The Souls That Follow Me Home

I have collected souls for three hundred and twenty years, and in all of that time, not one has escaped me. 

Until tonight. 

My name is Elspeth Blackspell, though the villagers call me the Soul Witch. They whisper my name when children fall ill, when livestock die without an explanation and when their loved ones take their final breath. They leave offerings at the edge of the forest: silver coins, bottles of red wine, locks of hair and sometimes a black ribbon. 

They believed that the gifts would keep me away from their doors. 

They are foolish. I don’t take souls without permission. Not exactly. I offer the dying one final wish, a small kindness before the darkness claims them forever. 

A dying husband might ask to see his wife and children one last time. A frightened child might ask not to be afraid. A greedy person might ask for another year of life. 

I grant their wishes. 

And afterwards, their souls belong to me. I keep their souls in glass jars in my house. Each one glows with a faint blue light. Hundreds of them line my cellar shelves, whispering in the darkness. I have grown accustomed to hearing their voices. They are no louder than the wind passing through the trees at night. 

At least they weren’t until tonight. 

I had just returned from the village with a new soul when I noticed something strange. The forest was silent. No owls called from the branches. No insects hummed in the ground below the trees. Even the wind had stopped blowing. The trees were frozen under the moonlight. 

I tightened my grip on the small glass jar tucked inside my tote bag. The soul within belonged to a man named Plomas Wren, a farmer who had died that afternoon. His final wish had been to see his oldest daughter get married. That was a wish I could not grant because the girl had died three winters ago. 

Instead, I had offered him a vision of her standing in a field of golden flowers smiling as she did when she was a young girl. 

He died peacefully. His soul entered the jar without resistance.

Now, however, the blue light inside the glass jar had begun to flicker. I stopped walking. “What is the matter with you?” I whispered. 

The light dimmed. Then a voice spoke behind me. 

“Elspeth.” 

I turned so quickly that the jar nearly slipped from my hand. 

There was nobody there. I raised my lantern. The tree branches stretched in every direction, their branches twisted like the finger of a dead man. Shadows appeared between their trunks. 

“Show yourself!” I commanded. 

A soft laugh drifted through the forest. 

I immediately recognized it. It was the laugh of a woman named Maggie Vale, a seamstress whose soul I had collected more than fifty years earlier. She begged me to save her from a fever, but I had arrived too late. I had granted her a final wish instead: to see her infant son for one last time. 

She thanked me as she died. Why would she be laughing now? 

I hurried to my house. The old wooden door slammed behind me as I entered, and I threw handfuls of salt across the threshold. I lit candles, drew the curtains closed, and placed Tomas jar on the kitchen table. 

Then I listened. Something was moving outside. 

Slow footprints were circling my house. I could hear them dragging through the dead leaves. One set became two and then three, until the sounds of dozens of feet filled the clearing. 

I had lived alone for centuries. I knew every creature that wandered through the forest and these woods at night. These were not creatures. 

I approached the window and opened the curtains. At first, I saw nothing but the darkness. Then figures appeared by the trees, pale and motionless. Men, women, and children. Some wore the clothes they had died in. Others looked exactly as they did on the day I collected their souls. 

Maggie stood at the front. 

Her long gray dress was stained with mud and her long red hair hung to her shoulders in tangled strands around her face. She looked older than I remembered. Although, the dead were not supposed to age. 

Behind her stood hundreds of others. Every soul I had collected. 

My knees became weak. 

“No.” I whispered. 

Maggie raised both hands above her head. 

“Let us in, Elspeth.” 

I stumbled backwards. 

“You belong to me.” 

Her expression changed. The softness had vanished from her voice and her face. It was replaced by something cold and ancient. 

“Do we?” 

The candles went out. 

I screamed and stumbled toward the fireplace, searching for the iron poker I kept near it. Iron could disrupt spirits. It would not destroy them, but it might keep them at a safe distance from me. 

A knock on the door. 

Once. 

Twice. 

Three times. 

Then came the scratching. Hundreds of fingernails dragging across the wooden door panels. 

I rushed down the stairs to the cellar door and threw it open. If I could reach the jars, I could strengthen the wards. I had spells for that sort of thing, ancient incantations written in a language no living person no longer remembered. 

But when I went down the stairs, I stopped dead in my tracks. 

Every jar was empty. Hundreds of glass vessels were on the shelves, their lids were still sealed but their contents were gone. 

A cold breath brushed the back of my neck. I turned around. 

A little boy was standing at the bottom of the stairs. His skin was gray, his eyes were as black as coal. He wore a white nightshirt, and his bare feet were covered in dirt and mud. 

I recognized him immediately. He was Samuel Finch.

He was only seven years old when he died of the winter fever two hundred years ago. His mother had begged me to take her life instead, but I had to explain to her that death did not work that way. I granted Samuel his final wish, to see his mother again. 

Now he stared up at me with an expression that made my blood go cold.

“You promised us.” He said. 

I swallowed hard. 

“Promised what?” 

“That we would be safe.” 

“I gave you all peace.” 

