Soul Remains Read online

  “Am I thinking out loud or something?” asked Sloot. “I’ve got some fretting to do about anatomy, perhaps I should leave the room.”

  “No, no,” said Nicoleta. “We just know how you like to worry.”

  Sloot said nothing. Were he to have said something, he’d probably have denied that he liked to worry. It was just something that he did all the time. Worry was an old friend, as constant a companion as a hungry wolf who runs exactly as fast as he does.

  Willie floated into the room, looking at once dapper and downtrodden. “Oh,” he said, in a dejected sort of way.

  Wilhelm Hapsgalt, son of Constantin Hapsgalt and heir to the Three Bells Shipping Company fortune, had been put to the business end of Mrs. Knife’s … knife, shortly after he’d done the very same thing to his father. He hadn’t wanted to, of course. Willie was a gentle sort of idiot, having only found himself in possession of a great fortune and in the upper echelons of the Serpents of the Earth as an accident of birth. It was their gruesome traditions that had compelled Willie to fratricide.

  “Something wrong, Willie?” asked Myrtle, seeming disinterested in the response.

  “Yeah, I’ve seen this room before.”

  “And that’s bad.”

  “It’s all right, I guess. I was just hoping it’d be bigger.”

  “The room?”

  “The house!” Willie rolled his eyes. “We all live here. It should be bigger, shouldn’t it?”

  Two things struck Sloot as funny. The first was the use of the word “live,” which none of them were doing in the proper sense. The second was that Willie was right. Sloot knew it to be true. He definitely, well, resided there. It lacked any feeling of coziness or comfort that one would expect to find in a home, possibly due to the lack of covers having been knit for everything. Sloot had lived with his mother for a very long time.

  “How much space do you need?” asked Nicoleta. “I’m not entirely sure that ‘space’ properly exists here.”

  “Finally,” said Arthur, “a proper debate on existentialism! Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for one of you to join me on an intellectual level?”

  “That’s cute,” said Nicoleta, who had less than zero respect for philosophy. Wizards considered it to be the lowest form of magic. They’d disavow it altogether, were it not for the fact that it does come with a few quasi-magical abilities. That was how Arthur had managed to possess Myrtle, after all.

  “Where am I supposed to put my wardrobe?” asked Willie, who punctuated the question with a little huff. He’d tended to do that in life, when he’d been too long without a nap.

  “You don’t wear clothes in the Hereafter,” said Nicoleta.

  “Nonsense. Explain this cravat.”

  “It’s a manifestation of your psyche,” said Arthur.

  “It’s silk!”

  Sloot looked down. He was wearing the same black wool ensemble he’d worn in life, only it was grey and translucent, like everything else. All the clothing he’d owned in life had looked very similar, as was proper. Fashion was a distraction. They’d taught him that in accounting school, along with a complete recounting of the unanimous agreement on the correct size, shape, and placement of leather elbow patches.

  The outfit that Sloot wore now wasn’t exactly what he’d been wearing when he died, but rather the average of every piece of clothing he’d ever owned in his life. It was the first pleasant thing he’d found about being dead, aside from Myrtle being there as well, though he didn’t want to take joy in that.

  “That’s all the Hereafter is,” said Nicoleta. “It’s the amalgamation of every psyche within it manifested in a way that they can all sort of agree upon.”

  “That doesn’t make the house any bigger,” said Willie.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Myrtle through clenched teeth, “you haven’t got any things!”

  Willie’s eyes went black. A pair of smoky, ethereal wings sprouted from between his shoulders. His forehead sprouted a pair of menacing, recurved horns to round out the look. The horns caught fire.

  “All things shall be mine,” said Willie, both in his regular tantrum voice and in a matter-of-fact one far deeper than the normal range of human speech. He gnashed his teeth, which were thrice as long as they’d been a moment ago, and razor sharp to boot.

  Sloot was worried by this, but hardly surprised. Following the whole ritually-murdering-his-father-and-then-being-ritually-murdered-himself business, Willie was now presumably the Soul of the Serpent, one of two leaders of the shadowy secret society. The dead one. Mrs. Knife, having killed him, would be the Eye of the Serpent. The living one.

