Old Soul

by Susan Barker

Genres: General Fiction; Historical Fiction; Horror; Thrillers; Supernatural suspense

Synopsis

The Historian meets Under the Skin in this searingly provocative  literary horror novel about one woman’s determination to stay alive at any terrifying cost.

In Osaka, two strangers, Jake and Mariko, miss a flight, and over dinner, discover they've both brutally lost loved ones whose paths crossed with the same beguiling woman no one has seen since.

Following traces this mysterious person left behind, Jake travels from country to country gathering chilling testimonies from others who encountered her across the decades—a trail of shattered souls that eventually leads him to Theo, a dying sculptor in rural New Mexico, who knows the woman better than anyone—and might just hold the key to who, or what, she is.

Part horror, part western, part thriller, Old Soul is a fearlessly bold and genre-defying tale about predation, morality and free will, and one man’s quest to bring a centuries-long chain of human devastation to an end.

Release date: January 28, 2025

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons

Print pages: 352

Sample

Taos County, 1982

August 1st

I woke before dawn to an empty mattress. Wrapped myself in a bedsheet & went outside to find E on the bench in the clearing, staring out across the drought-stripped plains to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, a jagged line against the shadowy blue sky. She was naked, near luminescent in the half dark. Hearing my footsteps, she spoke without turning.

I couldn't sleep.

The wooden bench creaked as I sat beside her. I could sense she didn't want to be touched, & chilly though it was, I suppressed the urge to wrap her up with me in the bedsheet, or reach for her face or dark waves of hair. E still didn't turn to me. She remained gazing at the low peaks, beneath the constellations fading in the end-of-night sky.

T: What are you looking at?

E: I'm waiting for Venus.

T: O Venus, beauty of the skies. To whom a thousand temples rise . . .

I faltered, embarrassed. I couldn't remember the rest.

E: The beauty's a mask. Venus was once like Earth, but now it's an inferno. Its oceans boiled away and the continents are just black volcanic rock and rivers of lava. The atmosphere is crushing, vaporizing-sulfuric acid & carbon dioxide. Can you imagine it?

T: Not really.

Lately my imagination's limited to the block of Oaxaca granite I'm pounding away at w/ mallet & chisel for 10 hours a day in the studio.

E: Venus spins backward, opposite to the spin of Earth or any other planet. And it spins slowly, at the pace of a walking man. A day on Venus is longer than a year. There.

I followed the end of her pointing finger. A tiny sphere of celestial light was appearing in the dip between two low summits. Eerie. Haunted. Pale. We watched silently for a while.

E: I dream I'm there sometimes. Walking toward the sunset at the speed that Venus slowly turns, so the sun never disappears. It just continues to set, forever.

I shivered, pulled the sheet tighter around me.

T: Sounds lonely.

Venus shone at the lower edge of the dusky, purple-streaked sky.

E: No. It's not.

Testimony 1-Mariko

It begins at Kansai International Airport, by the gate for flight KL378 to Amsterdam. I'd sprinted there through Terminal 1, after realizing at security the departure time I'd thought was 19:05 was actually 17:05. Sweaty, breathless, and frantic from the repeated "last call" of my name over the Tannoy, I reached the empty lounge and ran over to the Dutch agent at the gate desk, pleadingly holding out my passport and misread boarding pass. She told me gate 27 had just closed.

But the plane hasn't detached from the skybridge, a voice called out behind me.

A woman with a small wheeled suitcase was clipping toward us in low heels, her sleek black hair shimmering in the light streaming through the high Terminal 1 ceiling of glass and curvilinear steel. Her gray trouser suit, silk blouse, and leather shoulder bag all exuded the wealth of business class.

The luggage is still being loaded on, she added.

Glancing through the glass wall at the Boeing 787, I saw she was right. The jet bridge was still connected and cargo containers were being lifted into the underbelly of the plane. The portholes showed passengers shuffling up the aisle or reaching up to stow bags overhead. Tapping at her computer, the blonde-chignoned agent frowned at the monitor and shook her head.

The gate's definitely closed, she repeated, and your checked baggage has just been removed. I can book you on the next flight to Amsterdam tomorrow. Change your connecting flights too if they're with us.

By now my heart rate and anxiety levels were returning to normal and I was resigned to the change in travel itinerary-it was my own fault for misreading the boarding pass after all. The other passenger, however, small though she was, looked ready to throw some weight around. Though her demeanor was poised, her eyes flashed entitlement.

