“I think he might have a way in,” Jane said.
Henry isn’t paying attention. He’s thinking about how no one wants his ghost. Even the robot doesn’t want him. His sister is afraid of being haunted by him. He’s scattering like smoke, and he just wants something to hold on to.
Jane backed toward the door. She already shared herself with one ghost. She didn’t want another, not Henry’s and not Trigger’s. She didn’t want to become like the hollow men, her mind torn to pieces by warring spirits. Bethany was the only person she knew who could handle so many ghosts inside of her, all of them aligned perfectly with her iron will.
Henry looked at the pictures scattered in front of him like he was searching for the right screw or tool, the right piece to a puzzle.
“I’ll have your car fixed soon. Then you can get far away from Swine Hill.”
That wouldn’t help her now. Trigger’s presence moved closer, its rage expanding storm-like in her mind. Henry’s ghost vanished, and the robot lumbered out of the room, off on some errand of its own. Jane ran out of the room and through the halls, looking for somewhere to hide.
* * *
The laughing room, its ghosts hissing and boiling with glee, beckoned Jane inside. The spirits surged and rebounded from the walls, their shrieks serpentine and coiling. They promised Jane escape. If she listened to them, if she understood their jokes and laughed, she would be swept away. They promised that if she was chained together in the river of them, Trigger would never find her.
She ignored them and sank to the floor. He was almost here, and there was nothing to do now but wait. Maybe she could still reason with him. Maybe there was enough of the boy she had loved left inside the ghost.
The temperature dropped. The door opened and Trigger walked into the room in a white hazmat suit. He looked down at the floor, sandy hair falling over his eyes. Despite the width of his shoulders, his thick limbs, and deep chest, there was something timid about him, as skittish as a beaten dog.
He looked the same as the first day she’d seen him in the grocery store. Seeing him that way, knowing that he was gone now, made her ache to hold him again. She was breaking a rule, she knew. Ghosts were things, not people. But she couldn’t see his shape and not remember what he had been to her.
Thoughts whipped off him like wind, cutting and cold. A long, scraping song blew over her: your fault, your fault, your fault. He blamed himself, he blamed the town, and he blamed Jane. Judgment was all he had left.
Trigger knelt down beside her. Before, he had looked at her with worship, astonished that she could care about him, full of gratitude. But now he saw Jane the way his father might. Dark and unfamiliar. A thief who’d stolen the music box and chased away his brother’s ghost, selfish and smirking and careless. He thought punishment was what she needed, mixing up violence and love.
He grabbed Jane, and cold shocked her arms. He brought his face close, features blurry, mouth open and scrambling words like static. When he leaned in, she thought he might try to kiss her with his dead mouth.
Silence exploded in her head. Something leapt away from her, making her feel cored out. The thoughts of the laughing ghosts went away. Trigger’s thoughts of blame and anger faded. For the first time in years, Jane couldn’t hear what anyone else was thinking. Her ghost had left her.
“No,” she said, speaking to her ghost and to Trigger. “No, please, don’t.”
Trigger hovered over her, wrapping her limbs like frost, his mouth on her mouth. He kissed her, his ghostly lips passing in and out of her skin like he was gnashing her open. Insubstantial, he was still heavy, and he pinned her to the floor. It felt like a storm cloud embraced her, drenching her with rain and cold, its lightning spearing her body, its words thundering in her ears.
“I’m dead because of you,” he said, voice flat.
It wasn’t true. Mason had been storing away anger for years. He might have killed his son anyway. But for a moment, Jane believed it. A seam opened in her mind, and Trigger forced himself in.
She drowned in him, sinking into dark and ice, the huge beasts within his mind brushing against her as she spiraled deeper. Trigger had killed his own brother. He brought Jane into their home, held her hand, loved her in his bed as if he deserved to be happy. He had lost his brother’s ghost, and then he let spirits devour his father. Everything that had happened was his fault, and everything that had happened was Jane’s fault, too.
