Soul Catchers

by Tony Moyle

  “What you do to me will be done to you with the same intensity!” exclaimed Asmodeus. “John thinks he can rewrite his story. He wants revenge, then. If only he knew who his revenge should be aimed at. So many people have done him wrong. John Hewson versus the Universe. I still can’t figure out how he wrote the inscription, though.”

  “I think that might be the easiest part of this mystery,” replied Primordial. “The soul is made of memory and feelings. If revenge was his last emotion before he achieved the Limpet Syndrome, then it might have been imprinted in the metal. As one part of his soul was drawn from Earth it attracted the other part of his soul through the walls of the box. The neutral part of his soul would have been left behind. Almost invisible it waited inside until we opened the box and it departed completely undetected. This theory is dependent, though, on the positive part of his soul leaving John after the first Limpet Syndrome. Which would make sense, as revenge is a purely negative emotion.”

  “There’s only one person who can answer that question for certain. Laslow was the only person who met John at different times before he came back here. He’ll know whether his attitude changed at all,” replied Asmodeus. “Let’s bring him down.”

  Asmodeus clicked his fingers and two demons at the far end of the table immediately leapt to their feet and started to work at the winch directly below one of the dark black metal boxes that floated on the edge of space high above their heads. The thick, metal chain clinked and clanked through its crank as it struggled to descend to the floor. It nestled quietly on the surface of level twelve and the demons went to work.

  The sound of a billion atoms being wrenched apart tore through Hell. Even the creatures on level zero raised their heads. All due to a single touch of a demon’s finger on the outside of the metal box. No trace of metal was left and all that remained was the pale and withered form of a vessol flattened to the floor.

  There were no signs of life. The plastic of the vessol had become wrinkled and worn as if the soul inside was being pressed in by its prosthetic exoskeleton. Without the slightest degree of sympathy, the two demons carried the corpse and threw it down on the huge, round table in front of Asmodeus. With a twisted smile and a strong hand he lifted the wretched figure by the hair, raising Laslow’s head up to his eyeline.

  “Wake up, Laslow. You’re a lucky lad. It appears you’ve been granted a brief holiday from your everlasting insanity.”

  “No more pain. I beg you,” mumbled Laslow.

  “Only now does he regret the folly of deals with Satan. If you feel there is nothing more that we can do to hurt you, you are wrong, Laslow. I need answers and I will get them.”

  Laslow’s eyes widened, revealing two pitch-black irises devoid of character that not even the light could escape. All-consuming black holes that once witnessed the pureness of beauty and the bitterness of sorrow now saw nothing but despair.

  “When you last saw John Hewson, had his demeanour changed at all?” Asmodeus demanded.

  “I was promised a second chance.”

  “Were you indeed? Maybe you shouldn’t have accepted his deal, then,” replied Asmodeus.

  “I had no choice but to accept his deal. He said it was the only way to save her.”

  “Now that won’t do, Laslow. I did say I wanted answers and there are far more agonising ways for me to get them from you than asking nicely.”

  “It’s so difficult to tell: the Devil’s shadow was on me always. After three hundred years in his company I had little control over my senses. My body was his to use at his leisure,” complained Laslow.

  Asmodeus raised a fist to strike him, but in one final act of self-preservation Laslow summoned up his last memories.

  “My recollections are that John became far angrier towards the end. He became bitter and twisted when he acknowledged how things had been played out against him.”

  “Excellent. That wasn’t hard, was it?” Asmodeus replied. “Put him back where he came from.”

  “Kill me, I’d rather be dead,” pleaded Laslow.

  “But you are dead, my pathetic, plastic friend. Anything else would be too good for you.”

  “You have what you wanted from me!” screamed Laslow.

  His voice diminished as he was carted off into the distance, dragged by his long, straggly nylon hair.

  “That suggests the positive part went first, which explains why we never saw it here,” declared Primordial. “It had nowhere else to go but into its host.”

  “All this fails to explain where all the parts of him are now!” shouted Asmodeus, losing his patience. “Where is the little shit?”

  “After he disappeared we scanned the area to detect his soul. All we found was energy that seemed to belong to him,” replied Brimstone. “That energy could have been the fragments of his soul, although I think the neutral part returned to Earth.”

  “How could he return there? We’d be able to see him if he was possessing someone?” spat Asmodeus, directing much of his anger at Brimstone, convinced that he in some way was partly responsible for John’s escape.

  “That’s not the only way to get back down there, I’m afraid. He could have gone for an unborn, then his soul would effectively become part of a new person. John Hewson would cease to exist, at least to us.”

  “Who told him about that?”

  “I did,” replied Brimstone. “You have to remember I had no way of knowing that any of this would happen. Plus, he’s an inquisitive little git.”

  “Why didn’t you just give him the manual and a set of keys?” shouted one of the demons who was concealed by the crowd and happy that the flack was being aimed elsewhere.

  “Are you saying that there is no way of knowing which unborn he has gone into?” raged Asmodeus.

