Stolen Soul

by Alex Rivers

  One drew my eye, the image on it disturbing. It was the card of the Lovers, but it looked wrong. Different.

  I picked it up and stared at it. The nude man and woman stood across from each other, as before. But above them stood a strange creature, its body a mass of darkness. The couple’s expressions were masks of pain and fear. Their bodies were etched with scars and wounds.

  I picked up another card, the High Priestess. The woman in it was fighting off a dark creature as it slashed her with its claws, her cheek torn and bleeding.

  The Empress was dead, several shadowy creatures looming around her body. The Fool cried as a creature tormented him with a barbed blade. The Emperor sat in mute horror as creatures committed atrocities around him.

  “Sinead is on her way,” Kane said behind me. “So is the ambulance. What is that?”

  “It’s the future,” I answered. “It’s the future Isabel saw.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  We sat in Isabel’s torn up shop. The ambulance had gotten there first, Sinead a few minutes after, just in time to see Isabel carried out on a stretcher.

  I gazed at the floor. There were specks of blood everywhere, a reminder of what Isabel had gone through in here mere hours before. Sinead was picking things up, trying to busy herself by restoring a shred of order to the chaos around us. Kane smoked a cigarette.

  “Are you sure it was ABC who did this?” he asked.

  I bit my lip. “Who else could it have been?”

  “Harutaka. Trying to make sure we didn’t find him like we planned to.”

  “Then why beat her up and ruin the shop? Why not kill her instead? Whoever did this wanted something from her. It was Breadknife. And he wanted me.”

  “He called me several times after you left,” Sinead said. “I didn’t answer. I haven’t been home yet.”

  “He realized I was gone,” I said. “That I was hiding from him. He went for Isabel and Sinead, because he knows they’re close to me. He couldn’t find Sinead, but he found Isabel, beat her up, bashed up her store. And then he… went for my daughter.”

  “He what?” Sinead snapped.

  I showed her the message he had sent me on the phone. Her eyes widened with horror.

  “There’s something about this crystal,” I said. “I’ve never seen him that obsessed about anything.”

  “What does he want to do with it?” Sinead asked.

  “I don’t know. But I have to get it to him. He has Tammi. He’ll hurt her if I don’t hand it over.”

  “Is there a way we can find Harutaka without Isabel?” Kane asked.

  “I can’t think of a way…” I tried to think of a solution. “Can you create some sort of… forgery? I don’t know, something that looks like the crystal? An illusion?”

  Kane nodded slowly. “Yes, but I’d need the original to do it.”

  I groaned. “That doesn’t help us, then. We still need to find the crystal.”

  “I can ask around,” Sinead suggested. “Maybe someone knows where Harutaka is. And hopefully Isabel will wake up and help us find him.”

  “If they hadn’t hurt her…” My words faded as I gazed at the cards scattered on the floor.

  “Lou? What is it?” Kane asked.

  “What did Isabel ask the cards?” I pointed at the twisted images strewn on the floor. “She wanted to know something. Something specific. What was it?”

  “Couldn’t she have just… asked about the future?”

  I shook my head. “Isabel always looks for specific answers. She doesn’t believe in a generic pointless reading.”

  I suddenly recalled what she’d said last night when we were breaking into the vault. Darkness, and misery. She couldn’t see the numbers because of the suffering.

  She had seen something in the tea leaves. Something terrible. Thinking back, she had been distracted for the rest of the night. Hardly speaking, her mind somewhere else. When we had celebrated our success, she had remained silent. Whatever she had seen had worried her.

  But she did ask about the box. Asked where it was. The truth suddenly hit me. Harutaka hadn’t taken the crystal after all.

  “Isabel saw the future when she read the tea leaves last night,” I said. “She saw something that scared her. She saw…” I gestured at the cards. “This. Or something like it. Maybe it wasn’t entirely clear. But she saw something very bad approaching. And it had to do with the crystal.”

  “She took the crystal,” Kane said.

