Soul Remains

by Sam Hooker

  “You do not threaten the Steward,” said the woman. Unlike Mrs. Knife, her voice was not rising. All the same, it did seem to be strapping on its helmet and inching toward its sword.

  “Mark my words, your days are numbered.” Mrs. Knife chuckled. It was the sort of chuckle that you’d expect from a meat cart vendor who’d just served last Thursday’s souvlaki to his brother-in-law, the one who was always telling his wife she could do better.

  “You have no authority in this matter,” replied the Steward with all the furor and intensity of his father after binging on dinner at Snugglewatch, probably.

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Mrs. Knife practically sang. Sloot could hear her smiling. “There’s a passage in the Book of Black Law that allows me to dissolve the Skeleton Key Circle and take possession of all the Souls’ remains.”

  “That’s preposterous,” said the Steward.

  “No argument there,” said Mrs. Knife, “it was my lawyers who found the loophole. All I need is the agreement of the current Soul, and he wouldn’t dream of disagreeing with me. I spent his entire life ensuring that the mere whisper of my name would terrify him.”

  Not just him, Sloot thought. He was sure that Mrs. Knife had applied some of the same treatment to him. If she hadn’t, he’d shown real initiative in picking it up himself.

  “I believe I know the loophole of which you speak,” said the Steward. “Fortunately, until his remains are in the custody of his proper keeper, his word is not sufficient to shape the Black Law.”

  “That’s what you think,” Mrs. Knife growled.

  “That’s what I know!” The Steward had finally had enough, it seemed. He’d started using his I-really-must-insist tone of voice. “It is my job to know the Book of Black Law, namely as it pertains to the Skeleton Key Circle, backward and forward! Until Wilhelm’s remains are in the custody of their keeper, he may be unduly influenced by whomsoever possesses them, so he cannot apply his voice to the Black Law. Without his agreement, you cannot change the Black Law, Madam Eye.”

  “We’ll just see about that.”

  “You’ll see that I’m right.” The Steward’s voice gave no indication that he harbored any doubt. “Deliver the Soul’s remains to us, and there’s nothing I can do to stop you from burning the entire Book. Until then, I’ll not sit here and be insulted by a would-be tyrant. Good day.”

  “Listen to me very carefully, you little—”

  “I said good day!”

  The line disappeared. Sloot began to panic. Not that he wasn’t panicking before, of course. Sloot was an accomplished panicker. It would be more accurate to say that he opened a new line of panic to add to his already impressive portfolio, and fretted over the increased workload.

  What to do? He was in the middle of an abandoned tenement building, or at least he hoped it was abandoned. There were a few people sleeping in it, and he hoped they were homeless. It was not something he wished upon people in general, but he couldn’t bear the thought that they were paying to be there.

  He resolved to continue along his present trajectory, at least for a little while longer. If he were close, perhaps he’d stumble into another chamber of the Cross before its occupant left.

  It wasn’t the first time Sloot had secretly wished he wasn’t so smart. There had been the time in grade school when he’d been beaten up for answering all of his teacher’s questions with such zeal that the rest of his class felt they’d been made to look bad. Afterward, in the recess yard, a few of them had decided to teach him a few things that he didn’t know, namely about the taste of dirt and how the wind might be driven from his lungs by a well-placed fist.

  This time was far less painful in the physical sense, but Sloot had a feeling it would be far more troublesome in the long run. He’d hoped to eventually find a room like the one where he’d stood with Roman, only it would be empty. Curses, rotten luck, back to the business of death and eternity, then.

  Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on whose side you were on, Sloot did indeed find such a room. Unfortunately—from his point of view—there was a person in it. To his further chagrin and misfortune, he recognized her as the tall woman from the secret room beneath the crypt. The one who had pinned him to the wall with her wand.

  In a welcome break from Sloot’s standard rate of misfortune, he’d emerged from the wall just as she was trying to light a candle of the normal variety. It was totally dark in the room. She hadn’t seen him! Acting on a cowardly impulse that came across very much like cat-like reflexes if you’d never met Sloot, he dodged quickly upward into the corner behind her.

