Soul Census - War of Shadows - Book 1

Chapter 6.2 - Cyclecon 4

Earth Date: 16th of August 1939 CE
Location: Soul Sphere, Earth

Maddock awoke to find himself on black onyx floors, lying in a puddle of water. He looked around and realized he was in a hallway of the Soul Sphere that intersected with one of the main arteries leading to the Atrium. Feeling his jaw, he winced at a sharp pain, like someone had been playing chin music on it.

The memory of the dream snapped him to lucidity. He looked down at his body. No more translucent sheets and appendages. He was himself again. No pooka or tunnel around him. His ears picked up the sound of approaching footsteps—the familiar clattering of high heels. He slowly inched up from the ground to see a pair of familiar long gams attached to those heels.

“Good morning, Agent Maddock,” Director Black said.

Her eyes looked down at him—a look that made him feel like his mother was about to scold him for coming in drunk from a late-night romp.

“Hello, Mom,” Maddock said, picking himself off the ground. His clothes were soaked, the skin on his bare feet all wrinkled up. It was damn cold too. “What the hell happened?” he said. “How did I get here?”

Black was wearing a skirt that went above the knees, tight fitted too. She held her arms crossed and pressed against her chassis enough to show off her bubs.
Is she doing that on purpose?

“Ah, let’s see,” she said. “That Fury clan—they are a sensitive bunch, aren’t they? Have to end every sentence with a ‘yes’ for some odd reason, or they get really sore.” She stabbed a finger at him. “You, Mr. Maddock, had the misfortune of upsetting not just a member of the clan, but the chief himself! It’s a good thing he could see you’d been bathed in the River Styx, or he would have dropped you off on that floor as a mere sack of bones and Fury excrement.”

“Chief Adam?” Maddock said with a chuckle that sent pain throughout his jaw.

“Yes. At least you got past an introduction with him. And don’t mock the Blemmyes clan. The chief and his tribe have done more for us and humanity than you will ever know.”
“If you say so, muffin,” Maddock said. “So what else happened?”

“Well, after he knocked you into next week, he dropped you off here in the hallway. You’ve been out cold for a full day, lying there like wet rags. Quite the spectacle.”

Maddock looked around at the agents, who gave him odd stares as they passed by him through the hallway.

“You know, you could have moved me to somewhere a little more private to recover?”

Black shrugged. “Oh, you were sleeping so peacefully that I felt horrible at the thought of waking you.” Her voice was so thick with sarcasm that Maddock actually felt a little hurt by it.
“What’s with you, anyway?” Maddock said. “Why do you hate me so much?”

Black dropped her arms and blinked in surprise. For a moment he thought it was going to turn into another fistfight.

“Hate?” Black said. “I would never keep an agent around that I hated, Willem. Hate just takes up too much emotional space.”

“You slay me, kitten,” Maddock said. “Where’s Wolfe? Is he okay?”

Black dropped her gaze slightly, enough to tell him it was not good news. “I’ve lost contact with him,” she said. “Ninian, that pooka you met, explained Wolfe’s plan to me—chase a U-boat. Reckless of him.” Her gaze darkened. “You should have stopped him, Agent.”

Maddock sent her a scowl. “Look, doll, I tried to help him, and I pasted a bunch of Rattlers too. But he shut me out and threatened to kick me out of Census if I went aboard that freighter. I was following orders.”

“Following orders?” she said. “Were you just following orders when you were flying in your SPAD XIII and shot down your friend?”

Maddock’s muscles fired up and he saw red. “How the hell do you know about that?”

Black held her hands up. “My apologies. That was a bit mean of me. But my point is you should have known that Wolfe can’t kick you out of Census.”

Maddock was still trying to calm himself. “Yeah, well… well,” he said, stammering for words. “How am I supposed to know that? He’s my superior, right?”

Black shook her head. “If you bothered to pay attention in orientation, you would know that only the Director—that’s me—has the authority to terminate an agent’s employment. Nevertheless, if Wolfe didn’t want you along, he would have kicked your ass into submission to keep you out, so despite your ignorance, I guess I won’t fault you for that.”

“Pfft,” Maddock sounded. “I’d beat that daisy to a pulp—” He suddenly searched his pockets and soon pulled out Wolfe’s glasses. Somehow they’d remained intact throughout all the ordeals.

