Next Door – House of Haunted Souls

On a small back street in Soho under dark looming trees that made the shop next door to my flat even more foreboding, was the House Of Haunted Souls. Kids would walk by quickly, not even daring to take a look as they rushed for the shops that sold bongs, credit card coke kits and vials for whatever you wanted to sneak into a nightclub further down the road.

Mr Onus was the owner and he had a very devious operation going on that both used the most modern Japanese tech, and years of experience on the plains of Glastonbury, listening to gurus and other masters of the consciousness in the mountains of India, and many hours spent analysing anything Elon Musk ever said on YouTube. He had once even paid him a visit in Los Angles for a lucrative investment in some of his technology. It was tech that had made this shop what it was, and Mr Onus a very rich man.

He wore a very tall blue top hat, far too tall for his head, but it made him look very foreboding, and below his nose sat a curly bicycle moustache. It was one that he used wax to constantly point into shape, and he would often play with the ends ensuring they stayed in position, a habit he had when no customers were about.

A triangular little bit of trimmed bearded hair on his chin made him look a bit like Ming the Merciless from the film Flash Gordon, and he stood at his shop counter all day, two hands spread out across the glass top, constantly staring into his favourite shop item, a huge mirror on the far wall. It was a mirror where he often thought he could see various shapes and images seeping from his ears, eyes and mouth. The mirror glowed and leaked colour and light, and it fascinated anyone who looked into it terribly.

When you went into the House of Haunted Souls it was because you needed a new one. People who visited were the sad and the desperate, the sick and the very needy. People who had seen death on the battlefield, or deaths down alleys, blood from their enemies dripping from their hands and blood dripping from the mouths of their victims. Rapists and murderers seeking solace from their deeds and wife beaters and stock brokers needing relief from their sickening needs. It was a place where a person could buy a new soul and hope for some relief from the mental anguish they were suffering from.

Mr Franks was one such person in need of a new soul. He had just recently killed his wife and dissolved her body in the bath with acid after chopping her into small pieces. He could not live with himself and was not sleeping well at all. The Zopiclone the GP had given him for his insomnia was not working and he just lay there at night staring at the ceiling, watching a spider in the corner as it slowly built it's web.

It has just been a simple argument that had turned nasty, and went too far. His wife was moaning about the secret bank account of his she had found. He was arguing back that as he paid for all the bills plus her hair and nail bar outings it was his money, and he could what he wanted with it. It was just a silly argument that had turned red hot in the heat of the moment and for some unknown reason he had just grabbed his wife's head by the hair and slammed her face down onto the corner of the kitchen top. It had instantly skull brained her, and left a dead body to be disposed of on the floor in a pool of claret.

He had heard of the House of Haunted Souls one day whilst reading a discarded Private Eye on the train to work one Saturday afternoon. In the advert section amongst the adverts for “beating the fruit machines”, and “getting high at the green grocers” and plenty of insurance companies willing to insure the most careless driver for a price cheaper than the rest, sat an almost hallucinating advert that he could not take his eyes off even when he tried. He had an instant re-action to write down the address of the shop and from that point on a desire he could not subside seemed to keep him thinking about the House of Haunted Souls.

When it came to the stage that Mr Franks hadn't slept for 3 weeks solid, he thought he might as well try the shop out. He paid for a ticket to London and got off the train at Waterloo station before hitting the underground on the Northern Line to Tottenham Court Road. This is where he departed and walked down Oxford Street towards Soho Square.

As he walked down the streets he was met with multiple hot dog seller stands. That is, hot dogs to the tourists, and white and dark, to the locals and homeless that lined the streets with cardboard signs asking for money. He passed Soho square and took a sharp left by the sexy lingerie shop as a woman leaned out of a flat window and wolf whistled at him trying to get some custom for her illicit job. However Mr Franks was not interested in quick passionless sex, he had more important things on his mind. It was his mind that was going mad, and only a new soul he honestly believed was the answer.

He walked further down the road and past the clothes shop that my flat lay above. It was a sleepy closeted part of Soho and one that not many people on the usual tourist route trod. He spotted the shop as soon as he saw the old Victorian arched doorway and carefully opened the door.

As he entered the House of Haunted Souls, Mr Franks was met with mirrors reflecting his image all around the shop, some were bent in specific angles to make him look fat, others in a way to make him look smaller than he really was. It was like an old funfair attraction he used to go to as a kid but seeing his reflection bounce around him like a crowd of different people was unsettling for sure and he quickly looked around for somewhere without his reflection peering back at him, almost taunting him in a hundred different ways.