  Her sparker set the candle alight, and she stood there for a moment as the flame cast a warm glow about the little room. It was exactly the same as the one where he’d just been with Roman, down to the slightly askew stone walls and rough-planked table with one leg slightly shorter than the others, so it wobbled a bit when she picked her satchel up for a moment.

  She sighed. Sloot was nearly in fits over the possibility of her whirling around too quickly and discovering him, but he couldn’t help catching a whiff of sorrow coming from her. As if on cue, her shoulders lifted twice in a little sob. She suppressed it with a sniff, shook her head, and squared her shoulders.

  “He’s gone, and that’s that,” she murmured. “It’s up to me now.”

  To Sloot’s chagrin, he found her sorrow intoxicating. He felt drawn to it, in a way that he found deeply troubling. What sort of person could possibly find amusement in another person’s misery? Aside from the obvious, like people who brag to hungover people that they never get hangovers. He didn’t want to find her melancholy so scintillating, but he did. He’d have had a long think about why that was later, had he not been the sort of person who bottled up his uncomfortable feelings and vowed never to look directly at them. You know, a normal person.

  Sloot managed to stay behind her as she made her way through the door and out into the very shadowy daylight. Sloot followed her and found himself on a little walkway beneath a bridge that ran across the river.

  For lack of a better idea, he continued to follow her. He started out keeping his distance, even going so far as to find places—flower shops, hat shops, and other shops as well—where he could duck in and be inconspicuous. He eventually recalled that the good people of Salzstadt were observing the practice of ignoring the dead, and that he was probably calling more attention to himself by going through the motions of subterfuge. Since no one was gawking or screaming at him, he decided to abandon the pretense and simply keep up. It wasn’t until she was within a block of the black market that he felt a familiar tug behind his ear, and turned to meet it.

  “So,” said Roman, “what’d you find out?”

  “Less than I could have,” said Sloot. He didn’t want to be involved at all, but since his preferences on the matter seemed to count for nothing, he’d have settled for doing a good job. “I think she was headed for the black market. She was nearly there when you summoned me.”

  “Following the woman, eh?” Roman wiggled his eyebrows in that way that respectable people don’t. The way that they teach creepy uncles to do, presumably at beer-swilling camp. “What did she look like?”

  “Yes,” said Myrtle, “do tell.” She was wearing the sort of expression that amused girlfriends do not.

  “Myrtle! When did you get here? Where are we?”

  “We’re in an alley.” Roman’s tone was definitely sarcastic, as was his sweeping gesture to draw Sloot’s attention to the piles of garbage, leaky rain gutters, and other standard accoutrements that one might expect to find in such a place.

  “I just picked one of the lines and followed,” said Sloot. “I didn’t know it was hers!”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Myrtle. “I’ve come to bring you home.”

  “Home?”

  “To the Hereafter. Things have … escalated. You’re supposed to step in.”

  Puppies Most Vile

  Being dead was … well, fine
, really.

  No, not fine. It just was. Sloot’s general opinion of this, the next phase of existence, wasn’t really something he cared to pick apart. At best, he no longer had to worry about the effects of fatty foods on his digestion. At worst, he was no closer to being free of the tribulations of his earthly affairs than he’d been before his head was repurposed in the name of fashion.

  He’d been told more than once that the affairs of the living were no longer his concern, that he had to deal with the affairs of the dead. That would have been fine if the affairs of the dead weren’t determined to intersect with the affairs of the living at every opportunity.

  Myrtle had seemed anxious to get Sloot back to the Hereafter. It undoubtedly meant there was trouble, or at least he hoped it did. Otherwise, his probably-girlfriend was merely casually anxious for him to depart the land of the living.

  “Things are getting bad,” said Myrtle, making Sloot feel better and worse at the same time. “If you could just do something about Constantin, Nan could probably get Willie back into the circle.”

