Page 86 of Squad Ghouls

“You are literally sitting on top of me. Ask me.”

“But…”

“Owain, just ask,” I repeated, giving him an indulgent look.

He bit his lip for a second. “Ryan, will you help me?”

“Yes, I will. Tell me how.”

“I don’t know. My family… They destroyed all our family records—journals and manuals and the history of it all. The only thing I managed to find was a tiny pocket notebook from my great-great-great-grandfather, who apparently was also a psychopomp. I read it a few times but none of it makes sense to me.”

“Do you still have it?”

He shook his head. “My dad found it and took it away. I managed to snap a photo of a few pages though.”

He pulled out his phone and flicked it on, thumbing through his folders until he found the right one. He pulled up a line of five photos with schematics, bullet points and vague descriptions scribbled in barely legible handwriting.

I zoomed in on different parts of the photo, trying to make sense of it, but I was lacking so much context.

“I have zero clue what any of this means,” I admitted, feeling like I was letting him down.

“From what I remember reading before it was taken, there is a psychopomp every few generations in my family on my mother’s side. But my great-grandfather was the last practising one. There are zero records of anything in my family after him. Like they just…shut it all down.”

I looked at him, tilting my head in question.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but why can’t you just shut it down too?” I asked carefully. “It’s dangerous, it’s stressing you out. It’s scaring your family.”

“I don’t know how they did it but I…” He shook his head. “Like I said, there is this…need inside me. It’s constant and almost impossible to ignore. If I don’t help it makes me feel horrible. Hollow. If this is how they felt, I don’t know how they managed to ignore it.”

“Right.” That did sound fucking awful. “And you have nobody to ask?”

“I tried, but they want to forget that part of our family even existed. They won’t answer a single one of my questions. All they want to do is pull me away from it. That’s why they called you.”

“Okay,” I said. “So the first step would be to find some information.”

“From all the library and online research I’ve done, as far as I can tell psychopomps usually aren’t human. They’re these mythical supernatural beings that guide the souls to where they’re supposed to go after they die. I have zero idea why I even have this power in the first place.”

“Then let’s start at the beginning. We just need someone smarter than us to tell us where the beginning is.”

There was only one person I knew who made being smart his personality.

“Who are you calling?” Owain asked.

“Someone dead.”

I dialled the number, putting it on speaker.

“What’s up!” a bright voice replied, and I frowned.

“You’re not Hollis.”

“Nope.”

“But this is his phone,” I said.

“He likes t’ think so too,” the voice said. “Name’s Theo. I’m Hollis’s…spokesperson.”

“Right,” I said. “Well could I talk to him for a second?”