Page 22

“End of the road. Here’s where I get out.”

—Rose Marshall

The realm of the anima mundi, which I wasn’t sure was actually possible, but here we are

M Y EYES , NOT E LSIE ’ S . E LSIE ’ S eyes were still screwed tightly shut. She was sitting beside me on the blacktop, bandaged shoulder covered in blood. That top was beyond all saving. Price women know a hundred ways of getting blood out of fabric, and none of them were going to work here.

The road we were sitting on was as warm as if it were the middle of a summer day, but the sky overhead was bruised with twilight, and a cool wind was blowing through the fields of golden wheat that grew all around us. I pushed myself to my feet, newly aware of the fact that however solid my body felt, it was a dead body: nothing inside it moved or beat or decayed, and that was just fine by me. I was happier in a dead body. That was where I belonged.

“Hey, baby,” I said, turning back toward Elsie and leaning down to offer her my hand. She lifted her head and finally opened her eyes, blinking at me.

“Mary?”

“Yeah. We’re separate again. No more possession.” Nor was it something I was ever intending to try again. I could see why it would become addictive for a ghost who had the capability—and I wasn’t sure I would have the capability when the damage from my time in the spirit jar finished resolving itself. I still felt unsettled deep in my gut, like the substance of my body had been replaced with frozen slush, sloshing around instead of staying solid and pretending to be part of a normal human being.

That’s the afterlife for you. Always coming up with new and exciting ways to make things more complicated than they ought to be. It doesn’t help that we’re all super-specialists, adjusting our approach to our individual hauntings to suit whatever we need them to be. Time, for example. Most ghosts experience it as a nuisance but don’t really feel or experience the passage of time. They don’t get bored the way living people do; they don’t lose track of things; they don’t change. They just live life in the present tense, with nothing mattering more than the moment.

I take care of children, and I’ve never had the luxury of splitting myself off from the forward progression of time. So I was far too aware that we were here, Elsie was injured, and Arthur’s body was still in the possession of a dead man we barely knew.

“Come on, honey, get moving,” I said, still holding out my hand. Elsie looked at it dully. I shook it, trying to transmit the urgency of our situation to her without explicitly vocalizing it and running the risk of her getting stubborn the way she used to as a child, digging her heels in and refusing to be budged.

She wasn’t a child anymore, and after a few seconds of looking at my hand, she reached out with her uninjured arm and took it, letting me lever her up off the pavement. She staggered a bit, putting her other hand to her temple.

“Woozy,” she proclaimed.

“You’ve lost a lot of blood.”

“I didn’t lose it,” she said. “I know exactly where it is.” Then she cackled, and there was a hysterical note I didn’t like to the sound, an element of brittleness that hadn’t been there before her mother died. But this wasn’t the time to dwell on it. I tugged her out of the middle of the road, moving toward the grain, and plunged us both into the gold without hesitation. I couldn’t see any sign of the anima mundi’s farm or homestead, but they had to know that we were here by this point. I wasn’t sure the anima mundi’s land could be accessed without them knowing someone had crossed their boundaries.

I led Elsie onward, deeper and deeper into the gold, until swaths of short, stubbly stalks began to appear around us, patches where the harvest had already happened. She staggered, yawning, and said, “I’m tired. I think I just want to sit down for a little while. Can’t I sit down for a little while, Mary?”

We weren’t in the lands of the dead. Elsie was alive, and that meant she could die here. I tugged a little harder, trying to keep her moving with me. She grumbled and groaned, and I felt bad for not allowing her to rest, until finally she just let go of my hand and sat down on the grain with a hard thump.

“No,” she said, petulant as the child she’d been when officially in my care. “I don’t go any farther than this.”

“Okay, baby.” I tilted my head back, addressing the air. “You’re the living world. She’s alive. Can’t you help her? Just this once, can’t you find it in your heart to help? She wouldn’t even be in this situation if not for what you asked from me.” I paused. The wind whistled around us, cool and scented green. “Please,” I repeated.

“I’m sorry, Mary; I was busy elsewhere,” said a familiar voice behind me. I turned, and was facing not the anima mundi but Jane. My Jane, mom jeans and loose blouse and all, the way she’d looked in the days before she died. Younger than she thought she was, older than she felt, healthy and vital and breathing and so very alive that it made my heart ache to see her so.

“No,” I said.

She blinked. “What do you mean, no?”

