The Uncertainty of Death

by Y. K. Greene

  Shit, “so. You are telling me. That this woman. Had all her skin?”

  “Well yeah, lack of skin would definitely have made it harder for me to tell she was female.”

  I did it again, worse yet – I lost her! Mitei jumped to her feet, marched over to the steaming pile of her clothes and tested them with a finger. Still very wet, but I have to get out of here, now! She abandoned the dress, pretty as it had been it was probably ruined anyway and started toward the tree line again.

  Aedan caught her by the elbow long before she reached it, “what are you doing? I thought we’d gotten past the whole hunting thing?”

  “I do not really care what you intend to do from here on but I have to find this smoking woman.” Mitei said, shaking off his grip. “And Leo.”

  “And exactly how do you plan on doing that if you really have ‘broken’ your Path?”

  “I will have to walk. Once I get to one of the offices I can always use the employee network to locate them…” She trailed off.

  “Figuring out that won’t work, are yah?” Something about the way Aedan said that made Mitei want to kick him. She made a mental note to ask Leo about it, when she found him. “Look, first of all you’re not on Earth as you know it right now so there’s no way you’re going to be able to just walk out of these woods and find an office. Actually, you shouldn’t have even been able to run through those woods like you did without losing your mind or getting terminally lost.”

  “I have to do something!”

  “Of course you do.” Aedan said, stepping aside and gesturing at the fire behind him, “first you have to march back over there and sit your lily white ass down, then you can listen to me and maybe the two of us can figure out a way to find them.”

  “My ass is lily white?”

  “More like snow with the faintest hints of pink, like you got a light spanking – and that’s beside the point!”

  Mitei was not entirely sure why that made her smile at Aedan but it certainly did. Something strange happened then, though she was robbed and hooded a state sure to cause shivers in even her most devote secretary but when she smiled at him, Aedan did not flinch, shudder or avert his gaze. Instead the god of the hunt met Death’s eyes beneath her hood and smiled back.

  Even with everything that had been happening to her up to that moment, Mitei found it unsetting and was seated and listening to Aedan almost automatically, without further protest. He explained that though he had managed to track her footsteps in the world as easily as he ever had – her Path had been completely beyond his tracking skills. Whenever she was on it, he had lost her trail, only picking it up again after she had returned to the world for a while and long after she had moved on to her next location. This had been frustrating when he was ‘hunting’ her but also meant that her Path probably was not on the material planes that he had access to.

  “In short, I can bring you anywhere you want to go - except for this Path of yours.” Aedan said, folding his arms, “that might be different if you brought me to it, so I’d be able to fix its location in my mind but for right now all I can do for you is to take you to places on the mortal plane. Though I probably won’t be half as fast and efficient as your Path normally is, we could maybe do a little damage control before trying. At least get you some more clothes.”

  “Damage control,” Mitei recalled the room full of dying teenagers and shuddered. That is going to be a big mess waiting for me in the offices too. “I should get back to the offices, but why are you suddenly so willing to help me when you only chased me before?”

  Aedan surprised her again then, by getting up and dropping to his knees before her. He was not a terribly tall man, even standing she was far taller than him in the body that Leo had given her, so kneeling before her like this Aedan had to crane his neck up to look her in the eye. It left his throat oddly exposed and Mitei found her eyes tracing the long line of it before meeting his eyes.

  “I apologize; I have not acquitted myself in a manner that my goddess would have approved of, chasing you through these woods that were a home to us, brought that fully to my awareness. Let me atone for my actions by helping you get this ‘Leo’ back.”

  The form was not exactly like those she had seen in recent memory but Mitei recognized the gesture well enough as one of supplication and difference. He wants something and has decided he is more likely to get it by being nice than not; so gods are not that different from mortals, at least this I know how to handle, “fine. I will accept your help and gladly.”

  ***

  “Alright,” now that Jules had said it, there wasn’t anything else left to do except face the monster in the room and solve the problem. Just what a math teacher does, right? “Somehow we managed to get onto Mitei’s Path and apparently without her to guide us we have very little control over it. But not none.” Jules started to open her mouth a protest evident in her furrowed brows but Leo beat her to the punch. “I wasn’t standing close enough to touch you when I got here. I was able to move, we just have to figure out how and repeat that.”

  The simplest answer was to keep each other in view and try using that as a kind of anchor so that one could move away then the other would follow. If they could get a momentum going like that they’d cover plenty of distance in no time at all. Except Leo remembered not moving at all when he’d first opened his eyes and seen Jules screaming in the distance, all of his original effort had amounted to absolutely nothing, so how did I get over here?

  While he thought, Jules made a few more attempts to move away from him. She’d obviously noticed that the only thing to focus on here was each other and this time when she tried to start off she kept an eye on him; first trying to crab walk sideways then trying to keep both eyes on him and walk backwards. She got exactly nowhere before finally giving up.

  “I think I’ve got an idea how to do this.” He said when he noticed that she’d settled down again. “I’m going to give it a shot, you stay here.” Then Leo took a deep breath and tried to concentrate on being ‘there’ a spot about six feet away from where he was currently standing. Once he had the distance fixed in his mind, he took a deep breath and stepped forward – and nearly fell on his face when his foot connected with what he was, for lack of a better word, calling the ground but also seemed to be a few inches lower than the ground he’d been standing on a second ago.

