Chapter 26 #2
‘You mean they sacrificed themselves?’ I asked, appalled.
Blake nodded. He still hadn’t moved a muscle, as if it was taking all his focus to keep talking. ‘It created a sort of tool, which enabled the other participants in the ceremony to liberate their own souls from their bodies.’
My mouth opened and closed several times without producing any sound.
My mind raced with a hundred questions and objections, but I forced myself to put them aside.
If I wanted to understand what was going on here, I had to be open to what Blake was saying.
No matter how far-fetched it all sounded, I had to at least try to keep an open mind.
I could decide at the end what to think about it.
‘Okay,’ I said, deliberately matter-of-fact.
‘But a soul without a body, can it survive?’ I’d read that some cultures and religions believed the human soul detached itself from the body after death.
But as far as I knew, it then either passed into the afterlife or was reabsorbed into the natural cycle, ready to inhabit the world again into some other form.
‘No, it has to … anchor itself in another body, otherwise it breaks apart. Permanently.’ Blake’s voice broke on the last word, as if it were an oath. Or a curse.
‘So it has to enter the body of another person? Like a … corpse?’ My mouth twisted, and I quickly took another sip of honey milk to mask it.
Blake pushed away from the lip of the countertop and came towards the island. I tensed, but he just pulled one of the stools aside to sit down. ‘No, it doesn’t work that way. A body has to be alive to be habitable.’
‘But if we’re assuming every human has a soul,’ I began tentatively, ‘then surely that means there’s one inside it already?’
‘Yes.’ Blake was running his thumb absently over a nick in the wood.
‘The moment a second soul enters the body, it’s sort of superimposed over the weaker one.
The first soul is still there, like a flimsy veil, but essentially it’s no longer …
animate. It’s a shadow of its former self.
The soul that lays claim to the body takes the reins, as it were. It takes over the person’s life.’
I frowned, baffled. My head was beginning to ache, and I felt dizzy again. ‘But if you’re effectively erasing someone’s soul, then that’s pretty much just … murder, isn’t it?’
Blake nodded. His face had gone pale, making the scar on his temple dark and prominent.
‘Why would someone do that? Just to have a different body? A lot of effort to go to for some plastic surgery.’ I forced out a smile, but Blake still wasn’t looking at me.
‘It’s not about any one body. It’s about being able to keep switching to a different shell before it dies.’
His words thickened between us until they were the only thing in the room.
Everything else faded. The light above the island flickered, the fridge’s hum fell to a whisper, my heart thudded dully in my ears.
I gripped the mug more tightly, but not even the warmth reached me.
It took all my focus to assemble a thought from the pieces I’d just been given.
Blake was telling me that these people had figured out how to put their own souls into strangers’ bodies, making them …
immortal, because only the body died, not the soul.
The soul could move on, and begin a new life.
One after another, while the original people …
wasted away in their own husk. Rationally, I could entertain the thought, but I couldn’t grasp it.
How could I? It went against everything I knew about life, death, nature.
But that was exactly the point – Blake was talking about something supernatural. Just like Professor Edwards had said.
I felt sick, pressing the back of my hand to my mouth. ‘That’s insane,’ I whispered.
Blake smiled faintly. ‘I told you, you wouldn’t want to believe it.’
It had nothing to do with wanting to. The question was, was I even capable of believing? How could I accept something so far-fetched as the truth? Something for which there was no evidence, besides the word of a person who had told me many times what a good liar he was?
‘If all this is really true’—I hesitated—‘then what has it got to do with you and your friends?’
He closed his eyes. ‘You already know.’
I clenched my teeth, hissing out a single word: ‘No.’
Blake looked down at me. I wished he hadn’t. I didn’t want to see the raw, open look on his face, I didn’t want to see that he was fighting back tears, I didn’t want to see that his whole expression was more intent and honest than ever before. ‘Yes, Mabel,’ he said roughly.
I pulled my hands into my lap, fingernails biting into my skin.
I had to feel something to distract me from the pain of this absurd revelation.
‘So, you’re telling me you’re some kind of wandering soul that infests other people’s bodies so you can live forever?
