Every Christmas, Judas Iscariot is let out of Hell. Most people never leave, not even once, and they did not betray Our Lord and Savior to his agonizing if necessary death, so you might not expect him to get special treatment. In fact, Judas leaves Hell on a regular basis. As this infamous man told St. Brendan the Navigator, that night long long ago when the saint and his companions came across him on a frozen sea, he is released from Hell on Sundays, for the twelve days of Christmas, and a couple additional feast days beside.

The demons do not wonder over his privileges. They assume that this freedom is merely one more exquisite punishment. They are half right, which is the same thing as being all wrong. Demons don’t know anything.

For hundreds of years, Judas visits that rock in the middle of the sea and looks up at the stars whenever it’s time to go. That he might go other places does not occur to Judas. After Hell, as he’d assured St. Brendan, the rock in the middle of the ocean is…

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I didn’t want to be cleansed. Things were fine as they were. I could feel death inside me, smooth as an egg. I knew what it was. In the Gospels Christ says, if a man is rid of one demon, he’ll just end up with seven more. I didn’t need seven. I only needed one.

Everything looks different with a ghost inside you. Even the air and the light. Nothing weighed anything. It all swayed at the slightest provocation. Every tree was seaweed. I moved slowly, because I no longer belonged where I was. Not where I was going, not where I came from. Not that you are trying terribly hard, but I don’t think you could understand. You have only lived with the living, only breathed air. There is so much more of death. There’s a gap in you. Just the right size for an egg.

You, though. You’ll never find one.

I know what you want. You want me to tell you how it happened, in the hope that, by accident, I’ll tell you something else along the way. I got lost in a cave. Not many people like caves, I’ll admit. They…

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Herbert hadn’t meant to do it, was his argument. There was no way to know that out of all the things that could have mattered, “not returning a library book” would have been the snag that kept him out of the afterlife. Surely everybody forgot those things sometimes. It wasn’t like he hadn’t returned it on purpose, or at least, not at first. OK, yes, when the library told him he was banned from the premises until he either returned the library book or paid to replace it, it’s true, he didn’t handle it all that well. Did he say “I have no recollection of even checking it out” on the phone while looking directly at the unopened book that was sitting on his coffee table—sure. And did Herbert, after that call, take some steps that were, in retrospect, more extreme than the situation really called for? Maybe.

But Herbert had been provoked. He’d reacted the way anybody would. It wasn’t like he couldn’t afford to pay, he explained to the angel. It was just the principle of the thing.

“What prin…

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Every girl at St. Monica’s wanted a friend who had been assigned to Vernon Hall, but nobody wanted to live there. A month before the end of each school year, when the new housing assignments came down, the girls were in silent agony as they received their envelopes. They slid their french-tipped fingernails under the seal, they bit their glossy lips, they braced themselves. A few had even been known to pray: it was known that the Director of Student Services listened to no appeals, but perhaps God was different. (Despite its name, St. Monica’s was not, and had never been, a religious school.) For Vernon Hall was the dormitory with St. Monica’s only ghost.

Twenty years ago, every dormitory at St. Monica’s had had a ghost and Vernon Hall had not been special. You would have been hard pressed to find a school, a hotel, a hospital, or even a gym that didn’t have at least one ghost. If you went back forty years before that, you would have found a world in which ghosts were not thought to be real at all. Those who claimed to see them were considered either crazy or attention-seeking. The ghosts had always been there, but most people couldn’t see them.

But then a contractor for the government, while trying to synthesize an ingredient from ultra-violent light that could be used to give enemies of the state cancer, stumbled on what the press and the market termed “Vitamin X.” Vitamin X, which was not actually a vitamin, could preserve and even restore vision if ingested daily. Goodbye glasses; goodbye contacts. So after testing confirmed that it was safe for people to take, it was added, like fluoride, to the water supply. Ghosts, as it was later discovered, hate laboratories and testing facilities of all sorts. Even the ghosts of scientist hate them. (Things must look different from the other side.) And so one particular side effect had not been uncovered during trials. Vitamin X did not simply preserve vision. You could see things you could not see before. Like ghosts.

What were the ghosts? Were they the dead themselves, or mere psychic imprints? No one knew, and the ghosts weren’t saying. Aside from seeking their help in investigating murders, a task at which ghosts were invariably a help, trying to communicate with them was quickly given up. Some ghosts seemed to be free agents: they could go anywhere they liked. Others were stuck in one spot. Particularly in art museums, there were so many ghosts that the effect was one of walking through a hazy, smoke–filled room. The museums did not appreciate these unreal, if devoted, patrons. There might indeed be something romantic about looking at a Holbein through the haze of the countless dead, one of whom might even be—who knew?—St. Thomas More himself. But it was bad for business. “As touching as it is that ghosts love art,” said one director of the Frick Collection, after yet another failed exorcism, this one involving holy water firehoses, “they don’t pay for the privilege.”

