Damned If You Do

by Gordon Houghton

  ‘What’s the point in going on?’

  ‘There’s always a point.’

  ‘It doesn’t feel right.’

  ‘How’s it supposed to feel?’

  I gaze at her, recording her face in memory. Raven’s wing hair, knife-cut lips, witch’s nose, brown dagger-eyes. Her teeth chatter. Her features are frozen. Her black hair falls.

  I file the memory and turn around. I see a mound of snow through a break in the trees. It rises like a wave, like a dune.

  ‘A bridge.’

  She follows my pointing finger and nods, but the despair remains. We are individuals divided by time and space. She was a lone candle in a dark room, she shone like starlight, she was a hurricane blowing, she was the sea and the shore, she was birdsong – and I was all of these things to her. And I am an extinguished candle, a black hole, a weakening breeze, a dried-up riverbed, and a long, loud wailing.

  And she is all of these things to me.

  * * *

  Famine’s pale, sickly shape strode quickly through the snow in my mind. Dry pine needles covered his tank top. The sight of him surprised me. I stepped backwards and tripped over a root on the upland slope.

  ‘Shouldn’t be so jumpy,’ he observed, offering me his hand.

  ‘You shouldn’t sneak up on people,’ I countered.

  ‘Found anything yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nor me.’ He stopped and studied me briefly. Opened and closed his mouth like a fish. ‘Haven’t read the Life File, have you?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘No problem. Not really necessary anyway. It’s a simple ransom job.’ He smiled thinly. ‘We’re here to make sure it goes wrong.’

  ‘I’m tired of all these deaths,’ I complained.

  ‘Never easy … But you get used to it.’ He gestured for me to accompany him along the path. ‘Today, for example, I have to supervise the starvation procedure. Ensure that the body has exhausted all stores of glycogen and fat. If client shows severe wasting, tissue proteins will be under attack. Good sign.’ His yellow eyes rolled sideways, lizard-like, then flicked back. ‘And I need to make sure she doesn’t have water … And that she really feels hunger.’ He stopped. ‘Don’t like any of it, don’t dislike it – but have to do it. Chief’s orders.’

  ‘Death seems to feel the same way,’ I suggested.

  ‘Death’s like me, perhaps worse. Tired of it all.’ He paused, and sighed. We sat down on a patch of grass beneath a weeping willow. ‘Working for the Agency isn’t easy. After the first thousand years you begin to recognize patterns. Patterns that repeat, and repeat, and repeat in millennia that follow. Difficult not to become very bored.’ He sighed again. ‘All terminations different, but all essentially the same. Anything we achieve creatively is a bonus … But for Death, problem is more serious. Not just the detail of his job which bothers him, but the reason for it.’ He scratched his hairless head with long, black nails. ‘Pes and War different. Always take pleasure in their work. Don’t stop to think.’

  ‘What about Skirmish?’

  ‘New. Still enthusiastic. Big ideas.’ He smiled. ‘Can be dangerous.’

  We walked along the path, back towards where Death had disappeared.

  ‘The Chief tries to make our terminations more exciting … But lacks compassion. No experience of dealing with Lifers face-to-face.’ He frowned. ‘Had you read today’s file, as I have, you would’ve seen that today’s termination is totally inappropriate to the client. Has not lived her life in a manner which deserves a death such as this.’ We stopped at a shaded viewpoint overlooking the sluggish grey river. ‘Feeling is that the Chief is staging terminations. Manipulating the data we’ve compiled to produce work which satisfies him on a personal level. Could have very serious consequences.’

  ‘Why don’t you speak to him about it?’

  ‘Would like to. But have never spoken to him. Never even seen him.’ He chuckled briefly. ‘Sometimes doubt that he exists.’

  I heard a shout in the distance: ‘Over here.’ Down the slope to our left, near the river.

  Death was standing by an eroded stretch of bank, surrounded by trees. A slender, brown boomerang of silty water bent towards and away from us in a smooth arc, its ends disgorged and swallowed by the woodland. As we drew closer we saw the narrow, plastic air-pipe rising from a low mound of raw earth.

  ‘Still alive?’ Famine asked.

  ‘Barely,’ Death replied.

  He reached into the front pocket of his jeans and produced three pairs of sunglasses, like the ones I’d seen in his polo shirt on Monday morning. He handed one each to Famine and me, and kept the last for himself.

  ‘What are these for?’

  ‘Try them on,’ he suggested.

  I studied the glasses in my hand. Thick plastic, black lenses. A simple frame. Nothing unusual. I shrugged and put them on.

  I removed them immediately, afraid of what I’d seen.

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Death, reassuringly. ‘Everyone reacts like that the first time.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Put them on again. Keep them on. You’ll see.’