  “Not unless he reveals himself to us. If the Newton reference is anything to go on, I expect he will when he’s ready. Remember his soul is now purely neutral. The Devil can no longer speak to him and neither can…” He paused and nodded knowingly. “The other side.”

  “Doesn’t give us much of an advantage, though, does it?” spat Asmodeus.

  Brimstone was feeling the heat. Being made of molten rock meant he was hot most of the time. But it was nothing to the heat of the searing accusations that were increasingly building up around him. The whole council seemed to have decided to gang up in collective finger-pointing, safety in numbers always being a safer place than out on a limb. If he wasn’t careful he was in danger of being dragged off for a week with Laslow in the darkest, most depressive holiday chalet in history.

  “I disagree,” replied Brimstone. He knew he could only make his situation better rather than worse. “I think we have a double advantage. If ‘neutral John’ has gone back to Earth, answer me this: who helped him reverse the Soul Catcher and press all the buttons?”

  The demons developed unique expressions on their faces that only the unique fear of an unanswerable question can have on a group of delegates fighting for their own personal reputations. They searched their brains for the answer, at the same time hoping someone else might have the wrong one before them. After Brimstone had allowed the silence to make him look far more intelligent than anyone else, and cooled the hot stares that had been bubbling his skin, he answered.

  “It’s quite simple, really. Only one part of John is accounted for, so the two other parts of his soul must be here. Good and Bad John, if you will, are somewhere in Hell. They must have fused together when the positive part encouraged the negative part to pass through the metal cube. I’m guessing that Good/Bad John helped the other John get home. He probably got inside a vessol so that he could operate the controls. He has seen the Soul Catcher with me a number of times before: it wouldn’t take much to work it out.”

  “Ok, I want every part of this place searched: find me both of them, and when I say now I do actually mean you’ve already found them. One last question, Brimstone, you said we would have an advantage: I don’t quite see how,” asked Asmodeus.

>   “If we can find Good/Bad John, the John with all the hatred, all the anger, all the cunning, all the bitterness, we could make him go back and find…um…John. Who better to find John, than John?”

  - CHAPTER THREE -

  HOLLOW MAN

  David Gonzalez had never found dreams easy. Sleep was the only time when he experienced anything remotely close to an emotion. During waking hours he was the most stable and rational eleven-year-old you’d ever meet. Come to think of it, he made most adults look childish. Sleep was different. Sleep took away his ability to reason and apply logic. This complete lack of control allowed his dreams to run wild with imagination and colour in a way that his normal conscious self would never allow.

  This morning he woke in the same conditions as he always did. The bedsheets were wet from the profuse sweating that seeped from every pore of his body. It was accompanied with a scream he’d learnt to instinctively muffle in case his flatmates came on a cavalry charge to see who was attempting to assault him. This pattern was replicated every night for as long as he could remember. The dreams were not all the same, but they had the same themes and qualities to them. At least until tonight.

  Tonight a new dream had been added to the roster of repeats he got used to taping night after night. And like all the others, this dream featured John Hewson. That’s not to say that David was in the dreams with John, but more that he was acting John’s part with the aptitude of an Equity cardholder.

  Sometimes he played the part of John as he was crumpled against a postbox in a car waiting for an eventual fireball. Occasionally he played John standing in a metallic sphere facing the barrel of a gun that was aimed at him by a decrepit old man.

  Once in a while he was walking in a field of white grass with a red sun beating down on him through a translucent barrier where blue, electric clouds attempted to break through to meet him. In that scene he was at his most comfortable, but the scene never lasted long enough for him to enjoy it. That was the dream he had the least first-hand knowledge of, like it was trying to encourage him to imagine rather than remember.

  David picked up the folder and pen that he kept on his bedside table in order to quickly document any new findings before they ran from his waking moments. The new dream had been released, kicking and screaming, from his subconscious by the recent and unexpected meeting with John’s mother. Tonight he’d played John as a bullet travelled through his heart and he’d hit the floor of an apartment. Although clearly dead in the dream, David experienced the out-of-body experience of climbing out of the body and following the shooter.

  If the story that John’s mother told him was genuine, there had to be some record of it inside him, even if it had been buried deep down in what was left of his soul. There would be no emotions left to associate with it, but there would definitely be fact. There was, after all, nothing else in his head anymore. Where the rest of his capacity to feel was he could only guess.

  Once a few of the details had been beautifully scribbled down and catalogued in order to obtain easy access in future, he flicked through to the first page. The first page of any book is always the most important. It’s the launch pad for the reader to decide whether the combined contents of the following pages are likely to be entertaining or informative. The first page of this book was neither. All that existed on it was a list entitled at the top, ‘Newton’s Third’.

  David always had an unbending drive to make things right, even though it was often difficult for him to be certain as to what ‘right’ looked like. Lacking the emotions to feel or recognise pity, righteousness, fear, anger or empathy meant that you had a unique view on the subject of right and wrong. His desire to put things right was, in his mind, logical. Unjust deeds had been carried out and they must be undone. David ran his finger down the list to double-check that everyone that should appear was accounted for.

