Soul Remains

by Sam Hooker

  “I see.”

  “I just wish I knew what it was doing over there. What I was doing over there.”

  Willie’s body would have been entirely unrecognizable if it hadn’t been alone in the room with his head. It was wearing a tattered shroud in lieu of anything remotely fashionable, and if it was striking any pose that might have been intentional, it must have been called something like the Certain Violent Intent, or the Your Grave Needs A Good Spitting Upon.

  “I’m not going to hurt us, am I?” Willie sounded truly worried for the first time since he’d realized he couldn’t smell his perfume collection anymore, or find it.

  “You’ve removed your own head,” said Sloot. “I’d imagine that if you were going to do worse than that, you’d’ve done so already.”

  “That sounds reasonable. All the same, what am I doing over there?”

  “If I had to guess,” said Sloot, who abhorred guessing for the implied risk involved, “I’d say you’re working some sort of black magic.”

  “Hmmm,” said Willie, in an approximation of thoughtfulness. “That would explain the tortured moaning that’s coming from that melting wall over there.”

  Sloot tittered nervously and nodded. “Wouldn’t it just?”

  They watched for a while as Willie’s body committed whatever atrocities it was up to. Sloot, at least, was racking his brain for a way to stop it, but coming up empty. He didn’t realize how badly the attempt was going until he found himself glancing over to Willie, in case he’d perhaps thought of something.

  “Do you think you might go sit in the circle for a bit, m’lord?”

  “Probably a good idea, but all of my sitting bits are otherwise engaged at the moment.”

  “Ah.”

  “It’s a strange sort of dance, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t think it’s dancing, m’lord.” If he were being completely honest, Sloot was no authority on the matter, having never danced a step in his life. That was just the sort of thing that led to wearing tight pants, and poor circulation would kill you. Hardly a factor now, but if that was dancing, he wanted no part of it.

  “Looks like necromancy,” said Nicoleta.

  “When did you get here?”

  “I never left,” Nicoleta snapped. “While you were out gallivanting across the Narrative, Mr. Peril, I was here trying to help Willie! Never mind that I didn’t succeed. Anyway, the best I can tell is that his body’s up to some sort of death magic. Necromancy.”

  “I’d prefer if that were dancing,” said Sloot, feeling more than a bit abashed. His divided loyalties meant he was attending to each of them poorly, and he hated doing a bad job.

  “Necromancers go in for that sort of stuff,” said Nicoleta, pointing at Willie’s body with disdain. “Big gestures, hands clawing at the heavens. Show-offs, the lot of them. I’m sure he’d rather be on a cliff overlooking the sea during a thunderstorm.”

  “I find it hard to believe that Willie’s body is a necromancer when his head’s not looking.”

  “Of all the things that have happened since you died, that’s where your suspension of disbelief hits a wall?”

  She had him there.

  “You’re a wizard,” said Willie, “go over there and tell him—me—to stop doing that. If I come over here and put my head back on, we can try some of that ‘forgive and forget’ business that I’m told poors are fond of.”

  “I am a wizard,” said Nicoleta, with a note of praise to Willie for having noticed. “But my spells still aren’t working. Besides, it looks like all of your talking and reasoning bits are on your platter. If you can’t get your body on board, I’ve got nothing.”

  “Never fear!” shouted a voice from behind Sloot, close enough that a whisper would have gotten the job done. “Reason and logic shall prevail!”

  Sloot yelped and wheeled on Arthur with a haunted look.

  “Was that entirely necessary?” Sloot’s voice had gone shrill and warbling in alarm.

  “Oh, good,” groaned Nicoleta. “Arthur’s here.”

  “Oh, good,” beamed Willie, “Arthur’s here!”

  “As always, there’s a logical explanation for what’s going on here. There’s no need to go ascribing everything that happens to magic, no matter how strange it may seem.”

  “It’s summoning something,” said Nicoleta. “That was clearly the ‘come hither’ gesture it just did with Willie’s left hand.”

  “It didn’t look very welcoming to me,” said Willie’s head.

  “That’s because you’re not an unnameable terror from the void beyond the stars. Or an imp. But you use the right hand for them.”

