Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Closing night at Chapman’s bar was always going to be a raucous affair. Most of the village turned out, coming and going throughout the square all evening, a roiling crowd of joyful merrymaking and bittersweet fondness for what had become a Piffling institution. It had been a day of cheer and goodwill and camaraderie, which meant Rudyard wanted nothing to do with it.

Despite it all, there he was. A lone figure in funeral black, unsociability and teetotaler tendencies on full display, sat at the bar munching on maraschino cherries.

“Thank you for coming along, Madeleine,” Rudyard said. He stole a cherry from the bar while his friend sliced a piece off her own with a set of tiny cutlery. “I couldn’t stand the thought of doing this by myself.”

Madeleine squeaked.

“You’re slurring already,” Rudyard chided gently. He cut off another, affronted squeak. “No, you are. I know you’re half a teaspoon of gin and tonic down, and don’t think I didn’t see you mooch a drop of ale that spilled over the top of Sid Marlowe’s pint. You ought to keep your wits about you. Anything could happen tonight, the whole village packed into this place, drunken debauchery ‘round every corner. Yes, anything at all…” He trailed off ominously, staring into the middle distance.

“Squeak, squeak?”

“I haven’t done anything! Oh, don’t give me that look. I only meant,” Rudyard folded his hands on the surface of the bar, chin tilted up haughtily, disapproval dripping from each enunciated syllable, “that when the people of Piffling Vale get it in their heads to have a good time, our business tends to come out the worse for it.”

“Squeak.”

“Yes, yes, of course I meant our family. You don’t have to say it so loud,” Rudyard hissed. He stole another cherry and popped it in his mouth. “Speaking of which, Antigone really should have been our delegate to this sordid shindig, don’t you think?”

“Squeak?”

“Well, for a start, she’s the one who told Georgie she couldn’t come just to burn the place down, ruining any excitement we could have had for tonight. And it was her idea to show Funn Funerals’ ‘goodwill,’” the air quotes would have been audible even if he hadn’t jabbed at the air quite so vigorously, “by making an appearance in the first place.”

“Squeak squeak!”

“I could be doing work too, you know!” he said around his sixth or seventh cherry of the evening. “A quadruple funeral doesn’t plan itself—”

Rudyard opened his mouth to take in a breath, which should have carried him through a rant that would eventually be pacified by the arrival of the glass of milk he’d ordered. He ought to have tired himself out with complaining, been swayed into a brief, begrudging congeniality that would maintain itself through a short conversation with the last traces of the vicar’s sobriety about the solar eclipse of 1724 that entirely missed Piffling due to inclement weather, and brushed off yet another irritating overture of civility from Eric Chapman before going home to bed.

In another world, that all happened. In this one, that fateful, pilfered cherry came back to have its revenge.

It began with a quiet sound like gelatin being pulled through a vacuum hose, which suddenly became an equally jarring silence. Rudyard’s throat bobbed. His chest contracted. His eyes bulged as he waved one frantic hand at Madeleine, the other closing around his own neck.

“Squeak!” Madeleine cried, horrified.

Rudyard turned on the bar stool to face the crowd of happy, oblivious patrons. He clawed desperately at elbows and coattails, but those who’d lived on Piffling long enough could clock the putrefied vibes of a Funn from twenty paces; they reflexively avoided eye contact and huddled around plausible deniability when forced to be in proximity to one.

There was only one thing left to do, and only one mouse left to do it.

She took off down the bar, a rodent possessed, dodging deadly obstacles every step of the way—hands, toothpicks, bowls of nuts, wet bar napkins. Glasses being set down fell from above like stalactites.

Eric Chapman, a gleaming beacon of blond hair and affable smiles, the shining undertaker on the hill, came ever closer. Madeleine mentally rehearsed what she would tell him, in as few words as possible—no time to waste, speed and efficiency, as Rudyard would say. Rudyard needs help! Rudyard is choking! Rudyard! Quick! Eric! Please!

When her paw slipped in a puddle of grenadine syrup, terror flooded Madeleine’s thoughts. She could barely hold her grip on which way was up. She scrambled, sticky and squeaking with fear, sliding closer and closer to the edge of the bartop until her back paws met nothing but empty air.

With a Herculean effort, straining and sweating, back paws kicking against the void, she hauled herself back to safety. And there he was, pulling a light ale from a tap immediately above her: Eric Chapman.

“Squeak!” Madeleine scurried up the tap handles and then along his arm all the way to his shoulder. “Squeak!”

“What’s—Oh! Madeleine, is that you? Blimey, I didn’t think I’d see any of the Funn Funerals crowd here tonight. Awfully good of you to stop by!”

“Squeak!”

“What’s that? Here you go, Tanya, and give Bill my best.” Eric handed off the pint before tilting his head back toward his own left shoulder. “I’m sorry, I can’t quite hear you, Madeleine. It’s loud in here, isn’t it? I’m going to miss this place.” He sighed wistfully.

Madeleine was all for wistful sighs at any other time, but the urgency of the matter could not wait on Eric’s nostalgia. She grabbed him by the earlobe and yanked, forcefully turning his head down the bar toward Rudyard, right at the end, who bent in on himself with his back to Chapman and Madeleine.

“Oh, you’ve brought Rudyard along! Now there’s something you don’t see every day. I should have known when I read the order for a glass of milk.” He laughed lightly, then paused a beat. “He doesn’t look good, though, does he? Is he…”

Rudyard convulsed, curling in tighter, one hand thrown out beside him to white-knuckle the edge of the bar.

“Crying?” Chapman guessed. “Well, I’ll wait to bring him his drink, then. Can’t imagine I’m the person he’d like to see right now. I’d only make it worse.”

“Squeak! Squeak! Squeak!” Madeleine’s pleas grew ever more desperate, throat going sore, as she shouted at the one other man in the building who was at least conversational in mouse.

“You’re—Sorry, excuse me.” Eric turned to another thirsty guest angling for an ale. “Yes! How are the kids? Oh, that’s lovely. Yeah, I know, but hopefully someone else will take up the mantle and open their own water slide soon!”

Madeleine, sick of not being heard and scared to death for her friend, ran up the side of Eric’s face and into his hair. She dug her paws into his scalp, ruining the cherubic arrangement of spun gold.

In the crowd, someone shrieked, “Eric has a mouse on his head!”

“Madeleine, what the hell are you—It’s alright, folks, she’s a friend! Nothing to see here—what are you doing? What’s the matter?”

She turned his head toward Rudyard again, just in time for them both to watch in shock as he tumbled off the bar stool and collapsed.

No one in the crowd reacted until Eric did. He threw the towel off his shoulder, sprinted down the length of the bar in three long runner’s strides, and vaulted over it, Madeleine clinging for dear life all the while. Cries of shock and confusion echoed among the partygoers—three of whom were already standing on various limbs of Rudyard’s, seemingly without notice.

“Out of the way! Rudyard? Rudyard!” Eric kneeled beside the unconscious undertaker.

Madeleine scampered from his head and down to Rudyard’s chest, which was unmoving. She pressed her ear to his ribs, squeaking with wordless worry.

“Is he breathing? Do you hear anything?” Chapman asked. Madeleine shook her head. “Damn.”

Eric pressed his hands over Rudyard’s chest and shoved his weight down onto them, once, twice, again. Madeleine was jostled by the movement, still dizzy from drink. She thought she remembered that there was an important part of the story Eric needed to know.

The cherry!

The chatter in the bar had dampened to confused murmurs. Someone kindly turned the music down. Hoping Chapman might be able to hear her now, Madeleine explained as quickly as she could.

“Squeak, squeak squeak. Squeak!”

“We’ll have to get it out of his windpipe, then,” he replied, stopping the compressions. He took Rudyard by the chin, opened his mouth, and shoved a finger in.

Not two seconds later, he yelped a startled, “Ow!”

Rudyard’s eyes flew open, rolling in his head like a panicked horse, as he bit down hard on Chapman’s finger. “I’m—trying—to help—you,” Chapman grumbled through gritted teeth. He finally retrieved his stinging hand with a violent yank. “Right, since you’re conscious, up you get. Come on.”

He scooped a delirious-looking Rudyard off the ground and set him on his feet. Rudyard’s scuffed shoes had barely touched the floor when Chapman wrapped arms around his middle, fist below his ribs, and pulled in and up with the sure practice of a man who had delivered a Heimlich maneuver many times before and expected to many times again.

Rudyard sagged like the life-sized dummy he’d once thrown over the Piffling cliffs. He heaved with every hard press against his abdomen. Madeleine watched from a bar stool, wringing her paws. She saw his eyes close again, face more pale and drawn than usual—nearly blue, now, unless that was the tasteful mood lighting.

“Hey, everyone, look!” Bill shouted. “Eric’s saving Rudyard’s life!”

At the mention of Eric Chapman’s heroics, or the promise of an endangered Rudyard, the murmuring picked up. It had the tenor of gossip rather than confusion, and there was the tell-tale click of Sid Marlowe’s camera shutter.

It clicked again. Then, for the next five seconds, all hell broke loose.

Chapman delivered one final tug; a sickly, gagging noise wrenched itself from Rudyard’s throat, alongside a shiny maraschino cherry. Madeleine wanted to gasp with relief, but before she could catch a full breath, let alone release it, the cherry zoomed on a fateful trajectory. It struck the edge of the bar, ricocheted off like a speeding bullet, and hit Eric Chapman in the eye.

“Ow! Bloody—Whoops.”

In bringing his hands up to shield his face, Chapman released his hold on Rudyard’s half-conscious body.

