by Rich Horton
“Nice.”
“And guess what—we know this guy. His widow found my business card in his wallet. Do you remember Aidan Cleary?”
It takes a moment to find my voice. “The guy who installed our firewalls?”
“Right. He fell downstairs and broke his neck last Monday.”
“Oh.”
“Will you be okay, Syne? It’s starting to rain, and I know you don’t like driving at night.”
“I’ve got the company car,” I remind him. It has all the bells and whistles, right down to GPS and a DVD player. “I’ll be fine.”
He gives me the addresses, and, like always, ends the call with, “Is there anything you need?”
“Just tell Mrs. Cleary I’m coming.”
I pack an overnight bag, just in case, and go through the house twice, making sure all the doors are shut. My OCD is learned behaviour: open doors could be extremely hazardous to my health. I slam a couple of them, furious with myself. I hate being blind-sided, but it’s my own fault for not reading the obituaries this week.
The fall rain is cold and sharp as I run to the car. Coloured leaves swirl around me like the sky falling beautifully.
Aidan Cleary’s death changes everything. Now only one person has my home phone number. And the odds of me dying tonight just went up.
• • •
I asked Aidan once, “What am I to you?” We were tangled in damp sheets, my head on his chest. “Tell me!”
“Impatient little thing,” he murmured, knowing exactly what his voice—and those words—did to me. He said, “Omoshiroi,” and kissed me to end the conversation.
There are many words to describe what I am. Ectocourier is the most common: someone who carries ghosts in their head like snakes in a basket. Freak, ghoul, whore: fair enough. Sam once called me the embodiment of chaos theory.
But omoshiroi? Maybe Aidan thought I didn’t know what it meant. But I did, and if I hadn’t already been in love with him, that would’ve done it.
He loved a story. He would have liked to know more of mine. But by the time I met him, protecting myself was second nature. My armour is forged mostly of secrets, and every crack is a place for a knife to slide through. So I didn’t tell him that my father’s sister Isabel spoke Japanese. That she was a student of the origin of words, and my best friend until her death. That she lived by the notion of wabi-sabi, the art of accepting the natural cycle of growth, decay, and death—and of finding beauty in imperfection. I think Aidan did, too. He didn’t look past my untameable dark curls and too-pale eyes. He took me as I am. I am not kirei: pretty, but he found me omoshiroi: fascinating enough to be considered beautiful.
Isabel would have adored that. And Aidan would have enjoyed hearing how she gave me the nickname Syne when I was little, hoping people would think it was Gaelic for Jane. “Because, dear, your name is . . . regrettable.”
It is. But my mother loved mythology, and my father loved her enough to let her fill out the birth certificate. Mnemosyne was one of the Titans, beloved of Zeus, mother of the Muses. My name means memory.
If she could see me tonight, Isabel would probably say I’ve lived up to it.
Near the end of her life, after she’d lost both breasts, my parents and I moved into Isabel’s house to take care of her. We were there long enough for me to pick up her occasional quirk of breaking names down to their roots. When she died, the first thing I thought was, Isabel, form of Elizabeth, from Hebrew meaning My God is abundance.
We packed to go home that evening. The house felt strange without her in it. I checked the watch she’d given me for my birthday as I headed to the kitchen. It was suppertime, I was hungry, and there was a box of her favourite cookies in the pantry.
They were a little stale. I ate one anyway.
And nearly choked. It was suddenly cold in the kitchen, as if a fog had rolled in. I gasped, getting a mouthful of whatever it was, and almost slammed the door into my mother’s face trying to get out. My watch beeped, signalling that it was time for Isabel’s six o’clock painkiller.
“Come on, Syne, we’re leaving now.”
It was a short drive home. As we went inside Mom said, “You look pale, sweetheart.” I stumbled into the kitchen, wondering if there’d been something wrong with the cookie.
She said, “What’s wrong?”
Isabel came billowing out of my mouth.