Mr Onus, turned from the V like position he stood behind his counter at, and looked Mr Franks directly in the eye. “Mr Franks, I presume” he said knowingly. This put Mr Franks on a right turn, how did he know his name, he hadn't even given it out to him when he had rung to enquire about the nature of his business. “How do you know that?” he replied. “Oh I know lots of things”, came Mr Onus's retort. Like using 1471 for instance. It all added to his air of mystery and always put customers off balance when they entered making him seem more mysterious than he was.

“What is it that you would like”, asked Mr Onus, as Mr Franks shuffled about looking from mirror to mirror as his reflection bounced around the room like a ghost. “Well you said on the phone you could replace my soul, I need a new one badly, I am not going to heaven with this one inside me” came the reply.

“Ah, a dammed soul requiring blessing is it. Are you religious Mr Franks, do you really believe you won't get to a place called Heaven in the sky without having a clean conscience and a soul worthy of the golden city?” Mr Onus inquired as he started opening drawers under his desk.

“Well I guess so, I was just brought up to believe all that you know, I never really thought about if it was true or not” Mr Franks answered as he tried to find a position to stand in that didn't cast back a mirror image that shocked him so much.

“Oh a true Christian believer indeed, I see”, chuckled Mr Onus as he pulled out a grey metallic half cylinder with a cable attached to the back. It led down to the floor and to the containers of all the souls he had taken from previous customers before. “Well lets just sit down and see what we can provide you with shall we”. Mr Onus went over to the front door and locked it with an old wooden style block wedge that he slammed down from one side of the door to the latch on the other. No-one would be interrupting them during the soul replacement session.

“Will this work though, will it?” asked an eager Mr Franks, “I've never heard about soul transfers before”. “Well Mr Franks, we are all basically one in the great scheme of things, every atom and being is connected throughout the universe. Shake an atom here, and a super nova goes boom, halfway across the imaginary space time you are taught to believe but do not perceive. Don't worry I will fix you, just sit in this chair and let me do the transfer, but of course, first I must take payment.”

“Oh yes”, Mr Franks said as he reached into his grey suited trousers for his wallet. He pulled it out and slid a credit card that had just been used a little too much for chopping lines of cocaine up over to Mr Onus. He picked it up and wiped it quickly, back and front, on his long velvet looking black long tailored coat. He then pushed it through his payment machine and took the best part of a thousand pounds off the card which went straight into an untraceable foreign crypto- currency account that would not be taking refunds.

“Just sit here Mr Franks and relax” he said as his customer sat down on the red chair in front of the desk. It gave Mr Franks some sort of relief from the mirrors but now he was peering into the same mirror that Mr Onus stared at all day, and the colours and swirling lights within it almost hypnotised him without pressure.

Mr Onus slipped the metal helmet onto Mr Franks head and ensured that all the wires were attached correctly and that the back of the neck was plugged into his 20 Terabyte connection lead that he had obtained from Elon Musk. It was a one of a kind cable that allowed the transfer of gigabytes of data per millisecond and was unique in that it allowed the data to be transferred from the end of the cable through human skin and direct into the brain stem.

“This won't hurt will it”, Mr Franks enquired only now doubting his choice to go through this process. “No, not at all, just stare into the mirror and let your mind drift off to wherever it wants to go, this will not take long and soon you will be a new man altogether”.

Mr Onus smiled slyly as he took the other end of the cable and bend down behind his huge desk to the custom server he had build up over the years. He plugged the other end of the cable into the HDMI slot on the side of the box and turned to the drawers of souls he had extracted from other customers over the years. What should he give him he wondered, a murderer and wife beater in need of redemption, well he had just the thing for such a man and took a disk out of the child abusers drawer. It had belonged to a sick Scout leader who had a preference for young boys that he could no longer stand.

“What comes around, goes around”, Mr Onus laughed to himself in his head as he slid the disk into the drive and then turned the machine on and ran the set-up process to ensure there were not connectivity issues. Once diagnostics had all been fully checked and passed, he pressed the run button and stood up. It was here he looked straight ahead into the mirror and watched the reflection of his customer as his eyes closed and his body started to jolt up and down slightly as the soul from a paedophile was transferred into the mind of a murderer. No better fit, thought Mr Onus, who truly believed he was providing a service to mankind. Not letting people escape their fate but only changing the possible punishment and torment that came with a new tainted soul being implanted into a body.