Once upon a time, the people of Piffling Vale had described Rudyard’s late father as stiff as the corpses he buried, referring to his stern demeanor and constant state of tightly-repressed rage. His son had failed to inherit the simile when he inherited the business, as Rudyard was notoriously both more cheerful and less capable of restraining his anger.

One is never destined to become one’s parents, of course; the way in which he took after his father at this inopportune moment was purely metaphorical. Still, that gave him no consolation at all when, instead of collapsing in a heap on the ground, he tipped forward like a felled tree.

It could never be said of Rudyard that he had very good timing. Hopefully he can be forgiven for it in this instance, as he wasn’t even fully conscious. But probably not.

Rudyard’s head followed the precise trajectory that his regurgitated candied cherry had taken only moments before, although with a great deal more mass behind it. His brow struck the side of the bar with a wet crack.

What had been the beginnings of a cheer for Chapman became an audible wince from the crowd. Madeleine shrieked, leaping to the crossbar of the stool and then onto Rudyard’s unmoving shoulder.

Chapman wasn’t far behind.

“Rudyard! I’m sorry, I—Oh, for the love of—Someone call Dr. Edgware!”

St. Spratt’s had been the only hospital on Piffling for generations. It wasn’t anymore.

It was, however, the only hospital where the Funns had ever stayed as patients, and that would not be changing now.

Henry Edgware was saying something about hypoxia, cranial trauma, and how it might, in fact, be the best thing for Rudyard to stay unconscious for now—in Dr. Edgware’s medical opinion and as someone who knew the man personally. Antigone was hardly listening.

It didn’t matter. Georgie was here, too. She was great at listening to difficult medical news.

Tucked into the small hospital cot with a bandage wrapped around his head, Rudyard would have looked comical if he’d been awake to bluster and shout and complain about it all. Lying motionless beneath the harsh, flickering lights of Piffling’s worst-of-two-hospitals, he just looked… small.

Rudyard had always been on the short side, and scrawny, but somehow he had never seemed so small before. Antigone recalled helping him out of garbage bins at school. She recalled helping each other, in turns, out of ponds they’d been thrown in. She recalled how he’d broken his foot, long after they were children, trying and failing to help her again.

There was a lull in the conversation. Either the updates were over, or the doctor had closed his eyes for a 5-second, upright nap.

“Henry,” Antigone said suddenly—then, at the exhausted look on his face, amended, “Dr. Edgware.”

“Yes? What is it, Ms. Funn?” he asked, mournful but not unkind.

“Rudyard… Did he have, er. That is, had he—Has he given you a, a do-not-resuscitate order? Just. Curious.”

On the other side of the cot, Georgie crossed her arms and shifted on her feet. Antigone didn’t look at her.

“Ah. No,” Dr. Edgware replied. “When you filed yours, he asked me if I had, and I quote, ‘the opposite of that.’ A yes-please-resuscitate-by-all-means. I told him that didn’t exist and would be an unnecessary amount of paperwork, but he was so insistent that I made up an entirely redundant, fictitious form just so he would leave. Me. Alone.”

“That sounds like you, eh, sir?” Georgie patted the mattress beside Rudyard.

“Right. Of course.” Antigone spoke quietly and evenly, as if worried about waking her brother, though she knew that was ridiculous. “I have an advanced directive for him too, somewhere at home. I can bring it over tomorrow. I think it’s with his will. And the death plan, I know Georgie and Madeleine have copies—”

“Nope,” Georgie snapped. “I’m not listening to this. Use Madeleine’s copy of whatever, since you’re so excited to have a new client.”

Antigone finally found the courage to look Georgie in the eye, only to watch the back of her head walk right out of the room.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Georgie.” Antigone began to make for the door to follow.

Dr. Edgware cleared his throat and moved half a step into her path. The residual guilt of a recent uncomfortable date and a less-recent, near-violent hospital escape stopped her from physically pushing past him.

“Antigone.”

“…Henry.”

He sighed. “I’m going to ask you a difficult question now, and I hope you won’t hold it against me. But even if you do, please don’t let it interfere with any medical decisions you make on Rudyard’s behalf.”

Antigone grumbled wordlessly for a few seconds before snapping, “Yes, alright.”

“Do you want your brother dead?”

She took a step back, wringing her hands, blinking as if in sudden light.

“No! No, I… I don’t,” she said slowly, admitting it aloud for the first time in her life. “It’s only… there’s nothing about this I can control.” She waved a hand over Rudyard’s hospital bed, his chest rising and falling shallowly, his sunken eyes closed.

Dr. Edgware nodded.

“A lack of control can bring us to some—” He snored for half a second as his chin dipped down toward his chest, then awakened when his head bobbed back up, “—frightening places.”

“But if he were dead, then I could do something about it!” Antigone gasped and lowered her voice again. She wasn’t sure if Dr. Edgware could even hear her when she spoke this softly, but it wasn’t for him, anyway. “I’ve thought about how I would embalm my brother many times. How I’d prepare the body, set the features. I’d make him look… peaceful. Content. Something he had very little of in life.”

Dr. Edgware chewed his lip and looked at her, really looked. She felt seen and it made her skin crawl with terror, but she refused to lower her eyes from a man who thought of her entire professional calling as a necessary evil to be unseen and unheard. He was seeing her now.

Finally, he set down Rudyard’s chart, sighed, and gave her a weak, barely-there smile.

“He’s not dead yet, Ms. Funn.”

“Yes. Right. Yes.” Antigone took a shaky breath. “Yes.”

“Stay as long as you need to, but please,” the desperate edge she associated with him returned in full force as he pleaded, “please, do not do anything that forces me to kick you out.”

“I won’t.”

“That goes double for Ms. Crusoe,” he added, eyes clouding over with a thousand-yard stare back in time to twenty-five people with thirty broken legs between them. He shook himself into the present. “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

She settled into a chair at Rudyard’s bedside after Dr. Edgware left the room. Madeleine was a tightly-curled gray dot next to his pillow. She twitched and sniffled in restless sleep as Antigone watched, quiet as the grave.

A gentle knock came at the open door. When Antigone looked up, Georgie was there, sheepish, with two small, steaming cups in her hands.

“Coffee’s for me, hot water’s for you.” She dropped herself into the uncomfortable hospital chair next to Antigone’s. “It’s rubbish, but I had to fight an old man with a catheter for the last styrofoam cup at the coffee machine, so drink up.”

“Oh. Thank you,” Antigone said softly, taking the cup in her hands.

They sat for a while, a visitation. A vigil. Steam rose from their cups like wisps of smoke off a candle.

“Sorry for storming out like that.” Georgie said. “I needed to cool off, but I shouldn’t have gotten angry.”

“It’s alright.”

“No, really. I heard what you told the doctor after I left.”

Antigone whipped her head around to squint at Georgie.

“How? Where were you? There aren’t any shadows in the room to lurk in! Believe me, I checked.”

“I was in the hallway outside. The door’s open.”

“Oh. Right, yes. Of course. Yes.”

“It’s not all up to you, you know.” Georgie took a sip of her coffee. “Augh! Ugh, yeah, no, that’s bad. How’s your water?”

“Bland. It’s just not the same as when you make it at home.” Antigone drummed her fingers on the cup. “What’s not up to me?”

“Everything. Rudyard. Fixing it. There’s nothing to fix right now. Well, there is, but neither of us has experience putting together a fractured skull unless it’s with restorative wax or chewing gum.”

“Chewing gum?”

“Nothing. What I’m saying is,” Georgie swept her hand out, a freckled ship of warmth sailing through the void in a cold, uncaring universe, “you can’t hope for the worst outcome just because it’s easier. And you can’t totally check out either, don’t think I don’t see you, planning to hide away in your mortuary until kingdom flippin’ come.”

“I have four bodies to prepare, if you’ve forgotten—”

“Even if the Crackerjack brothers hadn’t all been in that tandem bicycle accident—”

“Oh, Chriiiiist, we have a quadruple funeral in less than a week!” Antigone jerked forward, clawing at her own hair, rocking slightly. “Rudyard’s been doing all the planning, and you know how he is with his spreadsheets. Never lets anyone near them. Am I going to have to do the service? I’ve already more work to do than I’ve had in years! Not counting the clowns. Oh, this will be the clowns all over again, won’t it?” She released her hair and shot a hand out, grasping desperately at her friend and yanking her across the gap between their chairs until they were nearly nose-to-nose. “Tell me, Georgie. Tell me it’s the clowns again. I can handle it.”

“Antigone.” She gently pried Antigone’s fingers out of their tight grip in the collar of her shirt. “It isn’t the clowns again.”

“You would say that!”

“Look at me. That’s it, c’mon.” Georgie extracted the cup from Antigone’s other hand. There were nail marks left behind in the styrofoam. She set it on the empty tray beside Rudyard’s bed and took both of Antigone’s hands in her own.

“I’m looking,” she said through gritted teeth, eyes darting anywhere but Georgie’s.

“Now, breathe. I said breathe,” Georgie threatened caringly.

“I am breathing. I breathe every day of my life. It’s one of the more irritating requirements of being alive,” Antigone sneered.

Georgie inhaled to demonstrate, giving Antigone a look. She was great at giving people looks. After a beat, Antigone took a long, shaky breath. She and Georgie exhaled together.

“There, that’s better, isn’t it? We’ll get through. You’ll see.”

“But how?” Antigone’s hands—long-fingered and pale, constantly stained by chemical dyes and cosmetics for the dead—tightened around Georgie’s strong, calloused ones.

“Aren’t you always saying a rock with a face painted on it could do Rudyard’s job better than him?” Georgie asked, dry.

