Christopher Moore: Secondhand Souls

“Not broken,” Audrey said, “just not finished yet.”

“I’m telling you, that child is not normal,” said Minty Fresh, who had seen her through the eyes of Anubis and knew. “For one thing, she got a mouth on her like a sailor.”

“Her auntie Jane is very proud of that,” said Charlie.

After a time, their suspicions about Sophie’s future were confirmed when the hellhounds returned and remained Sophie’s constant companions everywhere but at school, where they waited patiently outside as she instructed until they could escort her home in the afternoon. The goggies were quite happy and fairly well behaved, only occasionally sneaking down to a North Beach sidewalk café where one would eat a comfort dog off the lap of some self-indulgent diner, only to return looking innocent but for the leash hanging out of the corner of his mouth. To atone, Charlie encouraged San Francisco’s animal control people to put the hellhounds down, and at Sophie’s instruction, they would go away in the back of a truck, only to return a few hours later, justice done, somewhat stoned on whatever poison they’d been given, to resume spinning bags of kibble into great steaming spools of stool.

When Inspector Alphonse Rivera returned to his bookstore and opened his copy of the Great Big Book of Death , he found the entire text had been changed to the following:

“Congratulations, you were one of the select few chosen to act as Death. It was a dirty job, but someone had to do it. A new order has been established and your services will no longer be required. Feel free to keep the calendar and the number two pencils for your own personal use. Best of luck in all your future endeavors.”

Rivera called the other Death Merchants that he knew to confirm that their copies of the Big Book had changed as well, which they had. For a moment, he considered putting a price tag on his copy of the Big Book and offering it for sale in his shop, but after contemplating how sneaky and ever-changing the universe appeared to be, he decided instead to keep it in his personal collection, just for reference, in case things got weird.

He also decided, having served twenty-five years as a policeman and survived the reset of the Wheel of Life and Death still never having shot a human being, nor having been shot, that he would take a second retirement and become a bookseller full-time, despite the precarious prospects of that profession.

On his second day of his second retirement, Rivera called Lily Severo’s mother, Elizabeth, and invited her to join him for coffee. The two found they quite liked each other, and started dating regularly. What began as gratitude for being rescued from loneliness developed into love; they reveled in sharing who they were and how they had come to this place in their lives, and everything was made that much sweeter by how much their relationship annoyed Lily.

Lily, having served nobly as oracle to the bridge, found the specialness she felt by having been chosen remained, even after the ghosts moved on. She comported herself, at least outwardly, with less cynicism and hostility toward the world, and at times, with humility and style, if only because she knew secretly how much it annoyed everyone who had known her before.

“So,” Charlie Asher said to her, “I’m going to reopen the shop. I mean, it was a successful business for my family for thirty years before I became Death, there’s no reason why it can’t be again. And the pizza oven is still in there. So I thought we might go into business together.”

“So it would be Asher’s Random Used Crap and Artisanal Pizza?”

“No. Not necessarily. You could put your name on the sign, too.”

“Thanks, Charlie, but I don’t think so. I’m going to stay at the Crisis Center and go back to school. Get a degree in counseling, maybe even become a psychologist.”

“That’s horrifying,” Charlie said. “I mean, I’m happy for you. I’m proud of you, but your poor patients.”

“Hey, blow me, Asher. Those crazy fucks will be lucky to have me.”

“That’s what I meant,” he said.

“I have a knack with the damaged,” Lily said. “It’s my thing. Speaking of which, I’m supposed to go see M.”

The Mint One, his duty as a demigod done for now, returned to Fresh Music and resumed his business to great success. Despite the lack of any supernatural stimulus, the current horde of elitist music enthusiasts with money that were infesting the city, each looking for anything more obscure and/or arcane than his contemporaries, had created a booming market for worthless crap that Minty Fresh had long ago relegated to the realm of unsellable, and the buyback market, fueled by their mercurial smartphone-crippled attention spans, was whipped into a light and frothy profit.

He was adding up the day’s receipts, and Bitches Brew was playing in the background when Lily came into the shop.

“Look,” she said, “you are not the love of my life, but you are definitely a love in my life, so if you’re okay with that, I’d love to spend some more time with you, but if I break your heart, I warned you, so it’s fair.”

“I’d like that,” said Minty Fresh. “But you’re not going to break my heart. I am the human presence of an ancient Egyptian god of death, girl.”

“Sure, throw that in my face. But I got my thing, too. And besides, you cried on my voice mail.” She made as if to draw her phone out and play the proof. “You want me to break your heart, that’s not healthy.”

“I do not want that. I am not the blues, I am jazz. I want to be present in the moment, not wallow in it. Do you feel me?”

“About that; how is it you’re all erudite and nerdy some of the time, and other times you’re all smooth and badass and black?”

“I’m black as I need to be. I use the language that serves what I have to say. You cool with that?”

“Are you cool with me thinking that Miles Davis sounds like he’s smothering squirrels?”

Minty Fresh feigned taking an arrow to the heart, then shook it off.

“I guess Miles don’t work for everybody.”

“And Pizazz was a stupid name for a restaurant.”

“Well, I don’t—”

“Admit it!”

“All right, Pizzaz was a stupid name for a restaurant.”

“Good, I win,” she said, moving close enough to the counter so he could kiss her when the time came. “Now we can play for fun.”

When the ghosts of the bridge rose to find their places in the universe, so, too, did all the souls in all the soul vessels around the world. The souls of the surviving Squirrel People, who had turned to neo-druids since the attack of the Morrigan, and who had built a miniature Stonehenge from stolen hotel mini-fridges in their amphitheater beneath the Buddhist Center, also found their way back onto the Wheel of Life and Death, most moving on to live new lives as humans, except for Bob (who was Theeb), whose soul would be reincarnated twice as a woodchuck and once as hedgehog to present to him the lesson of humility, because the universe thought he had been kind of a dick.

When the ghosts of the bridge rose to find their places in the universe, Jean-Pierre Baptiste just happened to be cradling the cat person who had been his patient and friend, Helen. She went limp in his arms and he could see the red glow of her soul in her chest ascend and pass through the ceiling. Baptiste knew he would have some difficulty breaking the habit of being kind to Helen, and would have to console himself by being actively kind to other patients, as did most of the people of his calling.

Not coincidentally, halfway around the world, in Paris, on the four-hundred-year-old stone bridge over the Seine called the Pont Neuf, a craftsman named Jacques was repairing one of the carved marble faces that decorated the fascia of the bridge when a ghost appeared sitting on the railing above him. She wore the midcalf tweed skirt and crisp white blouse of a college girl from the midtwentieth century on her semester abroad in Paris. She wore her hair shoulder length and curled under in the style of Katharine Hepburn’s in Bringing Up Baby , Kate being her idol.