by Sam Hooker
No, not preferable. Definitely easier, though. He assumed that breaking the Agreement would land him in some very serious trouble that would involve a lot of bureaucracy to clear up. While he was intrigued by the prospect of visiting whatever bureaucracy the Hereafter had to offer, he didn’t want to risk finding out that there wasn’t one. He didn’t know what that sort of disappointment would do to him.
The spiders continued their weaving, chittering excitedly among themselves as they worked. Sloot couldn’t hear what they were whispering anymore, not that he lamented that fact.
So, this was eternity, then. Were there others? Kindred spirits, no pun intended, who’d been so foolish as to traipse heedlessly into the spiders’ web? Quite the menagerie they’d make.
Some time passed. Sloot spent a good deal of it amassing a feeling of resentment for the earlier ghosts, for not coming up with some way to mark the passage of time. He’d never thought much about the sound of his heart beating in his ears, as it was usually most prominent during his reaction to terror. But standing there, imprisoned by spiders for the first little bit of the rest of eternity, he felt the accompaniment could have served as his ticking clock. At least he’d have a way to count eternity.
More time passed. If he had to guess, he’d say he’d been there for several … time. Time? What did you call them, the bits that were marked out on the edge of the … round thing … little arms in the middle … time circle? He had a firm grasp on the words when he was in the Narrative, but he simply couldn’t seem to summon them in the Hereafter.
“Sloot? Is that you?”
Myrtle! It was Myrtle! Sloot couldn’t decide whether he was relieved that he was about to be rescued after so many long … time? Whatever. There was also the matter of being rescued by one’s girlfriend. In the great sagas, the muscular heroes were always rescuing the scantily clad damsels from imminent danger, not the other way around! Not that Sloot was particularly muscular or, in fact, muscular at all. If anything, the ghostly apparition that was his soul’s projection of itself might have been a touch scrawnier than he’d actually been in life. Given Sloot’s borderline contagious low self-esteem, that made quite a bit of sense.
“Er, yes,” he admitted.
“Why don’t you come out of there?”
“I’m not sure I can.”
“He can’t! He can’t!” chanted the spiders. “He’s our prisoner for eternity, a victim of our terrible webs!”
“All right, you’ve had your fun,” Myrtle conceded in a sing-songy way. “Sloot, please come out of there. We have things to do.”
“No,” hissed the spiders, suddenly petulant. “He’s our victim, we found him fair and square!”
“I really don’t think I can,” said Sloot, his voice quavering a bit. “I’m all bound up.”
“Oh, for … ugh!” In her frustration, Myrtle said a swear word that could have curdled a glass of milk at ten paces. “It’s just their silly little game, Sloot! They can’t hurt you. Just close your eyes and follow the sound of my voice!”
Sloot did as he was told. As off-putting as he found showing even the slightest shred of bravery, he could no more have refused to obey Myrtle than use his own webs to ensnare all of the spiders and say, “There, that’s how that feels, you jerks!”
“That’s better,” said Myrtle.
Sloot opened his eyes. Myrtle was smiling at him, and there was a cocoon of webs behind him that matched his height.
The spiders were swarming in their direction. He shuddered.
“Naughty, naughty,” whispered the spiders. “What shall we do with it now?” They descended into excited whispering among themselves, from which the occasional word was distinguishable. “Devour” came up a few times, though not quite as often as a word that Sloot would have needed special exercises to pronounce, but that he understood to mean “very nearly touching the tip of his nose, making it itch like mad.”
The spiders abruptly ceased their joyful sussurus when Myrtle spoke a word, though “word” might have been a generous description. It seemed more accurate to Sloot to say that she left a flaming bag of excess consonants on a doorstep and ran away.
It was quiet.
“You’ve got a knack for getting into trouble,” said Myrtle.
“What are you doing here?”
“Saving you from spiders, obviously. Please pay attention, darling.”
The spiders were going out of their way to clear a space for Myrtle.
