by Cutter, Leah
I walked back into the dark street, wishing as always that I had some way of adjusting my collar or my cuffs. I would be leaving the next day. I’d really wanted to be able to say goodbye to Toni. I did the best I could by running my fingers along the strap of Betsy still hanging around my neck.
“Andrew! Paisano!” I heard Toni’s voice call from behind me. I looked around, but she wasn’t coming from the gallery. She came walking down the street and I took a moment to admire her. She looked gorgeous as always, wearing a low-cut dress that showed off her cleavage as well as her curves with high heels that might as well have been ballet slippers given her graceful walk.
“I didn’t know you celebrated,” Toni exclaimed, handing me a tall, Fixed candle, then directing the flame from her own lit taper to mine. The fire danced under her fingers, licking at them, then leering hungrily towards me before settling down. Flames responded to all ghosts: Arson investigators now put the undead at the top of the list for all unexplained fires.
“Celebrated?” I asked, dazed, as I followed her up the street. Only then did I notice the half-dozen ghosts trailing behind her, also holding lit candles.
“The solstice,” Toni explained.
“Oh,” was all I could think to say. I hadn’t known ghosts celebrated anything during the holidays. “Where are we going?” I asked after Toni greeted another ghost and pressed her into the service as well, wondering just how widespread this celebration actually was.
“To Beaker’s Yard,” Toni said, as if it should be obvious.
My blank look gave me away. I was never going to impress Toni with anything at this rate.
“When the veils shredded, they discovered a private family burial at the Beaker house,” she explained.
“Nice euphemism,” I muttered as Toni turned away again. When I’d been alive, the Beaker case had been a tough one that had consumed more than one homicide detective. I’d been in vice, so I’d only heard grumbling about the case after hours in the bar. The family had disappeared one by one, taken from all over the city. No one could prove anything, though, because the bodies had never turned up. Portals had sprung up near where they’d been buried, which turned out to be the backyard of one of the apartment houses they owned.
“It’s the closest graveyard,” Toni said, ignoring me. “I prefer these intimate gatherings to the big ceremonies, yes?”
Numbly I nodded as Toni recruited yet another ghost on the street, wondering how intimate she meant when there now appeared to be over a dozen ghosts, each lit by his or her internal glow that outshone the candles they carried.
We turned off the main drag, walking out of the business district and into the surrounding neighborhood. About a block away was a community pea-patch garden. A collection of the living stood outside the gate, also holding candles. They watched silently as the ghostly parade marched past, through the garden, and into the courtyard of an old brick building.
Instantly the portals sprang up, each showing our individual Hells. I tried not to look at Toni’s—I only caught a glimpse of waiting monsters—before I drew close enough that the appearance shifted to my own boiling clouds of nothingness with flames that would burn my soul.
A well-dressed younger man—one of the Beakers, I assumed—waited for us. He wore a bespoke suit with a cut so classic it would always look good. He directed us into a larger circle, hands waving like a magician’s, fascinating and agile. His face had long features; an elongated nose and chin and almost pointed ears sticking through ginger hair.
“That’s Simon,” Toni whispered to me as we found our places.
Before I could ask more, Simon began. “Tonight is the longest night.” His voice carried more power than I was used to hearing from a ghost, as well as a passion that had abandoned most of the dead. “A symbol of our continued existence.”
I wondered if he’d been a lawyer.
“We mourn the Heaven we were promised, that we no longer believe in.”
A strange happiness blossomed in my chest. I wasn’t in mourning like they were, not anymore. I’d seen my Heaven again—not just promised but delivered to me on a silver plate by my family.
I smiled at Toni, who frowned at me. I realized that this was supposed to be a solemn occasion and schooled my expression into something more suitable, pressing down on the budding, alien elation I felt.
“We no longer face the day with joy, hearing the ringing of Hell’s bells brought with the dawn. But I urge you to see hope with the growing light.”