  What Sloot didn’t know about evil cults could fill several volumes of an encyclopedia. Or, quite possibly, it couldn’t. He wouldn’t know, would he? But it stood to reason that becoming the Soul of the Serpent might come with some bells and whistles that might, to the casual observer, come off as evil.

  “By the Domnitor’s eyes!” Sloot exclaimed, invoking the despotic ruler of the Old Country in the most potent exclamation he could muster. Long may he reign, he added silently.

  “Sorry, what?” Willie was back to normal again.

  “That was amazing!” said Nicoleta. “Can I do it?” She made a few faces that one might normally affect in the course of lifting heavy iron contraptions in gymnasiums, which exist only for the purpose of being lifted.

  “I suppose not,” she said, scanning everyone else’s faces with a dejected smirk.

  “Don’t feel bad,” said Willie. “Nobody can pull off the Cadbury Lad without practice. Took me years to make it look this effortless.”

  “Ah,” said Sloot. “That would be the pose you’re striking, then.”

  “No, the eyebrow raise! Honestly Sloot, it’s like you don’t even care about these things.”

  “A bit like that m’lord, yes.”

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Just the one,” noted Myrtle.

  “One’s all it takes,” said Sloot, noticing how it had reverberated throughout the house.

  “One of the servants will get it,” said Willie, who hadn’t opened a door himself in all the time that Sloot had known him. He wasn’t altogether sure that Willie would know what to do with a doorknob if put to the task.

  “I haven’t seen any servants,” said Myrtle.

  “Oh,” said Sloot.

  “Oh, what?” asked Myrtle.

  “I think that would be me.” Sloot was referring to the tug he’d felt at Willie’s suggestion, a gentle compulsion to do as he was told. But he hadn’t been told, had he? He’d still been Willie’s financier at the time of his death; perhaps he still technically worked for him.

  Sloot couldn’t suppress a little smile. He still had a job!

  “I’ve heard about things like that,” said Nicoleta. “Ancient kings would be buried with their servants, so they could be attended in the afterlife.”

  “But I don’t want to be an ancient king!” Willie stamped his foot. “They had to stand still for portraits all the time, and I won’t!”

  There was a second knock at the door—one that implied there would be trouble if it had to repeat itself a third time.

  “Hold your horses!” came a voice from the other room.

  “Is that Nan?”

  It most certainly was. She gave the top of Willie’s head a kiss and a pat on her way past, and glared at Sloot.

  “She was still working for Willie when she died as well,” said Sloot. “But is she still under the spell that makes her believe Willie’s a 6-year-old boy?”

  “Powerful magic, that,” said Nicoleta. “Must be a bit of necromancy, to follow her across the veil.”

  Necromancy. Magic having to do with the dead. Sloot remembered that from when he’d been alive. Roman had told him it had a lot to do with wizards who never took showers, owing to the fact that they’d just get dirty again in the course of rifling through fresh graves for finger bones and the like.

  “Roman,”
said Sloot, to no one in particular.

  “Still alive, I think,” said Myrtle. Sloot took a measure of relief from that, even though it had been Roman—the Spymaster of Salzstadt for Carpathian Intelligence—who’d embroiled him in the harrowing chain of events that led to his untimely demise. While Sloot didn’t believe there was such a thing as a timely demise, he hadn’t yet finished paying into his retirement accounts. They’d be seized by the Ministry of Wealth upon his death since he had no heirs, and he didn’t like to think that the Domnitor—long may he reign—would be disappointed in the amounts.

  The door opened with a groan. There was no good reason for it that Sloot could see. After all, why would the ethereal representations of iron hinges need oiling? Probably something to do with the way that people who’d formerly been alive expected hinges to work.

  The figure that entered was clad and hooded in a robe like the black ones everyone had been wearing at Willie and Greta’s wedding. The hood provided an exceptional level of shadow over his face, which was probably one of those expensive-but-worth-it-for-making-ominous-entrances upgrades that tailors charge. All that could be seen of his face was a bulbous nose and a sideburns-and-connected-moustache arrangement that had gone out of fashion centuries ago.

