by Ellen Datlow
Eventually I make my way to the area where monuments tend to be ostentatious, if not downright ridiculous. This is also where the crypts are located, including the Perlmutters’, which has seen a great deal of activity on the part of Anna May Perlmutter, the latest late Perlmutter to be interred there. According to signs and portents as interpreted by Grandma, it’s also going to see some serious trouble, drawn there by Anna May’s inability to rest in peace.
It’s still early, but what the hell, I’m here, so I check all three crypts and several of the showier monuments. Everything’s okay—no vandalism, no leftover occult detritus and/or beer cans the real maintenance staff missed, no sign anyone’s tried breaking in. But it’s not so much people breaking in I’m concerned about.
It’s pretty tidy around the Perlmutter crypt, but ruffling the grass with the charmed rake reveals traces of Anna May as far as thirty feet from the crypt. Although they’re not that recent—from what I can tell, she hasn’t been outside in several hours, which is kind of strange for a spirit who’s been acting up so much.
Maybe it was the daylight—some of the newly dead find it overwhelming after a while. Or maybe the saints intimidated her. A lot of them get pretty puffed up, especially the martyrs. Although, who can blame them? All Saints’ Day is for those who don’t have their own commemorative day of the year, and hardly anyone other than theology scholars know who they are.
My mind is still wandering when I spot a car moving slowly along the road about a hundred feet down from where I am. I saw it cruising around earlier, slowing down, speeding up slightly, slowing down again. The two people in the front seat were looking for something, maybe an interesting gravestone to take a rubbing on. Or they could be looking for a particular grave.
You would think what with the Internet and websites and practically everything being online, no one would ever drive around a cemetery looking for someone’s grave. And you would be so wrong. It never occurs to some people they can actually call the cemetery office and ask. Like they don’t even know cemeteries have offices, with live people working there. Do they think when someone dies, a grave magically digs itself and it’ll be waiting for them after the funeral, complete with headstone?
Maybe they do, for all I know. People can be so damned strange, and just when you think you’ve seen everything, someone’ll show you a whole new level of bizarre. But nothing weirds the human animal out like death. Even the steadiest, most down-to-earth hardheads can totally lose their compos mentis where death is concerned.
And that’s just the living. The dead are worse.
Especially the recently deceased, “recently” being less than a full calendar year, usually a lot less. In general, the longer people have been dead, the less they crave life. How long varies with the individual, but eventually even the most stubborn haunts will accept that the realm of the living is out of their reach.
The problem is, this isn’t always true.
Every year, there are a few days when the border between the natural and the supernatural worlds gets less solid, less real, less…there, and nobody knows why. There are all kinds of theories but no genuine information. It’s kind of like what we have instead of quantum mechanics. The natural world has spooky action at a distance; the supernatural set has border theory.
Personally, I think it really is quantum mechanics—there’s some kind of wave function that’s supposed to collapse but doesn’t—it just stops. Only temporarily, but the repercussions go beyond the level of single photons all the way up to the world humans experience so that something that’s usually real becomes not so real.
Hey, does that really sound less plausible than “just because it’s Samhain”?
—
NIGHTFALL TAKES ME BY SURPRISE. I know it’s getting dark earlier every day now, but something seems off. I consult my phone; the almanac says sunset’s at 17:36, full dark by 18:00, give or take, so it shouldn’t look like the middle of the night now, at 17:45. Which makes this one hell of a gigantic glamour. It must have taken him ages to build up that much juice. Well, time is the one thing he’s not short on. Time and darkness.
My mother phones at 17:46. “What does it look like where you are?”
“Midnight,” I whisper. “You?”
“We’re right on the edge of the illusion—looks very weird, like a Norway night in June. Of course, nobody on the natural side’s noticed. Where are you?”
“Right by the Perlmutter necro-mansion. Nothing’ll get by me.”
