The Soulscope

The stethoscope head sat on the table between the professor and me. We had commandeered this room, the library at the Coop from the couple of drowsy young students who had still been pretending to be studying, and shut the doors while Ravyn helped get Zenny to her room.

The larger, flatter side of the piece was plain and unremarkable. That side was made entirely out of dull but unstained steel. Its shallow cone shape appeared to be designed to be placed directly on the skin of the victim, much as the flat side of a normal stethoscope would be placed on a patient to enable a doctor to hear the patient’s heartbeat.

The darker, more sinister-looking part of the device was the hard, enameled knob on top of it. That’s where the swastika sat staring back up. There was a pair of small nozzles onto which I presumed small rubber hosing could be attached. If this thing were a normal stethoscope, those nozzles would feed the sound of the patient’s heartbeat up to the pieces that the doctor would insert into his ears. I had no idea why the nozzles would be needed on this device, or what it actually did.

Jim shifted in his chair first, causing it to groan and creak as he did so. “So, what is thing? I know what it looks like, but I get the feeling that it isn’t really what it looks like. And why did El Diablito leave the thing there? It seems like it would have some value to him.”

“When I took it from Zenny, just touching that thing awakened the Voices inside me that have been pretty dormant for a while. This thing looks old enough to have been used by the Nazis. Matter of fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if El Diablito himself hadn’t worked with the Nazis. Drake had originally told me that a lot of the secret stuff that the Allies took from the Nazis related to magick. He also said that a lot of those practitioners escaped to different parts of the world.”

The door opened and closed quietly behind me. I saw Jim’s eyes and face light up for the briefest of moments before his features settled back into a look of concern. “How’s Zenny doing, Ravyn?”

“She was protesting the whole way to her room, but she collapsed into a deep sleep as soon as she hit her pillow.” Ravyn pulled a chair up to the table, turned it around and sat on it backwards, looking intently at the device that lay on the table. “I don’t like the feelings I’m getting from that thing one little bit. When we’re done with it, I want it taken far away from here. I don’t want to risk any students getting a little too curious.”

I nodded. “Yeah, I think I’ll take it with me when we go to see the bastard in Detroit, tomorrow night.”

Jim’s lips pursed in thought. “Are you sure that’s wise? What if he left it there for just such a possibility? He did have that phone set up for you guys.”

Ravyn placed her hands on the table and leaned in for a closer look without actually touching the thing. “Zenny did manage to tell me that she felt that something was in that room, but that she had to dig around for it the corner of the room. I don’t think he left it there on purpose. There’s no way he could have known someone with Zenny’s sensitivity would have been in the group to check that place out.”

Jim watched as Ravyn leaned in real close to the thing and then backed away. He finally breathed when she was far enough away not to touch it by accident. “Then if it is something that he lost, are we really sure that we want to take it with us? He might want the thing back, and I don’t think this is something we want in his hands.”

I shook my head. “He’s not going to get the thing back. That much is for sure. What’s this ‘we’ stuff anyway, Jim?”

He cleared his throat and crossed his arms as he sat up straight again. “I’m going with you to Detroit.”

“Just like that, huh? No discussion about possible dangers or who else we might ask to come along?” I looked to Ravyn for some support. “I don’t think that they’ll let us take any visible weapons into the casino, Jim.”

Ravyn glanced from me to Jim, then reached out and touched Jim on the shoulder with her right hand, giving him a reassuring squeeze. “I think Jim should go too. We’re not planning on fighting in any event. But even it comes down to that, Jim can hold his own, even without his Louisville Slugger.”

Looking between these two, I saw that they had a united front against me, so I shrugged my shoulders and gave up. “OK, it just means I’ll have to watch out for another person.”

Jim’s brow furrowed at that. “I can take care of myself, Rusty.”

I shrugged again and reached out to touch the device on the table. “I just think we need to puzzle out what this thing actually is before we go…”

Behind us the door opened again, this time with a bang. As we turned to look back at who would interrupt us, we saw the slight figure of Zenny standing in the doorway, her head uncovered and barefoot in a heavy white bathrobe instead of the black outfit she had on previously.

Ravyn was already standing up and starting towards the door. “Zenny, dear, you should be getting some…”

Zenny brushed a stray strand of black hair from in front of her face and dismissed Ravyn’s concern with a shake of her head. “No. I’m OK.” She entered the room, closing the door behind her. She kept one hand on the front of the bathrobe, near her neck, keeping it closed more than it would have been if she had relied on the belt at her waist.

We all watched as she walked up to the table where the device still sat, she stood across from Ravyn.

There were dark splotches under her eyes and her cheeks were still moist with tears, but her mouth had a determined set about it as she stared down at the Nazi symbol.

When she spoke, her voice sounded hollow and distant. “That device was called a Soulscope. It was the first one of its kind. The man you call El Diablito designed it around seventy years ago as a Nazi researcher.”

Jim cocked his head. “A Soulscope? What does it do?”

Zenny choked back a sob as she remembered her intimate contact with the device. “In the hands of someone like El Diablito, it can be used to suck the soul out of living bodies, in part or in whole. In the hands of lesser talented individuals, its uses are more limited.”

“How so?”

Zenny shuddered pushed back another bunch of stray hair before answering. “Professor, you would probably only be able to ‘listen’ to the soul of another person, but you might know if that person were telling you the truth, or you might even hear what their darkest fears were.” She turned her head away from the thing, even as she still stood there. “That particular device was used both by El Diablito to conduct some of his early experiments and was later given to some SS guards at a death camp to learn more about what manner of death or torture scared the victims more. It had been lost in the war and was only recovered in the last five years. Even that heartless man couldn’t stand the way it feels now. That’s probably why he didn’t look too hard for it when his office was packed up.”

She looked back down at the device before reaching out to pick it up in a move that surprised all of us. She had it in her palm before any of could move to stop her.

Ravyn gasped, “Zenny, what are you…?”

Jim pushed back from the table as if getting ready to stand up.

I just sat there watching her with keen interest.

Zenny, one hand still holding the neck of her robe closed held the item up for all of us to see with her right hand. “I’m alright now. I was simply caught off guard by the evil of this thing and what it had been used for. This device is crude compared to the tools that he uses now, but he will not be amused to see that we have one of his early prototypes.

“I’m going to Detroit with you as well, and I think I should hold onto this for safekeeping. It has no more power over me.”