Page 35 of How to Survive Your Own Death

Specifically, an Acme parking lot.

Bazel directed her through lanes and narrow streets, working off some mental map charted two hundred years ago when the city was paved with wooden blocks. Alleyways, byways, and snickelways. Philadelphia had all the fancy places.

They headed in a general southerly direction but never took a direct path. Bones chased after them, never tiring and avoiding the traffic that could not see her.

“Can Bones get hit by a car?” Geri asked. Frankly, the way the dog darted in and out of traffic was heart-stopping.

“Possibly. I’ve never tried,” Bazel answered. “Do you want to find out? Seems cruel.”

“No. We are not finding out.” She would just have to believe that Bones wasn’t a dog. She was something more, unfathomably old, undeniably intelligent, and could take care of herself. Probably. “I don’t want her to get hurt.”

“A mortal cannot hurt her. Turn here.” Bazel pointed with a skeletal hand to a narrow alleyway that was barely wide enough to accommodate her bike.

She wasn’t a fan of being the reaper’s personal chauffeur, but he wanted to share his happy place. Where did a grim reaper go for comfort? A cemetery? Nah, too obvious. City morgue? Pet store? There was absolutely no logical connection between the two locations. None. What about a bakery? No judgment. Bakeries were her favorite place. The smell of warm bread just scratched all the right spots in her brain.

Finally, he gave the order to stop.

Not a bakery and not a cemetery.

Geri popped the bike over the curb onto the sidewalk to get out of the way of traffic. She moved as far to the side as possible. She knew this intersection. If they had traveled in a straightforward manner, she would have realized that they were only a few blocks from Molly and Anh’s place.

“A grocery store,” she said, less than impressed.

“This is once the Moyamensing prison,” Bazel said, spreading his hands wide, as if this were a grand reveal, and not, in fact, a spot she had ridden past hundreds of times.

“This is your happy place?” Perhaps she was missing the picturesque qualities. She turned around. Eleventh Street basically terminated in the Acme parking lot. Reed Street made a strange ninety-degree turn. There was 10th Street, Passyunk, and Reed making an absolute mess of an intersection on the far side of the parking lot. There was a drug store and a drycleaner, and the tangle of streets and lack of planning was evidence that the city had grown around something immovable. A prison would do it.

There was a thin row of trees between the pavement and the street, offering some shade, but without a bench it hardly seemed inviting for periods of reflection. There wasn’t even a plaque to mark the historic spot.

Geri had ridden past this spot a hundred times on her bike on her way to Molly and Anh’s and never once given it a second thought. An old prison had been there once, torn down decades before she was born. Everyone knew that. Now it was nothing more than an inconvenient snarl in the street grid with a parking lot.

Bazel drifted down the sidewalk and around the corner. Geri followed, pushing her bike. The back of the grocery store was absolutely mundane, excluding a low stone wall.

“It is difficult taking a soul, even a dark soul, and I like to come here to be with my thoughts,” he said. He reached out to the knee-high stone wall. “This wall is all that remains.”

“I have to be honest, I have a hard time seeing the appeal.”

He tilted his head to one side, his cloak moving in an ethereal wind.

Bones sniffed around the trees, no doubt smelling every dog in the neighborhood who passed by.

“Memory casts a favorable glow over a mundane tableau, I confess,” he said at length.

“Okay.” Geri leaned forward on the handlebars. “Share a memory.”

“I took my most famous soul here. H.H. Holmes, noted serial killer.”

“H.H. Holmes? That man killed like two dozen people.” In the days after the divorce, Geri found a lot of comfort in serial killer documentaries. No, she couldn’t explain why.

She didn’t want to talk about it.

Yes, the irony wasn’t lost on her that she felt shaky and disturbed by watching a man die less than an hour ago and serial killer documentaries were her comfort show. Seeing someone die in real life was so different from passively watching it flicker on a tv screen.

Apparently she wanted to talk about it a little bit.

“Confessed to twenty-seven but he killed many, many more. His soul was black, rotted from the inside,” Bazel said, his tone wistful. “I took his soul and tore the veil, but he was stubborn. He tried to possess his own body after his death, reanimating even as he hanged in the noose. It was a terrible sight.”

The way he spoke with a touch of nostalgia, it really did not sound terrible.