“Well, yes. But only when he can hear me.” Antigone’s eyes flicked over to Rudyard. He had notably failed to make a miraculous recovery through the power of sibling indignation in the last thirty seconds.

Antigone took her hands back and folded them primly in her lap. She settled against the seatback, slouching enough to start the process of core collapse into a black hole. Her gaze hovered somewhere in the air above Rudyard, the empty space that would eventually be all that was left of anything.

The hospital churned around them like one big organism; machines and tubes and things beeped and pumped and counted, and all for the sake of people flowing through the corridors like blood, moving, healing, dying.

“Look,” Georgie sighed, “let’s leave it for the morning, yeah? It’s late.”

“It is.” Antigone agreed, hoarse voice tightened to a sudden, stilted calm. “You ought to go home, I think. Get some rest.”

“‘M not tired.”

“Georgina.”

“You’re not the boss of me.”

“I am. I am literally the boss of you.”

“Alright, you are. But I’m still not tired.” She glared, a challenge. “Are you?”

“No,” Antigone lied, glancing down at the side of the cot. “But Madeleine is.”

“Aww. She’s worn out, the poor thing.” Georgie leaned forward to scritch Madeleine between the ears, which twitched. “Someone ought to take her home. Someone whose skirting board she lives in?”

“Don’t try to trick me. It won’t work. I’m staying.”

“Well. So am I.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be at the mayor’s office in the morning?”

“I’ll tell him I’m sick.”

“You’re not sick.”

“I could be. Great place for it to happen, this.”

“Wouldn’t a better place be the Chapman Community Hospital?” Antigone sniped.

“You take that back,” Georgie growled, betrayed.

“You’re right, I’m sorry.”

Antigone pulled her knees up. She was bent at odd, Escher-esque angles to fit the length of her limbs into the confines of the chair. Somehow her bony appendages took up little enough space, when lined up side-by-side, to sit comfortably without pesky things like joints and ligaments getting in the way.

“D’you think he’s dreaming?” Georgie asked, hauling one of her own legs over the arm of her chair.

“I couldn’t say. He usually talks in his sleep. It’s supremely annoying.” There was a long pause. “I wish he’d do it now.”

“Yeah,” Georgie agreed. “Did you ever share a room as kids? Can’t imagine that’d be easy to deal with.”

“No, we didn’t. I suppose if we’d both been girls or both been boys, but Father was a very traditional man. And I used to—Hrm.”

“What?”

“Sleepwalk,” Antigone murmured.

“Oh.” Georgie paused, then snorted. Breaking every couple of words with barely-suppressed mirth, she said, “Sorry, but that’s—I mean, no offense, Antigone, but the thought of you, wandering around that creepy old house at night—Did you wear a white nightgown and everything?”

“Of course I did,” Antigone replied, biting the inside of her cheeks to keep her tone even. “I still wear the same one I’ve had since I was twelve. The skirt used to go all the way to the floor before I got taller.”

Georgie let out a “Ha!” so sharp and loud that Dr. Edgware, on his rounds, stopped in the hall and poked his head into the room sternly. Both women looked up at him.

“Sorry, doctor,” Georgie said, stifling snorting giggles. “Just talking about the ghost of a Victorian orphan. As you were.”

“Georgie,” Antigone sighed.

The doctor, reassured that at least no one was kidnapping his patient or breaking anyone’s bones, moved on.

A moment passed.

Antigone glanced to the side, met Georgie’s eyes, and broke into breathy, hysterical spasms of laughter. The two of them rolled in their chairs, punchy and half-weeping after a long, trying day and an anecdote that was unlikely to have been quite so darkly funny at any other time.

“Rudyard was the only person who never seemed shocked to come ‘round a corner and find me lurking,” Antigone said once she could breathe again.

Georgie, still hiccoughing, asked, “You scared the pants off your parents, then?”

“Father fell down the stairs once when he saw me on his way to the toilet.” Antigone’s mouth twitched with glee at the recollection, until the look fell softly from her face. She stared at her brother. “That was Rudyard’s favorite memory of him.”

“Really?”

“He mentioned it in the eulogy.”

The conversation tapered off into an easier silence than the previous tension. The hospital carried on around them, rather more like a persistent cough than steady breathing. At some point, Georgie began to snore. Light from the overhead bulbs stabbed into Antigone’s eyes even when she closed them, red as a dying star through her eyelids. Sleep would be unreachable—despite the familiar and soothing chemical scent of heavy-duty cleaning supplies.

Antigone’s right leg fell asleep, but she didn’t move it. She narrowed her thoughts to nothing but the numbness. It was a strange thing, to make an absence the focus of one’s attention.

Antigone found it almost effortless. She had a great deal of practice.

A tall, narrow window on the far wall staunchly proclaimed the dismal hospital’s Edwardian origins. On the other side of the glass, the black of night gave ground to the pre-dawn grey of morning over the channel.

“Georgie,” Antigone whispered. She waited a long time, not wanting to wake her but knowing she should. She reached out a single finger and poked Georgie in the cheek.

Thin, ginger eyelashes fluttered. Georgie twisted her head to the side to bury her face in her own shoulder.

“Hrrrng,” she groaned, then snorted, smacked her lips, and opened bleary eyes. “‘Ntigone? What’re you pokin’ me for?”

“It’s nearly morning. Sorry.”

“Ugh.” She sat up to roll her neck and stretch arms over her head. Several points along her spine let out alarmingly deep pops. “Nah, thanks for waking me. I gotta take Timmy for his walk before I make sure the mayor puts his trousers on.”

“You’re not calling out today?” Antigone asked.

“I’m not sick,” Georgie replied with a grin that failed to reach tired eyes. She cupped Madeleine in one hand, lifting her gently into the front pocket of her dungarees. Madeleine sniffled and chittered but didn’t wake. “I’ll drop this one off on my way. Did you sleep?”

Antigone pressed her lips into a thin line. There was no point in lying to Georgie, really. She could get defensive at the concern and wear hypocrisy like a survival suit, but she was simply too tired.

At last, she said, “No.”

“Ah. Well.” Georgie pointed to the soft lump in her chest pocket. “At least you’ll have someone waiting for you when you go home soon, eh?”

“I—I suppose I will. Thank you, Georgie.”

“Don’t mention it.” Georgie crossed her arms, chewing the inside of her cheek as she stood in the doorway, looking at Rudyard. Antigone imagined she was contemplating picking him up and carrying him off in her pocket, too. Instead, she gave a lazy salute and said, “See you later, sir.”

Dawn crept like a thief into the cloudy sky. Antigone watched it through the window with accusation. Her leg was still asleep. She knew if she moved it, the pleasant numbness would turn to pins and needles that would not be pleasant at all.

She was only putting off that unpleasantness. No other reason for not leaving.

It was properly light outside when someone interrupted her brooding. The sound of fashionable boat shoes heralded his arrival. Antigone saw Eric Chapman in profile as he strolled into the room, bold as anything. He had a bouquet of yellow daisies in a cheerful vase.

“Hello, Rudyard,” he greeted. There was something staggered to the words, as if he’d stuttered and then edited the tripped syllables out of his own voice in real time. “Beautiful morning. Sorry to see you all on your lonesome, though.”

“He’s not,” Antigone said from her chair.

After all this time, it was still satisfying to see Chapman jump like a cat sprayed with a hose. As he was busy yelping and then trying not to drop his flowers, Antigone stood. She staggered on her bloodless leg, but kept her balance by clawing at the wall.

“Hi!” Chapman said once he’d gotten ahold of himself.

“Hello.”

“Hi.”

“Yes, you said that already,” Antigone pointed out.

“I did? Yes. Of course I did.” Chapman cleared his throat. “In this trying time for your family—”

“Save it, Chapman,” Antigone cut him off before he could start in on the platitudes, to save them both the suffering. “You… brought flowers?”

“Yes, I caught Petunia just as she was opening up the stall. First bunch of the day! Got a bow and everything.” He held up the vase, which did indeed have a white bow tied around the middle.

“Rudyard doesn’t like flowers.”

“Oh. I thought they might… brighten up the room.” Chapman wilted, and the daisies almost seemed to wilt with him. “I’ll just… set them here, then?”

Slowly, he walked around the end of Rudyard’s bed to lower the vase onto the table there. He didn’t break eye contact with Antigone the entire time, as though he were waiting for her to physically stop him.

“Yes, fine, alright. What more harm could they do to him, anyway?” At the taste of poison in her mouth, Antigone realized she was angry.

It was an anger that hovered too far out of reach to hold in her hands. It wasn’t the sleeplessness, the yawning hunger making itself known after nothing but a cup of hot water for hours, nor the discomfort as feeling slowly returned to her leg. It went far beyond the frustration of hurrying across the village late at night so suddenly she had neither brought a jacket nor taken off her plastic shoe covers.

She felt herself grow cold with it, cracking inside as she froze.

“Right, fair enough,” Chapman said after a beat. “I’ll leave you two alone, then?” He made no move to leave.

“Mm.” Antigone settled back into a seat at Rudyard’s side, gaze focused sightlessly on the sheets tucked over him. “Chapman?”

“Yes?” Unscuffed shoes shuffled against the floor.

Slowly, neck creaking like an ancient door hinge, Antigone turned her head and looked him in the eye. There was no venom in her voice anymore. There was only a sad, serene certainty.

“If he dies,” she said darkly, not a threat but a statement of fact, “I’ll never forgive you.”

“Ah.” In the sickly light of St. Spratt’s, Eric Chapman looked more like he’d been stained with iodine than gilded as he usually seemed. “You know, Antigone—”

“What?” she snapped.

