Damned If You Do

by Gordon Houghton

  I remembered the note I had written, and wished that I could have created a more meaningful message, something unique to her. But all I had managed was a single word:

  Sorry.

  Dead red roses

  We ate at a grim first-floor burger joint a hundred yards from the tower, overlooking the road that led back to the car. Hunger is one aspect of existence I didn’t miss as a corpse, and its tentative return at the sight of a greasy chargrilled steak was particularly unwelcome. Death said little during the four hours it took him to devour three T-bone specials, five portions of thick-cut chips, a chocolate nut sundae, a banana split, and countless coffee refills, but he did wonder why, before sampling it himself, I’d only consumed a tiny part of my meal.

  ‘I’ve never liked TexMex,’ I explained.

  ‘What kind of a zombie are you?’ he said.

  Frankly, a poor one. Even amongst the undead, I don’t make the grade. I am non-violent, relatively sentimental, and have no great lust for flesh – living or otherwise. But even if I had, I still wouldn’t have felt like eating.

  At the end of lunch, after the crowd, the ambulances and the police had disappeared from the scene, Death paid the bill (without tipping) and we walked slowly back to the car. He tore off a parking ticket fixed to the windscreen and ripped it up before accelerating rapidly away. After a quick trip to Office World to collect five packets of plain white copier paper, a laser cartridge and a novelty pen, we returned to the Agency. Apart from his insistence on humming a particularly mournful tune, and his observation that the reason he ate so much at lunch was that he ate so little at breakfast and dinner, Death seemed content to travel in silence.

  He reverse-parked in front of the house between a white 2CV and a black Fiesta, turned off the engine, stopped humming, got out, shut the door, and walked away. It was all done with a fluidity and speed born of long practice; but he seemed preoccupied. I remained in the car for a moment, then followed him.

  It was early evening and the sun was hidden behind the house. I guessed that it must be late summer, but having been underground for so long I couldn’t be sure. A corpse, of course, doesn’t notice the passing of the seasons – because for him all the days and months and years are the same.

  * * *

  The sound of laughter led me to the office, where Famine, Pestilence and Skirmish were listening to Death’s description of the day’s events. As I walked through the door Pestilence failed to stifle a snigger.

  ‘What’s the joke?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ he replied. He let his jaundiced eyes wander the length of my shining blue suit, then smirked.

  ‘How’s the bruise?’

  He seemed genuinely pleased by the question. ‘Growing by the hour – and spreading round the back.’ He began to lift his shirt. ‘Would you like to have a look?’

  ‘Later, maybe.’

  Death tossed his car keys to Skirmish, with the simple explanation: ‘I’ve got some paper in the boot. Take one for yourself.’ Skirmish tutted and shook his head, but obeyed. He scuttled out of the room, knocking over a coffee cup as he left. Death picked it up and put it on his desk, next to the chess board. Then he turned to me and asked if there was anything I needed.

  I needed reassurance that I had performed my work adequately; I needed a translator to help me understand my new world; I needed to know exactly how I had died – but above all, I needed to rest, and this is what I told him.

  He nodded. ‘I’ll show you to your room.’

  We headed for the doorway but Pestilence intercepted us, a sickly grin splitting his pimpled face. ‘Don’t forget we have to collect the goods from the Lab tomorrow. Before we head downtown.’

  ‘We’ll be there,’ Death replied.

  We walked back along the main corridor, turned right after the stairs into a narrow passageway, followed the passageway to another long corridor, turned right again and headed for the last door on the left.

  Death removed a golden key from his pocket and turned it in the lock. ‘The key is the Chief’s idea,’ he explained. ‘For the first few nights we’ll shut you in. Make you feel more at home.’ The door opened into a medium-sized corner bedroom, with two windows facing the side and rear of the house. The furnishing was sparse: a threadbare Barca lounger in the near left corner, a two-tier bunk bed against the left wall, a writing desk beneath the side window ahead, a wardrobe in the far right corner, a table with a stand chair beneath the rear window, and a menacing candelabra cactus to the right of the door. ‘As you can see, you’ll have to share. We’re one room short, I’m afraid.’ He smiled and gave me a comforting pat on the back. ‘Anyway, breakfast is about eight tomorrow. Come to the office when you’re ready.’