  “She was worried that whatever Breadknife was about to do with it would result in this. So she took it, probably just to buy time, and then came home, and began reading the cards to see what he wanted to do with the crystal. And this is what she saw. Somehow, if Breadknife gets hold of the crystal, it will unleash… whatever this is.”

  “But if she took the crystal, and Breadknife was here, he might have found it,” Sinead pointed out. “So he would have it already.”

  I shook my head. “He came here before he kidnapped my daughter, I’m sure of it. That means he still thinks I have the crystal. Isabel must have hidden it somewhere.”

  Kane looked around the broken store. “Well, they would have found it, if it was here.”

  “It’s not here,” I said. “It’s in her family’s mausoleum.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  The sun was setting, its rays filtering through the brown and red leaves of the trees in Forest Hill Cemetery. Kane and I walked down Canterbury Lane, glancing around us, waiting for a safe moment to hop over the cemetery’s fence. It was past visiting hours and the cemetery was closed. I would have waited until night settled, but I wasn’t sure I could find my way to Isabel’s family’s mausoleum in the darkness. In fact, I wasn’t convinced I could find my way there during the day, either.

  Sinead was in the hospital, waiting by Isabel’s side. The doctors said she wasn’t in immediate danger, but were keeping her sedated. Our hopes that she would be able to guide us to the crystal were evaporating. We would have to trust my hunch that it was in the mausoleum, and my ability to find the place by following my hazy memories from our childhood.

  I shivered, but not from the cold. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to touch those memories, that dark time of my life. Did other people have that part in their past? A cluster of memories that felt like a stormy sea that would wash over you and drown you if you waded close to it?

  Most kids who lived on the streets surely did.

  I pushed my apprehension away and glanced at Kane. He gazed at the cemetery, avoiding my eyes. I followed his stare to the cracked gray tombstones protruding from the thick layer of brown leaves. The graves were scattered in a seemingly random manner, some bunched close together, some standing alone. I turned my eyes back to him.

  “Thanks for coming with me,” I said. “For helping me after…” I couldn’t end my sentence.

  He nodded curtly. “Let’s find this thing and get your daughter back.”

  I didn’t correct him, didn’t say I wasn’t getting her back, I was simply trying to save her life.

  “Where is the mausoleum, exactly?” he asked.

  “I don’t remember… yet.”

  “Better figure it out.”

  “Yeah.” Would I? How long had I left those memories untouched, to rot and crumble and dissipate? Were they even still there, hidden in my skull?

  I glanced to both sides. No traffic. No dog walkers. It was time. “Come on.”

  I went to the waist-high fence. With practiced ease, I climbed it and hopped—

  —to the other side, Isabel already waiting for us impatiently in the cemetery grounds, her hands in her pockets, her hair a tangle of dreadlocks. There was a light drizzle, just enough to make it a bad night to sleep outside. Usually, we’d go to a shelter, but Sinead had found a stray kitten, which she was looking after. The shelters wouldn’t let us in with a pet. And then Isabel, staring into the distance, had said she knew of a safe place.

  “Lou, can you help me wit
h her?” Sinead said, holding out the small bundle. I took it from her gingerly. The bundle meowed piteously. Sinead had wrapped the kitten in a blanket from her pack. The rest of her pack was slung on her back, along with her guitar. She always carried more than the rest of us. She would joke that while Isabel and I were homeless, she was a snail, her home on her back.

  She climbed over the fence and jumped, landing in the wet grass, the leaves crunching under her feet.

  “Okay, you can hand her back.”

  I did, hesitating just for a moment. We kept telling Sinead the cat was nothing but trouble, but now, holding her, I realized there was something special about her. She was so helpless, so small, so light in my hands. She wasn’t something one could simply abandon.

  “Okay.” I hunched my shoulders against the rain. “Where to, O wise one?”

