Secondhand Souls

by Christopher Moore

  “Maybe not?” Minty Fresh repeated. “Sophie is maybe motherfucking not the Luminatus—­the only thing that kept the whole damn city from being destroyed last time? Maybe not?”

  “We think she might not have her powers anymore,” Charlie said.

  “You think maybe you ought to find out?” asked Minty Fresh.

  “Probably,” said Charlie.

  “A few months ago, Bummer lost the hellhound powers she bestowed upon him,” said the Emperor, being helpful. “It was a relief, really. He had such a penchant for biting the tires off of Volvos. I don’t know why. He still enjoys barking at them.”

  “Excuse me?” said Jean-­Pierre Baptiste. “Could someone tell me what all of you are talking about, please?”

  “Us,” said Carrie Lang. “Tell us.”

  And so they did, running through the whole history of what had happened before, glossing over the bits about Audrey and the Squirrel ­People as if that was just a minor thing that had passed, not mentioning that they had been the ones who had saved Carrie Lang from the Morrigan by duct taping her up and hiding her in a dumpster, as she was still a bit traumatized by the event, focusing more on how Sophie had basically vaporized the Morrigan with a wave of her hand.

  When they were finished, Carrie Lang said, “Whoa. A little kid?”

  “She’s in the advanced reading group,” said Charlie.

  Carrie Lang said, “So now you think there could be a thousand souls unretrieved?”

  “Maybe more,” said Rivera. “I’ve gone back to the early names on my calendar. I haven’t found one soul vessel from those.”

  “Plus all those on my calendar,” said Charlie. “While I was—­uh—­unable to retrieve them.”

  “The Big Book revised edition still says that it would be really bad if they ended up with the powers of darkness,” Lily said, tapping the page in Rivera’s copy of the Big Book. “There’s no way to know how many souls have been missed.”

  “I have a list,” said the Emperor, and they all turned to him. He pulled the journal from his map bag and held it up. “Here.”

  Lily handed the Big Book back to Rivera and crossed the circle to get the Emperor’s journal. They all watched as she leafed through it, hundreds of pages of names in two, single-­spaced columns per page, printed in the meticulous hand lettering of an engineer. “You have nice handwriting,” she said. She flipped back and forth. “You have dates next to them. These aren’t just for the last year.”

  “I was given the dates along with the names.”

  “Some of these go back to the 1700s.”

  “Yes,” said the Emperor.

  “Who gave you the names, Your Grace?” Charlie asked.

  “I got many from the library. And public records. Inspector Rivera was very helpful with that. But some were given to me by the dead themselves. While I slept. The older ones. When I awoke, I would know all the names and the dates next to them.”

  Lily closed the journal with a finger in it to hold her place. “So, basic­ally, I’m the only one here who doesn’t have a superpower. Even the crazy homeless guy has a special power, but not me?”

  “That’s not true, Lily,” Charlie said. “The Emperor may be fabricating all of this.”

  “A distinct possibility,” said the Emperor.

  Lily looked around the circle. “I need each of your date books. Cough ’em up.” She collected the date books from the five Death Merchants then slung her messenger bag over her shoulder. “Audrey, I need a place to work and I need your Wi-­Fi password.”

  “What are you doing, Darque?” Minty Fresh asked.

  “I’m going to check the names in all of your date books against the Emperor’s list. Then I’m going to check as many of the names with the old dates with what I can find on the Web. If they match, we have a list of the unaccounted for.”

  “There’s a table in the kitchen where you can spread out,” said Audrey, standing. “And an outlet where you can plug in your laptop.”

  As Lily followed Audrey out of the parlor she grumbled, “I feel like the accountant for the Justice League. If someone finds a magical cat or an enchanted stapler or something, I’m calling dibs, you got it?” She looked around the circle as everybody nodded. “Good, give me half an hour.”

  While Audrey was out of the room, Minty said to Charlie, “So when do you have to go back to painting the bridge?”