  On the writing desk stood an old Bluebird typewriter. Next to it was a white vase filled with dead red roses.

  As a corpse I had had no need to distinguish between good and bad taste, between rubbish and quality. I lost all sense of discrimination, considered all things equal. As a result, when I looked at the Artex ceiling, the white, shagpile carpet, the red-and-black diagonally-striped bedclothes, the floral wallpaper with matching curtains, and the Formica table with its portable television and blue glass ornament in the shape of a swan, I was incapable of deciding whether or not I liked my new home. It was more exciting and more unusual than the coffin – and it gave me a powerful sensation of something familiar from my past – but, fundamentally, it wasn’t me.

  I was vaguely aware of Death closing the door and turning the key in the lock. It was a nice touch: that simple sound gave me an immense sense of security. I walked over to the rear window. A canal and a railway line separated me from the long, low meadow and the evening sun.

  I returned to the bed and lay down on the bottom bunk. I knew this town, of course – but I couldn’t remember its name.

  * * *

  As I sank into sleep, alone and safe once more, I floated back to the warm, slow days of my childhood, and to my parents’ house. I climbed the stairs to the first floor, staring at the soft, floral-patterned carpet beneath my feet as I counted the steps; I passed the old grandfather clock on the landing, listening to the lazy swings of the golden pendulum; and I turned the wooden handle on the door to my father’s study, and crept inside. It wasn’t that I was forbidden to enter, but to walk boldly into such a sacred place seemed somehow irreverent.

  I was an only child, and the study provided the perfect space for me to make my own amusement. It contained an old writing desk in which my father kept the tools and scraps of his hobby wrapped in a blue velvet cloth: he used to repair watches in his spare time. There were pictures and painting kits, too – and scrapbooks and photo albums, newspapers and notebooks, curios and potted plants … And there were dozens of board games permanently piled high against one wall. I remember spending the whole of one summer teaching myself to play chess.

  But, best of all, the entire room was lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, containing hundreds of books in all sizes and colours. I spent many hours immersed in solitary silence, browsing through volume after volume of fact and fiction, absorbing anything that came my way: science or art, story or trivia, essay or anecdote. Sometimes, if my father was out working late, I would climb onto his desk and reach up to the highest shelves where he kept his crime novels. I think he put them there as a precaution, because of the adult world they described; but I was far less interested in the secrets of adulthood than in fraternizing with the criminals and helping the detectives solve their cases.

  It feels now as if most of my youth was devoted to creating and inhabiting an interior landscape of mystery and suspense. I shared arcane knowledge and indulged in melancholic reflection with Sherlock Holmes, exchanged hard-boiled wisecracks with Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, hung out with the comic hoods on Damon Runyon’s Broadway, drank tea from china cups with Miss Marple … I could never get along with Hercule Poirot, though. Even as a child, I found him far too smug.

  And now, lo
ng after my death, I see that I was never happier than in those hours I spent alone, with a pile of unread books before me; listening to the slow ticking of the grandfather clock, waiting for my father to come home.

  * * *

  I awoke to a succession of loud grunts and the rattle of the door handle. It was as if some irate primate had been released in the corridor and was desperately seeking an exit. I sat on the edge of the bed, collecting my thoughts. The room was dark, and pleasantly cool. Through the window I saw stars, and heard the barking of dogs. I was about to speak when the rattling stopped, and the angry grunts were replaced by receding footsteps.

  I had just remembered fully where I was when the footsteps returned, this time accompanied by petulant complaints. A key was inserted in the lock, the handle was twisted, and the intruder stood in the doorway.

  I heard a sigh.

  War’s little helper

  The silhouetted figure gave a token knock.

  ‘Who is it?’ I said, squinting against the light from the hall.

  ‘Skirmish.’

  ‘Come in.’

