Paul Kohler - The Borrowed Souls, A Novel

With Enoch’s attention on Luke, I lunged for the gun in Enoch’s hand, but before I could grab it, Enoch vanished and reappeared two feet behind me.

“What the hell just happened?” Luke asked.

“Shut up, Luke,” Enoch and I said in unison.

“You see, Jack, sometimes you can’t actually change fate. Luke and Meghan were supposed to die, and dammit, I’m gonna make sure that happens.”

“What does it matter to you if they live or die?” I demanded.

“Honestly, it really doesn’t matter one iota. I just saw an opportunity here, and I decided to take it.”

“What opportunity is that?” I asked, stepping toward Enoch discreetly.

“Back off, Jack. You don’t want to end up like Meghan here, do you?” Enoch asked.

I froze. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Luke once again inching toward his cell phone.

I raised my hands up in surrender. “Hey, it’s no sweat off my brow either, buddy,” I said as I took two steps back, hoping to keep Enoch’s attention away from Luke.

Enoch raised an eyebrow. “You surprise me, Jack. I thought you were all about saving lives. Why the sudden change of heart?”

“No reason, really,” I said, taking another step back.

Enoch instinctively glanced toward Luke, grasping his cell phone in his hand. Without another word, Enoch squeezed the trigger, placing a bullet in the side of Luke’s temple. He dropped to the floor next to Meghan’s dead body.

“Nice try, Jack. But what do you think him calling the police would’ve done for your cause? I’ll tell you, absolutely nothing.”

I rushed into the kitchen, knelt down next to the bodies, and felt for a pulse. There was none, on either of them. Instinctively, I withdrew their soul boxes from my pocket.

“Not so fast, Jack,” Enoch said as he leveled the revolver in my direction. “I need you to back up, and I mean right now.”

I saw the revolver cocked and loaded, and obeyed Enoch’s command, stepping away from the dead bodies. I wasn’t entirely sure whether or not I could be killed again, seeing as I was, for all intents and purposes, dead already. Regardless, I wasn’t about to tempt that particular fate.

A moment later, Enoch withdrew a cylindrical copper tube no longer than a medicine bottle. He unfastened the lid, and an instant later Luke and Meghan’s souls shot directly into the opening. Enoch reattached the lid and slipped it back into his pocket.

“What, you did this just so you can collect their souls on your own?” I asked.

“I have my reasons, and none of them are of any of your concern.” Enoch continued to point his pistol in my direction. We stood, facing each other in silence. Slowly, Enoch began to move toward the entry door of the apartment, shuffling his feet backward, blindly.

Suddenly, Hauser appeared next to me in the kitchen.

“Oh, I was wondering when you would show up,” Enoch said, now pointing the pistol at Hauser.

The look of surprise on Hauser’s face spoke volumes. Without a single word, he smiled, then vanished just as suddenly as he’d appeared.

Enoch blinked rapidly as he swung the pistol in an arc around the room, expecting Hauser to reappear just as randomly. Thinking along the same lines, I also disappeared, jumping into the bedroom momentarily before returning to the living room. Enoch’s back was toward me, but he sensed me almost instantly. He repointed the pistol at me, but before he could pull the trigger, I vanished again. I continued to jump in and out of the bedroom and various parts of the living room and kitchen until Enoch clearly became bored with the game. He stopped pointing his gun at me at every reappearance.

Then, Hauser reappeared right behind him. He reached out to grasp Enoch’s shoulder, but before he could get a grip, Enoch vanished himself. He rematerialized near the apartment door.

“If you want to catch me, old man, you’re going to have to get up a little earlier in the morning,” Enoch said. He no longer pointed the gun at either of us but just stood there, waiting for something.

As if on cue, the apartment door opened and in stepped Dana Holloway.

Enoch looked in our direction one last time, then winked. He handed the revolver to Dana and vanished.

Dana looked at the gun in his hand quizzically before looking up at Hauser and me. “What… what’s going on here?” he asked.

Curious, I wondered how Dana could see any of us. Was he still destined to die? In Luke’s flash-forward, Dana had taken his own life after he’d killed Meghan and Luke. Now I wondered if he would do the same once he discovered that they were both already dead in the kitchen.

Before Hauser or I could answer, we heard the sound of police sirens out front, and then the screech of tires echoing between the buildings. I looked at Hauser, who nodded his head slowly and then flipped his thumb up and over his shoulder. It was time to go. We vanished from Luke’s apartment.

“What the hell was that all about,” I asked as I paced around my cabin.

Hauser stood at the center of the room, his eyes staring off into space, as if trying to focus on a distant star. “I don’t know. I haven’t actually seen Enoch in person for—”

“No, not that. What was up with him killing Luke and Meghan?” I asked.

“I’m sorry, what?” Hauser asked.

“Didn’t you see them dead? Haven’t you been following me around, silently, letting me stumble and fall?”

“No. I’ve been… busy. You say he killed them?”

“Yeah, kind of like that dream I had a few months ago. He kind of just showed up, and when I wasn’t willing to take their souls, he killed them both.”

“Wait, slow down. I need you to tell me everything,” Hauser demanded.

I recapped my search for Meghan and Luke, my dismay at their infidelity, and my decision to intervene once again in my soul collection, pacing around the cabin as I spoke. When I finished catching him up, I sat heavily on the couch. “You’re telling me you really didn’t know anything I was doing?” I asked.

“No, nothing whatsoever.”

“Well, after deciding to save their two souls, I jumped back to Luke’s apartment to make sure that they were okay, and that’s when Enoch showed up and killed them both. Your timing couldn’t have been worse. He fired the gun just seconds before you arrived.”

“My God, so it’s true.”

“What’s true? That Enoch is a psychopath? I thought we knew that already.”

“No, that he is in fact interfering with the collection of other souls.”

“Well, I believe that’s the understatement of the century,” I said, then wondered if my own interference would be equally feared by the Sentinel. Granted, my own changes in fate were far less violent than Enoch’s, but still, I was changing fate just the same.

As Hauser and I contemplated the situation, I began to worry that things might be far worse than I’d imagined. Hauser’s was not his usual jovial self, and a worried look was plastered across his face.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“Well, after he killed them, I attempted to collect their souls. But before I could do so, he pulled out some kind of collection chamber of his own and took both of the souls instantaneously.”

Hauser stopped pacing and stared at me. “Was it a copper tube, and about yea big?” he asked, holding his fingers a few inches apart.

“Yeah, that’s about it. What’s this all about?” I asked.

“I… I have no words. I had always thought that it was a rumor. What you just described is what we’ve coined a soul magnet. It is believed to have been created centuries ago for the mass collection of souls without the need of cleansing. The way that it was rumored to work was that you opened the vessel and any free soul present with a hundred-meter radius would shoot into the tube.”