  Looking around was useless, there was nothing but that hard to grasp blur in front of him. Leo forced himself to turn around, slowly, and scan that blur regardless of how difficult it was to make anything out in it. When he was facing the opposite direction from where he had started, he saw her. Jules was a tiny spec, quite far from his current location he could see her vigorously waving her arms and he imagined that she was probably shouting as well but he couldn’t hear it from where he was.

  Going back was a lot easier than going forward had been, he only needed to focus on her gesticulating figure, focus on being ‘there’ and take a step. He stumbled again and nearly collided with the woman who was now yelling directly into his surprised face.

  “What the, pardon my French, fuck was that?”

  “I think, I’ve just figured out how to move forward in this place,” Leo said when he’d regained his balance. “But it’s tricky. I was only trying to move six feet away but I ended up going much farther than that. It was easier getting back than it was going out. I think you acted as a guide.”

  “What?”

  Leo sighed and flopped down on the ‘ground’ trying to get comfortable before he began, “ok this is all ungrounded guesswork really, but I think that having something in here to focus on helps us tell the Path where we want to go. When I went out I just concentrated on moving away about six feet, which both worked and was a horrible failure. I went farther out than I had wanted but I did move! Coming back I just focused on getting to you and when I took a step, the Path just activated somehow.”

  “But that’s not how Mitei’s Path is supposed to work! Or at lea
st I don’t think that’s how her path is supposed to work.”

  “How do we know that?” Leo snapped, “all we have is Mitei’s word for it, but most of the time she admits to not knowing how she does what she does. It stands to reason that her Path is always following her unconscious desire to go to the dead and dying! She just never realized it.”

  “If it’s an unconscious desire than why are we still here?” Jules tone was just as sharp as his had been, she crossed her arms and looked down on him, “I don’t know about you but I’ve been desperately longing to be home since I got my mind back.”

  That was true, when Leo had first realized what state he’d left his class in he’d definitely wanted out of here with a deeper desire than when he’d tried to move a few feet away. Still he hadn’t actually gone anywhere at all, not six feet away and certainly not back to his classroom in California; “ok, I’m definitely missing a component or a rule or something here. Still, we can move as long as we do it that way. Maybe if we try exploring a little bit we’ll find a solution or an exit.”

  Jules snorted but uncrossed her arms when he stood up. “Then who goes first and who follows?”

  “I’ll go first, since I’ve done this a couple of times before, it’ll be easier for you to follow me.”

  He waited for her nod before starting out again, this time trying to imagine a distance relative to Jules’ current location. This worked better than before and when his foot hit the ‘ground’ less than a second later he was pleased to find that Jules was clearly visible about three yards behind him. Or she was, even as he was focusing on her behind him, she was stepping forward and appearing directly in front of him. It was almost as disconcerting as watching Mitei do it, no actually it was worse. Mitei usually stepped onto and off of her Path at a distance, never so close that he could reach out and touch her, and now I know why.

  Jules staggered and Leo reached out to steady her, “you alright?”

  “As I’m going to be I guess. Let’s keep going, I’ve just thought of a really good reason to explore this place.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m starting to get hungry; we have to find some food and water or an exit – soon.”

  Shit, she was right of course, without knowing how much time had passed or was passing they didn’t have the option of waiting for Mitei, they’d have to find food and water quickly.

  ***

  Corporations have Boards of Directors or Trustees, people who represent the investors in the organization. They have a little or a lot of power depending on the structure of the company and the Chief of the Board who usually is the one that interacts directly with the CEO and or the President of the company. Board meetings usually consist of the members of the board, the CEO and the companies Presidents. A company can have as many Junior Vice Presidents as they need but only one President and only one CEO and usually only one Senior Vice President. The Senior Vice President is usually the most likely subordinate to take over the company after the ousting or retirement of the current President.

  That’s the way a corporations infrastructure usually works, of course, Death Inc. was never a normal company. Where other companies gained revenue through commerce Death Inc. got its revenue through the business of Death. Everyone dies after all and anyone who has ever been left to deal with the aftermath of a death could tell you: death is expensive. That’s where Death Inc. ‘made’ its money, from the variable and constant costs of dying.

  Death Inc. also wasn’t a publically traded company. How could it be? So technically there weren’t any investor’s interests to guard. But Death Inc. has a very large board of directors because of its revenue stream, in order for Death Inc. to wring a profit out of the business of death, than Death Inc. needed the cooperation of the governments and the churches. It was representatives from these governments and theological institutions that made up Death Inc.’s Board of Directors. When a full board meeting was called Death Inc. often put the United Nations to shame in size, grandeur and even peaceful discourse. No one could really argue with Death, and they all knew it.

  This is also how Death herself managed to hold onto the position of Chief of the Board, an elected position, decade in and decade out. Of course, this didn’t stop her from being careful nonetheless, in more than two hundred years of the corporation’s current incarnation, she’d been very careful not to appoint a single Senior Vice President. As if she wasn’t already hard enough to get rid of.

