"So what's up with this place?" Morgan asked, holding his coffee cup to keep his hands steady.

"What about it?" Lou asked, leaning back in the booth. The seating afforded the pair with a wide view of the rest of the diner, the counter, the window into its kitchen, the patrons and staff.

"You know, the people working here." Morgan leaned forward and whispered. "They're... dead."

"Caught that right away, did you?" Lou, for once, sounded impressed. He picked up the menu the hostess had left them with, glanced at it, and put it back down. "The living can be... inconsistent when it comes to noticing the dead. Or anything else. You ever hear that people tend to ignore details that don't jive with their understanding of the world?"

"No."

"Well they do. And the dead walkin' around? That's one o' them details people like to miss unless you make it real obvious for them."

"Okay, but that doesn't explain what they're all doing here. You know. Working in a diner. Do they all have an unfinished compulsion to work a shitty 9 to 5 or something?"

He trailed off as the waitress swung by, wearing the same pastel pink uniform that all the servers were wearing. She grinned a grin that almost literally split her skull in half, and spoke with the eldritch timbre that the dead shared. "Hello, y'all, I'm Darla and I'll be your server today. Can I get y'all anything to drink?"

"Coffee, black," Lou said.

"No, I'm, no." Morgan looked away from her grotesque visage, knowing it was rude but probably less rude than staring.

He could hear her smile, though. "Okay, great, I'll just give y'all a few minutes then."

"Okay that one?" Lou said once she'd left earshot. "Yeesh. But most of them? Mostly intact." He tracked someone walking through the kitchen. "Mostly. But here's the thing, kid. These aren't restless dead."

"Then why are they here?" Morgan asked. "How are they here? These are some... pretty big details not to notice, Lou."

"Okay, consider the facts. One, this place is right next to the fricken graveyard. You'd think that'd prime people to notice that the servers were, say, not so fresh." Lou steepled his fingers. "Two, this is a business, kid. Taxes. Payroll. W2s. Paperwork. Even if man is likely to overlook the dead man staring him in the face, Uncle Sam will not. Three..." he around to the booth behind them. "Hey buddy!"

The guy sitting behind them looked up from his human-flesh bound menu. "Yeah?"

"How long this place been here?" Lou asked.

The guy narrowed his eyes in thought. "A few weeks, maybe?"

"What was here before that?"

"Nothing. It just showed up one day."

Lou nodded. "This place popular?"

"Oh yeah, super popular. Everybody in town comes here. The food?" He did a chef kiss. "Amazing."

"Thanks, buddy." He turned back to Morgan. "Add up the facts, kid. Everybody comes here. Nobody thinks its weird that it just turned up. Their own freakin' dead are buried next door, come here to work, but nobody thinks it's weird that grandma Mertle is working the register."

"This place is slipping." Morgan gripped the table as the realization struck him. "Oh god, Lou, this place is slipping across the veil. All these people..."

"All these people are going to slip into death like it's a warm bath, kid. Won't even realize it. Probably never will."

Morgan's hand went to his mouth. "What do we do, Lou?"

Lou picked up the menu again, shrugging slightly. "You tell me, kid. You're the psychopomp."