by Tony Moyle
The cloud of particles that embodied his spirit existence were projected into the room in the shape of a human. Not just any human, one he barely recognised from the distant past. It was John’s. Although there was nothing normal about his actual structure. Every feature from head to hip to heel was a crackling malevolence of blue light, powerful and intimidating. Although his limbs moved freely, his mobility from the spot where he had landed was restricted. The light that tapered away from the back of his head shook like a rattlesnake, eager to extricate itself from Nash’s eye sockets. The enjoyable nostalgia of being himself one last time was soon shattered by a voice.
“This is a turn-up for the books. That makes you number twelve,” said a voice, no more than a whisper. None of the people in the room were talking. Whether it came from outside or inside him, John couldn’t be sure.
“Who said that?” John whispered back.
“I said it,” came the voice again, “and, although you think it’s a whisper, believe me, I’m shouting from where I am.”
“Where are you?”
“Very close and very far away at the same time?”
“I don’t get it?”
“You’re not meant to. I can’t believe you’re number twelve and I didn’t know anything about you. They have been keeping you from me?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about you and your ability.”
“What ability?”
“The ability of a non-human to enact the Limpet Syndrome.”
“This is the Limpet Syndrome?”
“Oh yes indeed. Welcome to the ultimate human survival mechanism. A unique trait that has evolved over countless millennia to protect mankind, and they don’t even know about it. The most amazing of all man-made creations. Except, of course, you are not human.”
“Yes, I am, don’t oppress me,” replied John indignantly.
“I’m not. You were human once. But now you are only part-human. A human in soul alone. Only eleven human souls have ever succeeded to do what you have just done. That also means you’re not reincarnated, which is the normal consequence of the Limpet Syndrome in a human. So, I’d guess that you’ve been sent back. Am I right?”
“Who are you?”
“I’m part you and part me,” said the voice ambiguously.
“I’m sorry, I think I’m aware of the ‘me’ part, but not the ‘you’ part?” replied John.
“Maybe you’ll find out, one day. The more important question is what do you want to do now?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you want to stay here, or do you want to let go?”
So much had been asked of him since his death but until now no one had asked him what he wanted. All of his energy had been focused on saving humanity and nothing had been reserved for saving him. What he wanted most of all was to put the world, and his place in it, back to normal.
“It seems, then, that your choice is made,” said the voice.
“What? I didn’t say anything,” replied John.
“You didn’t have to, John. If you want all of those things you cannot stay where you are. You must find another way to fight, and only you have the answer to that.”
“What answer?” shouted John, “I don’t have the answer.”
“You’re smart, John, you must know who holds the key to what you want?”
“Who? I don’t know who you mean.”
“You will, soon enough.”
“When?”
“I don’t know why they have sent you back. But I will find out. Whatever they’ve offered you in return, ask yourself, John, do you really believe that they will keep their side of the deal? They will not. They will do everything they can to cover up your very existence.”
“Why should I believe some random invisible voice that might just be my own insanity?”
“Well, if you don’t believe me, ask them yourself. There is only one person who can help you get back what was taken from you. But you must start fighting clever. It will become clear, but you must let go now.”
John had no reason to trust this voice. It was hard to trust anything that you couldn’t see. It wasn’t the voice that was telling him to let go, though. He had already made that decision himself. It wasn’t just for his benefit either. One of the side effects of his occupation of Nash was the dependency that it had created. If he didn’t want to destroy that link he was no better than Emorfed.
“I’m ready to let go,” he said.
“Good decision. Now before you go there are two pieces of information that will be useful. Next time you set up residence inside someone’s body I highly recommend you spend some time in the frontal lobe. That’s the bit of the brain that manages emotion and memory. You’ll find it a lot safer there and they won’t even know you’re at home.”
“Frontal lobe, got it.”
“Secondly, when you are at your very lowest point, a place where even desperation or despair would be welcomed alternatives, when any glimmer of hope has been utterly extinguished, then you will have one, and only one, more chance to enact the Limpet Syndrome again. You’ll know when that time comes. I won’t even dare to explain the aftermath of using that talent a third time. Let’s just say the power of it would be so intense we’d be finding bits of you from the Milky Way to Orion’s belt. Just don’t do it. Well, this has been an extremely enjoyable nanosecond of your life, but if you’re ready, John, time to hold on tight again.”
The light snapped from Nash’s eyes like the breaking of an elastic band, and in an instant John was sucked out of the window, fired at regurgitating velocity through sky and space. Nash opened his eyes, his pupils having returned to their correct positions. The faintest sparks of electricity flickered off the lights and appliances before being absorbed into whatever stood in their way. Herb and Dr. King were aware that something had happened but had no clear recollection of what it was.
“I’m not sure what happened, but it would appear we’ve…we’ve…oh whatever.”
- CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO -
TO HELL…AND BACK
“Brimstone, we’ve got a problem. I think you better get down here,” came a voice wafting over the intercom system as Brimstone was taking a break in the Library.
