”

“Nah,” said Amelia. “I was kidding. The girl’s more my speed. I like a lady with fluffy technicolor hair.”

“And we’re back to me not caring,” I said, putting down the knife. I glanced at the window, where the sun was more than halfway down in the sky. “Close enough to dark that I can get started, and there’s no reason for me to stay for dinner, what with the whole ‘I don’t need to eat’ aspect of my existence.”

“I’ll feed your Lilu,” said Phee, waving a ladle before she started stirring the sauce. “You have fun with your genocidal maniacs.”

“I always do,” I said, and disappeared.

When all else fails, find a haunting.

All ghosts can locate other ghosts, if we’re given sufficient time and good-enough reason to deal with one another. Most hauntings are fairly territorial. The reason we haven’t lost Baltimore or some other major metropolitan area to a massive ghost vortex is because we can’t stand each other for long periods, or sometimes at all.

Road ghosts are more social than the rest of us. I guess when your haunting is a mobile one, you sort of have to be able to tolerate the presence of other ghosts every once in a while.

I’ve never been as bothered by other ghosts as some of my kind are, maybe because caretakers are another type of mobile haunting. We don’t stay with a place: we stay with the people who make it relevant to us. That makes me unusually suited to dealing with other hauntings, and I tried to hold that firmly in mind as I appeared on the outskirts of a city park, green grass around my ankles and half-lit buildings all around. I was deep enough into the city’s commercial district that most of the things around me were closed; the living had all gone home for the night, leaving this place to the inhuman residents of the city. Including the dead ones.

Everything in me was screaming that there was a ghost near here. I turned in a slow circle, breathing in the night, trying to feel for the spirit I could halfway sense. When I didn’t find anything more precise than “nearby,” I started walking into the park, crossing the grass with long, careful strides.

Something whistled behind me, sounding almost but not quite like the wind. I turned. Behind me, lit from below by spotlights, was the great white box of City Hall, recognizable as a major civic building even before I saw the signs. I turned back the way I’d been facing. In front of me, beyond the grass and in the middle of a brick courtyard, was a pink marble basin topped by a bronze statue of a young boy standing behind a sea turtle.

“Public art is so weird,” I said, and kept walking.

As I got closer to the statue, I heard the whistling sound again. I stopped to look behind me, trying to find its source. There was nothing. Still, there was nothing.

The night and the noises were beginning to make the back of my neck itch, which was a fascinating reminder of the fact that no matter how dead I got, my spirit still remembered what it was to have had a body. Sometimes the autonomic reactions I no longer really had would kick in and make things weird, muscle cramps and sneezes and itches and other things that dead girls shouldn’t need to worry about. I turned steadfastly back toward the statue and resumed walking faster, heading for the boy and the turtle like they had been my destination all along.

The statue got stranger and stranger-looking as I drew closer, making me question who would have sculpted such a thing, much less installed it in a public park. Then I was right up on top of it, and stopped, squinting at the placard that identified it as the Burnside Fountain. There was no water.

“Go looking for ghosts, find weird-ass statue,” I said, eyeing the boy with the turtle. This close, it was difficult to find an innocent explanation for the pose they had been sculpted in, with the boy behind the turtle, holding it by the sides of the shell and pulling it back against his groin. The turtle looked startled and unhappy. The boy looked pleased with all his life choices up until this point. “Massachusetts is officially freak central.”

“Why would you come here, then?” asked a voice, from directly behind me. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end, and I turned to find myself facing a boy about the same age as the one in the statue, maybe twelve, maybe thirteen. He was faintly transparent, with dark, messy hair and bare feet, wearing a nightshirt in a style that had been outdated and forgotten before I was a child. There was something distinctly old-fashioned about his face, although I couldn’t have identified it exactly if you’d been offering to pay me.

“I’m pretty freaky myself,” I said, mind racing. Child ghosts aren’t as rare as I’d like them to be, and they mostly sort into one of two categories: the majority are ever-lasters, the ghosts of kids who haunt schools, trying to finish their trek to the strange, distant country of adulthood before they move along to their rewards. They’re the only ghosts that naturally age, getting older as they learn. It can take them centuries, but they will grow up if you give them enough time.

The rest of the child ghosts fall into a big bucket I like to call “trouble.” They died too young, and they’re pissed about it. They tend to become poltergeists and hostile hauntings, the sort who wind up with opportunistic filmmakers making horror movies about them.

This kid didn’t look like an ever-laster.

As if he’d read my mind—which was impossible; I’ve never heard of a telepathic ghost, much less met one—he looked me up and down, then smirked. “You look like you’d get freaky.”

I folded my arms. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those kids who’s been dead for so long that you think you get to be gross about things you didn’t live long enough to properly understand,” I said. “It’s not funny, it’s not cute, and it’s not going to change anything.”

He looked faintly disappointed. “You’re no fun.”

