The Ghost-Catcher

The Network doesn’t have an edge. That’s common knowledge. But most travelers know that the further you go, the stranger the towns get. Here’s one with a giant fossil ribcage arching over it. There’s one that’s clinging to the underside of an upside-down mountain. Now we find one where people only come out at night because the sunlight is dangerous.

There was a time, when I was younger, when I kept on traveling just to see how strange it would get. There’s always work for a ghost-catcher. Not all problems are caused by a ghost, but a lot of them are.

Someone asked me, once, why there are ghosts all along the Network, when everything else is different from town to town. I don’t have an answer for that. The Head of my order once explained it by saying, “A lot of things are broken,” and I think that may be the closest I can come. A lot of things are broken. Including life and death.

One night, after surrendering my collected ghosts to the Repository, I decided to ride the line east from there and just see where it took me. I went past those fossil towns and upside-down mountain towns and rotted, dying towns and newly started towns, and then, finally, the train stopped at a place I’d never seen before.

I got out. Looked around. The soil was sandy, and the town was downhill from me. It was just before dawn, and everything was quiet. Still, I knew that the trains don’t arrive during interdicted hours, in those towns that have them, so maybe everyone was just asleep. I shouldered my bag and walked down towards the town.

The train didn’t whistle as it pulled away. I wondered a little bit about it, but I wasn’t sure why.

And then I came over the crest of the hill, and I saw what I assumed was the Desert for this town, and it was—magnificent. Like a mirror. A vast, flat expanse of mirrored land—that’s what I thought.

I watched the sun rise, glimmering on the mirrored Desert, and that’s when an old man found me, much to both our surprises. “Hallo,” he said. “I didn’t know anyone was coming around today. Where are you from, then?”

“A lot of places,” I said. “What town is this?”

“This is Land’s End. Come on down into the town, we’ll find you a place to stay.”

So he did. There was a woman whose son had just married and moved out, and she had a spare room, decorated with pictures I didn’t understand and small curios on the dresser. I picked one up and asked what it was, but the woman said she didn’t really “know her shells” and I would have to ask her son when he came around. There didn’t seem to be any malice in the things, but they also didn’t seem to be important enough to tell me the correct way to handle them, like most charms.

“What are the rules?” I said.

“Well, breakfast is at seven, and it’s more or less what I feel like making. Lunch is at noon, and dinner is at six. Other than that, just—be a good guest? I don’t know, I’ve never had a houseguest before.”

“I meant the rules of the town, not your rules,” I said, “although I was going to ask about that next.”

“Just normal rules, really,” the woman said. “No stealing, no fighting, things like that. We have a town jail but there’s hardly ever anyone in it. Mrs. Mafry’s boy had to stay in a week after he broke Alby Cotter’s nose, but they figured they could let him out after the girl said she didn’t want either of them because they were both idiots, which I thought was fair. We haven’t had a real problem here since—oh, since Jayline Fancy’s husband blacked her eye, which was after several years of us telling her that he wasn’t treating her right, and she finally locked him out of the house and he got fighting mad and threatened her and the kid. We thought we were going to have to use the jail for real then. But he disappeared in the middle of the night, and I wouldn’t say anybody much missed him. And it saved us from figuring out what to do about him, which I suppose means it all ended well after all—although Jayline has never been quite the same, so wherever her no-good husband went to, I hope he’s having a horrible time. At any rate, just keep the peace, that’s good enough for us.”

I tried to absorb this flood of information. “Is it wise to ask what happens if you don’t keep the peace?”

“I just told you,” the woman said, confused, “there’s a town jail.”

Of course, that wasn’t what I was getting at, at all. A jail is just people. I wanted to know about the rules of the town, the time you mustn’t go out or the thing you mustn’t touch or whether they burn a person every year to keep the wrong things from getting them—I especially wanted to know about that last, because if a town can manage it, they’ll grab someone who came in on a train and not one of their own. I stopped in a town like that once, and caught the ghost that was demanding the sacrifice—and the next year they did it again, “just to be safe.” I don’t understand people sometimes.

“Oh, and the pistol,” the woman said. “It’s—probably not a good idea. I know you wouldn’t use it, or at least I hope you wouldn’t use it, but it would make people nervous, someone walking around armed like that. Do you mind?”

I thought long and hard about it, but she might be trying to tell me something that she couldn’t tell me directly, and at any rate I’d seen no armed people in the town at all. “Are there any children in the house?”

“No . . .”

“Then I don’t mind.” I took the pistol off and took the bullets out, and laid the pistol and the ammo both in the top drawer of the dresser. She saw me do it, but I decided I didn’t mind that much. When it comes to it, a ghost-catcher has other ways to kill people if she really sees a need.

So then I went out into the town, and it was—peculiar. I’m not sure to explain exactly how, but these people had a different mood about them than I’d ever seen.

And then my host took me down to the “docks,” and I found out I’d been wrong about the Desert.

It wasn’t a mirrored landscape.

It was water. An incredible expanse of it, out to the horizon.

