Christopher Moore - Secondhand Souls

I spent whole days, wrapped in a cloak against the fog, staring out to sea, thinking that my presence might pull him to me. I knew he had to feel the same thing, the tether to his heart, and I would be there above the Gate so he could follow it across the ocean, home, to me.

For forty years I waited, meeting every morning with the thought of him, ending every night with prayers for him, and he never returned. Word never came. What had befallen him? Whom had he met? Had he forgotten me? I died a nun, for I would have no one else, and when he did not return, the only way to keep my father from making me marry another was to marry God. Yet I was an unfaithful wife, for I was Nikolai’s and he was mine, always and forever, and there could be no other for me, not even God.

“That’s the saddest story I’ve ever heard,” said Mike, who was shivering in his safety harness, and not from the cold wind coming in the Gate. He held out his arms to her, to hold her, to comfort her.

Concepción bowed her head to hide her tears, then slipped off the beam and floated toward him.

Mike’s radio crackled. “Sully! The fuck do you think you’re doing?”

Mike scrambled for the mic strapped at his shoulder. “Wha, wha, wha.” He whipped his head around so quickly, looking for his coworker that his hard hat nearly came off.

The radio: “I’m on the lower north tower, about a hundred feet below you. Seven o’clock.”

Mike spotted him. Bernitelli, wiry little Italian guy. Berni , they called him, working in a window washer’s lift, suspended from cables a hundred feet over the bay.

“I’m okay,” Mike said into the radio. “Just shooing some gulls that were getting in fresh paint.”

“You hooked in?”

“Of course.”

“Then stop waving your arms around and hang on. I thought you were going to take the big dive.”

“Roger that,” Mike said. “Sorry.”

Concepción stood right beside him, now, as solid as the bridge itself, the wind whipping her dress around her legs. Strands of her dark hair blew across her face and she wiped them back behind her ear, then reached out to touch the stream on his cheek left by a tear. He couldn’t feel her hand, but at the gesture he felt a pain rise in his chest, an emptiness, and he squeezed his eyes tightly shut, then opened them. She was still there, but smiling now.

“So you never knew—you don’t know what happened to him?”

She shook her head. “Perhaps he found someone else. Perhaps the Czar kept him in Russia? We would ask after him whenever a Russian ship anchored in the bay, but no one had heard of his fate. Had I been a fool, a young girl who clung forever to a broken promise? Perhaps he was pretending all along, playing on my affections to get my father to release supplies for his colonies. This is why I have come to you: to find out.”

“You waited two hundred years?” He realized, even as he asked, that if you were chatting with a ghost, two hundred feet above the San Francisco Bay, you really had no right to question anyone’s judgment.

“You are the first person who could hear us. Sometimes, when someone is about to jump, they can hear us, but they do not answer, and soon they are here with us. By that time, it is too late for answers.”

“Then everyone who has ever jumped—they are all here? They, like you, they—”

“Not all of them, but most.”

Mike tried to count in his head, about one jumper a week, since the bridge was opened, nearly eighty years ago—it was many. “That’s—”

“Many,” she said. “And there are others. Not only those who jump. Many others.”

“Many,” he repeated.

“A bridge is a place between, we are souls that are between.”

“So if I can find out what happened to your count, then what, you move on?”

“One hopes,” said the ghost. “One always hopes.”

“One moment, please.” Mike spidered his way back into a matrix of beams so he was out of sight of Bernitelli, then reached in his coveralls for his smartphone, but paused. It couldn’t be this sudden: two hundred years and he simply looks something up on a search engine and resolves her mission, puts her to rest? What if her count had married another woman? What if he had used her, lied to her?

“Concepción, you have a modern way of speaking, do you know about the Internet?”

“Please, call me Conchita. Yes, I have heard. We hear the radios in the cars as they pass, listen to the people walking on the bridge. I think the Internet is new way people have found to be unpleasant to one an-other, no?”

“Something like that.” He typed the count’s name into a search engine, then, when it suggested he’d spelled it wrong, he hit search. In seconds, the result was back and he tried not to react as he read what the count had done, so many years ago. When she had first appeared, while he was still in shock over the sweater guy going over the rail, she had shown him pity, given him a week to prepare for her reappearance. She had warned him she was coming the second time and had only appeared to him after he was safely hooked to the bridge. She had shown him consideration. He owed her the same.

He shook his head at the phone and said, “Unfortunately, the Internet has sent me to the library to look for word of your count. It may take some time; can you come to me again, soon?”

“It takes great will to come to you like this, but I will return.”

“Thank you. Give me a couple of days. I’ll be working under the roadway for the next few days.”

“I will find you,” she said. “Until next time, thank you, Mike Sullivan.”

In an instant she was beside him. She kissed his cheek and was gone.

Rivera was standing in the living room of a woman named Margaret Atherton, who was eleven months dead, when he realized he wasn’t invisible.

“Hold it right there, you son of a bitch, or I’ll splatter you across that wall,” said the old man, who had entered the room from the kitchen while Rivera was rifling through a side table drawer. Rivera fought instinct and did not reach for the Glock on his hip. Instead he looked over his shoulder to see a man, at least eighty years old, shaped like the letter C, pointing an enormous revolver at him.

“Wait! I’m a cop,” Rivera said. “I’m a policeman, Mr. Atherton.”

“What are you doing in my house?”

Rivera didn’t have an answer. People weren’t supposed to be able to see him when he was retrieving a soul vessel. That’s what it said in the book. That’s what Minty Fresh had told him. “You aren’t actually invisible, it’s just that people won’t notice you. You can slip right into their houses when they bring in the groceries, and as long as you don’t say anything to them, they won’t notice you.”

“That’s hard to believe,” Rivera had said.

“Yeah,” said the big man. “That’s the hard to believe part.”

The old man said, “If you’re a cop, let’s see a badge. And you do anything sketchy I’ll turn you into pink mist.”

When did old people start talking like that? The old fellow was slight and frail-looking, like he might just fall apart at a touch, a man of ash, yet he held the heavy revolver with the steadiness of a bronze monument.

Rivera turned and reached slowly into his jacket pocket for his badge wallet. He’d gone back to active duty two days ago, thinking that the credentials and access would help him to track down the missing soul vessels, but he hadn’t expected this—only the fifth person on his list, the first four were washouts, and already he was abusing his authority. Rivera held up the badge.

“Mr. Atherton, I’m looking into the death of your wife. I knocked and the door was open. I thought something might be wrong, so I came in to check on you.”