Page 21
“Everything hungers for life. Even when it says it doesn’t. It may not know it lies, but it does; everything hungers for life.”
—Apple Tanaka
Inside Elsie, which is sort of like being inside a spirit jar, only squishier
M ARY?
Elsie? Oh, Elsie, you’re still here! Can you hear me?
I can hear you. I’m just glad it is you.
Elsie’s words felt like my own thoughts, just delivered in a slightly different tone of mind, like I was talking to myself. I couldn’t be sure she was actually there to talk to me, or whether she was actually giving her tacit consent for what I’d done by acknowledging that I was the only ghost she would have wanted to possess her. I still felt emotionally compromised and about as solid as well-used cheesecloth, like even the slightest shock would blow me apart.
And I was inside Elsie’s body, which was simultaneously fascinating and deeply, deeply unpleasant. It was fleshy and squishy and filled with sensations I barely remembered and might never have felt when I’d been alive. And then there was the gunshot wound, which was definitely something I’d never felt before. It hurt. Like nothing I had ever experienced, it hurt.
“Mother fucker, ” I snarled, clapping Elsie’s hand over the wound once again. It must have fallen when I invaded her, the effort of keeping her blood inside seeming suddenly secondary to experiencing a spiritual takeover. The blood pumped between her fingers, hot and thick and nasty in a visceral way.
Unlike the kids I helped to raise, I had lived a fairly sheltered life, one that didn’t involve a lot of stabbings or gunshots or other opportunities to interact with blood. I didn’t like it.
I also didn’t like the feeling of Elsie’s heartbeat, or the slow shifting of her internal organs. Fun fact I lived my whole life without knowing: there’s a part of the human brain whose only purpose is keeping the person it belongs to from feeling their own organs move, something which happens basically all the damn time. Apparently, naughty ghosts who take over other people’s bodies don’t get to use that piece of brain.
“Hurts, don’t it?” asked the man inside Arthur, without a trace of sympathy. “Gunshots will do that. You the one she wanted me to look for?”
I nodded Elsie’s head. “I’m Mary. The babysitter. Who are you?”
“They called me ‘Banjo’ when I was alive, and that works well enough for me now that I’m dead. Would do me some good to hear you call my name, sweet little thing like you.”
“Okay, um, ew. The body you’re using is this body’s brother, and I raised both these bodies from infancy, so please don’t make any comments like that.” I glared at him, unwilling to take Elsie’s hand off her shoulder to fold her arms. Managing an open gunshot wound was proving more difficult than I would have expected. “What kind of a name is ‘Banjo’?”
“Mine.” He looked around, then shrugged out of Arthur’s plaid flannel, grabbing it by the collar and ripping it briskly in half. “Come over here, will ya? I know you modern girls have big ideas about boundaries and consent, so I don’t want to lay hands on your meat shell without permission, but if we don’t stop that bleeding soon, you’re going to need a new one.”
“Elsie is not just a ‘meat shell,’ and she’s not going to die— Wait . You know how to deal with a gunshot wound?”
“Lady, my name was Banjo DiCola, and if I’d lived a little longer, I would have run the Boston mob. Yeah, I know how to bind a gunshot wound, maybe not as good as a doc would do, but good enough that your pink-haired little princess probably won’t drop dead before we get you out of her.”
“All right,” I said, reluctantly, and walked over to him, letting him guide me to perch on the edge of a nearby steamer trunk. He began to pack and wrap the wound in Elsie’s shoulder, which was a whole new variety of pain that I could have gone my entire afterlife without experiencing. But the tighter he pulled the cloth, the more the stabbing agony was reduced to a throbbing ache, and the more the blood slowed. I realized I wasn’t breathing, having stopped in the face of the pain, and forced myself to start again. Elsie’s body knew what to do, even if I didn’t remember how to breathe.
Ow, complained Elsie.
I know, baby, I’m sorry, I replied, while privately glad that she was aware enough of her own body to feel pain when her gunshot wound was dressed. I was wearing her like a coat, and I didn’t much care for the sensation—or for how addictive I could see it becoming. It was no wonder most ghosts didn’t have the capacity to possess people anymore. It was too effective. Ghosts that could do this would do it, constantly, and that would result in the living rising against the dead in a whole new, horrible way. Exorcisms as far as the eye could see.