  I tried on the sunglasses once more, and the gloom of twilight descended. Two grey aliens grinned at me in a dim landscape of ghosts. Everything was shadow, nothing had substance. I removed the glasses agitatedly.

  ‘I don’t understand—’

  ‘They help us to observe,’ Death explained. Both he and Famine were now wearing them, so that I couldn’t see their eyes behind the black lenses. ‘They’re handy in cases like this, when you need to record the precise moment termination took place. But generally, we use them to check that we’ve found the right grave when we’re digging people up. Look for yourself.’ He pointed at the earth mound.

  As I put on the glasses for a third time, the world lost its colour and slipped into a dimension of shimmering spectres. It was as if the top layer of existence had been peeled away to reveal the grim, grey structures beneath. I looked at the skeletal giant standing at the grave side. Diaphanous layers of changing patterns fluctuated over his entire body: sombre clothes shivered above ashen flesh, flesh slid over pallid muscle and fat, colourless organs hung inside string baskets of bloodless veins. A gloomy framework of pearl bones held the creature together.

  ‘We’ve got a whole box of them back at the office,’ he announced, proudly.

  ‘How do they work?’ I asked.

  ‘Who knows?’

  The figure standing next to the giant was tiny in comparison, but its translucent fragility was just as disturbing. It wavered before me, its mouth open in a toothy grin. The folds of its white brain and the feeble beating of its withered heart disgusted me.

  ‘Shock, isn’t it? Keep looking. Becomes routine.’

  The landscape had no depth. Features were laid on top of each other in a series of overlapping planes. I turned around. The fish-speckled river was a dirty grey cloth sliding between two flat banks. I turned again. I saw a thousand feet of hillside and woodland, dimly floating in space. I looked down. I felt like I was walking on air. If I took a single step, I would fall to the centre of the earth.

  The vision was clearer than an X-ray but darker than daylight. The further away everything was, the hazier it became.

  It was like looking into the past.

  I turned at last towards the grave. I saw the mound of earth, six feet of soil, the wooden coffin walls. I saw seven feet of black plastic pipe stretching from the head of the casket to Famine’s skeletal feet. I saw the body of a tall, young woman, the clothes that covered her, the panic on her face, the pounding of her dark heart through the watery bars of her ribs. I saw her hands coiled into fists. I saw grey worms burrowing in the soil beneath her, waiting.

  And through all this confusion of skin, and soil, and skeleton, I realized, with horror, that I knew her.

  Snow White and the three Agents

  My zombie brain refused to deal with this information, and reverted to trivi
a mode again. It reminded me that I’d once had a paranoid fear of premature burial, because it was one of the few forms of death that offered no chance of escape: those who bury you assume they have good cause, and don’t normally dig you up every fifteen minutes to check if they’ve made a mistake. I wasn’t the only one afraid of this fate, either. I knew of over twenty patented devices designed to avert the annoyance of accidental interment.

  I could never understand those lunatics who actually requested to be buried alive for the sake of some record. Such people exist. They’ve even devised two strict rules to ensure that they are as uncomfortable as possible during their subterranean confinement:

  The coffin should lie at least two metres below ground and have a maximum capacity of 1.5 million cubic centimetres.

  To keep the contestant alive, a communication and feeding pipe with a diameter of no more than ten centimetres is allowed.

  Just before I died, I read that the longest documented voluntary interment was one hundred and forty-one days.

  Beat that.

  * * *

  ‘Let’s get on with it,’ said the tiny skeleton.

  ‘I agree,’ agreed the giant skeleton.

  I knew who she was. I had seen her, still alive, on Tuesday. I had been paralysed by the memory of her yesterday morning. It was Lucy. And I couldn’t restrain my imagination: I remembered again the moment when I emerged from my shell at the Jericho Café.

  ‘I think I’m falling in love with you,’ I said.

  ‘Me too,’ she replied.

  When I first met her, I thought she was the kind of person who would throw you a conversational rope and use it to drag you down into the mire of her own misery. When I tried to speak to her about anything else in those first few weeks she suffered from temporary deafness. She hardly ever listened to anything I said and often completely ignored the questions I asked her; even when she did answer, her reply betrayed a profound misunderstanding of the question. It was a challenge simply to communicate – a challenge I found irresistibly attractive.

  But after that moment when I first crept out of my carapace, I discovered that she could also be the funniest and most charming person anyone would wish to meet. She told me jokes like my father’s: inoffensive, surreal and short. She once made me laugh so hard that I had stomach cramps for an hour. These are the kind of memories a zombie treasures.