  “I don’t. They offered me a disability settlement. Post-­traumatic stress. I can take the settlement or they’ll train me for a job that’s not on the bridge. The gardens or the tourist center.”

  “Take the settlement, and the time off,” said Fresh. “Get your shop up and running again. You saved the city, gave your life, really. THE MAN can help you out for a while.”

  “I know,” said Charlie, fidgeting in his chair. “But whenever I used to hear that expression I always thought I was THE MAN.”

  “No, you’re A man,” said Audrey, returning to the room. “Kind of . . .”

  Minty Fresh laughed and high-­fived Audrey. “I always liked you,” he said.

  There came a scratching at the door to the butler’s pantry, just behind where Charlie was sitting. He tapped the door lightly with his palm. “Settle,” he whispered, in a way that made no one at all look away from him. “New puppy,” he explained.

  The scratching became more frantic. He reached back and opened the door just a crack.

  “Need a cheez,” came a little voice at about shin level.

  “Play with your ball. We’re out of cheese.”

  “Need a cheez,” said the voice again.

  Charlie closed the door, grinned at everyone, embarrassed, as the scratching resumed. “Maybe if you show him your boobs,” he said to Audrey.

  Now, Charlie pretty much had everyone’s attention.

  “No,” Audrey said, crossing her arms.

  “Excuse me,” Charlie said. He got up, moved his chair, then got down on his knees and opened the door again.

  “Need a cheez,” said the voice.

  Charlie opened the door a ­couple of inches, reached in, grabbed something, and threw it. “Go play.” They could all hear the distinct sound of a tennis ball bouncing off surfaces and something scurrying after it, then nothing.

  “There,” Charlie said, getting back in his seat. “He’ll be fine.”

  “I have a basset hound,” said Carrie Lang. “Showing him my boobs doesn’t really have much of an effect on him.”

  “Hmm,” Audrey said. “Go figure.” She moved to the center of the floor. “Okay, here’s what I’ve been thinking, about this new order.” She paused a moment, seeing if they would let her out of further explanations about her dog-­training methods. Everyone appeared to be letting it go and she felt loving kindness toward all of them.

  “The universe seeks balance, order. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, right?” Audrey was suddenly grateful that Lily was out of the room. She was feeling somewhat vulnerable to sarcasm as she waded into this concept. Everyone waited.

  “So, for every dark, there is a light, the wheels turn, the planets spin, the machine seeks and finds order. But the universe also oscillates, pulses, expands and contracts—­and, I’ve lost all of you, haven’t I?”

  “Pretty much,” said Charlie. Now that it was out there, everyone agreed.

  “Okay, let me come at it this way, The Book of Living and Dying, what you call The Tibetan Book of the Dead, talks about hundreds of demons and monsters that one will encounter on the journey from life to death and beyond. It describes them in detail, but warns not to be afraid, because they are all illusions, manifestations of human consciousness.”

  “Like the Morrigan . . .”

  “But, they aren’t an illusion,” said Charlie. “They are very real and deadly.”

  “They beco
me real,” Audrey said. “The Big Book warns not to let souls fall into the hands of those from the Underworld, but at one time, they weren’t in the Underworld, were they? Human souls empower them. They were part of someone’s living religion. So was that bullheaded thing, so was, or is, this elegant Death entity in the Buick, so are you guys, you Death Merchants. The Big Book is revised because things change, the rules change, and I don’t think this whole system of moving souls from one life to the next has always been that way. Every supernatural entity is a projection of human consciousness, going back for, well, who knows how long? And any change is going to be countered, always has been.”

  She looked around the room. “Nobody?”

  “We need to figure out what to do,” said Rivera.

