“This is absurd,” Margie said. She had the full heat of her volcanic stare directed at Lowell. He had already asked her three times to stop looking at him that way.
Ryan tried the ATM again. “Ryan Matney,” he attempted to say into the voice-activation microphone. But he couldn’t move the air the way he used to. Fine detail in sound was impossible in his incoherent state, and he could hardly get any volume at all. So the sound he produced was like a swarm of mosquitoes that had figured out how to work as a team and move the pitch of their whine faintly up and down.
The ATM buzzed negatively, a sound much more cohesive than anything Ryan could manage. “Please try again,” it said, as though he just needed a little encouragement and everything would be fine.
It was late, and there was very little traffic on the street. Living pedestrians had long since abandoned the night to the ghosts, who now seemed mildly annoyed at having someone here invading the time when they did some of their best glowing and flitting around. Some scowling 18th century farm hands leaned on their hoes and kept looking over Margie and Lowell’s shoulders at what Ryan was doing. Lowell had to keep giving them “you want to make something out of it?” looks.
“Ryan Matney,” Ryan said again, leaning in close to the microphone. He didn’t like how his head disconnected from the rest of him when he leaned like that. For a moment he couldn’t even find the rest of him, and his head was on its own. He located his torso a few feet to his left and had to float his head over to it and then drag the whole thing back.
“Please try again,” the ATM replied with the exact same encouraging tone.
“Let me do it,” Lowell said, stepping forward.
“You’re an ass,” Margie spat bitterly. “He may only have a few minutes left and you want to bill him?”
Ryan appreciated that she was outraged on his behalf, but he wasn’t actually mad at Lowell. At this point, moments away from annihilation, it gave him some small sense of satisfaction to honor a commitment and do something nice for someone. “It’s okay,” he said to Margie gently, concentrating hard to make himself understood. “I hired him. He helped. He deserves to get paid.”
“He deserves to get kicked in the teeth,” she muttered.
“It’s okay,” Ryan said. He chose whatever part of himself was most well defined at the moment—somewhere around his hip, he suspected—and pushed it into the softly glowing SES scanner on the side of the ATM. It was designed for ghosts to put their fingers in, but it would have to take what he could manage. He nodded at Lowell.
“Ryan Matney,” Lowell said.
The SES scanner brightened for a moment as it confirmed Ryan’s identity. Then the ATM’s display lit up with a menu of options.
“Transfer,” Lowell said into the microphone.
Ryan fought to keep as much of himself as possible inside the scanner, but his particles kept spilling out. The ATM buzzed and the screen turned red. “Please keep your finger inside the SES scanner,” it said pleasantly. Ryan twisted and contorted, searching for a part of himself that would work.
The only cohesive part of Ryan left was the shirt. Nearly as well defined now as in the moment he had unwillingly formed it. He pushed his stomach into the scanner so the bottom of the Float Beer logo was directly within the scanner’s beam, and the main menu flashed back up. “Do it fast,” he said to Lowell.
“Are you sure?” Lowell asked. Apparently Margie had convinced him to feel guilty. He avoided Ryan’s gaze. Or perhaps he just couldn’t tell anymore where Ryan’s gaze was.
“You earned it,” Ryan said. He wasn’t sure it was clear enough to be understood, but Lowell apparently guessed from the tone. He fished around in his coat pocket and produced a slip on which he had written his account number.
“Transfer,” Lowell said into the microphone.
More options popped up on the display. But Ryan was distracted by his shirt. Even the letters on the logo were coming apart now. And the little illustration of a floating scoop of ice cream was swirling out of focus as though being sucked down a drain. Ryan started to slip backwards, and the ATM lost connection again. “Please keep your finger inside the SES scanner.”
“That’s it,” Margie said. She took two fast steps over and shoved Lowell backwards with both hands and all her weight. He stumbled, flailing his arms. “Get out of here!” Margie bellowed. “I’m taking him home.”
Lowell looked stunned. “But… it’ll just take…”
“Is this who you are?” Margie demanded, coming at him again. She was ready to knock him flat if she had to.
“Apparently!” Lowell said, annoyed. He held out the slip of paper with the account number on it.
Margie slapped it out of his hand. “Get out of here!”
Lowell snapped up the slip of paper and backed away. “I’ll leave this on your…” he started to say. But Margie charging him again cut him off. He spun and dashed straight through the farm hands, and stormed angrily across the street, glancing back frequently.