He shook her in his dead hands, screamed his wordless pain into her ear, anointed her with his self-loathing. At the bottom of him, he thought that he still loved her. This was best for her, he had told himself. She deserved to be punished. Better it came from him. It was what she needed. He stroked her face, kissed her cheek. He told her that she had failed him.
Jane rolled away from his phantom arms and threw up on the floor. She spat until her mouth tasted clean, and tried to crawl away from him. But he was in her and through her, his weight on her back. She begged him to let go.
She didn’t deserve this, Jane told herself. She had made mistakes, but so had everyone. She didn’t want to carry Trigger’s pain. There was no reason he should need her to.
There is every reason. He spoke within her mind, from the place where her ghost always sat. He filled her, put pressure on her skull. Jane thought her head would burst.
The river of laughing spirits still murmured along the ceiling. Jane looked around the room, hoping Henry would come back, that someone would help her.
She saw a little girl crouched behind the teacher’s desk.
The girl wasn’t older than ten. White, dirty hair hung limp over her ears. She wore an oversized dress with a frayed hem. Jane hadn’t seen her in years, but she recognized her at once, as familiar as a sister.
Her ghost.
It watched Jane wrestle with Trigger, face partly covered by thin, translucent fingers. Jane had seen this same look on its face when she had been a girl, when it gave her a pair of binoculars to watch the couple through the window. It was horrified, but it was fascinated, too.
Feeling herself grow angry and knowing Trigger would use it against her, Jane turned, struggling to push him away, but her hands slipped right through him. She tried to sit up, but he pulled her back down to the floor.
You will feel sorry for what you’ve done.
“I am sorry,” Jane said. “I’m sorry you’re still here. I’m sorry you have to punish yourself for things that were never your fault.”
He collapsed like a shutting eye, his hold loosening.
Jane stood and limped for the door, not bothering to see if the girl’s ghost followed. The lost spirits that had found their way into her muscles radiated pain through her legs.
Trigger threw himself against her again, his probing mind looking for a way in. He reached deep into her memory and pulled up every glistening regret she had. Her father filthy and thin, crouching under a tree to get out of the rain. Her brother coming home bruised and bleeding, and Jane telling him only not to go out alone again, like it was his fault. Her mother crying into her hands because she thought no one loved her, and Jane not comforting her because she wasn’t sure if she loved her mother either. Henry’s severed nose. Dennis carved apart in the casket. Henry’s naive ghost, thinking it could glue the whole broken world back together.
You understand me.
She tried to remember that she had taken care of her family the best she could, that she loved Henry, that she couldn’t blame herself for what other people had done. But thinking so felt small in the face of all that had happened.
I can’t haunt you yet, but I will, Trigger said. I will help you change. You will believe that you deserve me.
The ghost lifted from her. The floor was hard against her face. Desks circled her like a herd of animals in the dark. Jane sobbed so hard she couldn’t breathe, choking on her own breath. What if he was right?
Her ears rang with laughter. She could almost hear what the ghosts said, the embarrassment that caused t
hem so much mirth. If she listened a little closer, she would understand, and the voices would carry her away.
Soft footsteps came to her. Two slender arms wrapped around Jane. The ghost of a girl leaned over her.
“I’m sorry,” the ghost said, the first time she’d heard its voice outside her mind in over a decade. “I didn’t want you to be pulled apart, so I left. I knew he wouldn’t be able to keep you.”
Jane wanted to tell the ghost to blow away and be forgotten, wanted to lash out at it for not being strong enough to save her. Was that how she really felt? Or was it only a bruise that Trigger had left on her mind? Maybe he had already changed her.
There was a hollow place at the center of her, and her ghost stepped inside. I’m here. No one can take me away from you. But even her ghost didn’t know if that was true.
