Chapter 10
BAZEL
He did not like this mood on Geri. It did not suit her.
“You should have ice cream,” he suggested.
“I’m not eating my emotions.” Pushing off with a foot, she maneuvered her bicycle into traffic, keeping her eyes forward.
No, he did not like this at all.
Keeping pace with the bicycle was no challenge.
He was incorporeal and manifested alongside her, never more than a few steps away.
If she moved, he moved, no matter the speed or velocity.
It was very handy in the modern world with fast-moving vehicles.
However, it found the current situation vexing.
He shifted, stepping into the area of the bicycle’s basket. He could not sit, per say, but it was almost as if they shared the contraption.
The view was… alarming. They moved on the street at a distressing pace. He shouted a warning as a door opened on an automobile. The bicycle swerved to avoid collision.
Geri frowned, leaning to one side. “Move. I can’t see through you.”
“What is our destination?”
“The hospital if you don’t stop blocking my view.”
He shifted, this time materializing on the seat behind her. The position was superior in all regards.
“I’m going home. Where else do I have to be? My life is just invisible entities and dead people,” she said in a bitter tone.
Why he should be concerned with her mood was baffling.
He understood that she took this post under duress and cheerfulness was not a requirement in collecting souls.
He himself could be quite morose. He suspected that Zarall had never experienced a jovial thought in his entire existence.
Humble Good Day was quite amiable but he was the exception.
A lighthearted disposition was not a requirement of the job.
“You did what was required today. Well done,” he said. No one could ask for more. Not even management.
Geri made a grumbling noise which he found distressing. He did not like to see her unhappy. It was most disagreeable.
He made a hurried decision, which was out of character.
“Turn right there,” he said, pointing at an upcoming intersection. “There is someplace I want to show you.”
“I don’t think I’m up for a field trip.”
“It is where I like to go when I feel the weight of my responsibilities.”
“Intriguing,” she said, her voice perking with curiosity. “New reaper lore is about to drop.”
Her words were nonsensical, but she followed his instructions and turned. Perhaps it was a lingering effect of having lost his scythe or draining his power to resurrect her, but this pleased him.
GERI
Geri stood, straddling the bike. “This is a grocery store.”
Specifically, an Acme parking lot.
Bazel directed her through lanes and narrow streets, working off some mental map charted two hundred years ago when the city was paved with wooden blocks. Alleyways, byways, and snickelways. Philadelphia had all the fancy places.
They headed in a general southerly direction but never took a direct path. Bones chased after them, never tiring and avoiding the traffic that could not see her.
“Can Bones get hit by a car?” Geri asked. Frankly, the way the dog darted in and out of traffic was heart-stopping.
“Possibly. I’ve never tried,” Bazel answered. “Do you want to find out? Seems cruel.”
“No. We are not finding out.” She would just have to believe that Bones wasn’t a dog. She was something more, unfathomably old, undeniably intelligent, and could take care of herself. Probably. “I don’t want her to get hurt.”
“A mortal cannot hurt her. Turn here.” Bazel pointed with a skeletal hand to a narrow alleyway that was barely wide enough to accommodate her bike.
She wasn’t a fan of being the reaper’s personal chauffeur, but he wanted to share his happy place.
Where did a grim reaper go for comfort? A cemetery?
Nah, too obvious. City morgue? Pet store?
There was absolutely no logical connection between the two locations.
None. What about a bakery? No judgment. Bakeries were her favorite place.
The smell of warm bread just scratched all the right spots in her brain.
Finally, he gave the order to stop.
Not a bakery and not a cemetery.
Geri popped the bike over the curb onto the sidewalk to get out of the way of traffic. She moved as far to the side as possible. She knew this intersection. If they had traveled in a straightforward manner, she would have realized that they were only a few blocks from Molly and Anh’s place.
“A grocery store,” she said, less than impressed.
“This is once the Moyamensing prison,” Bazel said, spreading his hands wide, as if this were a grand reveal, and not, in fact, a spot she had ridden past hundreds of times.
“This is your happy place?” Perhaps she was missing the picturesque qualities.
She turned around. Eleventh Street basically terminated in the Acme parking lot.
Reed Street made a strange ninety-degree turn.
There was 10th Street, Passyunk, and Reed making an absolute mess of an intersection on the far side of the parking lot.