“What seems to be the issue, Mr. Silica?” he said, calmly putting down a cup of frothing red liquid that overflowed with smoke and craning what neck he had towards the microphone.
“We have an unidentified foreign body inside the machine,” replied Mr. Silica, in the tone of an apprentice who’d been left in charge on his first day and had accidentally been pressing the wrong buttons.
“That’s impossible,” Brimstone huffed. “The Soul Catcher can predict every soul in, and every soul out. I’m afraid you must be mistaken.”
“If you saw the fireworks that I’m seeing, I don’t think you would agree. Shall I just tell the team to ignore it and if they happen to be disintegrated in a ball of fire and time static, not to worry as they’ll probably get compensation for their families?” came the sarcastic and jittery response.
“Alright, you don’t have to throw a wobbly. It’s still impossible, even if there is a little bit of a…situation,” replied Brimstone, struggling to remove himself from his seat.
“I know that but what if something that should be impossible had been made possible? What if the Soul Catcher can’t predict a soul that’s not meant to be out there in the first place?”
“John Hewson,” gasped Brimstone, finding an invisible power to leap to his feet, an action that took much longer for a three-foot-piece of rock than it would have done for anyone else.
*****
Inside the Soul Catcher, John’s soul ricocheted off the insides like a pinball. The journey to Hell had taken just a few minutes travelling at a velocity close to the speed of light, but having previously experienced it was still no preparation for the complete and utter disorientation. The electrical charges of his soul were bumping around the walls l
ike beans in a coffee grinder, emotions and memories in constant collision that created a weird and bizarre dreamlike state. These twisted recollections flashed in front of him in incredible life like detail.
At one moment he visualised the end of his first day at school. But not as he originally remembered it. At the old, rusty school gate, tearful and distressed by the realisation that twelve years of educational selection and humiliation had just begun, he was being collected. Not by his mother, as was the reality, but by his faithful dog Jelly whom he’d only bought when he was twenty-eight. To add insult to insanity, the Red Setter was dressed in a tatty corduroy suit and talked in the posh English accent of one of his ex-girlfriends, Trudy Sackville-Brown.
These twisted memories flashed intermittently through him one after the next, every example more absurd than the last, each no more than a second apart. As the walls of the Soul Catcher absorbed his speed, his own hallucinations began to wane. Although this was not the end of his discomfort. Around him, hundreds of other souls pressed against his own, whilst more and more were flooding into the round holding bay at the bottom of the chamber by the second. As the hundreds poured into the free space, the build-up of pressure was forcing the Soul Catcher to expand and grow. As souls collided with John’s, so did the electricity and emotions that they emitted, overwhelming his memories with theirs.
*****
Brimstone and Silica stood gazing agog at the rapidly expanding bulb of the Soul Catcher. It was fair to say that neither of them had ever seen anything like it before. Brimstone placed a craggy hand onto Silica’s waist, the highest point he could reach, in the same way a normal-sized person would place a hand on someone else’s shoulder. It wasn’t there long. He watched it slide effortlessly through the sand-constructed body and thump back against his own. The sand reassigned itself from other parts of his anatomy, refilling the area that Brimstone’s hand had just displaced.
The usual hub of activity outside the Soul Catcher, the conveyor belt of vessols that carried new inmates away, the demons busily moving around like drones, had all ceased. Everyone had stopped to watch the event unfold. There was an eerie silence in the cavern, occasionally broken by the harsh sound of metal grinding on metal as the bulb tried to expand and break loose from its standings.
“Well, I think you were right, my friend. Definitely not normal,” sighed Brimstone. “How many souls do we have inside?”
Silica reviewed the list that showed the number already inside and the number that were due. The one on the left ticked along, adding about a hundred or so every second, whilst the list on the right was also gaining numbers at pace.
“We’ve got eight thousand inside at the moment, and a torrent on its way. If we don’t do something soon then I fear the whole thing will explode and we’ll be picking up pieces of fractured souls for eternity.”
“I’m guessing that John has blocked the exit. If we had nothing to put him in, then the machine would have stopped letting people out. It’s an override to stop any leakage. I never thought when it was being built we’d ever use it. What we need is something to put him in, and quick,” concluded Brimstone, waving over three of the demons who were still gawping, mouths open at the scene like bewildered infants watching a fireworks display.
“Right, go and find something to put a soul in. I don’t care what it is, just go!” shouted Brimstone.
Five minutes later the three of them returned with an assortment of plastic bodies, dropping them on the floor in front of Brimstone and Silica. They retreated backwards as if their hunter-gathering would be met with disapproval. After examination only two of the vessols on the ground were undamaged, one of a young girl and the other of a shrew.
“A girl and a shrew,” muttered Brimstone, scowling in the direction of his now departed minions. “So, Silica, if you’d just spent several months cramped inside another human, before having the discomfort of being shot like a cannon halfway across the galaxy, which would you rather be?”