  He did so, switched on the light, locked the door behind him and said, ‘I see you’ve settled in.’ He was carrying a tray with a plate of salad, a wobbling brown dessert, and a glass of water. He saw me studying the food. ‘It’s a goat’s cheese salad with walnuts, olives and sun-dried tomatoes. Very healthy – I don’t want to end up looking like War.’ He pointed at the dessert. ‘That’s a low-fat creme caramel. Pes stole the last of the rice pudding. D’you want some?’

  I shook my head. He placed the tray on the table, turned the chair around, sat down, and took a long, slow drink from the glass.

  ‘You don’t say much, do you?’

  ‘I’m out of practice.’

  He grunted an acknowledgement. ‘It’s hard coming out of the coffin.’

  He ate his meal noisily and very quickly, shovelling the food into his mouth as if he hadn’t touched anything since breakfast. When the last flabby gobbet of dessert had disappeared, he sank into his chair, rubbed his belly in a circular motion, and belched loudly.

  ‘So,’ he began. I waited for him to continue. Instead, he stood up, walked over to the Barca lounger, twisted round and sat down. He eased the lounger into recliner mode and started to pick food from his front teeth.

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So … how was your job today?’

  I was standing at the top of the tower again, gazing down at the woman’s broken body. I imagined Death pushing her, and watched her fall earthward. For one brief, glorious moment she was graceful, like a diving bird of prey, then she thumped onto the pavement below. The thought made me feel sick.

  ‘It was OK.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ He ran his tongue around the inside of his lips. ‘You’re on a standard contract, aren’t you?’ I nodded. ‘So it’s … shape up or ship out?’

  ‘If I fail,’ I said carefully, ‘I get to choose any one of the deaths I witness this week.’

  Not that I had any intention of throwing myself off a tall building on Sunday evening. Suicide was far too low down the list of respected deaths in the corpse community to be my first choice. I couldn’t decide what it meant, either. To the woman, it was a final decision produced by years of despair and an act of revenge on the living. To the watching crowd it was a shock, or an entertainment, or simply a story they would never forget. To my employer, it was a reluctant obligation.

  ‘What was your original termination?’

  ‘I can’t remember it.’

  He laughed. ‘I remember everything about mine. I was kicking a football around with some mates in this loading depot downtown, and the ball went under a truck, and I went in after it. And I started pissing about pretending I was trapped under the wheel – it got big laughs. Jack the bloody lad. Anyway, long story short, the truck started up, went straight into reverse, and backed over my chest. Splat … Funny thing is, exactly the same thing happened to a cat I once had.’

  Skirmish finished picking his teeth and climbed onto the top bunk. I removed my shoes and jacket and returned to the lower tier. We were silent for several minutes, until he leaned over the edge and said:

  ‘Has anyone explained why you’re here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They haven’t told you about Hades?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘No-one has mentioned anything at all about an assistant?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Typical.’

  He looked at the wall with an expression of disgust before retreating to the upper bunk. Faint strains of Mozart’s Requiem echoed across the corridor from the room opposite. I was exhausted, and confused, and ill-at-ease with my new surroundings – and I would much rather have turned over and fallen asleep – but one question wouldn’t leave me alone.

  ‘Who’s Hades?’ I said.

  Breakfast of the damned

  I awoke feeling happy.

  This was unusual. Happiness is useless in the coffin; so is despair. Emotions as a whole never really concern the dead because they are incapable of experiencing anything to any great degree. Ask a corpse how he feels and he’s likely to respond:

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Assuming he can still talk, of course.

  * * *

  The wardrobe I shared with Skirmish was stocked with a supply of clothes for six more days: a rainbow collection of T-shirts, a stack of floral boxer shorts, and half a dozen fresh pairs of socks. To reflect my mood I selected yellow socks embroidered with a dancing crab design, boxer shorts decorated with yellow roses, and a yellow shirt bearing the slogan ZOMBIE POWER! I was not offered a choice of suits or shoes.

