I didn’t know how to answer. “What do you mean?”
“I mean a soul: an eternal spirit or an inner animus or whatever you want to call it. A special thing that makes you you, the thing that goes up to heaven when you die, the thing that gives you conscious thought instead of animal instinct. Some people say it weighs twenty-one grams, some people say it doesn’t exist. Whatever you think it is: do you have one?”
My family wasn’t especially religious, but we had a funeral chapel in our home, and I’d heard more sermons about the afterlife than most kids have heard sermons. They said the soul left the body when it died, and that made a kind of sense to me because I’d seen Marci after she died, and she wasn’t there. Her body was, but Marci wasn’t. Was that just a superstition? I don’t know. Probably. But I wanted to believe that some part of Marci was still somewhere, because otherwise what was I in love with? A cadaver? I guess there are a lot of people who wouldn’t be surprised by that at all.
I shook my head. “Are you asking about souls in general, or mine specifically? Because those are going to be two very different answers.”
“I only ask because it’s a word we use,” said Elijah. “I don’t know if it’s the right word, or what ‘right’ even means. But the Withered’s souls are broken and corrupted—not just metaphorically, but physically.”
“You’re not just talking about their sense of wonder.”
“I’m talking about the black sludge,” said Elijah, and I looked at him closely. He nodded. “I know you know it, because you saw it dripping out my chest that night in the mortuary. You’ve killed Withered before, so you’ve seen what happens: the body decomposes into a kind of dark muck. Charred grease and gristle. We call that soulstuff.”
“Brooke’s used that word before,” I said. “What is it?”
“Some say it’s our souls, which are too corrupted to go to heaven, so they just stay behind and destroy the body. Some say it’s our bodies themselves, breaking free from the physical form that confines us, which is why some of us can use it to change shape or move around.”
“That’s how Nobody worked,” I said. “Or I guess you knew her as Hulla—she didn’t have a body of her own, just a big blob of ashy grease.”
“I remember her,” said Elijah, “though not much. She worked with Forman, I think.”
I nodded. “Our best guess on the sludge was that it’s what happened to the body when whatever power that keeps you alive isn’t … keeping you alive anymore. That you’d been around so long your body was just a pile of grease that looked like a human, and as soon as the energy or whatever disappeared—the thing behind that human disguise—the real body fell apart.”
“Maybe,” said Elijah. “I don’t know enough to say that’s not true, but I can tell you for sure that it’s not the only truth. It has a power of its own, like you saw with Nobody. Some Withered can use it for other things. Rack is one of them.”
“What can he do?” I asked again. “We need to know, so we can kill him.”
“Rack has a normal human body,” said Elijah, “all except for one part.” He traced a line around his upper chest and lower face, and I remembered Brooke saying something similar. “He has a hole here, where his heart should be, and up through his neck and into his head—there’s no jaw, no mouth, no nose, just a hole. It’s full of soulstuff, and that’s how he kills people: the darkness reaches out, like a tendril, and it goes right down your throat and tears out your heart.”
“He eats hearts?” I asked.
“He doesn’t eat them,” said Elijah, “he uses them. His body needs a heart just as much as yours does, but when we made our pact with the darkness he gave his up. He lives by stealing new ones.”
“And you say he takes the hearts through the throat?” I asked. “He doesn’t go just straight through the chest?”
“I suppose he could do it either way,” said Elijah, “but I’ve only ever seen him use the victim’s mouth and throat. It’s … actually much more disturbing that way.”
“And much easier to hide,” I said, and glanced at the mirror behind me, knowing the team was watching and listening. “If he has to sustain himself by eating hearts, there will still be corpses around town that we haven’t identified as his victims. We might not have identified them as victims at all—most bodies don’t get autopsies, so a mysterious death with no external sign of violence would probably just get rubber-stamped as a stroke or a heart attack. Someone would find the body, the coroner would take a look, and then it’s on to the funeral.” I looked over my shoulder. “Somebody talk to Rhonda Hess and see if she has any unexplained deaths over the last few weeks.”
“You think Rack is here?” asked Elijah. “In Fort Bruce?”