Margie turned back to Ryan. He had sunk to the ground, and struggled to focus on her as she came back to him. “Ryan? Can you describe what’s happening? Are you still…”
She froze, staring at the ATM.
After a moment of staring she swerved past Ryan and pressed in close to the ATM display. Something on it had caught her attention. She jabbed at the screen with her finger. “Look! Look!”
In the corner of the display was Ryan’s name next to a small thumbnail of his SES pattern. Ryan couldn’t tell why she was pointing at it.
Margie waited for him to clue in. Finally she spat it out. “It’s not a pirate!”
Ryan leaned in closer and struggled to focus on the SES thumbnail. She was right. The signature on the screen looked nothing like a pirate. He thought it more closely resembled some kind of crested lizard. He focused for a moment on remembering the name of the particular species, and completely forgot to figure out the significance of what Margie was saying.
Exasperated, she did it for him. She tapped on the lizard-shaped pattern. “That is you. The ATM just scanned you, so we know that’s you. That means—” She poked at her phone until Ryan’s Clinic file came up again. She held it up for him to see the SES record, and even pinched to zoom it in for him. It had the familiar pirate shape. “—this is not you! This scan was taken right before your ghost was extracted, but it’s not you!”
“Please keep your finger inside the SES scanner,” the ATM suggested unhelpfully.
“What does that mean?” Ryan’s mind was trying to reach understanding, but kept bumping hard into an invisible wall like a fly trying to find its way through a window.
Margie turned her phone towards her and studied it. “I don’t know,” she admitted. Ryan was grateful to hear her say it. It wasn’t just him. “We have two scans on file for you.” She swiped back and forth a few times. “They’re both the same. Pirate.”
“When was the other one taken?”
She frowned, uncertain. “Just a few days earlier. Did you have another procedure done? An unhaunting? That makes no sense.”
Ryan’s mind fly found an opening in the window and bolted through. “That wasn’t me. I mean, I filled out the forms in my name. But it wasn’t me. That was Sye.”
Margie looked at him without seeing him. He could see a thousand mental calculations going on behind her eyes. Her jaw fell slowly open as the results of the calculations came in and added up to something. “So this… the SES in the Clinic file under your name is Sye’s. Not yours. That means…” More calculations began processing. Ryan could almost hear her mind clicking.
“Please keep your finger inside the SES scanner,” the ATM put in, for the first time with a hint of impatience.
Margie’s mind stopped clicking. She looked down at her phone once again. “When I scanned you before your extraction, I scanned you, but Sye’s SES came up.”
“But you scanned me,” Ryan said. “My ghost was still in my body.”
She looked at Ryan again, searching for where his eyes were and finally deciding on a spot. “Yes, it was.” Her face lit up with realization. “But Sye’s ghost must have been in there too!”
“How…?”
“When I unhaunted Sye’s chair, how close were you? Do you remember? Did you come in contact with Sye at all?”
Ryan scanned his memory of the procedure. It seemed so long ago, and even his recent memories had a haze around them now. One so distant felt like it might not have actually happened, like a far-fetched story he had been told. But there were pieces of it. Sye’s expression. Margie holding the paddles. The Box charging. The back of the chair coming loose.
The back of the chair coming loose.
“I touched it,” Ryan said. “I touched the chair. While you were doing the thing, I touched it.”
“That’s it!” she said. She almost threw her phone in the air, but instead just punched at Ryan. Her fist went through his shoulder. “You must have come in contact with Sye when you did that. The procedure forced a possession. It detached him from the chair and attached him to you. He possessed you, and you didn’t even know it!”
“But I walked home with Sye! I could still see him!”
“Yes, but his ghost was attached to your body! It’s possible for a ghost to be attached to a body without being inside it. He’d be able to go into it at will. Do you remember having feelings you couldn’t identify the day after the procedure? Thoughts that weren’t yours? Confusion?”
“Now that you mention it, that was the day I decided to have myself extracted. I wasn’t totally sure why I wanted that.”
“Maybe you didn’t. But Sye did! He was hiding in your body, encouraging you to get out so he could take over!”
Ryan sank further onto the ground. His form was coming completely apart. He felt like a cloud, a fog, an assortment of wisps. Yet still he tried to force the wisps to piece together the implications of what Margie was saying. Thoughts evaded him, but he chased them. When he tried to speak he could manage only the faintest whisper, grass in a breeze. “So Roger didn’t give my body away.”
Margie shook her head. “He doesn’t know where it is either. Because right after your extraction, Sye just got up and walked away with it.”