Soul Catchers

by Tony Moyle

  “So she does exist, then?” said David. “I was starting to believe she was a figment of Scrumpy’s imagination. Even when I saw her upstairs I couldn’t be certain.”

  “Of course she exists. She’s my daughter,” said Faith.

  “Your daughter?”

  “And mine…” replied Nash, not altogether convinced by the revelation.

  “What? Sorry, I must be missing something.”

  “What business is it of yours?” said Violet. “You’re just staff.”

  “No he isn’t,” replied Nash with a sigh. “This is John…Hewson…again…the proverbial boomerang.”

  “What?” said several people.

  “Who?” said Faith, who had never officially been introduced.

  “It’ll take too long to explain now. How can Faith have had a baby? She’s been devoid of emotions for the past twelve years. Did you…” – he looked at Nash – “…take advantage of her? You did have a little bit of a girl obsession as I recall.”

  “How dare you,” he said, leaping from the floor and clasping his fist. “I’d never do that…ever…even back then.”

  “Then how can it have happened?” said David.

  “The night my father sent me to Nash’s apartment to find information. I stayed the night and we made love.”

  “Yes, I remember?” said David.

  “What? Were you watching? Sicko,” said Faith, also clenching her fist. David was outnumbered and a little confused.

  “In a way,” he said, unable to distance himself from the truth.

  A fist hit him in the jaw.

  Nash felt bad that it hadn’t been his, but the truth was he already knew. He grabbed Faith’s hand before she could strike again.

  “It’s not his fault. Well, not totally, anyway. He wasn’t watching in the way you think. That night, when I said he was my soulmate, I wasn’t being metaphorical. John’s soul was possessing mine. Victor here can confirm, can’t you?”

  “Don’t drag me into your perverse little game. Weirdos. I’m not on your side, remember?”

  The barrel of Violet’s gun kicked him in the guts.

  “Yep…” he said with a forced breath. “It’s true.”

  “Victor, after you kidnapped Faith from Herb’s flat, how quickly did you give her Emorfed?”

  “The same morning I think,” he replied.

  “That would mean the foetus inside Faith would have been affected by the drug as well. What impact would it have on her soul?”

  “She’s always been different,” said Fiona. “Very few emotions. I always suspected that Emorfed had altered her, but she wasn’t the same as Faith. Unlike Faith, she wasn’t haunted by the shadow.”

  “Well, she wouldn’t be. Her soul mutated before it was even born. She never lost part of her soul because it never existed in the first place,” said David.

  “None of this is important,” pleaded Faith, a maternal instinct kicking in that wasn’t possible twenty minutes ago. “Where is she?”

  “She’s gone after the boy,” said Violet, whose eyes remained fixed on Victor.

  “It’s very likely,” said Fiona. “She’s only ever been interested in him. There’s a bond between them.”

  “Then we’ll go after both of them,” replied David defiantly. “Victor, tell us what you know.”

  “Why would I do that? I’ve been trained to resist interrogation, you know. It’s not that hard, particularly if you’re doing it.”

  “Do you see this list?” said David opening up the folder he’d brought from upstairs. “Your name is here, look. This is the list of people I am going to make pay for their involvement in John’s fate. The easy thing would be to shoot you. It’s been ages since I drew a line through one of these names and even then I didn’t get to pull the trigger.”

  “Well, you’re not the only one looking for revenge,” said Victor. “You ruined me, remember.”

  “You did that to yourself. Violet, I think we’ll start with the left foot.”

  “You don’t scare me.”

  A larger shotgun cartridge hit the floor, shortly followed by Victor. The toecaps of his boot and, more importantly to Victor, several of his toes were no longer visible at the end of his foot. Everyone’s ears were ringing as the smoke cleared. Victor refused to show any weakness or react to his not inconsiderable pain.

  “Is that your blood, by any chance?” said David.

  “Do your worst,” he croaked. “I’ve been chaperoning the Devil for the past few months. Do you think you can break me?”

  “Yes. Thanks, by the way. I didn’t know it was him, but I’ll add him to my list.”

  “You can’t stop him. He’ll melt you before you get near him.”

  “Maybe. I saw that power from Laslow. He didn’t use it against me then, and I don’t think Byron will now. What deal has he offered you?”

  “Money and power,” replied Victor.

  “You know he doesn’t keep deals, don’t you? I have first-hand experience.”

  “Then make me a better offer. How much have you got?”

  “Nothing. Not a penny,” said David. “I can offer you something more valuable.”

  “What’s more valuable than money and power?”

  “Answers. Hope. Maybe even redemption.”

  “You can’t pay debts with those.”

  “Not here. The currency I offer isn’t valid on Earth. Think about it,” said David. “The rest of you keep him here.”

  “Where are you going?” said Nash.

  “To find the children,” replied David.

  “I’m coming with you,” replied Faith.

  “No. You’ll need to stay here and defend yourselves. They may come again. Keep Victor for bargaining, I’m not sure he’s worth much, though.”

  David set the algorithms running. A number of options presented themselves, but crucial details labelled them invalid. One remained at the forefront, jumping for his attention. It lacked one piece of information to calculate its chance of success.

