Soul Remains

by Sam Hooker

  “I second that,” said Lilacs. “Shouldn’t we hear from Greta, please? I mean, she has a lot at stake here, and you made it a point to include her among the managing partners so it wouldn’t be two against one all the time. That was more than fair, I thought.”

  Dandelion nodded. Periwinkle scribbled furiously to get all of this into the official record.

  “Mrs. Knife,” Lilacs continued, “would you remove that cloth from Greta’s mouth, please? We’d like to get her vote for the official record. Please.”

  Mrs. Knife shook her head slowly from side to side. “My hostage. You choose.”

  Dandelion rolled his eyes and scoffed. “Well. You warned us that they were ill-tempered, Vlad! I owe you an apology for underestimating that.”

  “Is the gentleman officially apologizing, please?” asked Periwinkle.

  “I suppose there’s no time like the present,” Dandelion replied. “Ahem. For the official record, as it pertains to the matter of my incredulity toward Vlad Defenestratia’s assertions regarding the remarkable lack of politeness on the part of—”

  “Enough!” shouted Vlad. “Release Greta, take the boy, and go back behind your great wall! We will put this behind us, though I am sure we shall be at war soon enough.”

  “I vote that we keep the Domnitor,” said Lilacs.

  “What?” Vlad bellowed.

  “We’ve got more than enough fairy soldiers to keep the goblins in line,” Lilacs continued. “I say we invite them in, they’ll release Greta, and we can monitor them while they’re passing through on the way to Svartalfheim to make sure they don’t wreck up the place.”

  “That sounds fair,” said Dandelion. “They’ll want to keep their host as large as possible for their war with the dwarves, won’t they? They wouldn’t risk losing their strength fighting us. We’re not their primary target, are we, please?”

  “Agreed,” said Lilacs.

  “No!” shouted Sloot.

  “Well, you’re not a managing partner,” said Lilacs, “so you don’t get a vote.”

  “Wait, please,” said Sloot.

  “Oh, all right.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, you said please.”

  “Oh. Well, thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Out with it!” shouted Vlad.

  “She’s going to kill Greta either way,” said Sloot. “She said so in the dungeons!”

  Vlad’s head whipped around to look at Greta with wide eyes.

  “I heard her myself,” Sloot went on. “I thought there was a chance to save her sooner, but—”

  “I love you,” Vlad said.

  A single tear ran down Greta’s face. She nodded softly, coaxing a thin trickle of her blood onto Mrs. Knife’s blade.

  “But that’s not fair,” said Lilacs, barely above a whisper.

  “Last chance,” growled Mrs. Knife.

  “Uh oh,” said Roman. “I know that look.”

  For the second time, Sloot saw something in Vlad other than anger: hope. Mad, romantic hope. He knew it as well, because it’s exactly the same thing that he’d have done in Vlad’s shoes, if that were Myrtle on the end of Mrs. Knife’s namesake. Nothing could ever have stood in its way.

  “You are welcome in Carpathia,” said Vlad.

  It was plain on the faces of Mrs. Knife and Gregor, and in the stillness that suddenly came over the writhing congress of goblins behind them, that the deed was done. They stared in naked fascination at the hills of Carpathia that rose behind Vlad.

  A hush descended upon all of them. A calm before the storm. It was all too brief. The soft splatter of Greta’s blood spraying over the grass brought it abruptly to an end, and then the whole world erupted in war.

  Fog of War

  Of all the people that Sloot hadn’t expected to see on the battlefield … actually, there was a very long list. It’s hard to say who’d have been at the top of it, so it may as well have been Willie.

  “Hey, Sloot,” he said, with the sort of impromptu joviality that people often employed when failing to avoid him at a party. He was actually about fifty feet above the battlefield, not on it.

  “Willie! What are you doing up here?”

  “Oh, good,” said Willie. “I’m not sure either! I thought I was the only one. But why are you all the way over there?”

