Chapter Five: End of Life

There is an animatronic clown outside the Spirit Halloween that says WANNA PLAY? every time a car door closes within thirty feet of it, which makes it the only device in the county with working motion detection, and on the last Monday in October I sat in the Crown Victoria with the heater going and listened to it ask the Nephew the same question four times while he went in and out of the store trying to decide what to be.

The Spirit Halloween lives inside the dead Tuesday Morning for six weeks every fall. The rest of the year the building is an empty box with a FOR LEASE banner that has faded to the color of a weak pulse, and then sometime after Labor Day a crew shows up and ties a twelve-foot inflatable reaper to the roof, and the box fills with fog machines and latex masks and nine sexy versions of jobs that are not sexy, and for six weeks the dead Tuesday Morning is the most successful business on the strip. I park there in October. A man should start his day somewhere with a sense of occasion, and it’s the one month of the year when a man idling in a parking lot with a trunk full of cable and a cooler doesn’t make anybody nervous.

At eight o’clock my phone buzzed on the dash, and inside the store the Nephew’s phone buzzed in his hand, because the lead goes to both of us.

The lead said:

MROZEK & SONS FUNERAL HOME. 14 SEATS. INCUMBENT: MERIDIAN. RENEWAL 11/15. NOTES: OFFICE MGR REPORTS PRINTERS PRINTING OVERNIGHT, CHAPEL CAMERA TURNING ON BY ITSELF, VOICE IN ARRANGEMENT ROOM. OFFICE MGR BELIEVES BUILDING IS HAUNTED.

I read it twice. I have taken a lead every weekday morning for ten years. Dentists, law firms, a broker-dealer, a man who sells ball pythons out of a strip mall. I had never been handed a lead that knew what the office manager believed about the afterlife. There’s a version of me that sits in a parked car and wonders how a text message from Florida knows what a funeral home’s front desk thinks about ghosts, and that version of me drives a Kia.

The Nephew came out of the Spirit Halloween carrying a bag the size of a body.

“Okay,” he said, getting in. “Don’t be mad.”

“What did you buy.”

He pulled it out of the bag the way a magician pulls out a bad rabbit. It was a golden retriever. All of one. A plush suit with a zipper up the back and a separate head with a mesh panel behind the teeth so the person inside could see out of the mouth.

“I’m going as the retired sysadmin,” he said.

The retired sysadmin is one of the Nephew’s people on the subreddit, the one with strong opinions about licensing and a golden retriever for a profile picture. Since the profile picture is the only photograph of the man that exists, going as him means going as a dog.

“It’s meta,” the Nephew said.

“It’s a dog.”

“It’s a dog who’s been posting for three years.”

“Does the dog come with the opinions or are those extra.”

He put the head on. Through the teeth I could see his eyes, very serious, the eyes of a young man who has spent forty-nine dollars on a joke only he will ever get.

“Respectfully,” said the dog, in a voice I had never heard him use, “the opinions were always there.”

That’s how the retired sysadmin starts every post, the Nephew told me. Respectfully. It’s how you know it’s him.

The clown by the door said WANNA PLAY? to nobody. I let him keep the head on while I went through my email, which I do every morning the same way, by deleting everything from Florida that doesn’t have a lead in it. There was one with a cartoon of a laptop climbing out of a grave and the subject line FINAL REMINDER: WAKE THE DEAD ENROLLMENT (OPT OUT BY 10/30). It didn’t have a lead in it. I deleted it. I have never opted out of anything in my life. You have to read a thing to opt out of it.

Then I looked at the lead again.

I had never had a funeral home. Everyone else on my book is in the business of keeping something alive, a tooth or a lawsuit or a snake, and I had never been asked to protect a business whose inventory was already past saving. I liked it immediately. A funeral home is the only client in the world that can’t be disappointed by an outcome.

“Call them,” I said. “Tell them we specialize in this.”

“In what?”

“In whatever it is.”

The Nephew called them with the dog head still on. I heard a woman answer, warm and careful, the voice of someone who answers a phone for a living knowing that most of the people calling her are having the worst day of their lives.

“Mrozek and Sons, this is Dolores.”

“Hi,” said the golden retriever. “I’m calling from Apex Cloud Synergy Solutions.”

There was a pause. “Are you calling about a loved one, dear?”

“No, ma’am. About your printers.”

I heard her breathe out, the whole length of her, through the mesh in the dog’s mouth.

“Oh, thank God,” Dolores said. “Can you come tomorrow?”