  “Well, I’m off,” said Willie.

  “What?” Nan balked. “Where are you going?”

  “I must not be detained,” said Willie, his voice and features going all malevolent again. He strode past the visitor and through the door without another word.

  Before Sloot was able to wonder aloud—or quietly, for that matter—where Willie could possibly have been going, he accidentally committed eye contact with Nan. Her face had festooned itself with a half-crazed leer that demanded, simply, “Well?”

  “Well, what?” asked Sloot in response.

  “You know very well, well what!” Only one of Nan’s fists were at her hips, her other hand having been called away for the urgent task of waggling a stern finger at Sloot. “You’d better get after him!”

  Old Bones

  Sloot was utterly bereft of instincts with the singular exception of his flight response. He was sure he’d heard it called a “fight or flight response,” but given that it had never called on him for the former, he assumed he’d heard wrong. In any case, he fled the house at Nan’s insistence and found himself plodding along behind Willie. They were following a path that led into a dark and foreboding forest behind the house. He’d like to think that the path led through the forest to something else, but he was far too new to the afterlife to be sure.

  “Er, pardon me, m’lord,” called Sloot.

  Willie turned. A forked tongue darted out from between his razor-sharp teeth. His glossy black eyes glared such malice into Sloot that he was certain it would have frozen his heart, if he still had one.

  “I must not be detained,” he boomed, with the same pair of voices he’d used before.

  Sloot cringed. He was too fearful to do anything else, so he hoped it would be sufficient.

  Willie’s frightening visage vanished. “Oh, hi, Sloot,” he said in the unaccompanied voice he’d used in life. His outfit had become an outdoorsy ensemble like the one he’d had tailored in homage to his hero, Sir Wallace Scoffington the explorer.

  “Yes, hi,” said Sloot. He continued to cringe, hoping perhaps that the shrinking pose would come off as a martial arts maneuver. “Er, would you mind telling me where you’re going? Not that I’d dream of detaining you, of course.”

  “Oh. Um, well...” the pained expression on Willie’s face conveyed to Sloot that he was thinking very hard about something. Sloot knew from experience that thinking was not Willie’s forte.

  “It’s all right,” ventured Sloot, “you can tell me.”

  “Oh, all right then,” said Willie, “I’ve got to run and check on Dad’s bones.”

  “You’ve got to check on your father’s bones,” repeated Sloot, while doing his level best to repress a shudder of revulsion.

  “I thought ‘Dad’ and ‘Father’ meant the same thing.”

  “They do, I wasn’t correcting you. I just meant ... really?”

  “Well, yeah,” jibed Willie, making a goofball smirk at Sloot that added a silent “duh.”

  “Okay,” said Sloot, “good, good. Er, would you mind if I tagged along?”

  Willie beamed. “That would be great! I’ve always wanted a sidekick. Where’s yours?”

  “Where’s my ... oh.”

  Willie’s outfit had changed again. He was wearing an opera ensemble, complete with a floor-length cape and burglar’s mask like the ones criminals wore on the Ministry of Propaganda’s posters.

  Try as he might, Sloot couldn’t even begin to fathom how to change his wardrobe. The clothes he was wearing, according to Nicoleta, were a projection of his psyche.

  “Er, perhaps we should go incognito,” he suggested.

  “Incognito,” said Willie, the pained expression of thought creeping back across his face.

  “Less formal,” said Sloot. “Perhaps try to blend in a bit, look inconspicuous?”

  “Incon ... spacious?”

  “This is an important mission,” Sloot said, just above a whisper. “Shouldn’t we avoid drawing attention to ourselves?”

  “Of course,” said Willie, suddenly wearing the sort of overcoat and tall boots one might wear on the fanciest fishing trip ever. “Now, then, where are we going?”

  Death had definitely changed some things about Willie. He’d not been able to grow horns and wings and razor-sharp teeth in life. That was new. He’d had the attention span of a fish. That wasn’t. It was a “worst of both worlds” outcome in Sloot’s mind, but such is life—or the lack thereof—when one works for the vastly wealthy leaders of deeply sinister cults.