  It wasn’t uncommon that details escaped Willie’s attention, but Sloot felt that the swirling, sickly yellow energy field around him should have been obvious enough that even he wouldn’t have been able to overlook it. The last time Sloot had stood too close to Willie, he’d been drained of a good deal of vitality. He opted to keep Willie’s energy field at arm’s length.

  “Really good view of the battle from up here.” True to form, Willie had moved on to his next observation instead of waiting for an answer. He wasn’t wrong about the view. The roiling horde of goblins was much smaller than the army of fairies. The fairies were holding their own, though, and Vlad was cutting a smoky swath through the bulk of them. Sloot didn’t doubt for a moment that she was hunting for Mrs. Knife, though he couldn’t see where she’d disappeared to. Lurking among her forces while letting them do her dirty work, no doubt.

  At least the goblins weren’t piling up toward them this time. Sloot still got the occasional shiver of dread when he thought about that tottering pile of goblins clambering up toward their portal.

  “Willie!” shouted Nicoleta, floating up to join them. “What are you doing here?”

  “It’s a big secret,” said Willie. “I don’t know if—”

  He froze, a look of realization dawning on his goonish face. He smiled.

  “It’s not a surprise if I know about it before,” said Willie.

  “Oh, no,” said Sloot. “Not this again.”

  “You really got me,” said Willie, waggling a finger at Sloot. “I didn’t even realize that today was my birthday!”

  “It’s not,” said Sloot, “and I assure you—”

  Willie laughed. He slapped his knee and struck a pose that looked like a heron preparing to strike at a fish.

  “This is even better than a man doing magic! Especially if it’s Gregor doing the magic. His stuff’s all black and boring. No rabbits or colored handkerchiefs or anything.”

  “Oh, Gregor’s doing magic, all right!”

  Sloot looked down to where Nicoleta was pointing. The chaotic mass of goblins had cleared a perfect circle just beneath them, around Gregor and a dozen or so blood wizards, who were sending streams of eldritch power up at Willie, hence the sickly yellow energy field around him.

  “Did Nipsy set all of this up?” asked Willie, who was talking much faster than usual. “Is he dead? That would be sad. But then he could come have a sleepover! Not that I sleep anymore. Gosh, I feel like I’ll never have to sleep again!”

  “They’re energizing him,” said Nicoleta.

  “Why?” asked Sloot.

  “No idea, but whatever’s happening, it can’t end well.”

  For lack of a better idea, Sloot fidgeted. He was out of his depth here.

  “What do we do?”

  Nicoleta snapped her fingers. “Bartleby!”

  “What?”

  Nicoleta made a very mopey face and set herself to making a series of hopeless-looking gestures, the sort that one might make in conjunction with phrases like “oh, I give up,” or “it’s pointless, anyway.”

  There was an explosion of bats, and Bartleby hovered within a shroud of dark grey clouds. The clouds had their own thunder.

  “Foolish mortals! Vhy have you summoned … oh, hi.”

  “It’s Gregor!” said Nicoleta, pointing frantically downward. “I don’t know what they’re doing to Willie, but it can’t be good!”

  “Hi Bartleby!” Willie waved with the ferocity of a kid who’d eaten an entire bag of sugar. His eyes went wide, then wider, until there were three glowing red pairs of them, each the size of dinner plates. His enormous, razor-sharp grin filled Slo
ot with a further sense of dread, though he’d thought he was already full-up. He somehow found room for more, like when pies come out after holiday meals.

  “Er, hi, Villie.” Bartleby gave a little wave. His expression didn’t know whether to be impressed with Willie’s wicked cool new look, or concerned with the few-and-terrible possible outcomes.

  Nicoleta clapped her hands in front of Bartleby’s face. “You have to stop him!”

  “That sounds like fun,” said Bartleby, his grin overflowing with malice. “That little tverp has it coming!”

  He disappeared in a puff of smoke and bats, only to reappear in a similar one right behind Gregor. After a few seconds, some of Gregor’s tatters burst into flames.

  “What about the other wizards?” Sloot wondered aloud.

  “Leave them be,” said Willie’s voice, at least in triplicate, one of which was speaking backward. “The power … the power!”