And we shouldn’t have been able to do this. The extra strength the anima mundi said was floating free while the area’s ghosts were jarred, it was feeding into us, making possession possible. That was good. It meant that when this was all over, I wouldn’t need to be afraid it was going to happen again. My people would be safe.
Banjo-in-Arthur pulled the makeshift bandage a little tighter and tied it off. “That’s as good as I can do without cutting off circulation completely. You don’t want to lose that arm, do you?”
“No, I’m sure Elsie would prefer to keep it,” I said, flexing it experimentally. The resulting bolt of pain was unpleasant but manageable, especially compared to what it had been before. I turned to look at him. “Now what?”
“Now we unleash hell,” he said, and swept his arm across the nearest shelf, sending jars cascading to the floor, where they broke on impact. Individual plumes of foggy smoke began to fill the air, some hanging where they were, some swirling around us. They varied in shade from white-gray to virtually black. I yelped.
Banjo smirked. “They won’t hurt us,” he said. “Like knows like, and they can tell we’re dead on the inside. But anyone living they find inside this house isn’t going to be so lucky.”
Several smoky plumes dove for the floor, only to bounce off like birds that had run into a closed window. They swirled fast, managing to look pissed off without facial features or heads. Aoi would be proud of them. Banjo scowled.
“They went and put ghost traps inside their ghost trap? What the hell is wrong with these people?”
“Too long at the top of the food chain,” I said. I looked toward the attic door. “You any good with locks?”
“Never needed to pick ’em when I could shoot ’em out or kick ’em down, but I know the basic principles.”
I can pick a lock, said Elsie.
I paused, frowning. “If we let go of our possessions, the ghosts you’ve released will attack Elsie and Arthur.”
“Yeah, and I ain’t letting go.”
“What?”
Banjo folded Arthur’s arms. “I ain’t letting go. Getting a good grip on a living person is hard enough, and doing it a second time is just this side of impossible. I need a living body if I want to get out of this shithole, and I’m holding on to the one I have.”
“You’ll let him go after we’re out of the trap, though.”
“That remains to be seen, but for the moment, we’ll go with ‘yes, of course.’”
“Right.” I didn’t trust him any farther than I could throw him, and while Elsie was fairly strong, she wasn’t “toss your brother like a caber” strong. But that was all a problem for later, when we were out of this attic. “So we can’t let go right now. Can we share space?”
“What? Why would you want to do that ? You get to be alive again, and the first thing you think to do is share ?”
“I’ve been a babysitter for a long time.” I closed Elsie’s eyes, trying to concentrate on loosening my grip without entirely letting go, giving her the space to come forward and share this possession with me. I tried to think of it as teaching her how to ride a bicycle, those days when she’d been gripping the inside of the handlebars, pedaling for all that she was worth, while I’d held on to the outside and focused on running along beside her. Awkward, yes; also effective.
Are you sure? she asked.
Just trust me, baby, I replied, and then she was there, shoving me aside, and I felt the body we shared moving without my telling it to do so. It was… odd, like being a passenger in the back seat of a car, with no way to control or influence where we were going. I didn’t feel helpless, though, although I might have expected to do so; I could tell from the balance between us that I could seize control back in a moment if I felt I needed it.
But I wouldn’t need it, because this was Elsie’s body. I was just here to make sure we got it safely home. She stooped, picking up a few nails, some needles, and a sprig of pine from the mess on the floor, then moved toward the door, carrying me along with her.
Several swirls of phantom smoke followed us, some brushing against our shared skin. They were cold, and I tried to flinch away from them without giving up any more of my now-tenuous hold on Elsie. If I lost much more, she’d be able to shove me out entirely, and then she’d have no defenses against the dead.
Don’t push me out, honey, I thought, fiercely. You need me in here to keep you safe.
I know, Mary. I won’t. She hunkered down in front of the door, beginning to work on the lock with the items she’d collected from the floor. Banjo crowded in close behind us, casting a proprietary eye over her work.
“You’re gonna have to get out of my brother, mister. I don’t care if you are some big-time dead gangster,” said Elsie calmly.
“Oh yeah? Or what?”
“Or I’ll tell my Aunt Rose, and she’ll make you get out of my brother.” There was a click from inside the lock, and she pulled her makeshift tools away. “I don’t think you want to deal with Aunt Rose. She’s a Fury.”
Banjo blanched. The expression wasn’t like anything I’d seen Arthur, or Artie, wear. It was a relic of the man now occupying their body like it was a rented Halloween costume. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, and picked up a nearby jar, throwing it as hard as he could into another pile of them.
