The daze lifted, but only momentarily. Albert felt his mind resettle itself, like he had just woken up all over again. The memories of the days prior didn’t flood back in, as people are want to say about recovering lost memories. Rather, they bubbled up from a murky depth; scattered, volatile, and unclear. Most of the memories were out of order, though in that moment Albert had no idea what the proper order actually was. He’d had them on the forefront of his mind just minutes ago, but now even the memories he had that felt like a dream were jumbled.

In confusion, Albert began to pace the length of the apartment.

“Come on. What happened first? What’d I do first?” Albert growled at himself as he tapped against his forehead with more force than he meant to.

“Was it the dinner?” Albert flashed back to the night he’d stopped by Death’s office. He couldn’t remember why he’d gone there, or how he’d gotten there, but he’d had dinner with someone. Hope. He’d had dinner with Hope. She was Death’s daughter. She’d gotten him the job with Death and they were celebrating, but he’d been a bad guest and she had been upset. But that wasn’t the first thing. It couldn’t have been.

“I met you… I met you somewhere else first.”

There were other memories swimming in his head as he clapped his hands harder against his forehead. He’d met Hope a few times. Sometimes in her office, sometimes in Death’s office. But there was a memory of somewhere else. A park. He’d played chess with Hope at the park after leaving school. He’d talked to her about something. He couldn’t remember what, but he’d been rude again, but she’d been understanding. Polite even. But why had he gone to park in the first place? Why’d he left the school?

“I’d followed someone… A new girl?”

There had been a new girl in his classes, all of them. She’d just showed up one day and had given him weird looks the whole time. But when he went to confront her she’d made her way off campus and he’d followed her to the park The park where he’d played chess with Hope. Amy. Her name was Amy. Hope hated her, but Albert couldn’t think of a reason why or how he felt about her. He barely even remembered her name. But she’d been unnerving. And Hope had done something about her, made her leave.

“And it was all real, right? Death writes contracts to trade people’s souls and property. So does Hope, I guess. And Amy… is a part of it? And I was working for them all.” Albert stopped pacing, that had to be it. Nothing else in the scattering of memories made sense. “But then something went wrong. I went to the McClellan’s, then to Madame Offry, and then Death had me hunted down and killed. But I’m okay now?”

Once that timeline settled a further resurgence of memories flooded Albert’s mind. The contract he’d signed with Death, the offer to work with him, the souls he’d contracted in arbitration. Markus, then Arnie, then the nurse. Three souls. A steep price. But it had been paid. And Albert needed to go back. He needed to go back and prove that he hadn’t betrayed Death. He needed to hand back the souls he’d collected. He could feel his eyesight blurring as he thought about it. He felt the strain on his body as the weight of the souls he carried from arbitration fought against his being. His vision began to tinge blue, and cracks like glass began to spread through everything around him like he was looking through a broken lens.

“I need to get to Death’s office.” Albert muttered to himself as he struggle to hold on to the kitchen counter to keep himself upright as he felt his body break down even more.

“He can fix this.”

“I can’t trust him though. He put a hit out on me.”

“But Hope…” His mumbling conversation with himself trailed off as he lurched towards the door to the apartment.

It wasn’t like it had been before, when he’d been unable to lock or unlock the door due to the injuries he’d sustained from dying before, but it was difficult to balance himself on the way out. The shift in his vision was giving him motion sickness, but it was more than that too. There was an odd sensation that was scrambling the way he was attempting to move. It was as if his body, independent of his own will, did not want to leave the apartment. And every step down the stairs, consequently, became treacherous. But, after roughly a half hour—which felt much longer than a half hour, as the steps to the street normally only took a minute to traverse—Albert found himself standing outside.

Albert’s first instinct was, of course, to puke. There was a convenient little gutter sort of underpass stairwell to the side of the main entryway to the apartment building, usually used to store smaller trashcans for pickup but also marked the entrance to the boiler room beneath the building, which Albert let loose his wretched cargo over. Looking down to the dumpsters below him, Albert vaguely remembered Death tossing his body into that very spot and then somehow appearing in front of him again before Albert could escape. The memory felt far more recent than it actually was, but the confusion that had taken root in Albert’s mind fit it somewhere into his broken timeline of events within the last two days.