A muttered sigh went through the ghostly community, otherworldly enough that I shivered. I noticed that only two of the living had followed us into the enclosed space. One wasn’t affected by the noise. The other reached up and tweaked something behind her ears.
I remembered Susan hadn’t seemed bothered by any of my ghostly exhalations. Did she wear something as well? Some sort of earplug or aid that filtered out ghostly subsonics? She had read Mr. Potter’s notes. She knew I was capable of terrible haunting. Was it merely a matter of being comfortable? Or was it protection against me in case I turned on her?
And why would I turn on her, unless what she’d shown me was a trick?
Suddenly, I no longer felt so smug.
We didn’t sing together, and we couldn’t hold hands or hug. We had to wave out our candles because we didn’t have any breath to blow them out. Only a vigorous shake would put them out, as the flames were too attracted to ghosts. We stood in the dark, glowing with our own deadly pallor, the flickering portals to Hell shining behind us.
Toni thanked Simon as we walked past, depositing candles in the box he held. “So, paisano, tell me what you wanted,” Toni said as we separated from the others.
“You don’t believe it was just to see you?” I asked, finding my smile returning.
“You? You are all business,” Toni said. She shrugged one shoulder. “It’s a cliché, but you need to learn to live a little.”
I glanced down at my ghostly form, then looked back up at her, one eyebrow cocked.
“You know what I mean,” she said, exasperated.
“I, uhm, yeah.” I paused. If I’d been alive, I would have swallowed around a lump in my throat or wiped suddenly sweating palms across my thighs. It was much harder to speak my plans aloud than I’d expected. “I may not have to,” I finally told her.
Toni grew very still. “You’ve decided to pass Beyond?”
I nodded, still unable to speak easily.
“Andrew! Why would you give up that way?” Frustrated, Toni slapped her hand across my shoulder, passing through me. It was distinctly disturbing, first to have a part of my body suddenly displaced that way, and second by the chill of being that intimate with another ghost.
“What did you do that for?” I asked, betrayed and stunned.
“Because you’re being an idiot.” Toni glowered at me.
“It’s not like that,” I assured her. I looked up and down the street, and though it was quiet enough, there were still too many people and ghosts milling around to accommodate Susan’s requests for secrecy. “I can explain,” I told Toni. “Not here. Someplace private, where we can talk.”
“Paisano,” Toni said flirtatiously. “If you weren’t—you—I’d be flattered.”
“Come on,” I growled at her.
She smiled and shook her head, but followed along.
I could only hope that she’d follow me into the Beyond as well.
* * *
We ended up at my office. There were several things I needed to take care of there, anyway. I hadn’t decided what I was going to do with my files, whether I should burn them or give them to my lawyer or something else. I wanted to ensure their confidentiality. I also didn’t know what to do with all the natural artifacts—the rocks, pieces of glass, marbles, and plastic toys—which covered the shelves of the cinder-block-and-board bookcase that ran along the one wall. Each of them held a spark of something—life, Heaven, energy, I didn’t know—that took them far enough out of
the mundane world that ghosts could touch them.
Toni didn’t believe me at first. I purposely didn’t tell her of Beppe. I wanted to surprise her, just show her the picture and prove that her brother had gone to Heaven. “There is no scientific explanation of Hell,” she told me. “No atoms or physics.”
“I have proof.” I put Betsy between us and scrolled to the pictures, showing Toni the beast, then the first shot of the portal.
The dark picture of my Hell started Toni. “Oh, paisano,” she muttered. I think she would have patted my hand if ghosts could touch.
“It gets better,” I assured her. I scrolled to the next photo, expecting Beppe’s Heaven.
My Hell remained.
“But I thought—wait.” I thumbed through the rest of the shots.
The ones with the screen were especially telling. Betsy had captured it beautifully: the false image of my Heaven partially covering the real image of Hell that lay behind it.
“Andrew. I’m sorry,” Toni said softly. “It looks so beautiful.”