  “I don’t think you can solve a problem if you don’t know what it is, Inspector,” said Audrey. “I think that the order the universe found, for a time, anyway, was this ridiculously complex system of souls transferring through objects. Maybe there was a wobble a thousand years ago, and this is the universe trying to correct that, but now there’s another wobble. ­Maybe when Sophie was born, somehow as the Luminatus, there had to be a balance, so that horned death thing rose, and the hellhounds came to protect Sophie, and the Morrigan appeared to balance that. The whole conflict changed things, and for the last year it’s been seeking a new order. Subtle, like Mr. Baptiste being able to sell souls over the Internet instead of having a shop.”

  Charlie said, “But if Sophie was on the light side, and has lost her powers, and this new Death has come, with the Morrigan, doesn’t that mean that everything is out of balance again?”

  “Yes,” said Audrey. “It means we’re in a wobble. And there’s way too much on the dark side of the wobble. Something has to balance it out.”

  “Some good guys?” said Charlie.

  “Not necessarily,” said Audrey. “There’s order and disorder, we may not perceive whatever is balancing the dark as good. I’m just saying there has to be something to balance the dark, and if it’s not Sophie, there’s something else, some other being or force—­”

  “So,” Charlie said, “you’re saying that every god, throughout his­tory, every supernatural being ever, is a manifestation of the power of the human soul?”

  Audrey shrugged.

  “The Ghost Thief,” Lily said from the doorway. Everyone looked up at her. “Mike Sullivan said that the ghost on the bridge told him we had to find the Ghost Thief.”

  “Which is what?” said Rivera, starting to show some impatience now.

  Lily held up the Emperor’s journal. “This is not a list of everyone who has died in the Bay Area, but it is a list of a lot of ­people who have died, most I confirmed. And so are all of your calendars. But none of the names on the Emperor’s list are in any of your calendars, except those in Charlie and Rivera’s calendars, and only Charlie’s from the last year.”

  “Which means?”

  “It means that if your soul object was retrieved, your name isn’t on the Emperor’s list. And after all those Death Merchants were murdered, the list got a lot longer fast. It means that there are a shit ton of unretrieved souls—­souls out of order—­floating around or taken by another entity. If what Audrey says actually applies, if they gain their power from human souls, there’s something very big and very scary that’s been taking these souls. I think that’s what Mike’s ghost girl was calling the Ghost Thief.”

  “You know this for a fact,” said Charlie.

  “No, Asher, I don’t know anything for a fact, I’m just putting it together from what we know and what Audrey is saying. I’m saying there’s a big hole in the system right now and I’m calling that hole the Ghost Thief. Could be good, could be bad.”

  “So, there,” said Rivera. “What do we do?”

  Lily looked to Audrey, “All yours.”

  Audrey said, “I think you need to carry on, collecting soul vessels, getting them to new ­people, keep as many as you can out of the hands of the Underworlders. The cycle of living and dying is the order the universe is seeking.” She paused, scanned faces, got nothing. “I think.”

  “Maybe it’s better to do it Mr. Baptiste’s way,” said Minty Fresh. “Not have them in our shops. Put them somewhere out of the way, a vault or something. Sell them remotely over the Internet.”

  “My wife and I can sell them,” said Baptiste. “We would just need a photo of each vessel.”

  “We could move them all to a vault somewhere,” said Minty Fresh. “Only go there to get the ones you will ship.”

  Rivera said, “That might keep the soul vessels out of their hands, but it does ignore the more immediate problem, which is when they come for the souls, they kill us. Does no one else find that a problem?”

  “Yeah,” said Minty Fresh. “That’s why I’m suggesting we hide the objects, then we hide. Stay out of our shops. Just go out to retrieve the new vessels. What do you want to do about it?”

  “Go after them,” said Rivera. “Sure, we try to figure out who this Ghost Thief is, and I’ll use what resources I can to help, but the Morrigan require a little more direct action. We know they can be hurt by weapons, and they only get stronger as they accumulate human souls, so the sooner we go after them, the better chance we have of stopping them.”

  He looked at Charlie. “You need to figure out if your little girl still has her powers, because if she doesn’t, her history with them is probably all that’s protecting her, and without her hellhounds, that’s about it. So even if we can’t kill them, we can at least weaken them, slow them down.”