  “Hi or low?” he said.

  “Hi or low what?” asked Fiona.

  “Tide.”

  *****

  The island of Tresco, half a mile across the bay from Bryher, was starting to wake. Dawn had cracked open across the horizon and the residents were rising to a new day. Byron hadn’t intended to stop here. The plan, and it was a loose description, had been to get the boy as far away as possible. The next island was as far from ‘as far as possible’ as it was possible to be, unless you counted not going anywhere at all. Several things had slowed him down, and he could only explain some of it.

  The call from the telepathy network came first. No one talked. The noise that came through was the intergalactic equivalent of accidentally dialling a fax machine. It was a type of S.O.S., or more precisely an S.Y.S. call: Save Your Souls. Although the circumstances would have to be connected later, like a dot-to-dot connected to a self-destruct button, the consequences were clear. The heart had left his Soul Catcher. It stopped him in his tracks. Here he was dealing with human plebs, as the cretins he’d left in charge were allowing some inconceivable force to tear down his world.

  This was still not the most concerning piece of news this morning. Morning was. He’d left at dusk, travelling at a speed even rocket pilots would be impressed with. Yet he’d arrived at dawn. Time didn’t work like that down here. You could literally set your watch to it, unlike in Hell where you could only set your watch on fire and keep your hands warm.

  “You’re actually not a pirate, are you?!” said Scrumpy, still unable to escape his captor’s clutches.

  “No. Pirates don’t have rockets in their shoes.”

  “Alien?”

  “No,” he said, still paying more attention to his surrounding than to the boy. The village was starting to see activity. They were on a simple high street just outside a small post office. Monoliths guarded the lawns like a band of granite security guards. Pretty wooden chalets with light blue paint jo
bs hugged pristine flower beds. A few characters were emerging from these wooden shells to see what the day offered. Soon someone might start to notice he was not a local.

  “Ghost?”

  “No.”

  “Pantomime Villain?”

  “No. What?”

  “You look like you’re wearing make-up.”

  “No, I’m not,” he said, rubbing his face to prove it. “And if I was a pantomime villain, surely I’d be behind you.”

  “Oh go on, tell me. I can’t guess.”

  “Are you not frightened, little boy?”

  “Not really,” said Scrumpy. “I’m quite excited.”

  “Excited?”

  “Yes. I’ve been waiting my whole life for this moment. I’m a soldier ready for battle.”

  “You seem a little underprepared. Aren’t soldiers meant to be burly types with rough expressions and, oh what’s that other important thing?” he said mockingly. “Yes that’s it, weapons.”

  “I’ve got one.”

  “Is it your increasing ability to annoy me?”

  “No, guess again.”

  “A talent for bullshit?”

  “Keep trying.”

  “An exceedingly low attention span and the inability to understand danger?”

  “What did you say? I wasn’t listening. Only joking.”

  “Ok, I give up,” he said, tiring of the game. “What is your amazing, fear-inducing and clearly non-existent weapon?”

  “Her,” he said with a nod.

  *****

  David turned the key. Something large and foreign rattled briefly. He tried again. The beast roared and a thousand mini-earthquakes directed themselves at his butt. The walls of the outbuilding clung onto each other to avoid being disintegrated by the anger confined so close to them. A cloud of black smoke gave notice of the monster’s readiness to act. The key had both woken the machine and provided an incongruous soundtrack. Radio Four was blaring out from the front of the cab. Unable to identify which button turned it off, he left it playing.

  The controls looked simple enough. Gearstick, pedals and steering wheel were all where he’d expected them. He shifted the tractor into first and inadvertently hit the accelerator. The alien Audi engine burst into life and David hung on for fear of falling. The tractor devoured the doors in front of it and raced off across the fields following the direction of the sun poking out from behind the treetops.

  It was wrong to describe the motion as driving. David merely aimed and hoped whatever obstacle they collided with was somewhat less prepared than the red half-breed, full of rubber and metal. Down the incline it weaved, building speed as it went. The air rushed through the gap where a windshield once sat, forcing David backwards like being strapped into an experimental wind tunnel. The vehicle levelled out and made a beeline for the shore. New gears were initiated and the tractor hit a new personal best. With the grace of an ice-skating hippo, the tractor hit the sea and created a mighty spray behind it.

  Where the sea had filled the channel a few hours before, the machine skipped and swerved over the remaining water and sandbanks, desperate to buck both driver and vehicle. The sea spat its contents in all directions, showering David with a coating of sand. A voice on Radio Four proclaimed some great political victory, right up until the point that the vehicle hit the beach of the destination shoreline and the radio displaced it for Radio Two. The new soundtrack accompanied the crescendo of stones being spun off by the four wheels as it advanced on the new terrain like a well-planned surprise attack. Up the beach and down a narrow track banked by gorse it marched.

  Re-entry was achieved via a low stone wall that could no longer be described as organised. The monstrosity jolted to the left, following navigational instructions that were not available to the naked eye. It thundered down a concrete road, marshalled by palm trees, towards a collection of cottages. Desperately David tried to slow its progress by easing off on everything that he’d potentially been doing to that point. On either side of him, in the windows of houses, a blur of battered red paint flashed by.

