Damned If You Do

by Gordon Houghton

  ‘What do I have to do?’

  ‘Just switch it on.’ I showed her the button. ‘When you feel it’s necessary.’

  Looking around the room, at its gaudy opulence; watching her folding her arms, trying to remain in control; listening to the fear in her voice as she thanked me and hurried me through the front door, two questions still remained.

  What did she want from me?

  And what did I want?

  Cactus ex machina

  We ate a very late, and very long, lunch at an Indian restaurant opposite the railway station. A vegetarian curry for me, a range of meat dishes for Death – and I passed my first stool since resurrection. It was early evening when we returned to the car, and it had stopped raining. Cerberus was still sleeping peacefully on the back seat where we had left him, and he didn’t stir until, back at the Agency, Death dragged him from the boot and escorted him to the kennel.

  I excused myself and retired to my room – where I was startled by noises I hadn’t heard since I was alive.

  I paused, then knocked hesitantly on the door.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘The apprentice.’

  ‘Come in.’

  The curtains were drawn against the evening sun, but I saw Skirmish slumped on the Barca lounger, watching a television programme I vaguely remembered. This was the source of the strange sounds.

  ‘Inspector Morse,’ he explained, without taking his eyes off the screen. ‘My favourite episode. The one where the driving instructor goes bananas.’

  I hopped across his line of sight and sat on the edge of the lower bunk. I couldn’t claim to know the particular episode he was referring to, or to be as interested in it as he was, but I maintained a respectful silence for the next two hours until the programme finished. Quite coincidentally, this idle time also revealed the answer to a question I’d been pondering since Monday morning. As I watched, I began to recognize landmarks from the last three days, places I had visited, even the cemetery where I was buried; and long before one of the characters mentioned the name of the city, I remembered, at last, where I was. Oxford.

  This was a relief, but there were more pressing questions. In particular, I still wanted to know what had happened to Hades. As the closing credits rolled I wandered over to the table by the rear window to collect my thoughts. Skirmish switched off the television and yawned. I turned around, and was just about to speak when Pestilence’s remedy launched its final and most vicious assault.

  I convulsed, tripped against the table leg, lurched forward, tried to steady myself, lost my balance completely, and fell against the cactus in the corner.

  How unlucky can you get?

  Have brain, will travel

  Thursday’s outfit:

  The usual sparkling suit and white slip-ons, blue forget-me-not boxer shorts, sea-blue socks embroidered with smiling crayfish, and a sky blue T-shirt bearing the enigmatic if rather bland statement: DO NOT DISTURB. I watched myself dress in the mirror on the back of the wardrobe door, and felt comfortable with my new identity.

  I was the coolest zombie in town.

  * * *

  The dining room was crowded. All the Agents were present, and their miscellaneous breakfasts blanketed the table like multicoloured pond weed. The only free place was a low stool in the far corner where, after avoiding a collision with Skirmish on one of his frequent trips to the kitchen, I sat down.

  ‘How’s the cactus?’ Pestilence asked.

  ‘Better than I am,’ I replied.

  Skirmish disappeared through the saloon doors and returned with a bowl of cereal and some fruit for me, before resuming his assault on a natural organic yoghurt. He had been equally helpful the previous night, spending almost an hour patiently removing over a hundred spines with a pair of tweezers. I had passed the rest of the evening in the bath, soothing the discomfort, removing the variety of cadaverous odours I’d acquired in the past couple of days, and contemplating the suitability of accidental death. If nothing else, the episode with the cactus had confirmed my opinion: should my apprenticeship end in failure, I would not be slipping and stumbling my way back to the grave. As curtain calls go, it was too spontaneous, too uncontrollable.

  ‘How’s the bruise?’ Death asked Pestilence.

  ‘I told you yesterday.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘In the meeting.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Silence.

  ‘So how is it now?’ War shouted, spitting prosciutto.

  ‘Smaller,’ Pestilence replied.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘SMALLER.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  Silence.

  ‘Where d’you go from here?’ Famine continued.

  ‘I try again,’ Pestilence answered.

  ‘New ideas?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right.’

  Silence.

  Sitting there, chewing on a banana, watching my employers, I had an unusually complex thought for a zombie. I wasn’t sure what the thought meant, or even if it was interesting, but this is what my brain was telling me:

  The Agents’ conversation was like many I’d had when I was dead. It functioned like a smooth, efficient machine: the words created a simple mechanical rhythm and worked tirelessly to produce useful output from minimum input. It is the same in the coffin. To a cadaver, words mean precisely what they say; if they didn’t, the explanations would last until Judgement Day. So: a shell is a hard outer layer protecting a vulnerable core. A machine is an apparatus using mechanical power to drive movable parts. A coffin is six walls of wood dividing the dead from the soil. There is no room for metaphor or misunderstanding.

  Corpses take things at face value. This is why they are never invited to parties.

  ‘What’s on your agenda today?’ Famine asked me.

  We’re off to the fairground,’ Death answered with forced joviality. ‘In disguise.’

  ‘Lucky buggers,’ War interrupted. ‘Me and Skirmish are spending tonight doing PR in the city centre. Knife-fights, minor riots, that kind of crap.’ He scanned the table for sympathy. ‘Obviously, I’d rather be in at the sharp end.’