“I’m lots of fun. I’m just age-appropriate fun, and it’s late. You should probably be in bed.”

“I can’t be in bed,” he said sourly. “I’m dead.”

“That’s never stopped me.” Not entirely true, but good enough for this encounter. At least I’d managed to find a local ghost. “So are you haunting this park, or this weird-ass fountain?”

“Neither,” he said morosely. “I haunt City Hall, most of the time, but there’s been ghost hunters around the area for the last few months, and it’s not safe for me there.”

I turned to look speculatively at the city hall. It was a solid-looking building, and it felt old, but it didn’t feel old enough to have been used as any sort of schoolhouse or hospital wing. Those are the places most likely to be occupied by the ghosts of children—well, those, along with orphanages and mental asylums. But the ghosts you find in orphanages and old asylums don’t tend to be very friendly, and they definitely don’t try to weasel their way into tame sex comedies.

“City Hall? Really?”

“I didn’t die there, if that’s what you’re trying to get at,” said the kid. “My family home used to stand there, and then they knocked it down to build the new city hall because we were all dead and they didn’t think anyone would care about it. Well, I cared. I cared a lot. So I moved into their stupid civic building, and I haunted their fancy new halls, and I’ve been haunting them ever since then. Only now it’s all stupid ghost hunters, and I’d be in a jar with Martha and Agnes if I went back there.”

“Do you have a name?” I tried to keep the question as light as I could. Older ghosts don’t always know who they were. Older ghosts who’ve been traumatized somehow—say by having their traditional haunting disrupted by a bunch of ghost-hunting assholes—are even more forgetful.

“Jonah,” he said, and looked at me flatly. “Same question, fun police.”

“Mary,” I said.

To my surprise, he laughed. “Oh, thank the good Lord, you have a name. The last umbramancer who came through here, she called herself ‘Sunbeam,’ like that wasn’t something you’d call a good draft horse. Who names their daughter ‘Sunbeam’? Who thinks the inanimate exists to be mined for nomenclature?”

“Lots of people,” I said. “One of my closest friends is named ‘Rose,’ and she’s from the 1930s. I also know a girl called ‘Apple,’ and she was born in the 1920s, although ‘Apple’ isn’t her given name. We’ve always used nature names for babies. There’s just an arbitrary list we think of as ‘normal,’ and then everything else gets filed under ‘weird.’ I don’t know anyone named ‘Sunbeam,’ and you got one part wrong.”

“Only one, lecture lady?”

I decided to ignore that. Decades spent with a sarcastic, verbose family—they get some of it from me, and some of it from the mice, and regardless, they think mid-conversation lectures are perfectly normal—has left me inclined to lecture when the opportunity arises. I’m not proud of it. That doesn’t make it less true. “I’m not an umbramancer.”

Jonah looked at me disbelievingly. “You can see me, you’re out here at night, and you must have followed the screams the ghost hunters ignore. What else could you be?”

“Dead.”

“Nuh-uh.”

I flickered, reappearing in a dated skirt and blouse I could have worn to school once upon a time. The outfit wasn’t comfortable anymore, not the way it would have been when this was clothing rather than a costume. Time changes everything, even me, in its own terrible ways.

Jonah stared. I crossed my arms.

“Believe me now?”

“You can’t be dead,” he said. “You’re too solid. I can’t see through you at all. Your hair is moving with the wind. My hair doesn’t do that, not even when a really big storm rolls in. The grass is bent where you’re standing.”

I lifted an eyebrow. “You’re observant.”

He shrugged. “I get bored a lot. Watching stuff’s about the only thing I can do where it doesn’t matter that I’m dead and can’t touch anything. I’m really, really good at birdwatching and I don’t have to tell you any of this, because you’re alive and playing a trick on me.”

This was fun, but I needed him to take me seriously and answer my questions, not keep trying to dismiss me as an unwanted representative of the living world. “Could a living person do this ?” I demanded, and lunged forward, grabbing his wrist with one hand, before dropping down into the twilight.

He had time for a single startled squawking sound, and then we were standing on the same brick courtyard, next to the same fountain, under a sky the color of a child’s watercolor painting of the sunset, complete with vacantly smiling sun. I do mean “smiling”—the sun had human features sketched across its gaseous surface and looked like it had been hitting the “special brownies” pretty damn hard, since it was staring off into the distance with unfocused eyes, unblinking. But then, I don’t know how often a sun is supposed to blink.

There were other figures around, in this modified version of Worcester, people walking on sidewalks in the distance, or floating serenely through the sky. One small family was having a picnic on the grass, two adults and two children. One of the children had tentacles in place of arms, long, fleshy things that curled and uncurled as she chased the other child in circles. The adults watched her indulgently.

“She’s going to be a fascinating haunting when she finishes settling,” I said, letting go of Jonah. He sputtered and stumbled backward, away from me. I turned to focus on him, blinking. “What? You never seen the twilight before? This is where you’re supposed to go when you’re not haunting the halls.”