To his (no doubt, given the certainty he now possessed of the afterlife, eternal) chagrin, however, the secret to getting rid of ghosts would not be discovered at the Frick, but at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And all because the Met cost less to visit. Because twenty years ago, a young man was looking at the rooms in the American Wing of the Met. He enjoyed looking at fine furniture, but, as a graduate of a program in psychotherapy, he could not find a job and he had little hope of ever buying a nice sofa for himself, let alone a period piece.

In those days, the social and professional consensus was in favor of what was then called mechanized therapy, which consisted of conversations with chat programs which offered solutions that could be employed by anybody. Mechanized therapy was not very helpful, but it was cheap, and, as its proponents liked to point out, talking cures were also not very helpful, but they were expensive. The young man knew his choice to go into psychotherapy was very impractical, but like all young people who enter into impractical professions, he assumed that he would be the exception.

So as the young man wandered into the Verplanck Room, wondering if perhaps he should enter into a more lucrative and stable field, like book publishing, when he saw a weeping lady hovering one inch above the yellow couch. And even though everybody knew that talking to ghosts was a waste of time, the sight of a sad woman adjacent to a couch stirred his professional training, and he asked her, “Why are you crying?”

“Oh,” said the ghost, weeping. “I worked all my life as a maid in the homes of the wealthy, surrounded by their beautiful things. But my own life was so small and dirty. One day, I stole a little china dog. They didn’t really love their beautiful things, and it was so small…. But of course they knew. They never charged me, simply fired me and refused to provide a reference. In the end I pawned the little dog. I never had anything beautiful that was my own except that dog and even that, I couldn’t keep.…”

“That sounds very hard,” said the young man. “Is that why you came here?”

“I suppose it is,” said the lady.

“To have beautiful things of your own?”

“Yes,” said the lady. “But you know, even here, I can’t touch the things. They aren’t really mine. If I think about it, I’m just going through the same pain that made my life so hard, because it’s familiar.” Then her mouth made an “oh!” of recognition, and—

She vanished.

That was the discovery that made the young man very famous and very rich: talk therapy, while only sometimes helpful for living people, was incredibly effective when it came to ghosts. Soon, there were almost no ghosts left. Their lingering issues were located, discussed, resolved. Even living people began to undergo talk therapy again as a preventative measure.

For there to be almost no ghosts, however, there must be a few ghosts.

Such as Emily, of Vernon Hall.

Emily had been at Vernon Hall for such a long time that some people suspected she predated the building. There were no clues on her to give even an estimated year of death, for she always appeared in the St. Monica school uniform. Emily was five feet tall and eternally sixteen; she had fine dark hair and bugged-out eyes. She also had a knife stuck in her back. The knife had been stuck into her so thoroughly that the point jutted out her front. She dripped blood wherever she went. The girls of Vernon Hall could hear Emily howling through the night: it hurts, it hurts, it hurts.

The rest of St. Monica’s posed little trouble. Sinclair Hall’s Berenice, who had poisoned herself for love, moved on when she learned how to locate her self-worth outside of romantic relationships. Jackson Hall’s Katy Anne, who had keeled over from an aneurysm, required only a single session (no one had explained to her that she had died). And though she was sorely missed, for she had been a real character, Jill of Radcliffe Hall, along with the ten other girls she’d murdered after she’d failed her exams, ascended once they’d all had a chance to talk it out. Building by building, St. Monica shed its ghosts.

Only Emily remained. It seemed incredible, but there she was. How hard could it really be (as each therapist hired after the failure of the last privately believed) to sort out one girl’s residual trauma? That no one had yet done it was only a sign that the demand for therapists had lowered standards.

When, one after the other, they came to exorcise Emily, she would cease her crying and listen to them politely. When they explained to her that she had been dead for some time and that she could not expect closure as to her death and that closure was an illusion in any case, Emily would reply that she knew who killed her and felt that justice had been done. She had no unfinished business. One by one, the therapists would seize upon the obvious solution: all Emily had to do to pass over to the other side was to take out the knife. The knife kept her here, pinned to this world, and in some more mysterious way, to Vernon Hall itself.

Emily already knew all that.

“I like the knife,” she said to the therapists.

“No you don’t,” cried therapist after therapist in exasperation. “You float in the shower screaming it hurts while the students are trying to get ready for the day. You can’t possibly like the knife.”

“Well,” said Emily, simplicity itself, “that’s because it does hurt.”

