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“I sometimes wonder what it’s like for the ordinary dead. One minute they’re part of the world as everybody knows it, and the next they’re trapped on the outside, learning how much of everything they ever knew was a lie. It’s got to be an enormous shock to the system. I still wish they’d leave me alone, though.”

—Laura Campbell

Once again in Oregon, this time appearing in the kitchen of a small house in the city proper

J ANE HAD ALWAYS HAD A complicated relationship with food. As one of the only members of her family not to choose fieldwork as a primary occupation, she’d been worried about gaining weight and not being able to handle the rare trips she actually did make into the field, resulting in a life spent counting calories and looking for low-fat substitutions in her meals. I’ll give her this much: she never intentionally forced her flirtations with toxic diet culture on her children. While they might not have been able to find potato chips and candy in the pantry on a regular basis, she didn’t scold them when they brought those things home, or try to convince them to eat the same way she did.

Her complicated relationship with food had extended to her kitchen, which was basically always spotless. A dish would barely have time to hit the sink before it was washed, dried, and put back in the cabinet where it belonged. As I appeared in what had previously been Jane’s kitchen, the absolute proof of her death struck me even harder than the funeral pictures.

The sink was mounded with dishes, piled high enough that the threat of a cascade was impossible to ignore. A few pieces of flatware had already fallen on the floor, and I paused to pick them up and place them gently on the unnervingly sticky counter before taking a closer look around.

The trash can and recycling bin were both in a state similar to the sink, so full they threatened to overflow, while the compost bin was empty, devoid of the fruit cores and vegetable scraps I would have expected. The lights were off and the air was oddly stale, like no one had been lingering here for longer than it took to run in, grab something, and run away again for quite some time. Open boxes of sugared cereal and Pop-Tarts sat on the counter, next to a full flat of Coke cans. The message couldn’t have been clearer if it had actually been written on the whiteboard on the fridge: Jane didn’t live here anymore. Jane’s rules were no longer in effect.

I would have to rethink my normal “if there are no children in the house, always appear in the kitchen” approach to visiting the house after this. I shook my head and left the room, heading for the living room.

The house in Portland that Jane had shared with her husband and children was smaller than the compound outside the city, but so were some chain grocery stores. It was still respectably sized, large enough for both kids to have their own rooms while they were growing up, while Ted and Jane each had an office for their own use. Artie had moved downstairs to the basement as soon as he turned eighteen, preferring the isolation of his own level of the house to the comfort of a bedroom that didn’t also contain the washer and dryer. Elsie and Jane had promptly split his original bedroom down the middle, using it for Elsie’s art studio and Jane’s overflow document storage.

Because the house was smaller, it had always had a more reliably lived-in feel to it, rather than feeling vaguely like a large hotel complex that was only half in use at any given time. That feeling wasn’t here anymore.

The hall was dark, the air thick enough with dust that I started to get annoyed on Jane’s behalf. She deserved better than to inherit the old cliché of “the woman does all the housework,” and while she’d been alive, that had never particularly struck me as the case. She and Ted both kept the house tidy, and as the children got older, I’d helped in teaching them how to clean up after themselves. Artie had been doing his own laundry since he was nine, and hadn’t even allowed me to help him fold it and put it away in years. And Elsie didn’t let anyone into her room for any reason short of “the world is actively on fire and you have the only extinguisher.”

Not that she’d ever been able to keep me out. Being able to walk through walls has its perks.

Frowning, I followed the hall to the living room, finding it empty, and turned to head upstairs to the second floor. That was usually where Ted could be found, if he was home. He and Jane had both worked out of their offices, her as a cryptid social worker—not a position that paid in any formal or legal sense, but which kept her more than busy enough to justify making it a full-time career—and him as a human social worker, which was an amusing inversion, given that she was (mostly) human, and he was a full-blooded Lilu. Somehow, it worked for them, like being a step removed from the species they were trying to support made it easier for them to see the answers.