  “Through here.” Isabel began to cross the long stretch of grass. Sinead and I walked side by side, following her, passing near a tall gravestone shaped like a—

  —cone, an intricate engraving of a cross on top. I was lowering my head, as if trying to protect my face from a rain that did not exist. I looked around me, trying to remember the exact path, but it was impossible. Like trying to remember a dream that was already fleeting away. I walked over the leaf-covered ground, smelling the unmistakable scent of the cemetery, a smell of wet earth and of foliage. The stench of the city was somehow left outside the fence, among the living.

  “We used to come here some nights,” I said. “It was safer than sleeping in the streets; we weren’t hassled by cops or threatened by drug addicts.”

  “You were homeless?” Kane’s voice was flat, but there was an edge of curiosity there. He was still angry, but he wanted to know more. And I wanted to talk. I’d forced Kane to reveal his past. Telling him about myself would, perhaps, be the first step in making amends.

  “Yeah. Sinead, Isabel, and me. Before we joined Breadknife’s gang.” Focusing on the memories wasn’t only helping me find the way. It was keeping the fear at bay. I let them flood my mind—images, smells, and sounds from long ago.

  “And you slept here? In the cemetery?”

  “The dead didn’t bother us.” Not usually. “We could sleep deeply here. When you sleep on the street, you never really sleep well. You’re always tense, listening to faint sounds, trying to figure out if someone is coming for your stuff, or for your body. But here, there was no one. It was peaceful.”

  “Peaceful,” Kane repeated.

  I let out a small smile, remembering. “Sinead had a small kitten. So tiny. Sinead called her Trouble, because we kept telling her she was only trouble.”

  “Wasn’t it cold? Living in the street, in Boston?”

  “You wouldn’t believe how cold it could get.”

  I brushed my fingers against one of the—

  —gravestones, looking at the name. Anne Rose. Her remains were here, somewhere below. Along with countless others.

  “Did you ever hear the story about the lady in black?” Sinead asked me.

  I looked at her. She wore the purple parka she had received one morning from an old lady who felt sorry for her. Underneath, she had her orange T-shirt on. Sinead had three shirts. The orange T-shirt with the torn collar, the off-white T-shirt with the ketchup stain, and the green T-shirt with the faded print of an alien smoking a joint. Lately she avoided the green one. She had been wearing it when a drunk had lunged at her and groped her, and she said she could still smell him on it.

  “What lady?”

  “The lady in black. So this Confederate soldier was being held prisoner at Fort… what’s it called? The one on the island.”

  “Fort Warren,” Isabel said. She walked ahead of us, and we could hardly see her in the settling darkness of the night. Just a silhouette of a kid, walking purposefully, occasionally stopping to focus on something that neither I nor Sinead could ever see or hear.

  “Right! Fort Warren. This Confederate soldier had a wife. Her name was Mrs. Lanier.”

  “Didn’t she have a first name?”

  “I don’t know. Shut up and listen. Mrs. Lanier found out her husband was being held in Fort Warren, so she crossed the water one stormy night on a flimsy boat with nothing but a small pistol and a pickaxe. When she reached the fort, she whistled a Southern song her husband knew well.”

  Sinead whistled a soft tune. Hearing it in the dark graveyard, surrounded by the dead, made me shiver.

  “Her husband repeated the whistled notes.” Sinead whistled again, repeating the same—

  —tune. I was whistling to myself, the same tune from that night, when we had first entered the cemetery.

  “That way,” I said with certainty, leading Kane to a small path. “Sinead used to scare the hell out of me with ghost stories when we walked here. Whenever we entered the graveyard, she always had a new ghost story to tell. I was only fourteen, and those stories sounded so real…” I smiled, shaking my head.

  “My sister and I used to tell ghost stories to each other some nights,” Kane said. “She would fall asleep straight away afterward, but I’d stay awake for hours, too scared to sleep.”

  “Did you hear the one about the lady in black?”

  “I don’t remember.” His voice suddenly became slightly colder. Perhaps he realized he had forgotten to hate me for a few seconds.