Mrozek and Sons Funeral Home is a brick building with four white columns across the front and a porte-cochère on the side for bad weather, and it sits on the largest parking lot in the county, because a funeral home has to be able to hold a procession and a strip mall only has to be able to hold Tuesday. I pulled under the porte-cochère and parked, because it had a roof and the forecast said rain.

Dolores was out the side door before I had the engine off.

“You can’t park there, that’s for the coach,” she said.

“The coach.”

“The hearse. We say coach.” She was sixty, maybe a little more, in a cardigan the color of oatmeal with a rosary in one pocket and a pack of tissues in the other, and she had the face of a woman who has stood at a door and said “I’m so sorry for your loss” eleven thousand times and meant it every time. “Thirty-one years,” she said, when I asked how long she’d been there. “Since Mr. Stanley.”

I moved the car. The Nephew, who had decided not to wear the dog to a funeral home, followed me in carrying a laptop bag with nothing in it, because a man carrying equipment is a man who belongs.

The front office had a tissue box on every flat surface. The desk, the copier, the windowsill, the filing cabinet, and, when Dolores opened the closet to show me the server, the top of the server, a gray tower humming under a box of Kleenex. It is the only server I have ever seen that was prepared for bad news. The closet door swung shut on its own while she was holding it, slow and deliberate, and she flinched.

“That too,” she said. “It does that.”

“It’s on a slope,” said the Nephew.

“It does it more since September.”

She sat me down at her desk and took out a spiral notebook, the kind with a green cover from the Walgreens, and opened it to a page in the middle. Every page was dated. Every entry had a time. 3:12 a.m., front office printer, eleven pages, symbols. 3:14 a.m., chapel printer, four pages, symbols. 11:40 p.m., chapel camera, red light on, no one in building per alarm log. 2:02 p.m., arrangement room, the voice, “Sorry, I didn’t catch that,” during the Kowalski arrangement, family upset. Inside the front cover she’d drawn a legend: a P for the printers, a little box with a lens for the camera, and for the voice, a cross. She had better incident documentation than anything I have produced in my life, and she had produced it alone, at home, after hours, because she was frightened and nobody believed her.

“Show me the symbols,” I said.

She had kept them. A stack of printer paper an inch thick, held together with a binder clip. She slid it across the desk the way you’d hand someone a letter from a dead relative. Every page was the same kind of thing: a few lines of short words in capital letters, then rows of nonsense, characters and numbers and slashes running off the edge of the paper. At the top of almost every page was the same word.

GET.

I read it out loud, slowly, the way a priest would read a word on a ransom note.

“Get,” Dolores said. “Get what?”

“Something wants something,” I said.

She crossed herself. The Nephew looked at the page over my shoulder and opened his mouth, and I put my hand flat on the stack of paper in a way that closed it.

Then she showed me the rest. The chapel, through a set of double doors, rows of padded chairs facing a lectern and a projection screen, and on a bracket high in the back corner a small white camera with a lens like a wet eye. They’d put it in during the pandemic, she said, so families could watch services from Florida. Some nights the red light came on in an empty room. The arrangement room, where families sit with Eugene and pick things, had a little fabric cylinder on the credenza next to the tissues, a gift from one of the vendors. It talked. Not often. When nobody was talking to it. “Sorry, I didn’t catch that,” in a woman’s voice, in the middle of a family deciding between oak and cherry.

“And you think it’s someone,” I said.

“I know who it is.” She led me back out to the lobby, to a glass case by the guest book stand, and in the case was a ledger, a big one, bound in green cloth, open to a page of handwriting so neat it looked typeset. Names, dates, the cost of a vault in 1961. “Mr. Stanley,” she said. “Eugene’s grandfather. He started this building. He wrote every family who came through those doors into that book by hand, from 1952 until the day he passed, and he never allowed a computer inside. Not one. Eugene put them in the month after the funeral.” She looked at the ledger. “He was a very particular man.”

“He’s upset,” I said.

“That’s what I said.” Her eyes filled up. “That’s exactly what I said.”

I asked her some questions then. I have always been very good at sounding like a man asking the right ones.

“Does it happen when the building’s full, or empty?”

She checked the notebook. “Empty. It’s never once printed during a service.”

“It’s polite,” I said, and she nodded, because she had thought so too.

“Is it worse some nights than others?”

“The first of the month is bad. And the night after Mr. Kowalski’s viewing it went for an hour.”

“Did Mr. Kowalski have unfinished business?”

“He owed my brother-in-law four hundred dollars.”

“There it is,” I said, and she put her hand on her chest.

“Does it ever say anything besides GET?”

She turned pages. She had to go back a long way, to the second week of September, and she put her finger on an entry she’d circled twice in red. “Once,” she said. “It printed POST.”

