Whispers echoed off the walls of Purgatory. They disappeared into the vast expanse of the void hanging above the confines of ceiling-less walls that sectioned off the different areas that the populace of purgatory could access. Giant iron chains, anchored into the walls at various points, were the only thing that suggested there was something beyond the darkness of the void that hung over them. Most of the citizens with a scholarly or philosophical background had come to the conclusion that the chains were physical manifestations of the ties connecting Purgatory to the living world and its timeline. The more theologically-minded speculated that, unseen, the souls of the newly dead arrived by following those chains.

But Agnes had never developed a taste for philosophical contemplation of what might be. To her, the chains merely served as landmarks by which she’d learned to find her way around when she’d first arrived. In the centuries since then, she’d memorized the layout of all of the spaces to which she had access. Most of it consisted of offices where one could petition the employees of Purgatory for different things: various contracts to earn haunt points, application for moving on to an afterlife, which had seemed largely religion-dependent from the brief look she’d taken at the paper work, and, a place she visited often, the Department of Relocation Resources.

She’d had to go there almost every decade, every time to push off the afterlife paperwork they’d automatically put through when a resident had been in Purgatory for over a century. She didn’t want to move on to an afterlife like most of the undead; she wanted to see more of life than the dozen years she’d spent confined on her family’s farm. She wanted to go back, to see the rise and fall of kings and queens and kingdoms, to witness legendary history through the phantasmal eyes of a ghost. She wanted to haunt her old childhood home.

In the middle of line, Agnes bounced on the balls of her feet, excitement pouring out of her any way it could. She clutched her stack of point vouchers close to her chest, every hard-won point carefully accounted for and ready to be added together and redeemed. She was finally up to the thirteenth person in line for the Office of Haunt Management, where she would finally be able to haunt and return to the living world.

She leaned over to look past the people in front of her to the Reception Hall at the end of the concrete-lined hallway that the Office of Haunt Management sat in. The Hall was much grander, with some carved patterns along the walls and hanging dyed drapery, but still generic, with no identifying marks beyond the gate titles that the newly dead arrived through. The Priority Gate, where the famous dead came through, was on the opposite wall, straight across from her. Kings and queens, revolutionaries, notable scholars who would have a lasting influence, artists whose work would be held upon a pedestal for centuries, and many others came through there.

When Agnes had first arrived, she’d watched the Priority Gate constantly, wondering if she’d see a familiar face. There’d also been an old woman back then, dressed in layers of richly dyed cloth like the French nobility, hunched more out of habit than the pain of age, since pains didn’t follow the dead into Purgatory. Her breath had smelled of mildew and decaying leaves while she berated Agnes for her naïveté, reminding her that someone as low-born as herself would never have known someone great enough in life to become a Priority Denizen.

That old French woman hadn’t been around for a long time, but Agnes still didn’t spend much time at the gates anymore. Instead, she’d spent much more time talking to the educated dead, learning as much about what was changing in the living world as she could. It was a lot, and, if she was honest, none of it quiet made sense or added up; she couldn’t visualize any of it. It would probably be clearer when she was actually back in the living world herself.

The door to the Office of Haunt Management swung open, protruding out into the hallway with everyone in line. The person at the front went through, and the door slammed shut. The line shifted forward.

There was a young boy in front of her, who looked like he had been maybe twelve years old when he died, not much younger than herself. He wore upper-class American dress, a dark, fully buttoned up shirt with the white collar of another shirt underneath poking up above it, and his hair combed flat against his head. She’d learned to recognize the clothing by watching the arriving waves of the recently dead and talking to whoever was willing to hold a conversation. A lot of British colonists, calling themselves Americans, had started coming through gate almost two centuries after she’d died. The flow of them hadn’t really slowed down all that much since then, either, but they had changed more and more rapidly over time.

When he turned around to face her, he pinched at the hem of his jacket with one hand, the other staying in a pocket where his vouchers were sticking out. Not long before, she’d heard his attempt at conversation go ignored by the person ahead of him, so she offered him an encouraging smile when he glanced up from his shoes to her.

“Hi,” she said, with a little wave. “I’m Agnes.”

“Hi.” He wiggled the toe of the shoe he was staring at. “I’m Willie,” he answered.

She waited silently for a moment, giving him plenty of room to say something more if he wanted. When he didn’t, she straightened the stack of point vouchers in her hands again. “You’re redeeming a haunt?” Willie nodded. “Where for?”

“Um,” he slid his right foot in a semi-circle over the cement floor of the hallway. “The White House.”

Neither of them had noticed the office door open, but they did jump at the sound of it slamming closed. Their conversation was stopped for a moment as they recovered from the shock, and then, several seconds later, took a single step forward, following the movement of the line like segments of an inching caterpillar.

“The White House?” Agnes asked. “Which one? Where?”

“No, where the President of the United States lives.” Both names were unfamiliar to her. She knew of several Americans who had spoken reverently about the United States. Was it a place? An alliance of places? She still didn’t know exactly what it was.

“Did you live there?” she asked. Normally, the Office of Haunt Management wouldn’t let you haunt a place you’d never been to in life. She’d heard it was even stricter for Priority Denizens; according to rumor, they could only haunt the place they died.