I fly business class with your airline several times a year. I have over four hundred thousand frequent-flyer miles and an important meeting in Paris tomorrow. The skybridge is still attached and I see no reason why you can't let us on.

The gate's closed, the agent repeated evenly, her professional veneer showing no signs of cracking. The rebooking fee's 20,000 yen, but I'll waive it this time.

Informing us where to collect our suitcases, she scanned our passports and printed out new tickets for the following morning. Sighing, the woman accepted her ticket and cast a disdainful eye over her new itinerary. Then she left without a word, pulling her wheeled cabin bag over the vast and shining marble floors to navigate her way out of the terminal.


I took the express train one stop back to Rinku Town, checked into a budget hotel, and WhatsApp-called my partner to tell him what an idiot I’d been. Then I headed out toward the seafront and ended up on the white pebble beach across the water from the man-made airport island, three kilometers out in the Seto Inland Sea. The orange sun was setting in the polluted sky, turning the cirrostratus clouds pink and gilding the waves so they scintillated toward the shore. I sat on the desolate stretch of pebbles and watched the blinking trajectories of planes taking off with a weird sense of being split in two-that a more functional version of me had made the 17:05 flight and was now crammed into economy, soaring over China or Inner Mongolia at an altitude of 35,000 feet, leaving the foggier, more hapless version behind.

The tide was coming in and I inched up the beach to keep the water from my Converse. It was chilly and dusk was falling, but something about the place exerted a pull on me, keeping me watching the half sun vanishing beneath the dark gleaming waves as my backside numbed through my jeans. The giant Ferris wheel in the nearby Rinku Park lit up a lurid green, and as the wheel and its many passenger cars turned in slow revolutions, I remembered the time me and Lena got stuck on the Big Wheel in Southend-on-Sea. We were fifty feet up when it broke down-just the two of us shivering in one of those barred cages, Lena's long black hair whipping about in the freezing wind coming off the gull-shrieking North Sea. All she had on was a denim jacket over a vintage dress, so I lent her my jumper and we swigged Lambrini, smoked roll-ups, and danced about to The Cramps on my Discman, listening through one earbud each, the cage creaking and groaning as we tried to stay warm. It wasn't long before Lena was half bent over, crossing her legs because she needed to pee.

Please, Lena, I said. Can't you hold it in?

I can't . . . she laughed. I'm bursting.

She squatted on the floor of the cage, dress gathered up in her lap, knickers around her knees, sighing in relief as a stream appeared between her ballet flats. And I climbed up on the seat as the stream trickled over to me, cracking up at Lena's panicked cry of fuck as the Big Wheel suddenly jolted and we started moving down.

That gray and drizzly day on Southend Pier had been back in February '05, and seventeen years later on the beach in Osaka, watching the last orange beams on the sea, I thought about how sad and strange it was that everything still reminded me of Lena. But perhaps it was important too. She'd been so alone in her thirty-two years, I doubted anyone ever thought of Lena anymore, other than me.


Around seven or eight, I went to buy dinner in the FamilyMart in Rinku Town Station and bumped into the other late passenger who’d been refused entry at gate 27. She’d changed out of her trouser suit into a black cashmere sweater dress and had a shiny red apple and a bottle of Evian in her basket. Our eyes met, recognition clicked, and without any greeting or remark on the coincidence of us meeting again, she said, I emailed the airline HQ in Amsterdam about that gate attendant. If you do likewise, we could have a stronger case. That attendant should be retrained and we deserve a refund.

Under the bright convenience store lights, she looked airbrushed, of an indeterminate age between thirty-five and forty-five, her luminous face reminding me of the commercials for skin-whitening lotions ubiquitous in Japan. An auburn tint shone in her black hair as she looked up at me, intent on recruiting me to her cause.

D'you think so? I said. I mean, we were really late. And she was only doing her job.

She wanted to avoid the paperwork, that's all. And her laziness has caused me a lot of inconvenience. I just spent two hours rescheduling a week of meetings.

The woman looked stressed, and I supposed being flexible and grudgeless was easy when I had nothing important to rush back to London for.

OK. I'll send an email too then. If you think it'll help.

And though her expression didn't change, I could feel her warm to me-an ally. She extended a hand.

I'm Mariko.

I was holding a bento from the chiller cabinet, which I transferred awkwardly from right hand to left before shaking hers.

Jake.