“ I— You— How? ” He stopped sputtering as he turned and stared at me, betrayal in his eyes. He looked suddenly even paler than he’d been in the lands of the living, washed out and reduced to a sketch on paper.

I blinked, and everything fell into place. “You haven’t been here since they tore your house down, have you?” I asked, making my voice as gentle as I could. He was a scared child, and I was a babysitter; softening my response was easier than I would have expected it to be.

Jonah shook his head. I winced.

“Shit. I should have realized, but all that stuff about moving, like it was voluntary, well, it threw me. They used part of your old house when they built the city hall, didn’t they?”

“No sense in wasting the brick,” he said, voice high and quavering. “So they gathered it up when the wrecking was done, and they built it into the new foundations. They didn’t want to use too much where people could see—it wasn’t the right color—so some of it’s in the courtyard around the fountain, too. That’s why I can go so far.”

“Oh, kiddo, I’m sorry.”

Jonah wasn’t a house haunting, however strange and misplaced. He was a homestead that had been stopped from fully forming. “For what?” he demanded, lower lip jutting.

“They didn’t just tear your childhood home down because they wanted the land, did they?” He looked away. I pushed on. “They tore it down because it was a ruin.”

“There was a fever,” he said, going paler still, red spots beginning to appear livid on his cheeks and temples. The pox crusted over almost immediately, seeming to almost glow against his skin. “It ran through the whole house, and everybody died. Mother was first, and then my sisters, and then the baby, and then Father and me. I was the last to go.” He shot me a hard, challenging look. “I didn’t want to go.”

“Most people don’t,” I said. “When you died, were any of them waiting for you? You mentioned Martha and Agnes—were they your sisters?”

“No,” he said, almost sullenly. “They came later. Mother’s ghost was still in the house when I died, trying to wake up the baby, but the baby wouldn’t wake up. The baby was like a doll made of rotten dough.”

“I’m sorry.” That happened sometimes, with dead parents who were immediately predeceased by infants, or to people who died in childbirth. The babies didn’t have enough connection to the world to leave any sort of unfinished business, and they didn’t linger, but their parents couldn’t let them go. So they conjured false babies for themselves out of ectoplasm and need, and they never woke up, and they never cried or fussed or needed anything again.

There are infant ghosts, but they’re rare and specialized, and almost never happen when there are loving parents anywhere nearby, living or dead.

“For a little while, we were all right,” said Jonah. “Mother missed the girls, but I liked having her attention almost all to myself. And then one day, she tripped—she was a ghost, I don’t understand how she could trip—and she dropped the baby. And when it hit the ground, it burst, like a rotten egg. What came out wasn’t blood or meat or even maggots. It was just slime and stinking. Mother looked at it, and said, ‘Is that how it is,’ and then she was gone, and I was alone. The house fell apart all around me for years, until the day the men came with their hammers and pulled it down for pieces.”

I nodded. “I think I understand now.”

“That’s great,” he said, in a flat tone. “How about you explain for me?”

“You know how there are different kinds of ghost?” I asked.

He nodded vigorously. “Yes. I’m just a ghost, no special kind. I haunted my house and now I haunt the city hall, and that’s all I need or want to do, ever.”

“Well, buddy, you’re not just a ghost. You’re what we call a homestead. You may have heard the term ‘caddis fly’ used for what you are. You’re the ghost of a person and a place. Normally a homestead happens when there’s a fire, or a flood, or something else that destroys a house without giving the occupants time to escape. For you, because you were so young and your whole family died of a sickness circulating inside the house, you took longer to form than most would.”

“So?”

“So if you’d been all the way formed when the living tore down your house, it would have appeared here with you, in the twilight, and you would have been bound here, not in the land of the living. You should never have been stranded there for so long. That isn’t how this is supposed to work.”

There must have been some sort of system once, older ghosts telling new ones what they were becoming and what their existences were going to be going forward. I thought back to when I’d been newly dead and trying to figure things out. A few of the other crossroads ghosts had made excuses and opportunities to come and speak with me under the watchful eyes of our mutual owner, explaining how things were going to work for me as best as they could. They’d been mostly correct in the beginning, until Fran hired me to sit for Alice and things started to get weird. Fresh ghosts are malleable, as Jonah was demonstrating.

He glowered at me. “What are you trying to say?”

“That half of your haunting is missing. You should have had the time to carry your house down into the twilight with you, and you didn’t, and I’m sorry. But also we’re getting away from the point here, and I’m definitely dead.” I flickered again, returning to my modern clothing. “I came to the city hall area looking for ghosts who hadn’t been caught by the ghost hunters yet. I’m here to stop them.”

“Why didn’t you say so to begin with?” asked Jonah. “I can take you to the others. Come on.”

He offered me his hand. After a moment of hesitation, I took it.

We disappeared.