Christopher Moore - Secondhand Souls

“Oh, Señor Sullivan, I am so happy to see you,” said Concepción, swinging around one of the trusses under the bridge like a real girl might swing around a lamp post in the park on a joyful summer day in a musical comedy, her skirts flaring out around her.

“I’m happy to see you, too,” he said. “Please call me Mike.”

“Mike it is, then,” she said with a shy smile and a fluttering of her eyelashes. If she’d had a fan, she would have flirted from behind it. “What have you found out of my Nikolai?”

All of Mike’s preparation had not prepared him for this, for a ghost that was light of spirit. A sullen, grieving, heartbroken ghost, yes, but not this bright and laughing Conchita who skipped amid the heavy steel like a feather on the wind.

He checked his safety lines, then took off his hard hat and held it over his heart, just as he had practiced. Then he told her. Watching the light go out of her eyes made him feel as if he’d just kicked the angel of mercy in the mouth.

“A horse?” she said.

“Sorry.”

“A horse? A horse! A goddamn horse! I wept for two centuries and he fell off a horse six weeks after he sailed away?”

“Really sorry,” Mike said. “But he was riding across Siberia to St. Petersburg to get permission from the Czar to marry you when he fell.”

“Nobody just falls off a horse. Who falls off a horse?”

“It said on the Internet that he snapped his neck when he hit the ground, so he didn’t suffer.”

“All this time, I thought I might have said something wrong, I worried he had fallen in love with another, that the Czar had imprisoned him for breaking the rules of trade, but no, for him it was over in an instant. He didn’t have to go all the way to Siberia to fall off a horse. We had horses here. My father had men who could have pushed him off a fucking horse.”

“Excuse me, Conchita,” said Mike, “but that doesn’t sound like the Spanish lady who—”

“What do you know about Spanish ladies? You, with your stupid bucket, you, spattered with your orange paint.”

Mike swallowed hard and put his hard hat back on. “But you can rest now, right? You can be at peace.”

“Peace!” Her dress and hair whipped around her as if in a hurricane wind, although it was a calm day on the bay. “Oh, there will be no peace. I am two hundred years grieving, it will take at least a hundred to get over my anger. Oh, yes, señor, there will be haunting. Such haunting as no one has ever seen. If anyone in those cars passing above is of Russian blood, I shall visit such horrors upon them, they will wish they had fallen off a horse. They will beg to fall off a horse.”

“But he loved you,” said Mike. He was grateful to whatever circuit breaker in his brain had stopped from telling her that she was beautiful when she was angry, for, although she was, she was also scaring the shit out of him, nearly as badly as the first time she’d appeared to him.

She stopped raging for a moment. “Do you think so?”

“It says so in all the books. His love for you is legendary. A few years ago they brought earth from his grave to mingle with yours in Benicia. Your name is inscribed on his tombstone in Russia, with the words ‘ May they forever be together.’ ”

“Oh,” she said. She bit a nail, kept a delicate finger against her lower lip, as if to keep it from trembling.

“I’m very sorry, Conchita,” Mike said.

She smiled again, all for him. “I know. You are my gallant champion. You have done as I asked and I have given you no thanks.”

Mike shook his head. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t think of anything to say, he was having trouble even swallowing—being forgiven for not being able to change history had touched him more than he would have ever guessed.

She reached out and caressed his cheek and he was sure that this time he could feel her touch.

“I must go now,” she said. “But I will come to you again, if I may?”

Mike nodded.

“And I must ask you, my gallant champion, for another favor.”

“Anything,” he managed to say without his voice breaking.

“There is another one here on the bridge that would speak with you, but if you don’t wish to hear him, I will understand, my champion.”

“As long as I’m hooked in, I suppose it will be okay. No sudden surprises, okay?”

“I will send him now,” she said. “I will see you soon. Thank you, my love.”

“Wait, your what?” Mike said, but she had stepped into a beam as if stepping behind a curtain and was gone.

Before he could pick up his paint bucket to move on, a guy in a suit and a wide-brimmed fedora floated down from the roadway and settled in a seated position on the beam where Mike was standing.

“Nice-looking broad,” said the guy in the hat.

Mike realized that at the appearance of the second ghost, even though he was braced for it, he peed just a tiny bit in his shorts. Just a bit. There’s something about being suspended over a two-hundred-foot drop that snaps you to attention, and in a second he was back in control, dealing with a weird situation in the only way you could, weirdly.

“I thought you knew her,” Mike said. “She brought you to me, right?”

“Well, yeah, but I’ve never seen her. Persons are less put together on this side of the bridge, you don’t so much see each other as you get an impression of them as they go by, and the impression I get most of the time is they’re loopy as a snake salad. Not this broad, though.”

“So you two talked?”

“Sure, you could say talked . Ghosts mostly communicate by odor. Gotta tell you, you got a house that smells like farts, you got a haunted house. Next time you think, oh man, Grandma farted, think again, it might be your dead grandpa. Unless your grandma eats a lot of cabbage, then it’s probably her. Cabbage can be a rough road for old people. But’s there’s good, too. Every time you smell peaches, a ghost just got his rocks off. I should have known that broad was a dish before I even saw her, she smelled like peach pie.”

Mike wanted to punch him. The ghost looked as solid as any person, sitting there on the beam, his feet dangling, ships and wind surfers passing two-hundred feet below, and Mike wanted to punch him right in the mouth for saying Concepción smelled like peach pie—like ghost come. Instead he swung his paint mop, which is what they used most of the time—a rough, fist-sized mop on the end of a two foot stick, to spot paint the bridge —swung it backhand, hoping he could knock off the ghost’s stupid ghost fedora. Instead the mop just whiffed right through the shade and flung paint off into space. The ghost didn’t even notice.

Exasperated, but trying to hide it, Mike said, “Well, why are you here? Why did she send you to me. She said it’s difficult for you to appear this way, so why?”

“Whoa, don’t get sore, I’m getting there.”

“Well, get there.”

“Fine,” said the ghost, thumbing the lapels of his jacket. “You don’t have to hit me with a brick.”

I was working in the Naval Investigations Service out of Chi-town when we first got word of a potential enemy propaganda operation called the Friends of Dorothy operating on the West Coast, probably originating in Frisco. I know, What’s Naval Investigations doing in Chicago, a thousand miles from the nearest ocean? That’s the slickness of our strategy, see: Who’s gonna suspect navy cops in the middle of Cow Town on the Prairie, am I right? Of course I am.

Anyways, we get word that new troops shipping out to the Pacific out of San Fran are being approached on the down low by this Friends of Dorothy bunch, who are playing up on their prebattle jitters, trying to cause some desertions, maybe even recruit spies for Tojo.