Soul Remains

by Sam Hooker

  Two roads diverged in a haunted wood, one behind a scary-looking gate. It was simple odds, but Sloot had never been lucky.

  “We’re going that way, aren’t we?” Sloot pointed toward the gate.

  “How did you know?”

  Sloot sighed. “I’m here.”

  Willie looked puzzled for a moment, but then tossed his head and gave a carefree chuckle, as though he’d just remembered that he was ridiculously wealthy. He gestured lazily toward the gate and it creaked open.

  Down the path and into the distant shadows they went, eventually coming to a graveyard. It was the second one that he’d seen in the afterlife, which, at this point, was unremarkable. If there was one graveyard, there may as well be two.

  “There’s nobody else here,” Sloot pondered aloud.

  “No,” said Willie, “just us and them.”

  “Them?” It was then that Sloot learned that the sensation of hairs standing on the back of one’s neck was dependent on having neither.

  “Them,” Willie repeated. He pointed toward a sinister-looking mausoleum near the back of the graveyard. There was a dim grey light emanating from within it. Willie strode toward it.

  “Wait!”

  “What?”

  “Who’s in there?”

  “Lots of people.” Willie rolled his eyes. “That’s what mausoleums are for, right?”

  Sloot opened his mouth to ask more questions, but shut it when he considered that none of them could possibly result in an answer that would make him feel any better. He resigned himself to following Willie along the path toward possible doom, hoping that the dandy’s demonic transformations came with strength beyond that of whatever horrors lurked in the crypt.

  There was nothing. Well, not nothing. There were the standard accoutrements one would expect to find in a mausoleum: lots of marble, some long-dead flowers in marble vases … or, rather, the ethereal approximations thereof. The whole place was dimly illuminated, though Sloot couldn’t tell from where.

  “Hey!” shouted Willie. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Me? I was just—”

  “Not you, them!” Willie pointed toward the altar on the back wall of the crypt. There were some old candlesticks that had fallen over, some quasi-religious-looking statues that made Sloot feel strangely uncomfortable, but no people.

  “Oh, dear,” moaned Sloot, more reverberantly than he’d intended. It felt strangely satisfying, moaning like that. The acoustics in the mausoleum were quite nice. Sloot felt as though this would be a perfectly nice spot to do a bit of haunting, if only it wasn’t someone else’s property. Wait, how did he know that? He wasn’t sure how, but he was certain of the fact. Pity, it was just the sort of place that he’d love to moan and rattle a few chains at odd hours of the night.

  “Hey you, stop that!” Willie was pushing against an invisible wall of some sort, straining under the effort. Curiosity got the better of Sloot, and he moved to place a hand against the wall himself.

  He felt nothing. His hand passed right through it. He felt certain that Willie hadn’t suddenly taken up pantomime, given how often he’d compared mimes to “clowns that don’t know how to do balloon doggies or anything.”

  As Sloot watched Willie struggle with the non-existent wall, a shadow moved in the corner of his vision. He looked over at the altar and saw it again. The dim light was coming from the left side of the altar, at a jaunty angle suggesting that there was a space behind it.

  “A secret passage,” said Sloot. He’d just noticed that the altar wasn’t quite centered on the wall, as though it had been moved a few feet to the right.

  “Almost there,” said Willie. His eyes had gone all black again, and there were lines of energy crackling beneath his palms, across the surface of the invisible wall.

  “That looks dangerous,” said Sloot, taking a step backward. “Are you sure that you should—”

  There was a sound like glass breaking under water. Willie lurched forward a bit as the non-existent wall before him gave way, and there remained a sort of jagged hole in … Sloot wasn’t sure in what. Space, probably, or maybe reality. But whatever it might have been, the other side of the hole was something Sloot hadn’t seen in … well, since he died.

  Colors. There were colors! Only faint ones, as it was nighttime on the other side of the jagged hole, but Sloot knew “not grey” when he saw it.

  “Now then,” said Willie, “time to put a stop to this.”

