Christopher Moore - Secondhand Souls

In the waiting area, Lily sobbed in her mother’s arms while Rivera, Charlie, and Audrey stood by feeling helpless. Audrey squeezed Charlie’s hand until it hurt, but he was actually grateful for the pain, because it took his mind off of everything else. Rivera stood aside, observing, until Lily’s mom looked over her daughter’s shoulder at him. He recognized that same helplessness in her eyes that he’d seen in the families of so many murder victims—and he touched her back, lightly, and for only a second, to let her know he was there, another human being: backup.

The medical crash team had pulled curtains across the glass in Minty Fresh’s room, but after twenty-two minutes the curtain whooshed aside and the doctor came through, paused a second at the desk, then turned to come through the double doors into the waiting room, the look on his face broadcasting what he was going to say: “There was nothing we could do.”

Before the doctor reached them, Charlie felt himself go light-headed; his vision tunneled down, went black, and he collapsed. The doctor helped Audrey catch him and lower him into a chair.

Asher, what the fuck you doing here?” said Minty Fresh.

Charlie looked around, saw literally nothing but the big man, standing perhaps ten feet away from him, wearing only a bedsheet.

“Where’s here?” asked Charlie.

The Mint One adjusted his sheet, which was too small for a man his size to wear as a toga, opting instead for a sarong/towel wraparound effect. He looked around. They might have been standing on a sheet of black glass under a starless night sky, except he could see Charlie and Charlie could see him, so technically, it wasn’t dark. When he rubbed his eyes and looked again he could see that they were inside a large stone chamber, lit with bronze oil lamps that jutted from the wall and threw long shadows up to a high, pointed ceiling. Across one wall and plane of the ceiling stretched the elongated shadow of a dog’s head with long pointed ears. Minty searched but couldn’t see the dog that was casting the shadow, yet there it was, a shadow thirty feet tall, and still reaching only halfway to the apex of the ceiling.

“I’m going to guess the Underworld,” said Minty Fresh.

“You’ve been here before?”

“I had it described to me once,” said Minty Fresh. “And you look like your old self.”

Charlie was his non-Mike Sullivan self, dressed in one of his Savile Row houndstooth suits.

“Oakland?” asked Charlie.

“Not Oakland,” came a voice that echoed through the chamber.

A circle of torches appeared; in its center, a tall, dog-headed man in an Egyptian kilt stood by a stone table on which stood a gold balance scale. In front of the table was a stone pit, perhaps five meters across; something down there was growling and snarling.

“You know who I am?” said the dog man.

“I do,” said Minty Fresh. “Anubis. A man I knew came here once, met you, told me about you.”

“He was my brother’s avatar on earth, you are mine.”

Anubis crouched, leaned forward, opened his eyes wide; the irises glowed deep gold.

“The eyes,” said Charlie. “Of course.”

Minty Fresh looked at Charlie. “Of course? This all makes sense to you?”

“Sure,” Charlie said. He inched forward until he could see into the pit. Thirty feet below, a creature the size of a hippo circled the floor, with the body of a lion and the jaws of a crocodile. The floor of the pit was littered with bleached human bones; Charlie could make out skulls here and there in the orange light of the oil lamps. He backed away from the edge until he stood next to Minty again. “Maybe not.”

“You will go back,” said Anubis. “You will be my avatar on earth and you will put things in order again. Do you understand?”

“I’m not good at taking orders,” said Minty Fresh.

The dog-headed god seemed disturbed at the answer. “You’re not afraid, then?”

“Of what? I’m dead already, aren’t I?”

“You are,” said Anubis.

“Then no, I’m not afraid.”

“Good. And you?” Anubis nodded to Charlie.

“I’m fine,” said Charlie. “Dogs love me.”

Minty Fresh’s gaze fell on Charlie like it had fallen off a table. “Really?”

“Sorry.” Charlie looked at his shoes.

“The weapons of men will not help you. Your enemies are of the realm of the dead. You cannot kill them. You shall have my gifts to meet your adversary,” said Anubis. “Defeat him, restore balance, order. You are mine and I am you. Now return.”

“That is totally not helpful,” said Charlie.

“Why are you even here?” said Minty Fresh.

“He must keep them from desecrating your body until you return to it. Away with you,” said the dog-headed god.

The torches faded, the blackness returned, and once again they were standing as if they were in empty space at the end of the universe, nothing but the two of them and the faint barking of hounds.

And then Charlie was in the waiting room, Audrey standing over him.

“Are you okay?”

“Fine,” he said. “I’m fine. Fainted or something. How long was I out?”

Audrey looked at Rivera, then shrugged. “About eight seconds, I’d guess.”

“Hmmm. Seemed longer.” Charlie looked at the doctor. “No autopsy.”

The doctor seemed surprised. This was not the reaction he was accustomed to getting from people who had just received the news of the passing of a loved one.

“In cases of a crime,” said the doctor, “it’s the law…”

“No autopsy,” Charlie said to Rivera. “No embalming, no autopsy. It’s important.”

Rivera said, “Doctor, if we could hold off on the autopsy, I’d appreciate it.”

The doctor nodded. “It will be up to the coroner after I sign off,” said the doctor.

“I’ll take care of it,” said Rivera.

“I’m very sorry,” said the doctor. He turned and went back through the doors.

Once the doctor was gone, Charlie went to Lily. “Hey,” he whispered in her ear. Lily’s mother looked up. Lily nodded to her that it was okay to let this stranger close.

“Kid, come here,” Charlie said. He put his arm around Lily’s shoulder and walked her away from her mother, away from the others.

“He told me to go to work,” Lily said. “Those were his last words, ‘Go to work, Darque.’ ”

“Yeah, that’s the thing,” Charlie whispered. “You probably need to go to work.”

“Fuck you, Asher. I’m grief-stricken. And I’m not even being overly dramatic.”

He didn’t want to tell her that with the black eye makeup smeared down her cheeks like a sad clown, she was overly dramatic without saying a word, but in her hour of grief, he let it go. “Yeah, I know, and I know that’s a first, but you need to have your mom take you to work, because you need to stay busy, and keep your mind off of this. And when I tell you this next thing, you can’t overreact. Promise me.”

Lily looked at him with the familiar “could you be any more annoying?” look that she reserved for him, and he knew he could plunge on.

“Promise?”

“Okay, fine, I promise. What?”

“He’s not dead.”

She stared. Just stared. Stunned.

“He’s coming back,” Charlie said. “Don’t scream.”

She didn’t move. She stopped breathing, then started again, in short, halting gasps.

“I don’t know when, but soon. I just saw him in the Underworld. There’s a god called Anubis—”

“Asher, if you are fucking with me—”

“I’m not! Really, I’m not.”

Now she was catching her breath. She leaned in. “He told me once that an Indian guy in Montana told him he was, like, the chosen of Anubis. That’s why he had—has golden eyes.”