by Tahereh Mafi
It wasn’t always like this.
Mordeshoors used to mean something in Whichwood. They used to matter. But people had gotten used to abusing Laylee, and they’d lost sight of the risks—the consequences—of defrauding a mordeshoor.
They’d forgotten the ancient rhyme.
You’d try to cheat a mordeshoor?
You’d dishonor this noble deed?
What comes of all this wickedness?
Filthy swindlers!
Take heed:
A gentle warning to remind you
Of the things that you’ve forgot
Your mortal skin
will slowly thin
Your heart will fail and rot.
Steal from any mordeshoor!
And walk free for just a day.
Steal from any mordeshoor!
And death will make you pay.
Let me explain:
There could never elapse more than three months between a death and its spirit’s dispatch to the Otherwhere. Any longer than that, and the souls grew too attached to this world and would do whatever they could to stay.
This was what had happened to Maman.
Baba (from whom Laylee had inherited her magic as a mordeshoor) had been too distraught to wash Maman’s lifeless body and, under the pretense of finding (and fighting) Death itself, had left home and was led eternally astray by grief. Laylee, only eleven years old at the time, hadn’t known what to do. She’d only trained with Baba a short while before he left, and had been understandably horrified by the idea of washing her own mother’s decaying corpse—never mind the fact that she could barely lift the woman into a tub. So she did what anyone would’ve done in her situation: She ignored the problem and hoped it would go away on its own.
But the doorbell kept ringing.
Corpses piled up faster than she could count them, and it was all Laylee could do to drag them into her shed and keep them sheltered until Baba came home. At first she did nothing but wait—but within a month she was out of food and out of options, and soon she was scrubbing as many dead as she was able and taking whatever money she was offered. She threw herself into her work, washing bodies until her fingers bled, determined to direct her mounting fury into something productive. But every night, no matter the weather, she’d steal away from Maman’s angry ghost and sleep outside in the open air, her young heart still soft enough to hope. She thought maybe Baba had forgotten she was in there, and she prayed he would see her waiting for him if he ever passed by. She held on to hope for six months before she discovered him in town one day, counting his teeth in the middle of the street.
He’d been selling them in exchange for food.
It was only then that Laylee gave up on the world she’d once loved. That was when—at eleven and one half years old—she finally washed her mother’s rotted dead body and, ready to send her off, had discovered Maman’s spirit would not be moved. Maman’s ghost had grown too attached to this world, and she wouldn’t be persuaded to leave her daughter, no matter the tears Laylee shed.*
The problem was, there were rules about ghosts who wanted to stay behind. Life and death were regulated by endless bureaucracy, and exceptions to the system could not be made without proper procedure. Spirits were, first of all, deeply discouraged from remaining in the land of the living (for a long list of reasons I won’t bore you with now), but those ghosts who insisted on living with mortals would have to find a mortal skin to wear. Without it, a spirit would eventually disintegrate, dissolved of both life and death forever, the worst of all possible fates.
Any skin would do, really, but human skin was the spirits’ favorite, as it had the best fit and that je ne sais quoi—nostalgia, perhaps?—that reminded them of better times.* If all this sounds terrifying—don’t worry: It was the job of Laylee (and people like her) to prevent it from ever happening. This was precisely why it was so important to pay a mordeshoor a living wage. Dead mordeshoors, you will understand, could only do so much.
And everything had a schedule.
After three months, the magic that bound ghosts to their mordeshoor would break, and they would then be free to leave hallowed ground, roam the land, and steal skins from the first persons they could find.
Ticktock.
It was coming up on days eighty-seven, eighty-eight, and eighty-nine for all of Laylee’s dead, which meant the people of Whichwood were running out of time.
It might not surprise you to hear that, for practical purposes, a portion of Laylee’s vast property had been landscaped to accommodate an ancient, overcrowded cemetery. But it might surprise you to hear that the citizens of Whichwood cared very little for this cemetery, and that they were a people who did not visit their dead. Mourners rarely came by Laylee’s freshly planted graves to lay flowers or have tearful conversations with the memories of their loved ones, and this was because the Whichwoodians were—as I mentioned earlier—an extremely superstitious people, who believed that being kind to the dead would only encourage the cold corpses to come back to life. So, as they had no great desire to have their lives rampaged by festering zombies, they were content to leave the dead undisturbed. This meant that the ghosts who lived on Laylee’s land had little distraction from their tedious ghost schedules, and as the hours of the day dragged on long and dull, seeing Laylee never ceased to please them. For the ghosts she served, Laylee was a delight.
But as she stepped out onto the land to collect her fallen helmet and crowbar, Laylee remembered what she’d nearly forgotten: She’d left the morning’s work unfinished—and the ghosts had no problem reminding her. In an instant, a school of gauzy wisps were screeching her name.
Laylee looked up with a reluctant smile as fifteen spirits sidled up to her. She gave her ghosts a limp wave. “Hi,” she said, scooping up her wet helmet in the process. “How is everyone?” She shoved the helmet onto her head and stifled a shudder as a dollop of cold slush slid down her forehead.
“Good,” the ghosts chorused, all flat and monotone.