Willie shifted his foot again, the sound soft, but still drowning out the whispering voices drifting down the hallway from the Reception Hall. “For a bit, right before I got sick. It’s where my dad went to haunt, too.”

Agnes thought about it. Normally, two ghosts weren’t allowed to haunt in the same residential place like a house. But if it was his dad, and they’d signed an agreement to it before his dad went to haunt there, the office would probably allow it. The line moved forward again. “Why do you want to haunt there?”

Willie brightened up a bit, his shoulders lifting, straightening like a reviving flower. “He was the president. He said he was going back to keep helping the country, and I wanted to go, too. He gave me his left-over Haunt points so I could go sooner.”

“He was a Priority Denizen?” Willie nodded, and Agnes nearly dropped her point vouchers, having to straighten the sliding papers back into a neat stack again. “Wow.”

Willie nodded, more full of life than he’d been during any of the previous conversation. The line inched forward again. They were getting fairly close to the door, and she rubbed her hands against the coarse fabric of her simple dress, trying to wipe off the sweat forming on her palms. She couldn’t afford for any of the ink to get smudged.

Agnes had been tediously collecting a couple points a year for centuries to go back to the living world. In all those years, though, she’d never heard of someone being able to borrow another person’s points. Maybe it was just because she’d never known any Priority Denizens, who would actually have the extra points to give.

She decided against saying anything about it to Willie. He would know what he was doing better than she did, and hearing that people doubted you at every turn was hard. She knew that well enough. So, instead, she asked, “What’d you do to get the rest of your points?”

His head dropped again as he looked back to his shoes, but he didn’t seem quite as shy as he had before. The line moved forward. “I was an imaginary friend for other kids. I miss them. I hope some come to the White House one day so I can say hi.”

Agnes nodded. She’d known about the imaginary friend program; it was specialized for dead children such as themselves, and probably more fun, but didn’t bring in as many points as quickly as guardian angel contracts. That was the route she’d gone for a while, being temporarily sent into the world in a semi-corporeal form to do some small act to steer a person on to a different, usually brighter, path. Frequently, she’d do things like appear some ways down the street from someone and get their attention somehow to keep them from accidentally crossing in front of an oncoming car. It was quick work, but taxing to go back and forth between the living world and Purgatory, and you could only do it a couple times a year.

Just as she glanced past Willie at the milling citizens in the Reception Hall, Agnes saw a small commotion near the Priority Denizens Gate. The crowd parted for just a moment, and she caught a glimpse of someone coming through that she had no hope of recognizing. They’d just died, and likely already briefed about the bonuses they had access to as a result of living a historically important life.

They held a single point voucher in their hand, and were headed towards the hallway with the Office of Haunt Management. The line moved forward again, and now there were only three people ahead of her and Willie. Four, if this new Priority Denizen was planning to move on to a haunt instead of an afterlife.

There was a faint tapping sound, and Agnes noticed Willie’s fingers moving against the smaller stack of vouchers that he held. Being the son of someone important enough to have leftover points, he’d probably come in with a decent amount of his own due to his connection to history. Her own stack was at least three times as thick, the ultra-thin papers sliding against one other and threatening to spill if she didn’t hold them carefully.

“Are you nervous?” Agnes asked.

Willie nodded, and looked back at the approaching Priority Denizen. Now that he was clear of the crowd, Agnes could see his plain, smooth-fitting suit and the man’s kind smile. There were wrinkles of all kinds across his face, like an open biography. It displayed the long list of his life experiences and demonstrated that it included the best and worst of life.

He had barely reached the front of the line before the door opened, and for the first time, someone stood in the doorway rather than just calling out. It was a woman wrapped in a length of thick cloth, dyed a rich vermillion, collected in around her waist by a leather belt. The gold woven into her headband called attention to the golden prosthetic eye in one socket, the rays of a sun etched in. She looked like one of the roman goddesses Agnes had heard of from some of the scholarly denizens of Purgatory. 

“Mr. Nelson Mandela. We’ve been anticipating your arrival; please follow me and we can discuss your options.” Without another word, she turned, and the white-haired man followed her into the office. The door slammed closed again.

“What do you think he did?” Agnes asked quietly, as though they might be overheard.

“I don’t know, but he looked a lot like the people the South kept as slaves. But also rich,” Willie added. “Maybe he helped his people a lot.”

Agnes nodded, but didn’t really know what he meant. Most of what she knew of the world after her death was in bits and pieces, and mostly in Europe. “The South” didn’t sound much like something she knew about, much less a significant name in and of itself. She clutched the stack of vouchers tightly in both hands.

The door opened up again, a voice called, and Willie moved forward. Agnes took a hesitant step after him. “Where are you going to haunt?” he asked.

She looked down at the top of her stack, the most recent voucher for three points staring back up at her in impassive print. The last person she had helped, helping them avoid being fatally bitten by a snake, had been in an open field of wildflowers near the Salisbury Cathedral. The River Avon had been in sight, just across from a host of new gardens and buildings that now blocked any clear view of the cathedral itself. It was easily one of her favorite guardian angel assignments, being the only one in a place she could even remotely recognize as England. But it’d also been one of the most alienating, seeing how much her homeland had changed without her.

