Currency of Souls

betrayed him and herself, by waiting until she was alone to die.

Then, abruptly, her mouth drops open. His moaning subsides. Frantically, he scrubs tears from his eyes, narrows them, afraid to believe he has just seen what they are telling him he’s seen.

And though no life returns to her face, she speaks, though here is where Wintry knows memory has slipped the rails. It hardly matters though, because what she says are the same words that have tailed him through life.

“You killed me.”

With a roar that is animalistic yet filled with sorrow and rage, Wintry once more regains his feet and without knowing, without caring, whether his aim is sure, he swivels on his heel and jabs hard at the air. His father is prepared and smiling a suddenly silver smile. He dodges the punch, as Wintry knew he would. It is a feint, a ploy to induce the dead man to open up into a vulnerable position. His father has grown too certain, too comfortable, depending on his son’s injuries and hesitation to make him predictable. In the old days he would have anticipated the feint. But these are not the old days.

An instant too late, he realizes his folly, tries to correct it. And in that instant Wintry unleashes a volley of punches: left jab, straight right, left hook, uppercut. His father reels, but refuses to go down, so Wintry does not stop. The anger in him rages to the surface, equals the fire in his wounds. Straight left, jab, jab, rabbit punch, right hook, uppercut…

“You fuckin’…” his father starts to say, his teeth connected by strings of black blood. Wintry steps back, watches his father try to regain his balance, and does not wait.

“Sonofabitchin’ los—”

Uppercut.

It almost takes his father’s head off.

“What…do…you…see?” Wintry says, his teeth grinding out a squeak as he punctuates every word with another punch, his arm pulling back, head jutting forward, knuckles crunching into yielding bone, skin slipping against tar-like blood. “What…do…you…see…you…son…of… a…bitch?”

“Wintry?”

The voice does not belong here, so he ignores it. There is no third man in the ring, no chief second howling advice at him, no cut man. There are no lights, no crowd, no world beyond the face that is caving in like a pumpkin but will not fall.

“Wintry, what the hell?”

“Fuckin’ palooka, fuckin’ tomato can,” his father manages to spit between punches. He raises his hands, covers, tries to block the barrage of lethal blows, but Wintry is fast now, on fire, caught up in a memory he can never change and so uses to deliver him from the loathsome presence of a man long dead, a man who didn’t need to physically return to haunt him. In the dark house inside Wintry’s head, the man he called father is a permanent resident.

“Go down,” he demands, the words slicing his throat. “Go down.”

“Wintry!” A shout, right into his ear and he knows it must be addressed, knows it must be dealt with. He prepares his last blow, the last shot, a right hook he imagines as a scythe that will slice through anything it touches. His father straightens, grins bloodily, goading him.

Wintry swings.

His fist thuds into rotten oak.

Chapter Twelve

“There’s nothing I can do for you,” the doctor tells him. “Take it to the Sheriff.”

Vess sags and his suit starts to feel like a tortoise shell, waiting to conceal his addled mind from a world that rarely seems inclined to cut it a break. “I thought…She told me to—”

Hendricks scowls. “This isn’t my business.” He starts to close the door and Vess, in an uncharacteristically bold move, makes an obstruction of his foot, which the doctor looks at as if some unpleasant rodent has just insinuated its way into his domain. Fear ripples through Vess. This is not how he behaves. He has forgotten much, but knows that what he has just done is a violation of the doctor’s sanctuary, his private quarters, and that if it suited him, the doctor could take any steps he deemed necessary to remove the foot, and its owner, and be well within his rights to do so.

So he speaks quickly. “She was shut up in a fridge, a white coffin. She wasn’t supposed to be in there. She told me. Said I needed to find someone, let them know where she was and why she was there.” He composes a sincere sorrowful look that nonetheless feels false under the glaring light from the doctor’s spectacles. “She’s a lady, Doctor, and no lady needs to be treated like that, left alone with no one to pray for her. And she doesn’t want to be there any more. Can’t blame her for that. She needs help.”

Hendricks looks up from the offending appendage keeping the door open. “What is it you think I can do for her?”

To this, Vess has no answer. All he can think of is that surely a man as distinguished and gifted as Doctor Hendricks can do more for her than he can, but before he has a chance to organize those words into a proper sentence, he feels a jarring pain in his foot and quickly withdraws it. When he looks up, the Doctor’s face is crimson.

“I have things to attend to,” he snaps. “Now take your goddamn finger and bring it to someone who can actually do something about it, assuming you didn’t swipe it from a boneyard somewhere.”

“No, sir. Oh no this wasn’t—”

The door is slammed shut hard enough to make his coat flutter. The gunshot-like echo is quickly drowned in the dense river of mist that has seeped up from the quiet earth. Vess stares at the door for a few moments, runs the tips of his fingers over the woodgrain, willing the doctor to come out again, then after a few moments, sighs and turns away.

“He wouldn’t listen.”

He has never claimed to be clever, or wise, and certainly not someone to turn to when a plan of action is required. He has drifted through these recent years with no responsibilities save one: to find the box and get home, but though he has vowed never to give up, his hope fades with every passing day.

“Find him,” the finger advises, and he smiles down at where it lays unmoving, nestled in his palm.

“Are you cold?”

“Find him. He must know.”

“It will probably be warm later today, but it isn’t now. I don’t want you to be chilly. Here,” he says and gently lays the small brown bundle inside his hat and pops it on his head. The bones are cold against his scalp. “I was distracted. I let my mind get away from me again. I should have thought of you being cold. I’m sorry.”

The finger doesn’t reply.

Vess puts a long-nailed finger to his chin and scratches at the stubble.

The Sheriff is a member of an exclusive club that gathers at the tavern on the hill. But of course the tavern burned down last night. Still, this early in the morning, perhaps that’s where the Sheriff will be, maybe picking through the remains of the place or making sure the fire is well and truly out. Barring that, he might be home, or at the jail, but one of the three sounds probable. If nothing else, it will keep Vess moving, keep him filled with that sense of purpose, keep him feeling useful.

For now, he is Kirk Vess, emissary.

Kirk Vess, soldier. And while there are no mortars detonating around him, no razor wire tugging at his clothes, no mud sucking at his feet, no bullets whizzing by, carving out the grooves in his face that he still bears today, no mustard gas tugging at his lungs, his charge seems no less important, no less thrilling.

He walks, and the small cold bundle pressing against his crown is a lock on the gate of his misgivings, holding back the tide of disappointment that has struggled to overcome him since the discovery that the metal box