Forever After

4


Michael cut a sullen figure as he sombrely trudged towards the centre of town. He took the route that led from its top to its centre, a twisting road that cut down a steep hill and was boarded by a line of poorly maintained houses and hollowed-out shops and businesses.

He lifted his head to acknowledge the people he passed. A part time prostitute; a full time drug addict. A kid without a future; a mother without a care.

Further down he saw his old friend Del walking towards him. He had his arm snaked over the shoulders of an attractive, intelligent looking woman. They were both smiling, happy with each other’s company, as they strode up the sloping pavement.

He hadn’t seen his old friend for years and in that time he had aged, but he had aged well. He was still a good looking man; his youthful sprite had been replaced with wizened handsomeness. The years had treated him well.

He didn’t live in Brittleside and wasn’t on Michael’s radar. He had moved to a better place to live a better life and he had someone to live that life with.

Michael passed them with a glance and a longing smile, allowing it to linger for longer than he intended. Del gave him a nod in return, a brief and friendly recognition to acknowledge a stranger. He didn’t see the friend he had spent most of his youth with, he didn’t see the spirited young man who had nearly gotten him killed on a number of occasions and yet loved him like a brother, he saw a stranger, a random, insignificant nobody.

When he brushed past Michael the sullen reaper released a drawn-out sigh, allowing the memories that had rapidly reformed at the sight of his old friend to fade into his breath and disperse.

The main street that snaked through the centre of Brittleside was a boarded up shadow of its former self, or so Michael had been told many times. It was how he had always known it to be: rundown, empty, grimy and dilapidated. He didn’t doubt that at one time the buildings had been open and the street had thrived with life and activity, but the only difference between now and thirty years ago were an extra board or two.

He checked his timer anxiously. He was late. He was rarely late, but when he was it didn’t usually matter, the dead had nowhere to go, and they couldn’t go anywhere when he wasn’t around to guide them. There was nothing stopping him from going home and leaving a spirit of the recently deceased to wander aimlessly around his own place of death, and it had been known to happen to far more experienced reapers than Michael, but the people at the top, whoever they were, wouldn’t be impressed. He needed to make as many good impressions as he could, otherwise he’d be the one stuck patrolling those streets, left to wonder aimlessly around the spot where he allowed his eternal soul to die the night he agreed to immortality.

He picked up his pace when he saw the entrance to the park. A night-time rain and a light morning shower had sprinkled the grass with tips of dew that spat at the bottom of his jeans as he walked, soaking them by the time he reached his destination.

He saw the body first. The man had been shot a dozen times, his wounds filled with drying blood which had painted the moist grass green underneath his thick figure.

He checked his timer again. On it were the vague details of every death he had to deal with in the coming days, every soul that was about to commit itself to the afterlife. The rest, the semantics of death, came through an intuition that coursed through Michael like a second soul. There were exceptions of course, only on rare occasions could he anticipate murder, where the free will of others was involved, and that rarity faded to an impossibility when the hand of immortals, or non-humans, played a part.

In thirty years he had been to less than fifty murders, and he had only foreseen two of them: a drug deal turned violent and a drunken domestic which had resulted in a beaten wife stabbing her abusive husband. For the others, the timer flashed him a warning moments before the event, giving him a matter of minutes to get to get to the scene and transport the soul. Although it didn’t matter if he was late. More than once he had taken his time to drag his weary self to the scene after being woken by the dreading chirp of the timer.

He glanced around. He expected to see the soul hovering over his body, but there was no one there. If he had wandered off he would return. Like a murderer to the scene of the crime, they always came back, but Michael couldn’t afford to wait around. He had been around enough murder scenes to know that people had a way of ignoring him; it wasn’t that he was invisible, they could see him and he was sure they had, but they seemed almost entranced by his presence. He could step back, blend in with a waiting crowd and chat amongst the people there, but if he was found standing over the body looking suspicious, he was ignored.

It made his job a lot easier, but he still didn’t like to hang around. There was much emotion around death and when it came to murder that emotion was usually unbridled fear and morbid curiosity, two of the human emotions that made Michael feel sickly uneasy.

He peered into the forest, lit from all sides by the breaking afternoon sun. In the undergrowth something writhed against a mass of fallen leaves. It popped up a curious head, sniffed the air and then bolted up a tree. A rat or a squirrel, it didn’t matter, neither were on Michael's agenda.

The body couldn’t have gone far. It was resigned to a restricted radius. Michael didn’t know the exact rules, another aspect he wasn’t sure of, but he had enough experience to guess at the proximity. He searched that proximity three times, even peering under bushes and up trees, despite the fact the spirits couldn’t interact with their environment enough to climb or hide, but he still couldn’t find him.

Taking one last glance at the body, Michael halted his search and prepared himself for the inevitable long day ahead.

There were a few people in the waiting room when he arrived, reapers preparing confused and sedate souls for the afterlife and whatever lay beyond those black doors. Michael recognised a few faces, colleagues he had seen many times over the years, most of whom he never spoke to. It was a depressing, dull business and it created depressing and dull people. There were exceptions of course, Seers being one, but they were even worse.

Michael nodded a smile in the general direction of the seated population, a generic greeting that covered all bases. He went up to the receptionist who sat alone behind her desk. A short, miserable woman who wore a permanent scowl on her wrinkled, aged face.