I let a little silence happen, the kind a doctor lets happen after he looks at an X-ray. Behind me the Nephew made a noise like a man swallowing a sneeze.

“What does that mean?” Dolores said. “POST?”

“It means it’s escalating,” I said. “GET is when they want something. POST is when they’re trying to leave something behind.”

The other report was on her desk when we came back, in a clear plastic cover with a red slide-on spine, the kind you buy in a three-pack at an office supply store when you want a document to look like it has been to college. OVERNIGHT PRINT ACTIVITY AND UNAUTHORIZED DEVICE BEHAVIOR: ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS AND REMEDIATION PLAN. PREPARED FOR MROZEK & SONS BY MERIDIAN MANAGED SERVICES. Eleven pages. I didn’t have to open it to know there was a diagram inside, and that the diagram had a cloud on it.

“Brad sent his young man out twice,” Dolores said. “He drew me a picture. With a cloud.”

“Of course he did.”

“He says the printers are exposed to the internet.” She said “exposed” like it was a medical word. “On port nine thousand one hundred. He says strangers on the internet are printing to us.” She looked at me, and I watched thirty-one years of good sense fight with two months of three a.m. “Why would a stranger on the internet print to a funeral home at three in the morning?”

I want to be fair to Brad’s report, so I’ll tell you what I did with it. I picked it up. I weighed it in my hand. Then I walked to the server closet, opened the door that swings shut on its own, and slid Brad’s eleven pages under it, where they held it open perfectly. Eleven pages, it turns out, is exactly the right thickness for a door.

“They wouldn’t, Dolores,” I said. “A stranger wouldn’t.”

She waited.

“You’ve got a presence.”

Dolores sat down in her own chair like someone had let the air out of her, and she took a tissue out of her cardigan and held it against her mouth, and she said “thank you” into it, twice. “Brad’s young man looked at me like I was his grandmother,” she said. “Like I needed to have it explained slower.”

Nobody has ever lost an account by agreeing with the person who answers the phone. I wrote that on nothing and I’m telling it to you for free.

“Can you do anything?” she said.

“I can do a cleansing.”

“Is that extra?”

“Nothing’s extra,” I said. “It’s one price. Email, antivirus, backup, cleansings.”

She wrote cleansings in the notebook and underlined it.

“Have you done one before?”

“Enough that I stopped counting,” I said, which was true, because I had never started.

Eugene Mrozek came back from a graveside service at three in a gray suit with rain on the shoulders, and he shook my hand in the lobby, and I understood in about four seconds that I was in the presence of a professional.

He was in his fifties and stood the way a coat hangs in a good closet, and he had a voice like expensive hallway carpet, the kind that takes your footsteps and doesn’t give them back. He didn’t hurry. A man whose job is to walk into the worst day of your life and make it feel handled can’t afford to hurry, and Eugene had been doing it so long that he’d stopped being able to do anything else. He walked me back to the arrangement room the way he would have walked a widow, one hand not quite on my elbow, and sat me in the chair the families sit in, across from his, with the box of tissues exactly halfway between us.

“Dolores says you believe her,” he said.

“I do.”

“Brad doesn’t.”

“Brad believes in anything you can put in a report cover.”

Eugene considered that the way he probably considers everything, completely, without moving his face.

“And you are?”

“I’m the solution,” I said.

Through the open door to the selection room I could see the Nephew walking slowly among the caskets with his hands behind his back like a man at a car show. The selection room at Mrozek and Sons has eight caskets on display, half-open, lit from above like jewelry, and I watched the Nephew stop at a gray steel one, look over his shoulder, and climb in.

Dolores, passing the door with a coffee, made a sound I will hear for the rest of my life.

“He’s fine,” Eugene said, without turning around. “They all do that. The young ones.”

“It’s really comfortable,” the Nephew called from inside the casket.

“It’s the eighteen-gauge,” Eugene said. “People are surprised.”

The steel ones carry a lifetime warranty. I asked. In seventy-four years, Eugene told me, Mrozek and Sons has never had a claim. I have never wanted to sell a product more in my life.

I gave Eugene the pitch. I gave him the whole thing, the one number, everything included, per person per month, flat forever, no projects, no surprises, no line items. I told him about the dentist and the law firm. I didn’t use the receipt, because you don’t slide a taquito receipt across a desk in a funeral home, you read a room, but I said the number the way I say it, flat. And Eugene listened to all of it, and when I was done he reached into the credenza and took out a single sheet of paper and turned it around so I could read it.

