Whichwood(20)

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-thawed bodies into open caskets and just about to answer Roksana’s question when three more ghosts appeared.