“Okay, okay. You like the knife,” the therapists said, each one thinking the maybe the ones before had not gotten this far. “The knife is what you know. And you don’t know what the other side is like. So you cling to the knife, even though it hurts you, because it’s familiar. But if you let go….”

“I know that,” said Emily. “But why shouldn’t I cling to the knife, if I want to?”

“It’s bad for you,” said the therapists.

“How can it be bad for me?” asked Emily. “I’m dead.”

And so, while, as we said before, nobody really wanted to live in Vernon Hall and deal with the reality of Emily sobbing and howling and bleeding everywhere, with the bad nights when no one could sleep and the worse days of coming back from class to see she’d written “UR NEXT” on your fresh sheets in blood—every girl wanted an excuse to visit. After all, those sealed envelopes always informed a few girls that they were leaving Vernon Hall. Even though they made the obligatory cries of relief, the girls who found themselves moving out did feel, inevitably, a certain loss of distinction and status. A girl who lived in Vernon Hall could, if she played her cards right, be very popular.

Unless you were hopeless, hopeless, hopeless Mildred Burnes.

The name didn’t help.

She was hopeless, that was true. A non-starter, everybody agreed. It wasn’t only that Mildred didn’t know there were cards to play or even that there was a game to win or lose, but that Mildred barely seemed to notice the existence of other people. She certainly was unable to abstract from the individuals she could see to a social world with social rules. She was a scholarship student, but not for anything interesting, like field hockey, or arty, like Latin. Instead, Mildred had a scholarship for biology; she always smelled vaguely of formaldehyde. She aspired to become a forensic investigator, a career which the absence of ghosts had made relevant again.

And it was thanks to a childhood of reading books about crime scenes and practicing stabbing watermelons in her backyard that Mildred, upon moving into her room at Vernon, said something to Emily that nobody had ever said before.

“That knife wound,” said Mildred. “It’s self-inflicted.”

Emily, who had been doing her best “it hurts,” shut up immediately and stared at the new girl.

“I imagine,” said Mildred, in her odd nasal monotone, which was one of many reasons why she would fail, at St. Monica’s, to make a single living friend, “you wedged it up against something, then fell backward?”

“Yes,” said Emily. “Yes, I did.”

“Pretty good job,” said Mildred. “It must have hurt a lot.”

“To be honest,” said Emily, “it hurts more now. The shock meant I didn’t feel that much. Though it took a long time to die. I sort of wished I had taken poison or something beforehand.”

“Why did you do it?” asked Mildred.

“Well,” said Emily, “I wanted to be a ghost.”

“But you must not have known there were ghosts,” said Mildred, “whenever it was that you died. I mean, you’ve been here a long time, haven’t you?”

“It’s true—I didn’t know there were ghosts,” said Emily. “But I had a hunch. It seemed worth it to find out. And there were ghosts, after all.”

In some ways, little changed after this conversation. Emily was still howling up and down the radiator pipes and writing poems in blood on the walls. The other girls in Vernon could still count on Emily to scare them in the shower. Vernon retained its social cachet. But Emily came to the shower and did the rest of her haunting at much more predictable times; if Mildred was busy, Emily was active. Otherwise, she spent her time in Mildred’s room. As long as she didn’t keep Mildred up late, interfere with her studies, or bleed all over her things, Mildred didn’t mind Emily’s presence. They would sit in her room and talk and sometimes they’d play games that didn’t require Emily to touch the pieces. (Cards were a failure.) As Emily’s preference for Mildred became more pronounced, however, others at the school began to suffer its effects. If a girl who had made the mistake of bullying Mildred so much as set foot in Vernon, Emily would make her as miserable as possible. The very ceilings would rain blood on such an unfortunate girl—and that was the only beginning.

Then summer vacation came. Emily was alone. Now she was crying every day with a new and much more primal intensity. The janitor wouldn’t even enter the building.

“It hurts,” said Emily. “It hurts.”

She didn’t mean the knife.

When Mildred came back for her sophomore year—there was no question, that year or any other year, that she’d be assigned to a place that was not Vernon Hall—Emily had put together what she considered to be a foolproof plan.

“You need to kill yourself,” she told Mildred.

“No,” said Mildred, who had expected this.

“But,” said Emily, “I love you. You’re the only person I’ve ever loved. We can be ghosts together.”

“No,” said Mildred. “I don’t want to be a ghost. I want to be a forensic investigator. I can be a ghost later.”

“But why?” said Emily. “Being alive is terrible. The girls here are shallow and mean and when you grow up and graduate that’s what the whole world is going to be full of them. That’s the world. And who knows if forensic investigation will even come back? Your parents made the same bet on ‘Mildred.’”

“That’s all true,” said Mildred. “Being alive is hard. And the girls are mean. And I might never get a job. But it’s like how you love your knife even though it hurts. I want to be alive, even if it hurts, so I can see what happens.”