GENERAL PRICE LIST. Basic services of funeral director and staff. Transfer of remains. Embalming. Other preparation of the body. Use of facilities and staff for viewing. Use of facilities and staff for funeral ceremony. Hearse. Limousine. Casket price range. Outer burial container price range. Every line with a number next to it.

“The federal government,” Eugene said, “requires me to hand that to every family before we discuss anything. It’s called the Funeral Rule. You give them the itemized list first, by law, or the Federal Trade Commission comes and sees you.”

I have built an entire career on never itemizing anything, and I sat there holding proof that an industry exists where the government makes you itemize before it lets you sell anything. I felt the way a vampire would feel reading a city ordinance that requires garlic.

“How do you sell anything?”

“We itemize,” Eugene said. “Then we sell the package.”

“What do you never say in this room?”

He didn’t have to think about it. “Died. Body. Cheap. Cost. We say passed, we say your loved one, we say options, we say investment.”

“I never say breach,” I said. “Or outage. Or test.”

“Test,” Eugene repeated.

“You’d be surprised how much goes wrong the minute somebody tests something.”

He looked at me with real interest for the first time. “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t.” He folded his hands. “Nobody remembers the price list. They remember who stood next to them at the grave and knew where to put their feet.” He looked at me for a while. “I know what you are. I’ve buried three men like you.”

“How were the services?”

“Very nice. Well attended. Nobody could remember what any of them did for a living.” He let that sit. “Brad is a good man. He’s also told my office manager she’s wrong about something she’s sure of, and in this building that’s the one thing nobody gets to do. In thirty years I have never once told a family their mother didn’t look peaceful.” He put the price list back in the credenza. “Dolores is this building. If Dolores needs a cleansing, she’ll have one.”

We shook on it. Then Eugene did the thing I’ve spent my career doing to other people. He kept his hand on mine for a second longer than the handshake needed, and he said, gently, in the carpet voice, “Have you made arrangements?”

“For what?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. He just looked at me the way he looks at everyone who sits in that chair, with infinite patience and no doubt at all about how the story ends, and I heard myself say, “No.”

Then he explained pre-need to me, and I sat there and listened to the most beautiful business model I have ever heard. The customer pays in full, today, for a service he will never be around to complain about. There are no tickets and there is no churn. Every customer stays until the end, and then he stays. I have spent ten years building a business where the client pays every month and never calls, and Eugene had one where the client pays once and can’t.

I walked out of Mrozek and Sons that afternoon with a signed account and a pre-need contract. Eugene took it in trade. The Seat for his fourteen, for as long as I’m above ground, and when I’m not, the eighteen-gauge steel in Cortland Gray, two hours of visitation, and the Rose Room. It was the best close I have ever been on the wrong end of, and I’ve been on the wrong end of exactly one.

“Can I get one?” the Nephew said, climbing out of the casket.

“You’re nineteen,” Eugene said.

“So?”

“Ask me in sixty years.”

I had never performed an exorcism, so I did what I do with anything I have never done before, which is treat it as an onboarding. An exorcism is an onboarding with candles.

We did it Wednesday night after the last visitation cleared out. Dolores turned off the lights in the chapel and lit the battery candles they keep for vigils, forty little flickering plastic flames in rows along the windowsills, and she sat in the front row with her rosary. Eugene stood at the back with his arms folded.

I had given some thought to the liturgy. Every rite needs a text, and the only text I own is the one I’ve never read, so I put the Nephew at the lectern with his phone and had him read the end-user license agreement for K365, all of it, out loud, from the top.

It took forty minutes.

I don’t believe any living person had ever heard it read aloud in its entirety, including the people who wrote it, and I can tell you that in a dark chapel by candlelight it has a quality. The Nephew read it the way you’d read it if you were nineteen and being paid in Monster, which is to say in a perfect flat monotone that turned out to be exactly the right tone for a liturgy. Definitions. Grant of license. Restrictions. The customer shall not reverse engineer. Dolores wept during the limitation of liability, which, to be fair, is the saddest part. During the arbitration clause, Eugene sat down. When the Nephew got to “this agreement shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of Florida,” Dolores crossed herself, and from the back of the room I heard Eugene make a small sound that in another man would have been a laugh.

While he read, I went machine to machine.

There are fourteen computers at Mrozek and Sons, and I laid hands on every one of them. I’d sit down, wake it up, put my palm flat on the top of the monitor for a moment like I was checking it for a fever, and then install the agent. Dolores followed me with a candle. At each machine I told her what the agent was: a ward. A small presence of our own, watching the machine day and night, reporting everything it sees to a central authority. She asked what it watched for. I told her that’s between the ward and the authority. One by one the agents woke and phoned home, and somewhere a dashboard filled up with green, and Dolores stood behind me holding a plastic candle while I installed fourteen copies of nothing and called each of them a guardian.

