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.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Susan Barker’s Old Soul, which is out now.
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.
Mariko’s room was on the forty-fourth floor. She slumped against the elevator wall on the way down, and outside room 411 practically turned her leather Balenciaga bag inside out in search of her keycard, dropping the apple and Evian she’d bought in FamilyMart onto the hallway carpet, as well as Chanel lipsticks and compact. She let herself into the room, and I gathered everything up from the carpet and followed her inside. She flopped on the bed, her dress up around her thighs, and slender calves bulging against the bedcovers. She hadn’t taken her shoes off, and the scuffed heels dug into the pristine white sheets.
Ugh. The room is spinning.
She laid the back of her hand over her eyes as though to shield them, and I angled the bedside lamp away from her and turned out the main light.
Maybe you should roll over onto your side? I suggested.
She did so, clinging to the mattress like a raft on a choppy sea.
Water, Mariko croaked.
When I turned to go to the bathroom, she added, Not tap.
I filled the empty glass on the nightstand with the Evian, then placed the wastepaper bin by the bedside, hoping Mariko wouldn’t be offended. She regarded me through her tousled hair.
I feel so undignified.
Don’t worry about it. We all drink too much from time to time.
I glanced toward the door. The appropriate thing to do was to go, to leave Mariko to sleep it off. But she asked, Can you keep me company for a while?
I nodded and lowered myself into the easy chair at the end of the bed. Her hotel room was very tidy. Blackout curtains drawn, wheeled suitcase stowed away, and gray trouser suit probably hanging in the wardrobe. Mariko rolled onto her back again and pushed herself up against the pillow. She gazed up at the ceiling. The hollows above her collarbones seemed excavated by shadow, and her ribcage moved up and down under her black dress.
I lied to you earlier, she said.
Really? About what?
I am a cold person.
Awkwardly, and not entirely sincerely, I replied, I don’t find you cold.
My parents died when I was in my twenties. I barely went to see them when they were dying. I was too busy with work. I abandoned my brother too, and now he’s dead and I have no family left.
I stared at her, unsure how to respond.
You’re being too harsh on yourself. It’s just the whisky talking . . .
Alcohol makes the truth harder to avoid. When I’m sober, I make excuses for myself.
I’m sure you aren’t as bad as you think you are, Mariko.
Her gaze slid from the ceiling on to me. The shadows stripped her of her luster, emphasizing the lines around her mouth, aging her. Clumsily, she brought the glass of water to her lips, spilled some down her chin, then wiped it with the back of her hand.
Do you have any family, Jake?
I’m an only child. My mother left when I was three, and it was just my father and me.
I see.
But my childhood was fine.
My brother was my twin, Mariko said. We were close as children, but when we were teenagers we stopped speaking. By the time we were adults we were estranged. When Hiroji died in 2011, over two hundred people came to his memorial service. He’d been so loved. But I’d found it so hard.
It’s complicated with family, I said. There’s so much history. So many psychic wounds that never completely heal.
I winced at how trite I sounded, but my words seemed to resonate with Mariko.
Yes, she murmured. Psychic wounds.
Less drunk now, as though her remorse about her late parents and brother had sobered her, she began to talk about the connection she’d had with Hiroji, back when he was alive. How she’d always felt the psychic tug of him, even when they were thousands of miles apart and hadn’t spoken for years. In the weeks before he died, Mariko said, she’d had insomnia, and when she did sleep she’d wake panicked from dreams she was running through a bamboo forest, pursued by something evil and unseen. Her doctor diagnosed work-related stress and prescribed pills. But Mariko knew Hiroji was the cause—even though he was in Kyoto and she in Tokyo and they were completely out of touch. Something bad was happening to him. But she didn’t reach out.
Eleven years ago, on the night he died, Hiroji called at three a.m., Mariko said. I didn’t want to pick up. But then I did and he said he’d entered the mind of a higher-dimensional god . . .
A what?
