Secondhand Souls

by Christopher Moore

  Fresh said: “Y’all read the book, then, so you know you shouldn’t be here, talking to me. You know what happened last time Death Merchants started talking. Just go back to your store and keep collecting the objects when they come up in your calendar, like you been doing.”

  “That’s the thing: I haven’t been collecting soul vessels at all.”

  “The fuck you mean, you haven’t been collecting them at all?”

  Minty Fresh made a motion with his hands of leveling, as if he were smoothing an imaginary tablecloth of calm over a counter constructed of contemporary freak-­out. With concerted effort now, and lower register, he said, “Never?”

  “I bought the date book, and a number two pencil,” Rivera said, trying to accentuate the positive. He smiled. In the background, Coltrane improvised a boppy, playful riff around “Summertime” ’s sweet, low-­down mel­ody. “The names and numbers showed up on the calendar, like the Big Book said they would? But I didn’t do anything about them.”

  “You can’t just not do the job. Someone has to do it. That’s why they put it in the book, right in the beginning, right by the part about not having contact with other Death Merchants. You just ignore the Big Book, shit gonna get muthafuckin’ freaky up in here.”

  “It already has,” said Rivera. “That’s why I’m here. A woman appeared in my shop, not exactly a human woman. A dark thing.”

  “The Morrigan?” Minty could still see the Morrigan’s three-­inch talons raking the wall of a dark subway car where she had confronted him. He shuddered.

  “Different,” said Rivera. “This one didn’t have any bird features. She was just pale—­dressed in black rags, like a shroud. I didn’t see any claws.”

  “How you know she wasn’t just a raggedy woman?”

  “She disappeared. Puff of smoke, while my partner watched. Locked door. And she told me. She said she was called Bean Sidhe. Had a really thick brogue, I can’t say it the way she did.”

  “Banshee,” said Minty Fresh. “You pronounce it banshee.”

  “That makes sense,” said Rivera. “She did a lot of shrieking. You’ve seen her, then?”

  “Until ten seconds ago I thought the banshee was a myth, but I recognize the description. My ex—­woman I know—­did a lot of research on Celtic legends after that last—­”

  “Then you know what she’s doing here?”

  “Not being a detective like you, I can only guess, but I had to guess, I’d guess she the sound the Underworld make when you throw shit in its fan.”

  Rivera nodded, as if that made sense. “She did call herself a ‘harbinger of doom.’ ”

  “That’s all I’m saying,” said Minty.

  “There’s more,” said Rivera.

  “Of course there is.”

  So Rivera told Minty Fresh about the Emperor’s quest to record the names of the dead, of his insistence that they would be forgotten, and how in the past, the kindhearted madman had been somewhat ahead of the police on supernatural goings-­on in the city. When he finished he said, “So, do you think there’s anything to it?”

  Minty Fresh shrugged. “Probably. You broke the universe, Inspector, no tellin’ how bad.”

  “You sound happy about that.”

  “Do I? Because I don’t like that the universe is broken, I keep all my shit there.” For the moment, he did feel a little better, because as much as he had convinced himself that he was losing his grip on his cool, here was someone who was clearly worse off than he. Then he looked at Rivera, standing there easy in his Italian suit, his lines and aspect sharp as a blade, and he realized that the cop, or the ex-­cop, had not lost his cool. The world might be unraveling around him, but Rivera was chill as a motherfucker.

  “So what do I do?”

  “I’d start with doing your job.”

  “I’m retired—­semiretired.”

  “I mean picking up the soul vessels.”

  “You think they’d still be there?”

  “You had better hope they are.”

  “How do I find them?”

  “I’d start with your date book full of names, Detective Inspector—­that was your title, right?”

  Some of Rivera’s chill seemed to slip a bit. Rivera undid a button on his suit jacket, evidently to show that he was in action mode.

  Minty smiled, a dazzling crescent moon in a night sky. “Did you just unbutton your coat so you could get to your gun?”