Chapman took a deep breath. It was good to know he was flappable, but the novelty had long worn off of frustrating him and now it just made her peevish. She expected he might make excuses or claim it wasn’t his fault—which it wasn’t entirely, she knew; Madeleine had told her and Georgie the whole story, but it had been no more anyone else’s so he might as well take the blame for once in his sorry life.

Instead, he said the last thing on earth she expected.

“That makes two of us.” He nodded once to her, then to Rudyard. “Enjoy yourselv—self.”

He left, and left Antigone speechless.

All she could find it in herself to give was a horse gargle of frustration. And then, after the familiar horror of a tickle in her nose, a sneeze.

“Bloody—achoo—bloody, sodding flowers—achoo—I haven’t taken my tablets this morning, whyyyy—aaaaachoo!”

By the time Eric returned from the hospital, it was less than an hour until the cleaners would be in. He’d scheduled them in advance, weeks back, for the morning after the closing celebration. At the time, he expected the work would be nothing more than mopping floors sticky from spilled pints and prying peanut shells from hard-to-reach nooks and crannies.

He took the lift up, walked in, and stared at the bloodstain on the edge of the bartop.

“Ohh.” Something groaned, low and long. The sound felt close, but muffled, as if separated by a thick curtain. It spoke to nothing less than mortal agony. The hairs on the back of Eric’s neck stood up and gooseflesh bloomed over his forearms.

“Hello? Who’s there?” He grabbed for the nearest utensil—a spoon from the dish of bar olives, next to the nearly-empty cherry container. “Come on, show yourself!”

A soft, sweeping sound tickled Eric’s ears. He couldn’t place it. There was a shuffling and a knock against wood.

“Ow!” said the voice. Then, “Eric? Oh, God, is that you? My head…”

Eric strode to one of the tall tables across from the bar and pulled away a chair. Curled behind it, ashen and squinting, the reverend smacked dry lips as he slouched toward consciousness.

“Nigel? What on earth are you doing down there?” Eric set his spoon on the table and reached a hand down to haul the vicar back into the land of the living. “That’s it, easy does it.”

“Oh, thank you.” He sighed, rubbing a hand over his brow.

“Have you been under the table all night?” Eric asked, incredulous, as he poured him into a chair.

“You know, I couldn’t say, really,” he groaned thoughtfully. “I can’t imagine where else I would have been, but I don’t recall very much after my fifth brandy sour. You know how I get!” he chuckled, then grabbed at his own head. “Ow.”

“Dez went home without you?”

“Hm. That’s funny, I suppose he must have done.” Nigel propped his chin on his fist and looked out the window, which faced up the hill and toward the vicarage. “I hope he’s not worried. I’ll just toddle home as soon as—” he covered his mouth against a belch, “—the room stops spinning.”

“I’ll call over before you go. After all the hullabaloo last night, I want to make sure he made it safely.” Eric clapped Nigel on the shoulder before moving to the bar phone to dial the vicarage.

“The what?” Nigel asked, scandalized. “I missed a hullabaloo?”

“Oh, dear.” Eric set the phone back down in its cradle. He tensed his fists, took a deep breath, and prepared to say—

“Now that you mention it, something must have filtered through. I had the strangest dream that Rudyard Funn died! Isn’t that silly!” He chortled merrily, then groaned again in pain. “I suppose it was after he left, or something. The mind plays merry hell with information when we’re properly sauced, doesn’t it? I wonder if that’s what all those prophets were on about. There’s a damned lot of wine in the Bible, or so I hear. At least some of them had to have been—”

“Nigel. You weren’t dreaming.”

“I beg your pardon!” When Eric turned to look, Nigel’s mouth was agape.

“He’s not dead!” Eric added, putting up his hands soothingly. “Rudyard, that is. But there was, er, an accident.”

“Isn’t there always, with a Funn,” Nigel sighed. “What’s he done this time? I may need to play referee to furious mourners at the Crackerjack funeral later this week, and that’s always easier when I know what their bloodlust is for. And how justified.”

The words failed to undercut the slightly fond nature of Nigel’s exasperation. Such a fondness crept in whenever the vicar related the highlights of funereal mistakes over dinner, the times Eric had been privileged enough to share his and his husband’s company of an evening. A familiar pinch of envy stung Eric deep inside; how could the Funns fail so spectacularly, so often, and still—

This wasn’t the time. It was never the time for that, least of all now, but it was always the time to be the better man.

“Actually, Nigel,” Eric said in his best, sympathetic voice, “I doubt you’ll be seeing him at the funeral.”

“That sounds serious.”

“It is—”

“Are you sure he isn’t dead?” Nigel squinted suspiciously. “Because I’ve known Rudyard Funn since he was born, God help me—if He exists and if He were so inclined—and I’ve never known him not to follow a tight schedule, especially for a funeral. I rather thought he’d die first.”

“He’s in a coma,” Eric said bluntly.

The vicar blinked.

“Oh. Yes, that might do it.”

“Sure. I’ll give Dez a call now, let him know you’re alright.” Eric dialed the vicarage, and a clearly just-woken mayor Desmond Desmond mumbled blearily into his ear. “Hi! It’s Eric. I wanted to let you know that I’ve found your husband. Yes, safe and sound, if feeling a little worse for wear. Ha! Yes. He certainly does. Listen, how did you get on after all that fuss last night? Good, good. Give Georgie my best if you see her, alright? Wh—Because of… Because of Rudyard. When he—yes, you remember. Yes. Mhm. Right. That’s your choice, of course! But I don’t think it’s really necessary—No, of course. Mm. Well, I’ll send Nigel along as soon as he’s back on his feet. Haha, you too!”

Eric dropped the phone in the cradle.

“How is he?” Nigel asked, forehead flat on the table.

“Oh, doing well. He said, ‘I’ll never look at a cherry again.’ Sounded a bit shaken up by the whole thing. I can understand that—I am too, if I'm being honest.” Eric admitted. He rubbed his own biceps reassuringly. It felt a bit drafty in the bar, all of a sudden.

“I’m feeling quite grateful I don’t remember a thing, myself! Though that might become an issue if I’m put on the spot to say anything about it. That’s part of the whole,” he gestured to himself, “vicar thing, you know. Speaking to people in times of strife.” He tried for another warm chuckle, groaned, and pressed the tips of his fingers to his temple.

“Here, let me get you some water.” Eric turned back to the bar. Against his will, his eyes lingered on the red stain against the tasteful, dark wood of the bartop. He could have sworn it was bigger than when last he’d looked.

“I don’t know that I’ve ever talked to the Funns in a time of bereavement, now that I think about it,” Nigel said in the casual, almost chipper voice he used when he’d had an epiphany of one kind or another. “Georgie, yes, when her grandmother passed, but…”

Eric filled a glass from the spray nozzle and came back toward Nigel.

“Didn’t they lose their parents some time ago? Not trying to pry.” Eric settled into a chair across from him, leaning forward on his elbows.

“They did, yes. Yes…” He waved an airy hand and took the glass. His voice pitched lower in recollection, staring out the window. “Dreadful business, that.”

“Sorry?”

“Nothing.” Nigel shook his head, laughing again. He drank his water, chugging so steadily for so long that Eric began to worry he was about to watch a second person to asphyxiate in the bar in twelve hours. Finally, he surfaced with a gasp. “Ooh! That’s the stuff. The Lord Jesus may have done a pretty nifty trick turning all that water into wine, but I do hope he put it back again the morning afterward. Ah! Now I remember.”

“Remember what?” Eric loved Nigel, but his roving thoughts could be hard to follow at the best of times, when he was sober and fully awake.

“Why I never paid a visit to Rudyard and Antigone, after their parents… You know.” Nigel smiled, bemused. “I didn’t have any bloody time to do it! The first I heard of their passing was when Rudyard called me to schedule the funeral. About eight hours before it happened, mind you.”

“Before they died?” Eric said, aghast.

“Hm? What? No! Before the funeral.”

“Oh. Of course.”

Nigel groaned, stretching his neck.

“Anyway, I’d better get on. Maybe I can make up for lost time, this time ‘round. Give Rudyard some good, solid comfort when he can’t tell me to hurry things along. Ha! Who’s rambling now, eh?”

Eric huffed a sympathetic laugh. He paused, drumming his fingers on the table.

“Actually,” he said, “if you make time to visit, you might tell Antigone to get some rest. I think she sat with him all night.”

“Oh, dear. The poor girl.” Nigel sobered, then perked up immediately. “Yes, you know what? I’ll drop in on her. And Miss Crusoe! Right away!” He stood and immediately tottered forty-five degrees to the side before Eric leapt up to catch him. “Hm. Maybe not right away.”

“Stay as long as you need, Nigel. Though I might get you into the lift and down to the parlour. The cleaners should be here in a tick.”

“Right-o. Just prop me up against something, anywhere will do.”

Eric let Nigel sling an arm over his shoulder and walked him out of the bar like the three-legged race that Piffling’s ill-gotten fête had never gotten to see. When he passed the end of the bar, all the cherries were gone.

The day passed in a blur. Eric had movers to direct, buyers to contact, and emails to send. The third was proving tricky. The second was too, a bit, with shipping rates to the mainland being what they were, but luckily Agatha Doyle was purchasing a not insignificant portion of the pâtisserie equipment.

But the emails.

With no service anywhere on the island outside the reverend’s bathroom, Eric could only read and send emails from his computer. Even his attempts at setting up Wi-Fi when he’d opened the cafe had been miserable failures. Things worked well enough once he resigned himself to wired connection only—until today.

“Bloody thing, what’s wrong with it?” he muttered, plugging his ethernet cable in for the third time in an hour.