The door to Jane’s office was securely closed when I reached the top of the stairs, and I hesitated for a moment before I walked through it, into the controlled chaos of her workspace. She had always done her best to keep things tidy in there, and she had never once succeeded; see also “taking half the spare room for her file boxes.” Papers have a tendency to cascade, even when they’re not being stored in a house also occupied by a colony of sapient talking rodents. And indeed, one of the shelves above her desk was dedicated to a small village of dollhouses, wood and plastic and surrounded by tiny picket fences, creating an idyllic mouse vacation destination. A hole in the wall behind the largest of the houses showed how they were able to stay so clean. The majority of the mice were in the attic, living their ordinary, messy lives out of the way. I walked over to the shelf, stopped, and cleared my throat.

“And lo, did the Violent Priestess not say, Listen to the Babysitter, For She Is Trying To Keep Everyone Safe? And was it not the commandment, from that day on, that the Babysitter Should Be Heeded at All Costs? Well, hi. I’m the babysitter, and I need to talk to someone. Without a bunch of shouting or rejoicing. So if somebody could come and check in with me, I’d very much appreciate it. Thanks.”

Any sense of silliness I had about directly addressing unseen rodents had long since been beaten out of me by the reality of life among the Healys. I folded my hands behind my back and leaned back on my heels to wait.

Some ghosts can change size, squeezing themselves into a tiny bottle or the hollow of a tree, or passing seamlessly through a keyhole. Most of the types of ghost who can manage that sort of thing can’t turn fully intangible the way I can—they traded one set of useful skills for another, and if I’m being quite honest, I like my set of useful skills better. Being able to squeeze through a keyhole is never going to top walking through the closed, locked door of the petulant teenager you’re trying to keep in one piece. Still, sometimes, I wish I could make myself small enough to stroll into the network of tunnels and passages that the Aeslin use to get around, meeting with the mice on equal footing.

I had time to contemplate all the reasons that would be convenient before there was a rustling inside the largest dollhouse, a palatial manor that had originally been intended to house Calico Critters dolls and had been gutted and rebuilt for the comfort of the mice. The door opened, and an elderly mouse wearing the raiment of Jane’s priesthood stepped out, leaning heavily on a carved bone staff.

I couldn’t tell what animal the staff had belonged to when it was alive. That was something of a relief. The mice weren’t picky about the bones they used, and would take them from roadkill as readily as they would steal them from the garbage. I know I’m dead and shouldn’t be so sensitive, but it’s hard to have a civil conversation with someone who’s using a piece of a dead cat as a mobility aid.

The priest moved toward the fence around the house, and I amended my impression of its age: this mouse wasn’t just elderly, it was ancient, possibly the oldest mouse I had ever seen still moving under its own power. It stopped at the fence line and bowed to me, whiskers pressed tightly back along the sides of its white-furred, wizened muzzle.

“Greetings to you, o Phantom Priestess, she who walks the Dark Paths of Death in her Divinity,” it squeaked. “You are Welcome Here, in the Protectorate of the Silent Priestess. What brings you forth?”

Was it possible that Ted and the kids had somehow managed to cut the household colony off from the rest of the family mice so completely that they didn’t know why Jane wasn’t coming home? The thought was ludicrous, and yet. So was the concept of a mouse whose divinity had died still being here this long after the funeral. I frowned. “You speak of the Silent Priestess as if she were still here,” I said. “Why do you do that?”

“Because all that is Divine lingers always among the faithful,” said the mouse.

That was a new wrinkle on Aeslin cosmology. I blinked. “You know she’s dead.”

“So are you, Priestess. So is the God of Chosen Isolation. But you have both returned to us, in your ways, and we worship you still, despite all the strangenesses of your presence.”

Great. Had my continued refusal to move on to my final reward finally broken the mice of their ability to understand death?

The mouse leaned back, more toward the ecstatic position I was used to them taking when they got to speak directly with their gods, and said, “Most of the Silent Priestess’s congregation could not solve the Riddle that had been set by her Passing, and followed her into the Silence that was her Domain,” it squeaked. “But some of us were Wiser than that, and understood the Grand Mystery which we had been Presented. We have seen the Truth, and we will Worship Her even unto the very End of Days.”