That seemed to be the signal the dead had been waiting for. They began ripping through the remaining jars, shaking them and knocking them to the floor, until the attic rang with the sound of shattering glass and rattling torture instruments. Elsie squeaked in surprise and bent back over the lock, working even faster than before. There was another click, and the door swung open.
“Thanks, sweetheart,” said Banjo, grabbing it and pushing past us to the outside. A torrent of smoke followed him, endless and crackling with a sharp static that made Elsie’s skin crawl. She straightened up and staggered back, plastering herself against the wall.
“Mary, I think you’re up,” she said, and retreated into her own mind, leaving me to push forward and retake control. It took a moment, and when I reasserted my claim over the body, I found Elsie’s hands tingling like she’d fallen asleep on top of them, the blood flow struggling to return to normal. I shook them, then stuck them up under her arms, trying to warm her freezing fingers.
Finish this, she thought.
“Yes, dear,” I replied, aloud, and followed Banjo out of the attic, into the larger ghost trap of the house.
The hall was quiet, Banjo and the spirits already gone. I paused to listen, but I didn’t hear anything, not footsteps and not screams. That didn’t necessarily mean that he wasn’t doing something horrible to Chloe and Nathaniel, just that if he was, it was happening far enough away that I couldn’t hear it.
Did I want him to be doing something horrible to Chloe and Nathaniel? They had come to America on a mission of revenge, not caring who might get hurt in the process of finding the people who’d killed their mother. That was terrible, truly, but was it so different from what we’d done? We’d gone to England to make the Covenant stop, and we hadn’t worried enough about the collateral damage of our actions. No matter how we tried to assign blame, there was always someone who’d hit someone else, an action triggering a reaction, all the way back to the very beginning.
I’m not a true Price, wasn’t born into this endless conflict, but I’ve spoken to enough of them, and to enough ghosts with an interest in history, and near as I’ve ever been able to determine, this is what happened: a long, long time ago, dragons were well on their way to becoming the dominant intelligent species on several continents. They were massive, they could breathe fire, they could fly until they reached a certain size, and most importantly of all, they were territorial carnivores. The Covenant of St. George formed to stop the dragons from burning down entire human settlements, as a final effort against extinction. And it worked!
Maybe a little too well, as those early Covenant members realized they really liked being the ones who got to decide who lived and who died. Everything that’s happened since then has been the continuation of that first fight. So who wins? Who gets to say “okay, we’ve hit each other enough, it’s time to put down the rocks and start treating each other with some basic decency”? Is there an expiration date on striking back?
What Chloe and Nathaniel had done was unforgivable. They were acting as they’d been taught, and lashing out in pain. Heitor had just been trying to find his sister; Benedita had just been trying to survive outside of a spirit jar, unaware that she was leading the Covenant to her fellow dead. Even Amelia, who I desperately wanted to blame for everything that had happened tonight, was just trying to preserve her species. Everyone had a reason for hurting people. And at this point, I was just about ready to say that we were starting over, clean slate, no more revenge, no more graves.
I inched along the hall, finally finding myself at the top of a narrow flight of stairs, and descended to the first floor one step at a time, trying not to get distracted by the sound of Elsie’s heartbeat or the feeling of her lungs expanding. I didn’t remember those things being so noticeable when I’d been alive. Her legs were getting weak from the blood loss. I caught us against the wall before we could fall down, pausing for a moment while I tried to catch my breath. I just needed to breathe. Why was that so hard?
Because I was using someone else’s lungs, in a body that desperately needed medical attention, and that was making things more difficult than they had to be. Naturally. Gripping the bannister firmly, I started down the stairs.
I was halfway down when the screaming started.
I sped up as much as I dared. Any faster and we’d go sprawling. With the injury in her shoulder, Elsie couldn’t take too much more. Falling down like that could knock me clean out of her and leave her defenseless against the formerly jarred dead.
Who were nowhere to be seen right now, and were probably off causing the screaming. I reached the bottom of the stairs and tested my balance before letting go of the bannister, continuing to move toward the sound of people being horrifically tortured. I reached the living room, and stopped in my tracks.
When I was a kid, before she got sick, my mother liked to do little science experiments with me, saying they would encourage me to have a playful mind and a generous approach to the universe. I think she just liked an excuse to make messes and blame them on the kid. Regardless, one of my favorites was something she called “hurricane in a jar.” It was soap, water, and food coloring, and the way the soap and the water pushed against each other would make it swirl and spin like a for-real hurricane. Little me found it endlessly enchanting.
