Verda had been a medium for forty years, but Martian ghosts were a career first.
The planet was the size of a dinner plate out the window now, reddish-brown and mottled with shadow, like an enormous, dead eye. Verda couldn’t suppress the gooseflesh that prickled her arms, but her pulse hummed with anticipation, too. She and Jadie had read about Mars when they were girls. They’d wanted to explore it. All the old authors—Burroughs, Bradbury, Weir—had made the Red Planet sound adventurous, mysterious, exciting.
Maybe it was an odd concept, a medium starved for excitement. Verda had certainly had thrilling experiences. She’d helped lovelorn widows reconnect with the spirits of their spouses for a final goodbye. She’d helped detectives solve murder cases. She’d brought peace to dozens of grief-wracked people, both living and dead. It was all vicarious, though. No one had ever haunted her—at least not in the literal sense. The one spirit she wished would visit her had never so much as rattled a teacup. She was like a midwife who had no children of her own.
At orbital insertion, Verda pressed her face to the window. The arc of the planet filled her field of view now, copper with wisps of white. The other passengers chattered around her like restless children. She’d given them a false name, pretending she was a Martian settler too, bound for a life on the extraterrestrial frontier. It wouldn’t do to tell them why she was really here, why StarQuest had paid her way. She couldn’t if she wanted to; she’d signed an NDA before embarking.
They landed in a dust storm. That was appropriate, Verda thought as she pulled on her pressure suit. Weather and ghosts were usually connected. The more intense the negative feelings—anger, sorrow, fear—the more the wind howled and the thunder cracked. There was no thunder here, and not enough air pressure for violent winds. Still, great clouds of dust whirled around her as she and the other nineteen passengers made their way from the ship to the colony’s airlock. She caught occasional glimpses of the distant sun as it struggled, drowning in the clouds, casting shadows that looked almost but not quite human.
This was a tortured place.
Inside, smiling people in crisp, official-looking jumpsuits greeted the newcomers. Then one of them quietly shepherded Verda away and down a series of hermetic white tunnels. Verda did her best to keep up, but after six months in space, the gravity, even at forty percent of Earth’s, made her legs feel like concrete pillars.
A man waited for her in a small conference room. He was tall, handsome, and chiseled, the type a younger and less world-weary woman might have fallen for. He extended a hand. “Jordan W. Russell, head of Martian Development.”
She shook it. “Verda Cardo.”
“So you’re the ghost hunter.”
“I don’t hunt ghosts, Mr. Russell. I communicate with them.”
“You get rid of them, though.” He was smiling, but his tone suggested it was an order, not a question.
“I help them move on, yes.”
“For what StarQuest paid to bring you here, I’d hope so.”
The smile bordered on a smirk now, but Verda stayed calm. She’d dealt with people like Russell many times. Usually, they didn’t believe in ghosts. They turned to her out of desperation when nothing else worked, and they worried they were wasting money on her services.
She always proved them wrong.
Russell indicated that she should sit at the round table in the center of the room. She did, suppressing a sigh of relief; the gravity was becoming oppressive. She considered him. “Why don’t you start by updating me on what you’ve been dealing with.”
He remained standing. “Little things, at first. Footsteps in the tunnels at night. Lights flickering. Sudden feelings of cold. We brought in psychologists, doctors. Figured it was a side effect of living here, even though it didn’t happen in any of the simulations. But then it got worse. Airlocks suddenly springing leaks. Pressure suit malfunctions. It’s sabotage now. Everyone’s on edge.”
“And have you witnessed any of these phenomena personally, Mr. Russell?”
He hesitated. So long that Verda knew the answer was yes. “I’ll be blunt with you, Miss—”
“Doctor.”
“Doctor Cardo. I don’t believe in the supernatural. But at this point, I need whatever this is gone. Rumors are starting to leak out. People on Earth are wary of coming here. If our colony is going to grow, this nonsense has to end. No one wants to buy a haunted plot of Martian land.”
“How many people have died here?” she asked. “I mean unnatural deaths. Accidents—”
“None,” he said sharply, and Verda sensed this was a point of pride for him. “Not since the early days. The first three.”