“Somewhere in England,” she hedged. “Wherever is still standing from my time.”

The door opened, another person went in, and there was only one left standing between Willie and the door. Agnes examined the stack the stranger held, barely half the size of Willie’s. The top voucher was worth a hundred and seventy-five points. It’d taken her over an entire century to save up that much.

“You’re from England, then?” Willie asked. “You don’t sound British.”

Agnes lifted one shoulder in a sheepish half-shrug. “I’ve been here a long time. I guess I just lost my accent along the way.”

He paused, back to folding and pinching the hem of his jacket with one hand. “How long have you been here?”

“Since 1598.”

The door opened again, and this time Agnes was close enough to hear the next person’s name. “John McAvoy. Enter.”

There was a long pause in their conversation after John went in, emphasized by the distant whispers drifting down the hallway from the Reception Hall. “That’s a long time,” Willie commented. Agnes nodded.

“How many points does it take to haunt the White House?” she asked just to change the subject. Points didn’t really matter that much at this point; they were both about to be gone, at least an ocean apart, without having to worry about haunts and Purgatory for a long time.

“840,” he declared proudly. “My dad had an extra 400-some points to give me.”

Agnes glanced down at her stack. She had accumulated a little over 400 points herself, arriving in Purgatory with none and knowing it would take quite a few just to go back in the first place. Willie’s dad must have been extremely important.

The door opened, and Agnes gave Willie an encouraging smile. The same voice that had greeted John called from within: “Agnes Modeley. Enter.”

Willie and Agnes’s expressions of confusion were mirrors of each other. The door stayed open, waiting. “Me?” Agnes looked past him at the doorway. “No, Willie’s ahead of me.”

“William Lincoln, you do not have the necessary points to claim your haunt. Please step aside. Agnes Modeley, enter.”

“What do you mean he doesn’t have the points?” Agnes asked.

“I have 842 points,” Willie added, pitch rising to match his panic.

“William Lincoln owns 426 points, and has a signed claim to a position in the White House in the United States of America, which costs 840 points.” The same woman in the red dress with the golden eye stepped out. “William Lincoln, step aside. Agnes Modeley, enter.”

“What? But I’ve got the vouchers right here!” Willie desperately held up the small stack in his hands to her.

The woman took the stack, pulling out the bottom voucher. “These 416 points belong to Abraham Lincoln, who has already redeemed a haunt. These points are invalid for redemption.”

“But he’s my dad,” Willie protested. “He gave them to me.”

“He did not officially sign them over to you, so they are not legally yours.” She handed back his vouchers, keeping the one from his father. “Agnes Modeley, please step inside the Office of Haunt Management.”

Agnes took a hesitant step forward. Willie looked between her, the woman, and the door. “But- I, we thought… Please.” Tears were starting to fill his eyes, distorting the outline of his irises.

She didn’t want to leave him here alone, but didn’t know what to do for him. He had enough to haunt somewhere else, but Agnes knew he had been looking forward to seeing his father again. It would take nearly four centuries for him to build up the 416 points. That’s how long it had taken her.

And where was she going to go? She didn’t have anywhere specific to be, no one she knew that she could hope to see. The only reason she had originally wanted to pursue a haunt was to see the world develop, because she was curious about how the human race would evolve, where they would go, what they would find.

She thought about “The South.” That had been something very obvious and clear to Willie, who’d lived maybe two centuries ago, and she didn’t have the faintest clue what it meant. More than four centuries had passed since she had known the world even half as well. What were her chances of ever actually catching up just from watching one place?

“Could I sign over my points?” Agnes asked. The golden-eyed woman turned to her.

“To whom?” she asked. Agnes frowned, glancing at Willie.

“To William Lincoln,” she answered. Willie was staring at her now, open-mouthed, and she gripped the vouchers in her hands.

“Agnes, you’ve been saving up for so long,” he reminded her, voice wobbly with the tears he’d been about to release. “Don’t give them to me.”

“Do I need his permission to sign over my points?” Agnes asked.

The golden-eyed woman blinked at her. “No.”

“But I don’t want them, they’re yours!”

“Can I get the paperwork to sign over my points here, or do I need to go to a different office?” She hadn’t known before now that you could give other denizens your points, and she certainly didn’t know where to do that.

“I can pull it out for you. Agnes Modeley, William Lincoln, enter the office.”

Before Agnes could follow the woman as she turned her back on both of the children, Willie stopped her, stepping in front of the door. “But, Agnes, you can’t just give all of your points to me, you won’t be able to go back to England.”

She looked past him again, staring into the throng of strangely dressed people in the Reception Hall, from a timeline she couldn’t dream of and places she couldn’t imagine. “I think I’ll go on to an afterlife. I don’t have anyone waiting for me to join them, like you do.”

Willie still looked distraught when she looked back at him, but he didn’t protest anymore. Instead, he stepped forward and hugged her, tight. “Thank you, Agnes. So, so much.”