I never told Aidan about waking up on the floor with my parents hovering and Isabel’s doctor crouched beside me. A nondescript little man I didn’t know stood behind him.
Doctor Harrison said, “Welcome back.”
“Uh, thanks. Great to be here.”
“I’d like you to meet my friend, Sam Howard. He specializes in cases like yours. You’re lucky this was his night to have dinner with me.”
Before I could ask, “What cases like mine?” Sam said, “I’m the lucky one, you saved me from eating his meatloaf.” He told me that one of his employees, Sandrine, had removed Isabel before I accidentally absorbed her again. “Your parents suggested she release your aunt’s ghost in the park.”
He made it sound normal.
He told my parents, “If you don’t want this to happen again, we’ll have to start training her right away.” He noted the time I’d absorbed Isabel’s ghost and the time I’d expelled it, did the math, and subtracted the total from my year. I had 8758 hours and four minutes to go. All of them contracted to him.
Before I was even off the floor he gave me my first lesson: life as I knew it was over. No more school. No visitors except for Sam and Sandrine. No going outside unless I needed surgery or the house was on fire. He didn’t want me encountering any more ghosts until I was properly trained to handle them.
There is a hollow sphere the size of a grain of sand in the frontal lobe of my brain. No one knows why some people are born with this miniature cargo hold. Sam says at any given time there might be a dozen of us in the world, but I’ve never asked how he knows this, or how he finds us in a crowd of 8 billion. I’m just glad to have someone talking me through the craziness.
I did ask what makes the cargo hold open for the first time, but no one knows that, either. When mine opened and I absorbed Isabel, my biological clock started a countdown. The sphere would give me a year’s worth of containment, then shut down permanently, and life would return to normal.
But it takes longer than a year to work through a year’s worth of containment. “It can take decades, a few minutes at a time,” Sam said. “Or we can teach you to work your time off and be done with it. My clients pay well enough that when you get your life back, you can do anything you want with it.”
I wobbled to my feet. “Let’s go with plan B.”
“All right. Do you have any questions?”
“I do,” my father said. “What kind of lunatic deals in ghosts?”
• • •
I do.
Valerie Cleary does.
Aidan didn’t talk about her much. He once said she designed jewellery, but he never told me her name. Sam told me more by telling me nothing at all. He does a background check on all potential customers before he ever contacts a courier, so I know she has no criminal record, no history of violent behaviour, and has never legally purchased a firearm. She’s considered mentally stable, though I understand that at this moment she might debate that.
I don’t know why she wants Aidan’s ghost gone so soon after his death. A wife could have all kinds of reasons. This one certainly could. Maybe, like so many of our clients, she thinks removing her spouse’s ghost will make his absence hurt less. Sam doesn’t think she’s any danger to me, but he doesn’t have all the facts this time, and I don’t know what she might have learned and kept to herself.
She opens the door before I can ring the bell. I show my photo ID.
“Mrs. Cleary? I’m Syne Wallace, from Howard Real Estate.”
She’s the kind of beautiful that intimidates me instantly. She has that casual elegance. A few strands o
f silver glint in the loose blonde braid down her back. She has the same golden eyes as Aidan, but there are shadows under them, as if she’s slept badly. Maybe her bed doesn’t feel right without him in it.
Been there.
As I enter the house, I feel in my coat pocket for The Gizmo. Sam gave it to me with my watch, and explained its use very carefully. It looks like a keychain, and shuts down any audio-video recording devices in a three-hundred-foot radius. It wreaks havoc on security cameras. So far we’ve managed to blame any blank footage on the absorption/expulsion process.
Sam says recording the process would be an invasion of the clients’ privacy; and, of course, it would be a danger to us if the recordings ever fell into the wrong hands. Gizmo aside, clients must also sign a confidentiality agreement before a conversation ever takes place. Valerie signs hers at the door.
“Do you have the delivery address?” she asks.