  “It looks like a modified empowerment,” said Nicoleta. “Oh, dear.”

  Sloot gave into the futile hope that that was an “oh, dear” of sympathy for the wizards, and that they’d somehow bungled it and their spell was about to fizzle out.

  “I think they’ve taken the safety off,” said Nicoleta.

  “Is that what happens right before everybody yells ‘surprise!’ and they bring out the cake?” asked a dozen of Willie’s voices.

  Orange bolts of energy screamed past Sloot. He looked down to see that they were coming from Gregor’s wand, which he was doing a very poor job of controlling. A bright red line arced from Bartleby’s wand to Gregor’s posterior, and Gregor’s free hand was slapping him in the face.

  “Vhy are you hitting yourself?” Bartleby shouted, cackling.

  “The time is upon us,” came a deafening choir from Willie’s mouth. It was as though he was speaking with every voice that had ever been his, from the bumbling idiot who was obsessed with his birthday, to the boyhood predecessor to that idiot—for whom birthday obsession would have been more expected—to the demonic thing he’d become on so many occasions, and had been joined by a multitude of unseen horrors that Sloot was just positive he’d never be able to pretend didn’t exist.

  On a stroke of stupendously bad luck, one of Gregor’s orange bolts pierced Willie’s energy field, stabbed through him, and froze. It wavered there, like a spear of sunset that had gotten stuck. It wriggled and writhed, trying to break free. When it decided it couldn’t, it turned black and took Willie with it.

  “I don’t feel so good,” said a single, guileless Willie. Then he started to rumble.

  “Run!” shouted Nicoleta, and Sloot did just that. He sped off in the direction he was already facing, adjusting slightly to miss getting involved with Willie’s nasty-looking sphere, arms and legs flailing in a way that he knew in his very core was deeply embarrassing, but he was far too terrified to care.

  It all went dark. There was an explosion, Sloot was fairly certain, and then everything was black.

  No, not black, not dark … Dark. He’d never seen it before, but he knew enough about the Dark to know what it was when he saw it, and this was it.

  Somehow, he’d been transported to the Dark. Where was everyone? He could hear them, all sounding very far away.

  “Hello?” he shouted, and was immediately sorry that he did. The sound that reverberated back to him sounded an awful lot like his voice, but only if he’d taken up a new career haunting the dreams of children. He resolved never to speak again.

  He started to wander around, or thought that he did, anyway. Everything was so absolutely black that there were no frames of reference, no way to tell if he’d actually floated away from the spot where he’d been.

  Was there even a spot from which to float? He wasn’t sure. He wouldn’t have gone so far as to wish that he still had a physical form to help him figure that out, as he had no idea what the Dark might have been doing to it. Best to sit and wait it out, he decided.

  How long ago had that been? More evidence that he was in the Dark. Like in the Hereafter, he surmised that the passage of time was imperceptible in the Dark. He didn’t know what else he could do but sit and wait it out, and he had no way of knowing whether he was sitting or not. So he waited.

  Tidying Up

  “Name?”

  “Peril.”

  “And how are you feeling, Peril?”

  “Sloot.”

  “Sorry?”

  “That’s my name. Sloot.”

  “That’s not what I have here,” said the perfectly average-looking man in the grey suit. He had a clipboard in his left hand, and was scanning it with a fury to rival most of the bureaucrats that Sloot had ever met in his life.

  “My name is Sloot Peril.”

  The man’s smile was calm and collected, but the way that he made eye contact with Sloot gave the impression that there was a rage just beneath his surface, and it was only a matter of time before it breached. His smile said “how may I assist you,” but his eyes said “prepare to have the absolute expletive redacted assisted out of you, and do not even consider resisting.”

  “You’ve had a trying day,” the man said politely, nodding in agreement with himself on Sloot’s behalf. “Any other names rattling around in there that you’d like to make me aware of? Take your time.”

  His voice was patient. The bulging vein in his forehead was not.

  “Er, my middle name’s Gefahr.”

