Some dead men become ghosts, yes – but it is also true that some ghosts refuse to leave the body. Those souls who are truly affixed to this world, who feel that they have work yet to complete, can linger behind in the body by sheer force of will. Though it is not a pleasant thing, being married to dead flesh. One corpse I spoke to from the town of Daisypusher said that it was a bit like being walled away in a tenement forever – everything falling apart, rats in the walls. Surrounded by eternal decrepitude. Things break down and no landlord comes to fix them. You dwell in the ruins of your own body. Ruins that will forever be crumbling.

– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below

A hundred feet beneath the old marble cemeteries on Manhattan’s East Side sit the gates to the town of Daisypusher. Mookie and Skelly stand at these gates – a series of bones both animal and human wound to an old chainlink fence with coils of wire and swatches of black electrical tape – and stare through to the distant lights of the town past: a town that is carved out of the rock, itself a kind of tomb.

“Huh,” Mookie says, the two of them standing bathed in the light of a couple dusty old lanterns lit with the glow of some phosphorescent fungus smeared on the inside of the glass. He taps one of the lanterns. “Nora and I used to chase fireflies on the front lawn when she was little. I showed her that if you smushed their glowy butts it’d keep on glowing even after you smeared it on your cheeks. She cried for the little fireflies.”

To this, Skelly says nothing. That sad look on his face. She wants to say, “Times have changed,” because Nora’s not the type anymore to cry over a little lightning bug. But she doesn’t. She just kicks a stone with her heel.

Mookie then asks: “You ever been here before?”

Skelly gives it a look, shakes her head. “Heard of it. But no.”

Above their heads, bats rustle wings, clinging to dark tree roots pushing through earth and stone.

“You don’t have to be here.”

She smirks. “And yet, here I am.”

“Couple hours ago you were thinkin’ on cutting me open from nuts to nose.”

“Pssh. I wouldn’t have done it.”

“Maybe not. But you still don’t want to be here.”

She winds her fingers around a femur, stares through the gap. “No, I don’t. Maybe you need someone to keep you safe.”

“Maybe you need me to keep you safe.”

At that, she smiles, and winks.

He continues: “Hell. Maybe this is a trap. Maybe you’re just doing what Nora wants. You come at me…”