  As time did not seem to pass in the Hereafter, Sloot wasn’t sure how long it had taken him to remind Willie of his purpose and get them back on the road toward it. He was sure, however, that it had taken far longer than it should have done. They made their way through the path in the darkened wood, Sloot in his grey amalgamated ensemble, and Willie in a hunting jacket and matching hat.

  From the outside the woods had seemed dark and ominous. From the inside they were also disturbingly quiet. Just when the stillness had become too much to bear, something made an impossibly deep grumbling sound. Something that presumably had teeth the size of broadswords and claws to match. The grumble implied that its throat was wide enough for Sloot to walk down it without stooping.

  It was just enough to make Sloot long for the maddening silence to return. He looked around frantically as they continued to walk, but saw neither hide nor hair of any broadsword-toothed beast. After a while, he simply resolved never to think about it again. In his experience, that was the best thing to do.

  “Ugh, this is boring,” said Willie. “Where is my coach? Why is everything all grey?”

  “Er, we’re dead now, m’lord.”

  Willie turned around and demonstrated a confused expression that was far too strenuous to have been entirely natural. Willie knew all of the most fashionable walks, poses, dances, and even the most popular modes of tantrum. In Sloot’s mind, it stood to reason that he’d be in the know on some couture facial expressions as well. This one was probably called something like the Contrite Starlet, or the Ambivalent Shrew.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Quite, I’m afraid.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Do you remember your wedding?”

  “Of course I do,” said Willie. He affected a look of realization, probably called the Staunch Hedgerow or somesuch nonsense. “Hey, I’m a married man!”

  “Well, er, yes, technically. That is to say, right after the wedding we—”

  “Where is my wife? Oh, and Sloot?”

  “Yes, m’lord?”

  “Who is my wife?”

  “Ah,” said Sloot, scrambling to compose a cohesive answer to all of the questions that had built up over the
last … well, ever since Willie had gotten bored with walking.

  “A married man should know that sort of thing, I think.” Willie struck a dashing pose that Sloot felt should be reserved for advertising alcoholic beverages. He had no way of knowing that it was called the Once Upon a Thursday, and had been used twice for that very purpose.

  Sloot racked his brain, grateful for the respite that Willie’s infatuation with striking poses had bought him. He felt compelled to answer Willie, though he didn’t feel particularly honor-bound to tell him the entirety of the truth. Greta was a friend of Sloot’s, after all, and she’d been none too keen on being married to Willie. Still, nitwit that he was, Willie deserved some sort of answer.

  “Her name is Greta, m’lord.”

  Willie continued staring off into space as though he hadn’t heard what Sloot had said. All part of the pose, Sloot guessed. The affectation of staring off into the future, or the horizon, or whatever. It didn’t matter, really.

  The statement did eventually catch up to Willie, though. He shook his head. “Whose name is Greta?”

  “Greta’s, m’lord. Your—”

  “Right, of course,” snapped Willie with a dismissive wave. “It would be, wouldn’t it? Aren’t all Gretas named Greta?”

  “Er, yes? Yes, m’lord.” Sloot wore his most puzzled expression, which had no name of which he was aware.

  Willie patted Sloot on the shoulder. “You’re a decent fellow, Peril. I know you’re trying to impress, but overstating the obvious isn’t going to get you there, all right?”

  “I appreciate the advice, m’lord.”

  Willie nodded. “It’s this way.”

  As they continued down the path, Sloot waited for Willie to return to the uncomfortable subject of his nuptials, but it never came up. Either he’d forgotten the conversation entirely, or he’d felt the conversation had concluded in a satisfactory manner. Either way, Sloot was content to leave it alone.

  They eventually came to a fork in the path. One way led further into the darkened wood, into very dark shadows that seemed far more foreboding than Sloot felt he had the fortitude to traverse. The other direction looked much the same, but was barred by a foreboding iron gate. It was twisted and spiked at the top, just the sort of thing that weird teenagers would draw on their bedroom walls, much to their parents’ chagrin.