“I’ll take those,” she said.

“No,” Maddock said, putting them back into his pocket. “I’m keeping them. I made a promise.”

Black raised an eyebrow. “Fine, then. Go get yourself cleaned up and dry. You look like a damn prune.”

Maddock left the hallway and made his way to the locker room to freshen up. After a needed shower, he approached his locker, only to have his attention stolen by a sight on the other side of a window.

It was a swirling mass of white and black energy, like a bucket of white paint polluted by spilled ink. It was called the Line, a border between the incarnate and disincarnate universes—a border between the living and the dead.

There was nothing clearly discernable within the swirl. It looked like a distorted yin-yang. For some reason it called to him… as if both worlds wanted a piece of him, beckoning him. The other agents had warned him not to stare at it too long, as it had an inexplicable addictive effect on the observer. They told him of agents who would get lost in reverie for hours, sometimes even days, if left alone, without realizing that any time had passed at all.

Wolfe, on the other hand, told him not to pay attention to those warnings. He’d said, “Staring at the Line brings me peace and even evokes spontaneous insight into how to solve problems.” Maddock agreed. It was mesmerizing and calming to him. He was not sure what drew him to it. Maybe it just reminded him of the pigeon-shit-infested puddles he’d walked through in the streets of New York.

Maddock broke the spell and stepped away from the window to open his locker. He put on a clean, identical uniform. As he donned the black suit, he wondered how long it had been since he’d joined Census. He looked at the dingus on his wrist. It was supposed to be a wristwatch, but it did more than tell time. The glass face projected numbers, similar to the way the Soul Census’s Monolith displayed its information.

Wolfe told him it was called a “digital” screen, whatever that meant. The top showed the current date and time: 08-16-1939—07:16. Over six years of normal life gone, replaced by months of living in the Sphere. Despite it all, it was the most exciting and invigorating time of his life.

The bottom of the watch showed the latest numbers from the Soul Census: 1,073 on the left, while the right showed 2E9—apparently a large number. Over a thousand lost souls left to deal with… and then what happens?

Nobody knew… or nobody was telling him. He suspected the latter. Would he be out of a job then? Maybe that’s why they kept things from him. And what happened when an agent was formally “terminated,” as Black called it? Maddock’s mood darkened at that thought.

She had once threatened to throw him back up into the streets to starve and die for not playing nice. Was that the fate awaiting him either way? Maybe that was why she was always cold to him. It reminded him of how the veteran fighter pilots treated new recruits in the Great War. He was a bit guilty of that practice himself, having seen so many of his friends perish to the Huns.

A claxon sounded, interrupting his thoughts. The alarm signified an escalation of the CycleCon status.

“Never a dull moment,” Maddock said aloud.

The change in CycleCon meant a potential compromise to the Soul Sphere’s reincarnation system. It was something the wizards put together, based on something they deciphered with their machines and the Census Monolith.

Maddock headed to the Atrium, because he knew that was where the action would be. As he traversed the hallways, he noticed something new: frames hung on a wall and hosted pictographic information for agents. They showed pictures and descriptions of the different horrors they’d dealt with. He stopped to read them.

Rattlers and Demons—he knew about those. Disincarnuts—that was a new one. “In-between souls stuck in both worlds at once, becoming insane.”

Where do they come up with these names?

He saw Black come around the corner, trotting the same hallway. She gave him a passing glance.

“You’ll be pleased to know that Wolfe made contact,” she said as he ran up to her.

“What? Where is he? How is he?”

“He’s fine, and in Germany,” she said. “He obtained some intelligence that we must act on. That is the reason we are at CycleCon 4. It is a Level 5 CLOG event. At this time, we know solids are conspiring with a demon and some otherworldly beings, but we do not know how large or how powerful a group this is. We are going to open a séance now to obtain additional details. I will be sending you on a mission to meet Wolfe there.”

Maddock felt relieved that his partner was alive, but was leery of going on a mission without him. He felt like kicking himself for not listening more to the orientation training—he always counted on Wolfe to fill in the blanks. All he remembered was that a Level 5 CLOG involved a demon possession—even more powerful than Rattlers. This would be the first time since he joined the Agency that he had been called into a Level 5—the highest level was 6.