There was a drug store and a drycleaner, and the tangle of streets and lack of planning was evidence that the city had grown around something immovable. A prison would do it.
There was a thin row of trees between the pavement and the street, offering some shade, but without a bench it hardly seemed inviting for periods of reflection. There wasn’t even a plaque to mark the historic spot.
Geri had ridden past this spot a hundred times on her bike on her way to Molly and Anh’s and never once given it a second thought.
An old prison had been there once, torn down decades before she was born.
Everyone knew that. Now it was nothing more than an inconvenient snarl in the street grid with a parking lot.
Bazel drifted down the sidewalk and around the corner. Geri followed, pushing her bike. The back of the grocery store was absolutely mundane, excluding a low stone wall.
“It is difficult taking a soul, even a dark soul, and I like to come here to be with my thoughts,” he said. He reached out to the knee-high stone wall. “This wall is all that remains.”
“I have to be honest, I have a hard time seeing the appeal.”
He tilted his head to one side, his cloak moving in an ethereal wind.
Bones sniffed around the trees, no doubt smelling every dog in the neighborhood who passed by.
“Memory casts a favorable glow over a mundane tableau, I confess,” he said at length.
“Okay.” Geri leaned forward on the handlebars. “Share a memory.”
“I took my most famous soul here. H.H. Holmes, noted serial killer.”
“H.H. Holmes? That man killed like two dozen people.” In the days after the divorce, Geri found a lot of comfort in serial killer documentaries. No, she couldn’t explain why.
She didn’t want to talk about it.
Yes, the irony wasn’t lost on her that she felt shaky and disturbed by watching a man die less than an hour ago and serial killer documentaries were her comfort show. Seeing someone die in real life was so different from passively watching it flicker on a tv screen.
Apparently she wanted to talk about it a little bit.
“Confessed to twenty-seven but he killed many, many more. His soul was black, rotted from the inside,” Bazel said, his tone wistful.
“I took his soul and tore the veil, but he was stubborn. He tried to possess his own body after his death, reanimating even as he hanged in the noose. It was a terrible sight.”
The way he spoke with a touch of nostalgia, it really did not sound terrible.
“Eventually, he lost his hold on his world and went into the void.”
“And you like to reminisce about it? I mean, you’re a reaper, so expectations are different, but that seems dark.”
“No. I come here to remember another. A friend.” He paused again. “He could only see me when inebriated.”
“I thought people couldn’t see you,” she said.
“Under the right conditions. Delicate constitutions. Fragile grips on reality. Excessive drug or alcohol consumption. All these can bring a mortal closer to the veil, able to peer through, but not cross. His name appeared several times in my book but always vanished before it was time to collect.”
Words failed her. Anything she said would sound judgy and she had an inkling of how lonely it was moving through the world invisible. Eventually she said, “It’s nice that you had a friend.”
“He did not believe so. Called me a fiend and attacked me, though no one else could perceive me. He was held for a night here. Unable to flee, we had a chance to speak at last. He was fascinating. A poet, you know, but his time was brief. He died only a handful of months later.”
“Wait…” Geri put the pieces together. The city had one famous poet who was more famous for being a drunk. “Are you talking about Poe? Edgar Allan Poe? ‘Quoth the raven’ Poe?”
“He had a soul unlike any other mortal.”
Okay. Interesting. The reaper was a big fan. Geri wasn’t sure what to do with that information but it was good to know.
“Were you the one to reap his soul?”
“Alas, his name did not appear in my book for that final assignation,” he said, his voice remorseful.
Poe died in Baltimore, she recalled, which had to be out of network.
“I totally get wanting to come back to a place where you hung out with a friend,” she said. “When I have a bad day, I usually pester Molly. It might be cliche to say your sister is your best friend, but yeah. She is.”
“She gets you,” he said, repeating Geri’s words from the hospital.
“Well, it’s true. She gets me.” Molly was protective but not smothering. She never tried to bubble wrap Geri to keep her from being hurt, which was usually a person’s first instinct when they learned about her hemophilia. “It’s been that way since we were kids.”
“Today has not been easy.”
“I see where you’re going with this.” She glanced toward the grocery store. Her sister wouldn’t slam the door in her face if she turned up uninvited, but bringing a small gift was the polite thing to do. “Anh likes plums. Let’s pick some up at the store.”