“It seems like they’re afraid of you.”
“To be honest, I’m not sure what that word meant. Worked, though.”
“You mean that audible lurch that silenced the spiders?”
“That’s the one. I’d never heard it before, but somehow I knew it would make the spiders behave.”
“What’s it mean?” asked Sloot.
Myrtle shrugged.
“It’s our middle name,” whispered the spiders.
“So all of you have the same middle name.”
“Of course we do. Our mothers hatched thousands of us at a time. I’m sure human mothers have the time to give their children different middle names, but how else do you strike fear into thousands of young without using their middle names? A proper telling-off for tracking mud across the web would take the better part of a week!”
Everyone knows that middle names are a hex that mothers place on their children to keep them in line, it had just never occurred to Sloot that it applied to spiders as well. It wouldn’t, though—Sloot wasn’t anybody’s mother.
The spiders dispersed, apparently knowing that their little game had come to an end for good and all. They swarmed back toward their little copse of trees, presumably in search of some other incredibly morbid means of passing eternity.
“Can we go for a walk?” asked Myrtle. “Unless you’ve got business you need to finish up here.”
Witchery
Sloot was endlessly pleased to have left the spiders’ den. He only wished he felt sure that it had entirely left him. He was sure that there was a cobweb in his hair, and no amount of ruffling it with his hands was going to get it out.
“For the last time,” said Myrtle, “they never actually touched you!”
“It feels like they did.”
“We’re ghosts. The spiders, too. There’s no touching with ghosts.”
“There’s a spider under my collar, I just know it.”
“Just try not to think about it. What were you doing in there, anyway?”
“Looking for you,” said Sloot.
Myrtle stopped floating along the path and looked at him. She smiled in that radiant way that Sloot had always liked. It raised his confidence to the level of an acne-afflicted teenager, which he’d never managed to attain when he was one. He felt as though he could conquer the world, or maybe ask if he could walk her home from school.
“You’re very sweet,” said Myrtle. “I’m sorry that I ran off, I just needed to be alone for a while. A lot on my mind, you know.”
“I know.” As little as Sloot had wanted to die in the first place, the idea of being shoved back into a pile of flesh, blood, bones, and who-but-doctors knows what else—gristle, cockles, and earwax was probably most of it—was utterly repellent. Who would want to go back to putting food in one end, only to wait until it came out the other? Being a ghost was far less off-putting when you thought in terms of biology.
It couldn’t have been easy for Myrtle. Though a gentleman avoids fully considering the endgame of a lady’s digestive process, he could consider the whole “returning to the flesh” business in the abstract and sympathize.
“I don’t even know how it happened,” said Myrtle. “We were talking, and you started to leave in the middle of it. ‘Oh, no you don’t,’ I thought to myself. I sort of ... I don’t know, stepped into it with you, and poof.”
“Poof?”
“Metaphorically speaking.”
“Ah.”
“We were in the Narrative, only you were stil
l a ghost, and I was all elbows and earlobes.”
“I noticed.”
“It was weird.” Myrtle wrinkled her nose and shivered. “It wasn’t like I remembered it at all. It was ... I dunno, thicker. Like I was driving myself around in a lump of clay.”
“Maybe it was an aberration.”
“Is that like an abomination?” Myrtle looked wounded.
“No,” Sloot hastened, “like a fluke. Energies of the universe getting crossed up, something like that. Have you tried it again?”
“Yes. I went all fleshy again.”
They floated along a while in silence, which is not simply to say that they didn’t speak. There were no ghosts of birds chirping, no ghost of wind blowing the ghosts of leaves around. No footsteps, no crickets. Sloot affected the noise of clearing his throat just to make sure his hearing hadn’t quit.
“Yes?”
“Oh,” said Sloot. “Nothing. Sorry.”
“The Quietus,” said Myrtle. “Strange, isn’t it?”