That’s what he said—a higher-dimensional god. He said he’d seen every moment of his life from conception to death. He’d seen us sharing our mother’s womb as fetuses. I asked him if he was on drugs and he started to weep. He said, I’m sorry, Mariko, for what I did. It’s the reason you can’t love anyone.
Sounds like he was having a psychotic break, I said.
Mariko didn’t seem to see or hear me. One of her heels had slipped off and she looked not at me but at scenes of the past reconstructed in her mind.
Hiroji told me this god had marked him out. That it had moved all his insides about so they weren’t his anymore. Then he said that I was marked out too . . . because we were twins and his flesh was my flesh and my flesh his flesh . . . So long as he was living and we were connected, it would come for me.
At the familiarity of Mariko’s words my stomach plummeted as though a trapdoor had opened beneath me. Stunned, but not wanting to interrupt, I rose from my chair and began pacing between the end of the bed and the flat-screen TV.
Mariko didn’t seem to notice as she went on, Hiroji said he was going to our bamboo forest to make another sacrifice. I asked what he meant by “another sacrifice” and he only said if the sacrifice didn’t work he’d be dead by morning. I told him he was scaring me, that he wasn’t making any sense. And Hiroji said, Don’t let her in. She’ll leave you alone when I’m gone. Then he hung up.
Mariko described how she stood alone in her service apartment in the Asakusa district of Tokyo, confused. She dialed Hiroji’s closest friend in Kyoto—an old childhood friend of hers too—but suddenly had no reception. She opened up Skype, but her laptop couldn’t connect to the Wi-Fi. The lights on her modem were flashing, so she unplugged it from the wall socket and plugged it back in. Waiting for the internet to reconnect she walked around her living room, waving her phone about, searching for a signal. She was frightened for her brother. And she was scared for herself, feeling whatever strangeness or malign influence Hiroji was under had seeped into her home.
The internet blinked out. As Mariko pulled her coat on over her pajamas to go and try her cell phone out in the hallway or ground-floor lobby, the intercom buzzed. The high-rise building had a video-call entry system, and a gaijin woman appeared on the LED screen on Mariko’s wall. Late thirties, with dark, medium-length hair, and an appearance Mariko could only describe as “average,” the Caucasian stared into the camera twenty-three stories below. Mariko lifted the receiver to her ear, and though the video was one-way, the woman seemed to be staring right at her as she spoke in barely accented Japanese.
Takahara-san, I’ve come to talk to you about Hiroji. May I come in?
Her voice was calm and reasonable, but remembering her brother’s warning, Mariko hung up.
In the hallway outside her apartment, she finally found some reception. She got through to the voicemail of Hiroji’s friend and was leaving a message when she heard the mechanical sound of the elevator rising in the shaft. Mariko lowered the phone. From where she was standing, she could see the numbers going up: 19 . . . 20 . . . 21 . . . 22. The elevator halted on the twenty-third floor and Mariko didn’t wait to see who would emerge. As the sliding doors pinged open she flew back into her apartment and double-locked the door. Slow footsteps approached.
Mariko switched on the TV to some Korean rom-com, turned the volume up high. Then she sat on a floor cushion, hugging her knees to her chest. As the romantic comedy blared, she could hear knocking, a voice calling Takahara-san . . . Takahara-san. And she wondered if she was overreacting. What harm could possibly come from hearing what this woman had to say? But with Hiroji’s Don’t let her in replaying in her head, Mariko didn’t even go and look through the peephole. Instead she remained in a state of vigilance for long after the woman appeared to have left, and eventually she passed out.
In the morning my phone rang, Mariko said. It was my brother’s friend Kenji, calling to tell me that Hiroji was dead.
I stopped pacing and turned to face Mariko. Our eyes met for the first time since she’d started talking about her brother’s call.
How did he die?
Some heart defect.
Did the postmortem find anything strange?
In the shadows cloaking Mariko’s face I discerned her jaw tightening in resistance. But I pushed on.
Were his internal organs the wrong way round? Reversed?
Mariko glared at me. How do you know about my brother?