The first three. The very first crewed mission to Mars, almost fifty years ago now. StarQuest had come back from that PR disaster and sent another mission a few years later, but Verda sensed it was still a bitter topic. She kept her tone matter-of-fact. “It’s likely, then, that we’re dealing with one of them.”
Russell scoffed. “Why the hell would they be haunting us?”
“Was the third body ever recovered?”
“Kal Stewart? No. What, you’re going to tell me he’s pissed off he didn’t get a proper burial?”
“It’s hard for the living to understand,” explained Verda. “We take our connection to our corporeal forms for granted. But once a spirit is severed from their body, especially if it’s sudden and unexpected, they can experience a kind of—confusion. Seeing their body disposed of properly can help them find peace.”
“We’ve looked for him,” said Russell. “It’s impossible. This planet’s a giant sand box.”
“Let’s begin by trying to contact him,” said Verda.
“And we do that how?”
“I’ll need to wait for nightfall. Ghosts feel more comfortable then. And it would help if the moon--moons were full.”
“Jesus H. Christ.”
Verda shook her head. “I’m nondenominational.”
***
As it turned out, they didn’t have long to wait. Phobos, the larger of Mars’s two moons, entered its full phase every seven-and-a-half hours. Verda returned to the conference room that night to set up her space, unpacking what she’d brought from Earth. Russell looked on with an expression that blended curiosity and derision.
“I’ll need a lighter,” said Verda. “For the candles.”
Russell rolled his eyes. “We don’t have candles here.”
“That’s why I brought them.”
“Don’t tell me you’re going to burn sage.”
She shook her head. “Cedar.”
“Did you bring a pointy black hat, too?”
“Mr. Russell,” said Verda coolly, “I’ve never performed a séance on Mars. I don’t even know if it will work. I’m doing my best to replicate the conditions under which I’ve been successful on Earth. Do you have any salt?”
He sighed and left the room, and Verda tried to center herself.
“How’d you get into this woo-woo stuff, anyway?” asked Russell when he’d returned with a plasma lighter and a small container of salt.
“Always had an interest.”
“In the dead?” he asked. “Why?”
“I have three planets in the Eighth House.”
He gave her a quizzical look, but Verda said nothing more. It was her customary answer when clients asked her why she’d become a medium. Because I wanted to talk to my dead twin sister would make people uneasy, and she needed clients to feel comfortable. When everything was ready, when Verda had lit the candles and poured the circle of salt, when the lights were dim and the smell of burning cedar filled the air, she sat down at the table and instructed Russell to take her hands.
“Why?” he asked, looking at her like she’d suggested he go outside without a helmet.
“Human connection is important. It creates energy. It gives the spirit something to center on.”
He heaved a sigh and took her hands. His were cold.
“Kal Stewart,” she said softly. “We acknowledge you. We invite you into our circle tonight.”
She heard a stifled scoff from Russell, then silence. Verda reached out with her mind and heart, but she couldn’t sense the lost astronaut. Someone was there, though. A presence, drifting somewhere beyond the layer of sediment above their heads. That layer protected the colony from solar radiation, but ghosts were another form of energy entirely. Verda changed tack. “Spirit, whoever you may be, we offer you love and understanding. Please, join our circle.”
She felt the presence drift closer.
Russell started to mumble something, but she hushed him, giving his hands a reproachful squeeze. She focused on the presence and opened her mind.
And then it was inside her.
Coldness invaded Verda—an unearthly, inconceivable coldness, a coldness beyond cold, turning her bones to ice. She nearly let go of Russell’s hands, but she held on, maintaining the circle. The presence didn’t speak to her. It was communicating, though, in bursts of sensation, quick and brutal and stabbing. Alone. Lost. Alone. Forgotten. Alone. Alone. Alone.
“It’s not human,” Verda gasped out.
“What do you mean?” Russell demanded.
“Not human. Its mind—can’t fit in my own—”
“Then what the hell is it?”
Verda reached out not with her voice but with her thoughts. Tell me who you are.
Feelings and images flooded in. A ship under the sand. The passage of years. Tens. Hundreds. Thousands. A million years of utter loneliness. A fury born of misery.
“Sh-She crashed,” Verda muttered.
“She?”