“Yes. Do you know the buyers?”
“Richard and Tara Ramsey. I’ve never met them. They contacted me an hour after Aidan’s ghost went up for sale. They met my price immediately.” She closes her eyes over sudden tears. She wants this done, no matter how much she dreads it.
“Do you need to be alone for this?” she asks.
“It would be easier for me,” I lie.
“I’ll go next door.” She takes a well-worn brown sweater from the closet. It’s too big for her. It brings out the gold in her eyes. “It was my husband’s favourite,” she says when she sees me looking.
I know. I gave it to him.
“Will an hour be enough?” she asks.
“It should be.”
As she opens the door she looks at me, right at me, for the first time. She says, “I just don’t know how you can do this.”
• • •
Neither do I. God knows Sandrine tried to explain it. She came back that first evening, when the last thing I wanted was another lesson in anything. Along with the introductory lecture, Sam had given me the watch I wear to this day. It shows the time and date; and, if I push the buttons in the right order, it shows to the second how much time is left in my year. He said I could never take it off. I never have.
After he left I looked up chaos theory. It’s a mathematical concept that says you can get random results from normal-looking equations. I have my father’s fair skin and my mother’s straight, narrow nose, but neither of them was a ghost magnet. My playing-with-a-full-deck parents turned out a wild card.
Sandrine and I watched the eleven o’clock news together. I should have been in bed, but it’s not as if it was a school night.
Gas prices were up, unemployment was down. In Detroit an alleged ectocourier had been shot five times by a man screaming she was a witch.
I asked, “Was she really an ectocourier?”
Sandrine said, “Probably not,” very calmly, as if she’d accepted the fact that she could be killed by someone who didn’t know what exactly he was scared of.
“Some people think the dead tell us all their secrets,” she said.
“Do they?”
“No. They don’t tell us anything.”
That night I learned that an accusation could make me a target. That words could be as dangerous to me as they were beloved to Isabel. I thought of panicked lynchings, and witches burning, and realized chaos was no longer just a theory.
The news got stranger. The Oscar-winning actress Emma Jacardi had been in a car crash and wasn’t expected to live the night. Her family was already auctioning her ghost online; bids were up to $19.9 million.
Sandrine said, “You still have questions, right?”
When did owning a haunted house become a status symbol? Am I the only person who thinks bidding on the ghost of a dying celebrity too sleazy for words, or that putting it up for auction at all is even sleazier? Why would people who think selling ghosts is immoral be willing to kill to prove their point? Why do some ghosts move on while others stay? Why would anybody want to be more haunted than they already are?
I said, “Yeah, I have a few.”
“What do you remember about the absorption?” she asked.
“You’re going to think this is weird,” I said, “but I kept hearing slamming doors in my head.”
“Excellent.”
Not the word I would have chosen. But later I heard her telling Sam I had good instincts. Over the next few months we honed them carefully, working on my control. I spent hours focussing inward, practising her visualization techniques. They seemed like a form of potentially violent meditation. But you don’t want a ghost getting out and slithering into the rest of your brain.
I got my GED, and eventually Sandrine helped me become a licensed real estate agent, like all of Sam’s couriers. It’s good camouflage, in case anyone wonders why you’re hanging around a house where someone died recently.
“When your year is up,” Sandrine said, “your cargo hold disintegrates and you lose the ability to absorb a ghost. But you also lose the ability to expel one. If you’re still carrying when the hold dissolves, there’s going to be trouble. Ghosts don’t need much space, but most human brains aren’t designed for visitors.”
She showed me a photo of a dead ectocourier. I asked, “What happened to his eyes?”
“The ghost got out.”
• • •
Aidan’s ghost isn’t on the main floor. I head upstairs, waiting for the feeling of walking into fog. He’s not in Valerie’s workroom or the master bedroom. I wonder if the sight of the bed he shared with her should make me feel something, but it doesn’t.