“Don’t call it that, it’s a crypt. Is there—”
“Something’s happening—gotta go.” I hang up before she starts telling me more stuff she told me a thousand million times already. Then I see I didn’t tell a white lie after all.
The tiny, round, yellow-orange light bobbing along in the dark is normally imperceptible to the living, but I have a charm—or maybe I should call it an app, since I keep it on my phone with the non-magical software. The charm/app can also detect the siren song emanating from the light. I don’t really hear that so much as feel it; if I had fillings in my teeth, they’d be vibrating. I’m vibrating, all over, with the sensation that something really, really wonderful is about to happen, and if I can get near it, I’ll get the one thing I want most.
Or rather, what I’d want most if I were dead and unhappy about it: life. But not ordinary life, not the kind with mortality preinstalled. The siren song says this is ceaseless life, uninterrupted and unending. Continual life, incessant life, enduring and abiding life. Nonstop, perennial, perpetual life with no death at all, none whatsoever, just 100 percent life. Life and only life. Life, life, and more life. All life, all the time.
Everybody thinks that would be the most wonderful thing, and for all I know, that might even be true. What if you never had to worry about running out of time? You could do everything you ever wanted to do, and if it didn’t work out or if you simply got bored, you wouldn’t have wasted your best years going down a dead end. You could just move on to something else without worrying about time’s winged chariot hurrying near.
But that’s not how things work here. On this plane of existence, all life spans are finite, and death is mandatory. No matter what side of the veil you’re on, natural or supernatural, each life owes a death. Even inanimate objects meet entropy. It’s science—the laws of thermodynamics. It’s also a big philosophy thing, with people spending their whole finite lives studying it.
But really, what it all comes down to is, you can’t get something for nothing. For the same reason things don’t pop into existence from nowhere or vanish without a trace, you can’t live forever. Period.
Except for the loopholes. There are always loopholes.
The only place you’d find loopholes for the first two things, however, is in the heart of a black hole. You’d have to be fast, though—they don’t last but a zillionth of a second.
The loophole for living forever is worse.
Actually, it’s not even so much a loophole as it is an extremely nasty bit of legerdemain. If you fell for it, you’d regret it for all eternity and hate yourself for just as long. I wouldn’t call that living, but maybe it doesn’t look so bad if you’re desperate and dead.
—
I ONCE OVERHEARD a woman who’d just been to a funeral say something to the effect that the dead person’s troubles were over. I didn’t even have to look at her to know she lived only in the natural world.
Natural world people have it easy—they only have to make sure the physical remains of dead people end up where they’re supposed to. They have a wide variety of ceremonies and rituals, but all of them, without exception, are for the living. I don’t mean that disparagingly. Bereaved people deserve to be comforted. But we’re the ones who have to deal with the spirits of the dead, and it’s not easy.
Say, for instance, Anna May Perlmutter’s family and friends remember her in their prayers (those that say them), and her grandchildren ask God to bless her every night when they kneel beside
their beds under the approving eye of Mommy and/or Daddy. That’s all very nice, even admirable, but none of those prayers, no matter how pure and sincere, would keep Anna May from being swindled out of her afterlife.
That’s my job. It’s part of the family business, which has been operating for centuries.
Anna May Perlmutter died a week and a half ago at eighty, and according to the profile my mother put together from her obit and information gleaned from various other sources, she’s definitely not happy about it. Anna May Perlmutter didn’t just let life happen to her, she participated. Twenty years ago, she beat breast cancer and never looked back. When she developed high blood pressure, she always took her medication, although there was still too much salt in her diet. She probably didn’t expect the stroke that took her out in one fell swoop (no one ever does).
No doubt she had felt it immediately when the boundary separating natural and supernatural started to thin out. The newly dead feel its decrease in there-ness most keenly. The process starts at the official end of All Saints’, one second after midnight, and it continues all day. Souls that wander before the sun comes up are usually the lost ones—nobody knows where they go or what they do when they’re not roaming around in the predawn dark, not even them. It’s all very weird and creepy. I’ve only been in a graveyard before sunrise on All Souls’ Day a few times, helping Grandma gather magical items to replenish the pantry, and it left a bad taste in my head for days afterward.