  Minty Fresh rubbed his shaved head, as if polishing an idea in there, then looked at Charlie. “How did you find them last time?”

  “Bummer found them,” Charlie said. “I sort of wandered around in the sewers with the Squirrel ­People until we ran into Bummer. He led us to them.”

  “They’re definitely going to be out of the light,” Lily said.

  “We heard one, the Inspector and I, in a sewer in the Sunset,” said Baptiste.

  “That’s my neighborhood,” said Lily. “I’m officially pro-­fuck-­up-­the-­sewer-­harpies’-­shit. Now you just have to find them.”

  The Emperor held up a hand. “I know where they are.”

  “Okay, well, that was easy,” said Lily. “You don’t know where the thousands of souls listed in your book are, do you?”

  The old man shook his head dolefully. “I’m sorry.”

  Baptiste thought it was perhaps the strangest meeting he had ever ­attended, and even when it was over, and they were all leaving, he looked to Minty Fresh and said, “Mr. Fresh, can you tell me please, what happened just now?”

  “You know in a horror movie, when the scientist comes in and explains that there’s a zombie virus or there are vampires in the city?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s what this was, but instead of a scientist, we had a crazy old man who thinks he’s the Emperor of San Francisco.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Baptiste, who really didn’t see.

  He stood on the porch of the big Victorian, gathering his thoughts, searching in his messenger bag for his car keys as the others made their way to the street.

  “Pssst!”

  A noise at his feet, no, below his feet. It was coming from beside the stairs.

  “Monsieur Baptiste!” An urgent, small whisper.

  Baptiste went to the rail and looked over. Below, on the walk, stood a creature about fourteen inches tall with a rotund little body, small hands that looked like those of a raccoon, and the head of a calico cat, wearing what looked like miniature pink hospital scrubs and doll shoes.

  “Monsieur Baptiste, comment allez-­vous?” it said in perfect French.

  “Not so good,” said Baptiste.

  Part Three

  Cry woe, destruction, ruin and decay:

 
The worst is death, and death will have his day.

  —­William Shakespeare, Richard II, Act III: Scene II

  19

  Wiggly Charlie’s Adventure

  Wiggly Charlie lived in a big house with his friends Audrey and Big Charlie. He liked mozzarella cheese sticks, chasing his tennis ball, and putting his purple wizard hat on his willy and pretending they were friends.

  One day, he was playing with his ball in the butler’s pantry (which was a small room where rich ­people used to keep their prisoners until they needed them to bring them a beverage). When Big Charlie reached in the door, took the ball, and threw it for Wiggly Charlie, it bounced into a vent behind the wastebasket and disappeared.

  Wiggly Charlie didn’t even take time to be sad or think how throwing his ball down a vent was kind of a dick move, but instead jumped right into the vent after it. He slid down and down and plopped out on his bottom in the dirt. All around him were little lights in many colors. He stood up and turned all around, looking up at all the pretty colors. He saw that there was a little doorway, just his size, and on the other side he could see his ball.

  He went through the doorway and found himself in a passageway made of green glass, so he could still see the colored lights attached to the floor joists of the big house, as well as others that were strung through the glass hallway. He threw his ball and chased it down the hallway, catching it in his mouth just as it was about to roll down some stairs. Then he saw something wonderful.

  In front of him was a big round room, like a hole, only nicer, and all around it were little ­people just like him. He dripped drool on his toes as he looked around in wonder at all the little ­people, all with different heads and feet, different hands and different clothes, all just about his size. They gathered around a stage in the center of the round room as one of them talked at the others.

  “Bring the head for Theeb,” said the little person on the stage. He was wearing a red uniform, had a face that looked like a cat skull, and a very nice black-­and-­red hat. When he talked, he waved around a spoon that was a fork, or a fork that was a spoon—­whatever it was, Wiggly Charlie thought it was very clever.