  “This woman entered Fort Warren with a pickaxe and a—”

  —pistol. That’s all she had,” Sinead said. “She managed to wiggle through one of the cell windows, and with the help of the Confederate prisoners, she began tunneling with her pickaxe.”

  Fog was starting to gather on the ground, wisps of it curling around the gravestones. I hefted the pack on my shoulder and stuck my hands in my pockets. All my attention was focused on Sinead and her story.

  “But Mrs. Lanier got caught, and when the guard went for her, she raised her pistol and fired. Unfortunately, the pistol was old, and in bad shape after her long travels in terrible conditions. It exploded in her hands, and a shard lodged in the brain of the man standing next to her, killing him instantly. That man… was her husband.”

  You knew the scary part of the story was coming when the person telling it lowered their voice to a hoarse whisper. I wanted her to stop. I wanted her to carry on.

  “She was hanged for her crimes, in the black robes of a traitor, and with the knowledge that she had killed her own husband.”

  Sinead’s voice took a strange tremble, almost as if she had scared herself by telling the story.

  “Not long after the hanging, people began reporting strange experiences they had in the Boston graveyards. They could occasionally hear a quiet sobbing, accompanied by a steady clunking. Almost as if someone was endlessly trying to dig a tunnel with a pickaxe nearby. And then people began sighting a strange figure. Dressed all in black, hovering above the ground. And she was whistling an eerie Southern tune.”

  She whistled the tune again. Somewhere, in the fog, I could almost imagine the tap-tap-tapping of a pickaxe. I shivered, telling myself it was because of my wet clothing and hair.

  “Shhh,” Isabel suddenly hissed at us. She stood alert, her eyes unfocused, listening to things we couldn’t hear.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Isabel was the main reason we had managed to survive on the streets. Every so often she would stop to listen, or to stare at a pattern in a pile of street garbage, or at a strangely shaped puddle. And then she’d say something like, “We can’t go to the shelters tonight. It would end badly.” Or “There’s a restaurant with a blue sign somewhere close, and there’s lots of food in the garbage bin behind it.” Or “There’s a predator nearby. We need to move west, to keep away.”

  We always followed her advice. She had an uncanny ability to see things we couldn’t, to catch glimpses of the future, see the truth in random patterns. She said this ability ran in her family.

  “We need to move to the—”

  —left.” I pointed, and strode past a large w
eeping willow.

  “It’s getting dark,” Kane said.

  “We’re nearly there,” I muttered. “There should be a statue of a woman.” I looked around.

  “There’s one.” Kane gestured.

  “That’s it!”

  It was gray and intricately carved. A woman with curly hair, one hand raised up high, fingers splayed. She wore some sort of cloth shirt, its folds and curves all sculpted to make it almost seem as if its touch would be soft, silky, instead of hard and cold.

  I approached it, circled around it, and peered at the—

  —road, where a single light shone. A security guard, probably. He walked down the path, shining the beam of his light around him, coughing every two or three seconds. The light cast in all directions, and I was worried that at any moment he would point it at us.

  But he didn’t. We stood still behind the statue of the standing woman, and he stalked past, his cough puncturing the silence.

  Now that I was motionless, I realized how hungry I was. We hadn’t eaten since that morning. We had some food—Sinead had managed to earn thirteen dollars playing her guitar, and I’d scammed ten more from passersby. We’d bought a few pastries and some cheese. But just as we were about to eat, Isabel had become tense and said we should keep moving. So the pastries and cheese all went into Sinead’s huge backpack, and we walked on. Thinking about them now, my stomach rumbled. It was a low, growling sound, loud enough to wake the dead, not to mention the security guard only ten yards away. I clutched at my abdomen, pressing it, hoping to muffle the sound, my heart pounding hard. Would he hear it? Would he chase us?

  But he kept walking. By my side, Isabel and Sinead were stifling giggles as my stomach kept growling and humming like some sort of cartoonish motorcycle. Finally, its rumble stopped, the security guard none the wiser. He kept coughing, getting farther away. After a few minutes we could hardly even hear his coughing, and we all relaxed.