Oh, no. I hadn’t broken all the mice. But Jane’s death had broken some of them. That was heartbreakingly unsurprising. Aeslin mice who lost their divinity didn’t tend to last for very long. Every time a member of the family died, there was a spike in rodent mortality as the elder members of their priesthood either faded from grief or took matters more actively into their own paws, ending their lives rather than continue to exist in a world which no longer contained their living gods.

It was brutal. It was awful. It was the natural consequence of belonging to a species whose survival strategy had evolved to center upon a core of hyper-religiosity that would have been considered a mental illness in any other sapient species. For the mice, it wasn’t an illness or an aberration. It was just the way things were, always and from the beginning of everything, and all the way into the end.

Aeslin mice don’t leave ghosts, ever. They die and they move on to their final destination immediately, no hesitation, no fussing around with unfinished business or unanswered questions. On my good days, I think that’s why the various Healys I’ve buried haven’t chosen to linger. They’re on their way to mouse heaven, off to be reunited with their congregations and spend eternity being worshipped by all the mice that have ever been.

Exhausting but fulfilling, as afterlives go.

“May I speak to a representative of the faith of the Polychromatic Priestess?” I asked, carefully. Elsie was still alive. Maybe her congregation would be less unnerving, or at least less dedicated to the worship of a dead woman.

Maybe it was hypocritical of me not to want to talk to Jane’s priesthood when she was gone, but I didn’t. My priesthood had been formed after I was dead, and had always accepted that fact. Jane’s priesthood had been formed to worship her as a living entity, and I really didn’t want the Aeslin to transition into a death cult while no one was looking. That sort of thing never ends the way you want it to.

The mouse bristled its whiskers and flattened its ears, displeased by my request. “Must you?” it squeaked. “This is the sacred space of the Silent Priestess, and should be Preserved as such.”

“I must,” I said. “If they won’t come here to meet me, I’ll go into the office of the God of Careful Chances and petition them there, and when they come, I’ll tell them you refused me. That out of respect for your dead priestess, you refused the request of another dead priestess, one whose seniority within the family is provably greater. I’m guessing you’re already having trouble defending your faith before the collected priests. Do you really want to add disrespect to the challenges set against you?”

The mouse shot me what I could only describe as a frustrated look, which was a fascinating expression to read on a rodent face. “Please, Priestess, wait here,” it squeaked, and scurried back into the house, slamming the door as it went inside. I didn’t even know a dollhouse door could slam.

A few seconds passed, and the door opened again, allowing another mouse to emerge. This one was younger than the first, with naturally white fur that had been dyed in a variety of colorful streaks, making it look like something that had crawled out of a Lisa Frank painting and into the real world. It was wearing a crown of construction paper and brightly colored feathers, and a patchwork cloak made from a dozen different tiny scraps of stitched-together fabric. It left optical echoes when it moved, like it was too complicated of a pattern to exist in the real world. Like the first priest, it scampered up to the edge of the fence and stopped there, bowing its tiny head and folding its paw in front of its chest.

This displayed its impeccable manicure to flawless effect, and I spared a momentary thought for whether Elsie had taught her mice to do their claws, or whether she did it with them with the world’s tiniest nail-polish brush.

“Greetings to the Phantom Priestess,” it squeaked. “We had heard Rumor that you were Removed from this World and sent eternally into the Great Reward to join the Gods and Priestesses of generations lost.”

“I did get blown into the afterlife for a little while, but since I was sort of turned into ghost glitter all across the twilight, I didn’t actually go to any sort of reward, and I came back together in the end,” I said. “Sorry, still don’t know what comes next.”

“What comes Next for you may not be what comes Next for us,” said the mouse, diplomatically. “Your congregation will be overjoyed to hear that the rumors of your destruction had been Wildly Exaggerated. They have been Holding to Hope, but in light of the Unclarity which has gripped the congregation of the Silent Priestess in recent days, they were beginning to Waver in their Faith.”

“That makes sense,” I said, as noncommittally as I could. I didn’t want to get involved in an Aeslin religious dispute if I had any choice in the matter.