  ‘Obviously,’ Famine agreed.

  ‘But if the Chief says there are no flashpoints, there are no flashpoints.’

  ‘It’s beyond our control,’ Pestilence reassured him.

  ‘It drives me ’cking mad sometimes.’

  ‘Nothing you can do,’ said Death.

  * * *

  When I lived with Amy, I hadn’t yet grown a hard outer covering. Affection burst out of me like water from a spring. I told her I loved her on countless occasions, and meant it. This is more than I can claim for the relationships which eventually followed.

  After she left, I surrounded myself with a carapace which shielded me from intimate personal contact with other human beings. If I met a stranger, I withdrew into it; if I met a potential lover, I stuck out my head. But I never abandoned the shell completely, because I didn’t want anyone to see the pink and quivering thing which inhabited it. The only trouble was, even if I wanted to expose my deepest self, the shell prevented me.

  With one exception.

  On the night I died, I was standing in the bedroom of Amy’s apartment, delaying my exit because I wanted to be with her so desperately for just one more second. Without warning, my shell cracked open.

  ‘I love you,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she replied.

  * * *

  Pestilence spat out a gobbet of something that could have been flesh, fruit, cereal, pulse, vegetable or dairy product. Its true identity was masked by a thin film of greenish mould darkened by saliva.

  ‘Something wrong?’ asked Skirmish innocently.

  ‘This food,’ he grimaced, ‘it’s … fresh.’ He retrieved further remnants of breakfast from his teeth and flicked them onto his plate, shaking his head. ‘Are you trying to poison me?’

  Skirmish’s denial and Pestilence’s repeated accusatio
ns sparked a squabble which continued until Death stood up, beckoned me with a long white finger, and led me to the office.

  ‘I’d like you to do me a favour,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a ton of paperwork to catch up on and we need to collate some information before tonight.’ I nodded. ‘I don’t have the time to do it myself, so if you could read up on a couple of files—’

  ‘Which ones?’

  ‘The Life File, naturally…’ He rummaged through his papers for a note on which he had scribbled the name of today’s client, then handed it to me. ‘And Machines. Mechanical Accidents, specifically. Procedural details, that kind of thing. I can remember most of it but I’ll need you to fill in any gaps.’

  ‘Where can I find them?’

  ‘I think they’ve already been transferred to the Chief’s office on the second floor. Here’s the key.’ I was about to leave, when he added in a whisper, ‘One more thing. You asked me about Hades the other night … All I can say is – watch your back when War’s around.’

  Where’s the Chief?

  I opened the white door on the first-floor landing to find the cast-iron spiral staircase I’d seen yesterday. It coiled upwards into darkness. I groped along the wall to the right of the doorway, found a timer switch and pressed the button. Weak light from the head of the stairwell glimmered through the helix of black steps. I climbed the spiral slowly, turning through two revolutions, conscious of the sharp sound of each footfall. The naked bulb at the top swayed slightly, silently, and cast a dim glow on a low, wooden door ahead.

  I knocked lightly.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  * * *

  There was no response so I knocked again, firmly. I waited as a corpse waits: quietly, patiently, passively. When I was convinced there would be no reply, I turned the handle, unlocked the door and stepped inside.

  The Chief’s office was a long, low attic framed by stunted walls and sloping roofs. Two dormer windows opposite the door provided the only source of natural light. The room was empty apart from a writing desk, several armchairs and (curiously) a tombola drum. Everything – furniture, walls and carpet – was white.

  On the writing desk a mass of plain paper lay scattered, along with a small computer and laser printer, both switched off. Behind the desk was a fireplace, still smouldering from a recent fire. Nearby was a column of files, similar to the documents I’d seen in Archives on the ground floor. There were no other signs of life: no filing cabinets carelessly left open, no dog-eared books, no food, no drink.

  The column contained about fifty rectangular document wallets, all the same shade of grey. I removed each one carefully, searching for any reference to the subject or name Death had given me. Almost immediately, I discovered a wallet marked Mechanical Accidents, a heavyweight collection of files tied together with string. I spent two hours reading and trying to memorize every sheet, increasingly conscious that the Chief might return at any moment. At first I was simply curious to know how he might look. But the idea possessed me, and made me ever more nervous, until I was so afraid and resentful of the authority he wielded that my hands shook and I could no longer concentrate on anything but the fear of waiting.

  But the Chief never showed up – and my scrutiny of the files yielded only a single passage devoted to procedure:

  PROCEDURAL RECOMMENDATION:

  To ensure successful execution, the client must be followed at all times. The recommended pursuit window is between 2.1m and 9.8m. Intervention, which should be kept to a minimum, will take place at the Agent’s discretion.

  I continued the search. Sunlight funnelled through the windows, a transparent tunnel of heat and dust terminating in a small white rectangle on the carpet by the desk. Apart from the sporadic creaks and sighs of slow-burning wood in the fireplace, the room was silent. And I was completely alone.