Verda wasn’t sure why she’d used that pronoun—the alien couldn’t have a human gender—except that it felt closest to the feeling the ghost was giving her, the answer to who are you? “She crashed here a long time ago,” Verda continued. “Before the colony. Before humans were even on Earth. Her people never retrieved her body.”
“This is too much,” Russell snapped. “Is this the kind of show you put on for all your clients?”
The lights flickered. The circulation fan on the ceiling slowed and then stopped.
“You’re making her angry,” said Verda.
“Shit.” Fear frayed the edges of Russell’s voice. “So you’re saying its--her body’s still here?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
Verda’s mind felt full, painfully so, but she opened it a crack more. Where are you?
More images. A ruined spacecraft, crumpled like a crushed aluminum can. A crater near the South Polar cap. The weight of hundreds of feet of dust and rock.
Verda opened her mouth, but Russell’s face made her close it. His expression had changed from dread to something else, something that twisted the previously handsome features into ugliness. Verda had seen that expression before.
Greed.
“Mr. Russell,” she said cautiously, “if we were to recover the body, what would you do with it?”
“How well is it preserved?” he asked, and she had her answer.
“It’s intact,” she said. “And nothing decays without air. But—”
“People would come here in the thousands just to see it,” said Russell. “In the millions. It’ll turn this colony into a city.”
“She doesn’t want that.”
His smile twitched into a frown. “What?”
Verda could feel the entity’s disgust. “She doesn’t want to be ogled. She wants to be laid to rest. A funeral. That’s the only way she can move on. Can we incinerate her?”
Russell’s grip on her hands tightened. “You want to dig this thing up and then burn it? Are you out of your mind? Do you know how much people would pay to come see it?”
“Is money all that matters to you?”
“My job is to help this colony grow. Where is the body?”
“Far underground,” said Verda.
“I don’t care. We’ll excavate it. Tell me the location.”
Verda shook her head. “She’s gone. She’s broken the connection.”
It was the first time Verda could remember lying to a client, but she had no qualms. She felt the entity’s relief flicker through her.
“StarQuest hired you to perform a job,” Russell hissed. You were supposed to get rid of the ghost.”
“Putting her body on display won’t do that.”
“Then find another way. Exorcise it.”
There were ways, Verda knew. Ghosts could be banished from certain locations, or confined to small spaces or enchanted objects. Verda had never used those methods, though, even for the most hostile of spirits. She shook her head. “I won’t.”
Suddenly Russell loomed over her. He’d let go of her hands and stood up. “Miss--Doctor Cardo. If you can’t perform your job, you will be in breach of contract. The company won’t be obligated to pay for your trip back to Earth.”
She let the weight of the threat settle onto her.
Never to return home. To stay on Mars for the rest of her life. Years ago, it might have terrified her into compliance. Now, though, she realized there was nothing on Earth to go back to. Verda had never married or had children. Her parents had died a decade before, and her sister…
Jadie had never even had the chance to grow up. And on that terrible night, when Jadie’s life had ended in screaming tires and crumpling metal, half of Verda had died, too. She looked at Russell calmly. “So be it.”
Fury flashed across his face. For a second, Verda thought he might strike her. Then the lights flickered again and went out, and the whole chamber shook so violently he stumbled and grabbed the back of his chair.
When the lights came back on, he fled the room. And Verda, exhausted, finally let herself collapse.
*** In the end, the rest of Verda’s life passed more quickly than either of them had expected. It was only seven years later that her heart, atrophied by her long trip through space and weakened by Mars’s low gravity, beat its last.
She was lying on her bed in her small, spare pod. Then she was hovering above it. And then she was hovering above the colony itself.
Things had been quiet since the séance. The colony had grown, but not by much. The stars shone brightly, brighter than she’d ever seen them, and she knew that if she kept rising, she would go into those stars and past them, into a place full of light and love and long-awaited reunions.
She began to rise. And then she paused, floating bodiless.
She sensed someone near her. Someone extending a hand that wasn’t a hand. Someone with a mind so vastly different from hers that she couldn’t comprehend it, and yet, at the same time, someone with feelings she knew too well.
Verda decided she could wait a little longer to see Jadie.
She took the hand. It was somehow warm. And together they drifted down, over the dust-swept plains and craters and toward the metallic blue light of the Martian sunrise. She had a planet to explore.