“How May this Unworthy Follower of the Polychromatic Priestess best Assist You?” asked the mouse.

“I wanted to get somebody to tell me, honestly, what’s been going on around here since Jane died,” I said. “I knew the place would be different, but this is like walking into a tomb.”

The mouse stood a little taller. “Do you request Plain Text Accounting?” it asked.

I blinked. “What’s that?”

“For did not the God of Chosen Isolation issue a Commandment, that we should be willing to Give Account of things he had not seen in as simple of terms as possible, that he might remain Current on Family Gossip without needing a dictionary and an hour of theological debate?” The mouse sounded proud as it finished its declaration, looking at me expectantly.

I blinked again. “Wait. You mean Arthur just asked you to talk like normal people, and you said yeah, sure, okay?”

“Yeah,” said the mouse.

This was staggering. I took a step backward, halfway through the desk. “Oh, man, that’s huge,” I said. “Yeah, plain text would be great. I have a lot to cover, and not infinite time. What’s the situation?”

“Well, Ted’s a widower, and he’s depressed as hell about it,” said the mouse.

There are no words to express how strange it was to hear that sentence coming out of a mouse’s mouth. I stepped out of the desk and turned solid again, so that I could lean back against it, resting my butt on the very edge and my weight on my hands. “Most people get depressed when their spouses die,” I said.

“Most people aren’t social workers,” said the mouse. “He’s having trouble controlling his pheromones, so he’s been working remotely as much as possible, and he doesn’t bathe as much as he probably should. He’s mostly been eating Pop-Tarts and whatever he can order off of DoorDash, and occasionally scrambling eggs so he feels like he’s still a functional person. He cries a lot. We always knew he’d miss the hell out of her, but this is just sad.”

“Right,” I said, still trying to adjust to the strangeness of a mouse speaking colloquially. “And what about the kids?”

“Elsie’s pissed as fuck, ” said the mouse, and the fact that it was talking about its own divinity made the words almost blasphemous, even though that had never been my faith. “She’s just angry all the time, at pretty much everybody, because she can’t decide where all that anger belongs. She’ll figure out where she wants to point it sooner or later, and then a lot of shit is going to be on fire. Metaphorically. Actual fire is Antimony’s job.”

“Are there specific people she’s more mad at than others?”

“Sarah,” said the mouse, without hesitation. “For what she did to Artie, and for not saving her mother. Alice, for not being here most of her life, and for not saving her mother. You, for not bringing her mother back from the afterlife. Kind of everybody.”

“I see.”

“And Artie… whew.” The mouse grabbed its tail, wringing it between its paws. “He’s not well. He’s not mad, because he doesn’t know how to be. He’s not grieving, either, which just makes Elsie angrier, which makes her feel terrible, because she doesn’t want to be mad at him for things he can’t control. Whatever Sarah did to rebuild him as a person, it wasn’t good enough, and it’s coming apart at the seams. If she was willing to come here and perform continuous maintenance, that might have been enough, but she’s not, and he’s unraveling. He knows less about who he’s supposed to be every day. His clergy is discussing a liturgical renaming.”

“Really?”

Formal liturgical renamings happened when a god or priestess had drifted so far from their original title that it no longer fit at all, or when they died. Some gods would have multiple lesser titles, but one would always be the “correct” method of referring to them, the specific title that defined them in Aeslin theology. As far as I knew, only two full liturgical renamings of the living had been performed since the mice started worshipping the family: Alice, who got a new name when she began her quest for Thomas and could no longer be considered the woman she’d been before that, and the man who’d been married to Beth Evans, who was known to the mice as the Kindly Priestess. Presumably, he’d had a proper title before he decided to hit her so hard that she died from her injuries, but after that, the mice had renamed him to “the Cruelest God,” and intentionally forgotten his name, as well as any other titles he might have borne.

For them to rename someone was for them to effectively declare the person they’d been before dead and gone. Alice’s clergy was still split on whether she could return to her original title now that her long quest was finished: it seemed likely that she would always have two distinct liturgical lines going forward.