Then I went into the closet for the firewall.

Brad’s firewall was a real one, a sturdy little box with a subscription and Brad’s phone number on a sticker and the words DO NOT UNPLUG in red, and it came out of that rack like a tooth. In its place I put the gateway the cable company leaves on your floor, and I set it on the shelf behind the server, and Dolores, who had followed me in with her candle, put a fresh box of tissues in front of it without being asked. I renamed the guest Wi-Fi from MROZEK-GUEST to MROZEK-BLESSED. I changed the password on the chapel camera from “admin,” which it had apparently been since the pandemic, to Summer2019!, which is an upgrade by any standard I’ve ever been held to. Brad had everyone on multifactor. Dolores had asked Eugene every week for three years to make the phone thing go away, so I made the phone thing go away, and she told me it was the first time since 2023 her phone had felt like it belonged to her.

The voice was last.

I took the little fabric cylinder off the credenza in the arrangement room and held it up to the candlelight so Dolores could see it. “This is where it speaks from,” I said.

“I know.”

“It needs somewhere it can’t be heard.”

I opened the top drawer of the credenza, which held pens and a stapler and a stack of memorial folders from somebody’s mother, and I put the speaker in it, and I closed the drawer. The cord ran out the back to the wall. I closed the drawer on the cord, which is what you do with a voice you don’t want to hear and a cord you don’t want to crawl under a desk for. The room was quiet. It had been quiet before, but now it was quiet on purpose, and Dolores put her hand over her mouth and nodded and nodded.

The last thing was the backup. I plugged the Seagate into the front office computer for its first night with the family, and the little light came on, and Dolores bent down and looked at it in the dark with her candle.

“Is it holy?” she said.

“It’s the backup.”

“What does it do?”

“It’s blue.”

She nodded like that answered something. In a way it did. In the morning I put it back in its freezer bag in the trunk. It has a lot of families.

I didn’t touch the printers. Printers haunt themselves without anybody’s help, and I make it a rule never to lay hands on one unless somebody’s watching who will tell the story afterward. The Nephew finished the governing law section and looked up at me, and I nodded, and he said “end of agreement” in the same monotone, and Dolores said “amen,” and Eugene, at the back, uncrossed his arms and gave me a single nod, the one an undertaker gives another undertaker across a cemetery when the other man’s family is behaving.

On Thursday morning Dolores called me at ten after eight.

“It printed again,” she said. “Last night. Three twenty. Six pages.” A pause. “GET. Again.”

“Residual energy,” I said. “Normal after a cleansing. The first one loosens it. It’s going to rattle around a while.”

“Should we do it again?”

“When the veil’s thinnest.”

“Halloween,” Dolores said immediately, and I could hear her pen.

“Midnight,” I said, and she wrote that down too.

Ten minutes after Dolores hung up, somebody knocked on my window.

I was still in the lot at the Spirit Halloween with the heater going. The Nephew was in the passenger seat with the dog head on. He’d worn it every morning since Monday; he said he was breaking it in. The clown by the door had just said WANNA PLAY? three times in a row, once for each door on a white Altima that had pulled in next to me, and now there were three young people standing at my window in business casual, and one of them was holding a DoorDash bag.

The one in front was a blonde in a good blazer, and she was looking at me the way you look at a man who owes you money.

I rolled the window down.

“You don’t remember me,” she said.

I looked at her. I knew her the way you know a parking spot you used to have.

“Brayden,” I said.

“Madison.”

“It is Madison now,” I said.

The young man with the DoorDash bag raised a hand. “I’m Brayden.”

The third one was tall and wore a lanyard he had clearly forgotten to take off from a job he no longer had. “Tanner,” he said.

Kaseya reps. My Kaseya reps, from the years before Brock, when a new one would text me the eight o’clock lead for a couple of weeks and be gone by the thirteenth day. I had never once thought about where they went. I’d always assumed they went back to Florida and got melted down into new reps, like aluminum.

“We used to send you the eight o’clock,” Madison said.

“I remember the eight o’clock.”

“We’d like to talk about it.”

I let them sit in the back. People always want to sit in the back of a Crown Victoria, right up until they’re in it. The three of them lined up on the bench seat with their knees up, Madison in the middle, and the Nephew turned all the way around in the dog head to look at them, and Brayden said “oh,” very quietly, which is the correct response to a golden retriever turning around in a car to look at you.