  “Constantin.” Knowing that he didn't have to deal with Willie gave Sloot a measure of relief. It was an unusual sensation, and he wasn’t sure it could be relied upon. His suspicion turned out to be well-founded.

  “He’s gotten wind that Nan is here, and he’s hunting for her. She’s hiding from him, and Willie won’t listen to anyone else.”

  “Oh,” said Sloot. When he’d first met Constantin, the old man had specifically forbidden Sloot from allowing Nan to have anything to do with Willie. He’d unwittingly sworn on salt and spit—which was a big deal in the Old Country—to hire her if she cleared the house of goblins, which she did. Of all the things that could have followed Sloot into the grave, he’d never thought that answering for that would have been among them.

  “Well, he’s just an old codger now, isn’t he?” Sloot was trying to convince himself as much as anyone else. “No Soul powers or anything. He’s just a lot of hot air.”

  “In theory,” said Myrtle. “He still gives me the creeps, though.”

  This is ridiculous, Sloot thought. He believed in respecting one’s elders, but only to the extent that the Ministry of Etiquette and Guillotines allowed.

  Around fifty years before Sloot had been born, Sir Stellan Hosenfurcht had been named the youngest Minister of Etiquette and Guillotines in the history of the Old Country. Finding it impossible to get anything done for all of the old obstructionists in Central Bureaucracy, he pushed legislation that made deference to one’s elders a felony. It was summarily overturned upon his untimely demise at the hands of the Salzstadt Council of Elders which, strangely enough, no one saw coming. However, Sir Stellan’s zeal for the project had fast-tracked it through the lines at Central Bureaucracy—no one saw that coming, either—and the Ministry of Propaganda had so thoroughly postered the city with warnings to “Tell Grandpa Where He Can Shove It” that even now, nearly a century later, some of them were still up. No one really knew what the rules were anymore, but it would certainly never occur to a true salt of the Old Country to be more polite to anyone than the law required.

  Of course, no one wanted to cross the elderly. The lessons learned from Sir Stellan were that age and treachery always overcome youth and enthusiasm, and that a bureaucracy at rest will not put up with some young upstart trying to rush things along.

  None of this, of course, gave Sloot any indication as to how he might rein Constantin in. He needed to think of something. It wasn’t as though Willie was going to begin spontaneously listening to him. Sloot was still the help, after all.

  Sloot said a swear word under his breath. The one that isn’t grammatically correct in any context, and is most often repeated at least a dozen times while failing to regain one’s footing on a slippery kitchen floor.

  How was he supposed to get Constantin under control? Try as he might, he was unable to even consider striding up to Constantin in a non-deferential manner, and starting a sentence to the tune of, “Now you listen to me, you peer or lesser sort of person!”

  He’d worked for Constantin at the Three Bells. That is to say, his supervisor’s manager’s director’s board of director’s managing partners’ oversight committee’s chairman worked for Constantin’s undersecretary, but the result was ultimately the same. When Sloot had been promoted to Willie’s financier, he never officially left Constantin’s employ. Now that he was dead and those sorts of loyalties had become permanent, he was no more capable of dressing the old man down than dressing him up, ghosts’ lack of physical appendages considered.

  “I saw her!” boomed Constantin’s voice from within the house. “That harpy! That coddler! Bring her to me so I can thrash her within an inch of her life!”

  Sloot was able to disobey that on the grounds that Nan was already dead. Oh, sweet technicality! He'd have given it a big, wet kiss if he didn't most likely have a girlfriend.

  “Coming, m’lord!” Sloot floated quickly through the dusty corridors of the house, attempting to sidestep the confusing reality that dust exists in the Hereafter. A severe dose of good old-fashioned Old Country denial was just the thing for it. He was eager to find Constantin and placate him. He grimaced at that eagerness, not that it slowed him down.

  There was a worrisome darkness in the corridor that must have been half cat, in that it couldn’t make up its mind whether it wanted to be inside the house. It kept nearly casting the house into total darkness, then bringing the lights up again.

