Secondhand Souls

by Christopher Moore

  “There are many here on the bridge.”

  “Why?” Mike asked.

  “It is a place between places, and so are we, between places.”

  “No,” said Mike. “Why are you here?”

  She sighed, a light and ghostly sigh that was lost in the wind, and she told him.

  Although I had never set foot in Spain, I was very much raised as an aristocratic Spanish lady—­California was Spanish land then. I lived in the grand governor’s house in the Presidio, and my mother saw to it that I was dressed in the finest fabrics and latest fashions from Madrid. I was educated in letters by the friars and nuns of the Mission, and in the ways of the world by my mother, which is to say, despite our station in the wildest reaches of the Spanish empire, I was sheltered. I spent most of my life in our house and the gardens around it, surrounded by soldiers and priests, never venturing into the settlement of Yerba Buena. But then, when I was fifteen, there came through the Golden Gate a Russian ship, their chief officer, Count Nikolai Rezanov, seeking supplies for the Russian colony of Sitka far to the north, which was starving.

  My father received the count with great courtesy, and he spent many evenings at our home. My mother was intent upon showing the Russian that even in the colonies, the manners and traditions of old Spain could be maintained. Many dinners with officers and local officials and their wives were served. Even when our home was filled with guests, I could not tear my attentions from the count. He was so handsome and worldly, and he regaled us with tales of the north and Japan, where the czar had sent him as an ambassador. I was breathless in his presence, so I would retreat to the corners, but I soon found that as often as I tried to look at him from across the room, to drink him in, I found him looking back, and my heart rejoiced. I could not hide my love behind a lace fan, and he could not disguise his attentions behind courtly manners.

  Finally, he passed me a note one evening when kissing my hand and I hurried away to the kitchen just to read those few precious words: “Tonight. The garden. When the moon is over Alcatraz.” He knew, somehow, that I could see the island from my bedroom window, and after the guests had left and the house was long silent, I waited, watching the moon for what seemed months, but before it was over the island, the fog spilled in through the Golden Gate like milk poured into tea, and the night sky was nothing more than a gray shroud. I could wait no longer. Still in my party dress, I went to the garden, not even stopping to take a cloak, and before the chill could settle upon me, I saw him.

  “I couldn’t wait,” he said. “The fog—­I have been here all evening.”

  I ran to him, then stopped, bounced upon my toes, feeling as if I might burst with excitement. He took me in his arms and kissed me. My first kiss.

  In the weeks that followed I lived only for the time I could be in the presence of my beloved “Nikolasha,” and he was the same for me. He made excuses to be at the fort during the day, and I made excuses to be out and about when he was there. Even a glimpse of him during the day would make my heart leap and sustain me, until evening, when I could see him again in my parents’ house, and later, in the garden. Even as our love grew, though, so did the specter of time begin to loom over us. Nikolai had come to establish trade with the Spanish colony to sustain the struggling Russian settlements in the far north, but Spanish law dictated that the colonies could not trade with a foreign power. For all of his courtesy and goodwill, my father could not grant the count his request.

  “And what if I were to marry your daughter?” Nikolai said one evening over dinner.

  “Yes,” I blurted out. “Yes, Father, yes!”

  My father smiled, as did my mother, for they had not been blind to our attraction, and when my father spoke, my mother smiling in a bemused manner the whole time, I knew they had discussed this possibility before it had even occurred to Nikolai.

  “I would honored to grant you my daughter’s hand, but it is not in my power to enter into a trade agreement with Russia, nor, I daresay is it yours to speak for the Czar. But if you bring me a letter of permission from the Czar, sanctioning your marriage to my Conchita, then I think I can convince the king to grant a trade agreement with your colonies. In the meantime, the ­people of Alta California and Mission de San Francisco, will give, out of Chris­tian charity, enough supplies to sustain the ­people of Sitka through the winter. No trade will have taken place, no law broken. You can deliver the supplies on your return voyage to Russia to gain the Czar’s permission.

  Nikolai was ecstatic. Normally composed and ever so dignified, he stood and cheered, then apologized and bowed to everyone at the table individually, after which he sat down and collected himself.

  I was in tears and my mother held me as I wept with joy onto her shoulder.

  “I may be gone some time,” Nikolai said, trying to calm himself. “Even after I reach Mother Russia’s shores, I will have a long trek across Siberia to reach St. Petersburg to get the Czar’s permission. It may be more than a year before I am able to return.”

  “I’ll wait!” I said.

  “The Czar will likely order I stop at the other colonies on the return voyage and the journey is too treacherous in the winter. If I miss the season, I may be two years.”

  “I’ll wait!” I repeated.

