Albert's pages

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As I walk out of the Noise Den, I bump into Fred–well, I almost walk on him. He’s slumped on the pavement. Haggard.

I squat down in front of him and click my fingers at his face. Takes half a dozen snaps to get him to react. He looks up at me and says:

‘They got my soul.’

I run my fingers on his neck, his cheeks, his temples, for show. Then I scrutinize his eyes.

He’s right.

His soul’s gone.

‘Call 911’, I tell the Den’s bouncer. He picks his phone.

Thirty minutes later, the paramedics carry Fred away on a stretcher. He’ll be fine. Sort of. He won’t die, at least.

So… Someone stripped Fred’s soul from his body–but they could not capture it, or so I feverishly hope, so it must be wandering somewhere not too far from where it happened.

And Fred’s not exactly Mister Extrovert, so his shy little soul will be hard to locate.

A better plan is finding who did that to him, and tracing back from there.

I call all the town’s known mediums, and then some only I know, and I get nothing. No more newly freed souls than usual this time of year, and no more free souls fading out either.

Any new folks in town then, who’d be the sort to meddle with the unseen? There’s millions of people here, so I’ll need some help picking newcomers out. I know someone who can help, but he’ll sure have me jump through a hoop or two.

I don’t like that, but it’s my only card.

Some hoops passed. I’d forgotten how painful it was.

He’s sitting on a monumental onyx throne, a smirking ten foot reddish naked bastard surrounded by shimmers of overheated air.

‘My dominion is over souls from dead, not living, bodies.’

‘Plus those which will end up here but haven’t left yet. I need names.’

‘How do you propose to repay me?’

Not a single fly on him. I sigh.

‘Name your price’.

He does. I wince.

Fred’s soul is in the balance.

I agree.

As soon as I’m back from Down There, I go to Nettie’s joint. It’s a bit past five AM, so she has opened for the day already. There are other places where I could get breakfast at this hour, but Nettie does not ask any questions when I barge in looking like I’ve just… had a lot of exercise. I heave myself up onto a stool at the bar.

‘Got ice-cream?’

‘What flavor?’

‘One of each.’

‘That’s nine in all.’

‘It’ll have to do.’

‘Coming up! Coffee too?’

‘Yeah.’

While I wait, I fish out the parchment from my back pocket. Turns out there’s more than a name on it. There’s the whole pact–a copy, of course.

Let’s see what the guy asked for.

“Success shall be ensured in any endeavour the undersigned mortal would seek, unless it would prevent the forfeiting of the soul”.

The “undersigned mortal” probably thinks himself pretty rad for getting a blanket wish. If I’m any judge, he’ll get screwed like all the others.

And it’s got to be him, because no one else has concluded a pact in the last decade. Not many people are into the eldritch these days.

And those who did conclude a pact have gone for more mundane wishes. Gross, for some, but none in the “I get to be able to rip souls from other people’s bodies” ballpark.

Speaking of which… I call the hospital. Nothing wrong with Fred’s health, but definitely something with his mind, if only they could tell what it is.

Mind you, I don’t know the specifics either. What I do know is that the souls of the dead who stay behind, the ghosts, go progressively screwy. Takes anywhere between eight days and eleven centuries.

And what I don’t know either is why would a sorcerer apprentice want a living’s soul for. Try and pass it off as his own come the end? Demons are thick at times, but none would be stupid enough to fall for that.

So he’s trying something else. What?

Maybe he’s trying some new approach to necromancy? Rising the recently dead is feasible, but like a soul without a body, a body without a soul won’t last long. It lacks will, which is why they make such easy workforce.

But then, it would have been easier yet to subdue Fred while he still had his soul. Granted, that would have been a nightmare for him, because he’d still have had a soul, but that’s still simpler than turning a corpse back into a body.

Anyway, I still need to check that this soul-popping business is tied in any way to a certain Anthony Thorne, who succeeds in any endeavour he seeks.

And I can’t spy on him during the next few months in order to get a good idea of what he’s up to. I haven’t got this much time. More to the point, Fred hasn’t got it.

Anthony Thorne, you don’t know that yet, but you and I have an appointment this morning. In about forty minutes, if I can catch the next bus.

I stop by my place to grab my bag. I know I’m not the bag-carrying type, so that will get me some suspicious looks, but then, it’s not like I care much about who looks at me and how.

