Christopher Moore - Secondhand Souls

“Stop it!” Minty said. They were a couple. They were talking like a couple. The freaky-haired Buddha nun and the crocodile-wizard monster. It was wrong. Deeply, deeply wrong. Was he the only person on earth who had to be alone? “I can’t do it. You shouldn’t have called.” He stood.

“You’re the only one who can help,” said Charlie.

“It’s impossible. I have to get about finding out if the other Death Merchants in the city were replaced, if they’re doing their job.”

“Mr. Fresh,” said Audrey, standing. “When I thought the Death Merchants were somehow imprisoning human souls, when I was trying to rescue the soul vessels from you guys, the Squirrel People helped. They fanned out all over the city. I found a few of you, but they found others on their own. They can see the glow of a soul vessel. They can move around the city in the shadows. They could help. We could help.”

“No.” Minty Fresh turned to leave, bent to go through the door. He’d learned his lesson about the hundred-year-old doorways in this place before. There was still a forehead-shaped dent in the woodwork above the kitchen door from when he’d stormed in here to save Charlie the first time.

Charlie jumped off the table and scampered after the big man. “Fresh, my daughter needs me! She doesn’t even know I’m alive.”

“Well, go see her.”

“I can’t go see her like this.”

“She’ll be fine. Kids are resilient.” He didn’t know anything about kids, but he’d heard people say that. “She’ll understand. She’s the Big Death .”

“No she’s not. She seems to have lost her—well—powers; she’s just a normal kid. Her hellhounds disappeared, and if the Underworld is rising again, she won’t have anyone to protect her.”

Fresh stopped but didn’t turn. “I don’t mean to be critical, Asher, ’cause I know you got a lot on your mind, but that’s the part of the story you lead with.”

“Sorry.” Charlie stood in the entry to the parlor. Audrey joined him.

“Calling you was my idea,” said Audrey.

“So,” said Minty, “the one thing that was supposed to end all this light versus dark, manifestation of the Underworld on earth, crazy shit that went down a year ago, the rise of the Luminatus , that has been undone?”

“Apparently,” said Charlie.

Minty turned to them now and began to count on his fingers. “So there’s a banshee loose in the city, warning of coming doom. You, Rivera, and possibly many other Death Merchants have not been collecting soul vessels for over a year, and we don’t know what happened to the souls of all those who died in the city during that year. You don’t even have a shop anymore to exchange the vessels if you were collecting them. And the only thing that was keeping the forces of darkness at bay has been demoted to, what, a first grader?”

“Second,” said Charlie. “But she’s in the advanced reading group.”

“So, really, we are totally, completely fucked. And by we , I mean everybody.”

“Pretty much,” said Charlie, nodding furiously enough that his jaw flapped a little.

“Life is suffering,” said Audrey, cheerfully.

Fresh nodded. “All right, then. I’ll call you with the names.”

“Just like that?”

“I have to collect the souls anyway. I find someone in my book is young, healthy, male, and what else?”

Charlie started to untie his robe again, “One about this size if—”

Audrey interrupted, “Just the name and address if you have it. We’ll see if we can find any Death Merchants.”

“Yeah, you gonna have a hard enough time convincing someone they are going to die so they need to vacate their body so the wizard lizard there can move in.”

He turned to leave, then stopped and looked over his shoulder. “Oh, did I tell you that the Emperor is making a list of all of the city’s dead?”

“What for?”

“No fucking idea, I just didn’t want you to be the only one got to whip out a surprise.” He laughed—the resigned laugh of the doomed—as he walked out.

Outside on the street he paused by the door of the great bloodred Caddy as he fished in his jacket pocket for his keys. Fog had rolled up out of the bay at sundown and was drifting in a misty wave from the south. On this street they had come for Charlie, the Morrigan, snaking out of the sewer grates at either end of the block, singing their taunts even as Fresh was bearing down on them in the Caddy—screeching in anger and agony as he ran them over, the claws of one raking into the metal of the Caddy’s hood as she was dragged under the bumper, the other tearing at the rear fender as his tires burned across her back. The guy at the body shop said the fender looked like it had been attacked by a grizzly bear. He’d never seen anything like it. “Me either,” Minty had said. “Nobody has.”

He cocked his head, thinking he might have heard a female voice on the street above the jingling of his keys. Just laughter, maybe—girls out for dinner or drinks a block away on Mission Street, their voices echoing distant and diffused because of the fog. Probably.

They stared at the doorway as they listened to Minty Fresh’s steps recede and the front door close behind him.

Audrey checked the clock. “I have to lead a meditation at seven. They’re going to start arriving soon. You might want to get out of sight.”

“I should have asked him about Lily.”

“He would have brought it up if he wanted to talk about it. Why don’t you go ask Bob and the others if they remember all the places they collected soul vessels? They really might be able to help.”

“I don’t really feel welcome down there.”

“Don’t be silly. They love you.”

“Lately it feels like they might be plotting to kill me.” Despite having been liberated from his beta-male DNA, Charlie still viewed the world with glassy-eyed suspicion, due in no small part to the fact that he had already been murdered once and hadn’t cared for the experience.

“Take snacks,” Audrey said. “They love snacks. There’s some trail mix on the counter.”

“Sure, snacks,” Charlie said, heading for the kitchen. “If only Jesus had thought to take snacks with him into the lion’s den.”

“Jesus didn’t go into the lion’s den, that was Daniel.”

“Well, Daniel, then. I thought you were a Buddhist.”

“I am, but that doesn’t make me an oblivious nitwit, too.”

“Is that any way for a nun to talk?” Charlie called back, but Audrey had already headed upstairs to change. He scampered into the kitchen, grabbed a packet of trail mix off the counter, jumped down, ducked out the dog door, hopped down the back porch steps, then through the little hatch under the steps into the sanctuary of the Squirrel People.

The city under the house was a maze of mismatched found objects patched together with zip ties, silicone glue, and duct tape, all lit from above by low-voltage LED lights strung along the floor joists of the great Victorian, which kept the entire space in a state of perpetual twilight. Audrey had purchased the lights at Charlie’s request, after he had watched several of the Squirrel People nearly burn the house down while trying to construct an apartment from discarded yogurt containers by candlelight.

There was no one around.

Charlie had spent very little time down here, choosing to spend his days on the upper floors of the Buddhist Center, either with Audrey or reading from the many books in the library. When he was reading he could fly away into the wildest skies of imagination, untethered to the reality that his soul was trapped in a wretched creature cobbled together from meat and bone, like us all.