  “A stop to what?” asked Sloot. He hesitated in following Willie through the jagged hole, but felt obligated. He’d only come along so he could keep an eye on Willie. He didn’t have any idea how he might have done much else, given that he was armed with nothing but a growing list of questions.

  “You there,” Willie shouted as he rounded to corner into the secret room behind the altar, “what do you think you’re doing? When my father oof—”

  Sloot ducked. He couldn’t see anything coming his way, so he assumed he’d done it as a reflex. He’d liked to have taken a moment to ponder whether cowards might have instincts after all, but imminent danger was woefully effective at pulling him toward itself at the moment.

  “That’s the late Wilhelm Hapsgalt,” said a tall man in a dark grey suit, who was pointing a wand at Willie. There were no sparks coming from the end of it, as Nicoleta’s certainly would have done, but it was effective nonetheless in pinning Willie to the wall.

  “There’s another one!” The woman standing beside the tall man was tall as well, her long blonde hair woven into a pair of braids, the tips of which lightly brushed the tops of her … well, Sloot had a girlfriend, didn’t he? He wasn’t about to carry on noticing the attributes of other women, regardless of how well their corsets brought their ampleness to bear. He wasn’t sure whether “ampleness” was a word, but resolved then and there to never find out.

  “Oh dear,” said Sloot, studying the ceiling with singular focus. “Do forgive the intrusion, we were just oof—”

  Sloot was pinned to the wall next to Willie. The woman was pointing her wand at him. Her other hand rested on the pommel of a longsword at her hip, in a casual way that said, “I know how to use this, and I’d be ever so grateful for a reason to prove it.”

  “I told you,” she said to the tall man, “they make a handy distraction.”

  “Still,” the tall man replied, “it’s not proper for a lady—”

  “To run around in the middle of the night, moving shuffled-off mortal coils from place to place, but you don’t have anything to say about that, do you?”

  “That’s the job.”

  “A job which doesn’t mandate a dress code, last time I checked.”

  “Can we talk about this later?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it at all!”

  “Who are you?” This interjection from Sloot caused the two ostensibly living people in the crypt to shift their icy glares from each other to him. It also caused Sloot to deeply regret having opened his mouth.

  “Nice try, creature of evil,” boomed the tall man in a practiced baritone.

  “Hey,” Sloot protested. He didn’t feel evil, but the accusation raised an existential question—one he wasn’t keen to ponder. Scary questions rarely had answers that were otherwise.

  “They’re from the Skeleton Key Circle,” said Willie, in a rare fit of helpfulness.

  “The what?”

  “Silence, fruit of the grave!” The tall man’s baritone verged on musical. If skulking around in crypts and threatening dead accountants didn’t pan out, he’d likely do well in musical theatre.

  “Fruit of the—” the woman closed her eyes and gave her head a quick shake. “Never mind. How do you know who we are?”

  “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” Willie rolled his eyes. “You’re down here in the crypt with my father’s bones. Who else would know where they were?”

  Sloot had only been dead for … well, not long. He didn’t pretend to understand the mysteries of the
spheres, but he was baffled nonetheless by this sudden display of deductive reasoning by Willie. Perhaps the power imbued in him by the Serpents of the Earth balanced out some of his natural innocence, a word used in this case to indicate a complete lack of common sense as a result of monetary excess. In other words, Willie had been too rich in life to have been bothered with things like learning.

  “This is bad,” said the woman. “The Serpents are going after the Circle, I can feel it in my bones! We must—”

  “We must honor our purpose,” said the tall man. “We must show the Serpents that we can be trusted to do our duty in the face of trying times. The fate of fair-weather friends is just desserts.”

  “People are dying,” the woman pleaded through clenched teeth. “The weather is foul and they aren’t our friends anymore. We should snare these two in soul circles until we can figure out what to do with them!”