Then the bus (and a few looks indeed, mostly the suspicious type as expected), and half an hour later, I walk up to a a building which looks like it’s the reason why the word “mansion” was invented.

I ring.

A butler opens the door. In uniform.

I kid you not.

I smile, fish a calling card out of my bag and proffer it.

‘Hello! I’m here to see Anthony Thorne.’

The butler picks the card as disdainfully as is allowable in such circumstances.

‘Please wait. I shall see if Mister Thorne is available.’

I examine the entrance hall. Tasteful. Thorne isn’t a showoff. And if there’s any brimstone in the house, I can’t smell it.

The butler comes back.

‘Mister Thorne will see you now.’

The card worked. It usually does.

The butler leads me upstairs, along a corridor then into what was obviously a library but has been repurposed as a study, complete with a large desk. He gestures me in, then exits, closing the door behind him.

Anthony Thorne, or so I assume, is sitting at the desk, writing. Fifty-ish, short dark hair, smartly dressed.

‘Please, do sit down.’

I sit on the chair in front of the desk. And then comes the first red flag: as I try to reposition myself… I can’t.

There I am, sitting on the edge of the chair, hands on the armrests, slightly bent forward, and I feel that my body won’t move back against the back of the chair.

Thorne is watching me like I am some rodent he just saw sniffing the books in the mahogany shelves around us. Success in any endeavour, eh?

I disguise my initial move the best I can, pull out the parchment pact from my back pocket, put it on the desk, then sit upright with my hands on my knees.

He looks down at the parchment. That gives me a few precious seconds for a discrete but frantic scan of our surroundings. Fred’s soul has to be somewhere around.

Gotcha!

There’s an ornate copper pot on the desk, with a faint bluish glow dancing inside. I’d get up and flick its cover away, but I’m stuck to that chair…

Thorne sighs.

‘I was expecting this visit. After all, the pact’s ten years would expire any moment.’

His soul’s due now ? Heaven.

I have to think fast. Thorne keeps Fred’s soul close at hand as his own soul is about to be snatched from his body. Does he expect to pop Fred’s soul just as the demon reaches for his and confuse him into grabbing the wrong one?

Anyway, there’s one thing I can do. I pull my compact — ha, ha — from my bag and throw it. At less than four feet, I can’t be so bad a shot. The compact dislocates in a puff of powder against the pot… and knocks its lid open.

The soul of a dead body usually lingers close to it—or to what’s left of it, as anyone knows who’s ever visited a catacomb. The soul of a living body, now… I would have expected it to drift back toward its host.

But the one that comes out of the pot clearly doesn’t do drifts.

It shoots like an arrow… toward Thorne.

Either Fred recently became the type that urgently needs anger management counseling, or his soul is telling me something I don’t know.

I see Thorne’s hand shoot towards the pot. Then sag. Then he starts waving like mad.

’No ! Not now ! It’s too soon ! You have to wait !’

He’s talking to the soul, but he’s looking beyond it. I follow his terrified gaze and see a yellowish whirl forming beside of the desk. Any moment indeed. I can already make out the demon’s shape forming.

Too soon? Wait?

I stare into Thorne’s wide eyes.

There is a soul in him.

Just not his.

Fred’s.

Somehow Thorne endeavoured—and, with the pact, succeeded—to evict his own soul from his body and replace it with Fred’s.

Now I can see how, to a pact demon, a freewheeling soul would be suspect but a soul attached to a body would not. He would rip Fred’s soul out, and if Thorne’s own soul rushes in right away, then Thorne might get through alive and relatively unharmed, though it’s anyone’s guess what’ll become of his soul later, when he finally dies.

However urgently Thorne will wag his finger, his soul has got the “rush in as soon as possible” part of the plan down to a T—except for the timing, thanks to me. Now I need a way to get Fred’s soul out, and I need it now. Come on, think. There must be something I can do!

There is, of course. Pact demons aren’t the only ones who can take souls away. I can, too. It should work on Fred. If it does, Mother is going to be disgustingly radiant about it.

There will be a few barriers to my plan, though.

First, there will be Thorne’s soul : I’ll have to avoid touching it at all costs, because I’m not aiming for it, I’m aiming for Fred’s.

Second, there’ll be Thorne’s body aura. I can expect it will repulse me as strongly as it can.