Sloot nodded, banking on the possibility that the question had been a non sequitur. He didn’t disagree, primarily because he wasn’t absolutely positive what the Quietus was. If he was picking it up correctly from context, it was the absolute silence. It was unnerving, just like Mrs. Knife’s steely gaze or Vlad the Invader’s muscular chin.
He was soon back to thinking about Myrtle in the flesh, and that sent Sloot’s train of thought off into mournfulness. It’s just the sort of thing that ghosts are inclined to do, yearn for the things they loved most in life. For Sloot, the first things to come to mind were cracking open a brand new ledger and feeling Myrtle’s lips smile as he kissed them. The fact that she could find herself in a bodily way and he could not was disconcerting.
She was fully capable of putting him in situations where he could feel as clumsy and inadequate as he liked. Sloot, on the other hand—titan of insufficiency that he was—could not rise to the occasion.
“I wish there was a way,” Sloot sighed.
“There is,” said Myrtle.
“What, to give us both bodies?”
Given the absolute dearth of color in the Hereafter, it is not possible for a ghost to blush. However, the grin-and-wiggle maneuver that Myrtle executed left no doubt in Sloot’s mind that that was exactly what she was doing.
“That’s not what I meant,” she replied, “though I like where I think you’re going with it.”
Sloot felt as though he was blushing as well. He was also absolutely certain that the spiders had invented some form of ghostly substantiation, and were crawling around in his shoes, which he wasn’t actually wearing. He tried not to think about it.
“I think I know how to find out what’s happening,” said Myrtle, “but I’m not going to like it.”
“Probably not,” ventured Sloot. “It’s been a while since I’ve liked anything. Part of being dead, I believe.”
“It’s not just a feeling. I know it to be true.”
Sloot cocked his head and narrowed his eyes. “I never pegged you for a worrier. Oh dear, I used to be so good at recognizing one of my own.”
“No, no,” said Myrtle, “I mean it’s inevitable. Truly, properly inevitable. I’ve known for a while now that I’m not going to like it, and I’ve only just seen that we’re going to go.”
“What do you mean, ‘seen?’ And where are we going?”
“I can’t really explain the former,” said Myrtle, “but maybe Agather can.”
“Agather? From the Witchwood in Carpathia?” They’d gone there together once in life, and Myrtle had bought a broom. Sloot had a proper hyperventilation fit over that. In the Old Country, brooms were only for married people. That was a possibility that he’d been ill-equipped to consider at the time, to say nothing of the legal implications.
“That’s right,” said Myrtle. “That’s where we’re going.”
It was the first time Sloot had been to the Narrative without having been summoned by means of his shrunken head.
“It’s around here somewhere,” said Myrtle, who was looking as lovely as ever in her human skin. That was just the sort of compliment which, in the Narrative, would ensure a first date was never followed by a second. Even though he was armed with an abundance of context, Sloot predictably elected not to risk it.
“I really thought we were in the Old Country Hereafter,” said Sloot.
“It’s just the Hereafter,” Myrtle replied. “It’s not attached to the land of the living in terms of physical space.”
“That’s awful! What does that mean for taxes? Oh dear, that’s going to keep me up at night.”
“Have you been sleeping? I haven’t.” Myrtle groaned to the tune of “great, one more dead people thing I’m not doing correctly.”
“Just a figure of speech,” said Sloot.
“I thought you hated figures of speech.”
“I did,” said Sloot. He was an accountant, after all. Figures of speech were a lot like estimates in that they were imprecise. Why estimate when you can add a column of numbers? And why start using figures of speech now? “Nerves, I suppose.”
“Well, that much hasn’t changed. Oh! I think it’s this way.”
Carpathia hadn’t changed much, which made sense. Sloot hadn’t been dead for long. The countryside was still full of crags, the shadow of Ulfhaven loomed on the horizon, the forests were dark and foreboding, and Sloot couldn’t shake the lingering fear that cannibals were lurking around every corner. At least they’d get nothing from him now.
“I think we’re getting close,” Sloot kept saying, as though he were able to tell one tree from another or, if he were being frank, from a bush.