  It should go without saying that Sloot had no idea what a soul circle was, but his mind had already taken it up and charged headlong into terrifying conjecture, like a star athlete with whatever thing the sport had put into contention. Usually a ball of some sort, he imagined. It should go without saying that Sloot was entirely at sea with sports metaphors, and deeply regretted having attempted one.

  “The Book of Black Law clearly states that we cannot harm or hinder a member of their order,” said the tall man with a patience that could have eroded marble. He lowered his wand, and Willie dropped away from the wall.

  “My humblest apologies, Lord Hapsgalt,” said the tall man with a solemn bow. He shot a look at the woman and jerked her head in Sloot’s direction.

  The woman rolled her eyes and lowered her wand. She didn’t bow or apologize to Sloot, which was just as well. He doubted he could ever be comfortable on the receiving end of obeisance. He just hoped that they continued assuming he was a member of the Serpents, which he was not.

  “No problem,” said Willie. “Just leave my father’s remains here with me, and we can forget about it.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

  “Oh, I know it’s unusual,” said Willie, who started digging through his pockets, “but I’ve got a note here that says it’s all right this time. Oh, bother, what did I do with that note?”

  “That’s not the way this works,” said the woman. She tightened her grip on her wand and spread her feet a bit wider. Sloot had seen Vlad do that before, right before she drew her sword and turned a number of people into a larger number of bits of people.

  “She’s right,” said the tall man. “There’s a form that must be delivered to the Steward of our order. We can only reveal Constantin’s bones if—”

  “Right, yes,” snapped Willie, “only this time I have a note! It’s from Mrs. Knife. She’s very important, and so am I!”

  “Then you’ll have no problem filing the form with our Steward. I’m sorry, Lord Hapsgalt, but those must be my final words on the matter.”

  Since Sloot had known Willie, he’d only ever seen the little lord told “no” on a handful of occasions, and none of them ended with Willie not getting what he wanted. There was usually a tantrum involved, and the face that he was making was his standard prelude to one. However, at the point where the tears and the screaming at the top of his lungs usually started, his visage went all demonic again, with the black eyes, horns, wings, and teeth whose only purpose could have been turning people into meat confetti.

  “I shall not be denied,” said several octaves’ worth of Willie’s voice. “All things shall be mine, starting with this. Look upon me and despair!”

  The tall man lowered his stance and the tip of his wand went up. “Forgive me, your lordship, but you leave me no choice.” His wand made a series of quick flicking motions, and he recited a string of what Sloot could only assume were words.

  There was a little ethereal poof, and Willie was gone.

  “What did you do to Willie?” asked Sloot, though he was sure he didn’t really want to know.

  “This,” said the tall man, turning his wand to Sloot. The same series of flicks, the same strange words, and a little yelp of panic from Sloot. Suddenly, he wasn’t there anymore either.

  Well, that was an assumption. As far as he knew, he could still be in the very same spot, bereft of all his senses. He could see nothing and no one, only an endless black void that stretched on forever in all directions. It reminded him of when he’d died the first time, before his conversation with Fairy Godmother had gotten underway.

  “Hello?” he hazarded aloud. He heard himself say it, which he could have taken as a good sign, were he an optimist. He wasn’t, though. Erring on the side of pessimism, he acknowledged that there was a distinct possibility that he’d heard his own voice repeated by some malevolent demon who wanted to lure him into a false sense of security, because it’d be easier to drag him into madness if he were reassured first.

  Blood Economy

  Sloot didn’t remember going to sleep, but he must have done so because he awoke atop his grave again. The one in the Hereafter, on the grey hill beneath the grey sky. In the brief calm of first waking, he wondered if there was a corresponding marker in a graveyard in Salzstadt. It might have been comforting to know there was some remembrance of him in the land of the living, but probably not enough to offset all the wretchedness that had befallen him since he died.

  Sloot groaned. It soothed him, just the tiniest bit. The spiritual equivalent of stretching a sore muscle. He found himself thinking he could spend an entire night groaning, if only he had someplace to haunt.

