The Dark Soul by Duke Thompson

THE DARK SOUL

  Copyright © 2015 by Duke Thompson

  All rights reserved. No part of this story may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission from the author.

  GOT SOUL?

  I am sitting here, writing this, because I have a story to tell. These are not the words of a lunatic, but of a highly educated scientist. Whether you believe what I am about to tell you is possible or not doesn’t matter. Just remember that you read it. Because when this technology gets out, it's going to change everything. This is your warning.

  The soul is not just a battery source for living things. The soul is a living thing. It merely uses the body as a vessel to survive. A common misconception of the soul is that it can’t survive without that vessel. Many people think that a soul is a way for you to survive your death, and continue on into some kind of afterlife. That is certainly not the case. A soul can live forever as long as it has a body. It floats from one vessel to another. When a person dies, its soul leaves, and it has to find another body that does not yet have a soul. A soulless body that has never be occupied by a soul is called a fetus, while a body that once had a soul but no longer does, is called a corpse. Get it?

  I had woken up unusually early the morning I first found out the true extent of the soul with somewhat of an epiphany. It had not come from a dream, that I can remember, but it might have been induced by one. It’s not often that I remember my dreams, but when I do, it always blows my mind how I could conjured up such a madhouse of thoughts.

  I will never forget that day. I'll never forget the way that thing was coming at me. I mean, it was a hand, but I call it a thing because . . . well, it wasn’t attached to anything. No body. Nothing. It was just a hand, and it was moving. Running on its fingers like a spider. At the part where it had been severed, it was gushing blood into the air like a whale hole spewing water. Let me tell you, I almost shit myself when that thing hopped onto its ring and middle finger and started leaping in long strides, as if it were a person doing hurdles.

  And then . . .

  You know what? I’m getting ahead of myself, aren't I? Let me start from the beginning, and then I’ll tell the story in order. Make no mistake, what you have just read was by no means the end of this warning.

  The end, as you will find out, hasn’t happened yet.

  I’ll spare you the long detailed years of research I had to conduct in order to get to where I was on that day. Not because I don't want to bore you. No, because I don't want anyone to duplicate my work, or in a misguided attempt, my mistakes. I hope that anyone who might discover my technology will approach this whole soul thing with high caution, like I said at the beginning. But the wisest words I can give you are: don’t dare try this at all.

  I’m probably an idiot for what I’m going to do once I finish telling my story, but the way I see it, it’s my only chance… given my current situation. Anyway, I’ve probably warned you enough, so let's continue.

  Inventors like me are cursed with a crippling handicap; the inability to give up. There is no treatment or cure for this disease. Men with this conduction suffer one of two fates: success or madness. It was this inability that led me to do what I had done in the barn that night.

  My years of studying the nature of souls led me to what I believe to be a subsequent step – trapping souls. The basic idea was to put a living, breathing thing inside a humid glass tube filled with mist that was produced by the machine I created. Along with the falling water droplet, my machine also dispersed a steady current of electricity, which bounced around inside. The current, in theory, would stop the heart and separate the soul from the body, while the humidity trapped the soul inside. It is a Latin American belief that leaving a glass of water out will trap a soul, purify it, and then send it to Heaven. So if a body is coated in water, then it should become unsuitable for the soul without the soul actually leaving. In other words, I make the body uninhabitable for the soul, but I also turn the body into a cage that keeps the soul from escaping. This is the essential premise behind the trapping of souls—and it’s all you need to know.

  I’m not going to go into any more detail about how the process of trapping a soul works, for reasons I've already gone over. You probably wouldn’t even understand it, to be completely honest with you. I will tell you, however, that it was incredibly hard to pull off because the soul kind of runs on an alternate plane of existence, and for a reason I’m not a hundred percent sure of, electrified H2O is the only thing that has any effect on it.

  I had just brewed some tea, and I was going to take my soul trapping machine on its first real test run using a crow I had trapped in a cage the morning before. I placed it on the table next to some spare parts from past inventions of mine, including some I had used a few years back when building a time machine. And just a heads up, time travel, as it turns out, is kind of impossible, and things hadn’t ended to pretty when I tried to travel into the future; but that is another story entirely. Building a soul trapping machine takes a lot of expensive parts, so it was a good thing I never threw anything out.

  Anyway, after flicking the switch, everything seemed to be running smoothly. The sexy blue bolts rippled behind the glass, coiling through the mist, hissing and whistling. The moving parts, though graceful in motion, were loud and aggravating. The cacophony, to my colorful and scientific imagination, sounded as if two washing machines were making rough passionate love during an earthquake.

  With one hand covering my ear, I turned off the machine and grabbed the bird from its cage, and then I tore open the glass door and shoved the bird inside before quickly shutting it. Then, taking one last sip of my warm tea, I flipped the on switch once again.

  At once, the crow began to levitate to the center of the glass tube, spinning around as the blue bolts roasted its feathers off its body one by one, and before I knew it, the bird was dead. Its neck contorted to one side, its wings drooped from the rest of it, and patches of pink skin bled through its black coating.

  I turned the machine off, the bird plummeted down, slapping the mettle flooring of the machine with a doughy-wet thud, and I anxiously peered through the transparent-pink glass. I then waited. Waited for the soul to try to escape, and dearly hoped that it wouldn’t, because if it did, all my work would be for nothing and I honestly wouldn’t know how to start over. Luckily, though, it did work, and I knew that it did work the second the dead-birds body snapped stiff. The bird, which was now just a pile of feathers and pink patches, began to arch its whole body until its spine snapped—this happened in a single, swift, violent action, allowing more of its feathers to flake off. It no longer looked like a crow, but looked like some weird concoction some evil scientists could conjure up.

  I’m not sure why, but I moved back a little. Not for a second did I take my eyes off the creature. The parts of its skin that were visible began to writhe, and ripple, as if it were made of some kind of thick liquid that was reacting to a vibration. The soul was… freaking out, for a lack of better terminology.

  You know how sometimes when a pregnant mother’s stomach ripples, and you can see the imprint of a baby foot on her side? That was how it looked all over the bird’s body; only the “kicks” were coming fast, violent, and each one sent a jolt so strong that the crow began to flop around.

  All of the sudden, it stopped, and when it did, the crow's wings started to go off like fireworks, and up it went. Ricocheting off the glass in hollow thuds; falling down again, and then rocketing up.

  “Holy fuck!” I screamed aloud, horrified, but oddly delighted.

  The next day was the morning I was telling you about. The morning that the hand was running right for me. Dammit, that hand… I can’t seem shed its bony image from my mind.

  I only got three ho
urs of sleep that night because I was so astonishingly anxious about what I was planning on doing that day. I knew it was going to be groundbreaking. The kind of thing that would be on the news for weeks; on the cover of every magazine by every major publisher; the talk of every goddamn town. Most importantly, though, it would lead to more research, and possibly lead to answers to some of life's important questions. Although I still carry this belief with me after years have gone by, I really don’t care about any of those things anymore. I’m going to use my technology for my own selfish gain now.

  I had fallen asleep in my bed, hugging my portable heater, and an array of philosophy books about death and the soul scattered all across the small bed I was on. I had put that bed in there months before because I often found myself staying out in the barn, not wanting to go inside because I was too engrossed in my work.

  The dead crow was back in its cage, and it was flopping around, pecking at its own skin. I watched that thing, flabbergasted, for most of the night. It was truly insane that a dead creature could move. Of course, though, it did not have a functioning brain anymore. The brain was dead. I’m sure it could not see either. Souls don’t have eyes, but I believe that they may