“No,” he whispered, “you gave us cages.” 

I gripped the railing. 

“Your souls would have wandered aimlessly. I protected you from the darkness. 

Samuel tilted his head to one side. 

“What darkness?” 

A scream erupted from the seller's shelves. 

I turned towards the sound. 

For a brief moment, the walls seemed to disappear. Behind them I saw something vast and black pressing against the world, something with too many limbs and a mouth that stretched from one of the rooms to the other. 

Then the vision vanished. 

I almost fell backwards. Samuel stepped closer. 

“We tried to tell you.” He said. “For hundreds of years, we tried. But, you never listened.” 

My hands started to tremble. 

“What are you talking about?” 

“The thing that followed us.” 

The cellar door slammed shut. 

In the darkness I heard hundreds of voices speaking at once. 

It knows where you live. 

It has your scent. 

It has been waiting. 

I raised my hands and began chanting the oldest protective spell I knew. Blue fire burst from my fingertips, illuminating the air. 

Samuel was gone. 

In his place Maggie was not standing, and every other soul I had ever taken. They surrounded me, their faces were twisted in fear and terror. 

For the first time in three hundred years I felt afraid. 

Not of the dead. 

Of what stood behind them. 

A shape appeared at the far end of the cellar. It was taller than the ceiling, forcing its head to bend at an unnatural angle. Its body was covered in the shadows that moved like living things. I could not see its face but I felt its attention on me. 

The souls shrank away. The creature took one step forward. The floor cracked beneath its foot. 

“What are you?” I whispered. 

“We are what you kept from dying.” 

The creature raised one long arm. 

And I suddenly understood. 

The souls never belonged to me. They had been drawn to my jars because my magic had hidden them from whatever waited for them beyond death. I had believed that I was protecting them, but I was only delaying the inevitable. 

For three centuries, I had been collecting souls and keeping them imprisoned. 

And something had been following them. Something wanted them back. 

The creature reached towards me. 

I did the only thing I could think of. 

I shattered the nearest jar. Then another. And another. 

Glass exploded across the cellar floor. Blue lights burst into the air, spiraling around me like fireflies. The souls rose in a brilliant cloud. Their voices rose and filled the room with the sound of a thousand bells. 

For one brief moment the creature recoiled. 

The souls surged towards it. 

Maggie turned to me, her face was suddenly peaceful. 

“Thank you.” She whispered. 

And then she vanished. 

One by one, the souls disappeared into the darkness beyond the creature. The black figure twisted and screamed , its limbs thrashing around as the last of the blue lights passed through it. 

When the souls were finally gone, the creature turned towards me. 

Its face emerged from the shadows. 

It was my face.

My eyes. My mouth. My crooked nose. . Even the small scar above my left eyebrow, a scar I had gotten as a child when I fell off of my bike. 

Only its smile was different. It stretched far too wide. 

“You have been very busy, Elspeth.” It said in my voice. 

I tried to run. But my legs refused to move. 

“What do you want from me?” 

The creature stepped closer. 

“You have kept me waiting for over three hundred years.” 

I shook my head. 

“No.” 

“Oh yes.” 

It leaned towards me and I smelled wet earth and rotting flowers. 

“You made your bargain on the night you died, little witch. You asked for immortality. You promised to deliver every soul that you could gather.” 

Memories came flooding back. 

Memories of the storm. The graveyard and the stranger beneath the dead oak tree. The blood on my hands. 

I was twenty-three years old when I died from one of the plagues. I had begged for another chance, another life, another century. 

Something had answered. I had forgotten the price. 

The creature touched my forehead with one cold finger. 

“Your collection is finished.” 

The cellar vanished. 

I woke up under the dead oak tree, my body was covered in wet leaves. The sunlight of the dawn had begun to break through the leaves of the forest trees. My hands were young again, smooth and unmarked. 

For the first time in centuries, I could hear the birds sing. 

I staggered to my house. The door was open. The shelves beneath the stairs were empty. Every jar was gone. 

I should have felt relieved. Instead, I felt terrible emptiness. 

I had spent centuries believing myself to be powerful, believing that I controlled the boundaries between life and death. 

Now I understand that I had merely been a servant. 

I locked the door to my house and began packing my belongings. I would leave the forest, find another place to live and start again. Perhaps, I could live quietly. Perhaps, I could learn to be human. 

Then I heard a knock at the door. 

Once. 

Twice. 

Three times. 

I froze. 

There was a little girl outside holding a glass jar. Inside of it a faint blue light flickered. 

The little girl could not have been more than eight years old. 

“Are you Elspeth?” She asked. 

I couldn’t speak. 

She held out the jar. 

“My grandmother said that you would know what to do with this.” 

I stared at the blue light. 

A face appeared inside of the glass jar. 

My face. 

The little girl smiled. 

“She said that you would come for me when it was time.” 

Behind her, the forest became silent. 

And somewhere among the trees, something began to laugh. 

I closed the door. 

But the laughter followed me inside. 

And then, from under the floorboards, I heard my own voice whisper, 

“Elspeth, let me out.”