Mariko glanced at the katsu curry in my hand-sweating beneath the plastic lid of the bento container. An appalled look twisted her face.

You aren't seriously going to eat that, are you?

I laughed. Either this or one of the corn dogs at the counter.

Mariko hesitated. I could sense her contemplating me-assessing my character, debating whether an intervention should be staged.

I'm staying at the Star Gate Hotel just next door. The restaurant there seems to have decent reviews. You can join me for dinner, if you want.


The restaurant was on the fifty-somethingth floor of Rinku Town’s main skyscraper, from which Osaka Bay at night was a dazzling curve of illumination against the black void of Inland Sea. The Sky Gate Bridge began directly beneath us, lines of traffic flashing and streaming over the kilometers of empty darkness between Osaka and KIX. The only diners, we sat by the window and pored over the menu together. After the waiter took our orders, Mariko asked, You traveled to Japan alone?

I nodded. I taught English in Kyoto in the early 2000s. I've been staying with old friends from back then.

And what do you do in London?

I'm a primary school teacher.

Mariko was a Senior International Client Relations Manager for a Tokyo bank. A job title I'd learned in the elevator up, when she'd showed me the email she'd sent the airline HQ on her iPhone (presumably to inform the tone and wording of my own). She nodded with polite disinterest.

Fun. Kids are so cute.

Yeah, it's fun. But hard work. I'm taking a year off actually.

Like a sabbatical?

I smiled. Primary school teachers don't get sabbaticals. I've just been teaching for eighteen years straight and was feeling burned out. And my father died last year and I had some money after selling his flat.

Mariko expressed her condolences about my father. Then she asked, What have you been doing in your year off? Traveling?

Not really, other than this Japan trip. Mostly, I'm just pottering around.

Pottering around?

Mariko's head tilted inquisitively. The wide collar of her cashmere dress sat on her pale shoulders, exposing her slender clavicles and throat. She was graceful and straight-backed as a dancer, and I found myself attempting to keep my elbows off the table, to pull myself out of my habitual slouch.

It means doing nothing really. Gardening. Reading books.

Pottering around, Mariko repeated quietly, almost to herself. I would go mad doing that for a year. Even a week.

She frowned then, perhaps thinking of the abyss of meaning or purpose she would fall into without her role as Senior International Client Relations Manager at her bank. The waiter put down our drinks-a beer for me, a pot of chrysanthemum tea for Mariko-and our conversation turned to London. Mariko had been on secondment in the City in the 90s (which put her in her mid-to-late forties-older than I'd thought) and had lived in Spitalfields. Every year since then she returned to shop in various Knightsbridge boutiques and dine in Michelin-starred restaurants with her London clients, from the sounds of it never venturing beyond zones 1 and 2. We then moved on to other European cities Mariko visited yearly-Paris, Rome, Madrid, her recommendations for where to shop and stay in each one straight out of Condé Nast Traveler. When I attempted to steer the conversation to what I remembered of the history or politics of a place, she glazed over, uninterested in the social realities beyond the bubble of five-star tourism. She showed me photos on her iPhone of a luxury eco-resort in Langkawi where she'd attended a yoga and wellness retreat earlier in the year, guiding me through the interiors and tropical gardens like an emissary from a world of refinement and taste.

We didn't exactly click, but I wasn't bored or drained the way I am when conversing with someone I haven't much in common with. There was something compelling about Mariko's poise and anodyne prettiness, which reminded me of a newsreader or an AI robot. As she spoke, I wondered at the time and expense that went into keeping her hair shimmeringly cut, her skin ageless and plumped, and her nails French manicured to perfection, so when she held up her cup of chrysanthemum tea there wasn't a single defect or chip. So uncanny was the effect of her flawlessness, when the waiter brought our meals over on lacquered trays and Mariko said Itadakimasu and dug chopsticks into her buckwheat noodles, I was reassured by the messy human way she slurped.

Halfway through our set meals Mariko put down her chopsticks as though to give me her full attention and asked, What does your partner do?

I was chewing some prawn tempura. I swallowed too quickly and said, He's a social worker. That's how we met actually. We had a meeting about a pupil at my school.

He didn't want to come to Japan with you?

He has to work. We do our own thing from time to time.

Mariko nodded approvingly. You haven't sacrificed your independence.

I glanced at her hand. No wedding ring. She caught my glance and said, I'm single. I'm looked down on for being unmarried, for not having children. But I see how my male colleagues treat their wives and know I made the right choice.