  The Life File lay two-thirds of the way down the column and consisted of one hundred and twenty-six pages of detailed information. I discovered the average length of our client’s facial hair (4.6cm), the distance from the bottom of his right earlobe to the dimple on his chin (12.3cm), the size of his left thumbnail (1.08cm × 1.2cm), the length of his penis erect (14.9cm) and relaxed (4.4cm), the average number of freckles per square centimetre on his right shoulder (7); and so on. The file also included data I could make no sense of: the colour of his skin (49), the shape of his head (2677), his behaviour pattern (823543), his body type (343). Then there were pages of psychological profile, life history, character analysis, intelligence assessment; and numerical evaluations of abstract concepts such as love, hatred, courage and cowardice.

  After a while I tossed it aside in frustration.

  * * *

  My own life can be mapped out in numbers, too.

  I had nine lovers in all. The longest relationship I had, with Amy, lasted for thirty-five months. That’s about one hundred and fifty weeks, or eleven hundred days, or twenty-five thousand hours. The shortest relationship I had was with a woman who was freaked by the revelation of one of my fantasies. This lasted nine days, or just over two hundred hours.

  I had a favourite number, too – seven. I believed it to be magical and sacred. I believed it would bring me luck.

  What is more pointless than faith?

  * * *

  As I sat by the fire, staring into the embers and considering the data from the file, something strange happened. I briefly turned my back on death and remembered what it meant to be alive.

  This was a significant swing. As I’ve already explained, a zombie is neither alive nor dead, but exists in a kind of existential purgatory – a state correctly referred to as undead. More specifically: one broad definition of a Lifer is someone who can fully interact with their surroundings. Should they choose to do so, they can walk between two points, talk to each other, swim in the sea, fill in wall charts, fly kites, read newspapers, go fishing, have sex, play games, punch objects, light matches, climb trees, open doors – and on and on. Cadavers, on the other hand, know they are dead because of one simple fact: nothing happens, nothing will happen.

  A zombie is a tightrope walker between these two poles. He has the potential to feel, but can’t see how to achieve it. He has the ability to say anything he wants, but too often finds himself dumbstruck by his surroundings. He can survive amongst the living, but prefers the safety of his own room. A zombie is a corpse with certain limited privileges.

  And right now I was sensing the expansion of those privileges. I felt free, for instance, to sit in the chair at the Chief’s desk and read the Post-it note stuck to the computer: 1/12 of Batch 03/99 still missing. Strongly suspect S. – P. Free, also, to switch on the computer and watch it boot up, ignoring all the rules about privacy I had learned in the soil. Free to place my hand on the mouse and move the cursor over the options which appeared on screen:

  CODES

  CONTRACTS

  LIFE FILES

  REPORTS

  TERMINATIONS

  My hand wondered how much it could explore. My brain replied: as much as you want. So I clicked on the first category, and was surprised by the computer’s speed. It loaded a database program and revealed the contents almost immediately:

  None of this made any sense – but my brain, which only four days before had been about as useful as a jellyfish at a rodeo, suggested I explore some more. I scrolled through the next five pages, then exited and clicked on the second option: CONTRACTS. A different database loaded, and a sub-menu offered me a bewildering series of choices. But one word caught my attention, having been mentioned both by Death and Skirmish: standard. I clicked on it, and read:

  My body reacted to this new information by pumping out adrenaline. The adrenaline told me that I had discovered something important, but my head couldn’t work out what it was.

  So I thought about it. I remembered that during my adult life I often sought excuses for my behaviour. I convinced myself that circumstances were in control of me, that I had no choice but t
o do what I did, that I never had time to step back and consider my actions. I argued that because there was no time to consider anything, I couldn’t be held responsible for my actions; and if I couldn’t be held responsible, I could do what I liked with impunity. I was so stupid back then, I might as well have been a corpse lying in a coffin, knocking out idiotic messages to its neighbours.

  My adrenaline was merely reflecting the fact that every action has consequences; and that, in signing the contract on Monday without considering the alternatives, I had behaved like a complete airhead. But even as my confusion and humiliation reached their peak, a small voice in my brain was whispering that in the details of the contract, there might yet be a way out of this mess.

  I exited twice, clicked on REPORTS, then on the first directory in each subsequent menu until I found what seemed to be a pertinent filename: FALLING-08/99.TR. This is what it contained:

  It took me a moment to associate this data with the woman who had committed suicide on Monday, but the realization was far from comforting. It only accelerated the sickness rising within me, and the more I flicked backwards and forwards through the menus on screen, the more I felt like a creature from another planet.

  * * *

  In the blackest moments of depression following my breakdown, I regarded the world as an enormous filing system. I saw it as an infinitely large room filled with great, grey cabinets, each cabinet with billions of drawers, each drawer containing numberless folders, each folder holding countless documents and sub-documents. I perceived a labyrinthine network of cross-references so complex that no-one could possibly understand how even one single part interacted with another. How could they? The subject-range contained information from the smallest subatomic particle to the universe itself.

  And though individuals might claim to be separate from this process, they were integral to it. They were either its administrators, responsible for labelling, classification and control; or they were nothing more than anthologies of statistics, stacks of useless documents crammed into cabinets of skin and bone.

  I must have been crazy.