  “Of course not, it’s just a little warm in here. I carry my gun on my hip.” Rivera brushed back his jacket to show the Glock.

  “But you’re still packing, despite your retirement?”

  “Semiretirement. Yes, I started carrying my old backup. The banshee took my stun gun. She zapped me with it.”

  “So she can just appear out of nowhere and knock you out?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “Well, good luck with that,” said Fresh, feeling ever so much cooler.

  “I’ll call you,” said Rivera. “Let you know how it goes.”

  “If you feel you have to.”

  Rivera turned as if to leave, then turned back. “Didn’t you have a pizza and jazz place at Charlie Asher’s building in North Beach?”

  “For a while. Didn’t pencil out.”

  “You were in it with that spooky girl from Asher’s shop?”

  “Also didn’t pencil out.”

  “Sorry,” said Rivera, and he seemed genuinely so. “That can be tough. I’m divorced.”

  “No damage can’t be buffed out.” said Minty. “Girl ain’t nothin’ but tits and sass.”

  Rivera nodded. “Well, good luck with that.” He turned and left the shop, once again, chill as a motherfucker.

  Minty Fresh shuddered, then picked up his mobile and began to scroll through his contacts, stopping on Lily’s number, but before he could hit call to set in motion another humiliating surrender of his cool, the phone buzzed and the screen read Three Jewels Buddhist Center.

  “Sheeiiiiiiit,” said the Mint One, slow and dreadful, pronouncing the expletive with a long, low sustain of dread.

  An iguana in a musketeer’s costume ran under Minty Fresh’s chair and through the beaded curtain into a butler’s pantry, where Charlie Asher sat on an empty mixed nuts can.

  “Nice hat,” Charlie said.

  The musketeer removed his hat, holding it with perfect little hands (previously raccoon paws, Charlie guessed), and bowed grandly over it.

  “You’re welcome,” Charlie said.

  The musketeer scampered on through the butler’s pantry into the kitchen. Charlie looked through the swinging beads at Minty Fresh, who was sitting on an inverted dining room chair, his knees up around his elbows, putting Charlie in mind of a very large, mint-­green tree frog.

  “You never seen that hat before?” asked Minty.

  “Every day, but it makes him feel special if you notice it.”

  “Ain’t you sweet.”

  Charlie slid off his can and started through the beaded curtain.

  Minty Fresh waved him off. “Ease on back there, Asher. I need to talk to you.”

  “Why can’t you talk to me if I’m on the same side of the curtain as you?”

  “Because I start looking at you, and before I know it I forget what I’m talking about, and I think maybe I should chase you away with a stick.”

  “Ouch.” Charlie slunk back into the pantry and sat on his can. “What’s on your mind?”

  “You called me.”

  “But you showed up.”

  Minty Fresh hung his head, rubbed his scalp. “I’m thinking maybe us talking isn’t the same now as it was before.”

  Charlie was happy to hear it. “So you think now that Sophie is the Luminatus, everything is over, so we don’t have to worry about the rise of the Underworld?”


  “No. I think that shit might already be rising. When you were collecting soul vessels, how many you think you picked up a year? On average?”

  “I don’t know, a ­couple a week. Sometimes more, sometimes less.”

  “Yeah, me, too. So that’s about a hundred a year. And about fifty-­five hundred ­people a year die in the city proper. So that means there must be, call it, fifty-­five Death Merchants.”

  “That sounds about right,” Charlie said. “I met the Death Merchant in Sedona who collected my mother’s vessel, he said about two a week, too.”

  “Right,” said Minty. “So, when they all came up, when it hit the fan, we only knew a dozen Death Merchants in the city, and the Morrigan killed all but three of us. Two if we count you as dead.”

  “Which I don’t,” Charlie said.

  “But you don’t collect soul vessels anymore. You don’t have a shop to turn them around.”

  “Okay, don’t count me.”