I don’t know what I should feel. When Aidan vanished on me, I mostly dealt with his loss by not dealing with it at all. I shoved the hurt into an imaginary box and locked it away. Even now I’m not sure how over him I am.
So much of my life is about unfinished business.
Aidan’s home office is at the end of the hall, pretty much as he described it, his big desk still a little messy. The computer is turned off. I glance out the window. Valerie is standing in the driveway across the street, watching the house.
Though there’s been nothing in her words or manner to suggest she knows me, I’m still anxious to be gone. But wabi-sabi is about taking responsibility for your own actions. Cleaning up your own mess. Sam would be horrified if he knew how big this particular mess really is. If he knew both Aidan and I had betrayed him.
Sam took me to my first professional absorption, and stayed to make sure I could see it through. After my first delivery, he took me out for a drink. I think he loves the mystery of the transaction. He’s one of the few people I know who could truly appreciate an absorption video.
But as far as I know there’s only one in existence.
And it’s in here somewhere.
“The dead as decoration,” Aidan said the day before he left. “Who came up with that idea?”
I’ve often wondered. Ghosts shimmer beautifully, but can barely be seen in some light. They don’t do well in air-conditioning. They drift out through doors and windows if you’re not careful. Maybe some millionaire just enjoyed squandering his money. Maybe he’d already bought everything else.
I said, “I don’t know.”
It was the only time I let him drive me to a job, and the one time his curiosity about me outweighed his good manners. I was delivering a ghost to an art gallery, a place the deceased had haunted in life as well. She’d left most of her estate to the gallery, with a portion set aside for Sam to cover my fee. On the way there I kept thinking about installation art.
When we arrived, there was already a sign on the door, telling the public there was a ghost on the premises. The curator of the gallery knew I was coming, and let me in after-hours. He said that, as a courtesy, he would turn the security cameras off for two minutes. Then he turned and left the room—and Aidan, waiting outside, simply slipped in before the door closed.
“Let me watch,” he whispered, knowing what those words did to me, too.
They distr
acted me enough that, for the first and only time, I forgot about The Gizmo. I saw the function lights on the security cameras turn red, and got on with the job.
I didn’t know he’d recorded the release on his cell phone until afterward, when I saw him slipping it in his pocket and asked him about it. But because we’d already trusted each other with so many secrets, and because love often makes you stupid, it didn’t seem that dire, not even when he said he’d probably put it on disk. I wasn’t thinking of him leaving, then, and didn’t think of the risks until he did.
But even then I didn’t think he’d release the video. Couldn’t imagine him selling it. Didn’t believe he’d knowingly put me in danger, not while he was alive.
But dead is a whole different matter. What might happen if someone else finds the disk doesn’t bear thinking about.
I snap on a pair of latex gloves, something I’ve never used on the job before, and check my watch. I can spare forty-five minutes to find it.
But it doesn’t take long.
The first present I ever gave Aidan was a book-safe painted to look like my favourite Dickens novel, The Old Curiosity Shop. It’s on the shelf behind his desk now, between Angle of Repose and Perdido Street Station. Inside is a hundred dollars in cash and a CD case. The disk is decorated with a silver butterfly sticker, another souvenir I didn’t know about.
I leave the money and pocket the disk. This is the first time I’ve ever stolen from a job. Though not, of course, the first time I’ve stolen from Valerie.
If she hadn’t called Sam, I would’ve had to find another way to get inside her house and go hunting. It’s a good thing real estate agents are trained to be pushy. But it’s too bad I’m a fool.
I wish I could blame Aidan for this mess, but it’s not his fault I found him intoxicating.
It’s my fault for letting myself get drunk.
• • •
Sam said, “Syne, I’d like you to meet Aidan Cleary. He’s here to install the new firewalls.”
He was tall and broad-shouldered, his greying hair a little shaggy, as if he had better things to do than visit a barber, his eyes like burned gold.
Aidan, from Gaelic, meaning fire.