  - Laslow

  - Hell in general (those demons particularly)

  - Donovan King

  - Victor Serpo/Agent 15

  - Baltazaar? (undecided)

  - Faith

  - John Hewson

  Which item should he work on first? There were at least some of the entries on the list that he didn’t have any clear plan for. But there was certainly one that he could start with. One name had just revisited him in his most recent dream, and it was the single most important name on the list: Laslow.

  Eleven years had gone by with this single name constantly flooding his mind. This time nothing would stop him. Well, other than only being eleven, having a zero track record of assassination and Laslow probably being the most dangerous person to walk the planet, that is. Still the algorithms in his brain had done the calculations and he liked the odds.

  *****

  Sandy Logan was many things depending on whom you asked. If you were going to accurately document all of them, you’d need the world’s most comprehensive thesaurus. Distinguished observers, and even some family members, would immediately offer ‘bastard’. Some might say ‘clever’. and just a few people might even refer to him as ‘clever bastard’. Sneaky, devious, corrupt, ambitious, intelligent, single-minded would all potentially make an appearance. These words more than adequately described the deceased former Minister for Homeland Security.

  Yet there was one word that you’d never hear associated with him, even if you asked every single person ever to have had the displeasure to meet him. That word was ‘slow’. His mind was as sharp now as ever and could outrun any adversarial intellect. Of course, outside the confines of level zero all of these descriptors were lost in history and only one word was most appropriate. Pigeon.

  Not the only pigeon, though. Unlike all the other creatures that occupied this lowest level of Hell there were two of them. Level zero was like a warped version of Noah’s ark. In this version a drunken Noah had decided to kill one of every species because he was pissed off with all the rain and sea. The animals went in one by one, hurrah ‘hic’ hurrah.

  Pigeon or not, he’d lost none of the speed of thought or instinct that had been evident in his human existence. Much had happened since his meeting with John on level twelve when Asmodeus had confirmed what he’d already suspected. John had tried his best, but there never had been any other destination than where he was now. Even more significantly he’d worked out why. To him it was obvious, and if he could he was going to use it to his advantage.

  Ever since he’d been consigned to the relative paradise of level zero he’d taken to exploring. The most sparsely populated of all the levels in Hell, it had the equivalent population density of Greenland. Under the stagnant lake of the level above, the land stretched out for mile after mile through desert, around forest, over ocean, and across swamps right up to what Sandy called the window. The window was a vast opening that looked out on space to reveal the workings of the Universe. Where others would simply be captivated by its magnificent grandeur, he had keener eyes.

  Sandy was an expert at reading between the lines in order to spot opportunities no one else could see. It was this talent for exploiting the information available to him that made him both brilliant and extremely dangerous. Ian, on the other hand, was only one of those things and it didn’t begin with the letter ‘b’.

  Armed with his unique ability for creating catastrophe, Ian could be extremely dangerous in a vacuum. A Harvard University team with a decent-sized grant could spend years trying to understand it and still be none the wiser. What’s more, the two of them were once again coupled together like two incompatible train coaches, a spanking brand new high-speed locomotive next to a knackered old coal truck.

  “I really did imagine it would be worse than this, but it’s not so bad really,” said Ian, attempting to stimulate conversation when it was clear that Sandy was not the least bit interested.

  Sandy’s concentration was fixed on the activities that were continuing at a constant rate on the other side of the window. A steady stream of blue electricity was coagulating on the other side of the tran
slucent barrier, desperately fighting to get in, whilst in the other direction a less intense, almost dulled, light blue gas seeped away from Hell into the Universe.

  “I mean I wouldn’t have chosen to spend the afterlife as a bird, but I think we got off lightly compared to what I’ve heard goes on upstairs,” continued Ian.

  “Shhussh,” chirped Sandy, the words whistling through the valve of his fake body.

  “Why do you spend so much time down here, Sandy? I know it’s a good view but I’ve sort of got used to it now.”

  “You amaze me, Ian, and not in a good way,” replied Sandy, realising that the peace he sought was the one thing he was unlikely to receive.

  “It’s just a view, though. It’s always going to be there, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not the view I’m interested in, it’s what’s going on in the scene. I bet when you used to go to an art gallery you’d look at a painting and say, ‘It’s a screaming man, move on!’ Sometimes you have to look deeper.”

  “Ok. I’ll look harder,” replied Ian, genuinely trying to observe more than what he saw, but actually only seeing exactly that. “What am I looking for exactly?”

  “Opportunities,” replied Sandy.

  “What do they look like?”

  “It’s not like looking for a star, Ian. They don’t come in shape form. An opportunity can be a gap as much as it might be an object. It could be a sound or a taste or something that doesn’t even exist.”

  “Right,” replied Ian, with one of the stock responses he used when he actually didn’t understand. “But why are you looking for them?”

  “Because that’s what intelligent beings do. They don’t just switch it on and off. If you must know, I’m looking for a way out,” said Sandy.

  “Then you’re looking in the wrong direction. The trapdoor to level one is in that direction,” he replied, pointing to a pale white, plastic wing in the opposite direction.