Paul Kohler - The Borrowed Souls, A Novel

“Wait, you’ve done this before?”

Hauser nodded silently.

“Then what’s the big deal? If you’ve done this, my punishment can’t be too bad. You’re my trainer, after all.”

“My situation was a long time ago. My chastisement was quite severe at the time. Back then, the Sentinel was a lot different. They pulled me away from soul collection for almost a year, and that year was the hardest of my life.”

“What made it so hard?” I asked.

Hauser shrugged. “My discipline is neither here nor there. I do know this: the Sentinel is very set in their ways today, and trust me when I tell you they won’t be too happy to hear about your latest indiscretion.”

Worry spread through my veins. Hauser was making it sound like I’d lose an arm or leg as penitence for my deed.

Hauser chuckled. “No, it’s not going to be that bad.”

“Been reading my thoughts much?”

Hauser winked.

We sat on the park bench and watched the random pedestrians walk up and down the sidewalk. Seconds turned to minutes. Minutes turned into hours. Before I realized it, the sun had gone down. Neither of us said a word. My own mind raced through numerous possible consequences for my actions. Hauser, who knows? He might have been thinking about feeding his goldfish for all I knew.

Hauser finally broke the silence. “It was shortly after my own training. I think it was around 1820, and I… was trying to atone for my past sins. The soul that I was sent to collect was that of a young girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen, I don’t remember. Anyway, her father was killed in the war and her mother took any kind of job around the village that she could get so that she could feed her family. Because she was away so much, the little girl, I’ll call her Alice, was in charge of her two younger sisters while their mother worked.” Hauser paused but remained staring forward. “As you might imagine, back then there were fewer lawmen to keep the peace. With fewer police, the crime rate was a lot higher. I had just been given a device very similar to your rosary that allowed me to foresee the moment of death. Unfortunately, I didn’t have twenty-four hours like you do now. I only had about an hour, maybe two.”

“Why? Why are you telling me this now?” I asked.

“I’ve not told this to anybody, so take that for what it’s worth. I just wanted you to know that you’re not alone. Shall I continue?”

I nodded vehemently.

“When I used the device, I saw Alice and her two sisters being tortured, raped, and then killed. Two men were passing through town and had learned of the three girls being home alone when their mother inadvertently let it slip while working at a local pub.”

“And you…”

“Yes, I saved all three girls that night. And at the same time I filled two boxes with the bad men.”

“But how did you do it? I mean, I had to get creative with animal manipulation to save Noah. How did you save the three girls and kill the rapists at the same time?”

“That, my friend, is information that will never pass these lips. Let me just say that in this afterlife we live in, we have this… ability that even to this day, I don’t know the full potential of.”

I nodded, remembering something that Wilson had said before I took his soul. “Practical magic?” I asked.

“Yep. Wilson told you?”

“Yeah, but only briefly. I had asked him about his mind-reading ability and that’s how he explained it.”

“I’d imagine that you too will be developing that same ability anytime now. Maybe even before you collect your next soul.”

“But what about my punishment? If you were pulled away for a year back then, what’s going to happen to me now?”

“Well, I was… how can I say this? I was a special case.”

“In what way?”

“My previous life was not filled with joys of spring, so to speak. I did some bad things, very bad. And to make up for those atrocities, I tried to save every soul that I could. It wasn’t until those three girls that I finally got caught.”

“Wow. What did you do? You know, before…”

Hauser’s eyes were damp but the tears didn’t fall. “I’d rather not. Not right now. I’ve already told you more than I’ve told anyone else.”

I accepted Hauser’s answer and didn’t press. I already felt fortunate that he shared so much with me so soon after taking Wilson’s position.

“So what do I do now?”

“Well, have you looked at your box since you freed your mark?”

“No. I don’t mean that. What about me and the Sentinel? What are you going to tell them?”

“Don’t worry about that, kid. I’m supposed to discourage your ability to alter reality. That’s why I was so hard on you earlier. Everybody in our profession knows how much they can push the boundaries. I’ll smooth it over with them and it’ll be like nothing happened.”

“I’m speechless, Hauser. Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it, kid. Now, where is your box?”

I pulled Noah Clayton’s box from my pocket and held it in my hand. At the same time, Hauser pulled a glass vial from his own inside pocket.

“Go ahead and open it up,” Hauser instructed.

I did so, curious as to what Hauser was up to. As I turned the open box toward him, he removed the rubber stopper from the end of the vial, and a very faint wisp of smoke floated out and into the box. The box closed and vanished.

“Don’t I need to cleanse it first?”

“Nope. That was a clean, virgin soul. Hot off the presses, so to speak.”

Curious, I asked, “And where exactly did you get a vial of a brand new soul?”

“Um, where is of no concern. The big guys upstairs know nothing about it, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

“Mums the word,” I said as a replacement box materialized in my hand.

“That’s strange,” I said as I turned the box over and over. “This box is like the last one. No name.”

“Give it a minute. Sometimes they’re a little slow to catch up.”

Hauser and I sat on the bench, both intently focused on the box.

After what felt like an eternity, Hauser’s eyes narrowed. He looked into my eyes and uttered two words.

“Oh, dear.”

Having maneuvered the endlessly stark hallways dozens of times over the past few months, I still couldn’t get use to the stench. A sterile, antiseptic smell hung in the air like an arctic fogbank as I passed through the bleak corridors. Walking along, I could practically feel my energy being sapped from above. I knew it was a figment of my imagination, but I still found it oddly ironic that in place such as this, where life preservation was the standard, the harshness of the overhead lights seemed to counteract that exact intention. I wondered why it was different in other parts of the hospital; color and life were prevalent throughout the decor, but here in the Intensive Care Unit, white was the preferred palette.

Moving into the central core—the bullpen—I glanced at the personnel behind the counter. Having been a constant shadow in the ICU wing, I felt I knew the entire staff by name. When I saw a new male nurse standing near the coattails of one of the doctors, my interest was piqued. In all the time I’d spent searching for the owner of the soul I was there to collect, I had never once considered that it might actually be a doctor or a nurse, and not a dying patient.

I walked toward them in hopes of gleaning the new employee’s name. As I stood near, listening to the doctor ramble on about the various patients’ conditions, I looked over the nurse’s uniform for any indication of his name. Unfortunately his ID badge had been flipped over, and I was unable to read the front side.