  “And I sent your copy of the Great Big Book of Death to Inspector Rivera.”

  “Yeah. I wonder how he’s doing.”

  “He was in my shop right before you called. A banshee appeared in his bookstore and zapped him with a stun gun.”

  “So, not adjusting well to retirement?”

  “He hasn’t collected a single soul vessel.”

  “None?”

  The Mint One shook his head. “That’s at least a hundred souls not collected, not passed on to the new owner. Plus, we don’t know what happened to the souls the other dead Death Merchants were supposed to collect.”

  “I always assumed that when a Death Merchant died someone took his place. Audrey says the universe just takes care of the mechanics of it. Everything seeks balance.”

  “Audrey, the one who put you inside that little monster?”

  Charlie waved his talons in the air as if to dismiss the point and realized that he might be helping to make it. “So you’re saying—­what are you saying?”

  “Rivera said the names appeared in his date book, even though he didn’t pick up the souls. What if no one has been collecting the souls of the Death Merchants who were killed? What if by defeating the Underworlders we threw things out of balance? What if the Death Merchants who were killed weren’t replaced? What if there are a thousand souls that haven’t been collected since the Morrigan rose? Maybe more. A lot of ­people were killed in the city at that time. What if some of them were Death Merchants we didn’t know about, and all of those souls haven’t been collected?”

  “I used to hear them moving under the streets, calling out, if I was late collecting just one,” said Charlie. “When they got their hands on all the soul vessels in our shops—­”

  “It was a shit storm,” said Minty. “Now multiply that by ten, twenty.”

  “So you think this banshee—­?”

  “I think the bitch is announcing coming attractions.”

  “Sssssshit,” Charlie said, letting the s hiss out between his multitude of teeth.

  “Uh-­huh,” said Minty. “You know where your old date book is?”

  “At my apartment, I guess. I can’t imagine Jane would have thrown it out.”

  “Call her.” Minty pulled his phone from his jacket pocket.

  “You’ll have to help me dial.” Charlie waved his talons before his face again. They were not suited for touch screens and buttons. He gave Minty Fresh the number. Cassie answered and they waited while she found Charlie’s date book—­a three-­year calendar with only one year used when he had died.

  “It’s filled in for the whole year, Charlie,” said Cassie over the speaker. “The latest entry is today. How can that be?” Charlie looked up at Minty Fresh and again missed having eyebrows—­if he’d had them, he’d have raised one at the tall Death Merchant.

  “I don’t know, Cassie. I’m trying to figure it out. Let’s put the book back and I’ll call you as soon as I know anything. Thanks.”

  Minty disconnected them. “With you and Rivera, that’s a ­couple of hundred souls uncollected right there.”

  “And you think it might be thousands.”

  “In the Bay Area alone.”

  “We’re probably fine, all those souls and nothing has happened.”

  “Banshee,” said Minty, holding a long finger in the air to mark his point. “She calls herself a harbinger of doom, Asher. You know what a harbinger is?”

  “I’m really hoping it’s a brand of Scotch.”

  “It’s a messenger that tells you what is going to happen. With a banshee, that message is that death is coming.”

  Charlie shrugged. “Big Death or little death?”

  Fresh shrugged, shook his head.

  “Then you need to help me find a body,” said Charlie.

  “What?”

  “That’s why I called. You help me find a body, then I can help you fix whatever the banshee is warning us about.”

  “Like a corpse-­type body?”

  “Not exactly. Someone who is going to be a corpse, but before they become a corpse.”

  “Doesn’t that describe everybody?”

  “I mean right before they die. Like we have to be there at the moment of death.”

  “Are you asking me to help you kill someone, because no.”

  “Let me get Audrey. She’ll explain.”

  5

  The ­People Under the Porch

  Chöd,” said Audrey. The d was silent, it rhymed with “foe.”