  Sloot shook his head, repulsed at the thought. Why did that seem so attractive to him? Why did he feel as though rattling a nice chain would soothe away all of his worries? He decided not to think about it. Repression had worked wonders for him in life. There was no sense in fixing what wasn’t broken.

  Sloot floated glumly down the hill and into the house through the front door.

  “Well, it’s about time,” said the cloaked figure in the hallway. Sloot could tell by the moustaches that it was the same visitor who’d come along right before Sloot had followed Willie on his secret business.

  “How can you tell?” asked Nicoleta. “Time doesn’t seem to pass in the Hereafter. Do you get used to it?”

  “Not really,” admitted the moustaches under the visitor’s hood. “The passage of time is not the forte of the dead. I just know that I’ve been kept waiting, and that sort of thing won’t do.” He turned to face Sloot. “Now then, boy, where is Lord Hapsgalt?”

  Sloot wondered whether he qualified as a boy again due to his heretofore-brief tenure as a ghost. However, even if the epithet was intended to offend, Sloot lacked the sort of bluster that might have drawn a “now you see here” out of him.

  “Er, I assumed he would have gotten back before I did.”

  “Back from where?”

  “It was a cemetery,” said Sloot. “In the real world.”

  “The Narrative,” said the visitor with a chiding tone. “In the Hereafter, we refer to the land of the living as the Narrative.”

  “Oh,” said Sloot. “That probably makes sense.”

  “Not really,” said Nicoleta.

  The visitor made an exasperated noise that requires a sharp exhalation in the real … er, in the Narrative.

  “You’ll get it when you’ve been here a while,” he said with a dismissive wave. “Not much changes in the Hereafter. The Narrative is the only show in town, when it comes right down to it. Only place worth haunting, anyway.”

  “Are there still colors there?” asked Nicoleta.

  Sloot nodded. “There are.”

  A toothy grin stretched across Nicoleta’s face from ear to ear.

  “Enough of this prattle,” snapped the visitor. “Is Lord Hapsgalt here or not?”

  “Willie!” shouted Nicoleta. “Are you here? You have a visitor!”

  “No need for that,” said Nan, waggling a finger at Nicoleta as she walked into the room. “You still here
, Grumley? I thought you’d left.”

  The visitor—Grumley—said he’d been sent by the Serpents of the Earth to get some preliminary business squared away, and he needed to speak with Lord Hapsgalt very urgently.

  “I’m sure the old goat’s rattling around here somewhere,” said Nan. “You can go and fetch him, Peril. I’ll just be hiding in the basement.”

  “I need to speak to the younger Lord Hapsgalt,” said Grumley.

  “And what could you need to say to him that’s so important? He’s only six years old!”

  Grumley fixed Nan with an incredulous look. “What? Who’s only six years old? Wait, no, never mind. Look, I need to speak with Wilhelm Hapsgalt. He’s the Soul of the Serpent, perhaps you’ve heard of him?”

  “Finally,” boomed a voice from the next room that grew louder as it approached. “It’s about time we got down to business!”

  In life, Constantin didn’t simply walk into the room, he conquered it. He’d been an impressive figure, hale and ruddy in a way that other men envied until the moment of his death. Strange then that he was now in a wheelchair and appeared as fragile as an antique tea set.

  “Hello, Lord Constantin. Listen, I need to speak to the Soul of the Serpent, but he’s obviously not here. When he returns, would you please—”

  “Hogwash,” said Constantin. “I’m right here!”

  “Er, hang on a minute,” said Grumley. He held his hands out and a scroll appeared in them. Sloot made a mental note to ask for lessons. Very handy, being able to call up documents so easily.

  “We have you down as a Shade, Constantin.” Grumley said. He dropped his hands and the scroll faded away, probably filed neatly away in whatever drawer it was supposed to reside. Sloot hoped.

  “There’s been a mistake,” said Constantin. “I was properly murdered by my son, who is now the Eye of the Serpent, making me the Soul. That would make my mother, Otthilda Hapsgalt, the most recent Shade.”