It was morning, and golden light filled the town. The streets were empty of cars. People stayed inside, hungry and tired, recovering from the night before. The storm of spirits had ebbed. Ghosts settled to the bottom of things, fading to shadows on the wall or a knocking in the attic. A vicious few still prowled the darkest hollows of the town, but they had already found anyone who was close enough for them to hurt.
The robot walked, languid and bright, down the middle of the empty street. Its eyes were wide, taking in the day, and it swung its long limbs easily. It was love-struck and happy, its whole world new. The passionate ghost within the machine chased the other spirits out of its gears and kept its battery hot.
Henry floated alongside it, his shape ragged, just a spray of oily smoke. He found the robot’s joy tedious. And while the machine still let Henry give it orders and use its metal hands, neither it nor its jealous ghost would let Henry haunt the robot for long. They just didn’t want the things he wanted.
“Hurry up,” he said. “Are you going to help me or not?”
There wasn’t much left for Henry to do. He could feel his tie to the world growing tenuous and thin. He would make sure that Jane had a way to leave. He would make sure that the pigs were free to become whatever they wanted. He would draw the poison out of Swine Hill.
Bethany still hung beyond the edge of the world in every direction he looked, defying geometry and space. He was losing time, having trouble keeping himself solid. Unless he found a person to haunt, someone whose desires would focus and feed his own, he would soon fade away. There was no one in town like him, but even if there was, he didn’t want to become like Neilson’s ghost. He wouldn’t force someone to make all of his old mistakes. Jane had been right about that.
From their windows, people watched the robot stroll down the empty street. A man came out of a dark house and stood in their way. His hair and clothes were dirty, his eyes milky bright. He spoke with the voices of three ghosts, a rasping, overlapping hiss.
“You took everything from us,” he said. “You gave it all to the pigs. What about the people who still live here? What are we supposed to do?”
Henry felt bad for the man, but he didn’t know how to help. He wanted to scrape the living out of the dead shell of the town. It was true that they had been plundered—ground up by the town’s brutal industries and then left behind with only debt and sickness and a faceless blame. There would be no justice for them. It wasn’t the fault of pigs or machines or people like Henry. They would have to go new places, learn new things, change if they wanted to survive.
But how to reason with a ghost? How to convince someone that couldn’t change, who was still trapped in a past that didn’t exist, that had maybe never existed outside of their own belief ? Even after Jane had told Henry that he was dead, that nothing he did mattered now, he still couldn’t be anything but what he was.
“I’ll try to help you,” Henry said. “I only have a little time left, but I’ll do what I can.”
“Give back what you took,” the man said.
Spirits wrapped the man and lay over his shoulders like a coat. Henry was surprised to find that he felt jealous. He wanted a home, some anchor to the world. But his family didn’t want him, and he didn’t want to wander lost through an old toolbox or computer processor until it turned to sand. There was nothing to be done but finish what he had started and then let himself be swept away.
“The plant’s gone,” Henry said. “Even if I could rebuild it, that wouldn’t solve your problems.”
We’re already dead, Henry wanted to say. Everyone here might as well be, whether they know it or not.
“What are you going to do?” the man asked.
The robot stepped forward on long legs, its shadow falling over the man. It bent and put its arms around him, hugging him against its gleaming chest. “I will love you,” the machine said.
The man struggled and shouted for them to get out of his town. He said he would break every machine, kill every pig, burn out every stranger and newcomer who didn’t belong here. Finally the robot let him go, and the haunted man fled back to his house.
Henry led the robot deep into downtown, the streets cataclysmic with potholes, broken traffic cones, and burst sacks of garbage. Outside the police station, the bleeding man’s cruiser idled. Like the haunted school bus and the robot, a powerful spirit had fused with the car, shrieking through its fuel lines and shaking its cylinders with dead hands. It had survived the tide of ghosts that had passed over the town and fouled the other cars beyond starting, jealously chasing all other spirits out of its engine.