  After dressing, I remembered Death’s instructions from the previous evening and followed the corridor to the office. My door was already unlocked. Skirmish – who had deferred answering my question about Hades to a more suitable time – was nowhere to be seen.

  * * *

  ‘How are you this morning?’

  The office was unoccupied except for Death, who was sitting at his desk by the door. He was opening letters with the kind of knife normally associated with a ritual sacrifice. A portable CD-player to the left of the paper column was belting out a guitar solo from the Grateful Dead’s ‘Live Dead’ album.

  ‘Happy,’ I shouted.

  ‘Enjoy it while it lasts,’ he said glumly. He turned down the volume and handed me a single sheet of blue notepaper. ‘Take a look at that.’

  Written on the paper were four numbers – 7587 – and a signature.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Correspondence chess. My opponent has moved the knight she had on g5 to h7. She’s trying to recreate one of the matches from the Ninth Correspondence Olympiad. Penrose-Vukcevic, 1982–85. Probably using a computer.’

  He took the note from my hand and slipped it into a document wallet bulging with similar offerings. I seized the opportunity to ask a question which had occurred to me before.

  ‘Why do you play chess with the living?’

  ‘It’s an obsession,’ he said waving his arms manically. ‘I can’t resist the challenge … It’s like dancing – a passion and a weakness.’ He smiled briefly at the thought of these twin indulgences, then assumed a serious air. ‘It’s tradition too, of course. If my opponents win, their reward is to go on living. If they lose – and they invariably do – they die … I’m playing around two hundred games right now. This one’s a woman, about thirty years old, and she’s just had a freak heart attack. As far as she knows she may live, she may not, so I threw down the gauntlet and she picked it up. Actually,’ he added dolefully, ‘she would have recovered anyway.’

  I smiled in sympathy.

  ‘Do you play chess?’ he asked.

  ‘I used to,’ I replied laconically – and I would have added that I wasn’t a bad player either, but my mind was distracted by an idea I couldn’t pin down, and my cadaver’s instinct for self-protection forced me to deprecate my abilities: ‘I k
new the rules, but I never really explored it to any depth … Like almost everything I did, I preferred to watch.’

  A typical Lifer.

  Lifer, incidentally, is the term used by the dead and the undead to refer to the living. In general, Lifers are warm-blooded, agile, emotional and inquisitive. They have colourful, soft skin. They eat and excrete.

  The dead – the patient mass of corpses waiting for Armageddon – are an entirely different species, and one which included me until very recently. They are cold-blooded, lazy, socially inept, and indifferent to almost every subject but their own security. Their skin, even when intact, is waxy and pale. They are eaten and excreted by other creatures.

  The undead – zombies – straddle the abyss between the two. Our blood is cool and flows slowly; we can stand upright, but find it easier to fall over; we desire life and feeling, without really comprehending either; we want to ask questions but hardly ever find the right moment or the right words. Our skin is ashen and unyielding, but readily disguised. A zombie eats and excretes, but his diet is usually limited to living flesh.

  This plays havoc with the digestion.

  * * *

  Death and I headed down the hall towards the breakfast room, the last door on the right. When we arrived Pestilence and Famine had already found places at the oval dining table, and were reading the morning newspapers. Famine was wearing black silk pyjamas with the traditional scales emblem embroidered on the jacket pocket, Pestilence was wrapped in a white quilted dressing gown. They lowered their papers to exchange brief smiles as we entered.

  ‘Take War’s place,’ Death suggested, indicating a chair between himself and Pestilence. ‘He won’t be back until tomorrow.’

  There were five seats in all, three unoccupied. I sat down in silence and glanced across the table towards Famine. His head was hidden by the Guardian. A small headline caught my eye: Spate of grave desecrations signals ‘decline in moral standards’. Pestilence had apparently discovered a similar story. He was reading the Sun, where the full-page article facing us was titled: They Nicked My Stiff! Claims Sex-Op Vicar. Death either didn’t notice or didn’t care that he was in the news – he simply clapped his hands and announced a hearty good morning. When no-one answered, his enthusiasm waned as quickly as it had waxed.