  My father smiled. “We shall all wait, Count Rezanov, as long as it takes.”

  “Forever,” I said. “If it takes forever.”

  When he sailed out of the bay I felt as if my heart went with him, and I swear I could feel the tether, even as I stood on the hill above the Golden Gate and watched the mast of his ship disappear over the horizon. And I waited, after a year running to the top of the hill any time the guard announced a ship. Two years.

  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.”

  “In the side table drawer?” The old man squinted down the sights of the big revolver.

  Silent and dark as a shadow, she stepped out of the kitchen behind Atherton and touched the stun gun to his neck.

  ZZZZZT!

  The old man spasmed, dropped the gun, then fell and twitched in place a bit.

  “AIEEEEEEEEEEE!” shrieked the banshee. Then, to Rivera, “Hello, love.”

  Rivera fell to a crouch as he drew the Glock and leveled it at her chest. “Back,” he said. He moved to the old man and checked his pulse while keeping the Glock trained on the banshee.

  “That’s no way to treat someone who just rescued you.”

  “You didn’t rescue me.” Rivera moved the big Smith & Wesson away from Mr. Atherton, and shuddered. It was a .41 Magnum and would, indeed, have splattered parts of him all over the wall if the old man had shot him. “You might have killed him.”

  “And he might have killed you. He’s fine. Catchin’ a bit of a nap is all. I’ve your wee box o’ lightning here if you need to give him another buzz.” The banshee clicked the stun gun and a bolt of electricity arced between the contacts.

  “Put that down. Now. And back away.”

  The banshee did as she was told, grinning the whole time. The old man let out a moan. Rivera knew he should call an ambulance, but wasn’t sure how to explain why he was here.

  “Why are you here?” Rivera asked.

  “Same as I told you, puppet, harbinger of doom. Usually death, ain’t it?”

  “I read about your kind. You’re supposed to call hauntingly in the distance—­‘a keening wail,’ they said. You’re not supposed to just appear out of nowhere zapping old ­people and screaming like a—­”

  “Like a what? Like a what, love? Say my name. Say my name.”

  “What doom? What death? Mine? This guy?”

  “Oh, no, he’ll be fine. No, the death I’m warning of is a right scary shit, innit he—­a dark storm out of the Underworld, he is. You’ll be wanting a much bigger weapon than that wee thing.”

  “It was big enough to stop one of your feathered sisters,” he said.

  Rivera lowered the Glock. Actually, it was smaller than the fifteen-­round 9-­mm Beretta he’d shot the Morrigan with when he’d been on active duty before, nearly half the weight, only ten shots, but more po
werful—­it was a man-­stopper. What did she know about the size of a man’s weapon, stupid, sooty-­assed fairy anyway.

  “Oh, you shot one of those bitches, and you still draw breath? Aren’t you lovely?” She batted her eyelashes at him coyly. “Still, won’t do for him what’s coming.”

  “So you’re not here to warn of some general rising of forces of darkness and—­”

  “Oh, there’s those, love, to be sure. But it’s the one dark one you’ll be wanting to watch for—­not like that winged dolt, Orcus, what came before.”

  Rivera hadn’t seen it, the huge, winged Death that had killed so many of the Death Merchants. Charlie Asher had seen it torn apart by the Morrigan before they came for him.

  “This one is worse?”

  “Aye, this one won’t come bashing through the front door like Orcus. This one’s sneaky. Elegant.”

  “Elegant? So you’re not part of the dark rising, you’re just here to warn me, I mean, us?”

  “Appears so. Unsettled souls attract a bad lot. This city of yours is a whirlwind of ’em.”

  “Like here, in this house?” Rivera was hoping. Maybe she could help.

  “No, love, no human souls here ’cept yours and old Smokey’s there.”

  Rivera looked down at Mr. Atherton—­his shirt collar was smoking from where the stun gun had arced. He patted the ember out.

  “So that’s why he could see me . . .” He looked to the banshee, but she was gone, leaving behind the smell of damp moss and burning peat. Somehow she’d managed to grab his stun gun as she left.

  “Fuck!” said Rivera, to no one in particular.

  7

  Shy Dookie and Death

  A study in sadness: Sophie Asher—­sitting at the picnic table by the edge of the playground, away from the other kids, denied access

  to friends, laughter, and fun, condemned to watch from afar like some exile—­was in a time-­out.

  He walked across the playground with something between a limp and a soft-­shoe, as if there were brushes playing rhythm on a snare drum under his steps. He was tall, but not too tall, thin, but not too, dressed in different shades of soft yellow from shoe to hat, the latter a butter-­colored homburg with a tiny red feather in the lemon-­hued band. He sat down across from Sophie and swung his long legs in under the table.