  “Why is he summoning an unnameable terror from the void beyond the stars?” asked Sloot, throwing in some nervous fidgeting in case his voice didn't adequately convey his terror.

  “Ahem,” said Willie.

  “Sorry, m’lord. Why is m’lord’s body summoning an unnameable terror from the void beyond the stars?”

  “Clearly, we’re all suffering from Chestinger’s Communal Hallucination,” said Arthur. “What sorts of mushrooms have we all been eating?”

  “No kinds,” said Nicoleta. “We’re dead.”

  “Well, you can only catch communal hallucinations from eating the wrong sorts of mushrooms, so we must have done.”

  “Or it’s not a hallucination.”

  “There’s no time for you to question my expertise!”

  “We really need to stop this before Willie fin—er, m’lord’s body finishes summoning what ever it’s … summoning.”

  When surrounded by the trappings of incalculable evil—such as writhing masses of shadow tentacles wriggling across the floors of one's home—it's often difficult to decide how one should feel when said incalculable evil starts to leave. If decided in a committee, there would undoubtedly be a split between the optimistic "hooray and good riddance to it" types, and the "but where is it going now" types who consider themselves pragmatists, not pessimists. A true pessimist wouldn't turn up for a committee meeting, because what's the point?

  "Well, that's a relief," said Sloot, who'd never been accused of optimism in his life.

  "Don't relax just yet," said Nicoleta, taking a far more Sloot-typical position. "I'm not sure what the disembodied—wait, no, headless body of Willie—could want with writhing tentacles of dark energy. But whatever it is, it can't be good."

  "Good," said Arthur with a derisive snort. "No such thing! Evil either. If you'd done your reading, you'd know that Professor Calbage of Wilcestermount-Upon-Shatserbury-Adjacent-The-Sea has a seventeen-point treatise that firmly eschews the notion—"

  "I've been to Wilcestermount-Upon-Shatserbury-Adjacent-The-Sea," said Willie's head. "But don't tell anybody. I had a phase in my twenties, experimented with community theatre."

  "Er…" Sloot pointed to the melting wall behind Willie's body, which had nearly melted entirely. All of the tentacles of evil—or whatever analog Professor Calbage's treatise would acknowledge—were slithering off into the darkness beyond it. A pair of glowing eyes fumed within the darkness.

  "Eyes that glow in the dark don't growl, do they?" Sloot had surmised, accurately, that there was more to whatever lurked beyond the melting wall. Probably teeth. And if Willie could be decapitated, then perhaps teeth from within melting walls could threaten a ghost.

  As the last of the tentacles slithered into the blackness beyond the wall, Sloot considered running away. He dismissed the thought without much ado, on account of the way his luck tended to go. There hadn’t been a coin minted that, when tossed, would fall the way Sloot called it. He'd be better off wagering on standing there and being devoured by whatever malevolence was assembling itself in the shadows. It seemed like a sure bet, but Sloot had a way of bucking the odds.

  Perhaps it helped. Perhaps not. What emerged from the black maw in the wall was no ferocious beast.

  "It's a puppy," said Nicoleta, her voice tinged with appropriate confusion and disbelief.

  "W
ell, that makes perfect sense," said Arthur.

  "It does?" asked Sloot.

  "I wouldn't expect you to understand," Arthur retorted, his nose turning upward severely enough that he'd have drowned, had it been raining. "Communal hallucinations often cloud the minds of those experiencing them. You don't even remember eating the mushrooms."

  Willie's body made its way over to the dining table. He didn't so much set his head back atop his shoulders as reabsorb it and waver for a moment.

  "Well, that's a relief," said Willie. He patted down the front of himself, most likely assuring that he was dressed appropriately for the occasion, but he also could have been looking for his keys, which he did not have. The trousers of his tuxedo were far too tight to have accommodated them.

  "Er," began Sloot, as was his fashion, "do you know anything about the puppy, m'lord?"

  "Oh, I nearly forgot! Where is my head these days?" He looked around at all of them with a gleeful sneer of self-amusement. "Well, no, actually. Didn't one of you get him for me? Is it my birthday?"

  "Hard to say," said Nicoleta. "But ... weren't you paying attention?"