  Was he heading in the right direction? The tractor seemed to know better than he did. A deep sense of déjà vu rose above the algorithms that were imploding inside him. This strange imposter placed everything in order. It had been here before.

  The song on the radio fitted the memory. The time of day was right. A battered red vehicle surrounded him. There was only one element missing. Any minute now she’d be there. In anticipation, he slammed on the brakes. Fifty feet in front of him a young boy was flung into his path. Almost immediately after arriving the boy was knocked out of the way and substituted for another figure. In the middle of the road a young girl stood calmly smiling at him. Her bleached white hair flowed around her like wisps of fog on a breezy day.

  The braking took effect and the sharp turn of the steering wheel added to the change of momentum. The tractor skidded sharply left, through a narrow gap in a short wall, before crashing into a building. David’s head hit the dashboard as his body was catapulted into the sharp and unprotected frame of the tractor’s cabin. Blood streamed down his forehead into his eyes. The tractor’s bonnet was fused at right angles into the wall at the exact point where the post office had positioned a postbox. The pungent smell of fuel filled his nostrils and he waited for the inevitable.

  - CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX -

  JUDGE, JURY AND EXECUTIONER

  He knew how this story ended. Why he knew was more of a mystery. Over the years, of more than one life, he’d speculated how it was possible that someone could die as a result of a mild head injury and a broken ankle. Fuel was flammable only if you had a way to ignite it. There was plenty of it gushing out of the tractor’s broken petrol tank. He just needed to wait for a decrepit old man to light it. He didn’t need to wait long. Although it wouldn’t be the one he’d always visualised. How could it be?

  Laslow had always worn the face of the man moving towards him in the rear-view mirror, through the blur of his clouded eyesight. In Limbo, Laslow had even confessed to being responsible for his death. But which death? At John’s gravestone his mother had been adamant that Laslow had murdered her son with one single accurate shot to his chest. That murder had occurred in an apartment, and to his memory it wasn’t anywhere near the Isles of Scilly. So maybe Laslow was confessing to that death? And at the same time manipulating the idea of this one inside him?

  A crowd, which in the Scilly Isles was seen as anything more than two, had started to congregate around the incident. Big news here was someone losing a wedding ring or the escape of a wayward goose. They weren’t used to ‘real’ news. Other than stare agog they weren’t sure what to do. The police, singular in this instance, was still eating breakfast somewhere on the other side of the island. Response times being measured in days rather than minutes here. A man in a hat broke off from the crowd and approached the accident. When he reached the fractured remains of the cabin where David was still trapped, he doffed his hat.

  “Hello, David.”

  “Donovan. I didn’t know who to expect,” replied David, turning his head painfully to his right where the figure was leaning against the door frame. The man’s black shirt clashed with the dog collar around his neck and the white mane that flowed out from under his hat. The skin sagged under his chin, covered with liver spots and blemishes that the passage of age had decided to leave undisturbed.

  “You were expecting this?” said Donovan.

  “I thought I’d already been through it.”

  “Interesting. That’s the problem with living for so long.”

  “Eleven isn’t long.”

  “You shouldn’t be counting in years. You should count in lives.”

  “I lost count at two.”

  “Then you’re only counting you and John. I suspect you are well into a few dozens by now, although perhaps someone else knows more than I do.” He scanned the crowd to see if the one who could answer was there.

  “As many as that,” h
e said with a groan of pain.

  “And every one of them has been fired across the Universe at least once, maybe more. Your soul is probably the most well-travelled entity in the known world. Think of the miles on the clock.”

  “I must be due a service.”

  “It’s coming,” he replied sinisterly. “One cosmic trip for every time you’ve been born or reborn. Another one to locate a specimen or to lie dormant, waiting for your next death. It’s no surprise you see more than you have seen.”

  “See?” said David struggling against the metal frame restricting his movement.

  “Time, David. You can’t outrun time, but you can see through it. Your senses and memories have been shot across the Universe, faster than the speed of light, so many times that I think your memories have caught up with themselves. Déjà vu. You have seen glimpses of your future, or past as it is now.”

  “Why you, though? It was always Laslow in your position.”

  “Well, it’s Baltazaar’s turn.”

  “It’s not a game.”

  “It is to us. He’s killed you so many times I suspect you have supplanted him in your premonition. One old man for another.”

  “Your turn to do what?” he said with a whimper.

  “To execute a juror. He’s killed six of the twelve at the last count. I’ve only killed five.”

  “But why do they have to be killed at all? They’ve done so much for both of you,” asked David.

  “The jurors were always going to have their souls stretched beyond what they were designed for. They were only human, after all. They were chosen well. The most perfectly balanced neutrals that he and I could find. It was easy to tell if they were suitable. Only true neutrals can pass through the Celestium without removing their souls from their bodies. When they were no longer needed to judge their peers, Satan used them to find the mutations that came from the Limpet Syndrome. But every mission brought more questions. One by one they, too, started to trigger the condition, which was the first I knew about their new purpose.”

  “Why?”