“Well, it’s not much of a choice, but I don’t think I’d want to be a shoe,” answered Silica.
“I think you’ve got sand in your ears.”
Brimstone lifted the flaccid and empty body of the young female, attached the nozzle in its mouth to the end of the Soul Catcher, and fiddled with the control panel. The machine lurched around on its foundations for a moment before rattling furiously. The mass of the bulb sucked inwards, paused for a few tantalising seconds before explosively firing something forward like a huge reconstruction of the Heimlich manoeuvre. The young girl expanded rapidly as the pressure blew out the connection and the figure shot across the massive room. Silica dropped down to a stream of sand and scurried over to the place where it had landed in a crumpled heap against the craggy wall. He slid under the body and like a flying carpet carried the girl back to the machine.
John opened his eyes. Mentally and physically bruised from his experiences, he was still focused on what he’d witnessed and unsure as to whether the feelings were his or those that had pressed down on him. Above him, a familiar, square face loomed over him.
“You gave us quite a scare then, John.”
“I didn’t know you cared?” puffed John meekly, still gasping for air and clutching his head, which was pounding like a supersonic jet engine.
“I don’t. I thought you were about to break one of the most amazing pieces of engineering ever constructed.”
“That may be, but I never want to go through that ever again.”
“Why, what was it like?” enquired Brimstone curiously.
“It was horrendous. On Earth you think that being squashed on a train with merely inches to move is horrible. It’s not. That’s just uncomfortable, inconvenient, even mildly disappointing. All you have to put up with is the sweltering heat, someone’s breath on the back of your neck and the fear of being crushed. A fear that never develops. In there you’re not just feeling other people around you, they are in you. Their fears become your fears. Their emotions become your emotions. I have felt the most impossible, incredible fear, the most desolate panic and the most uncomfortable, searing pain,” John replied, still shaking from head to foot, his voice shallow and compressed by the weight of what he had learnt.
“This is Hell,” said Silica in disdain. “What did you expect, a holiday camp?”
“You’re right. I expected pain, fear, pity, shame, guilt, anger and evil. I found all of them. But not exclusively. I felt some things I didn’t expect and certainly can’t explain.”
Silica and Brimstone looked at each other with concern.
“What exactly did you feel?” asked Silica.
“I experienced hope.”
“Impossible,” scoffed Brimstone, a word that was coming out of him today with increasing regularity.
“Not just hope, I’m sure I felt joy, too. Someone in there showed me sympathy as our two souls collided. How could I have felt that? What were those emotions doing in there?” asked the female version of John.
Brimstone held out a stumpy hand to help John to his feet. He now stood only a little higher than Brimstone, prompting him to look down at his new existence. Nothing really surprised him anymore. Although he was less than amused by his new physique, there were far more pressing issues to solve.
“Not everyone who comes here is pure evil, John. The world isn’t black and white. It’s not split up into evil and good people. You should know that having been through the back door as a neutral soul,” replied Brimstone, having taken a few moments to contemplate how to respond to John’s revelations.
“Maybe, but it felt more than that. If people still had some good in them, even though they were still destined to be here, surely the prospect of coming here would move all of those feelings away. When I touched those people’s souls I didn’t have to go searching for the emotions that I felt. They were right there on the surface.”
“Look, this is a very interesting philosophical debate and it’s not that I am not thoroughly enjoying it, bu
t…why are you here, John?”
“Ian,” shouted John, suddenly remembering the mission at hand.
“He’s here, don’t worry. I understand he’s already causing havoc for Primordial down on level zero. Again, why are you here? You have one more to go if you remember.”
“Exorcism,” replied John.
“No, I don’t believe you,” Brimstone huffed.
“Given that I was there and as far as I remember you were not, it certainly felt like exorcism. Let me see: man of the Church, lots of incantations, feeling my soul being drawn out through the eyes – yep, pretty sure it was exorcism,” replied John, miming out each part of the process.
“You don’t have to be sarcastic. If it had been exorcism we would have known. The Soul Catcher would have lit up like a red dwarf.”
“Maybe it’s broken?”
“Look, if you’d like to be a shrew and spend a few days in the company of Primordial then carry on, John. What we have to do is work out how to get you back down there again.”
John was reminded of his experience of the Limpet Syndrome. The voice he’d heard had posed some pertinent questions that at the time he’d struggled to answer. It had suggested that there was one person who would be instrumental in helping him find a way out. A way of saving himself, not just everyone else. He’d not had much time to work it out whilst he was inside the Soul Catcher. There had been far too much going on. Soon he’d need to come up with a plan, before Brimstone escorted him up to the library to pick out another poor, unsuspecting victim. There was one particular aspect of what he’d been told that he was most interested in answering first, though.
“How will you get me to Heaven, when I complete my side of the deal?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I’ve been around most of this place. I’ve seen the Soul Catcher and how to go back and forward to Earth. I’ve seen the different levels and know what they contain. What I haven’t seen is what instrument takes me there.”