Last, I want to get Fred’s soul to consent. That’s going to be be trickier than it sounds, because Fred’s an introvert and a friend. My deep self will come as a shock to him.

I suspect Thorne’s soul isn’t really going to be a problem at all.

It still weaves all over him, but as the demon will become more solid, it will do what a soul held inside a body cannot, and that is, flee out of self-preservation.

Or at least, it will retreat away from the demon, which will leave large parts of Thorne’s aura accessible to me ; but it will probably stay close to his body.

I hope it does. I need it to, in order for my plan to succeed.

And lo and behold, Thorne’s soul’s erratic zigzag is shifting away and leaving swathes of his aura open to me. Now, where should I hit?

I conjure up my visual memory of what would have been the soul’s landing point, had Thorne not jerked in fear, and what was the focus of its swirlings afterward.

I think I’ve got it. Sternum height, slightly to his left. That’s probably the point through which his soul was extracted first, and Fred’s was injected.

Whatever way the chair restrains my body, it does not hold back my ethereal form. I ascend then rush straight to Thorne’s aura with all my strength.

No senses are involved in the etheral world, of course, but still: Thorne’s aura feels like a gelatinous lake, stickier as I push deeper, And that’s probably the weaker path. I hate to think how much harder it could have been.

The pact demon is closing in. I throw all my energy in and finally pierce through.

I’ve never read Fred’s soul before. I never wanted to. Now I am forced to, from the first to the last page of his life. Including the present one when he is terrified by my form.

‘Fred! That’s me!’

‘Lisa?’

He’s transfixed. He’s seen me in, and sometimes out of, various outfits, but never in full Succubus mode before.

‘You’re—’

‘Yes, I am! Now let me make you succumb to me.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t argue! Just trust me and tell me you agree!’

‘But I can’t—’

I need some added push to perforate through his defences. Oh well. He and I will deal with it later. Time for the Show.

I start morphing through every subject of Fred’s fantasies, most abhorrent ones first so that I can get over with those quickly.

‘The bad news Fred, is that you’re already a gray case. The worse news is that you’ll be sent to hell right now if you don’t come with me!

I finish the Show with my own corporeal shape and shout.

‘PLEASE!’

‘But I will be damned!’

‘Only if you actually succumb! If you don’t then you’re only tainted, and then you’ll have a lifetime to brood about it, flog yourself with nettles every day, whatever’s your thing, and get that written off!’

He falters.

‘But it’s you—’

’We won’t have to follow through! Not if I don’t want to! All I ask is that you agree to succumb! NOW !’

‘Er—Yes?’

Wow. Looks like my raging face works better than my pleading one.

That was all I need. I grab and drag Fred’s soul by its darkest parts, rush back into my corporeal form, open my bag wide, and shove Fred’s soul in it—while Thorne’s own soul rushes in his body through my exit wound in his aura.

Then I look at the demon beside the desk. The ruckus has left him nonplussed. He looks at me, nods politely, thrusts his clawed hand in Thorne’s chest, pulls the still unsettled soul and flashes out with it in a puff of acrid smoke.

I wait for the sulphur cloud to dissipate. Thorne sits, incredulous. The pact is over, and so is the spell on the chair. I stand up, and treat myself to a smirk.

‘Congratulation. Your endeavour to survive your pact with the Devil has succeeded. You will now find out what happens, not to a soul leaving its body late, but to a body whose soul has been sent to Hell. Enjoy the trip.’

I shoulder my bag and proceed to leave. The butler will not try to stop me.

I rush to the hospital, well, to the bus that will get me there eventually.

I disregard the visiting hours posters, go straight to Fred’s room, weave around the nurse at his bed, grab his soul in my bag and unceremoniously flip it at him.

There’s a faint flash, He looks at me, blushes profusely, then lets out a sad smile.

‘Sorry. I was caught—‘

‘We’ll talk later. For now, just—heal.’

I nod to the befuddled nurse and head out. I’ve got a debt to repay.

I am Down There – well, Down Here right now – again.

‘Happy to see that you have come back to honor your debt,’ says Lucifer, grinning. ‘Which of course I could only expect from my daughter.’

I don’t answer. He opens the doors to the dining hall. Mother – well, Lilith – is there already, in all her triumphant splendor and queenly contempt.

Family dinners Down Here take aeons. I’m lucky I got away with having to attend only one.

But Fred: you owe me.

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