The live-action version that had taken over the front room was somewhat less enthralling. Solid walls of smoke and fog ringed the room, patchworked in all the different shades of spirit, spinning wildly enough that they were generating a for-real wind. The darker patches were the more powerful ones, I realized, the ones who had managed to steal some poltergeist abilities from their pain; they were throwing papers and small objects into the air, where they were buffeted and flung around by the force of the storm. Banjo-in-Arthur was standing just on the other side of the wall, head cocked to the side, looking like he’d never seen anything more fascinating. I moved forward a bit to see what he saw, and promptly gagged.
Living reactions are inconvenient things. I never saw anyone in real danger of dying before I was dead myself, with none of those unfortunate hormones or reflexes to make a corpse more than an abstract complication. Even when I’d found Enid melted on her own kitchen floor, I hadn’t thrown up. But now, bile was burning the back of Elsie’s throat and her stomach was lurching, literally moving inside me from the force of the muscular contractions caused by her disgust.
The man from the van—whose name I still didn’t know—was hanging in the middle of the room easily a foot and a half off the ground, arms out at his sides like he was auditioning for the role of Scarecrow in a very modern production of The Wizard of Oz. His toes were pointed straight down at the floor. Not a natural position until you considered that he might not have a choice in the matter. The swirling smoke was thicker around him, the hands of a hundred furious, scrambled ghosts holding him captive.
“I didn’t— You can’t— Let me go!” he shouted.
“Mmm, no,” said Banjo. “The kids are angry. They don’t like bein’ bottled like so much cheap gin, and they really don’t like being stacked up in the attic for later. You shouldn’t have gone messing with the dead.”
“The world belongs to the living, ” snarled the man, right before the dead who were suspending him ripped his eyes out of his head with a wet sucking sound and threw them to the hurricane. He howled. The eyes bobbed along on the smoky tide, held aloft by the anger of the dead, spraying blood and vitreous humors on the walls.
“Try again?” suggested Banjo.
“Go to hell, ” said the man, somehow still forming words.
“Oh, buddy, you’re already there.” Banjo snapped Arthur’s fingers, and the ghosts— There really isn’t a pleasant way to say this, or a non-graphic way to describe it. They peeled the man. They began with the skin on his face, grasping his eyelids and the flesh under his eyes, and then they ripped it off with a vast, bloody tearing sound, exposing the raw muscle beneath. He howled.
They kept going. They ripped his clothing away, and then the skin that had been concealed beneath it, flensing him with the sharp little knives of their substance, until there was nothing left but a hanging, rotating side of meat that dripped unspeakable fluids and was still, somehow, managing to gibber and howl.
Banjo smiled. “That’s better,” he said. “Should have been a little nicer, mister. Wouldn’t have saved you, but maybe then we’d have let you die. Now where are those little brats you’re working for?”
I blinked, taking my eyes away from the rotating horror long enough to glance around the room. Heitor’s corpse was gone. So were Nathaniel and Chloe.
“House isn’t that big,” I said. “We can find them.”
Banjo made a noncommittal sound that I took as assent. I started moving toward the hallway entrance.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“To find them.” And to find a phone, if I could. Elsie and Arthur didn’t have theirs, and I’d seen nothing to indicate that the house had a landline. People like to talk about the convenience of cellphones, the way they’ve opened up the world. Reach people when they’re on the road! Map your way to your destination! They never mention how much harder they make it to call for help when you’re abducted by asshole ghost hunters and can’t stop possessing the girl you used to babysit for unless you want her to get skinned alive by pissed-off ghosts who have good reasons to be mad but shouldn’t use them as excuses to hurt her.
Banjo turned to watch us go, frowning the whole time. He thought I was up to something, I was sure of it, and to be fair, I was; if I could find a phone, I was going to call Michigan and ask Alice to send Sarah to help us. She couldn’t be around Arthur-in-Artie because she built him and it hurt to see him walking around not truly knowing himself, or her. Well, maybe Banjo-in-Arthur would be a different story. We’d just turn him into a nesting doll of one person on top of another, stacking them like bricks until she could stand to be in the same room.