If Anna May Perlmutter went out among the predawn spirits, it wasn’t for long. Maybe she thought she was saving her energy by staying in the crypt while the boundary between life and death grew progressively less substantial. Maybe she was hoping it would disappear altogether or at least that it would get weak enough locally for her to force her way all the way through to life again.
There’s an old story about how someone who’d died far too young actually managed to break through the boundary and reenter the living world. Supposedly the living air spontaneously regenerated the original physical body, and the person went home to be reunited with loved ones and lived to be a hundred.
Needless to say, this is an urban legend. It probably arose from stories about people who’d been mistakenly pronounced dead suddenly sitting up and asking for food or drink (something that happened often enough in the days before modern medicine to make people justifiably nervous about being buried alive). That isn’t the same as genuine resurrection, but the distinction is lost on the desperate dead, who seize on the story like it was on the CBS Evening News a minute before they died.
There are creatures who home in on that kind of desperation, like a shark knowing when there’s blood in the water. The natural world has con artists and phishers, bastards who have a talent for finding the most vulnerable and picking them clean. On the supernatural side, we’ve got all kinds of nasty creatures, from stingers and biters, more nuisance than anything, to genuine dangers like poison vessels and soul suckers. Not to mention wannabe tricksters, who are really just losers with a mean streak.
And then there’s Jack.
Jack is the guy who knows where the line is and never considers not crossing it. He’s like that one friend who doesn’t simply have to win all the time, he—or she—has to win ugly, even if it backfires. Jack is never not in trouble, and he’s always on the lookout for someone, anyone, he can off-load his problems onto.
And just like Grandma foresaw in the signs and portents, he’s coming this way. Anna May Perlmutter isn’t the only desperate dead person wanting to beat the Reaper, but for some reason, Jack seems to think she’s the most promising.
—
THE ROUND LIGHT is close enough now that it looks more like a lantern—the light shines out from top and bottom and both sides. Jack carved it himself and very skillfully, too. He’s had centuries of practice, but what’s really impressive is, it’s a turnip. It’s a big turnip, easily the size of a small pumpkin or gourd, but recognizable, with a handle woven from green turnip tops.
The turnip was what they used to carve way back in the day and across the sea. The pumpkin was a New World vegetable, and it had yet to be introduced to the land whose misfortune it was to produce Jack. Some say that was Ireland, some say Scotland or England. At various times, Jack has claimed each of those in turn as well as others. He can produce authentic-sounding accents from anywhere in Europe. Grandma said the first time she met him, he pulled off a convincing Magyar.
The lantern stops twenty feet from the front of the crypt. Jack is only a vague shape behind the bright light. Bright and warm—I can feel heat cutting through the cold of the November night. Then the lantern starts moving slowly to the right. I can hear Jack’s feet in the grass. The warmth recedes, but only a little. The burning ember in Jack’s turnip (how deceptively silly that sounds!) never abates; the longer it remains in one place, the warmer everything becomes. If Jack stayed here long enough, the air itself would catch fire.
Fortunately, he’s not allowed to do that. He has to keep moving, him and his turnip, always following nightfall, never staying anywhere long enough to become familiar, to be remembered, or to see a sunrise.
I know, you’re thinking of The Flying Dutchman, right? Same idea, different details. The Flying Dutchman is actually a sailing ship, complete with captain and crew. I don’t know what their deal is, but it probably involves hubris. There are lots of stories about immortal travelers, most of them very romantic.
But not Jack’s. Nobody ever found his story at all romantic back when it was widely known. Nowadays, it’s pretty obscure, but he’s still one of the Top Ten Dangers Before and After Death, and it would be a mistake to underestimate him.