Each time all day that he’d walked away to attend to one of the hundred things that needed his attention, someone must have accidentally kicked the cable, or run a vacuum cleaner over it, or brought their mischievous cat in without him seeing. It popped right out of the jack, and by the time the internet had connected again, he had some other, more urgent fire to put out than the increasingly terse communiques from a gentleman in Sheffield who ran a bowling alley. Or who wanted a large stock of bowling shoes for some other reason; Eric hadn’t gotten around to asking. And he never would, if things couldn’t simply stay plugged in where he left them.

There were other tiny calamities well into the afternoon—near-misses with tripping on carpet in the process of being pulled up, overheating equipment that ought to have been unplugged already, and the sudden disappearance of seemingly every pen in the building.

Worst of all was the Book Nook disaster.

An entire shelf toppled, its contents spilling through the air centimeters from Eric’s face. As the waterfall of literary works crashed before him, he heard Antigone’s voice like a prophecy—That bookshelf could collapse and bury you in Brontës.

It hadn’t.

If you haven’t got a plan,

He didn’t.

then we’d end up doing the funeral.

It was a warning that had hovered in the corner of his eye for months and months, at once too ominous and too sensible to leave him alone. But Eric Chapman thought of himself as a master of compartmentalization, a talent he picked up a long time ago, so he’d turned his head and let it hide in the blind spot that was becoming a bit fuller than it should.

He couldn’t hide it, or hide from it, now, because the thought of the Funns doing his funeral was a reminder that a Funn, singular, plus Georgie, could very well be doing another funeral quite soon, and while that had never been his intention it would be his fault—what would Eric’s professors at Oxford have thought of him, trying chest compressions on a man with his airway entirely blocked? An upright Heimlich on a choking victim whose consciousness he had failed to verify? His sloppiness with environmental hazards?

This was much a part of why he worked with the dead these days. There were plenty of people to disappoint at a funeral, but the only blood on his hands lately had been already cold and through two layers of latex gloves.

“Eric! Are you hurt, lad?” Graham clapped a hand on his shoulder.

“What? Oh! No, I’m fine. Just startled. Guess we’d better clean this up! Good a time as any to start sorting the library donation piles, don’t you think?” Eric grinned a charming rictus of a grin.

Underneath the sound of Graham’s words, Antigone’s voice had briefly transformed into Rudyard’s. Eric didn’t catch what it was saying—would say, if the voices were real and not just the fabrications of a guilty conscience. He put it all behind the opaque pane of his own optimism and got back to work.

That was his day, on the whole: a constant drip of stress that never ended until the last friendly face said goodbye and Eric shut off and locked the automatic door for the night.

He sighed. Across the square, in the gathering dusk, he saw the dusty front window of Funn Funerals glowing yellow as stained glass. He’d meant at the very least to call and check in today—in the back of his mind there had been a grand plan of bringing ‘round a hot meal Antigone had certainly not taken the time to make for herself. But it had gotten away from him, somehow. And he didn’t think he had anything in but a microwave curry, anyway.

Once again, Eric Chapman had failed to be all things to all people. Wasn’t that the very dream he was giving up by shutting down the pool and the bowling alley and whatever else?

He’d heard someone once say, a long time ago, that three times makes a habit. Here it was, then. The third blow to his foundations—the proverbial nail in the coffin. The ruination of Eric Chapman, just like Rudyard wanted, and he wasn’t even here to see it.

“Jesus,” Eric whispered to himself, giving a long, suspicious look toward the drearier of two funeral homes, “I didn’t know fatalism was catching.”

He left to have a shower. Things would look better in the morning.

After a warm scrub and a hair mask, he did indeed feel sunnier. He emerged in a fog of steam and looked up into a clear mirror. Eric was startled by the face he saw—himself, of course, but looking tired. Weary. Diminished, somehow. His dimples weren’t even visible, for God’s sake.

He tried for a smile. There they were, weaker than sunlight after rain.

Eric slept fitfully. Whenever he felt himself on the verge of a deep slumber, the memory of a sound jolted him awake.

Crack.

The harsh, bloody sound of Rudyard hitting the bar.

Chapman?

The throaty breath before Antigone said she might never forgive him.

He tossed and turned for so long that it was almost a relief when he heard a sound outside his own racing thoughts. He sat up, pink morning light creeping in beneath his curtains, and listened.

Yes, that was definitely the whoosh of an automatic door.

“I could have sworn I locked that. Forget my own head next,” Chapman grumbled, tossing on a dressing gown as he hurried from the residential wing toward the parlour.

The door whooshed shut, then opened again. Eric was just around the corner. He hoped his hair looked alright—he wasn’t even wearing socks.

“Hello?” he called. “I’m afraid we haven’t reopened yet! But if you come by later this…”

Eric stopped, shocked to paralysis, two steps into the foyer. As dawn crept across the stones of the square outside, the thin figure in a black jacket and slacks turned from the door to face Eric. The door swished shut again behind him. His face was gaunt and familiar, dark eyes open where they hadn’t been last time Eric had seen him.

“…week.” Eric let out a breathless laugh of shock. Of all the people to catch him off guard. “Rudyard! You’re awake! That’s… well, it’s miraculous.”

Rudyard Funn raised his eyebrows.

“Awake? Chapman, I’m not awake,” he spat. “I’m dead.”

“I—What?” Eric shook his head. Clearly the concussion hadn’t left Rudyard at his best, whatever that was. “No, you hit your head hard. Didn’t anyone walk home with you? Let’s get you across the square, that’s it.”

Eric came closer as he spoke until he could reach out a comforting hand to guide Rudyard to the door. God, where was Antigone, or Georgie? Even Madeleine? Henry would never have released Rudyard into his own care, but maybe he escaped again—

His hand, rather than touching Rudyard gently at the shoulder, touched nothing. Eric blinked. He moved his hand closer and watched his own fingers disappear into the image of Rudyard Funn. The sensation was like sticking his hand in a freezer—not making contact with the sides, but only hovering in the ambient cold.

“Oh, yes,” Rudyard whispered, eerily calm. “I told you.”

“I—I don’t…” Eric stumbled away.

“Congratulations, Chapman!” Rudyard shouted like he was leading a three-ring circus, not speaking to a man an arm's length away from him. Glee and spite stretched his face into a toothy smile. “You’ve earned yourself a haunting!”

Chapter Text

On balance, Rudyard's first day as a ghost wasn't so bad, really.

He hadn’t been overjoyed at first. It’s a trying thing to find oneself watching one’s own body being carted away. And by Chapman of all people, calling for the doctor as if he were some big hero—oh, look at Eric Chapman, he did his best even for his bitter rival, let’s all have a drink to his health and ignore the dead man on the floor, pity Rudyard is gushing so much blood over that nice mahogany bar—it added insult to mortal injury. There had been no time to be bitter, at first. He was just confused, shouting to be heard as Madeleine scampered away after Chapman, who carried what looked like Rudyard but couldn’t be Rudyard, because Rudyard was standing right there.

He had tried to sit down, fallen through the stool, and decided he might need to rethink some things.

Rudyard got all his moaning and bewailing out of the way that night. He had no spectral chains to rattle and there wasn’t anybody around to hear him even if he had. Chapman was who-knew-where; Rudyard had never gotten a handle on the layout of this bloody place. But moan and bewail he did, in his own way.

“Oh, that’s just classic, isn’t it?” Rudyard paced back and forth through the bar, vanishing into the wood up to his chest before stepping out of it again. “Only Eric Chapman could manage to kill me in a manner so annoying that it invents ghosts!”

He ranted and raved for hours, mainly retreading old ground. The beats were familiar. It would have been a comfort, but for one thing: at regular intervals, Rudyard expected at least a sympathetic squeak, if not a supportive fist pump or an aggrieved sigh. None came. The bar was empty and dark. A stain on the wood settled further into the grain with every passing moment.

Rudyard saw the vague shape of himself in the mirror over the line of top-shelf liquor, gaunt and slightly see-through, fuzzy at the edges. His reflection looked silently back.

A bit before dawn, he figured out how to operate the lift, and that was when things really started looking up.

Rudyard pulled the cable from the wall. He still wasn’t sure what it did, but after knocking it out by accident the first time and seeing how irritated Chapman became at his computer, he thought it was worth doing again.

If unplugging something caused a bit of havoc, plugging in something else that was already unplugged should do the trick just as well.

One by one, Rudyard stole every pen in the building. He tucked them away in a dish bin under the bar. Somehow, he thought, he would get word to Antigone and have her claim the spoils for the business.

Toppling the bookcase was an accident. After finding no serious injury done and a dazed, hilarious look on Chapman’s face, Rudyard chose to count it as a win regardless.

He was a bit put out by the incident with the mirror. Chapman, predictably, took incredibly inefficient showers—which created a canvas of steam for an enterprising ghost to write ominous messages on to his heart’s content. Rudyard began with glee, until he misspelled GUILTY—he was too concerned about uniform size and spacing to pay attention to spelling—thoughtlessly erased it, and found himself without any steam at all. It was a disappointment, but not enough to tip the scales.

All in all, the most productive day Rudyard had had in ages.

And here he was at the grand finale, now, with Eric Chapman quaking in his boots—no, he was barefoot, but quaking in his dressing gown, which didn’t have quite the same ring to it. Rudyard straightened to his full height, lifting an inch off the ground, and continued glowering at his murderer.

His murderer, who was not doing nearly as much blubbering and wailing for mercy as he’d hoped.

“No,” Chapman said haltingly, shaking his head, “that’s impossible. Somebody would have told me, surely. Antigone and Georgie—Oh, God, Antigone.”

Without another word, Chapman ran past Rudyard and out into the square.