  “Chöd?” Minty Fresh repeated. He couldn’t stop looking at the surprised comma of her hair, for which he was grateful, because it kept him from looking at Charlie, which made him uncomfortable. When Audrey came in she insisted that Charlie come out of the pantry, so now they sat at an oak table in the breakfast room of the Buddhist Center, Audrey and he on chairs, Charlie sitting on his mixed nut can atop the table.

  “Chöd’s the ritual I will perform to get Charlie a new body.”

  When Minty had first seen her in his shop, several years ago, when she was rail thin, wore no makeup, and her shaved head was still in stubble, it would have been easy to believe she was a Buddhist nun, although he remembered at the time thinking she might be a chemotherapy patient, but now, with her drag-­queen hair and a girlish shape filling out jeans and a San Francisco Giants thermal, it was hard to make the leap. This woman had been given the secret books of the dead by a Tibetan master? How could that be? She was dating a puppet!

  “She can’t use the p’howa of forceful projection ritual that she used to put souls into the Squirrel ­People,” said Charlie.

  “There would be no way to know that there wasn’t another soul in someone’s body,” Audrey said.

  “We don’t know what would happen, but at best you’d end up with two personalities battling,” Charlie added.

  “More likely two lunatics in one body, neither functioning,” said Audrey.

  “And y’all can’t just use a corpse why? Your thingy of undying?”

  “P’howa,” Audrey supplied.

  “Because it’s not permanent,” Charlie said. “You remember the old ladies who were here at the Buddhist Center when you and I first came here, the ones that were in my book but who didn’t die because Audrey used the p’howa of undying on them?”

  “Yeah, weren’t they living here?”

  “Well, they’re all dead.”

  “Six months,” said Audrey. “That’s the longest anyone lasted.”

  “Really? Sorry. Why didn’t you call me?”

  “The Big Book said we weren’t supposed to call you,” said Charlie. “I believe you said something like, ‘Don’t ever call me, Asher. Ever, ever, ever.’ ”

  Minty bowed his head and nodded. He had said that. He said, “But you did call, and there you sit, you and all your little friends are fine, a year later,
not even a stain on your wizard coat, while those old ladies died in six months.”

  “We don’t quite know how they work—­the Squirrel ­People,” Audrey said, wincing a little toward Charlie.

  “It’s okay,” Charlie said, putting his claw out to comfort her. “I’m one of them.”

  Audrey put her index finger in Charlie’s talon and looked into his expressionless black eyes.

  “Wait,” said Minty Fresh. “Y’all aren’t . . . ?”

  “No,” said Charlie.

  “No way,” said Audrey.

  “That would be creepy,” said Charlie. “Although, did I show you this?” He started to unbelt his robe, beneath which he appeared to be wearing an innertube wrapped around his waist.

  “No!” said Minty Fresh. “I mean, yes, you showed it to me.” He held up a hand to block his view of Charlie and squinted between his fingers until the croc-­headed puppet person retied his wizard robe. He found it easier to cope with the sight of Charlie if he pretended he was a really complex speakerphone, but a speakerphone with an enormous peen was a peen too far.

  “Mister Fresh,” said Audrey, “we need you to help us find someone who will willingly vacate their body for Charlie.”

  Fresh pushed back on his chair as if he needed distance in order to see her. “How the hell would I find someone like that, and if I did, why the hell would they do that?”

  “Well,” said Charlie, “if they knew they were going to die anyway, that their soul was going to leave their body anyway, they might.”

  And at last Minty Fresh knew why they had called. “Y’all want me to tell you when a new name appears in my date book so you can what, go talk someone into giving up their body?”

  “Yeah, and it’s going to have to be the right person,” said Audrey. “It’s going to have to be someone who will die accidentally. If it’s someone who is terminally ill, I don’t know if the disease won’t just continue like it did with the ladies.”

  Fresh shook his head. “You know the names don’t come annotated with a cause of death? Just a name and the number of days we have to retrieve the soul.”