“But,” wailed Emily, “when you graduate and leave, I’ll be all alone. Also, you didn’t say you loved me too, and that’s a little hurtful.”

“Of course I do,” said Mildred, whose belief that one ought not verbalize what she considered to be obvious facts was another reason she did not make a single living friend at St Monica’s. “Don’t worry. I’ll think of a solution.”

Sophomore year came and went. Junior year came and went. Every summer, Emily felt worse. And then Mildred came back to her room one day in a cap and gown. She had graduated. Emily was curled up in a ball and floating on the ceiling.

“Emily,” said Mildred. “I have a solution.”

Emily uncurled.

“You need to let me take the knife,” said Mildred. “You can only move on if you take out the knife, right? Not if I take out the knife. If I take out the knife, then I’ll take it with me wherever I go. We’ll always be together. I think. In theory.”

“Do you promise?” asked Emily, not coming down from the ceiling.

“No,” said Mildred. “How can I? Nobody’s ever tried this before. Everybody wants to get rid of ghosts, not keep them.”

“You have to promise me something,” said Emily. “One thing. There has to be something you can promise to do.”

Mildred thought carefully about this.

“What I will promise you,” she said, eventually, “is that I’ll never get rid of the knife. No matter what happens, or how weird people think it is. I’ll always keep the knife. I might leave it at home, or put it in a checked bag at the airport, but whenever I can bring it with me places, I will. Even if I never see you again, I will keep the knife. And when I am done with my life, I will come over to you.”

“Okay,” said Emily. She came down. Mildred pulled out the knife and Emily vanished. Mildred wrapped the knife up carefully and put it in her backpack. Then she packed up the rest of her things and left St. Monica’s.

And for the rest of her life, she never did see Emily again.

People did think the knife was weird. More precisely, they thought it was disgusting. After decades or even centuries of being stuck in Emily, the blade had become a nasty color. With her first paycheck, Mildred bought it a leather sheath. Upon being placed in it, the knife sliced the sheath right through.

“Okay,” said Mildred. “But you can’t cut up my things.”

The knife, no matter how it jostled in her bag, did not cut up her things.

Mildred steadily ascended in the profession of forensic investigation. As her reputation for being unfriendly and cold, but hypercompetent, grew, people began to assume that the knife possessed some professional importance to her—a relic from her first crime scene, perhaps. Mildred did not correct them. Aside from catching serial killers for the FBI, she minded her own business. And in a sense, the speculations weren’t wrong. She had a particular genius, everyone acknowledged, for detecting self-inflicted wounds. Had she found Emily out thanks to that talent, or had she developed the talent because she found Emily out? She wasn’t sure and had no one to ask. Or maybe it was Emily’s contribution, not her own.

Years turned into decades. Mildred continued at her chosen profession until the day a tremor in her hands told her she could no longer trust them with sensitive work. She retired. She went to a lawyer and made her will, in which she established a scholarship for scientifically-minded girls at St. Monica’s. Mildred had lived very simply and she had a lot of money to dedicate toward such an effort. After her last meeting with the lawyer, she went to her home. She cleaned it thoroughly, organized her possessions, and methodically began to throw away the perishable food. She wrote out a note.

Then she took the knife out of her bedroom, where she usually kept it, and placed it on her kitchen table.

“Emily,” she said.

There was silence.

“Emily, Emily… I can’t trust my hands.” Mildred looked down at the knife. “Emily—I kept my promise. Help me.”

Silence.

With exasperation, Mildred said: “Emily!”

The knife moved… a little.

“Do I need to say it?” asked Mildred. There was no answer.

So she did.

After all, she’d never really said it, not even back then.

After the body was found, Mildred proved to have left behind a puzzle for her chosen profession. It was plain, from everything she’d done, from the meetings with the lawyer and the note and the way she’d left her home, that Mildred must have methodically planned her own death. Only her fingerprints were on the knife. There were no traces of another person in the apartment. She had to have stabbed herself.

And yet every investigator agreed that the wound could not have been inflicted by Mildred. It could only have come from somebody else. It was physically impossible for her to have stabbed herself.

For years, the case was presented as a puzzle to new students of forensics, in case a fresh young mind noticed something previously overlooked. Every year, young forensics students dreamed of being the genius who put together the clues. And every year, none of them ever found a solution.

None of them ever would.

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The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results, but I can’t tell which one of us is crazy. I'm not even sure which one of us is dead.

But one of us has to be.

Here we are, walking down the street. Easy breezy early spring day. I’m a little underdressed for the weather, it seems, because I rub my hands up and down my arms and say “brr.” You know, I think it’s you. You’re crazy.… Does that mean I’m dead?

