The pendulum swings and clicks behind her voice. “But a sudden death brought on by a person’s own will, of their own autonomy? It’s complicated. It could outglitch the glitch. Say the person’s suicide is driven by low self-esteem or hopelessness. Well, I’d expect that person to loop. To feel a loss of control that carries over into the Divide.

“But! Say the person harms themselves as a means of harming others—to make their loved ones mourn for them, or to make someone pay. Well, they’d cross the realm motivated by vengeance.”

“And the vengeance would . . . tether them to the living world.”

“Vengeance tends to tether you to things you’re meant to forget. A spirit like the one you’re describing could very well have calculated the circumstances of its own death long before Death itself had time to catch up.”

The dead roses hanging upside down from the corners keep reminding me of Sawyer’s aura. The bleeding, decaying continuum of red. And the wraiths, jumping out in visions of black. Birds and wasps.

I rush to the bookshelf, snatch up a deck of wraith cards, and spill them out on the table.

“By all means.” Josette sits across from me.

I spread around the cards and survey the inkblots of animals with their descriptions underneath.

Spider

the curdling isolation of neglect unfurls inside you like eight legs

Hawk

you foresee a perceptive foe with a wise and deadly presence

Wasp

you may become a victim of someone’s misdirected vengeance

“Wraiths,” Ms. Josette says. “The most phony of the phony things you might ever see.”

“So, they’re not real?” I ask. “They’re really just projections?”

“Projections by the ghost, exacerbated by your own fear. It’s what the experienced haunter will use to frighten you into a state of anxiety so that it can use that anxiety to frighten you even more.”

There was something else I saw—like a demon of ash, running from and back into his body. “Is there one of these for, like, a demon figure?”

Ms. Josette flicks her wrist, and a vortex of ecto-mist separates the cards into a perfect circle, leaving one in the center. “Derelict.”

I snatch the card off the table and study the hunched, emaciated figure.

Derelict

you fear your body will soon be taken from you

“Would a ghost who projects this want to possess my body?” I ask.