There wasn’t a clear way to get to Death’s office, and hopefully to Hope herself, but Albert ambled down the side of the street anyway. He kept his hand and the majority of his balance against any walls or fences that he could so that he wouldn’t tumble into the road. Without realizing it, Albert found he had spent nearly another whole half hour wandering before he found himself at the mouth of the alleyway where his dead body had once been stashed.

“The blood’s still here.” Albert whispered to himself. “And this is where I came back to when I bartered for my soul for the first time. I jumped back into my body.”

Unbeknownst to Albert, his whispers had attracted the attention of a creature he had no memory of and had no method of seeing. The spirit of a cat had laid patiently in wait over the bloodstain on the concrete, and when Albert had returned it had become alert again as if reactivated by some accidental magic. The cat, which retained it’s collar with the tag that identified it as Pincushion, looked expectantly at Albert. It waited for some time as the boy muttered to himself and contemplated the best way to get to the office and why he had wandered to the alleyway in the first place, which Pincushion thought was strange. She waited and waited, and thought to herself that the boy really was lucky. He’d made it through so much unscathed, and even now, as he fought against his own mind, he had brought himself unwittingly to the place where she had been laying in wait.

And, by another stroke of luck, Albert’s mumbling stumbled upon an exact combination of words that solved all of his problems. Those words were, “take me to the office…” And while he had said them absently to the bloodstain on the ground, as if personifying the remnant of his own demise and demanding it solve his problems for him, his command was also unwittingly directed at the cat spirit sitting on top of it. And, at the command, Pincushion obliged.

Albert felt nothing as the cat spirit brushed up against his leg, as he had no method of discerning spirits and no memory of being able to do so. There was a logical, or perhaps illogical, gap in his memories regarding the matter of observing the spirits of half dead beings. He knew that he had conducted arbitration with three human spirits, and that there had been a special trick to doing so, but he couldn’t recall what it was or how he’d done it. This being the case, Albert had no way of identifying Pincushion or understanding why the cat was doing exactly what he had asked of it. To Albert, it was as if he had unleashed a snap demand at a stain on the ground and it had done as he had bidden it. And while that understanding verged on lunacy, even considering all that Albert had already witnessed, it was the only explanation Albert had.

So it was that the cat spirit teleported Albert to Death’s office and the boy stood there aghast at what had occurred.

Albert now stood in a place that felt familiar to him, though he could not place exactly why it was familiar. It was a back alleyway behind a small brick building and a chain link fence.

“Okay.” Albert whispered to himself. “Maybe I am actually dreaming.”

Albert pinched his shoulder to see if it would wake him up, but not only did he remain where he was but it also hurt far worse than he had anticipated. It felt like he’d just had a shot to the arm, and he could feel that there was a memory scratching at the surface of his conscious mind that would explain everything. Unlike other memories, however, the memory of traveling by quill and the cost of doing so was trapped beneath the surface. Several key categories of memory had been trapped this way, intentionally buried and sealed away by means that could not easily be undone. It seemed that some less consequential memories had not been so thoroughly dealt with, though perhaps that was due to their importance in maintaining Albert’s sanity to the degree that he was meant to have a functional sanity in the wake of the events that had left him mentally debilitated.

And perhaps that is just the way some interactions are. There are people capable of looking into the eyes of a mostly healthy and mostly functional person and, with only a few words and maybe a careful facial expression, tear their functionality asunder. Whether it be through anxiety, depression, guilt, or fear; everyone has a magic bullet forged just to destroy them that can only be fired by a specific person or type of person. And when that bullet is lodged in the brain, anything could be forgotten.

None of these thoughts crossed Albert’s scrambled mind as he carefully and nervously skirted around the outside of Death’s office. There were no cars parked out front, and no one stood guard by the front door. Albert didn’t think to take note of these factors. It was quiet, which didn’t send up a warning signal like it should have. And there was no sign of movement behind the barred and blinded windows.

At first Albert was tempted to knock before entering, but that felt silly. He worked there, even if there was some dispute about his place. It wasn’t a private residence either, so knocking at the front door would be strange. But it felt just as strange to walk in uninvited. But Albert’s physical condition seemed to be worsening by the minute. His vision was slowly being engulfed in cracks and fading to white, his body felt like he was on a boat and he had to shift his weight from side to side constantly to stay on his feet. And there was a strange stretching sensation, like his body was being pulled apart from the inside and outside simultaneously. It wasn’t a state of he felt like he could endure for much longer before passing out. As it was, he felt lucky to be standing after enduring it for so long.