You say: “Would you like my jacket?”

I say: “No, then we'll both get cold.”

BZZZZ. Rewind.

Here we are, walking down the street. Easy breezy early spring day.…

Did we ever even have this conversation? Is it even possible something like this exchange, which says nothing at all, could've bothered you so much? We’ve walked down this street at least forty times. Every time it starts I resolve to break the pattern somehow. Say something new. Unexpected.

(“Brr.”)

But then, why should I be the one to break the pattern? This is your dera…

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When the train went off the tracks, nobody really thought about the bear. They were busy thinking about other things, like dying. Of course, the monkeys were making a ruckus, so people thought about them. The bear had always been quiet and so even its silence didn’t really stand out. It was only after all the monkeys were dead and the fire department picked through the wreckage that the question of the bear arose. By then, however, it was gone.

If, a moment before the wreck, you’d asked the bear if it was happy or sad, the bear would not really have known the answer. Officially, it was Gloria, the Dancing Bear, and its life before the circus was a distant memory of green shade and misty cold. Sometimes the bear dreamed about these things, but mostly, the bear did not dream. It just did what it was told. The rest of the time, it sat in a cage. Had it been given time, the bear would not, probably, have described its situation in these terms, but the truth was that being a dancing bear in a traveling circus meant being the attraction people settled for when they couldn’t get lions. You could see a bear any time and everybody knew the bear couldn’t really dance.

So the bear did its job and it didn’t cause trouble and it was not happy and it was not sad. It just got through each day. It didn’t want a different life because it would have had to imagine a different life and living as it did it simply did not even consider imagining anything. That was how it was before the wreck. But then the train was on its side and the cage had burst open. At first the bear just sat there, but finally, not knowing what else to do, it walked out. As it emerged past the smoke and the screaming, the bear saw—

Green.

The bear gazed in what might have been wonder. Then, tentatively, it took a step toward the woods. A voice from above said: “Just wait here, they’ll come to fetch us.” That was one of the monkeys, up in the trees. The bear, however, took another step. One step, then another. One step, then another. One step, then another, and then there was only a world of green shade. As if there had never been anything else.

“Stupid bear,” said the monkeys. “But what can you expect? It’s only an Ursidae. Not like one of us.”

Now wait—I can hear you saying. Didn’t you say the monkeys all died? They did die. They were shot down out of the trees. There wasn’t enough time to try to coax them down and they were too dangerous to let roam free. Maybe a monkey or two lived because it went off into the forest too. You can think that if you prefer. As far as I’m concerned, though, they all died. Good riddance.

In any case, this story is not about the monkeys. And unlike the monkeys, which had each other and strong sense of pride, the bear had no real sense of being a bear. It had always been the only bear. It ate what it was fed, but it didn’t catch anything.

In the woods, it sensed that it was not going to be that way. The price of living in this dream world was looking after itself. But how? It longed to climb trees, but its claws, front and back, had been clipped to stubs. It tried to catch things to eat, but the clever woodland animals easily escaped, and the bear, having not been raised by other bears, did not know that it could also eat plants if it wanted. In the circus it had just been fed meat. The bear had a lot to learn, but mostly, now the bear was sad. It understood that somehow it fit into these woods, or at least that it could have, but that now, this would never happen. It couldn’t live anywhere except a cage. And though it, having seen this world of woods, did not want to go back to its cage, it also couldn’t. The cage was gone and there wouldn’t be another one.

The bear wandered and wandered through the woods, until it came to a clear blue stream. It laid down alongside the water and felt the misty spray on its muzzle. It looked at the green grass and listened to the water. It closed its eyes and it died.

Then the bear opened its eyes again and sat up. Sitting on the other edge of the stream was a white rabbit.

“I don’t think,” said the bear, slowly, “that I’m supposed to be here.” It looked down at its slumped body. A fly landed on the nose.

“Well,” said the rabbit. “You’re here.”

“But I’m dead,” said the bear.

“We’re all dead,” said the rabbit irritably. “Well, the two of us are dead.” It twitched its nose, and began to explain. “I belonged to a magician. But one day he wasn’t careful in locking my cage and I hopped off. I’m not sure I really meant to leave. I just hopped and then I didn’t know how to hop back. And it’s no good being a white rabbit in a forest, I can tell you. I got eaten two days in. In retrospect, honestly, I’m surprised it took that long.”

The bear said: “I’m not trying to be stupid, but I don’t understand.”

“I know,” said the rabbit. It groomed its whiskers thoughtfully. “It’s like this. Some animals belong to the woods and some belong to people. When they die, they just move on. But animals like you and me are different. Nobody loved us, so we didn’t belong to a person. We couldn’t be wild either. So we get… a window.”

“A window,” said the bear.