“Really,” confirmed the mouse.

“Poor kiddo. Either one of them home?”

The mouse nodded. “Yes—is that enough Plain Text Accounting?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Thank you, Priestess,” said the mouse, with evident relief. “The Polychromatic Priestess is not presently in Residence. She has gone to attend the Derby of Rolling, and to Drown her Sorrows in the eyes of pretty girls. The God of Chosen Isolation is Isolated in his Chambers. He last ventured forth at the hour of dinner three days gone, and has not been Seen since.”

“That sounds like a job for a babysitter,” I said, pushing away from the desk. I nodded to the mouse. “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”

It fanned its whiskers at me. “I am Honored by your Conversation.”

“Glad you think so,” I said, and dropped through the floor. I’ve never been sure how to end a conversation with the mice when I’m not bribing them to go away and leave me alone; getting the hell out of whatever room they’re in works as well as anything else.

Besides, dropping through floors is fun. You see all sorts of interesting things. Mostly pipes and electrical wires and dead beetles, but those are interesting if you look at them the right way.

I passed cleanly through the stairway to the ground floor, rolled my shoulders, and kept going.

Dropping through that much empty space wasn’t difficult or painful, but it was disorienting. Being a physical haunting means spending most of my time behaving as if I still have a body, as if I need to interact with the physical world in more than a superficial way, and living people don’t usually fall through floors, and when they do, they tend to plummet. I didn’t plummet from the second floor to the first—it was more like I drifted down, light as a feather, moving at the pace of the air.

Then I passed through the floor of the first story, and into the transformed confines of Artie’s basement.

Like the rooms of all “my” kids, the basement was a familiar space. I had watched its evolution from a barren storage space to the more comfortable, well-appointed space that he had turned it into after he was given permission to relocate. And indeed, parts of the room were the way I expected them to be. The carpet, for example, hadn’t changed, and neither had the bed. But the rest of the space was unnervingly divergent from my memory.

The walls were blank, posters, sketches, and pictures taken down to reveal the cold concrete beneath. The shelves were empty, books and comics and action figures gone. A pile of cardboard boxes against the wall next to the washing machine told me where at least some of them had gone. The desk was still in its customary place, computer turned on and quietly humming away to itself, but Artie was on his back on the bed, hands folded behind his head, staring unblinking at the ceiling.

Somehow, he didn’t appear to have noticed me. That, or he was so busy counting the cracks in the ceiling that he couldn’t spare a glance my way. It didn’t really matter. I walked in his direction, giving him ample time to realize I was there before I cleared my throat and said, “Hey, Art.” He’d been going by “Arthur” the last time I’d seen him, but the mice were calling him Artie. I wasn’t sure what he preferred right now.

“Arthur,” he said, eyes still on the ceiling.

“Come again?”

“My name is Arthur. Not Art, and not Artie. Artie was someone else. I don’t want to use his name. I don’t like it when people call me that. It makes me sad and angry and I wish people would stop. I keep asking and asking them to stop, and they do it anyway, and it’s not fair. ” He finally turned in my direction, eyes burning with quietly focused anger. “Hello, Mary. I thought you were dead. Again.”

“Not quite,” I said. “I took a hard-enough hit that it scattered me across the afterlife, but I’ve reconstituted.”

Too late, I realized that was a lot like what had happened to him, although my situation had come with a happier ending—I was still myself, at least as far as I could tell, and not an amalgam of other people’s ideas about me.

Artie—Arthur—scowled. “How nice for you,” he said, and sat up. “Why are you here?”

“You remember the anima mundi?”

“Living spirit of the earth, took the place of the crossroads after Annie went and made it so they never existed.”

“Well, it turns out they’re basically the boss of all the ghosts in the world. Most of them, they leave to go about their business, because they’re locked in to the rules of straightforward, defined hauntings, which means they aren’t running around, getting into trouble. I, on the other hand, was defined by a haunting that no longer exists, and managed to sort of wedge my way into a different sort of haunt by coming at it sideways. So right now, I don’t have well-defined rules or a job that I’m expected to be doing.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning they—the anima mundi—decided that if they have a job that needs doing and a ghost without a proper job, they may as well combine the two, and they want me to go to the East Coast to make the Covenant stop dicking with the ghosts there.”

