“Sorry,” said Deeba. “But I know what you lot do. I don’t want anyone taking my body. I just have to find something out—”
Hemi interrupted.
“You really do take the Michael[23] don’t you? Why’d any of us want your nasty body?”
Deeba was taken aback. In fact, many of the ghosts were shaking their fists at her angrily, mouthing what looked like swearwords.
“You barge in here,” Hemi said, “spouting nonsense, and then you demand help?”
“I…I’m sorry,” Deeba said. “I was told—”
“What next, you going to join in with the rest of them saying we’re in league with the bleeding Smog?”
Deeba looked around the gathered ghosts. “You…don’t want to possess people?”
“For Deadsey’s sake, of course not!” said Hemi. “Look, you,” he said to Deeba, jabbing his finger at her. “I’m not going to tell you no one from Wraithtown’s ever nicked a body. Just like you can’t tell me that no one from UnLondon’s ever stolen clothes. But do you see me blaming you all for that? Do you?”
“So…why do you live next to living people if you don’t want that?” Deeba eyed the ghosts.
“They don’t choose to stick around!” Hemi said. “After we die, a few of us just wake up again. Sometimes for a few days, sometimes centuries. Isn’t that right?”
A ghost by his side in an ancient dress nodded and rolled her eyes.
“And most of us end up here,” Hemi said. “So what? At least we can talk to each other here. And then we get accused of everything! Next thing we know, there are gangs of UnLondoners snipping at us with exorscissors! D’you know how often some UnLondoner passes over and wakes up in Wraithtown? And then when they see what’s going on, we have to hear all about how sorry they are, blah blah, they had the wrong idea about us, yak yak. Of course, by then it’s too late.”
There was a long silence. Of course, it might have been a hubbub of angry ghosts, but to Deeba, it was a long silence.
“Well…sorry,” she said. “I was told wrong.”
“Whatever.” Hemi sniffed.
There was another silence. Deeba waited for Hemi to ask her what she was doing there. He didn’t.
“Maybe…you could help me?” she said at last. Hemi eyed her.
“Me help you?”
“Please.” She began to speak more urgently. “It’s really important. I need to check something. Someone told me there was…Is there like an official list of all the dead?”
Hemi, and several ghosts, nodded.
“Yeah,” he said nonchalantly. “In the records office. Wraithtown’s a borough of Thanatopia— that’s the city of the London and UnLondon dead. We can’t move to the city center yet— don’t know much about it— but we’ve got access to some of their offical files. The dead are way more organized than the living.”
“Cool,” said Deeba. “Listen…I really need to find out if someone’s on that list.”
Hemi struggled not to look interested, and failed.
“Why?”
“Because I was told he was dead. And that he died before I’d met him. But he’s definitely not a ghost. So I want to know what’s going on.”
43. Flickering Streets
The giraffes bleated hungrily in the distance as Hemi led Deeba through the unstable streets of Wraithtown, past shops and offices clouded with their own remembered selves. Most of the spectral entourage dissipated. There were only a few flickers of ectoplasm as a curious dead or two flitted around Deeba.
“I cannot even believe,” Deeba said again, “that you’re taxing me for this.”
“Um, excuse me!” Hemi said. “This ain’t my business. And the way you’ve been talking about us, I think you’re dead lucky I’m helping you at all.”
“ ‘Help,’ ” Deeba muttered bitterly. “Half my cash…”
“Yeah.” Hemi grinned. He fanned himself ostentatiously with the out-of-date currency he’d insisted Deeba pay him before he’d escort her. “Pleasure doing business.”
“I am out of here the second we’re done,” Deeba muttered.
“Oh boo hoo,” said Hemi. “No, please stay.” They eyed each other.
“I know, I know,” Hemi said occasionally to one or another wisp they passed. “It’s alright, she’s with me.”
“We’re not used to heartbeaters in Wraithtown,” he told Deeba.
They passed phantasms of streetlights, in old styles, where illuminations had been and had gone. Little groups of ghosts gathered at street corners. They stood— or wafted, their legs disappearing— in costumes from throughout history.
“When you talk about them, you keep saying ‘us,’ ” Deeba said. “But you’re not like the rest.” Hemi looked away. “Someone told me that you’re half…How come I can hear you?
Plus…” Deeba reached out and shoved him.
“You’re solid.”
Hemi sighed.
“Mum was a Londoner like you,” he said. “Born two hundred years ago, died a hundred and sixty-five years ago. Dad wasn’t dead at all. He was an UnLondoner, came to Wraithtown out of curiosity.
“Mum tried to spook him. So she was all floaty sheets and woooo! and wooaaah! and so on. But he wasn’t scared. The way they told it…he just fell for her, right then. And so one thing led to another.”
“But how? If she wasn’t even…solid…”
“Some ghosts can get physical. A bit. A few. She was one.” There was a silence.
“Problem was,” he said glumly, “his family didn’t like it, and her friends thought she was sick. They managed to make everyone angry.”
“You the only one?”
Hemi shrugged.
“I dunno,” he said. “Never met any others.”
“So you live here with your parents?”
“Mum went to Thanatopia when I was ten. Dad said she tried to stay, but when that tide takes you…Dad disappeared a bit later.” Hemi spoke briskly. “Some locals didn’t like him living in Wraithtown. Maybe they scared him out. Or worse. Or maybe he did what he had to to be with Mum again.”
“Sorry,” Deeba muttered, shocked.
“Don’t matter,” he said, perhaps too brightly. “There are some great people here. Even if there are some dead who don’t like me because I’m half-alive, that’s not all of them. It’s the living who really don’t like me around, ’cause I’m half-ghost. I can look after myself. Full ghosts don’t eat, but I do. Luckily my ghost half makes it easy to, ah, go shopping out there.” He winked.
Before them was a building and its ghosts. It was a cement office, enshrouded with the specters of a Victorian house, a tumbledown Georgian structure, and a medieval-looking hovel. They shimmered around it and each other. Over its front door was a printed plastic sign, ghosted with an older hand-painted version, that read: WRAITHTOWN COUNCIL.
Hemi pulled the front doors open for Deeba, and the ghosts of all the earlier doors went with them. Deeba entered many layers of history.
44. Postmortem Bureaucracy
If it was confusing being in Wraithtown itself, surrounded by the ghosts of earlier forms, being in the building was overwhelming.
The corridor seemed to grow thicker and thinner as its ghosts eddied. The walls were lined with certificates and pictures, each surrounded by more in spectral form. Overlaying the lights were the ghosts of bare bulbs and of intricate chandeliers.
“I think I’m going to throw up,” Deeba said.
“You’re just ghostsick,” said Hemi. “It’ll settle down.”
Behind a desk— and countless ghost-desks— on which was a computer, sheaves of paper, pens, and all their ghosts, sat a fat ghost in a tracksuit.