“Look at your paws,” said the rabbit. “Don’t you see? Look.”

The bear looked. Growing out of its paws now was a set of sharp and perfect claws.

“We never really got a life,” said the rabbit. “So now you get to have one until the next one comes. Then you’ll explain, like I’m explaining to you. And then you’ll move on.”

“Move on to what?” asked the bear.

“Nobody knows,” said the rabbit. “Not even people.”

“Am I—real?” asked the bear.

“You are as real as you want to be,” said the rabbit.

“Do you have to go?” asked the bear, suddenly anxious.

“Yes,” said the rabbit. And it was gone.

The bear sat by the stream, running its tongue over its teeth. It looked at the dead body on the grass as flies kept landing on it. Then it shook itself and began to walk toward the nearest tree. It was time, at long last, to climb.

After the train crash, rumors of a runaway bear lured many teenagers into the woods. They dared each other to find the bear, or they just went there in the hope of finding it and somehow proving themselves. They never found it; they didn’t even find its bleached white bones. In truth, they were mostly pretty drunk when they went out into the woods and it was only luck that kept them from running into any bears at all. Decades went by and the teens kept daring each other to go into the woods, even though at this point everybody knew the bear would have died of a ripe old age. Did you know there’s a dancing bear in the woods? If you find it—

If you find it—

Nobody knew what would happen.

But it’s true. There is the ghost of a dancing bear out there in the woods. It has waited a long time for its successor, but so far, it’s just the bear. It climbs every tree, it catches fish in its claws and feels the twitch and bursting of their bodies in its mouth. It eats berries and it lies in the sun and in the winter, because it is a ghost, it doesn’t hibernate. It makes snow angels and enjoys looking up at the stars, unobscured by the leaves. The bear likes to think about the stars and it has on its own, over the years, discerned the existence of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. It thinks that perhaps that’s where it will go when it does move on. It thinks the rabbit went to the moon.

And when the moon is full, the bear gets up on its hind legs and it dances. Really dances, I mean. You see, there is a music the full moon and the stars make together that only bears can hear. In fact, if people understood this truth about bears, a dancing bear would become an extraordinary thing to see, since, after all, you could only see it once a month. People would pay lots of money to see real dancing bears. Bears, however—very wisely, in my opinion—never let on. And this bear couldn’t hear the music at the circus because it was always shut away and you can only hear it if you’re free and under the open sky. But now it can.

And if a particularly lucky teenager ever found the dancing bear on the night of the full moon, they would see its furry and ungainly body transformed into something that touched the earth as lightly as the lightest ballerina, but with all the power of the muscles it has built through year after year of its new life. The teenager would watch as the bear leapt and spun and swayed. And that teenager would never tell a soul because when you see something like that, you know that it deserves the honor of your silence. (Teenagers understand this; in their way, they are not unlike bears.) Maybe sometimes, that person would go back in hopes of seeing the bear again. But if anybody ever saw it, they never saw it more than once. That’s how it is with beautiful things.

For the bear, every day is glorious, every night is beautiful, and every full moon, it dances. It dances and dances. One day it will go to the place where bears go and dance with its fellow kind, but for now, alone, it dances. In the freedom and the glory of its body, its coat, its teeth, its claws, it lifts its nose to the moon. And it dances.

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You can know where something was, but you can’t know where it is. You don’t know anything, until you look, but then when you look, you only know the past. That was a rule, right? Some German guy.… Hindenburg, maybe. It doesn’t matter. I’ve just been trying to remember. I felt like you’d remember. You always liked physics. It was funny when you became a lawyer.

Anyway, thanks for coming out. It feels like just yesterday we were graduating from high school. I’ve meant to keep in touch with you since your wedding, but of course it’s easier said than done. Me? No, I never did get hitched. It doesn’t really fit with my life, I guess. It’s easier being alone.

You’re right, I never mentioned what it is that I do. It’s a little hard to explain—do you know Vicki Jayne? Yeah, everybody knows Vicki.… She’s performing tonight, yeah. You get tickets? No, of course not. Those tickets were gone the moment they went up for sale. No chance for an average guy like you, even if you had the money. But I c…

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The first time Jen heard the cat, she was in the bathtub. The meow was plaintive and unmistakable. She put down her glass of wine and listened, but it did not meow again.

She did not have a cat. She had no sort of pet at all, never had, not even as a child. Her neighbors did not have cats. In her garden-level apartment, perhaps one might have thought the cat was outside on the street; but there was no window in the bathroom, no wall shared with the outside, such that passing cat could have made the sound. There was—in short—no possibility of a cat that day, or any other day. Nonetheless, she knew what she’d heard. It had been a cat.