“I mean Jane chose to move on. She didn’t have any unfinished business, and she didn’t linger. That means you’re the anima mundi wearing her like a Halloween mask for reasons I don’t understand, and no. I don’t want you doing that to Elsie. She deserves better.”

The anima mundi—because it was them, it had to be—blinked, and then narrowed their eyes. “So you brought a living girl here and now you think you can give me orders? I think you’ve fundamentally misunderstood our relationship, Mary Dunlavy. I think it may be time to disabuse you of a few direly incorrect notions.”

They snapped Jane’s fingers, and we were no longer in the wheat. Instead, we were standing in the middle of a blueberry field, chest-high bushes dripping with fat berries stretching out in all directions. It was less obvious here where the harvest had already happened. Pails of berries sat alongside bushes that looked completely untouched, so full that fruit was tumbling out to land in the grass. Elsie was still sitting on the ground beside me, eyes closed, seemingly unaware of what was happening right in front of her.

Good. Sometimes ignorance really is the best option. “What are you disabusing me of?” I asked.

“You have no say in the faces we wear,” said the anima mundi. “For you, we appear as a combination of the women of the world, because it brings you the most comfort. We are not a woman ourself, but we are a mother to this noosphere, as well as a product of its growth. When the living face us, we show them the face that will comfort them the most. When your Antimony came before us, we showed her your face, and she called us ‘Mary’ until she saw how wrong she was. A dead woman’s face to comfort a living one. Why should this child be any different?”

“Because Jane was her mom, ” I said. “Look. Mothers and daughters are complicated. Even when they don’t like each other very much—and they don’t always like each other very much— losing your mother is a life-changing event. You don’t have to grieve for her to know that you’re never going to be the person you were before you lost her. Elsie just lost Jane. She’s in the process of losing her brother—her second brother, who was built on the bones of her first one. She’s grieved enough. Please. I know I don’t get to order you around, but don’t do this to her. She deserves better.”

The anima mundi sighed. “Really? Better than the chance to say farewell?” They looked past me to where Elsie sat. “We think she deserves that opportunity.”

I paused. Elsie hadn’t been able to say goodbye to Jane. She hadn’t been able to say goodbye to Artie, either—he’d gone to save Sarah, moving too fast to think about what he was doing, and then only his empty body had made it home. Arthur was dissolving a little more every day, and there was the chance that she wouldn’t be saying goodbye to him, either. The last few years of Elsie’s life had been all but defined by not getting that final farewell.

“You said you want to disabuse me of several things,” I said. “What else?”

“You don’t command us,” said the anima mundi. “We aren’t your friend, or your servant.”

“But you want to be my employer,” I said. “That means sometimes I get to need things from you. Even the crossroads understood that I needed things.” They’d been sullen and unkind about it, but they’d been able to understand. “And sometimes those things will be a part of doing whatever it is you’ve asked me for, like this time.”

“Oh? The Lilu’s well-being is part of answering my request?” They moved toward Elsie, stooping down and helping her off the ground. She unfolded easily, rising with no sign of weariness or weakness, and only swayed a little as the anima mundi stepped back. “She looks less like a fulfillment and more like a favor.”

“She is,” I said. “She needs medical help or she’s not going to make it, but if she opens the door and goes outside, she’ll break the wards keeping the ghosts from the spirit jars contained. That house is a phantom nuke in the middle of a populated area. Bringing her here lets us keep the wards intact a little longer, while we figure out how to disarm it.”

“I cannot heal the child,” said the anima mundi, sounding genuinely sorry. “She’s too small. I would heal her into nonexistence, make her into something else, and lose whatever of her it is that you treasure so.”

“I didn’t expect you to heal her. Just to help me get her out of the house. Please.”

The anima mundi didn’t answer. Instead, they leaned in and kissed Elsie, ever so gently, on the forehead. She took a shaky breath and opened her eyes.

Then she blinked, rapidly, like she was trying to clear her eyes. “Mom?” she asked, with fragile, burning hopefulness.

“Yes, and no,” said the anima mundi in Jane’s voice. “I was, but I died and I moved on, and now I’m a part of the great beating heart of the world. I belong to the anima mundi now, the spirit of Earth.”

“What?” I breathed.

“What?” asked Elsie.

The anima mundi smiled Jane’s smile. “I know, it’s a lot to take in. Not every spirit chooses to come back and belong to us, but your mother, when she died and found herself with nothing to bind her to the living world, chose to return to where she had begun. She became a part of us, and we know everything she was, and we know how much she loved you. It was an honor, Elsinore, to be allowed to be your mother. I always knew it wouldn’t last forever. I always knew I’d have to go.” Then, to my surprise, the anima mundi started to cry. “That’s what the mothers in our family do, after all. We leave. I’m so sorry I left you.”