I nodded, stunned. I should have known it was too good to be true, that Susan had been lying.
She was family, after all.
“Why did the picture change?” I wondered out loud.
Toni shrugged. “Maybe Susan’s machine can affect things on some quantum level. Or maybe she is trying to protect you,” Toni said, pointing to Betsy.
“How did you know—”
“You know she sometimes looks like she’s alive, no? Like the living?”
I shook my head, cradling Betsy in my hands. “Her name’s Betsy,” I told Toni, introducing them.
Toni looked at Betsy, then up at my face. “You take good care of her,” Toni said with a smile. “You can trust her.” Then Toni grew more serious. “You must destroy this machine, paisano. Before she fools others.”
I shook my head. “I can’t haunt Susan.” I explained my theory about the earpieces. “And the machine isn’t Fixed, not really. I can’t touch it.”
Toni reached up to her chest, pulled her lighter out from between her breasts, and then slid it to me across the desk. “She hid your flames of Hell from you, no? Maybe you should show her real fire.”
* * *
I did my own research then, the checking I should have done before I’d blithely gone off with Susan. I looked up my grandnephew Bill, dead now, though not a ghost if the records were to be believed. Susan was his daughter—the pictures proved it—and so we actually were related. She’d been sick as a child, something I hadn’t recalled, but there were a lot of things from that time that were hazy at best.
I cursed when I discovered the company Susan worked for, who her backers were. A faith-based organization called “Going Home” that was dedicated to convincing ghosts to travel Beyond.
Was Susan’s machine yet another ploy, to show a ghost Heaven so they would willingly go into Hell?
I went back to Susan’s records. Something nagged at me, an old police instinct.
Susan’s medical records were online, like everyone’s. The program I used to hack into them was strictly illegal and as far as I knew, only available to ghosts. The evidence was clear in retrospect. Susan hadn’t really been sick, just clumsy as a child.
Too clumsy.
The break in her arm when she’d been four was a spiral fracture: that only came from twisting, not falling. The broken toes came from an object that was too heavy for a five-year-old to lift, let alone knock over.
Maybe I had been kind to Susan as a child, as she’d claimed. But I hadn’t seen, or been kind enough.
On a whim, I did a casual search for Betsy. Sly pictures of her showed up on a website dedicated to special artifacts, candid photos of her bright red case in my ghostly hands. I had no idea that anyone else knew about her or even had any interest.
I’d always felt she had a warmth—now I learned other people thought the same. She didn’t have a fan page like some of the other artifacts, for which I was both grateful and disgruntled. I knew she was special enough to merit one.
I wasted some time scrolling through websites, looking at other artifacts. There was a statue of Buddha in Thailand that seemed to have a life of its own, as chilling to the touch as a ghost but warm enough to heat a spectralgraph; a clock in Germany running with its own life force; and a drinking flagon in Wales that was merry.
Eventually I came back to my own problem and the page with Betsy. Maybe Susan wanted to get some type of revenge on me. Maybe she’d been counting on my continued distraction or my inability to see what was right in front of me.
Or maybe there was something else she’d wanted all along.
* * *
I couldn’t confront Susan when she picked me up that evening. I needed to get out to her place, and the bus wasn’t going to cut it. Instead, I asked her about Betsy. “You said you’d read Mr. Potter’s notes?” They’d been missing from the artifacts website. Instead, the article was full of guesses about Betsy’s true nature, some startlingly accurate, such as her spectralgraphic abilities, and some far from the truth, about how she’d jump in my hands to warn me of danger. “What did Mr. Potter say about Betsy?”
“He didn’t have time to fully inspect her,” Susan said. She casually rubbed her ear. I saw now that she wore something in the canal there. “You’ve seen the website, right?”
“Found it this afternoon,” I confessed. I wanted Susan to continue to underestimate me, so it was easy to admit the truth.
“Ah.” Susan gave me an indulgent smile. “I couldn’t ask Mr. Potter about her. He died of internal hemorrhaging sometime after you’d chased him into the street and he was hit by a bus.”