It wasn’t still, either. It bumped and trembled and came to the shore in big waves that crumbled into white foam just before they hit.

One man was dangling a fishing pool over the edge of the water, just like you might do in a stream. I was told that was Old Engelhard, and that he boasted he had never gone a day without catching a fish, even now that he was in his nineties.

“Where does it become Desert?” I asked. For it seemed to me that the docks—wooden structures—extended out over the water, so the Desert couldn’t start there. No-one would be fool enough.

“Desert? It’s the ocean.” My host looked at me like most people would look at a madman.

“You probably call it something different here. A lot of places do. I’ve heard Bad Lands, Mad Lands—“ None of which were quite appropriate, since it wasn’t land out there at all. “Where does it change into something where directions don’t work, and the rules of nature don’t work, and if you stay out in it, you don’t work?” I realized I was being silly. “Never mind, I suppose it doesn’t matter. Nobody could swim in that stuff, so if the border isn’t very close to the town, you wouldn’t necessarily know.”

“Oh, the boats go out every day that the weather is fair. Fishing boats, you know?” I didn’t know. “I’ve never heard of anything like that. We must not have any of it around Land’s End.”

“You have to have some up that way, at least,” I said, pointing towards the other end of town, where I’d come from. I was still trying to sort out this ‘ocean’ in my head. All land turns into Desert sooner or later, but this wasn’t land, so . . . I wasn’t sure I knew how that would work.

My hostess shook her head slowly. “You go north far enough, you get to a town called Cranbury. You go west far enough, you hit the river that runs down to Cranbury Delta. The rules of nature work everywhere, or they wouldn’t be rules, just suggestions. We thought at first you might be from Cranbury, or one of the inland villages that we trade dried fish with, although people like that usually bring something to trade . . .” She trailed off, and I realized that she was a little bit afraid of me. And I realized, too, that was part of the different attitude I had sensed from the people in the town—none of them were afraid of me. None of them had taken a look at the bottles and wondered if I would let something out to terrorize the town, or how neatly I could stuff one of them inside if I annoyed them.

The people here didn’t know what a ghost-catcher looks like.

That wasn’t possible. Everyone has need of a ghost catcher sometime.

“The train I came in on didn’t stop at anyplace called Cranbury,” I said.

“What’s a train?”

I stared at her, and she stared at me, and neither of us knew what to say to each other.

Finally, we ended up walking up to the train tracks, as I tried to explain trains. And I noticed that these train tracks were somewhat brownish, with weeds growing amid the gravel, not shining like the train tracks I was used to.

“They say,” my hostess told me, “that Before Everything something called an Amtrak used to come along here. But it’s been hundreds of years since that. A lot of information was lost, you know, when everything went to pot.”

“When the world was broken,” I interpreted.

“Funny way to put it! The way I see it, the world wasn’t broken. We had a hard time of it. The world managed, one way or another. It being a lot bigger than us, and our troubles.” My hostess dismissed this remarkable statement as irrelevant. “Any road, it’s probably true that something used to run on this a long time ago, but it doesn’t now. You . . . didn’t say where you were from.”

“I’m beginning to seriously wonder,” I said, “how you get there from here, or the other way around.”

But I had no choice but to learn how to live in this town, since I didn’t know how long it would be until a train would come. I learned a lot about the place. I learned what a fishing boat is—a house-sized vehicle that goes out on the water, steering by the wind, to catch large numbers of fish for cooking and drying and trading. I learned about maps, which are drawn coded pictures that supposedly represent huge areas—accurately. I learned some of my host’s ideas about what happened hundreds of years ago, and they didn’t match my own in the slightest.

I thought at first that I would be most comfortable keeping company with their undertaker, for undertakers and ghost-catchers both deal with aspects of existence that people find morbid and terrifying. I was only half right. The undertaker was a man only a little younger than I am now, a placid soul who liked his long silences, and in that we were very compatible as friends. But his job was so much different than I had expected. There were no rules he had to follow. No dangers to come out of the grave at him. He had never dodged a ghost. He had never buried something that was begging him not to put it in a hole. He had never had a knock at the door in the middle of the night, begging him to put someone or something in the ground before the sun rose and it was too late.

About six weeks into my stay—for the train still did not come—Old Engelhard died. It was a normal enough death, as far as anyone could figure. The undertaker sighed and said he had been expecting it for a while now, which didn’t make it any better for the family of course, and he would have everything ready for the funeral on Saturday. I asked if they wanted me to check the room where it happened.

“Why would they want that?” the undertaker asked me. “It’s just a bedroom.”

“There might be a ghost.”

“That’s never happened that I’ve heard of. And even if it does happen, why would it happen to Old Engelhard? He lived a good life, as far as we can tell, and he didn’t have a lot of regrets. No. Don’t disturb the family any more than you have to. Pay your respects and deliver them a casserole so they don’t have to worry about cooking, and leave it at that.”