Still hesitant, Albert pulled open the door to the office. He was surprised to see that there was no one seated at any of the desks visible from the front entrance, and retroactively that the door was open if no one was present. The assumption that no one was in the office, however, was quickly shown to be incorrect. Albert heard someone or something talking quietly to themselves from one of the rooms in the back. Despite his disorientation and deteriorating physical state, Albert honed in on the source quickly. Partly because of the talking, but also because of a second sound—of a closing filing cabinet—which brought his attention to a storage room off to one side of the main entryway. It felt familiar, and after a moment of thought Albert concluded that he had been there before but could not identify why.

Without thinking about the potential ramifications of stumbling in on someone in the middle of something important, Albert called out to whoever or whatever it was.

“Hello? Who’s back there?”

There was silence in the wake of Albert’s question, as whoever was in the other room suddenly stopped.

“Who’s out there? Employees aren’t supposed to be…”

Midway through asking her question, Hope stuck her head out from around the side of the doorway. And as soon as she spotted Albert, she stopped abruptly.

“Albert?!” Hope was only frozen in place for a moment by the shock of seeing the boy. “What the hell?! You’re alive?”

“Barely.” Albert wheezed as the shifting and straining sensation that was running amok on his body nearly sent him toppling over onto one of the desks next to him.

“What happened?” Hope, totally flabbergasted, asked as she bolted from the storage room to Albert’s side.

Had Albert retained all of his memories in that moment Hope’s response to seeing him might have made even less sense. Her apparently caring demeanor would have frightened him, her closeness would have made him step away, her touch would have sent chills down his spine. But he was eager for her presence now. She was his salvation.

“Please, help me. I have souls… I can’t… my eyes…” Albert began to sob, the pain and disorientation had finally peaked. The pressure on his bod sent him reeling to his knees.

“How? How can I help?” Hope had knelt down next to him just as quickly.

If he could have seen her face anymore, he would have felt safer. But his vision had finally clouded over completely. Had it not, he would have seen that her worry and fear at his deterioration were powerful and genuine, and that it brought out a side she had not shown to anyone in nearly as long as she had been alive. The side that cared and wanted to help.

“Contract me. Take them away.” Albert managed to wheeze between gasping breaths that were quickly becoming more hysterical.

“How many souls?” Hope had stood up and Albert could hear her rummaging on the desk next to them for a pen and paper. “How many do you need me to take?”

“I don’t know. Three I think. I gathered three for your father.” With salvation in sight, though not literally, Albert managed to gasp out his final instruction before he began to retch and heave from the disorientation.

Albert didn’t hear the furious scribbling of pen on paper as Hope raced against the edges of Albert’s consciousness to draft something serviceable. And without time to come up with something more proper or thought out, Hope settled on the following arrangement:

I, the contractee to sign below, do hereby transfer possession of all souls under my ownership—save my own mortal soul—to the ownership of Hope, the writer and contractor of this agreement.

It wasn’t pretty, as her normally extremely neat and tidy handwriting had been rushed, but it was good enough.

“Can you write your name?” Hope asked frantically as she knelt back down and attempted to stuff the quill she had used into Albert’s hand.

Albert could feel the quill in his grip, and the paper underneath his other hand as Hope slid it into place, but the realization that he couldn’t see well enough to write anything legibly stunned him into inactivity. It felt too late, but when he didn’t respond—though he couldn’t have, even if he wanted, as his throat had begun to swell shut from the trauma of throwing up so violently—Hope ripped the quill back out of Albert’s hand. Almost just as quickly, Albert felt Hope’s gentle and soft hands grip his own and peel his thumb free of the quickly tightening fist he was making as his whole body began to tense in stress. Albert didn’t feel the nib of the quill slice across the side of the thumb, as he was quickly becoming unaware of the sensation of Hope’s touch. But he could still hear, and that was enough.

“Albert, if you can hear me, and you assent, my actions as I guide your signature will become binding. If you do not assent, I accept that your denial nullifies this contract. Your willful agreement, rooted in your soul, validates this.” Hope spoke the words, with enunciation that reminded Albert of students reciting the pledge of allegiance in school, and thrust his thumb down to the sheet of paper.

And as the bloody thumbprint stained the page, Albert began to feel it. To feel everything that had begun to fade. The cut, the page, Hope’s hands around his, and finally, understanding.

But, overpowering all other sensations that flooded his mind, Albert felt regret.