Eventually, he said it enough times to become right. Past yet another tree—which looked exactly the same as all the rest to Sloot—was the Witchwood. Agather was stirring her cauldron over a big fire pit, as likely making stew as anything else. Then again, anything in a cauldron could be stew, if you were brave enough.
“Ow!” said Myrtle, her hand flying to her face.
“Oh no,” said Sloot, “was it a bear? I’ve heard the outdoors is silly with bears.”
“No, I think I just walked into a wall.”
“Well, I don’t see any—” Sloot put a hand forward and it met with resistance. It wasn’t a wall made of bricks or wood or stone. It wasn’t properly a wall at all. There was nothing there. No, not nothing. Something that was barely more than nothing, which didn’t want him to pass. It wasn’t exactly stopping him, more like firmly insisting that this wasn’t the sort of place where the dead were welcome. Sloot was disappointed to find that sort of bigotry in this modern era.
“Hold yer horses,” said Agather, “I’ll be along directly.”
She gave her cauldron one more big stir. A forceful one. Not a great big sloshing affair, just one that had authority. “You’ve been stirred,” it said to the contents of the cauldron, “and there’ll be answers owed if there are any burned bits at the bottom, are we clear?”
“That’s that, then,” said Agather. She hiked up her skirts a bit to keep them out of the mud and waddled in Sloot and Myrtle’s direction. “Speak to me, spirits. I ain’t got all day. The living got priority, ye know.”
“Hello, Agather,” said Myrtle. “Do you remember me?”
Agather squinted. “From the Old Country,” she said. “Gretchen, wasn’t it? I can’t remember yer name, lad. Probably Hans. Ye look like a Hans.”
“It’s Peril. Sloot Peril.”
“Peril? Are ye sure? Don’t sound like an Old Country name. Sounds Carpathian.”
“It’s a long st—”
“And ye, Gretchen,” said Agather, who seemed to have time for a long story, though not the patience. “I suppose that broom met with more goblins than it could handle on its own.”
“It was a necromancer,” said Myrtle, gnashing her teeth in a way that Sloot found both alluring and scary. “And it’s Myrtle, thank you.”
“Important things, names,” said
Agather with a smile whose teeth were partially in attendance. “Best to hear them from the source to make sure ye’ve got them right, makes curses a lot easier to manage when spirits get out of hand.”
Sloot whimpered. Agather nodded in satisfaction.
“Necromancy,” Agather spat. “Worst kind of magic. Oh, where are me manners? I’ll summon ye in, just a moment.”
Agather hiked and waddled to the shack at the edge of the clearing. It was ancient and overgrown, the sort of place you don’t simply walk into. It swallows you up, or in this case, it swallowed Agather up. It reluctantly reproduced her a few minutes later bearing a wand, a bell, and what appeared to be a rug from a harem.
“Not the sort of thing I usually leave lying around,” said Agather. “Wand magic stuff. Clashes with the rest of the decor.”
Sloot was no aesthetic by any means, especially now that he had no earthly possessions, but even he felt Agather was playing fast and loose with the term “decor.” Most of what wasn’t just piles of dead leaves was either host to a pile of dead leaves or several layers of cobwebs atop piles of dead leaves.
Agather used a very old and dangerous-looking broom to clear a spot on the ground. To be clear, she didn’t do any sweeping. She brandished the broom in a severe sort of way and the leaves and twigs found other places to lie.
Nothing was as purple as that rug. Had that not been the case, Sloot might have remarked upon the silver stars that seemed to dance around the silver circle embroidered into it. He didn’t though, because of how vastly purple it was.
“All right then,” said Agather, holding the wand and the bell aloft, “in ye go.” She struck the bell with the wand. The barrier that had previously kept him at bay gave Sloot a sort of “all right, but I’ve got my eye on you” and relented. All at once, Sloot was standing on more purple than ever should have been allowed to exist in one place.