  Hard to get rid of indeed, but not impossible, the current international climate was less than forgiving towards corporate heads. Especially if those corporate heads did not seem to be acting in a manner that benefited all, or really me, me, me; no one really gives two shillings about the guy lower on the ladder but if they don’t feel like they’re getting special consideration…

  I can use that, was the last thing to run through Leslie Roth’s head as she took center stage in the Philadelphia board room. Three walls of the room were outfitted floor to ceiling with flat screens and almost all were filled with the faces of the other Junior Vice Presidents and Board Members, there was a camera somewhere, carefully recording her every nuance and gesture.

  She couldn’t keep herself from smiling. The reports had already come in, that little blip in California had been much more significant than she’d thought at first. This is going to be a very good day, indeed.

  ***

  The trip back to the Philadelphia office was a whole new experience compared to what she was used to. Mitei had never really considered alternate modes of transportation and though she had found herself on occasion in planes, trains and automobiles, not to mention submarines, space shuttles and just about anything else that humans had ever created to get themselves from one point or another, none of them really struck a chord with her. Some were more amazing than others but still they all seemed an utterly alien and highly inefficient method of travel when compared to the simplicity of her Path.

  Traveling with Aedan was a very different experience to the vehicles of man, or even to the Path for that matter. There was no compartment for one, most of the vehicles men created kept them insulated in as much comfort as they could manage while the world passed by harmlessly. Without a compartment everything was more present like her Path; stepping from the winter wood sideways into a vast and black cavern, the first thing you noticed was the change in temperature, the total absence of a breeze and the sudden lack of light. Still that was not what made Aedan’s method of travel so different for her; it was the slow pace and the smoothness of travel.

  Instead of moving from place to place in a single step, Aedan first led her to a space that he called ‘betwixt and between’ which he explained could be any place where two different locations connected, in the winter woods it was the exact place where the clearing where they built their fire met the woods. He had stopped her right before she could blunder into the woods, grasping her hand firmly and pointed at the area where clearing met forest, “don’t let go of my hand while we travel. Mortals might blunder right through the bridge betwixt and between but you, you might end up lost in it.”

  Then Aedan had made some gesture and Mitei had felt an odd tingle as he had moved forward and sideways all at once, dragging her with him. The chill had only increased as she had passed the bridge and through to the other side, still the sensation only lasted a moment and they were through, eyes adjusting to the sudden lack of light. All told the transition was smooth and easy; the floor on this side was worked stone beneath her feet instead of the carpet of falling leaves her feet had been resting on.

  “Where are we now?”

  Aedan squeezed her hand gently and she realized she had been grasping his fingers rather tightly, making an effort to relax her grip as he replied, “right now we’re probably Underhill, routes aren’t direct betwixt and between. Sorry, we’ll probably have to walk a ways or make a few connections before we get to your office.”

  That explained the absolute lack of light, she
supposed, if they were in some kind of underground cavern there probably was no way that the light of sun or moon could reach them. Still this would make it hard to find their way to the next location, Mitei could see in near darkness but nothing this total. Even as she was having the thought Aedan said something in a language that seemed familiar yet was not identifiable and lights came on.

  They were standing in the arch of a high and delicately carved doorway. What the light revealed before her was so unimaginably beautiful and delicate that for a minute Mitei actually just stared, breathless.

  “This is one of the places mortal men have rarely seen,” Aedan said breaking into her reverie as he started moving forward. “A place where the concept of mortality was little more than a bad joke, I never expected to find these places entirely empty.”

  “What happened? If the people who built this place where not mortal and I have never been brought here to end a life, what happened to them?”

  Aedan looked over his shoulder at her as they passed through a long hallway that mimicked perfectly the sensation of being back in the winter wood with pillars of stone carved for trunks and stones set to twinkling in the ceiling like the many stars in that night sky, “to the immortal, mortality can become a coveted treasure. It would seem that all who lived here passed on, trading their gifts for a mortal life and death long, long, ago.”

  Mitei wanted to disagree, she could not remember ever once being called to the side of a person that mimicked the features she saw carved in stone in those halls as she passed but she could not deny the emptiness of those halls. The beauty of the place was muffled and stifling and she could feel the echo of the essence of the people who had made them, of lives so long that the vibrancy of living lost all luster.

  Indeed though the halls remained uniformly lovely, the more of them she passed through the more morbid notes she could pick out in them. The hall that mimicked the winter wood was not matched by halls depicting spring or summer. The statues of elegant women and men featured no children, and the faces held more sorrow and despair than pleasure. Aedan pointed out the gardens long dead where beautiful blooms had once been cosseted on all sides by equally beautiful poisonous plants. They walked over a vast mosaic that at first seemed to depict thousands of men and women intertwined in dance, then lust and finally a horrible melding of limbs as people ripped into each other merging flesh in a way that could only be described as painful ecstasy. Still it was beauty personified and that was the worst part of the halls, at no point was the death lust of its’ creators written inelegantly upon their home but at no point was it neglected either, everywhere that the eye could alight was an homage to mortality and death that struck right to the heart and soul.