In that moment, I began to understand. The anima mundi wasn’t trying to make light of Elsie’s loss, wasn’t pretending to be Jane. The anima mundi was Jane, or rather, Jane was the anima mundi. This wasn’t just a chance for Elsie to say goodbye.

Elsie’s eyes filled almost immediately with tears, and she embraced the anima mundi, pulling them close to her. “Oh, Mom, no, no, you were an amazing mother. You didn’t leave me, you were taken away from me. There’s a difference. I love you so much. I’m not angry at you because you had to go. It’s not like you had a choice in the matter.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Good girl.” The anima mundi pulled back. “So can you stop being angry at your brother? Please? He didn’t choose to die when he followed Sarah—and you know he’d have followed that girl to the ends of the world and beyond. Hell, he actually did. ”

“Yeah, and that’s what it took for him to find out she actually loved him,” said Elsie, a bitter chuckle in her tone. “How many years did they spend circling each other like it was nothing, like everybody gets that kind of love just handed to them? He still loves her, and she won’t even talk to him. It isn’t fair. ”

“Life isn’t fair, bun,” said the anima mundi. “Neither is death. Your brother died, and now the man who’s taken his place is dying, and it’s awful, and you can’t stop it. I can’t stop it. You have to just love him until it’s time to let him go.”

“I’ll try,” said Elsie, voice soft. Then she swayed, catching herself on the anima mundi’s arm. “I’m so tired, Mom. I don’t feel good. I’ve lost a lot of blood. Do you think I can rest now? Is it okay if I rest now?”

“Sure, baby,” said the anima mundi. “Just close your eyes.”

Elsie closed her eyes. The anima mundi raised a hand, and we were inside the little homestead that sat on the edge of the wheat fields, in a bedroom that looked like something out of a frontier living museum. The anima mundi lowered Elsie onto the bed, where she made a bloody splotch against the blue and white log cabin quilt.

They turned to me once she was down. “Do you have a plan?”

“I think so.”

“Talk quickly.” They pushed their hair back, and they changed with the gesture, abandoning the veil of Jane for their normal shifting mask of aggregate faces. It was soothing to see them the way I thought of them, protein and ever-changing. “She doesn’t have a lot of time.”

That wasn’t encouraging. “I don’t think Arthur does, either,” I said.

“My ability to interfere directly in the land of the living is limited, or I wouldn’t need ghosts as go-betweens,” cautioned the anima mundi.

“Yes, but you can pull ghosts into your presence whenever you want to, can’t you?”

The anima mundi nodded. “I can.”

“Then what I need to ask you to do is reach into the land of the living and pull all the ghosts who are currently trapped in that house through to the farm,” I said.

They blinked. “That’s… an interesting notion.”

“They’re hurt. They’ve been tortured. Many of them probably won’t be safe to send back for a long, long time. They need a place to heal. Can’t you let them have a fallow field or something?”

“Removing them from the lands of the living won’t correct the power imbalance created by their removal.”

“Neither will them killing a few dozen living people when they get out of that house and go rampaging through suburbia. Can you get them out?”

“We can give them space, yes. Come with me.”

They walked out of the room, gesturing for me to follow, and I did, as quickly as I could, although it pained me to leave Elsie behind. She was my charge. I could still feel her, and I would know if she died. In the moment, it was the best I could do.

The anima mundi led me to a door, opening it to reveal a wide, empty field that looked suspiciously like the one between the old Healy house and the Galway Wood. There was even a barn in the distance, run-down and tattered, holes forming in the roof. They stepped onto the porch, raising their hands high. I stayed in the doorway, sensing that this wasn’t a situation I wanted to walk into the middle of without taking the time to prepare myself.

When they brought their hands down, the field filled with ghosts. Some of them were pale, see-through outlines of human beings; some of them were nothing more than puffs of skidding smoke. A few—a very, very few—had traces of color and solidity.

Two of the more solid-looking ghosts saw the anima mundi and started toward the porch while the rest were still trying to reorient themselves, looking around with confusion or hanging in motionless patches of wind-defying fog. One of them was a man dressed like he came from my time period, complete with slicked-back hair and unreasonably well-defined facial hair. The other was a woman Elsie’s age, who glowed a steady, lambent white that overwhelmed the rest of the color she might have once possessed. She was dressed like my mother used to when I was young, barely a generation ahead of me, prim and proper and perfectly polite.