“We’ve been sharing our death stories again,” said Zahra, looking gloomy.
“And Roksana was telling us her theories about the Otherwhere,” said an older man named Hamid. “It was so sad.”
“That’s nice,” said Laylee distractedly, fumbling for the latch that hooked the crowbar onto her tool belt.
Roksana stretched and spun as fractured rays of sunlight added a bit of glitter to her gauziness. “What about you?” she said. “Khodet chetori, azizam?” Roksana was always mixing languages when she spoke, never remembering to stick to just one.
“I’m fine, too,” Laylee lied as she marched forward in the sludge. She stopped to shade her eyes against the sunlight and peered into the distance. Her coffins were stacked in tall, precarious piles, and she still had to get the bodies in, nail them shut, and bury them underground. “Anyway, sorry, guys, I’ve got a lot of work to do today, so I better get back to—”
The ghosts groaned.
“You always have a lot of work to do!” said Deen, a dead boy about her age.
“Yes, yes, and I’m so sad,” said a large, heavyset older gentleman. “I’d very much like to tell you about it.”
“Komak nadari?” asked Roksana. “Hmmm? Why don’t you ever have help? Baba’t kojast? Who were those kids here last night? Can’t they help?”
Roksana was always asking her the hard questions. She was young when she died—still in her mid-forties—but as ghosts went, she was the oldest here; Roksana had been with Laylee just shy of three months now, and not only did that make her the natural leader of their ghost troupe, but it made it so Roksana harbored a special affection for the little mordeshoor. This affection was fairly uncharacteristic of the spirit species—ghosts were usually very grim, you see—but Roksana had a buoyancy that even death hadn’t managed to cure.
Anyhow, Laylee was heaving half-t
hawed bodies into open caskets and just about to answer Roksana’s question when three more ghosts appeared.
“Hi, Laylee.”
“Hiiiii, Laylee.”
“Hey, Layl.”
“Hello,” said Laylee with another sigh. She sat down in the slush and pulled a coffin into her lap, counting dead fingers and toes. Satisfied, she shoved the wooden box back onto the snow, plucked a business card from her belt, and tucked one end of the triangular card into the soggy mouth of the corpse.
THIS BODY WAS WASHED AND PACKAGED FOR THE OTHERWHERE BY LAYLEE LAYLA FENJOON
“You look tired,” said Deen. “It’s really not fair that you have to do this all alone.”
“I’d help you if I could, azizam,” said Roksana. “You know we all would.”
Laylee smiled as she pulled herself up to her knees. She had an important relationship with her ghosts, but it was a curious one, too; Laylee often felt like their mother, doing her best to keep them in line as they arrived and departed, always afraid for the day they got too bored and did something regrettable to the living. Normally she’d make more of an effort to keep their spirits low, but today Laylee was simply too exhausted to do more than address their most basic concerns.
There was so much work left to do.
Laylee struggled to keep her head up as she moved, pushing through a mental fog so thick she could scarcely remember the steps she’d left undone. It took a great deal of effort, but eventually all fifteen clean corpses were lying in their coffins, business cards tucked between their lips, and now she was nearly ready to nail tops and bottoms together. Laylee allowed herself a quick sigh before reaching for her pliers.
“Oh, gross,” said Shireen, one of the older girls. “I hate this part. It’s so, so gross, Laylee, ew.”
“Close your eyes,” said Laylee patiently. “You don’t always have to watch.”
And with an efficient, practiced hand, Laylee spent the next several minutes pulling all the fingernails and toenails off her corpses. Once done, she added the human claws to the ever-growing collection she carried in a copper box on her belt. She gave the closed box a firm, swift shake, and then popped the lid, closed her eyes, and chose six nails at random. This was a key step in the burial process, as human nails were the only kinds of nails that would keep a coffin permanently closed.
Laylee unhooked the brass mallet from her tool belt and, hands still trembling, carefully hammered dirty fingernails into the wood. She was grateful that her limbs had temporarily ceased their more vigorous shaking; the larger tremors came in waves, she was realizing, and she was happy to take advantage of the respite now.
Once all the lids had been properly nailed shut, Laylee unsheathed her branding iron and blew a gentle, warm breath onto the metal; the iron glowed orange in an instant, softly steaming in the crisp air. With a robotic proficiency, she stamped the closed coffins with the mordeshoor seal and then, finally, dragged the hefty wooden boxes into the cemetery where, one by one, she melted them directly into the ground.
This last bit was possibly the most fascinating part of the finishing process, because it involved a simple and simultaneously intricate facet of Laylee’s magic. Once the dead were ready to be sent off to the Otherwhere, Laylee knelt before each coffin and gently pressed the cargo into the earth. Once in transit, the bodies were no longer her business.
Except—
Well, there’s one more thing.
The very final act of the mordeshoor was the ghosts’ favorite part of the process, and they swarmed around her now, eager and proud and grateful, to watch as Laylee did her last bit of magic.
The mordeshoor fell to her knees where the dead had been buried and, for each person gone, she summoned a red rose petal from between her lips. These, she then planted into the ground.