If she’d told this story to her mother, her mother would have said: wasn’t it a pipe? These old buildings.… And maybe for her, it would have been a pipe. But one thing Jen would have said, in that conversation, if she’d been having it, which of course she was not, was that her building was not old. It was new construct…

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No matter what they say—no ghost respects a haunted doll. Every ghost knows it. Sure, sure, “every ghost is special in its own way,” that’s the kind of thing you hear. But ask a ghost to list hauntings it really admires, though, the kind of hauntings that might raise the bar for its own hopes and dreams—ask them those questions and pay attention. Or just say, who do you think is doing something interesting right now. You’ll never hear them mention a doll. It doesn’t happen.

Green ectoplasm billowing down the walls? That requires manifesting matter. Or take a simple, classic trick, like rearranging water droplets on a mirror to write out a message while your victim was showering. So many little details to attend to there (gender, military experience, ventilation of the room) that you might really only have a minute or two to get your words up, and then, naturally, you had to maintain it, keeping your letters strictly clear of droplets. That…

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She saw them the first time she stepped through the door: the ex-girlfriends. They slid down the walls of his home, leaving trails of—what? ectoplasm, was that it?—behind them. They smiled at her with translucent gelatinous smiles. They were not jealous. They welcomed her as a sister. She was not jealous either—that was impossible, frankly, after all, they were dead and she was alive—but it was hard not to lift up her shoes with each step and shake them out, as if there were gummy traces of ex-girlfriend stuck onto the soles.

She let him take off her coat, hang it up, uncork the bottle of white wine she’d brought with her. It was plain she’d made the wrong choice, but he was going to be a good sport about it, even if the ex-girlfriends were not. He likes a nice Merlot, gurgled one of the ex-girlfriends, crawling down the refrigerator. You should remember that.

Really, said another, burbling at her feet, a white wine? Terrible choice.

One thing that was hard to ignore about the ex-girlfriends: they’d been chopped up. Their faces were split down the middle; their heads were barely attached to their necks; their arms would pop off their shoulders. She knew, then, though she would naturally have denied it. Did deny it, later, to the police. I had no idea (she would, did, say). No idea. She could hardly have said to them: I knew when I saw the ghosts.

Or maybe she could have said it. It wasn’t as if they really needed her to be a reliable witness: they’d found all the bodies. So she saw ghosts, so she was crazy—it didn’t make much of a difference when it came to the legalities. But it was bad enough to be a serial killer’s ex-girlfriend, you didn’t need to be a public lunatic, too.

And then, it was bad—it looked bad—if she knew and kept seeing him anyway. She was aware. That first night, in bed, their dead fish eyes watching from the walls, their clammy hands trying to guide her. She was aware. The glug-glug of their voices telling her what he liked, didn’t like. She was aware. She didn’t leave. It wasn’t like they’d be any less dead.

And anyway, they didn’t mind.

He lived in a little house—one floor, two bedrooms—in a part of the county that was isolated without quite feeling rural. Well water, a generator for electricity. He knew how to fix things. (“I’m not a prepper,” he said defensively. “Things just break down out here.”) Poor cell phone reception, questionable internet service. (She supposed that was a professional help.) He had no pets, but he did have six orchids, which he monitored with careful precision.

In the kitchen, there was a door that led to the basement, which he never opened, or even really acknowledged as existing at all. On it hung a whiteboard, always featuring a crisp to-do list. He was meticulously clean; even the whiteboard was pristine, holding no traces of whatever it was he had written on there before. She, too, did not acknowledge the door. It wasn’t her business.

Because they had been dismembered so completely, it was hard to tell how many of ex-girlfriends there had been. Sometimes, as when she’d first arrived, the ex-girlfriends pulled themselves together, but other times it was just a haze of limbs and viscera. Trying to count how many pairs of eyeballs were rolling around on the floor, she felt it could have been just two ex girlfriends or it could have been seventeen. She supposed none of his relationships lasted all that long. There could have been a lot of them. She felt there were enough that he wasn’t pining after some lost Lenore. There was no all-important ex-girlfriend. He just hadn’t found the right person. Well, neither had she.

There was no sounding him out; he was reticent about the past, though in a gentlemanly fashion. He never alluded to having an ex that was crazy, for instance. She liked that about him. She’d always maintained one shouldn’t date a man who badmouthed his exes. How he talks about them is how he talks about you. It was obvious he had been a good boyfriend from how fond the ex-girlfriends were of him. And then, in more traditional ways, he was a desirable catch. He had a good job, he stayed fit. He had long and sensitive fingers, deep brown eyes, a soft gentle voice. She never saw him get angry—not once—not even in court.