“Hello, Banjo,” I said, once the man was close enough.

He eyed me. “You that Mary girl?”

“I am.”

“How’d you know?”

I shrugged. “Lucky guess.”

“How’d we get here?”

The anima mundi sniffed, looking at him. “I called the ghosts from the building you were trapped within, and you came.”

Banjo shot them a dismissive look. “Nah, see, I was possessing this hollow little guy—he was perfect, an unbroken vessel, just waiting for someone more useful to come along and put him to good use. I want to go back.”

I stepped forward, eyes blazing. “Excuse me?”

“Aw, yeah, little babysitter. Your boy’s got a good body. I can use it. Better still, he’s got a lousy grip on the thing. You sure he’s not already a possession? Maybe the original got on your nerves? I could live there forever.”

“But you won’t.” I looked to the anima mundi. “Please don’t send him back.”

“I dislike the dead occupying the living,” they said coolly. “I will not enable it.”

“Thank you.” I turned to look at the white lady. “You are…?”

“Agnes, ma’am,” she said, voice polite and deferential. “Have we been called to the great hereafter?”

“Technically you’ve been in the great hereafter since you died, but you’re currently in a new layer of the afterlife,” I said. “This is the anima mundi. They’re making sure the ghosts damaged by the spirit jars don’t have the chance to make things worse.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Agnes, sounding confused. “The spirit jar was very unsettling, and I didn’t much care for it. If we’re here, does that mean we’re all moving on, or is there a chance we can go back to our familiar hauntings? You see, I’ve a garden to tend, and a ward of sorts to care for.”

“Jonah, right?” I asked. She nodded. “I want to talk to you about him. I have a few ideas that might help make his afterlife a little more pleasant.”

“That would be very nice, ma’am, if it’s possible for me to return where I belong.”

“Ask the anima mundi.”

She turned her attention to the anima mundi. “I… Er… Ma’am?”

“As good an address for me as any, I suppose,” said the anima mundi. “How are you still yourself, lady of vengeance?”

“Oh, I found my peace a long, long time ago, but I had flowers to tend to, and bees to care for, so I stayed. It takes more than a little pain and suffering to unsettle me,” said Agnes serenely. “I have to go back for Jonah, and the bees.”

“Then you’ll be returned, as will any others still coherent enough to pose no threat to the living,” said the anima mundi. They turned to me. “I can put you and your charge down outside the house, but I can’t recover the boy from inside without bringing him here and dropping him back again, and he’ll have no means of understanding what’s going on around him.”

“If you get us back into the daylight, I can deal with Arthur.” I tried to sound more confident than I felt.

The anima mundi nodded. “Hmm. There is the small matter of resources. You’ve done as we asked you, which means the time of moving freely and without restraint is over, unless you agree to enter our service, as we previously proposed.”

“Elsie is bleeding to death, Arthur is presumably unconscious at the site of multiple murders, and you want to talk employment?”

“Yes. This seems like a time when you’ll understand the urgency of our request.”

I glared.

“The crossroads also made sure to back me into a corner, and I spent decades fighting against them,” I said. “Be very sure you want to do this.”

The look of smug assurance on the anima mundi’s face flickered but didn’t entirely fade away. “We are.”

“All right. I’ll work for you the same way I worked for them—part-time. My family comes first.”

“The children come first,” countered the anima mundi. “If you are needed for the care of children, you may always choose them over us. If an adult wishes you, then you will wait until your duties to us are done, and we may call you away at any time.”

“Just to be clear. I can move freely between my family members with no restraints when I’m not on a job for you, whether or not they’ve called for me, and I can go to the children I’m responsible for with no restrictions. What about the sick?”

“Come again?”

“Caretaker ghosts don’t just care for children. We take care of the unwell. We nurse them back to health. What happens when one of my people is sick?”

The anima mundi waved a hand. “We classify them as children when they ail. You may go to their side.”

It was basically the deal I’d had with the crossroads, with less of a focus on tricking people into selling their futures for a handful of glitter and a promise that would be twisted into a weapon as soon as the contract was signed. I’d enjoyed my brief period of freedom, but if it was this or leave my family undefended…

I shrugged. “Deal. Now send us back.”

The anima mundi smiled, and nodded in a hard, purposeful gesture, and the farm was gone.