There was no denying that, after the conversation that Hope and Albert had just had, the nature of their relationship had changed. Albert saw it most clearly, while Hope regarded it as nothing more than a moment of weakness. She had shown him kindness, empathy, she had even gone out of her way to help him when it would have been simpler for her to let him die and renegotiate from that position. Her father would have praised her for it even. But it had been nice, in an unusual way, Hope thought; to be kind, to be welcomed, to be needed.
But, as Albert left the main room of the agency, Hope swore silently to herself that she would never be so soft again. Not to anyone. Not even Albert; not even the only person that had asked her for assistance, genuinely asked her, in well over a hundred years. It had filled a void in her heart and she her instincts told her that she had to be firm and hollow it out again.
Albert, on the other hand, began to hyperventilate as soon as he was alone in the wash room connected to Hope’s office. The peace and calm that privacy afforded him, however, made it easier to calm down than if he’d been closer to Hope. It still took several minutes, but with the stink of the small pile of goop covered items he’d promptly dropped in the small sink he stood before Albert felt the compulsion to accomplish his task slowly outweigh his dread.
The small pile of things that Pincushion had spat out—at least that was what Albert hoped the cat spirit had done to produce them—were mostly covered in ink that had spilled from the open inkwell that was also part of the pile. But there was still some kind of other goo mixed in as well that Albert couldn’t place. It wasn’t acid like bile or vomit, and it wasn’t excrement. It was almost like petroleum jelly, but it didn’t actually lubricate the surfaces it touched. It didn’t resist force either; rather, it was merely a neutral sort of easily spreadable gelatinous paste. And it smelled of death, rot, and decay.
Since the inkwell was empty and the only thing it would do is spread more stained water around as Albert washed the rest of the things, it was set aside. The cell phone, as well, required a dry approach and was set aside. The rest, the quill and glasses, Albert ran water over and rubbed clean with his thumb. It wasn’t pretty, and they would need to dry out, but they would be functional and didn’t stink anymore. Albert tried to remember what other items had been in his backpack that he’d gotten from the office. There had been his own contracts folder, the associates list, the paperwork from the fake internship… he couldn’t remember if there was more.
Once the glasses were mostly clean, Albert lifted them carefully on to his face so that he could see Pincushion. He had assumed the cat spirit had followed him into the wash room, and he was not wrong. It was sitting on its hind legs by Albert’s feet, patiently watching as he cleaned up the mess it had made. It seemed to notice that he could see it now, and offered a happy purr as Albert looked down at it.
“I’d ask what you’re so happy about, but you just wanted to be seen again. Isn’t that right?”
Pincushion issued a happy meow at Albert’s comment.
“And I’m really grateful that you did. I don’t know how you managed to get my things after I went inside the den, or how you made your way back to the alleyway, but thank you.”
The cat spirit issued another happy meow and rubbed the side of its face against Albert’s ankle. Or, at least, it tried to. Albert didn’t quite feel the contact, though he saw it through the glasses. It was like a wind brushing up against the cuff of his jeans. Spirits, being only partially solid, had the misfortune of existing in a situationally interactive state. Albert knew the frustration that that could cause from his own brief existence as nothing more than a half-dead spirit. But Pincushion seemed content with the limited interaction.
“But at the same time, I almost wish you hadn’t been there. Because if you hadn’t, I get the feeling I would have just forgotten all over again. I would have gone back home, the symptoms would have faded, and I never would have interacted with Hope again.” Albert gripped the lip of the sink basin in a death grip as he let the train of thought run its course. “That’s what I feel, anyway. But at the same time, this was inevitable. Wasn’t it. They know where I live, and sooner or later someone would have seen me. They went looking. This is so stupid. Why do I feel grateful?!”
Albert had to stifle his frustration sot that Hope wouldn’t actually hear him talking about her. Pincushion made a noise that Albert couldn’t quite place, but he ignored the cat spirit’s reaction.
“I don’t want to feel like I owe her anything, you know? Like, she’s terrible. You can feel it under your skin when you’re around her. It’s like everyone else is just a toy to her. And now I feel like I owe her, because she put me back together…”
With a groan of frustration, Albert looked back down to his hands. They were white with the strain of his grip. And below them, he saw the cat spirit start to swirl around his feet in a figure eight.
“I’m loosing it.” Albert said with a quiet breath as he let go of the sink and pushed his hands through his hair. “I know people talk to pets all the time, but you’re dead and you can understand me. And as cool as that might be, it’s just so crazy I can’t trust that anything is real right now.”
The cat stopped and looked up at Albert, making eye contact that he had never seen any sort of non-human creature make before. Even gorillas at the zoo never really had that sort of intent behind their eyes when they stared you down. It was a piercing look that, apart from being unnerving due to it’s source, also felt comforting in a strange way. It was the spirit’s attempt to level with Albert, to say “that is crazy, but it’s also real.” That was the message Albert intuited, and it was very nearly exactly what the spirit was trying to tell him. But it was just the tip of an iceberg of information that the spirit wished it could confer upon him.
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“Alright.” Albert muttered after letting out a quiet sigh. “You think we should go finish that conversation with Hope?”
A chirp from the cat spirit seemed to indicate it’s answer as it walked out of the washroom ahead of Albert.
