Christopher Moore - Secondhand Souls

“We take Sophie to buy vegetable,” said Mrs. Korjev.

“Maybe snack,” said Mrs. Ling, defiantly, for no apparent reason.

“Both of you?” Lily asked.

Mrs. Ling stormed forward in teeny-tiny steps, stopping twice to uncatch her cart from the edge of the bar, but stormed right up in Lily’s face, well, in Lily’s general bosom area, but she was looking at her face. “You think we not know how to take care Sophie? We take care Sophie since baby. We know what good for her. Not Mike.”

“What is manny?” said Mrs. Korjev. “Is not real. Is imaginary. He is drug fiend. I see on Oprah. ”

“Dlug fiend!” said Mrs. Ling. Then she said something in Cantonese, most of which Lily didn’t get except for “white devil,” which she’d learned a long time ago because it was how Mrs. Ling referred to anyone who wasn’t Chinese.

“Maybe you ladies should wait for Mike to come back. He shouldn’t be long.”

“We go,” said Mrs. Ling. “We go, four block to market on Stockton Street, four block home. Two hour, tops. You tell. We go.”

The two matrons herded Sophie through the back room and out the steel door into the ally, and Lily let them because, really, it was only four blocks, and it was the middle of the afternoon, so there was no danger from the Morrigan, and because she was a little afraid of both of them. “Bye, Lily,” Sophie called as the door closed behind them.

Lily’s phone buzzed. It was M. She contemplated sending it to voice mail for a half a second, then remembered that he hadn’t yet found out about her specialness.

“Speak,” she said.

“Lily, where are you?”

“I’m at the restaur— at Asher’s.”

“You okay?”

“I’m mysterious.”

“Good. Look, Asher said he’s sending his daughter out of town with his sister. I want you to see if you can go with them.”

“No. I have a job. I can’t—”

“Dammit, Lily. Would you—” She could hear the exhale, his effort to calm his voice. “I need to know you’re safe.”

“Chill, M. I’m fine. It’s broad daylight.”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s not the Morrigan. We’re talkin’ ’bout a whole different level of badass. This motherfucker can go anywhere, any time of day. You hear me, girl? You need to get gone, right now, and stay gone until this shit is over or everything is over. I need that from you.”

She slid off the bar stool, ran around the bar, into the back room, and opened the steel door into the alley. No one was out there.

“Uh, M, I’m going to have to call you back.”

Audrey was missing her Charlies. Big Charlie, because he was her companion, her lover, her best friend, and Wiggly Charlie because

in the absence of Big Charlie, he was good for a laugh, better company than a dog, and a little more self-maintaining. Sort of like a talkative cat who wasn’t a jerk, but could still be entertained by a piece of string.

Charlie had been in his new apartment in his old building for only a day and a half, and she was already trying to think of ways to alter their living arrangement so they could be together, yet both attend to their responsibilities. Her first instinct was to have Charlie and Sophie move into the Buddhist Center. After all, she carried Sophie’s mother’s soul; the kid would get over the fact that she wasn’t Jewish soon enough. But Charlie didn’t think it would be fair to Jane and Cassie, who had really thrown themselves into raising Sophie as their own, plus the fact that Charlie, who inhabited Mike Sullivan’s body, did not look like the Charlie the world knew as Sophie’s father and who the world thought to be dead. The simplest solution, although not the easiest for Audrey, would be for her to leave her position at the Buddhist Center and move into Charlie’s building with him and Sophie, which would make her, what? Was her clinging to her title as the venerable Amitabha Audrey Walker Rinpoche, of the Three Jewels Buddhist Center, a regression in consciousness? Was she clinging to a self that had no meaning. Was she, in fact, a hypocrite for not letting go of ego, of desire, of attachment, as she prescribed in her teaching?

The bright side was that it might all be moot if the imbalance that seemed to be wobbling through the greater Bay Area destroyed the world of light as they knew it, and they would all be cast together into a dark pandemonium of destruction and disorder. So she had that going for her. She decided that she would call Charlie to celebrate their liberation into doom, but as she was scrolling through her contacts looking for Mike Sullivan’s phone number, one of the center’s landlines rang. She pocketed her cell and picked up a handset in the kitchen. MIKE SULLIVAN showed on the screen.

“Hi, Charlie. I was just going to call you. You really need to change the name on your phone.”

“Audrey, the bridge, I think they’re on the bridge.”

“You may have to be more specific, sweetie.”

“Lily talked to Mike Sullivan, the dead one. His soul, or his ghost, whatever, is on the Golden Gate Bridge. He says there are thousands of other ghosts there.”

Audrey wasn’t sure how to react, wasn’t sure that she should really question Lily talking on a ghost phone, considering everyone’s history. “So if that’s true—”

“That could be where all the missing souls went. Lily said Mike Sullivan’s name was on the Emperor’s list. What if all those souls, going back hundreds of years, are on the bridge?”

“I suppose it makes as much sense as someone’s soul trapped in an ashtray or a ceramic frog, and we’ve seen that.”

“Or a CD,” Charlie said. His wife, Rachel’s, soul had moved into a CD when she died shortly after Sophie was born, then moved out of it into Audrey. He’d seen it happen.

“What do we do?” Audrey asked.

“I don’t know, that’s why I called you.”

There was a skittering noise in the next room, then the sound of something falling over, maybe a wastebasket. Wiggly Charlie, she thought. “Wait a second, Charlie. I heard something. Wiggly Charlie has been missing, it might be him. Hang on, while I check.”

“Sure.”

As she came out of the kitchen into the dining room she saw one of the Squirrel People on the other side of the room and something grabbed her ankle. As she tried to steady herself, something caught her other ankle and she fell forward, losing the handset as she went.

“Audrey?” Charlie’s voice over the phone.

“No, I’m okay,” she said. “Tripped. Just a second—”

Audrey twisted her head and saw one of the Squirrel People with a duck’s face and especially nimble paws pick up the handset and click it off. Then they were on her, all over her, the sound of duct tape ripping, tension around her ankles, tiny claws raking her, pulling her hands behind her back.

Mrs. Korjev led them up Stockton Street and into Chinatown, clearing the way through the crush of shoppers like a blocking-back, Sophie right behind her, and Mrs. Ling bringing up the rear, the wheels on her cart squeaking like distressed mice. At Jackson Street, Mrs. Korjev moved toward a luscious display of pears at the corner market, whose trays of fruit and vegetables ran along the sidewalk and around the corner for another quarter block on either side. Mrs. Ling went in low, did a quick hand-sweep that threw a competing grandmother off balance, and snagged the perfect pear before her opponent could do anything about it. Doing tai chi every morning in Washington Square Park to Motown songs with a hundred other oldsters might seem a waste of time at first glance, but when those slow, repetitive moves were cranked up to marketing intensity, only the grandma with the strongest kung fu would emerge with the perfect pear. Eat dragon dung, loser. Mrs. Ling dropped the pear into her cart and moved on to some bok choy of superior crispness.