His mother was dead, he’d said. She had wondered idly if his mother was dead of natural causes or if he’d killed her (wasn’t that usually the way?) but she didn’t pry. Actually, as she’d discover months later, his mother was alive, well, and doted on by her son—a terrible thing to learn, as she’d never put him down for a liar.

“What’s hard about relationships,” he said in their early evenings together, “is you just need—space. You know?” He looked around his well-appointed room, its dust-free surfaces, its carefully preserved old furniture. Because the internet connection was so unreliable, his life was largely lived on an analog scale: vinyl for music, discs for movies. She teased him once about his lack of a typewriter, but he said he preferred the way a word processor simply made your mistakes disappear—no trash—just gone. “I guess that’s what happens when you’ve been single for a long time” (he went on) “you just get used to your life being a certain way. You don’t like the thought of somebody coming along, looking over your shoulder, fidgeting with things.”

“Oh I know,” she said. “I always thought the ideal would be side-by-side houses, like Tim Burton—”

“—and Helena Bonham Carter,” he said, smiling.

Around them, a great croaking chorus of approval. By now, she’d become expert at acting as if they were not there, at continuing to drink the wine when an ear bobbed up, eat the lasagna even when it contained a ghostly finger. When, watching a movie, she felt his hand slide up under the back of her sweater, she could tune out the chorus of advice on the next move.

Later, once their bodies were pieced back together, it turned out there were six ex-girlfriends, one for each orchid, but none of them were quite complete. Had he eaten those pieces? Had some rat borne them away? Buried them in the orchid-pots? (They must have checked.) She never found out. The only thing she was quite sure of, those nights she spent with him, was that he did not know the ex-girlfriends were there. He wouldn’t have been able to stand it for a moment, watching them leave their slime trails, that he could not clean because they were not, on everything he loved. It made her feel protective and loving, the way you feel when you tell somebody there’s spinach in their teeth. He would never know. He would never need to know.

When he went away and asked her to look after the orchids, she knew it meant trouble. It was not just that the orchids were fussy and delicate flowers. She could tell it was a test of some sort. This, she did not appreciate. They were both adults—it was childish. Did “no games,” written on a dating profile, mean nothing? She kept these thoughts to herself, however. He gave her the keys and explained what they opened.

Then he tapped one and said, in a surprisingly high, tight voice: “This opens the basement door. But don’t go down there.”

“OK,” she said.

“Don’t” (he stressed) “go down there. It’s private.”

“OK,” she said.

And she didn’t.

Gurgle gurgle: you should open the door, said the ex-girlfriends. He wants you to open the door.

“I won’t,” she said. Now that he’d gone, she felt they could have a frank conversation.

He’s going to be so disappointed, they burbled and croaked. You don’t understand him.

“I don’t want to open it,” she said.

Well, we warned you.

He came back a day early, surprised her, took the keys, looked at them for a long time. He said, in a strange voice—“You didn’t go in the basement.”

“I thought you didn’t want me to,” she said.

“I didn’t,” he said. “It’s just, well—” He stopped speaking for a moment. A month later, he went on another trip. Once again, his ring of keys; once again, a stern injunction, not to open the basement door.

Now you see (said the ex-girlfriends) you see he really wants you to open the door.

“He can open it for me himself,” she said, “if he cares that much.”

Look (said the ex-girlfriends) it’s like this: he wants you to care about what’s behind the door. If there’s something really important to him that he has locked up, he wants you to care about what it is. You’re really hurting his feelings very badly by not opening the door.

“Isn’t the only thing down there—you?”

Well, they said. Yes. And if you open it of course he’ll kill you and you’ll become one of us. You betrayed his trust by opening the door, after all. But it’s what he wants you to do. You know, for a psychic, you’re really very dense, emotionally speaking.

“I’m not a psychic,” she said, sulkily. “I can just see you. You’re the first ghosts I’ve ever seen.”

Are you afraid? It’s very nice, they said. He comes back and he’s so sweet to you. He feeds you something drugged and you just fall asleep…. You don’t even feel a thing. You’re dead by the time you wake up.

“It’s childish,” she said, “to act like this. Adults just say: this is important to me and I want to share it with you. I thought he was too grown up for these sorts of antics.”

Suit yourself. You’ll see.

After his third trip and unexpected early arrival, he began to show signs of exasperation. After the fourth, he was done.

“I think,” he said, “we should see other people.”

She thought about saying, I already see other people, but she knew he wouldn’t get it. Assembled behind him, the ex-girlfriends smiled their smug goopy smiles; she had proved herself unworthy of joining their number. There would be no commemorative orchid, no careful scrubbing of surfaces. She really would never have been, not simply hidden away. She accepted the break-up with minimal fuss and drove away. Once she got to the part of the road where the cell phone reception improved, she pulled over and looked up the phone number she would need to call in order to leave the police an anonymous tip.

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