  Worry. That was familiar, if unsettling. Sloot was just starting to settle into some proper fretting over how the cat darkness thing could go horribly, horribly wrong when the voices joined in.

  Whispers, sobbing, maniacal cackling. It was a cacophony that couldn’t decide where it was going, but it had enough funding to hire one of everything, just so they had it. The screeching was the worst, though Sloot had to admit that it did the most to set the mood.

  He finally found Constantin sitting in the parlor, wearing his pajamas. Retirement seemed to be setting in.

  “I saw her!” Constantin repeated. Echoes are very soothing to the dead, even though this one seemed to agitate him intensely.

  “Who did you see, m’lord?”

  “That woman! Willie’s old nanny. I saw her here, with my own two eyes!”

  “Well, that’s disturbing.”

  “She’s coddling Willie, I just know it! He’s going to be the Soul of the Serpent one day, you know.”

  A gout of flames shot down the hallway just outside the parlor. Its timing insinuated it was making a little money on the side, punctuating the rants of cranky old ghosts.

  “What was that?” demanded Constantin.

  “Er, I believe it was Willie, m’lord.”

  “Willie? What’s he doing?”

  “Well … venting, I suppose?”

  “Good! Good for the constitution. Hapsgalt men can eat coal peppers right off the vine, you know.”

  Coal peppers were one of the first forays into evil produce. A grocer in Kaldakos was convinced by a book that was far smarter than he to flip through its pages. Upon realizing his folly, he closed it quickly enough that only the shadow of the corrupt spirit trapped in the book made its way into him. Once they’d gotten cozy together in the grocer’s mind, they cooked up the idea to craft a murderously hot pepper that would kill anyone who ate it. It met with some success, but only after it was rebranded as a tool for fraternity hazing. Sloot had never tried one, so he had no grounds upon which he might have disputed Constantin’s claim.

  The air, or whatever they had in the Hereafter that passed for it, trembled. A low rumble passed through the room, like the sound that might be made by the growling bellies of several million hungry spiders. The lights were starting to fade again. It was an ominous sort of darkness. Not the cool, clean sort of darkness that was good for sleep, but the oily sort that lurked at front doors and threatened to sell you things.

  “Have Grumley come in here,” said Constant
in with a dismissive wave. “He’ll sort out that noise in the walls. Rattling pipes, is it?”

  “Er, that’s one possibility,” Sloot replied, giving satisfaction to neither lies nor truth. He seized the opportunity to leave the parlor and hoped that Constantin would fail to remember about Nan for a while.

  Sloot went searching for Willie, figuring that following the ghastliest phenomena in the place would get him there eventually.

  The Hereafter doesn’t seem creepy enough on its own, Sloot imagined Willie saying to himself. I know, let’s get the floor undulating. That’ll add just the right amount of menace to the place.

  He wasn’t in the room with the circle that served to contain his power, though that wouldn’t have been hard to guess. He wasn’t in the room where all of the furniture was screaming, either. That one was particularly unnerving, so much so that Sloot barely noticed the difference in tone between screaming leather and screaming velvet. Leather was a bit more warbly.

  The undulating black roots spilling out ankle-deep from the end of the hall should have been obvious. Sloot reluctantly followed them and found Willie’s head lurking in the formal dining room. The rest of him was there as well, but the distinction was noteworthy.

  “Oh, hi Sloot.” Willie’s head rested on a silver platter. There was probably a metaphor there, or at least a pun.

  “M-m’lord?”

  “Yes?”

  “You seem to be a bit …”

  “Debonaire? More than a bit, I imagine. I got good marks in that at school, you know.”

  “I’m sure,” said Sloot, “but I was going to remark upon your, er, decorum.”

  “My what?”

  “Your ... decentralization.”

  “I can make up words too, Sloot.”

  “I beg your pardon, m’lord, but ... well, your head’s off.”

  “You noticed that too, did you? Horribly inconvenient. I’ve tried telling my body to get with the program, but it doesn’t seem to want to have anything to do with me.”