And then, when we were out of this situation, she could go home, and she and Arthur could go back to avoiding each other. Simple. Anything that would let me get Elsie out of this house and to someone who could help her. A normal hospital was out of the question. Lilu blood is even more potent than their pheromones. She’d start a sex riot if we took her to a normal human hospital, and the nearest cryptid hospital I knew of was in New York. With the amount of blood she was losing, there was no way she’d make it there alive.
The bedrooms were empty. I moved onward, finally reaching the garage, and pressed my ear against the door. I heard rustling from the other side. The door wasn’t locked. I opened it and stepped through.
My grip on Elsie wavered as we crossed the threshold, but she grabbed hold of me and held me where I was. Interesting. The ward couldn’t keep me out, because I wasn’t a disembodied spirit, but if she hadn’t been willing to help me maintain my possession, I would have become a disembodied spirit, and she would have stepped into the garage without me.
It made me wonder what would happen if Banjo tried to come into the garage. Nothing he was going to enjoy, I was sure, but as I wasn’t sure how close to the surface Arthur was at this point, I didn’t want to risk him trying to step through, coming dislodged, and leaving Arthur’s body to drop to the floor, possibly unconscious, definitely defenseless.
This was all too complicated, and I didn’t like it.
There was another scuffling sound, coming from behind the van. I walked closer, one hand clamped over the wound in Elsie’s shoulder, and called, “Hello? Cunninghams? Don’t you think it’s about time we finished all of this?”
Whoever had the gun didn’t bother looking to see where they were aiming as they stuck their gun around the corner of the van. I ducked. Their shot went over Elsie’s head, embedding itself in the wall. Cautiously, I straightened. “I don’t mean ‘finish it by killing us.’ That isn’t going to happen today. I’m sorry. But this doesn’t have to go on. If you just go back to England and promise not to come to America again, we can let you go. We can let this all be over. Call it equal.”
They killed our mother!
And we killed theirs. Now hush. No one’s leaving happy—I just want us leaving alive. Or not, as the case might be. I wanted the living to stay alive, and the dead to stay dead. I wanted to put things back the way they were supposed to be.
“Screw you!” shrieked Chloe.
I didn’t have time to realize what she was going to do before I heard the back doors of the van slam open, followed by the sound of jars breaking against the concrete floor. I craned Elsie’s neck as I looked in that direction, and saw the field of broken glass behind the van. Smoke rose from the shards, mostly dark gray but some almost black, as Chloe kept on smashing. There was a crash that sounded like it came from inside the van, and Chloe screamed. Nathaniel yelled something frantic and climbed after his sister into the now-rocking van.
Elsie’s body was increasingly unstable from the blood loss, but I managed to run us to the van. “No!” I yelped. “Stop! Don’t do—”
It was too late. There were two more screams from inside the van, both shrill and abruptly cut off, and I came around the end to find an abattoir coating the interior. Chloe and Nathaniel looked more like they had simply popped than anything else, bits of them coating the walls and ceiling in a thin red film.
About a dozen unbroken jars still stood on the shelves.
We were inside a ghost trap of massive proportions, and it was filled to the brim with furiously angry spirits capable of working together to literally explode a living person. The doors and windows could never be opened. We could never let them out of here. We could never leave.
It was easy to convince Elsie’s legs to lower us to the garage floor. Sitting was an incredible relief. So was closing her eyes.
Mary? Are we going to be okay?
I don’t think so, baby. The air around us was thick with ghosts, poking and probing at the edges of my possession. That was a way they might be able to escape from the trap they were still in: if they could unseat me or Banjo, they could walk Elsie and Arthur through the doors. Or they could all try to pile in at once, which was what I suspected had happened to the Cunninghams. Either way, it wasn’t going to end well.
Can’t you go and talk to the anima mundi?
I can’t take a living person into the twilight, Elsie. You know that.
Is the anima mundi in the twilight? The way Annie talks about it, she went there, when she had to kill the crossroads.
That made me pause. Annie had killed the crossroads by shifting herself physically to the place where they made their bargains, an in-between space that I had been empowered to access, as their representative in the world of the living. And I’d been able to carry her with me, because it hadn’t technically been the land of the dead but was a different sort of land of the living. If we could have layers, why couldn’t they?
Why couldn’t they?
Eyes still closed, I tried to focus on the feeling of shifting that had always accompanied the beginning of a bargain, of making that transition between one place and the next, however dissimilar those places happened to be. I thought about dusty roads and fields of wheat, and when the cold concrete beneath me began to feel like warm asphalt, I exhaled, and opened my eyes.