  "I have people for that. Sloot! Pay the woman."

  "Your body just summoned the puppy. All of the tentacles? The melting wall? Surely, you must remember some of it."

  "I'm pretty sure I'm the boss," said Willie from beneath smarmy eyebrows, "let's leave the 'musts' to me, shall we?”

  Nothing. That would do it. In the absence of any possible logical response, Sloot had historically managed some very positive results from saying nothing at all. In his experience, logic was a moving target. If you just stood still long enough, it would eventually fall into place.

  "I know what's going on here," said Willie, alongside the spiritual equivalent of snapping his fingers. "This is another one of Nipsy's classic pranks!"

  "I highly doubt that, m'lord."

  "Oh. Right." Willie giggled, then straightened up and started shouting in an amused sort of way. "I suppose this all just sort of came together naturally, and there's no one hiding ... under ... here!"

  He was right. No one had been hiding underneath the table, where his head had rested while his body had been about the business of conjuring evil puppies. Sloot had to hand it to Willie: if all of this had been some sort of elaborate prank, under the table would have been the best hiding place available.

  Willie spent several minutes refusing to allow anything as pedestrian as the earnest insistence of everyone else in the room to convince him that his old friend Nipsy wasn't somehow at the bottom of this. The puppy, in the meantime, confounded Sloot by engaging in the full gamut of standard puppy behavior. It yipped. It chased its tail. It tilted its head and looked at him with big puppy eyes. Never once did it waver in its commitment to the role, though Sloot didn't doubt for a second that it would have preferred terrorizing a countryside or lurking under a child's bed. It was, in a word, terrifying.

  And adorable. Two words.

  "Fine," said Willie after failing to discover Nipsy's hiding place. "If he won't come out and own up to it, I'll name the puppy Nipsy, and he'll be my new best friend. Do you hear that, Nipsy?"

  Nipsy barked. The puppy, that is. Willie's eyes darted around the room as if chasing a mosquito.

  "Fine!" he said again, and this time stamped his foot. "Come on, new Nipsy, we've got some secret business that we can't tell Sloot about."

  "Sorry, m’lord?" asked Sloot. Willie came no closer to answering than increasing the pace at which he floated from the room. Nipsy yipped and went chasing after him.

  "That can't be good," said Arthur.

  "I thought there was no such thing as good," Nicoleta mocked.

  "You leave the philosophy to me," Arthur barked, clearly ill at ease with having his expertise questioned.

  "It's an evil puppy," said Sloot. "It doesn't seem evil, but it is, right?"

  "It seems that way," said Nicoleta. "Willie was failing to contain all of the dark power being fed to him. I think his body just sort of ... puppied it."

  "Weird that his body was able to do that," said Sloot.

  "Not really," said Arthur.

  "I'd always heard that magic was done in the mind," said Sloot. "And by wizards."

  "Not a good idea to go imposing rules on magic," said Nicoleta. "It'll fight you on that, leak out through the seams."

  "No, no," said Arthur. "We'll be here all day if you just keep guessing! It's obvious that Willie's body had all the power, and he needed to be free of his head's nonsensical blabbering to get anything done."

  "That makes a lot of sense, despite being completely ridiculous." Nicoleta stared off into empty space, of which the Hereafter had quite a lot.

  "Myrtle would certainly agree with me," said Arthur. “I taught her everything she knows! Where is she, anyway?”

  “Gone,” said Sloot. He wasn’t sure how he knew, but there wasn’t a doubt in his mind. Perhaps they shared some sort of link, having to do with the love that they’d so briefly shared before they were crushed beneath a dust-up between a congress of goblins and a horde of the walking dead.

  Well, he’d been crushed. She’d had her neck snapped by Gregor. No matter, the important thing was that they’d loved each other. Whisking the details of whose violent death was more gruesome than whose distracted from the point. Sloot’s love for Myrtle seemed to be pointing him toward her, so he let it lead the way.

  “I’ll just clean all of this up then, shall I?” Nicoleta had a firm grasp of sarcasm and spared no opportunity to remind everyone.

  “Find Nan,” said Sloot, then added, “er, please and thank you. Have her find Willie and put him in the circle. I’m afraid it’ll be more than a puppy next time!”