I definitely won’t make that mistake. I’ve been preparing for my first encounter with Jack for the last year. My mother and my grandmother have been coaching me. I’ve studied the lore. I know this guy, backward and forward. Jack is a clever little bastard who outsmarted himself and got what he deserved, and he’s still trying to wiggle out of it. But I won’t let that happen. Even though I’m starting to feel so anxious, my nerves are turning into holy rollers.
The light starts coming back toward me. It’s getting really warm now. I want to take off my jacket except I’d probably rattle every bush and tree within fifty feet. Then suddenly, he says, “Oh, there you are!”
For a second, I think he’s talking to me. But then I see a woman by the side of the Perlmutter crypt. She’s wearing an evening dress that’s mostly black sequins, accented with lines of silver beads. Her short, curly hair keeps changing from red to brown to white; she apparently can’t decide how old she is now. Definitely not eighty, though.
“You can see me?” she says warily.
“And hear you. You’ve been calling to me since last night, Anna May.”
She starts to move toward him, then catches herself. “How? I don’t even know who you are.”
“We’re family. I’m your many-many-times-great-uncle Jack. So sorry you’re dead.”
Well, that explains why he’s going for Anna May instead of any of the other desperate souls in the vicinity. Jack’s so completely focused on Anna May, they can’t get closer than the farthest reach of the light coming from the lantern. Not an enormous distance—far enough to keep anyone from interfering, close enough to find another sucker if Anna May won’t bite. But he seems pretty sure that the family connection will make her more receptive. And I just have to wait—by law, I can’t intervene unless or until he actually starts trying to talk her into something.
Anna May leans forward but still doesn’t move toward him. “You’re the first, uh, the first one I’ve been able to communicate with. Everyone else around here sounds like—well, I don’t know what. Like they’re all speaking in tongues.”
This can happen with the newly dead, especially if they’re actively resisting the idea of being dead, like Anna May. It probably wouldn’t make her feel any better to know they don’t understand her, either.
“So maybe you can
tell me,” she goes on. “Is this it? Does it ever get more interesting? Does it ever get interesting at all? What am I doing wrong?”
Jack holds the turnip lantern to one side and raises it a little higher to give her a good look at his handsome smile. “I’m afraid I couldn’t say. You see, I’m not dead.”
Anna May actually draws back a little.
“Really. No lie. Come closer and see for yourself.” Jack stamps his feet to show her he’s mashing down the grass and making footprints, something souls can’t do, at least not those only ten days dead. He’s wearing an expensive Edwardian-style suit. Somewhere, someone’s mortal vessel is decomposing in the nude.
Anna May hesitates, then approaches slowly, gliding, more like ice-skating than walking. Her age is still fluctuating, but Jack keeps on giving her the old I’m-such-a-handsome-rascal smile and never bats an eye. Three feet away from him, she stops short and says, “I can smell you!”
Whatever Jack was expecting her to do or say next, this wasn’t it. I’m thrown off balance myself. The dead can be unpredictable, but Anna May just won the Never-Heard-That-One Award.
Jack’s mouth opens and closes a few times before he finally finds his voice. “I do hope I’m not giving offense.”
“It’s your suit. I can smell the wool. That’s strongest. I can also smell the polish on your shoes. And something else.”
“Waterproofing treatment,” Jack says confidently.
“No, you stepped in something.”
I can’t see her expression too well, but Jack’s isn’t very happy. I’m wondering if I’ll have to intervene at all. Anna May might be too smart for him.
Early on in his career as an itinerant bastard, Jack had a much harder time finding anyone who’d even listen because so many people knew about him. Several generations passed before he could get any takers. Whenever he did, the devil himself had to put things right again, and quickly, before Jack managed to sneak into heaven or hell. That would have sealed the deal so it could never be undone—Jack would be free and clear and whoever he’d conned into taking the turnip lantern would be screwed.