Again, the ghosts gave themselves away, this time not by making patients scream, but by sitting around chatting about it. No one knows why some mental patients can see ghosts. Maybe mental illness breaks down the boundary between possible and impossible, so, like small children and animals, the brains of the mentally ill weren’t always jumping in to edit their perceptions. Or it could be that these people have necro blood, but their families have strayed from the supernatural community. When they began hearing voices and seeing apparitions, everyone around them would assume the problem was psychological.

So when we came across a group of four people, laughing about how they’d made a patient piss his pants, we knew we’d found our haunters. Either that or we’d found the world’s first psych hospital staffed by the National Sadists Institute.

“No, no, no!” said an elderly man with a snow-white Van Dyke beard. “We had one better than that. Ted, remember Bruce? The one you convinced he could fly?”

“Oh, yeah,” chortled a ghost with his back to my wall.

“What happened?” asked a plump teenage girl.

Ted shifted to better face his audience and I recognized my headless accountant. I backed up and motioned to Kristof that I’d found our ghost. He nodded, and I returned to my peephole.

“…sailed clean off the roof.” Ted was laughing so hard he could barely get the words out. “Like Superman. Only, as he soon discovered, he couldn’t fly. Landed right on Peterman’s Jag. Hit so hard his fucking teeth popped out like Chiclets. Peterman was picking them out of his seats for weeks. That’s what he gets for leaving his sun-roof open.”

The haunters roared with laughter.

The old man waved his arms again, like a bird attempting takeoff. “The best part was when the dumb fuck hits the roof. For a second, he just lies there, dying. Then his spirit starts to separate. He looks around, gives the biggest grin you’ve ever seen, then jumps up and dances a little jig on the top of the Jag, yelling, ‘I did it! I did it! I can fly!’ Then—”

Ted stepped in front of the old man. “Then he just happens to look down, and there, under his feet, is this body. His body. He stops—freezes on the spot—stares down, and goes, ‘Oh.’”

“Just like that,” the old man chortled. “‘Oh.’”

I looked at Kristof.

“More smacking in order?” he murmured.

“Smacking’s too good. Think I can rip out their intestines and use them for harp strings?”

“You could try. Or…”

He tilted his head toward the paper-thin wall.

“…are the best,” someone said, then sighed. “We haven’t had a decent new one in weeks.”

I glanced at Kristof. We smiled at each other.

We found an empty room farther down the hall, where we could talk without being overheard by the haunters.