“Haunted him,” I corrected. I’d been locked in the basement at the time, facing my own inevitable Hell. I hadn’t known his final fate, though. I hadn’t bothered looking it up. Though ghosts could be vengeful, we weren’t passionate, and didn’t have a lot of follow-through.
“Okay.” Susan clearly didn’t understand the difference. “However, I suspect, given some of the early comments on the page by someone who called themselves The Magician, that he’d been interested in Betsy for quite some time.”
I thought back to the elaborate game Mr. Potter and Mr. A— had played. Had the hiding and passing of the Disruption stone been a smokescreen to hide their attempt to acquire Betsy? “He did have quite a collection of artifacts,” I mused.
“Supposedly he had a Disruption stone,” Susan said, not as slyly as she’d hoped.
“Couldn’t say,” I told her as blandly as I could.
“Most of his artifacts went to private collectors.” She sighed. “But I did get to see some of his notes on making the Disruption stones. Some of the alloys he used make up PETER.”
“Pure myth,” I told her, shaking my head and hoping to hide my lie.
Susan gave me a grin. “That’s what most people would say about a camera with a soul.”
I’d thought about Betsy for a large part of the day. If I took her apart, would she be free? Did she want to be free? Or did she have her own brand of Hell waiting for her in the Beyond?
I had no answer and no way to find out. I was determined, however, that if I ever did find a portal to Heaven, I would hold onto her as tightly as I could as I passed and hopefully give her a better place as well.
“No experiments, though, right?” I said, covering Betsy with a protective hand.
“No dissection. I promise.”
I didn’t comment on the change of words. Susan would keep Betsy whole. But I doubted she would cherish her as I did.
* * *
Twinkling fairy lights outlined the front hedge, spotlighting even more hidden creatures. “Why would people do that?” I asked, genuinely disturbed by the half-lit vampire bats and evil pixies.
“They probably thought it would keep Your Kind out,” Susan said.
It was good that Susan had her back turned to me so she didn’t see the look I’d shot her.
Your Kind. I co
uld see the capital letters Susan had unconsciously used, all the ramifications of her beliefs, her mistrust, and her fear.
I paid more attention to the living room this time, not allowing myself to be distracted by the deliberate hum of the beast in the basement.
The room wasn’t Sealed and inaccessible to the undead, which I found surprising given the work Susan was doing on My Kind. When I looked more closely at the wall under the great front window I saw a curling line of chalk. During the day it had been as invisible as a ghost was in bright sunlight. Now, at night, it had its own ghostly glow.
I didn’t recognize the text—some kind of Sanskrit—but I could easily guess the intent. A hidden sealing that most ghosts wouldn’t see or feel.
I didn’t comment on it, or point out to Susan how the letters now glowed. When we moved away from the living room I saw that they outlined a single clear path. The stairs going up were blocked by them, as were the other rooms. Any ghost would be hemmed in to following only this trail.
Susan went directly to her console and the beast shuddered to life. I tracked the electrical lines, memorizing their positions. The ceiling held a smoke detector, no sprinklers, nothing to put out a fire.
I didn’t want to kill Susan, to condemn her to any kind of Hell. Maybe her belief that she was doing good would save her and she’d find Heaven when she died. It was rare for a ghost to actually murder someone. We knew what was Beyond.
“Are you ready?” Susan asked. Her eyes gleamed with excitement. She had her own cameras set up to record the event, her proof for her sponsors. “Ready for Heaven?”
“You know that’s not where I’m going,” I growled at her. Now that the beast was running, drawing more power, it would be easier to kill, and I could drop this game.
Susan winced and adjusted her earpieces. “Yes, you are. You saw it yourself.”
“Lies,” I told her, baring my teeth. “Smoke and mirrors.”
She looked away, unable to face the death’s-head mask I now wore. “No! It’s Heaven! I showed you your Heaven!”