The Collection Agency: The Condemned Ones

Prologue: The Rules, as they were given to us There are seven ways to lose a soul. Everyone knows the names by now, they've been carved into cathedral doors and printed on cereal boxes and tattooed across knuckles, but knowing the names of the sins protects you about as well as knowing the names of the tides. Pride. Greed. Lust. Envy. Gluttony. Wrath. Sloth. A single sin does not condemn a person. A person is a large thing, wide enough to hold a great deal of failure. But when a soul has engaged, truly given itself over, again and again, until the sin is no longer a thing it does but a thing it is, that soul is condemned. To be condemned is not to be punished. It is to be overtaken. There is a difference, and I did not understand it until it happened to me. And there is a second rule, larger and colder than the first. When seven souls in ten within a single city have been condemned in five of the seven ways, the city is not punished either. It is erased. Not bombed, not drowned, not burned in any way a satellite could photograph. It is unwritten, pulled backward out of the world like a thread out of cloth, so that the hole closes behind it and the fabric forgets it was ever whole. The streets are replaced. The people are replaced with new beings who have never sinned and do not yet know they can. The history is replaced. Your mother, if she lived there, was replaced, and you were made to have grown up somewhere else, with a mother who never wore that perfume. Sodom is the one everyone remembers, and only because someone thought to leave a warning in the margin of an old book. But there have been thousands. You have lived near the graves of cities and mistaken them for empty fields. I have tried, more than once, to describe to the newly kept what it is to stand in a place that has been erased, and I have never found words that do not lie by making it sound like something. That is the whole of the horror. It is not something. Walk out into a wide green field where a city of nine thousand souls was unwritten a century ago and you will feel, at first, nothing at all, and it is the nothing that is the wound. The grass grows ordinary. The light falls ordinary. Birds go about the small ordinary business of birds. And underneath all of that ordinariness there is an absence with edges, a hole the exact shape of everything that used to be there, closed over so smoothly that only a thing already dead can feel the seam. There is a particular quality to the light in such places, if you know to look for it, which the living never do. It is very slightly too even. The world, where it has been unwritten and written again, loses the small honest imperfections a real place gathers over years of being lived in, the crookedness of a fence set by a tired man, the wear worn into a step by ten thousand feet, the way a true street remembers the shape of the people who walk it. Erased ground has none of that memory. It is clean the way a lie is clean. And the animals know. Dogs will not cross certain fields. Birds route around a particular acre of woods without ever landing in it. Cattle low and turn away at a fence line that looks, to a human eye, no different from any other. The beasts have kept the older senses the living traded away, and they feel the seam in the world where a city was pulled out of it, and they give it a wide and frightened berth, and the farmers who own that land call it haunted without ever once guessing how nearly right they are. The living pass their whole lives in the neighborhood of these graves. They picnic on them. They build cul de sacs across them and cannot understand why the new houses never feel settled, why the children who grow up there dream of streets that were never built, why a certain corner of the development is always three degrees colder than the rest. They have inherited a world stitched full of quiet deletions, and they walk it whistling, and the not knowing is the last mercy the machine ever gave them, and it is the cruelest one, because a person who does not know a wound is there can never once think to grieve it. The condemned of an erased city are not unwritten. That would be mercy, and mercy is expensive. They are kept. I know, because I am one of the kept. My name was Ben. It is still Ben, which is the small joke they allow us, though almost nobody down here can be bothered to say it straight. Two hundred years of collectors and clerks and worse, and not one of them ever just said Ben. It has been Ben Hiden, on the nights I did the quiet work. It has been Ben 10, from the ones who thought themselves clever. It has been Ben Bullshitting whenever a story of mine ran longer than a listener's patience, which, I am told, is often. You learn, among the kept, that a name is only a thing other people do to you. I stopped minding somewhere around the first century. Mostly.