Read Online The Soul Thief by Leah Cutter - Free Book Online

’em moaning something fierce out back.
    Franklin slowly climbed the two steps up to the porch, still pressing buttons on his phone. “Dang it,” he said when he realized he would have to redo the last word. It had all come out garbled.
    He unlocked his door and stepped inside, still focused on his phone, grateful for the light.
    Wait.
    Light?
    Franklin looked up.
    Someone had dragged his kitchen table out from the corner where it usually sat and placed it in the center of the kitchen floor. An odd, yellowish glow came from the center of it, like a sickly mist.
    A white man dressed in blue surgical scrubs stood behind the table. He wore a doctor’s mask across his face, and a blue cap over his head. He waved his hands across the table, in and out of the yellow glow, as if he were one of those fancy orchestra conductors.
    “What are you doing?” Franklin asked, confused. That weren’t no ghost standing there, or some kind of creature from Franklin’s exhausted imagination.
    “Waiting for you, Franklin,” the man said. His voice was smooth and educated. He took a loud breath. “Now, watch.”
    The man continued his conducting, moving his hands out toward the edges of the table then scooping them together, like he was raising armfuls of leaves. The glow spread out, growing long across the top of the table.
    More mist rose up, darker mist. It started collecting itself into a shape.
    A human shape.
    “What are you doing?” Franklin asked, horrified. He tried moving forward to stop the man, but he found himself moving sluggishly slow, as if the mist had wrapped around his ankles and had tied him there.
    Franklin reached down to see if he could free himself.
    He still had his phone in his hand.
    The mist was freezing his bones. It was hard to think, hard to move.
    Franklin typed out “9-1-1” and hit send.
    Would Karl get the text in time? Would he understand that Franklin needed help?
    Franklin pulled himself back up straight slowly. At least the man behind the table hadn’t seemed to notice Franklin’s call. He was focused on the mist, pushing it together, making it more solid. Sweat dropped freely from his forehead.
    Whatever the hell he was doing, it was taking an awful lot out of him.
    Finally, he seemed satisfied with his work. He lifted his hands up above his head and called out in some foreign language.
    It weren’t a friendly language. The man gargled and hissed, the words wrapped around his tongue like thorns.
    Franklin shivered. It was like the doctor was invoking an evil spirit to come down and witness his work.
    Something unholy.
    The form on the table solidified more, changing shape, growing breasts and hips and a recognizable face.
    Mama.
    Franklin had heard the phrase before about “a body at rest.” And that’s what Mama looked like—a body at complete rest. She was at peace.
    Then her eyes opened.
    Franklin had to smile when that familiar glare was immediately directed at him. Then it fixed on the stranger.
    But then Mama’s eyes started changing. Hollowing out. Growing dark and black and empty.
    “Stop!” Franklin said.
    The man was bringing back Mama’s ghost, like he’d brought back the others. The ones who was still howling in Franklin’s backyard.
    But it wouldn’t be Mama. Not really. It would look like her, but Franklin could already see the life being drained out of her.
    Not that a ghost had that much life to start with. All her will was being taken away, just leaving her with the anger of being ripped out of Heaven.
    “You don’t want to see your mother?” the man asked, his voice dripping with false concern. “What kind of a son are you?”
    “Don’t you mess with my mama,” Franklin warned. “You put her back.” How dare he? It just weren’t right, messing with the dead like he was doing.
    It was why the ghosts who’d returned to haunt Franklin had seemed unnatural. The man had brought them back against their will, against nature.
    The man seemed to consider for a