  The man’s smile tightened. Sloot looked away awkwardly. It was then that he noticed that he apparently hadn’t left the field of battle, though all trace of the battle had. It didn’t seem like much of anything had ever taken place there, actually. Even the road was gone. The stones that had been piled into something the undead would accept as a castle were still there, but not in a piled sort of way.

  The man scribbled on his clipboard, then let out a slow, soothing breath. “Now, then, Sloot Gefahr Peril, How are you feeling?”

  “Well, I’m dead.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed, and all of the erstwhile indications that he was on the verge of frenzy evaporated into curiosity.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Quite,” said Sloot, nodding to agree with himself, subconsciously taking a page from the stranger’s book. “I was trampled during the Fall of Salzstadt.”

  “Hmm,” the man said. He tore the top page off his clipboard and let it fall to the ground. “Well, that would explain why you’re not on this list. Excuse me a moment, won’t you?”

  He maintained profound eye contact with Sloot.

  “Er, of course,” said Sloot.

  The man rifled through the pages of his clipboard, ripping a few more out and casting them blithely aside.

  “Ah,” he said, with a satisfied smile. He pulled a page from near the bottom and clipped it to the top.

  “Name?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “It’s for the form.”

  “Oh, well, it’s still Sloot … er … Sloot Gefahr Peril.”

  The man waited a moment after Sloot finished speaking, perhaps providing a moment for any last-minute corrections, before writing it at the top of the form.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Now then, Sloot Gefahr Peril, would you please account for your absence from the list?”

  “What list?”

  “I’m sorry, what?” Much to Sloot’s chagrin, the man had returned to his prior mixture of unabated calm with an undercurrent of roiling savagery.

  “Er, I beg your pardon,” said Sloot, suddenly very glad that he had no life for this psychopath to take, “I just don’t know … to what list you’re referring.”

  Perhaps it was Sloot’s panicked demeanor. Perhaps it was the great lengths he’d just taken to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition. Either way, the man’s intensity seemed to deflate a bit. He smiled.

  “The list of the dead involved in the incident,” said the man.

  “Incident?”

  The man’s smile didn’t change for the durati
on of an uncomfortably long pause. “Look, this should only take a moment to clear up. Why don’t you stay exactly where you are?”

  “Er, okay.”

  The man turned abruptly away from Sloot and walked down the hill. He approached a trio of older people all wearing white, and gave them a curt nod. Sloot looked around to see that there were at least a dozen other people in grey suits milling about, measuring things, and taking notes on clipboards. He didn’t recognize any of them. He felt a bit unbalanced, but he was sure that he’d known everyone but the armies of goblins and fairies before … before Willie exploded.

  Willie exploded! He hadn’t actually seen it since he was fleeing as fast as he could, but that was what had happened, wasn’t it? Willie exploded, and then everything went black.

  No. It went Dark.

  Sloot looked up. There was the Dark. There was sunshine all over the place, but the Dark loomed above them, stretching off into infinity in every direction. Where was the sunshine coming from?

  “Sloot Gefahr Peril!” shouted the clipboard-wielding maniac. He was waving Sloot over. He and the three people in white were looking at him impassively. Sloot hadn’t a clue as to what was about to happen, but then again, that had been the case for a very long time.

  They stood there, watching him as he approached. The figures in white were older, though not quite old. There was a tall, gaunt man, a shorter and paunchier man, and a woman with wild, unkempt hair that was black, white, and every shade of grey in between.

  “Sloot Gefahr Peril,” said the man who’d interviewed him before, “allow me to introduce the Coolest.”

  The three figures in white all smiled and nodded in a very self-satisfied way.

  “The … Coolest?”

  “Oh, you’ve heard of us,” said the shorter man in a voice that threatened to leap into a musical number at any moment. He put an arm around Sloot’s shoulder and started walking with him in no direction in particular. “What’s truly strange is that we’ve never heard of you.”

  “And not strange in the fun, kooky mysticism kind of way,” said the woman. “It’s just strange. We know everybody.”