“What—Chapman? Chapman!” Rudyard ran for the door, which whooshed open before him. The moment he came to the threshold, as had been happening all night, he stopped dead. Deader, that is. Frozen in place, at the exact boundary of Chapman’s premises. “Come back here and take your haunting! Coward!”

Rudyard inched back just far enough to raise his fist and shake it.

Across the square, Chapman began pounding on the door of Funn Funerals. Ghastly early, Rudyard thought, especially for Antigone, unless it wasn’t. She had always kept odd hours. The better part of two decades without seeing sunlight played merry hell with her circadian rhythms and it wasn’t uncommon to see her creeping the halls at six o’clock in the morning, either having just gotten up or not yet gone down.

If Chapman woke her, he’d get an earful. Rudyard smiled at the thought.

Another minute passed and it seemed Chapman was giving up. He looked back at his own storefront over his shoulder, saw Rudyard hanging in the open door, and was off like a shot out of the village square entirely.

Rudyard frowned.

“If I’d known all I had to do to get him to leave the island was move into his house,” he groused, “I’d have done it years ago.”

Eric raced across the village, lungs burning. It wasn’t far, but he was built for endurance, not speed. If only Rudyard had been admitted to Chapman Community Hospital, he thought. It was much closer. But soon he saw the weather-beaten edifice of St. Spratt’s come up over the hill.

He burst through the doors, cheerfully but quickly greeted a couple of earlybird patients who waved at him in the hall, and skidded around the corner into Rudyard’s room, to find—

Rudyard.

Same as he’d left him yesterday.

“You’re alone this time, right?” Eric chuckled nervously. Half a second later, he braced for the voice he never managed to anticipate, but Antigone didn’t manifest out of any unnoticed shadows. He let out a breath.

Rudyard continued to lie there. Cautiously, Eric stepped forward. He’d seen a lot of corpses in his time, so he liked to think he knew one when he saw one, but the Funns were pale to begin with, waxy on a good day, and there was what he’d seen in his parlor to consider.

Eric reached out a hand, holding the side of his fingers under Rudyard’s nose. A weak, warm breath came at a slow, even rate. The tension holding Eric stiff as a board abated, just a little.

“What are you doing?” came a stern, exhausted voice. Eric jumped a foot in the air and whirled around.

“Henry!”

“Hello, Eric.” Henry Edgware loomed, clutching the doorframe so tightly his knuckles went pale. He was either very suspicious or very unwell, probably a mix of both. “Are you trying to asphyxiate my patient?”

“What? No!” Eric snatched his hand back from where it hovered over Rudyard’s nose and mouth.

“Oh, good.” He accepted the answer immediately and stepped into the room to pick up Rudyard’s chart.

“Yes, well, I ought to be going now. Lovely to see you.” Eric began edging his way past the doctor. “Enjoy your—”

“Hold on just a moment.” Henry jotted something down on the chart and hung it up again. He fixed Eric with his keen stare. Even through the fog of chronic sleep deprivation, he was a startlingly perceptive man. It made Eric’s skin itch sometimes. “I almost hate to ask this, Eric, but… are you okay?”

“Am I—?” A strained, hysterical laugh wriggled its way out of his throat. “You know me, Henry.”

“Yes. That’s why I’m asking.”

Eric’s stomach felt like a placid lake into which someone had just dropped a large and heavy stone. He was a man accustomed to carrying secrets he could never tell. That he was being haunted by the ghost of a man who wasn’t even dead didn’t crack the top ten in terms of potential international incidents it could cause, but it cleared a high bar of unbelievability. He had no playbook for this—frauds and hoaxes, certainly, but no experience with the real thing, and less so with talking about it.

So Eric Chapman did what he did best. He dodged the question.

“Well, we’re both busy men. Would you look at the time, and, oh, I think I left my kettle running, can’t have that.” He inched his way past Henry, a smile pasted across his face, and made a mad dash for freedom as soon as he had cleared the doorway. “Bye!”

Henry said something after him, but Eric was too far to hear it.

Rudyard was in the process of deciding how best to sabotage Chapman’s toilet when he heard the man himself return.

“Rudyard!” His obnoxious voice practically rattled objects off of shelves. “Rudyard! Where’ve you gone now? I have to tell you—Rudyard!”

“Now look here, some of us are trying to rest in peace!” Rudyard snapped. He couldn’t slam the door to the bathroom open, but he could throw himself through it with a damning scowl on his face that would have to make up for the deficient corporeality. “What is it?”

He found himself looking up into the face of a grinning Chapman. There was something wild about the eyes—was he driving the man to the brink already? Score one for efficiency.

“Good news!” Chapman sang. “You’re not dead!”

“Chapman,” Rudyard said lowly, raising a hand to indicate the place where a solid surface bisected his torso, “my head and my feet are currently on opposite sides of a closed door.”

“Oh, are they? I hadn’t noticed,” Chapman bit back. “You’re out of your body somehow, yes, but I’ve just been to St. Spratt’s. You’re in a coma! You were sort of dead for a moment there,” he admitted as an afterthought. “I had to do chest compressions. It’s one of those things, you never really forget how, even though I last used the skill… a long time ago…”

“Nice try. You won’t pull one over on me that easily.” Rudyard slid the rest of the way through the door and tilted his chin up to look imperiously down at his rival. It felt good to be above the man’s eyeline, hovering an undisclosed distance off the ground.

“Why would I try to trick you? No, honestly, what do I have to gain by telling you you’re alive?” Chapman’s always-suspicious face betrayed not a whiff of trickery, which only made him all the more suspicious.

Hope, Rudyard managed not to say. You want to string me along by feeding me pointless hope.

It was the most devious plan Chapman had ever devised, but if Rudyard were to continue not-living in the man’s home, he ought to keep his own cards close to the vest. Revealing he knew the gambit would only allow Chapman to stay a step ahead. Not on his watch.

“I won’t pretend to know what goes on in that brain of yours,” Rudyard scoffed. “But know this, Chapman. Just because you’ve managed to invent ghosts to drum up business, don’t think I’ll go quietly becoming your newest gimmick.”

“My— You— Invent—” Chapman sputtered. “You think you’re the first person to ever be a ghost? Unbelievable. Of all the self-important—”

“I’ve spent all my life around the dead. I’m sure that if there really were ghosts before now, I would have heard about it. There have been decedents galore with reason enough to haunt Funn Funerals long before Antigone and I had our chance at ruining things,” he reasoned, reasonably. “And we did that ridiculous rigamarole with the séance for Miss Scruple with no ill effects from the other side, no matter what Georgie was on about. No, then as now, the only person kicking up a fuss in anyone’s afterlife is you, Chapman.”

Rudyard stuck a spectral finger at Chapman’s nose. He made a funny, cross-eyed face looking at it, which cheered Rudyard considerably.

“That’s ridiculous.” He tried to wave Rudyard’s hand away and only succeeded in passing his own through it.

“Is it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“But is it?”

“Yes!” Chapman threw his hands in the air. “First of all, why would I wait so long? People die on this island all the time, and have done for years, as evidenced by our two mostly-functioning funeral homes.”

“Mostly?”

“Second, Rudyard, if I could turn people into ghosts, and if I knew that doing so would trap them in my house, where I live, no offense, but why in God’s name would I pick you of all people?”

“Uncalled for,” Rudyard muttered.

“And lastly, and I can’t believe I have to say this, you’re not a ghost! Because you’re! Not! Dead! So there!”

Rudyard watched Chapman seethe for a long moment after his outburst. He folded his arms, hovered a centimeter higher to better look down his nose at the man, and said, “I hope your plumbing’s fixed soon.”

“My plumbing?” Chapman said. As Rudyard floated away through the ceiling, he began shouting in an extremely satisfying manner. “What have you done to my plumbing? Rudyard? Rudyard!”

It was then that Rudyard first mastered the art of sending a chilling, disembodied chuckle echoing throughout the house.

After calling Graham, calling in one of his crew for a second opinion, and then doing it again for a third, all of whom swore up and down that there was nothing wrong with Eric’s plumbing whatsoever, he made a vow to himself. He must, by any means necessary, prove to Rudyard that he wasn’t dead.

“Chapman,” Antigone hissed as she was herded through the automatic door of Chapman’s. “Jesus wept, what’s so bloody important?”

“Just hold on,” he said in his third most reassuring funeral director voice. The first and second most reassuring voices could be a real strain, and it was always good to have something to fall back on.

“Hold on for—?”

“Antigone?” A soft, mournful voice drifted from the hallway that led to the lift. Rudyard’s gaunt face emerged from the shadows. The ridge of his brow and sloping nose appeared before the rest, eyes and cheeks and thin, worried mouth finally welling into being like pooling water as he stepped into the light.

“There,” Eric said gently.

“What?” Antigone snapped, testiness not at all lessened. “Chapman, why am I here? I have a business to run and four bodies to embalm, no thanks to you.”

“What?” Eric and Rudyard said in unison.

“Yes, four! The Crackerjack brothers! Does everything immediately tumble out of your statuesque skull the moment it doesn’t concern you?”

“My—?”

“Nothing, shut up.”

“Antigone.” Rudyard floated closer. His face was open and hollow, a heaviness to his brow over eyes that seemed to take all the light in the room and hide it away.

“Antigone,” Eric said for him. Words stopped then. His mouth and hands opened and closed helplessly “I just—”

“What?” She repeated. Something in the violin-string tautness of her posture softened. Sympathy or simply exhaustion, Eric couldn’t tell, but it gave him the courage to clear his throat and ask:

“How is your brother doing?”