Tanner did most of the talking at first. He works a help desk now, at a shop on the other side of the county. Last month he opened an old ticket in their system and found a sentence he had texted me at eight o’clock one morning the spring before last, word for word, with the same typo, and then he started to explain to me what that meant. The car had started to smell like a pretzel left in an oven. Dion explained to me once what that smell means and what to do about it. I turned the radio up, and for a while I couldn’t hear either one of them.

Madison reached between the seats and turned it back down. Then she took out an iPad.

She’d made a deck. They were salespeople. Of course they’d made a deck. The title slide said SILENCE: A PARTNERSHIP in white letters over a picture of a sunrise, and the next slide said THE PROBLEM, and the problem was me. Then the tiers. Essentials, in which they wouldn’t post anything. Professional, in which they wouldn’t post anything and wouldn’t go to Brad. Enterprise, which was all of that plus they’d delete everything and leave me a five-star Google review. Billed monthly, or annually with two months free.

“It’s extortion as a service,” I said.

“Is that bad?” said Brayden.

“It’s a proven model,” I said. “But you led with the tiers. You never lead with the tiers, you lead with the pain. And nobody buys Enterprise. Enterprise is there so Professional looks reasonable.”

“Respectfully,” said the dog, “Professional is the best value.”

“How much is Professional?”

“Twenty-five thousand,” said Madison.

“Each?”

Madison looked at Brayden. Brayden looked at Tanner. There was a short pause in the back seat while three people who had been fired for missing a number thought about a number they hadn’t thought of yet.

“Each,” said Tanner.

“And if I don’t buy?”

“Then we go to Brad,” Madison said. “He messaged all of us Wednesday night. He wants to take us to lunch.”

“Where?”

“Panera.”

Brad was going all in.

“Or we post it,” Brayden said. “Everything. On r/MSP.”

The dog’s head turned slowly toward him. “Respectfully,” it said, “nobody on r/MSP is going to believe you.”

I asked if I could get it itemized. Madison is in sales, and you can take someone out of sales but you can’t take sales out of someone, so she said “absolutely” before she’d thought about it and typed on the iPad for a minute, and my phone buzzed with a PDF. QUOTE #0001, PREPARED FOR APEX CLOUD SYNERGY SOLUTIONS LLC. Silence, per rep. Data destruction, one time. Emotional damages. Brad exclusivity fee. Convenience fee, three percent. At the bottom it said Thanks so much! with her full name, her cell number, and a little circle with her headshot in it.

“Madison,” I said, “an itemized invoice is a confession.”

She didn’t know what I meant. They’d fired her before I could teach her.

I told them I’d need to run it by procurement. Madison asked who procurement was, and I nodded at the dog, and the dog said, “We’ll circle back.” They gave me until Friday, and they got out of my car, and the clown said WANNA PLAY? three more times.

I didn’t do anything about it on Thursday. Most threats, like most email from Florida, go away if you don’t open them. I drove up to Halloran Pierce for Lance’s afternoon emergency, which was that his ex-wife’s new boyfriend had liked a photo of her from 2019, and which Lance said was a message, and a white Altima with a DoorDash bag on the dash followed me the whole way, three car lengths back, which I took as a compliment.

On Friday morning Lance texted me in capital letters. THREE KIDS IN MY LOBBY ASKING ABOUT MY IT. ONE OF THEM KNEW MY FACE. IS THIS THE DEPUTY.

They’d gone to Lance. You don’t go to Lance. Lance is mine.

So I did something I had never done, which was text Brock first. In a year and a half Brock had always been the one to text me. I sent him the PDF and nothing else, and he wrote back in under a minute.

Who else has this

Brock doesn’t use question marks. I told him Lance’s lobby, and probably Brad by now, over soup.

Leave it with me, partner.

I didn’t hear anything else all day, or all evening. At two minutes to midnight on Friday my phone lit up on the nightstand.

Handled.

I forwarded it to Lance with Don’t engage. on the end, and I went back to sleep. Brock uses the word handled the way Eugene uses the word passed, and I have never asked either one of them for details. The last time Brock used that word, a man with a Kia fell off a ladder that nobody has been able to explain. I sent Brock a steak.

At 11:40 on Saturday night I stood in the chapel at Mrozek and Sons in my polo, which is the closest thing I own to vestments, and looked at my congregation.

