“Right,” said Charlie. “But Audrey can go find the person. See if they’re sick. If they’re the right gender. I don’t think I could deal with being a woman.”
“Because being a woman would be a step down from what you are now?” Minty Fresh smiled.
“Because if I woke up in the morning and saw my breasts, I’d never get out of the house,” Charlie said.
“He does like breasts,” said Audrey.
“Although we only had the one night together,” Charlie said.
“But you were very attentive,” said Audrey.
“I’m always attentive. I’m looking at them right now.”
“Stop it!” Minty said. They were a couple. They were talking like a couple. The freaky-haired Buddha nun and the crocodile-wizard monster. It was wrong. Deeply, deeply wrong. Was he the only person on earth who had to be alone? “I can’t do it. You shouldn’t have called.” He stood.
“You’re the only one who can help,” said Charlie.
“It’s impossible. I have to get about finding out if the other Death Merchants in the city were replaced, if they’re doing their job.”
“Mr. Fresh,” said Audrey, standing. “When I thought the Death Merchants were somehow imprisoning human souls, when I was trying to rescue the soul vessels from you guys, the Squirrel People helped. They fanned out all over the city. I found a few of you, but they found others on their own. They can see the glow of a soul vessel. They can move around the city in the shadows. They could help. We could help.”
“No.” Minty Fresh turned to leave, bent to go through the door. He’d learned his lesson about the hundred-year-old doorways in this place before. There was still a forehead-shaped dent in the woodwork above the kitchen door from when he’d stormed in here to save Charlie the first time.
Charlie jumped off the table and scampered after the big man. “Fresh, my daughter needs me! She doesn’t even know I’m alive.”
“Well, go see her.”
“I can’t go see her like this.”
“She’ll be fine. Kids are resilient.” He didn’t know anything about kids, but he’d heard people say that. “She’ll understand. She’s the Big Death.”
“No she’s not. She seems to have lost her—well—powers; she’s just a normal kid. Her hellhounds disappeared, and if the Underworld is rising again, she won’t have anyone to protect her.”
Fresh stopped but didn’t turn. “I don’t mean to be critical, Asher, ’cause I know you got a lot on your mind, but that’s the part of the story you lead with.”
“Sorry.” Charlie stood in the entry to the parlor. Audrey joined him.
“Calling you was my idea,” said Audrey.
“So,” said Minty, “the one thing that was supposed to end all this light versus dark, manifestation of the Underworld on earth, crazy shit that went down a year ago, the rise of the Luminatus, that has been undone?”
“Apparently,” said Charlie.
Minty turned to them now and began to count on his fingers. “So there’s a banshee loose in the city, warning of coming doom. You, Rivera, and possibly many other Death Merchants have not been collecting soul vessels for over a year, and we don’t know what happened to the souls of all those who died in the city during that year. You don’t even have a shop anymore to exchange the vessels if you were collecting them. And the only thing that was keeping the forces of darkness at bay has been demoted to, what, a first grader?”
“Second,” said Charlie. “But she’s in the advanced reading group.”
“So, really, we are totally, completely fucked. And by we, I mean everybody.”
“Pretty much,” said Charlie, nodding furiously enough that his jaw flapped a little.
“Life is suffering,” said Audrey, cheerfully.
Fresh nodded. “All right, then. I’ll call you with the names.”
“Just like that?”
“I have to collect the souls anyway. I find someone in my book is young, healthy, male, and what else?”
Charlie started to untie his robe again, “One about this size if—”
Audrey interrupted, “Just the name and address if you have it. We’ll see if we can find any Death Merchants.”
“Yeah, you gonna have a hard enough time convincing someone they are going to die so they need to vacate their body so the wizard lizard there can move in.”
He turned to leave, then stopped and looked over his shoulder. “Oh, did I tell you that the Emperor is making a list of all of the city’s dead?”
“What for?”
“No fucking idea, I just didn’t want you to be the only one got to whip out a surprise.” He laughed—the resigned laugh of the doomed—as he walked out.
Outside on the street he paused by the door of the great bloodred Caddy as he fished in his jacket pocket for his keys. Fog had rolled up out of the bay at sundown and was drifting in a misty wave from the south. On this street they had come for Charlie, the Morrigan, snaking out of the sewer grates at either end of the block, singing their taunts even as Fresh was bearing down on them in the Caddy—screeching in anger and agony as he ran them over, the claws of one raking into the metal of the Caddy’s hood as she was dragged under the bumper, the other tearing at the rear fender as his tires burned across her back. The guy at the body shop said the fender looked like it had been attacked by a grizzly bear. He’d never seen anything like it. “Me either,” Minty had said. “Nobody has.”
He cocked his head, thinking he might have heard a female voice on the street above the jingling of his keys. Just laughter, maybe—girls out for dinner or drinks a block away on Mission Street, their voices echoing distant and diffused because of the fog. Probably.
They stared at the doorway as they listened to Minty Fresh’s steps recede and the front door close behind him.
Audrey checked the clock. “I have to lead a meditation at seven. They’re going to start arriving soon. You might want to get out of sight.”
“I should have asked him about Lily.”
“He would have brought it up if he wanted to talk about it. Why don’t you go ask Bob and the others if they remember all the places they collected soul vessels? They really might be able to help.”
“I don’t really feel welcome down there.”
“Don’t be silly. They love you.”
“Lately it feels like they might be plotting to kill me.” Despite having been liberated from his beta-male DNA, Charlie still viewed the world with glassy-eyed suspicion, due in no small part to the fact that he had already been murdered once and hadn’t cared for the experience.
“Take snacks,” Audrey said. “They love snacks. There’s some trail mix on the counter.”
“Sure, snacks,” Charlie said, heading for the kitchen. “If only Jesus had thought to take snacks with him into the lion’s den.”
“Jesus didn’t go into the lion’s den, that was Daniel.”
“Well, Daniel, then. I thought you were a Buddhist.”
“I am, but that doesn’t make me an oblivious nitwit, too.”
“Is that any way for a nun to talk?” Charlie called back, but Audrey had already headed upstairs to change. He scampered into the kitchen, grabbed a packet of trail mix off the counter, jumped down, ducked out the dog door, hopped down the back porch steps, then through the little hatch under the steps into the sanctuary of the Squirrel People.
The city under the house was a maze of mismatched found objects patched together with zip ties, silicone glue, and duct tape, all lit from above by low-voltage LED lights strung along the floor joists of the great Victorian, which kept the entire space in a state of perpetual twilight. Audrey had purchased the lights at Charlie’s request, after he had watched several of the Squirrel People nearly burn the house down while trying to construct an apartment from dis
carded yogurt containers by candlelight.
There was no one around.
Charlie had spent very little time down here, choosing to spend his days on the upper floors of the Buddhist Center, either with Audrey or reading from the many books in the library. When he was reading he could fly away into the wildest skies of imagination, untethered to the reality that his soul was trapped in a wretched creature cobbled together from meat and bone, like us all.
Charlie entered the main passage, which was constructed entirely from automobile side windows. Once in it, he felt as if he were walking in a long, serpentine aquarium. Despite the disparate materials from which it was constructed, the Squirrel People’s city had a strange symmetry, a uniformity of design that Charlie found comforting, because it was built for someone his size, yet disturbing, because it was so unlike anyplace human beings lived.
“Hey,” he called. “Anyone home?”
He made his way along a street that was lined by old computer monitors, each gutted of its electronics and filled with a nest built from throw pillows and fabric scraps.
Still no one. The city had tripled in size since he’d been down here, and as he moved he encountered open, communal spaces, as well as what were clearly spaces meant to preserve privacy. The Squirrel People did not mate, as there were no two alike, no two made from the same sets of parts, but they paired off, each finding some affinity with another that Charlie could not see. The only thing they had in common beyond their size—which was chosen quite by accident when Audrey was studying to be a costume designer, long before she’d gone off to Tibet, and she had wanted to design and sew elaborate costumes without the expense of the materials for full-size models—was that each housed a human soul. The first of the Squirrel People had been little more than animated dress forms. Later, Audrey had scavenged the shops of Chinatown for animal parts, trying to give each of them a distinction, trying different parts for limbs, testing efficacy, using first fresh meat and later smoked for the protein that the soul would direct into forming a unique, living creature.
“The universe is always seeking order,” Audrey had said. “The Squirrel People, how they come together, is the best example I’ve ever seen of that.”
“Yeah, or it’s black magic and creepy necromancy,” Charlie had said.
She’d smacked the tip of his enormous dong with her fork, which he thought a not very Buddhist thing to do, and said so. “Buddhist monks invented kung fu, Charlie. Don’t fuck with us.”
“Hey, Bob!” Charlie called down the corridor. “It’s Charlie, I need to talk to you.”
He didn’t really need to say it was Charlie, since he and Bob were the only of their kind for whom Audrey had constructed vocal cords. After Charlie, she’d found out she hadn’t actually been saving souls by making the Squirrel People, but had stopped them in their karmic progression, so he had been the last.
The computer monitor street branched into a half-dozen different passageways, each constructed from a different material. Charlie ducked into one that looked to be made of plastic drainpipe, and shuffled along its length, cutting back and forth until he heard voices coming from the far end. Voices?
He slowed as he approached the end of the passageway and peeked into the wide chamber it opened upon. The Squirrel People had excavated an amphitheater here, under the house, perhaps ten feet below ground level, and it was larger than the grand parlor upstairs. He was looking down over a large group of the people who were surrounding a central platform that looked as if it had been constructed from an old snare drum. How could they have gotten all this stuff down here without being seen?
Bob stood on the snare drum in his bright red beefeater uniform, holding his mighty spork over his head as if it were the staff of Moses.
“Bring the head for Theeb!” he shouted.
“Bring the head for Theeb. Bring the head for Theeb.” The Squirrel People chanted.
From another passage an iguana-headed fellow in a tricorner hat and a squirrel girl in a pink ball gown emerged carrying a silver tray between them. On it was the raggedly severed head of a calico cat.
“Bring the head for Theeb,” they chanted.
Charlie backed into his chamber. How were they chanting? Sure, some of them were still making the clicking noises, the growls, the hisses he was used to, but some were chanting. They had voices.
He crouched and backed away until he was out of sight of the amphitheater, then he turned and scurried out of the city under the porch.
6
Ghosts of the Bridge
A great regret of ghosts lingered on the Golden Gate Bridge. Mad as bedbugs, they slid down the cables, swam in the roadway, hung
off the upright lines, whipped in the wind like tattered battle flags, dangled their feet off the anchor piers, and called into the dreams of sleeping sailors as their ships passed through the Gate. Mostly they napped, curled up in the heavy steel towers, entwined together in the cables like impassioned earthworms, tucked under an asphalt blanket snoring into the treads of a million tires a day. They drifted along the walkways, spun and buffeted by passersby, wafting along like tumbleweeds, rebounding at the shore to bounce back the other way, waves of spirits, a tide of sleeping souls, dozing until awakened by human anguish in their midst. They could sense a jumper on the bridge and gathered around to watch, to curse, to encourage, to haunt, taunt, and gibe, which is how the ghost of Concepción Argüello came to find Mike Sullivan, the bridge painter, that day.
“Oh, pardon me,” she’d said. “It appears I have upset you. Of course, you need time to adjust. We’ll talk another time.”
She disappeared back into the steel of the tower, leaving Mike breathless and deeply, deeply freaked out. Still, when his supervisor called him down to be debriefed by the highway patrol and the captain of the bridge, Mike didn’t mention the ghost, and he declined the counseling they offered. He’d done the best he could, they said, considering the circumstances. Most of the time, someone who was thinking about jumping just needed someone to say something—someone to notice them, pull them out of the vortex of despair forming in their own mind. The state patrolmen who worked the bridge on bicycles were all trained to look for and engage anyone who was alone, looking pensive, crying at the rail, and they had a great record for bringing people back from the edge, getting them to snap back into the world with just a word of kind concern. He’d done fine, he’d be fine, just take the rest of the day off, regroup, they’d told him.
Mike had taken the rest of the day off, and he had rested, but unfortunately, he had also shared his tale of the ghost in the beam with his girlfriend of fourteen months, Melody, who first suggested that he might have had a ministroke, because that had happened to a guy on the Internet. When he insisted that no, he had seen and heard what he had seen and heard, she responded that he needed to see a shrink, that he was emotionally unavailable, and furthermore, there were much hotter guys than him at the gym who wanted to sleep with her and she had known deep down that there was something wrong with him and that’s why she’d never given up her apartment. He agreed that she was probably right about those things and that she would probably be better off if she slept with the hotter guys at the gym. He’d lost a girlfriend, but he’d gained a drawer in his dresser, a third of the clothes rod in his closet, and all three shampoo shelves in his shower, so he really wasn’t all that broken up about the breakup. Once she was gone, he realized that he didn’t feel any more alone than he had when she had been in the room with him, and he was a little sad that he didn’t feel sadder. All in all, it had been a productive day off.
He’d been back at work for a week and was hanging in the framework under the roadway when the ghost came to him again.
“You know,” she said softly, her voice reaching him before she appeared, sitting on the beam above his head, “when they were building the bridge they strung a safety net under it.”
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Mike caught his safety lines and tugged them to make sure they were both secure before he reacted. “Holy shit,” he said.
“When a workman would fall, and he was caught by the net, he was said to have joined the ‘Halfway to Hell’ club. I think I am also in that club.”
She had an accent but not much of one, and this time she wore a black dress with a wide lace collar. Her hair was pinned back into a bun, and again, there was a flower in her hair. He didn’t know what to say, but he had been preparing himself for her to reappear, just so he wouldn’t be surprised in a bad spot and end up tumbling off the bridge to his death. Hallucination or not, he’d resolved to be prepared. He said, “There’s seagull shit all over these beams. You’re going to mess up your dress.”
“Ah, you are so gallant, but I am beyond the reach of huano de la gaviota.”
“You are Spanish, then?”
“I was born on Spanish soil, yes, right there at the Presidio, in 1792.” She pointed a delicate finger toward the San Francisco shore and the fort beyond it. “I beg your pardon, I am Concepción Argüella. My father was the governor of Alta California, commandante of the El Presidio Real de San Francisco.”
“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Mike said. He didn’t reach out to shake her hand, or even to kiss it (that seemed like what he should do, her being so formal and everything), but he was hanging two hundred feet over the water, and she was a good twelve feet away, and if she floated over to him, he thought he might completely lose his mind, so he sort of bowed—nodded, really. “I’m Mike Sullivan, I paint the bridge.”
“Ah, I would have guessed that from your bucket of paint and your dashing coveralls,” said the ghost. “May I thank you for keeping our bridge looking beautiful? We all very much appreciate it, Señor Sullivan.”
“We?” Mike said. He was still trying on the idea of talking to a ghost; he wasn’t ready to be gang-haunted.