Solids was slang for humans, which meant there were people collaborating with this demon—Nazis, probably.

The two of them entered the Atrium. Maddock immediately observed the wizards bumping into each other and jumping between machines like mad drunks. Maddock gazed up at the Soul Census. It glowed a dark red at the edges, and the Earth globe seemed to be brighter than normal. He had never seen the Monolith glow red like this before.

Black moved to the center to face the Monolith and then gestured to the wizards. The room darkened as Black spoke the standard greeting that opened a séance: “Greetings, Caretaker. It is August sixteenth, 1939 CE, at 02:33:12 GMT… mark!”

The Caretaker’s voice broke through the ambient white noise: “Soul… Census,” the Caretaker said. “… Black. Séance is open… You may now speak… but not for long.”

“Thank you, Caretaker Akshat,” Black said. “Can you share anything about this CLOG event?”

Maddock nearly jumped back as the Earth globe suddenly expanded in size, nearly filling the room. The continents and twinkling lights spun as the globe rotated, creating dizzying streaks of light in the process. The globe finally stopped spinning, settling on a dark section of the planet where the pinpoints of light were absent, replaced by a rotating vortex filled with a deep red—in the middle of the continent of Europe.

“Dangerous,” Akshat said. “Demons… Nazis… Castle Wewelsburg… former agent …”

The white noise stopped, and the lights in the Atrium came back on.

“What happened?” Black said.

“The séance broke,” a wizard said, then looked at some displays on the machinery. “We received a dossier before it closed.”

“Give us the particulars,” Black said.

“What’s Castle Wewelsburg?” Maddock said.

Black’s eyes narrowed, and she ignored Maddock’s question.

Lamere came up and handed her a paper document. Black looked it over, and her expression seemed to darken.

“Him!” Black said. “I can’t believe he’s involved.… Lamere—get the plane and streamliner ready. And contact the SIS and the French. Get them down there ASAP. We’ll compare their intelligence with ours along the way.”

The wizard nodded and ran off to his station.

“Spare me the suspense, doll,” Maddock said. “What is it?”

Black gave him a sideways glance. “Watch your tone, Agent.”

When she looked away and stayed silent, he managed to give a muted apology.

She turned to him with a surprised expression. “Progress? I’m impressed.”

“Come on already,” Maddock said. “Give me the lowdown.”

“I’m afraid the intelligence is weak. Some Rattlers and three demons. One of them with a dark-purple energy signature …” She paused, looking at him. “It means it’s a powerful demon. The worst of it, though, is the solid that is supposedly involved—a former Census agent.” She turned toward the wizards. “Lamere—this can’t be right! Are you certain you accurately decrypted this?”

Lamere popped his head up from his station. “Well, I verified the communiqué twice.”

Black sighed, then returned her attention to the document.

“So I guess that’s bad?” Maddock said.

Black turned to him and looked him up and down. She seemed to be weighing him. Last time she’d done that, they’d gotten into a fistfight.

“You’ve definitely progressed,” she said. “You did well against those Rattlers, but this will be much more dangerous. Are you sure you want to help?”

Maddock shrugged. “Didn’t think I had a choice. I’m a Census agent, right?”

“We all have free will,” she said. “There is always a choice. But don’t worry, I won’t be sending you alone.”

She kept her gaze on him for a moment before motioning to a nearby agent, who brought over a backpack. It was Maddock’s. The agent handed it to him.

“You should find all of your usual gear in there,” Black said. “You’ll also be getting a care package along the way with some more things you will need.”

Maddock unzipped the bag to find his sword and heater, along with a Ouija gizmo and some ammo.

“So where am I going exactly?” Maddock asked. “And how am I getting there?”

“Your old stomping grounds—Germany,” she said.

“Germany?” he said. “That’s a long trip. How are we getting there?”

“Let’s just say you will be getting there via some exotic transportation,” she said. “Bring warm clothing. You will be meeting a team of agents and potentially some other allies.”
Mixed feelings welled up inside Maddock at the thought of going back to Germany. Why does it seem that war always lead to the Krauts’ doorstep?

“Snap to it, Agent,” Black said. “The snow-encroached fortress of Castle Wewelsburg awaits you.”