  Sloot followed his heart, which led him out the front door and into the hills. When did she leave the house? Sloot imagined that she must have had important business, to leave him to his own devices when every inch of the house was positively wriggling with malevolent darkness. She must have known he’d be safe, or that Willie’s shenanigans couldn’t possibly make everyone in the house any more dead than they already were.

  Myrtle was dead, wasn’t she? Of course, she was. He’d seen her die, and she’d been all spectral in the Hereafter before the incident—maybe it was just a fluke? Lots of dead people wanted back into the Narrative. Perhaps Myrtle had a special knack for it.

  On Sloot went, over the grey hills that surrounded the house, until his path led into the darkened wood where he’d followed Willie to the crypt. He reckoned that a darkened wood was probably the only sort he was likely to encounter in the Hereafter. Sunny glades where the bunnies befriended the deer were unlikely in this sinister landscape—unless, of course, the bunnies were part of a cult that needed to sacrifice a deer to open up a portal into the nether reaches of some unpronounceable demon dimension, where they could rule as gods and sup on the souls of those who had been truly naughty in life.

  It was that sort of charging headlong into baseless worry that would have killed Sloot due to heart strain within a few years, had his head not popped off when it did. Nevertheless, he was overcome with relief to discover there were no bunnies within the darkened wood. The innumerable spiders skittering across every surface in the place made short work of said relief, but still, bunny-free.

  “It looks lost,” whispered several thousand tiny voices in unison.

  “I’m not lost,” said Sloot in his highest falsetto. He cleared his throat and tried to calm himself back down to tenor. “I know exactly where I am.”

  “Then it’s either very brave,” whispered the multitude of spiders, “or very stupid. Or both.”

  “It’s certainly not the first one,” said Sloot. He’d learned a long time ago that pretending to be brave when you were afraid, despite the well-intentioned advice offered by dads everywhere, tended to earn you nothing but more of a bully’s spit in your ear. “What are you going to do to me?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” whispered the spiders
, who had obviously never met a worrier before. They erupted into a frenzy. Most of them jumped up and down, which made a sound like an avalanche on the side of a molehill. The rest of them leapt all around him, spinning silvery strands of webbing into a diabolical sort of prison.

  “Oh no,” Sloot whimpered. He’d never been particularly afraid of spiders, preferring to think that he feared all things equally. Under the circumstances, that was likely to change.

  “Oh yes,” whispered the spiders, “do stay here with us. Forever. We insist!”

  The prospect of forever suddenly seemed a lot longer than it had before. An eternity of keeping Constantin from learning that Nan was living in his house and coddling his son—who was the Soul of the Serpent in his stead—seemed downright pleasant when weighed against an eternity in the presence of more spiders than even he could count.

  That would be the fear talking. Sloot was an accountant. He knew perfectly well that a precise number of spiders existed there, but this was one occasion upon which he felt that a solid, rational number might be far more unnerving. Innumerable it was, then.

  He couldn’t move. There was a logical part of his mind screaming at him that he was a ghost, and he could float unhindered through the cocoon they were weaving around him. Sloot trucked with logic as a rule. Unfortunately, fear wasn’t logical, and the fearful part of his mind was screaming far louder at him that he was in grave danger, and how was he going to spend eternity in a spider web? They wouldn’t know where to forward his mail!

  While his inability to move was mostly thanks to fear, it owed partial credit to the Agreement.

  When the first ghosts awoke in the Hereafter, they were just floating around in a void. Having recently been living people with physics and everything, it was disorienting. The first thing that they did was to agree on some ground rules, literally including the establishment of the ground. They agreed not to go around floating through each other, retaining some symbolic semblance of the physical world they’d left behind, because it was comforting and familiar.

  When Sloot died, he’d been granted a set of new instincts, like the urge to haunt things and make the sound of rattling chains, especially when in close proximity to a bedroom. The Agreement was a part of the package deal. He knew that he could break the Agreement and simply walk out of the webs that had been woven around him, but he dared not. Somehow, staying right where he was for whatever span of eternity lay before him seemed preferable to breaking the Agreement.