Please be okay.
“We’d be fully human again?” Quinn asked in an awed voice. “We’d be able to age?”
She shook her head. “There is no reversing the gift, but what I can offer is even better. You would be immortal and free. You would never age, nor could you be killed by any conventional means. You would not get sick. You would not even need to eat to survive. At least, not conventional food. All would be the same as it is now, except that you could roam the earth, untethered to this school. Not only would you be free, but you would have the means to enjoy that freedom to its fullest extent.”
This is pointless. She’s not reversing what she’s done, only enabling them to walk outside the grounds, which we already know we can do by carrying around the sigils. But she doesn’t know that.
One glance at Trey’s face and a new fury burned inside me. She offered them nothing they didn’t already have for themselves and acted as if it was some great boon. Trey’s hands curled into fists. “We don’t want to be immortal. We want normal lives.”
“Why be normal when you are extraordinary?” She licked her lips. “You can sup of the riches and wonders of life at your own pace, over and over again until the sun swallows this feeble planet. What you see as a curse is truly agift– the greatest gift the god has given us.”
“You’re immortal, too,” I blurted out.
“Not exactly. Your parents’ power and the longevity granted me is nothing on what you are capable of. The god extended my life – and the lives of the faculty – but we cannot heal ourselves, nor do we possess the powers you haven’t even touched yet… such as the ability to walk in dreams.”
Hmmmm.I thought of Trey speaking to me through my dream when I was trapped in Dunwich.Little does she know…
“That’s not true.” Quinn’s eyes darted to me briefly before flicking away. “Even if the god isn’t giving them power anymore, they’ve been drinking his Kool-Aid for a long time. The god is where the real power comes from, and to him we’re nothing but a tasty snack.”
That mirthless smile spread across Ms. West’s lips. “No, no. You are so muchmorethan that. How much do you know about the human soul?”
I narrowed my eyes. “I thought you were a scientist.”
“Iama scientist – one with an academic interest in souls as a body of energy.” Her eyes swiveled to the ceiling, a smug smile playing across her lips. “The concept of a soul is unique in that it is present across practically all earth religions and cultures. On some innate level, we allknowthat while our human body can die, our consciousness – what makes us who we are – lives on as a separate entity. Souls are key to our belief in a future after death. Without the soul, the world can only possibly exist in the moment. The soul gives us subjectivity. While we believe that the world has an objective truth, when observed through the lens of our own experiences and biology the world will present asubjectivetruth, unique to each person. Subatomic experiments bear out this fact. The universal rules we’ve bound ourselves to – rules of space and time and gravity and relativity – are tools we’ve designed to hold the subjective together. Some members of the scientific community, myself included, believe this is because the soul itself is made of a kind of energy not found elsewhere in our universe – energy that arrived on earth from somewhere or somewhen else entirely.”
“Like the god?” Quinn asked. Ms. West nodded.
“We know the god came here from a far corner of the known universe, perhaps even from outside our universe. We know he requires souls to survive, but perhaps it was he who brought the soul here in the first place. For he was present on earth long before Thomas Parris, before the human race was birthed, perhaps even before the first spark of life ignited. Perhaps hewasthe spark. He has been lying in wait, dead but dreaming, ever since. We do not know why he came, but he has revealed his intention – to colonize our galaxy and to build on earth a factory of souls to fuel his expanding race.”
“He’s never said that to me,” I said.
“You do not ask the right questions. He revealed this to Vincent Bloomberg during their first meeting, when Vincent took over the role of President of the Eldritch Club from his father.”
Trey snorted. “Trust my father to see a malevolent cosmic deity as a kindred spirit.”
“Vincent is nothing if not brilliant.” Ms. West’s voice took on this wistful tone I’d never heard before. She turned to me, but her eyes were far away. “You may not know, but your boyfriend’s father is the director of one of the biggest aerospace technology companies in the world. The combination of his astrophysics background and his judicious imagination meant he was the first member of the Eldritch Club to discern the god’s true purpose. That’s why Vincent contracted me to study the god. He knew I was uniquely suited to help both the god and him achieve their aims.”
“What aims were those?” Trey demanded.
Ms. West waved her hand. She was clearly going to tell this story in her own time. “Before I knew your father or had contact with the god, my early experiments looked at how to separate the soul from the body – the subjective from the objective. I figured out that trauma severs the soul/body connection. And, of course, the greatest trauma a human can endure is their own death. The soul as energy is then reabsorbed and reused as part of the world, in a similar way that all life on earth is made from the dust of stars. What this reabsorption involves is unclear – are souls reincarnated, or does that energy become something else? These are the questions I wanted to answer but have not yet fathomed. What Idoknow is that the most traumatic deaths can damage a soul so it cannot be absorbed, giving us ghosts and spirits who linger on our plane.”
Easy pickings for a god who devours souls – like the ghosts of the witches that haunted Parris. I shuddered at the memory of the names scratched on the walls of the weight room. I still didn’t know how they tied into all this, or why the rats scratched them for us to read. And I didn’t want to ask Ms. West. I had a feeling she hadn’t noticed the scratches, and I didn’t want to give away the rats’ secret.
“After many months of unsuccessful attempts, I was able to intercept the soul on the very point of transition,” Ms. West explained. “The soul is just energy, and any standard conductor of energy can then be used to direct that soul wherever I wish.”
“You did experiments on cadavers at Arkham General,” I said.
“Of course. To test my theory, I needed subjects on the brink of death. I needed to be able to capture the soul at the very point of its observable transition. And it proved successful – I was able to isolate and trap the human soul within an occult sigil.”
I wondered about the sigils I found on the Miskatonic Prep graves. Had the sigils somehow trapped their souls? But there wasn’t time to consider it – I had to focus on Ms. West’s words, for each sounded more insane than the last.
She continued. “Now that I had captured a human soul, what could I do with it? I wanted to know what happened if I placed the soul in another body. What if I could move a dying soul into a new body and therefore eliminate death entirely?
“But before I could explore further, the hospital discovered my experiments. There was an inquiry. I explained the importance of my work, but they could not see beyond the potential litigation into the wider benefits for humanity. Luckily, Vincent sat on the hospital board and immediately recognized my brilliance. He stepped in at the last minute with an offer I couldn’t refuse.
“He introduced me to the god. When he opened those trapdoors, what rushed at me was the sensation of a soul leaving, only amplified a hundredfold. I knew then that Vincent was right in his theory – what for centuries has been called a god or a demon is really an alien entity that required no food to exist, but a kind of living energy that originated from its home across the stars. It had been starving for millennia, for it was trapped beneath the earth, starved of souls, the very thing which I could supply.
“Vincent explained that he could kill a person and throw their corpse into the prison, and the entity – the god, if you prefer – would give off a small burst of power that Vincent could use. He wanted a way to make that power grow and last. I knew immediately what was happening – in the same way we eat food to give our bodies energy, the god devoured the soul and took the nutrients of life itself to give off an energy that has never before been discovered in our world. And that energy was absorbed by Vincent and other members of the Eldritch Club – all descendants of powerful witches and occult leaders. The answer to Vincent’s question was therefore simple – if he wants a great release of this energy, his god requires a great feast of souls.”
