‘Do you want to leave?’ Blake asked, as if he knew very well I was questioning his sanity.
‘Would you let me?’
At last he looked up. His eyes were dark, the expression in them at once exhausted and alert. ‘As soon as you leave this flat… as soon as you leaveme, I can’t protect you anymore. So please don’t force me to choose what to hate myself for.’
‘Well, anyway. I don’t want to leave. Not until I know what’s going on.’ Now it was my turn to nod promptingly as I took another sip of milk. Each one made the shiver in me easier, more bearable.
‘If I tell you everything, you won’t want to believe me. It goes against everything your rational mind tells you about the world. And I know how much that matters to you.’
‘The truth matters to me more. So. Try me.’
Blake nodded hesitantly. ‘What Ashton told you about souls is true. It’s also true that he… that we have the ability to access the energy inside them and take some of it for ourselves.’
I felt several impulses at once: walking off without a word and bursting into laughter were the two strongest. Suppressing both, I counted to ten in my head before I trusted myself to answer. ‘Why would someone want to do that?’
Blake was watching me closely. ‘Feeding on other people’s souls energises you. It clears your mind, gives you a sense of vitality, euphoria, strength. It’s like… a kind of high. A special drug that only a handful of people are able to consume.’
‘So how come you guys figured it out, then?’ I tried my best to sound diplomatic, but it wasn’t easy. I didn’t doubt Blake believed what he was saying, but surely he must realise how it came across.
‘My ancestors were very spiritual. These days we might callthem witches, but that’s misleading. What they practisedwasn’t magic. They just understood how nature really works– how the universe works. They realised that human beings are made up of two elements that don’t necessarily have to be connected.’ He paused, as if I should be able to figure out the rest. But I hadn’t followed a word of what he was saying. ‘The body isn’t axiomatically bound to the soul,’ he continued slowly. ‘In theory, the two can exist independently of one another. And while the body is limited to a certain lifespan, the soul itself is eternal. So they began to wonder how they could free the soul from the mortality of its shell.’
The look on my face was starting to give me away. Was he really talking about…immortality? ‘How is that possible?’
‘Several of them imbued their combined life force into an object, letting all the energy in their souls flow into it.’
‘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 somethingsupernatural. 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.’