Antigone stared straight at Eric, face as unreadable as the surface of the moon. At her side, Rudyard floated. He faced perpendicularly, in profile, staring at his twin with an intensity of focus that Eric had only ever seen from mourners.

“Oh,” she said at last. “The same. Not any better, but—” Antigone visibly steeled herself to utter the optimistic clause, “not worse. He hasn’t woken at all.”

“Sit bolt upright in the coffin, should I?” Rudyard muttered.

“Still in the coma, then?” Eric asked pointedly. Rudyard’s head whipped toward him like a dagger.

“Yes, that’s what I said.” Antigone’s tone was so withering, Eric felt his skin dry out. “You’re—hm. You’re the first person to ask about him.”

“I sent Nigel along earlier,” Eric objected weakly, more to Rudyard than Antigone.

“You know what he’s like. All the questions were rhetorical.” She ducked her head, glowering at Eric through the half-open curtains of her hair.

“I see.”

Eric risked a sly glance toward the incorporeal interloper in the conversation. Rudyard was frozen like marble, but for the widened eyes under his heavy brows, which flicked frenetically across his sister’s face. His jaw locked tighter than a tetanus patient, he slowly began sinking into the floor.

“Is that all?” Antigone’s tone was softer than the snappish fury of a moment ago. She sounded hoarse.

“No!” Eric shouted toward Rudyard, who was up to his shoulders in the quicksand of carpet.

Antigone jolted in shock and stared at Eric as if he might at any moment begin spitting out peas at her like a human gatling gun. “What, Chapman?”

“I meant yes!” he corrected himself. “I’m sure you’re very busy. Four bodies, right? Don’t let me keep you.” Eric gritted out a friendly Haha through his teeth. “In fact, I have something downstairs I need to check,” he hissed pointedly toward the vanishing top of Rudyard’s head.

Antigone left with a confused grumble, and Eric legged it to the mortuary.

“Rudyard!” Chapman’s voice echoed annoyingly down the labyrinthine hallway that, until recently, led to a bowling alley. “Rudyard!”

Rudyard paid him no mind. There were more important things afoot, like making use of all the invisible prying he’d done when repeatedly unplugging everything in sight to recall the password to Chapman’s computer. The man had entered and re-entered it in front of him a dozen times in the last two days. Three…N… Jo… Yy… R, then S, then another three…

“Ell eff! That’s the ticket.” With a triumphant, “Ah-ha!” the final stroke brought him to the desktop screen.

“Rudyard!” Chapman loomed in the doorway. “There you are. What the hell are you doing?”

“Work, Chapman. Good, old-fashioned nose to the grindstone.” He began clicking through the list of applications. Because Funn Funerals’ own computer was two halves of different Chromebooks that Georgie had found in a dumpster and wired together, the UI was unrecognizable—Rudyard couldn’t imagine how Chapman could stand it.

“Wh—” Chapman spluttered. “Why? Also, how? And—what?”

“I’m not dead, apparently, so there’s no reason to treat this like some beach holiday. Funeral directing in the modern age requires certain specialized tools, you know. The one thing all this,” he gestured broadly to the computer, “is good for.”

Chapman’s curiosity seemed to get the better of him, because he came closer in order to do the infuriating thing where one who cannot mind their business watches over the shoulder of an innocent victim simply trying to use a computer in peace. With a final scroll through the deep information stores of the infernal machine, the cursor finally landed on the long-sought icon.

“Spreadsheets!” Rudyard declared. Nothing happened. He frowned, and attempted again to open the selected program.

“Here, let me—Just let me click it for you, dammit, man!” Chapman’s presumptuous insistence on doing everything just to prove he could overtook Rudyard’s mostly-incorporeal hand. Rudyard put one winter-chilling finger in his ear.

A moment later, the program opened.

“Right! Spreadsheets!” Rudyard rubbed his hands together. “Now get out.”

“‘Eric, would you be kind enough to lend me use of your computer?’” he said in a clipped, reedy tone that sounded like no one Rudyard had ever met. “Yes, Rudyard, by all means. Be my guest.”

“Now look here, I have a quadruple funeral to plan and I’ve lost enough time on this coma nonsense as it is.”

Chapman took an audible breath, let it out, then took another.

“You know what?” he said. “Cheers, Rudyard. Don’t break my computer.” He turned, knocked out a short pattern on the doorframe, and left the room.

“Don’t break my computer,” Rudyard muttered mockingly as soon as he was gone.

“I heard that!”

“I know!” Rudyard lied with a sneer.

And that night, miracle of miracles, Eric Chapman was proven wrong: Rudyard did not break his computer. He broke the printer. Entirely different, could happen to anyone.

The bell over the door to Funn Funerals rang, and Eric made it almost all of the way through the phrase, “Hello, Funns!” before he managed to stop himself. Georgie and Antigone stared at him in open, silent disdain. It was heartening to see them practically back to business as usual.

“What d’you want, Eric?” Georgie sighed. “We’re kind of busy at the moment, case you forgot.”

“Yes. Well. I thought you could use a hand around the place! Lots to do, eh?” He held out his hands in a universal gesture of Put me to work, I’m keen.

“No,” said Antigone.

“No?” said Eric.

“Yes. No.”

“So, was that a yes or a no?”

“No!”

“What she means,” interrupted Georgie, “is we don’t need another hand, thanks. Got Cal helpin’ out.”

“You—Sorry, who’s Cal?”

“Hello, Mr. Chapman,” a soft, slightly hoarse young voice said somewhere very, very close behind him.

“Gah!” Eric jumped clean out of his skin. He turned quickly to see that a young girl had materialized out of thin air. Right. Calliope, the child who had beaten him out for the position of scout leader once. Bright kid, deeply unsettling. “Have you been there the whole time?”

“No, I was just in the toilet, putting on my PPE.” She lifted a foot to show off her plastic shoe covers, then lowered a clear face shield on a strap that held her flyaway hair down close to her head. “Ms. Funn is going to give me a tour of the mortuary. I’m very excited.” She sounded as much, nearly breathless with it.

“Oh! What an honor!” Eric exclaimed. “Antigone, can I speak with you a moment?”

She reluctantly allowed Eric to usher her into the hallway that led to the Funns’ living space proper. It was strange; in all this time, he’d never actually been invited further into their home than this. He supposed, break-ins notwithstanding, there’d been little reason for them to go beyond the public boundary where he lived either. Before the current haunting, anyway.

Antigone crossed her arms, crossly. “What?”

“You hired a ten-year-old to work in your funeral home? What were you thinking?”

“She’s just turned twelve, actually. And I’ll thank you to keep your opinions on my staffing choices to yourself.” Antigone stood a little straighter, one of those rare moments when Eric remembered she was quite a tall woman when she wasn’t slouching. “As co-proprietor of this business, possibly soon to be sole proprietor, if you have your way—”

“That’s not fair, and you know it,” Eric snapped. “I’m as worried about Rudyard as you are.”

“Do you really think so?”

Antigone’s voice alone could wither plants more effectively than a January frost. The moment stretched taut, cold shoulder against cold shoulder.

“No,” Eric finally conceded. “No, I suppose I’m not. But despite what you think, and despite what he’d say if our positions were reversed, I do want him to get better as soon as possible. Believe me. That day could not possibly come soon enough.”

Upon entering his own funeral home, Eric saw his local ghost, sighed, and walked straight to the sitting room of his flat upstairs. As he knew would happen, Rudyard followed.

“Well? Did you give her the spreadsheets?”

“No, Rudyard, because you broke my printer.”

“Mister Three-Dozen-Businesses-in-the-Same-Building doesn’t have a second printer?”

Eric didn’t bother summoning the strength to answer that. He dropped himself into an armchair and ran his hands over his face, groaning at his lot. Wasn’t it funny, the way life worked? You live through things that ought to have killed you—and did, for other people—with the cheeriest smile this side of the Atlantic, keep secrets and carry regrets and see death every single day, but the thing that breaks you, the singular thing, is, when you get right down to it, nothing more than an unwanted, irritating roommate and his family drama.

Quietly, as if low volume might disguise the fact that he cared, Rudyard asked, “How are they?”

Eric sat up.

“Well, your sister has hired a child to help with the dead bodies, and she accused me, again, of all but murdering you, but other than that, I’d say things are going swimmingly as ever at Funn Funerals.”

“A child? In our funeral home?” Rudyard gasped, notably not objecting to the allegations of manslaughter. “There haven’t been children there for thirty years!”

“Aren’t you and Antigone thirty-seven?”

“What’s your point?”

“Nothing. Makes sense you’d say that, actually.” He blew out a long breath through his lips. “Antigone doesn’t seem to care. Probably sees too much of herself in Calliope.”

“Calliope? Why on earth didn’t you say so?” On a dime, he veered from fuming disapproval to outright delight.

“What,” Eric said, flatter than the club sodas that had been left out all night after Rudyard almost-slightly-actually died.

“She’s an excellent scout and a true professional. She’ll get wonderful on-the-job experience at Funn Funerals. What, Chapman?” Rudyard smirked smugly right in his gobsmacked face. “Are you disappointed you didn’t think to entice her into being your intern first? Clearly, she knows quality when she sees it.”

“I just think,” Eric ground out, “she’s a bit young. I mean, what must her parents think?”

“What have they got to do with anything?”

“What parent in their right mind would send their twelve-year-old into a house full of dead people, so they can go look at the dead people?”

“I beg your pardon, Antigone and I were born in that house.”

“Yes, and you’re—” Eric stopped. If he had been talking to anyone else in the world, even beginning to imply what he was about to say would have been unthinkable. But trust a Funn to bring out pettiness he didn’t even know he had in him.