Hope was not situated in her office, and Albert thought better of lingering there lest he damage anything by accident. But when he emerged back into the main lobby, Hope was still nowhere to be found. There wasn’t any noise coming from the storage closet either. It wasn’t until Albert directed his attention to Death’s personal office that he noticed a dim light behind the ever so slightly ajar door.
“Hope?” Albert called out. “Everything’s cleaned up and I think I’ve got my head back on straight all the way. Was there anything else you needed me to do?”
There was a surprised jolt of movement from beyond the door, Albert could hear something like a wooden draw shut suddenly before Hope spoke up.
“Yes! Hold on. I need you to write down everything you remember from your outing with Graham.” Hope seemed slightly flustered as she emerged from her father’s office with a legal pad in one hand and a small stack of other papers in the other.
The fluster in Hope’s voice made Albert uncomfortable. He interpreted it as the result in the shift in their relationship. It had moved past a mere professional one into something more intimate. Not friendship, not romantic. At least, Albert hoped it wasn’t romantic.
In reality, their relationship had become the kind one develops with someone that goes above and beyond to help them for no good reason. An altruistic bond; perhaps one of the oddest types of social bonds. They are difficult to discuss, as they are often misconstrued to be some kind of romantic interest, and they tend to be stronger than most all casual connections. Even when the two parties dislike each other in the way that Albert and Hope now disliked each other. Even as each of their distaste for the other had grown, the connection of altruistic cooperation remained stronger.
“Here.” Hope held out the legal pad at a full arm’s length as if getting any closer to Albert was distasteful. “I’ll get you some more ink, so you can use your quill.”
“Oh, no. Don’t burden yourself on my part.” Albert caught hold of the potential danger of the offer, suddenly remembering Amy’s advice about receiving help at the office. If he agreed to let Hope do anything for him, she could trap him in an open-ended agreement that could leave him legitimately in debt to her in a contractual sense.
“Oh, shut up.” Hope groaned as she dumped the legal pad in Albert’s hands and walked back into the supply closet. “If I was going to stoop so low as instituting a verbal contract without your full awareness and consent, I wouldn’t have bothered to keep you alive in the first place.”
“Right…” Albert whispered. It was mostly to himself, but when he looked down he saw Pincushion looking up at him as she listened just intently to the conversation.
“Actually, before I put pen to paper for you, you never answered my question from before.”
“What question?” Hope asked, a look of displeasure clear on her face as she leaned out of the door to the supply closet.
“How many souls did you end up taking from me? You said more than three, but I get the impression you have a better idea than that.”
Hope made her way all the way out of the closet before answering. She even handed Albert a full inkwell before she spoke. Her silence was contemplative. Not about the actual question itself, but whether or not she should reveal the truth.
“I checked just now.” Hope held up the other stack of papers in her hand. “These are documents outlining the spiritual property that were tied to the souls you transferred over to me. There’s about eighty or ninety of them. And my current holdings, the souls I have actively in my possession… when I ran that check it came back nearly two hundred and fifty over my estimate at the start of the day.”
Albert was almost too stunned to respond, two hundred and fifty was a lot. Way more than the two that had nearly rendered him totally blind the first time he’d worked as an arbitrator for Death. But a thought occurred to him that made it less impressive.
“Oh, but I’m sure you contracted for other souls today too. So about how many actually—”
“No, Albert. I didn’t.” Hope interrupted him. “We’ve been focused on locating our lost assets for the past three days. We haven’t written up new acquisition contracts for anyone since we realized that something was wrong. You just handed me, if my math is correct—which it is—two-hundred and forty-eight souls.”
With confirmation of his initial shock, Albert was left truly speechless. Even Pincushion, cat spirit though she was, didn’t offer any sort of noise in response. All eyes in the room were blank and overwhelmed, unwilling to accept the truth of what had just happened.
“It makes sense, in a way.” Hope spoke up. “Altering someone’s memory isn’t exactly simple work, even for us. It takes a lot of logic, a lot of mental redirection. Cutting off certain memory pathways and connecting them to others. It’s comparable to actual brain surgery. Which makes sense out of the length of your disappearance. Whoever took you, I’m betting this Madame Offry, spent three days diluting your mind with souls so that you would forget something important.”
“Should I write that down?” Albert was lost. He had his quill in one hand, the legal pad in the other, and his jaw as near to the floor as it could get while he was standing upright.
“Take some more time, if you need. You can sit at Milli’s desk.” Hope gestured to the desk Albert had sat in front of after signing on to work for Death. “I’m going to call my father and clue him in on the situation. I’ve already put it off long enough.”
Without other options coming to mind, Albert followed the directions given to him. He sat down at the desk, waited several minutes while he heard Hope talking on the phone in the background, and then put the pad of paper down and started writing. The phrase “I was worried there might be some kind of permanent side-effects” came up in Hope’s phone conversation more than once. And by the time she slapped her phone shut to end the call with her father, Albert found himself at the bottom of his second page with nothing more to write.
The sound of movement from within Death’s office told Albert that the contractor had returned. And all he could think about, now that things were starting to return to normal—or as near as they could get to normal—was that there was no way that he was going to be able to look at Hope in the same room as Death and not have her father realize that something unusual had happened. Something Albert wasn’t sure if he’d be killed for.