Chapter 5: The Price of a Soul

Chapter 5: The Price of a Soul

The brass compass was no longer a comfort; it was a leash. It hummed in Liam’s pocket with a low, insistent vibration, pulling him through the grey labyrinth of dawn-lit streets. The needle, steady and unwavering, was a tyrant, dragging him southeast, deeper into the city's forgotten corners. With every step, the nightmare's oily residue clung to him—the silent grey void, the Collector's mocking voice promising that an anchor only makes the fall hurt more. He was beginning to understand what that meant. Hope wasn’t a shield; it was a nerve ending, and the Collector intended to play upon it.

The compass led him to a part of the city that had been left to die. The buildings sagged, their windows like vacant eyes. Here, the needle’s vibration intensified, the pull becoming almost physical. It pointed him toward a hulking gothic structure, the skeletal ribs of a collapsed roof stark against the pale morning sky. An old church, its stone facade stained black with a century of grime and neglect. A wrought-iron sign, hanging from a single rusted hinge, read ‘Church of the Blessed Redeemer.’ The irony was a physical blow.

A house of abandoned hope was the perfect stage for the Collector's sermon on despair.

Liam pushed open one of the heavy oak doors, which groaned in protest, the sound unnaturally loud in the oppressive silence. The air inside was thick and heavy, a cocktail of decay, damp plaster, and the cloying sweetness of rot. Motes of dust danced like tiny ghosts in the shafts of weak light that pierced the grime-caked stained-glass windows.

At the far end of the nave, near the ruined altar, a small group of people were gathered. There were perhaps eight of them, huddled together not for warmth, but as if seeking shelter from an invisible storm. They had the clean but threadbare look of people who had recently lost everything—not the long-haul destitute, but the newly fallen. A family, perhaps, or the staff of a failed charity. Their despair was fresh, sharp, and overwhelming.

And there he was. The Collector stood before them, his bisected suit a jarring insult to the faded sanctity of the place. He wasn't speaking, merely standing in his unnatural stillness, his cheerful smile radiating a profane sort of peace that seemed to calm the very air around him.

This time, Liam didn’t hesitate. He wouldn’t be a helpless witness.

“Stop!” His voice, raw and desperate, shattered the quiet. It echoed through the cavernous space, startling the small flock. Heads turned, their eyes wide and dazed, as if waking from a dream. “Don’t listen to him! It’s a lie! Whatever he’s offering you, it’s a trap!”

The Collector turned his shadowed head slowly, his smile widening with genuine delight. “Ah, my little outlier,” he chimed, his voice resonating without effort. “Come to join the sermon? You are just in time for the benediction.”

An older man in the group, his face a mask of grief, took a protective step in front of a teenage girl. “Who are you?” he demanded of Liam, his voice trembling with anger. “Leave us be. This man… he understands. He offers an end to it.”

“An end to what?” Liam shot back, taking a step forward, his hand instinctively going to the compass in his pocket. “To feeling? To existing? I’ve seen where his tickets lead. It’s not peace. It’s a silent, screaming hell.”

The Collector chuckled, a soft, pleasant sound that was more terrifying than any snarl. “Such passion. Such fire. He would have you cling to this,” he said, gesturing with his cane to the ruined church, the dying city, the world that had cast them out. “He would have you suffer, endlessly, for a flicker of something you have already lost. I, on the other hand, offer mercy.”

“It’s not mercy, it’s consumption!” Liam yelled, desperation making his voice crack.

“You lack perspective, little man,” the Collector said, his tone shifting from playful to something colder, more instructive. “You see their pain as a temporary state. A problem to be solved. You still have the arrogance of the fortunate.” He took a gliding step toward Liam. “You need to understand the data. You need to feel the weight of what I am lifting from them.”

Before Liam could react, the Collector raised his cane and pointed the tip directly at him. “Let me help you with your research.”

The world dissolved.

It wasn't a vision or a dream; it was an assault. The air thickened, and Liam was drowning in a psychic deluge, a tsunami of pure, undiluted hopelessness. He was no longer in the church. He was under the Oakhaven Bridge, feeling the bone-deep cold and the final, bitter surrender of Sal as he gave up his flask. He was in Martha’s mind, experiencing the seventy years of loneliness and loss that made the Collector’s offer an irresistible release.

The scene shifted. He was in the textile warehouse, choking on the dust and the sudden, brutal reality of being homeless, the combined shock and terror of twenty souls hitting him at once.

Then it became a flood. He felt the crushing despair of a farmer in a dust-bowl drought, a family evicted during a plague, a soldier left for dead on a forgotten battlefield. Decades, centuries of misery, the collected agonies of every soul the Collector had ever harvested, poured into him. The sheer volume of it was incomprehensible, a library of sorrow being force-fed into his mind page by agonizing page.

His own misery, the loss of his job, his apartment, his pride—it was a single drop of rain in this endless, roaring ocean of pain. He understood now. The Collector wasn’t just a predator; he was an archivist of ruin, and he was making Liam read every entry.

The psychic weight buckled his knees, and he crashed to the stone floor, gasping. A raw, guttural cry was torn from his lungs. He clawed at his head, trying to stop the influx of ghostly sorrow. His anchor, the compass, felt impossibly heavy in his pocket, not a shield but a sinker dragging him down into the abyss. The rope had been cut, just as the Collector promised, and the fall was agonizing.

As suddenly as it began, the assault ceased. The psychic noise receded, leaving behind a silence that rang with the echoes of a million silent screams. Liam was on his hands and knees on the cold flagstones of the church, trembling, tears and sweat mingling on his face. The world seemed thin, grey, and pointless. Hope was a child’s fantasy, a cruel joke told in a dying universe.

The Collector stood over him, his smile now one of gentle, pitying understanding.

“Do you see now?” he asked softly. “The burden I carry? The mercy I provide? The peace of perfect silence is a gift beyond measure for those who have suffered enough.”

He reached into his pristine grey coat and produced a single, cream-colored ticket. He knelt, his movements unnervingly graceful, and held it out to Liam. The clean cardstock was a stark contrast to Liam’s own filth and despair.

“You have felt their pain. You have carried their weight. You understand the rules, and you understand the prize,” the Collector cooed. “Trade me that foolish anchor, that heavy little piece of brass that only prolongs the agony. Give it to me, and this ticket is yours.”

Liam looked up, his vision blurry. He saw the ticket, the promised end to the crushing weight in his soul. He saw the Collector’s shadowed face, the patient, cheerful smile of a predator that knows it has finally cornered its prey. He felt the cold, hard weight of the compass in his pocket.

The choice was laid bare. Hope or hopelessness. The anchor or the abyss.

And in that moment, under the crushing weight of a thousand stolen sorrows, Liam Ashford was finally, truly, ready.