Rudyard stared him down.

“Go on,” he said. His voice was very calm and very low.

“I’m sorry, Rudyard. I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just…” All his years of diplomacy training were going to waste. “You have to admit, you and your sister aren’t exactly a typical case.”

“If you’re going to insult someone, Chapman, at least be consistent. You were talking about parents ‘in their right mind.’” Rudyard added heavy air quotes around the last phrase, then shrugged as if the concept had little, if anything, to do with him.

“It’s funny,” Eric mused abruptly, staring into space for a walk down short-term memory lane. “We’ve known each other for years, but this is the second time this week I’ve realized, I really don’t know the first thing about the late Funns.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Rudyard stiffen.

“What could you possibly want to know? They were undertakers. They died. That’s been the story every generation since the fifteenth century. It would be a waste of time to tell it over and over.”

“Nigel said something… very vague. About your parents,” Eric dared to press, just a little. “Or didn’t say, I suppose.”

“Hm? When?”

“In the bar, after—”

“Oh, yes!” Rudyard nodded. “After you tried to kill me and told him I was dead!”

“I didn’t—Look, never mind. I don’t mean to pry.”

Rudyard snorted. “I find that hard to believe,” he muttered.

“I’m sorry, what?” Eric turned his head to boggle at Rudyard.

“I shouldn’t be surprised. All you’ve done since you came to the island is stick your nose into my family business.” He hissed the last two words with all the subtlety of a traveling circus on a mile-long island.

“Fine.” Eric threw his hands in the air, then let them drop to his thighs. He stood, making a halfhearted move toward the door. “Forget I said anything.”

“No, no, ask away! It’s not as if the truth is very interesting. There are all sorts of ridiculous rumors.” Rudyard hit each consonant of ‘ridiculous’ like a man falling down a set of stairs. “I heard none of them for years, until Georgie came along and asked me if our parents really had died in a grisly murder-suicide.”

He scoffed, shaking his head.

“Then, can I ask…” Eric broached cautiously, “how did they die?”

“Murder-suicide.”

“Oh, my God.” Eric sat heavily back in his chair.

“Pick your jaw up, Chapman, you look like a fish.” Rudyard rolled his eyes.

“That’s terrible. And you—you two did the funeral. Nigel said.”

“Well, yes.” He blinked, seeming surprised not by the fact itself but by Eric bothering to bring it up. “Who else would have done it?”

A thought even more awful occurred to Eric.

“Did… Oh, God, Rudyard, tell me you didn’t make Antigone embalm them.”

“Make her? Chapman, I couldn’t stop her. She obsessed over getting our mother just right. Our father was a task, too, apparently,” he chuckled. “He was a scowler. She padded his cheeks so much, by the end he looked like a chipmunk.”

“Christ.” Eric dropped his head into his hands.

“Oh, the looks didn’t matter, really,” Rudyard said flippantly. “They were both closed-casket.”

“How can you be so casual about this?” Eric raised his head so fast a muscle in his neck twinged. “I know it was a long time ago, but Jesus, Rudyard. You buried your parents! Buried them yourself. I mean, that doesn’t haunt you?”

Rudyard looked at him curiously.

“Have you never worked on someone you’ve known?” His voice was—soft, almost. Not by any normal standards, but on the scale of Rudyard Funn. Only a little judgemental, and mostly curious. That didn’t stop him from making Eric bristle.

“Of course I have,” he retorted. “I know lots of people. Most of them pre-book, I meet them well before they die.”

“No, no, not someone you’ve met. Someone you know.” Rudyard, without even meaning to, managed to land a devastating hit upon a distinction that had haunted Eric far longer than the literal ghost in his house. “Someone you’ve known your whole life. Family. Old friends. Our father buried his parents and his grandfather, just in our lifetime. We were at school with Jerry—didn’t Antigone do an adequate job on some piece of him or other?”

“Of course she did.” Eric chose to ford his defensiveness like a river. Rudyard’s sister surely needed it more than he did, after all. “You know Antigone is good at what she does. She’s not here, you can admit it.”

“She’s not here,” Rudyard agreed bitterly, “and couldn’t hear me if she was. But you’re right, Chapman, Funn Funerals has by far the best mortician on the island. I’m glad you’ve finally seen sense.”

“I didn’t say that.” Eric paused, watching Rudyard for long enough that the smug expression on his ghostly face faded into irritation.

“What? Why are you staring at me?”

“I haven’t,” Eric finally answered, feeling the words almost wrenched out of him.

“You certainly have, I’m looking right at you!”

“Buried a family member, I mean.” The words forced their way between his teeth. “Not professionally. I’ve lost people, people I’m close to, even, but—not since I took up this career. Let’s leave it at that.”

“Hm.” Rudyard hovered thoughtfully. “Well, if you’re ever in need of a funeral and don’t have the strength of will it takes to lift a finger for your loved one, you need only hop across the square—”

“Get out, Rudyard.” Eric pressed fingers to his temples. He felt a headache building behind his eyes.

A silence stretched on for long enough that Eric began to get suspicious. He looked up, wondering what ghoulish trick Rudyard had learned now, but the room was empty. He was alone. Rudyard had gone quietly, just as Eric had asked, and he’d be damned if it didn’t make him feel a little colder to find him gone.

“I think my mother knew what she was doing,” Antigone said into the silent parlor, “when she named me.”

“What d’you mean?” Georgie looked up from the wreath she’d been wrestling with for half an hour—stupid lilies didn’t want to stay put, but unfortunately for them, Georgie was great at wreathes.

“There was her daughter, tiny and wailing after having been left alone in the womb for a week. I’d never been alone before.” Her eyes were dark and far away, as if straining to see in that long gone place. “Did she know I’d have to get used to it? Did she look at me and say, ‘You’re going to bury your brother one day, Antigone’? What a curse. She was good at those, even when she didn’t mean to be.”

“Right. That’s enough.” Georgie dropped the mostly-finished wreath, dusted her knees off, and pointed at Antigone. “If you’re talking about him like he’s already gone, then it’s time for the nuclear option.”

“Nuclear—? Georgie, where are you going? Georgie?”

When Georgie Crusoe burst through the front doors of Chapman’s, she brought a tempest with her. The sky outside was on the verge of rain, and her voice was the first crack of thunder that tells the rest of the cracks to get cracking.

“Eric! I’ve got something to say to you!”

“Georgie.” Eric came into the parlor, abandoning the half-assembled cold sandwich in his kitchen. Rudyard was already there, floating forlornly near his friend.

“If Rudyard…” Georgie swallowed, hard. “You know. If he doesn’t wake up.”

“I’ll stop you right there, Georgie.” Eric held up a hand and brought out his best voice for the bereaved. “I couldn’t do that to Antigone, and I certainly couldn’t do it to Rudyard. He wouldn’t want me burying him.”

“I don’t want you to do the funeral, you knob.”

“What?” Eric dropped his hand. Rudyard snickered.

“Antigone’s kept a table in the mortuary open all week, just in case. She’s in no state to organize everything, but we’ve got Cal and I’ve been there long enough to know how it all works. We’ve got this, but.” She took a shaky breath. “Look. I haven’t read the death plan he gave me, but if Rudyard were here, he’d say we might as well just chuck him in the ground and throw some dirt on top, in and out in five minutes. Done.”

“She really knows me,” Rudyard said, sounding genuinely touched.

“But that’s not what he’d really want,” Georgie continued.

In unison known only to the two of them, Eric and Rudyard said, “It isn’t?”

“No. What he’d really want is the whole village turning up to talk about how much they actually appreciated him deep down. How he made a difference. How he was important to somebody besides me and Antigone and Madeleine. Because he was—he is. Important.” She corrected herself furiously. “Listen to me, I’m already talking about him like he’s gone! He’s not! Dr. Edgeware says his head’s healing, but he’s still not waking up.

“First it was my nan, and now it might be Rudyard. And Nana's service was proper nice. Even though it’s not what she booked for herself, it was just right, and I’m going to make sure Rudyard is taken care of the same way. The funeral part’s alright, that’s our territory. That’s what we do. But what I want from you, Eric, is for you to work your flipping sunshine man magic and Pied Piper the whole bloody island to the funeral! Get them all talking. And if anyone says an unkind word about Rudyard, I’ll kick you to the moon. D’you hear me? The moon!”

Georgie’s teeth were clenched by the time she finished saying her piece. She seethed, heaving in hard breaths through them like she’d just broken twenty people’s legs.

“Right,” Eric said.

“Right,” Georgie said.

She left. The sky outside was still cloudy, but the thunder had ended.

Rudyard stood in silhouette against the window. He watched Georgie walk across the square, watched her disappear into Funn Funerals, and watched the silent edifice with all the stillness of the dead.

“Was she right?” Eric asked. “Is that what you want?”

Rudyard took a deep breath. He did not turn around.

“Is that what I want?” he repeated quietly. “Chapman, what I want is to see my sister. I want to talk to Georgie and Madeleine. I want to sleep in my bed, and eat breakfast at my kitchen table, and read the newspaper. Do the accounts. Be shouted at for doing the accounts wrong and do them again with Madeleine’s supervision. I want to answer the telephone and eat sherbet and be shouted at by people around the village! When people shout at me, it’s because they know I’m there. And right now, the only person who knows I am here is you, Chapman. Only you.”

Eric left Rudyard at the window. Privacy was the least he could give.

The thought arrived, then, that perhaps it wasn’t the only thing. Something had to give, and the plan forming in his mind might be mad enough to work. He hadn’t started it, but Eric saw, in a flash of absolute certainty, exactly the way to finish it: meddling in the afterlife after all.