After about 20 minutes the computer screen was flashing a red light and the words “Soul Transfer Completion” appeared above a graph that told Mr Onus how much of the soul had been successfully transferred and if any errors had occurred.

A perfect transfer. Mr Onus, turned the machine off and detached the cable from Mr Frank's neck and took off his cylinder helmet. He put his wires away and took out the new disk from the computer that held Mr Franks old soul. Picking up a black marker pen from the side he wrote “Murderer & Wife Beater” on the white covering before opening the drawer marked “Killers” and slotting the disk away.

He then tapped the still sleeping Mr Franks on the head a few times, and the newly contained soul of a Scout Leader with a predilection for little boys woke up. “Uhh, how long have I been out”, spoke the newly born Mr Franks. “Oh not long, not long at all”. “Did it work, did it work though”, he asked, almost begging. “Of course it worked, it always does, trust me you are a new man” replied Mr Onus as he patted his customer on the shoulder and smiled.

“So I will be able to sleep now”, asked Mr Franks as Mr Onus started to lead him to the door of the shop. “Oh I am pretty sure of that”, he smiled with his waxed moustache glistening in the glow of the sun beaming through a hole in the wooden door. What he will be dreaming of is another matter altogether Mr Onus thought to himself as he unbolted the door with the heavy wooden latch.

“Don't worry Mr Franks I don't see any-more death or nightmares full of reminders of that horrible incidence in your future, I am 100% sure of that”. He opened the door and the sunlight flooded the alcove the shop sat in. “Okay, well I hope it has worked”, Mr Franks was anxious, he wanted so desperately to sleep some more.

The shop keeper led his latest customer to the door way and shook his hand. “Nice to have met you”, he said glaring into his eyes before clicking a pen lid in his pocket that turned all the mirrors in the shop around and around in a circle, with Mr Franks facing this show of reflection his eyes became misty and his mind wandered. What was he doing here, why was he at this place he kept thinking to himself, before coming around to be faced by an odd looking man in a tall hat and weird moustache.

“I do believe you are in the wrong place sir” said Mr Onus after the hypnotised Mr Franks stood slightly wobbly in front of him. “I do believe the place you are looking for is down that way” he pointed down towards the market stalls that lined the street with all the brothels. He patted the confused customer on his arm and slightly pushed him away. Mr Franks was confused and dazed as he staggered off down the road with no memory of his visit to the House of Haunted Souls at all.

As he walked down the lane a little lad passed him in the street and he found himself unable to keep his eyes off him as he passed, noticing every curve and limb of his body as he turned his head to see him walk off. What was that, he thought to himself, he had never fancied little boys before and as he stood in the middle of the street gazing at the boy walking off he bumped into another man walking past.

“Sorry old boy”, said the old Grandpa looking type as he brushed Mr Franks suit down. “I didn't see you there, you were all over the place.”, “Oh yes, sorry about that I am a bit um a bit blustered” Mr Franks replied as he turned around and walked off into the distance.

The old man who had just bumped into him carried on up the road and soon came to the shop next door to my flat. He knocked on the old wooden door three times and then entered. “Ah Mr James how nice to meet you” came the words from the shop counter as the old man was staring hypnotically into the mirrors that reflected his image all around him. “Do come in and take a seat”.

The old man, a serial rapist who had seen the advert for the shop one day, somewhere, somehow, where it was exactly escaped him, but what didn't was the flash backs of all the women he had abused over the years. He was haunted by his deeds, a haunted soul and he had come to the only place he had found that may save him from damnation.

Mr Onus smiled at the old man as he tottered on his feet, unsteady at the reflections of himself bouncing from eye ball to eye ball. Another customer, another soul, another trick and another switch of a bad persons conscious with another’s, “I think I have just the soul for you”, Mr Onus said as he opened up the drawer labelled Killers and pulled out Mr Franks disk.

“Please, take a seat”. A devious trick, it maybe, but then Soho is the place for tricks, and the shop next door to mine was full of them. It was a nasty trade but as the landlord it paid high inner city rent, and I didn't mind too much, especially when I needed a free new soul after the old one grew tiresome. I did like trying out new experiences, it wasn't something I put on my Tinder profile but then that all depended on what soul I was using at the time.

I did like to experiment.

© 2021 All Rights Reserved - Rob Reid - Competition Winner

This won The Creative Writing Groups bi-monthly Competition for Best Short Story Sometime in 2021