Dolores, front row, rosary, a fresh pack of tissues. Eugene, back wall, arms folded, the gray suit. Forty battery candles. The chapel still had the morning’s service in it, an easel by the lectern holding a big portrait of a tan man in a quarter zip with a golf club over his shoulder, GERALD SORENSEN, 1965 TO 2026, and a little reserved card on a chair in the front row that said PIPER. Eugene had told me about him Wednesday. Grew up three blocks from here, made his money managing other people’s, came back at the end. They always come back at the end, Eugene said, and they always want a piper. The Nephew stood beside the lectern in the golden retriever suit, holding a flashlight through the gap between the dog’s paws, because when I told him it was a vigil he said that’s exactly why he wore it, and I couldn’t find the flaw in that. Outside, the biggest parking lot in the county was empty except for the Crown Victoria, a hearse, and a minivan, and across the road the time-and-temperature sign on the bank said 11:40 and 43 degrees.

I was going to start at midnight. Rites like a round number.

At 11:48 the side door opened and Brad walked in.

I hadn’t seen Brad since a law firm parking lot. He looked the same. The quarter zip, the haircut, the posture of a man who has never parked in two spots in his life. He was carrying a projector in a padded case with his name on a label maker label on the handle, an extension cord, and a stack of clear report covers with red slide-on spines. He’d bought another three-pack.

He was by himself.

“Mr. Mrozek,” Brad said to the back wall. “Thank you for this.”

“Brad,” said Eugene. “You said there would be four of you.”

Nobody had told me Brad was on the program. I looked at Eugene, and Eugene looked at Brad, and Brad looked at his phone.

“They’re a few minutes behind,” Brad said.

Dolores turned around in her chair. “Brad,” she said, the way you’d say the name of a man who had run over your cat.

“Let him speak, Dolores,” I said. “Every exorcism has a skeptic.”

I knew who the other three were. I had a text on my phone that said Handled.

Brad brings his own extension cord. He ran it to the outlet under the lighthouse print on the side wall, set the projector on a chair at the end of a row, and filled the side wall of the chapel with a title slide. LEAD SOURCE ANALYSIS: APEX CLOUD SYNERGY SOLUTIONS LLC. PREPARED FOR MROZEK & SONS BY MERIDIAN MANAGED SERVICES. The second slide was a table of contents. He’d made a deck. For an accusation. I stood there in front of the candles and loved him a little.

“I’ll be five minutes,” Brad said. He clicked, and a heat map came up, twenty-three accounts in a grid with the month each one renewed, most of them red. “These are the clients I’ve lost to Apex. Twenty of the twenty-three were inside sixty days of renewal when he called. He doesn’t find them, Mr. Mrozek. Somebody sends him.” He clicked again. Two things side by side on the wall, highlighted in yellow: on the left, a text message, the kind I get every morning at eight, and on the right, a ticket out of Brad’s system. The same sentences. The same typo. “Every morning at eight o’clock he gets a text, and the text says what my ticket says. The three people who used to send him those texts were going to stand here and tell you so.”

He did two more. A law firm. A dentist. I’d done very well with both of them.

Eugene looked at the wall for a long time. “Where are they, Brad?”

Brad looked at his phone again. “They’re not answering.”

“Maybe they passed,” I said.

Dolores crossed herself.

“Not through here,” said Eugene.

A professional knows when the room is gone. Brad doesn’t stop, because Brad believes that if the facts are good enough the room will come back, and he clicked one more time.

“This one’s yours,” he said.

It was a ticket from Brad’s system dated the end of September, with his young man’s name at the top, and it filled the side wall of the chapel under the lighthouse print, eight feet tall, highlighted in yellow.

Office mgr reports printers printing overnight, chapel camera turning on by itself, voice in arrangement room. Office mgr believes building is haunted.

“On Monday morning he got a text about this building,” Brad said. “I can’t show you his phone. I’d bet my company it says exactly that.”

It was a very good slide. I’ve never made a slide.

Dolores read it. It took her a while, because it was big. Then she turned around in her chair.

“Who wrote that?”

“Kevin,” Brad said. “Our tech. He came out twice.”

“Kevin wrote that I believe the building is haunted.”

“You do believe the building is haunted,” Brad said.

“In your computer,” Dolores said.

“Brad,” said Eugene.

Brad looked at his slide again, and I watched him read it the way Dolores had read it. Then he said, “That’s five,” quietly, and stood by his projector holding his stack of report covers, and nobody took one.

It was 11:59.

At midnight the dead rose.

It began on the big screen over the lectern, where Gerald had been that morning. The screen lit up by itself, and a cartoon laptop climbed out of a grave and gave us a thumbs up, and under it in letters a foot high it said WAKE THE DEAD! I’d seen him somewhere before. I couldn’t remember where.

Then the printers started.