’ My voice quivered with the effort of stifling a frantic laugh.
‘We call ourselves soul-jumpers. But yes, that’s essentially the gist of what I am.’
I stared at him. There was no twitch at the corners of his mouth, no trace of amusement or derision.
He wasn’t making fun of me, he wasn’t lying.
He was telling me something he considered to be true.
I didn’t want to believe him, but suddenly I wasn’t sure how not to.
What did he stand to gain from telling me this story?
It was bonkers, sure, but at the same time it explained so much.
Everything I’d been trying to make sense of for weeks.
I’d been missing the glue that held together all the things I’d heard and witnessed.
Ashton and his friends’ behaviour, June’s death, Paulina jumping after her conversation with Jack, Professor Edwards’s death, my research with Davie, Blake’s hints and attempts to push me away, Zoe’s condition, which was getting worse the more time she spent with Ashton.
If I accepted the idea that the League of Starlings could mess with other people’s energy, it all made sense. But if I accepted that, I had to take the rest of Blake’s story seriously. I had to … believe him. Even if it meant forgetting everything else I thought I knew.
‘How long…’ I couldn’t bring myself to finish the sentence.
He understood me anyway. ‘There’s only one generation of us.
The original ceremony released us from our bodies, and we’ve been using the artefact to jump ever since, but it no longer allows us to make new soul-jumpers.
The League of Starlings has consisted of the same members from the very beginning: today there are one hundred and seventy-five. ’
My heart was droning in my throat, and I pressed my hand to it. ‘How long?’ I repeated tonelessly.
Blake’s eyes gleamed. ‘The ceremony took place in 1867. I was twenty-three.’
‘So you’re telling me’—I took a deep breath—‘you’re nearly one hundred and eighty years old?’
Blake’s lips twisted. I was still wishing he would burst into a laugh instead.
‘Depends how you look at it. The bodies were never older than twenty-five when I left them again. But if you’re counting by the age of my soul, then yes.
’ Again he smiled, a bit more genuinely this time.
‘I don’t think you can measure it in years, though.
There are too many other factors involved. ’
‘Like what?’
‘Experiences, memories, emotions you’ve gone through.
The way you’ve come to know the world, how many layers of life’s meaning you’ve already witnessed.
And what you’re like more generally.’ He shrugged.
‘Each individual has a different personality, a different depth to their soul. A totally unique way of thinking, feeling, living. I’ve met eighty-year-olds with the cheery, superficial souls of teenagers.
And children who have a way of looking at the world as if they’ve been here for hundreds of years.
’ His voice trailed off, as if he were thinking in that moment of the hundreds of people he had met.
Over the last one hundred and eighty years.
God, it was so… I pressed the heel of my hand to my temple. First get the facts, then interpret them. I pointed at him. ‘So … that’s not your body?’
‘Well, that also depends how you look at it,’ he replied, studying his hands. Or … not his, actually? ‘But no, it originally belonged to someone else.’
‘Blake Ames,’ I choked out. The words had never caught in my throat like that before. ‘Then, that’s not really your name?’
‘You knew that already, too.’
Yes, I did. I knew because he’d told me the night we met. Our first glimpse behind the curtain had perhaps been the truest of all – at least, until now. ‘Cliff,’ I whispered. ‘Your real name is Cliff.’
His expression relaxed, as it always did when I called him by that name.
‘We’re not supposed to use those names anymore.
We’re essentially … actors. When we take on another body, we immerse ourselves into that person’s life.
Which means we have to give up our own lives, the ones we had before, time and time again.
I’ve played many roles over the decades, but Cliff…
’ He shook his head. ‘I haven’t been Cliff for a very long time. ’
‘And yet it’s the name you gave me when we first met. Why?’
‘I’ve been asking myself the same question.
There was no reason, it didn’t even make sense.
I was just talking to you, and for the first time in ages, I felt like …
myself. A self I had to leave behind an eternity ago.
A self I’ve had to disown every day for over a hundred years in order to survive.
’ He smiled, and his eyes were almost cautious.
‘There was no reason, Mabel. There was only you.’