Henry pointed at the car. “If you can take a break from being in love with the world,” he said to the robot, “I need that engine.”
The bleeding man watched Henry from the station window. Thick, dark blood gummed up his eyes, and he kept wiping them as if what he was seeing wasn’t real. Once before, a man the officer had killed had returned to haunt him. He was afraid that Henry had come to do the same. He sweated blood thickly down his face and neck, keeping his eyes on them, but stayed inside.
Henry billowed over the pavement and kept his eyes on the cop. This was the man who had killed him, who would have killed his mother and sister. Already dead, Henry wasn’t angry about it. He was astonished. Everything he might have been, all of it taken away by a man whose name he didn’t know, for no reason at all. He understood how the ghost outside the grocery store could lie in the same spot for decades, holding its stomach wound and asking everyone it saw “Why?”
The robot ripped open the hood of the cruiser and started tearing out bolts and hoses, getting its thin arms under the engine and hoisting it up from the car. Black smoke roiling with the bright eyes of embers poured out of the haunted machine. Lifting the block of metal out of the car chassis and onto its shoulder, the robot turned and then followed Henry back the way they had come. The bleeding man watched until they were out of sight, not daring to follow.
It took the robot a couple of hours to lurch back across town, swaying with the weight of the engine on its shoulder. Back at their house, Jane’s car sat dead as a stone in the driveway, its engine finally too full of ghosts to start.
“I won’t be around much longer,” Henry said to the robot. “You’ll have to be Jane’s brother when I’m gone.”
“I will love Jane,” it said, its metal throat whining and stretching out the “o.”
He wondered where his sister would go, who she would become. There was so much ahead of her, decades of future when Swine Hill would be just a bad memory. No matter how much he did to help her on her way, he would only see her beginning.
It would have to be enough.
* * *
While the robot worked on Jane’s car, Henry floated near the homes of the pig people. Other ghosts couldn’t enter their houses, finding the pigs too strange, but Henry knew them intimately. He drifted through their ductwork and peered out from vents, listening in on their conversations.
They were worried. The Pig City Corporation had been hit by some kind of cyberattack. Paychecks weren’t going out. Shipping schedules, deliveries, personnel changes, all were in disarray. No one k
new what was happening or what needed to happen. The pigs called, and while management knew about the self-slaughtering pig project, no one had any record of it. “Just wait for someone to contact you,” the people on the phone said. But it was clearer by the hour that no one was coming for them.
The pigs met in Hogboss’s garage around a pool table. They found themselves free. They could do whatever they wanted. But they didn’t have much money, and Swine Hill was falling apart. They were excited, but they were also afraid. What would they do?
Hogboss was in Dennis’s old room, sitting on his dead son’s bed and staring brokenhearted and bewildered at the posters. Henry pushed through the wall, boiling out of a Marilyn Manson print. It was still day, and Henry was having trouble holding his shape together. He was a smear of smoke with glowing eyes. He hoped the pig man wouldn’t be frightened.
Hogboss stood and sniffed at the cloud, passing one of his thick hands through it. “You smell like iron and blood and smoke,” he said. “You smell like the plant.”
“I need you to come with me,” Henry said. His voice was a soft rush of air, like wind through tall grass. “I want to show you something.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t understand you better,” the pig man said. “I’ve been trying. I listen to your music and watch your movies. I’m doing my best to know who you were.”
The old pig thought he was Dennis. Henry didn’t know whether he should tell him the truth, but Hogboss kept talking. He had so much to say, as if he’d been waiting on that bed for days, as if he had been sure his son would return. Henry kept quiet. He could be Dennis if the pig man needed him to be.
Henry drifted outside, Hogboss walking beside him and telling him everything.
“There is so much I have to apologize for,” Hogboss said. “I acted like I couldn’t remember your mother, like I didn’t miss her. I didn’t want to make people any more uncomfortable than they already were. But I do miss her. I remember. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that.”
Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones Page 25