I took his advice, reluctantly. I will admit that I used the casserole—my hostess cooked it, because my own attempts at complicated cookery are generally more frightening than the ghosts I catch—I used the casserole to get into the Engelhard house, to see if I felt that distinctive chill. I didn’t. Old Engelhard was perfectly at rest.

Life went on. For lack of any ghost-hunting to do, I took up a job at the local pub, where my lack of cooking ability was not appreciated but my quelling effect on drunks very much was. It appears that when I tell people to go home and sleep it off, they’re inclined to do as I say, even if they don’t know what a ghost-catcher is.

I felt myself starting to untense, just a little. I still felt lost, and adrift, and bereft of the Network, for the train still did not come. But there was something soothing about Land’s End. I even came to appreciate the sound of the ocean waves coming in to the shore. I sat up late, some nights, and looked at the moonlight on the water, shining as if on a vast mirrored patch of Desert—but it wasn’t, it was something altogether stranger than Desert. It made a track that looked like train tracks seen through blurry vision, and sometimes I wanted to laugh, and sometimes I wanted to weep.

Ten weeks after I had come—ten weeks of the gentle rhythms of Land’s End, ten weeks of no ghosts in the dark—a man came in a horse-drawn cart. He had bags and bags of a tangy red berry, and it was explained to me that the town of Cranbury had sort of a pun for a name; they grew cranberries in the marshes there.

He had evidently traveled from one town to another, in the cart. Just like that.

I probably pressed him too much with questions, for I was soon gently drawn away. It just seemed so strange, and so uncanny, that a person could set off across a landscape and just go. More, that the people on the other end would be entirely sure that he was human when he got there, and treat him accordingly! It was too much. Too bizarre. I hid in my room for much of the day, and emerged only reluctantly.

“Sometimes,” my hostess told me gently, “things really aren’t trying to hurt you.”

I was coming to believe it, and that frightened me more than anything.

And then, one night, I heard a whistle far off in the distance, and I sat bolt upright, because I knew what it meant. It meant I had to choose.

I could stay at Land’s End.

I could stay where things really weren’t trying to hurt me.

Or I could go where I was useful, where I could feel the nearness of death and the exhilaration of being alive, where there were wrongs to make right.

I’m still not entirely sure why I chose what I chose.

But I left a note, a note saying, “Thank you. All of you,” on the dresser, and hoped that the people of Land’s End could somehow feel the gratitude that I didn’t know how to write, and I took my pistol out of the drawer, and put the bullets in it, and I put on my hat and walked up to the train tracks. They were gleaming in the moonlight, just as they should, and the train was sitting on them as shiny as new-minted silver, and the doors opened for me. I got on, the only one in my car, and after a while the doors closed and the train swept away.

The pause was longer than ever before someone managed to find their voice.

“I don’t believe that,” the Gambler managed finally.

The Ghost-catcher shrugged very slightly.

“I don’t! I don’t believe that. It doesn’t make any sense. Water out to the horizon? People—“ She swallowed. “People just going between towns? It doesn’t—it just doesn’t—“

“You have to admit,” the Medicine Seller said in conciliatory tones, “that it seems a very strange story indeed.” He sounded as if he were just as shaken by the surreal tale as everyone else in the car.

“Told you it was a bit of an odd one,” the Ghost-catcher said. She didn’t seem offended by the Gambler’s disbelief.

“Not odd,” the Preacher corrected. “Impossible.”

Another shrug. “If you like.”

“Not gonna stand up for your words?” That was the Gunslinger, with an edge to his voice.

“What’s the point? People think what they want to think.”

“And I think it’s rubbish!” The Gambler’s voice was too loud, and the Medicine Seller soothed her.

“Don’t suppose it matters much,” the Ghost-catcher said, “because I’m willing to bet it isn’t easy to get there. I more or less stumbled in, and then stumbled back out.”

“Don’t think much of the story,” the Gunslinger said. “Making stuff up is one thing. Making up obvious nonsense is something else. Ought to at least try to send a shiver down someone’s spine.”

The Kid thought that the story had successfully sent a shiver down the Gambler’s spine, at least, and he thought probably most of the others too, including himself. He felt a surge of admiration for the Gunslinger for being so unaffected.

“You didn’t tell a story last time,” the Ghost-catcher noted.

The Gunslinger lit another narrow cigar. “Don’t like talking much.”

“She’s got a point, you know,” the Medicine Seller hasted to say. He looked nervous. Caught between the Ghost-catcher and the Gunslinger, the Kid thought, both of them incredibly dangerous people—but of the two of them, the Ghost-catcher was surely more likely to destroy a person for disrespect, and he thought the Medicine Seller knew it. “If you don’t tell a story, you can’t really go around saying that someone else’s story is obvious nons—erm—never mind. Probably a silly thought.” He wilted under the Gunslinger’s considering gaze.

“Fair enough,” the Gunslinger said, after a long pause. “Maybe I do have a story.”

“We’d love to hear it!” the Medicine Seller said, with every evidence of enthusiasm.

“No,” the Gunslinger said. “You probably won’t.”