“The anima mundi is sending a ghost to stop ghost hunters.”

“Yup. Who better to figure out what’s going on?”

“I don’t know. Anyone the Covenant can’t stuff into a spirit jar as soon as they realize you’re there to stop them?”

That was a pretty good point that I hadn’t really taken the time to consider, preoccupied as I’d been with charging full steam ahead. “That’s why I’m here,” I said. “I wanted to get some living people who were willing to come with me and be my hands while we figured this out. Where better to start than with my family? At least you’re all halfway trained for this sort of thing.”

Arthur’s mouth twisted in an uncomfortable way. “Trained, sure. Does it count when you weren’t the one who got the training, you just halfway remember it happening?”

“I think so,” I said. “It’s not like anyone has field experience in this sort of thing.”

“But you didn’t come here to talk to me,” he said. “No one comes here to talk to me. I make them too uncomfortable.”

“You don’t make me uncomfortable,” I lied. I’m a babysitter. I have a lot of experience at telling necessary lies to my charges.

Arthur shook his head. “I do,” he said. “I wish I didn’t, but I do. It’s all right, Mary. You can admit how I make you feel.”

“You make me sad, not uncomfortable,” I said. “I hate seeing you suffer.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t be looking at me.” He lay back down and rolled over, so that his back was to me.

It would have been hard for a dismissal to be much clearer. I sighed. “Okay, Arthur,” I said. “But I’ll check in before I leave, and I really do want you to feel better.”

“I’ll feel better when I’m dead, and then we’ll have something in common,” he said, not looking back toward me. “We’ll both have died twice.”

I shook my head and moved to climb the stairs—the normal, substantial way this time—to the basement door.

I hadn’t really been expecting Artie—or Arthur—to help me. He’d never been a fan of fieldwork, and he was clearly dealing with a lot on a psychological level, which made a lot of sense. If not for the mouse mentioning him, I might have come and gone without seeing him at all. I felt a little bad about that, and kept feeling bad as I continued up the stairs to the second floor and down the hallway to Elsie’s closed bedroom door.

The mice said she was off watching roller derby practice, but my vague sense of her location didn’t agree. It told me she was here in this house for me to find, and when push comes to shove, I’ll still choose my own instincts over the word of a religious rodent.

Elsie’s door was painted a pleasant shade of Barbie pink that didn’t go with the rest of the hallway, and patterned with cotton candy clouds that I remembered her painting in her junior year of high school, sitting there and patiently dabbing them on, one brushstroke at a time. Jane hated it so much. She hated that Elsie had a pink door, she hated that it clashed with everything else, and she hated that her daughter couldn’t be placated with a nice eggshell that would still have stood out, but not quite as boldly.

I paused with my hand raised to knock, blinking back tears that didn’t actually exist but still stung my eyes. If I let them fall, they would get my cheeks and blouse wet, just like real tears, but they’d vanish as soon as they tried to fall to the floor. There are limits to my interaction with the world of the living. I am a discrete creature, and all I can leave behind are footprints.

Finally, I knocked.

“Go away, Arthur!” yelled Elsie. “I’m not in the mood.”

“It’s not Arthur,” I called back. “It’s me. May I come in?”

There was a long pause before Elsie’s voice, now closer to the door, said, “I know you’re not really Mary, because Mary’s gone. Whatever you are, you do an excellent Mary impression. Now go away.”

“Elsinore, come on. I’m not in the mood,” I said, peevishly, and stuck my head through the door.

Elsie’s room was as cluttered and pink as it had always been, with the bed drowning in a pile of pillows and plush toys that she’d been collecting and refining since preschool. Elsie herself was also as cluttered and pink as she’d ever been, standing off to the side of the door with a machete in her hand. When she saw my head appear through the door, she screamed and brought it down across my neck in a hard arc.

The world glitched, going gray for a moment, and Elsie screamed again as my head fell off and hit the floor.