In moments, the petals had broken the earth and blossomed into fully grown flowers. It seemed a simple bit of magic, but the roses planted by a mordeshoor would live forever—surviving even the harshest seasons. And they represented a single, unwavering truth:
That a person had once lived.
Laylee’s cemetery was a sad and stunning sea of endless red roses—tens of dozens of thousands of them—that marked the memories of every soul she and her family had touched.
And when she finally fainted backward into the snow—exhausted beyond words, hands and arms silver and trembling beyond recognition—her forty remaining ghosts gathered around her, whispered their words of thanks—and then, well, then they did what they always did when Laylee fell asleep on the job. They called for help from the birds nearby.
Not moments later, a dozen feathered friends swooped down, caught Laylee’s clothes in their talons, and carried her back to the castle.
Laylee woke up with a start.
The sun had moved a little to the right and snow had descended upon the hills in huge, thin flakes. Laylee was sitting slumped outside her castle door, and she had no idea how long she’d been asleep. Gone already were the earlier rays of warmth, and as she stifled the impulse to shiver, she realized she’d lost another hour of the day.
She staggered to her feet.
There were still forty corpses in her shed, and Laylee would have to hurry up and find Alice and Oliver before it was too late. She had no idea how far the pair had gone or how long it would take her to find them, but she was certain she’d have to leave her property in order to do so.
But leaving home meant she had to bring her bones.
Every mordeshoor was born with two skeletons: one they wore under their skin, and another they wore on their back. It was a symbol of their dual life and the death they carried. The spare skeleton was carefully stacked and bundled into a ceremonial sack where the bones would grow and age just as the mordeshoor did; the second skeleton was as much a part of their body as was their nose, and they could never leave home without it.
Laylee hurried inside to retrieve them, leaving behind her heavy helmet as she did. Once she’d hoisted the bone-sack over her dented shoulders, she pulled her scarlet hood up over her head and drew in a deep breath. With every step she took, the steady cloc cloc of clattering bones would alert the world to who she was.
I FEAR THIS WON’T END WELL
For all her careful planning, Laylee didn’t need to go far to find what she was looking for. She heard voices almost as soon as she approached the main road, and all she had to do was follow the sounds until she came directly upon them. Alice and Oliver were sitting on their bottoms in the snow—which would have been curious enough—but more curious still: they were not, in fact, alone.
Laylee was stunned.
She hadn’t actually expected Alice and Oliver to bemoan her absence, but she was still surprised to find they’d moved on so quickly. And of all people in Whichwood they should move on with, it had to be Benyamin Felankasak.
Laylee didn’t actually hate Benyamin, but she was feeling territorial at the moment, so she fancied she hated him. When she was feeling more charitable she would tell anyone that Benyamin was a nice enough boy; in fact, he was her only neighbor on the peninsula, and she’d grown up going to school with him. But she’d always thought him a dumb, hapless sort of young person who spoke with an optimism about life that assured her only of his naiveté. She found his excessive smiles and eager friendliness repugnant, and she couldn’t understand how anyone else could feel differently.
Regardless: Alice, Oliver, and Benyamin were engaged in—what appeared to be—a diverting conversation, and Laylee frowned, her eyebrows furrowing, as she felt the familiar pinpricks of envy. It wasn’t a fair reaction, as Benyamin was a boy with his own long list of troubles; and though she shouldn’t have begrudged him this unexpected kindness of strangers, she couldn’t, at present, remember how to be generous. Instead, she was frozen in place, her eyes burning holes into the head of Benyamin Felankasak, when Benyamin—standing some dozens of feet awa
y—finally looked up, evidently aware of her gaze.
He jumped half a foot in the air.
Laylee cut a formidable figure standing in the snow, and Benyamin was right to be startled. She was a vision in scarlet: her long, heavy robes a stark contrast to the pure white of the drift piled up around her. She was livid, hooded, and, in the time it took Alice and Oliver to turn around, storming toward them, her cloak billowing like a curtain of blood in the wind.
Once she was close enough to see their faces, Laylee was beset by a twinge of remorse. Gone in an instant were their smiles and happy conversations; no, now Alice was panicked, Oliver was pale, and Benyamin was bolted to the ground.
Laylee greeted her peers with an insouciant nod of her head and even managed to shrug back a flush of mortification when Benyamin looked directly into her eyes. (Benyamin, you see, was the only person present who knew her eyes were not supposed to be gray.)
Laylee looked away and quickly tugged her hood forward, further concealing her eyes in its shadow, but she couldn’t undo what he’d seen. He was still staring at her when she next lifted her head, but his gaze was no longer fearful. His eyes were now soft and sad, and though his pity was somehow infinitely worse, Laylee couldn’t help but feel a sincerity in his sympathy, and she knew then that he would protect her secret.
So she touched her forehead and nodded.
Benyamin closed his eyes, touched the back of his hand to his own forehead, and bowed.
It was the ultimate gesture of respect.
Alice and Oliver had no way of knowing what had just transpired between Laylee and Benyamin, but Laylee had at least stopped scowling, which Alice took to mean that things couldn’t have gone too badly. This was all the assurance she and Oliver needed in order to get back to the business of things that concerned them: