The Soul Consortium (13 page)

There is no real need for an unnatural atmosphere to be crafted, but Arrigo always does his utmost to set the scene for maximum effect. There are no lamps, just candles set in red-tinted glass bowls placed low to the floor beneath gentle drafts to create a subtle flicker of low bloody light. With all our faces illuminated from below and shadows flitting like tiny demons about the room, there is foreboding enough, but Fran, already secretly studied in the art of witchcraft, knows exactly the right aromas to enhance the mood—incenses of blue rose, honeysuckle, and lotus are burning their potent flavors in the air. Under her breath she chants words of esoteric power, believing them to prepare the ether for connection to the spirit realm.

Guido Liniro comes to the table, a scroll clutched in his sweaty hand. It’s an insurance policy that Livio demands from every customer—a signed confession of his request for the séance in case he decides to betray us to the church. Glancing at each of us in turn, the middle-aged man seats his ample form at the circular table and licks his lips nervously.

I sit directly opposite watching his every move, allowing the voices within to forge a link so they will come to the fore and be easily discernable above the cries of the others. Arrigo sits to my left and Livio to the right whilst Fran hovers near the back of the room.

“Do I need to do anything?” Guido asks, handing the scroll to Livio who tucks it away without bothering to check it.

“Please just place both your hands on the table, palms down,” I tell him. “I’ll do the rest.”

He obliges and I notice his wedding ring, a perfect medium.

I see what you see, Dominique, but it speaks differently to me. You see a reminder of your husband-to-be. I see a reminder of your shame.

Mama has lost none of her venom, but I have learned to ignore her. I slide my hands across the table, fingers splayed, and with the tip of one, I touch the man’s ring and close my eyes. His sour breath, saturated with cheap wine, hits me in fast rushes as his breathing quickens. I try to ignore it and focus on his ring. The voices press forward as I allow them access, and pain washes in like a flood after them.

One voice comes in louder than the rest, louder even than Mama’s, as I feel a prickle of energy drawing from the man’s ring.
Guido! Guido! Is that you?

I repeat the woman’s words and lower my head a little under the weight of the pain. There is an urge to stare into the top of my head as my eyelids flutter, and I do my best to resist. Arrigo tells me the sight of a woman drooling and shuddering with pure white eyes at the séance table is nothing short of a terror to the customers, but as always, I cannot prevent it.

In front of me there is the usual cry of shock and the inevitable struggle as my brothers hold the man in place. They tell him to calm down, that this is not unusual behavior, and that his bravery will soon be rewarded by his reacquaintance with his lost love.

“This was a mistake. Charlatans. You must be.” Still he struggles. I know it is only the fear talking, though. He senses this is real.

Don’t go, Guido. Please! I never told you the name, but I had made my decision, and I didn’t tell you because I was angry. I am so sorry, my love. Please don’t leave. Please.

I relate this back to him word for word, and the sound of scuffling stops. All I hear is the hoarse rushing of breath from the three men and Fran’s ominous muttering behind me.

“Lilly?” he whispers eventually. “What name did you decide?”

“Adele,” I tell him. “Or Adrian if we were to have a boy.”

“Your wife was pregnant?” Livio says.

“No, no. The day before she died we talked about having a child, and for the whole of that morning we discussed names. Lilly never did tell me which was her favorite before she …”

Mama’s spite surfaces again.
I thank God
you
never had a child, Dominique.

“Can you tell Lilly”—sobs stop him for a moment—“that they are both beautiful names … And tell her that I am sorry for doing this.”

“She can hear you,” I say.

He whispers, “Thank you.”

And then Lilly says something I can’t understand. Words said with such conviction and eloquence they come through as clear as a bright morning’s sky.

Don’t be sorry, Guido. I am not angry with you for turning to witchcraft to find me, but dear, sweet husband, you should know that I am not here. Dominique utters an echo of what once was. The wife you loved has gone, but whatever kind of devil that Keitus Vieta is, he needed this small part of me, this echo. He needed small parts of us all and kept them in his prison like the demons in Tartarus, waiting for their final judgement. I saw the place
where he wanted to send us, and never have I seen such a terrible abomination.

Quiet, girl, quiet!
Mama screams above her.
She must not know.

“Why?” I cry, oblivious to all else in the room and enraged that she should interrupt something so important. “Because you fear the thought that your fate may be worse than my own? Do you hate your daughter that much? What a wretched mother you are!”

It is the first time I have ever stood up to her, the first time I have ever truly acknowledged that I may not deserve such malice.

Liberated, I open my eyes.

The voices in my head fade for just a second as Guido snatches his hand away, his face an image of shock and confusion at my sudden outburst. He looks from Livio to Arrigo, his expression exchanging perplexity for outrage. “Is she possessed of demons? Mad? What is this?”

“Please be calm,” Arrigo says, standing as Guido stands. “The workings of the spirit realm are not always clear. If you would simply—”

“I will have nothing more to do with this, gentlemen. Witchcraft is witchcraft, and I should never have involved myself in such a shameful practice. No good can come of it, and I mean to make sure that you’ll not profit from this ever again.”

Arrigo shoots a look of spite in my direction as Guido makes for the door. Livio and Fran step forward, barring his way.

“What do you mean by this? Let me go!”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Livio waves the scroll in front of Guido’s nose. “A certain signed confession of your complicity in all of this?”

Guido smiles. “Did you actually
read
my confession?”

And now I understand his nervousness when he first entered our house. Not nervousness at the séance but apprehension at whether his subterfuge would be discovered, for he had not signed the document.

Fran grabs the scroll from Livio, opens it, and I know that in a few seconds she will understand. Guido’s intention was always to stop us. All he needed was personal proof that we were actually involved in witchcraft before reporting us, and now he has it. For myself I have not a care—I have been prepared for a witch’s death for months—but for Fran, Arrigo, and Livio, my heart is confused. I thought I loved them, but as I watch them, a righteous anger seethes within my bones. Livio has the man by the throat, Fran is wrapping a gag around his mouth, and Arrigo is holding his arms.

“Let
him go!”
The words roar from me, each one filled with an authority I never knew was in me.

They stop. Silent seconds pass as each of them studies me in terrified awe. Fran drops the gag, Livio and Arrigo let go of their captive, but Guido makes no attempt to escape. Instead he just stares at me.

“Dom,” Arrigo says, “you’re … you’re bleeding and you’re …”

“You’re glowing,” Fran says.

More than glowing. Something is happening inside me, something terrible. My head is a sickening pulsation of agony bursting through every blood vessel and organ as I stagger toward them. I lift my hands to my ears as every echoed soul captured in my brain screams in protest. Red covers my palms, and I feel tears of blood slide from my eyes and nose. The circular burn on my palm ebbs with crackling blue energy, and as all the candles blow out with a sudden gale, the bloody light is replaced with a blinding indigo radiance.

Fran raises her hands, muttering incantations to stop whatever it is she believes is happening. The others drop to the floor, cowering as a halo of power lifts me onto tiptoe.

“For God’s sake, Dominique, stop this!”

A curtain of blood and a hurricane of objects fly through the air—glasses smashing against walls; rags, plates, pans, and burning coals crashing against the ceiling and floor; someone’s body breaking against the table as it slams into the fireplace; someone else’s head splitting open against the corner of the table like a swollen fruit punctured by a poker.

Somehow I find the door and manage to stumble outside into the street taking the storm with me.

No, Dominique, don’t let us go there! Please don’t let go!

All the voices howl in unison like a demonic choir, but there is nothing I can do to help any of them. Perhaps I will join them in whatever hell it is they fear. A crack of cobbled stone smashes my cheek as I hit the road, and I can feel my grip on these tormented spirits slipping away with my life.

“Too weak a vessel,” says a small voice, cutting through the violence.

Someone turns me onto my back with a staff or rod, and as I struggle to focus on the form leaning over me, I know exactly who it is I will see.

Don’t let him take us!

Keitus Vieta leans over me, his hunched form darker than the night, his bulging eyes aglow with fascination as he watches me writhe in my last moments. Surely if he has an ounce of humanity in him he cannot let this continue.

“Help me.”

“My dear, you were beyond help the moment you stole from me.”

My reply is little more than a breath. “I … didn’t steal—”

“Four years of energy taken from my cane.” He shows it to me. The jewel in its handle is dull.

“I didn’t know.”

“But you do now.”

Run, girl, run!

But I cannot. Though the pain is fading, I can’t move my arms or legs. Sensation is bleeding away from me into the cracks of the cobblestones, and I can scarcely see anything.

“Nevertheless, it will be interesting to find out what will happen on a small scale. The measurements may help me gauge my progress thus far.”

I have no idea what he means, but with my last few lucid seconds of strength, I turn my attention away from the artist and on to the others. “Don’t be afraid … The Lord is our shepherd … we shall not want. He maketh us to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth us beside quiet waters …”

A tunnel of heavenly white light washes over me, but something else too—a brilliant explosion of bright blue radiance blasting outward from my body. Vieta’s black form is transfigured by starlight for a split second, and in his scrutinizing eyes, I see my reflection—a hole as small as a pinhead opening in my forehead and sucking in the air around it, as if a plug has been removed from a bathtub. I don’t want to see, so I close my eyes at the end.

“He restoreth … our souls …”

“A mere fraction. I have a long way to go.”

“He guideth us in paths of righteousness … for his name’s sake …”

“But I have all the time I need.”

And though we walketh through the valley of the shadow of death, we shall fear no evil … for thou art with us … your rod and your staff, they comfort us.

“Y
ou prepare a table before me in the presence of our enemies. You anoint our heads with oil; our cups overflow. Surely goodness and love will follow us all the days of our lives and we will dwell in the house of the Lord … forever.”

But I do not deserve to be in the house of the Lord. And so it is. This cannot be heaven; the white light has given way to an outlandish gateway, like a great, sideways mouth unsticking its dry lips. An alien world lies beyond, a place of tiny blue lights covering a curved wall.

But neither is this hell.

The voices in my head have stopped.

I am alone. Arrigo, Livio, Fran—all gone. Dead.

But if I too am dead, where am I? What of my prayer?

With a sudden impulse to feel my body, I try to move, but shackles hold my wrists and ankles. Perhaps, crucified in this strange purgatory, I should have prayed Psalm 22 and not Psalm 23. My God! My God! Why have you abandoned us?

Us? No. I am alone. Utterly alone.

And I have been alone for so very long.

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

That voice. Mama? No, not Mama, there is kindness there. “Mary?
Mother
of God?”

A momentary panic seizes me when I hear the baritone of my voice. The voice of a man! Yes. Salem Ben. I should know him.

“Mother of God?” the voice says. “Last time I was your goddess. Now I’m her mother? What will I be next?”

I’m Salem Ben, a man alone for all time. No family. No love, but the melancholy will pass soon as it always does. Perhaps it shouldn’t, though. Who was left to mourn the passing of Dominique’s family? They were as much my own family as they were hers, and even now, that sense of desperation, fear, and horror at what happened in those final moments grips me.

I weep for her and feel the pain as keenly as if it were my own life, even though none of that was really mine. Dominique Mancini died billions of years ago. I lived a facsimile—a replicated data string wired into my brain—a digital ghost. Yet only minutes ago I was there with the artist Keitus Vieta, watching as I lit my entire town with blue fire when I died.

But Vieta didn’t perish. In my final moment I saw his stooping figure untouched by the blast. And now that I am Salem again, I remember his intrusion into Orson Roth’s life too. This specter is no longer an unsettling curiosity; he is a conundrum too important to ignore. And I cannot afford to end my life until I find out who or what he is.

Or is this just another excuse to postpone death?

“Qod, did you find Keitus Vieta while I was away?”

“No. There is no record of Keitus Vieta in the Consortium files.”

“You’ve had thirty-one years to locate him, and you still have exactly the same answer?”