“Looking lovely today Hilda,” Michael said without feeling.

She had been writing, but stopped when Michael approached. She lay down the pen and sneered at him. “Cut the bullshit Holland.”

Michael thought about resting his elbows on the desk and leaning in, but he didn’t like the idea of being so close to her. There was a chance her breath was poisonous, her eyes almost certainly were, he could feel them boring into him as she spoke.

“As charming as ever I see,” he said, sticking his hands into his pockets.

“There’s only two foot of desk between us,” she said with a glare. “How about you keep up with the smart talk and I show you just how charming I am.”

Michael grimaced, “Fair enough.”

He looked behind him, checking no one was paying any attention. “I have a problem,” he said softly, keeping his voice low.

Hilda shook her head disinterestedly, looking back at her desk. She was eager to continue her work and for Michael to leave her alone. “Discuss it with the shrink. I’m not interested.”

Michael shook his head. “Not that kind of problem.”

The hint of a smile crept onto her bitter lips. “Is it the haemorrhoids again?”

“No,” Michael raised his eyebrows, studied the hideous figure momentarily. “How did you...never mind,” he shook the thought away, took another glance around to make sure he wasn’t being watched. “Look, I’ve lost someone. A soul. I was due to pick him up fifteen minutes ago, maybe more. He wasn’t there.”

Hilda raised her eyebrows inquisitorially. “Are you sure it was the right one?”

“Positive.”

“Because you’ve made that mistake before.”

“This guy was dead, he was the guy. And can you stop mentioning that please?”

“We still talk about that you know,” she said fondly, recalling the time when Michael tried to escort a living soul through the doors of purgatory. “It helps us pass the time. In fact you’ve come up quite a lot in our conversations; office talk would be so dull without you.”

“Thank you, you’re so kind,” he replied bitterly. “Now, can you please f*cking help me?”

Hilda reluctantly lowered her head to the glaring blue screen in front of her.

“Name?”

“Martin Atkinson.”

Michael handed over his timer. Hilda’s eyes scanned the small layout for a few moments. She placed it to one side. Her grubby fingers, sprouting hair around the knuckles and holding grime underneath the fingernails, began to patter away on the keyboard.

“Murder?”

“Yes.”

“Were you there on time?”

Michael shrugged his shoulders unconvincingly. “Sure.”

Hilda paused, lowered her frantic fingers and looked up at Michael. “Once more with conviction,” she pushed.

“No, okay?” Michael conceded, knowing he was going to find himself the subject of many more banal office conversations in whatever Hilda classed as her office with whichever unlucky idiots she classed as colleagues. “I was a little late. More than a little actually. An hour or two, maybe.”

“Did your appointment with the shrink run over?” Hilda quizzed slyly.

“None of your business.”

“I guess there was a lot to talk about.”

“Look, I didn’t have my timer. I didn’t see,” he groaned. “Can you please just get on with it?”

He was growing increasingly agitated. A few of the guardians behind him had heard the conversation and were trying to suppress giggles. Their faces were alight with hilarity when he turned to look. In a world of strict rules and regulations any mistake, especially from someone as loathed as Michael, was something to be enjoyed.

He sagged on the spot, sighing heavily. He didn’t particular care what the others thought of him, but he also didn’t need more reasons for them to think less of him.

“OK,” Hilda declared with a heavy exhalation, enjoying the barely audible giggles far more than Michael. “One soul, missing. Unknown method of death.”

“He was shot. A few times,” Michael explained calmly.

Hilda raised her eyes from the screen. “Are you a doctor?”

“No.”

“No method of death,” she reiterated, her attention back on the computer.

“He was shot. I saw the f*cking bullet holes.”

Hilda handed him a printout from the computer. “No method of death. Bureaucracy is a bitch ain’t it?” she asserted with a grin, clearly enjoying herself. “Now, hand that in. No credits for you this time. Anymore failed souls and you’ll have to report to the boss. We can’t have the world filling up with ghosts now can we?”

“Whatever,” Michael said dejectedly.

“Have a pleasant day.”

“Go f*ck yourself.”

The waiting room wasn’t quite heaven or hell, it wasn’t limbo or purgatory. It seemed, as far as Michael could gather, to be a mixture of both. He bypassed the waiting room without a glance and ducked inside one of the many uniform doors.

The room beyond was dark and seemed to go on forever. Michael took two steps and stopped before a small desk, the top of which lit up at his approach. A buzzing machine, almost organic in its frenetic mechanical nature, levered out of the table top with an incessant whirring sound before halting with an expectant click. A small shutter flipped open across its surface like a Jack-in-the-box preparing for a jovial surprise.

Michael placed his timer inside. The shutter closed, the machine whirred. A succession of electronic sounds followed, overlapping the background purr.

An automated voice leapt from the invisible walls, bouncing around the room like an echo with no origin.

“Failure to collect souls will result in a warning and deducted pay,” the gender neutral voice announced in monosyllables. “Repeated mistakes will result in demotion.”

Michael sniggered under a snarl. “You can’t demote me any f*cking further,” he mumbled under his breath.

“The deceased remains unaccounted for,” the voice continued.

The whirring stopped, one final beep, like the sound of an arriving elevator, sounded and the shutters of the noisy box sprang open, revealing Michael’s timer.

Michael took the device, dropped it back into his pocket and exited the room before the automated voice could offer its preprogramed message of salutation.