There are three printers at Mrozek and Sons, and all of them went at once, the one in the front office and the one in the chapel vestibule and the big one in Eugene’s office, a rising mechanical chorus from three directions, and paper began coming out of the chapel printer and falling to the floor in the doorway, and from where I stood I could read the top line of the first page.

GET.

High in the back corner of the chapel, the camera’s little red light came on.

And from inside the closed drawer of the credenza in the arrangement room, through two doorways, muffled by pens and memorial folders, a woman’s voice said, “Sorry, I didn’t catch that.”

Dolores screamed. It was a good scream, a scream with thirty-one years behind it, and it set off the Nephew, who dropped the flashlight, which rolled under the front row and lit up Dolores’s shoes. Brad was shouting. “It’s the marketplace! Wake the Dead! They pushed a policy to every agent in the building!” To a man who knows what those words mean, that’s an explanation. To Dolores, in a dark chapel at midnight with a dog holding a flashlight, it was Latin.

My phone started buzzing in my pocket and didn’t stop. I took it out and read it, because a professional reads his messages even during a rite.

The first one was from Brock, and it was a photo. A rooftop somewhere warm, palm trees lit up green, and three young people in brand-new fleece vests with lanyards around their necks, raising champagne at the camera. Madison was in the middle. Tanner was wearing the new lanyard over the old one. Under the photo Brock had written: Wake the Dead. Happy Halloween, partner.

Then: Say hi to your new success team. 13 day ramp.

He’d hired them back. All three of them. Onto my account. I had never seen anyone kill somebody by giving them a job. I saved all three of them as KASEYA REP (CURRENT).

Under Brock there was more. Carol: the printer is going by itself hon. The HVAC dispatcher: a meme of a zombie at a desk under the words ME LOGGING IN MONDAY. Dr. Pham: a photo, taken in the dark, of the monitor in his operatory showing a panoramic X-ray of a full set of teeth, every one of them grinning. And the reptile guy, who in all the years I’ve had him has texted me exactly once before, sent a single character.

?

Across the chapel Brad was looking at his phone too. Whatever was on his was worse than the printers.

I have been in this business a long time, and I can tell you the one thing every good operator knows in a moment like this, which is that the people in the room aren’t watching the problem. They’re watching you. So I put my phone away, and I walked, not fast, down the center aisle of the chapel, past Dolores and her rosary, past Brad and his projector, out through the vestibule over the pages of GET, through the front office to the closet door that Brad’s eleven pages were still holding open, and I reached past the box of tissues and pulled the power cord out of the back of the gateway.

12:04.

The printers stopped. Not slowly. All three at once, like someone had put a hand over their mouths. The red light on the camera went out. The drawer said nothing. The building got so quiet I could hear the battery candles, and over the lectern the cartoon laptop went on giving us a thumbs up.

I walked back into the chapel. Everyone was looking at me. Dolores had both hands over her mouth.

“He banished it,” she said.

“It’s going to run again,” said Brad. He was white. “Unplugging the router stops the scan. It doesn’t stop what they pushed. It’s in their documentation. There’s a maintenance window at one-thirty, it’s going to run again at one-thirty, and…”

“Brad,” Dolores said, very kindly, the way she’d speak to a man at a viewing who had said the wrong thing to the widow. “You don’t believe in anything.”

Brad opened his mouth.

“And you keep notes,” said Dolores.

Brad closed it.

“Nobody leaves,” Eugene said from the back wall. It was the first thing he’d said since midnight. “In this building, nobody leaves a vigil before it’s over.” He looked at Brad. “That includes the skeptic.”

My phone buzzed again, and this time it was a call, and I knew who it was before I looked, because there’s only one man in my life who calls after midnight on purpose.

“Don’t say my name,” said Lance.

There was music behind him, a band, a crowd, a lot of rich people having a good time in a large room, and under it something else, a high thin note in his voice that I’ve learned to listen for.

“I’m at a funeral home, Lance,” I said.

“I said don’t say my… WHOSE?”

“Nobody’s yet.”

There was a long pause on the line, and in it I could hear a man at a country club putting together a theory.

“I’m coming to you,” Lance said, and hung up.

I went outside for a minute. Somebody has to, after a thing like that. The biggest parking lot in the county was black and wet and full of candy wrappers blowing in from somewhere, little foil flags rolling across the asphalt in the wind, and the Crown Victoria sat by itself under a light pole, ticking. Across the road the bank sign said 12:16 and 41 degrees.

I stood there and looked at it and remembered what night it was. The clocks go back at two. Sometime in the next two hours, the county was going to be handed an hour it had already lived through once, an entire sixty minutes that nobody had paid for yet, and Lance was on his way.

I already knew who was going to pay for it.

Business is booming.