  And we became lovers. We wanted to, because we were so happy. But it was a mistake, and it only lasted nine days. I didn’t claim, as Amy had once said to me, that it just didn’t feel right. I didn’t look for incipient signs of rejection in Lucy, as I had with others, which would convince me that I should leave before I was kicked out. I didn’t even pick on something trivial, such as powerful body odour and bad breath (the kind of combination that, were he not dead already, a corpse would die for). Instead, and without knowing it – without even consciously intending that the end should come so soon – I found a different echo of my relationship with Amy.

  Our entire affair was spent in bed together. Eating junk food, sleeping fitfully, having sex often. Every suggestion Lucy and I made to each other, we acted on. We seemed totally compatible. And I recall every detail of her room, from the hills of soft toys in every corner to the leopard-print duvet, from the white shagpile carpet to the Artex ceiling. I remember lying half-awake on the morning of the last day and gazing up at the frozen patterns of stalactites, like little white stars clustered in crazy constellations. I even recall the patterns I saw: animals, and food, and faces, and the chaotic spinning of suns. I was comfortable and relaxed, and free to imagine everything or nothing, as I had often been in my father’s study so long ago.

  Our relationship felt so open and natural, I thought I could suggest anything to her; and lying there on the bed, gazing at the ceiling, I had an idea. Normally, I would have waited several weeks before mentioning some of my more unusual sexual preferences, but my fantasy fuelled my desire, and my desire had to be satisfied. I pulled back the duvet and stood up.

  ‘I’ve got a surprise for you,’ I said.

  She smiled sleepily.

  I left the bedroom and drifted into her kitchen, where I repeated the game Amy had once played with me. I found a plastic shopping bag and a large elastic band. I returned with both to her double bed, slipped the bag over my head and pulled the elastic band over my neck. I felt myself growing very excited, and sucked the plastic into my mouth as I spoke.

  ‘Take it off when I start to pass out,’ I said.

  But she didn’t reply – and a moment later I removed the bag and the elastic band and tossed them aside. I saw that she was standing up, with her back to me. She had begun to dress.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, breathing deeply, feeling my face redden.

  ‘You’re fucking sick,’ she replied.

  And I couldn’t see why. I had buried the corpse of my past. So I simply told her what I had often told myself, believing it to be true, hoping it would help:

  ‘How do you know what you want until you’ve tried it?’

  She wouldn’t listen. And I amplified this minor incompatibility between us until it became an excuse to end our relationship. Like all the others, it decayed to a pile of dry bones and a handful of dust.

  Safe again.

  Pathetic.

  * * *

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked the tiny skeleton. His white teeth were fixed in a grin over the end of the grey air-pipe.

  ‘He’s making her feel hungry,’ the giant skeleton replied.

  ‘Very hungry,’ confirmed the tiny skeleton.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  Both skeletons turned towards me and, as well as skeletons are able, stopped grinning.

  ‘Chief’s orders,’ they said in unison.

  * * *

  I didn’t need to look at the grave to describe Lucy – a tide of random memories washed over me. She was six feet two inches tall. Her face was angular, but not bony. When she moved, her limbs resembled an octopus waving half of its tentacles. She despised onions; she had thousands of friends; she loved sex, and gave it freely. And now she had a dark bruise on her right cheek, and a red cut on her lip – both, presumably a gift from the man with the deep, black eyes. I remembered him watching me. He didn’t seem the tolerant type.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ the giant skeleton said. His tone was sombre, but his skull was laughing.

  ‘I know her,’ I told him.

  ‘It often feels that way when you’ve read the Life File.’

  ‘No – I mean, I’ve seen her before.’

  He nodded, but still misunderstood. ‘Tuesday was an unfortunate day for meeting future clients.’

  * * *

  When he wasn’t breathing into the pipe, the tiny skeleton hummed a melody I didn’t recognize. I watched his small grey lungs shrinking and expanding inside his grey chest. He breathed, and he hummed, and continued to breathe and hum in an irregular pattern, repeating the same tune against the background of birdsong and the rolling river, until his breathing and humming irritated the hell out of me.

  ‘What’s the music?’ I asked, trying to break the cycle.

  ‘Funeral march from Akhnaten,’ he said, turning towards me. ‘Philip Glass. Seems appropriate.’

  And he started to hum some more.

  I desperately wanted to speak to Lucy again. Just a few words: It’s not so bad. Or maybe a reassurance: Don’t be afraid. Dying is the worst part. Just to talk to her. But I didn’t want her to die like this. I glided over to the graveside. The skeletons glanced at me then continued their work: the giant skeleton supervising, the tiny skeleton breathing.

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’ I asked.

  ‘You can watch,’ suggested the giant. He reached out with his double-boned arms to touch my shoulder, but I backed away in fear. I still wasn’t used to the reality the glasses were showing me.

  I looked down, through the bones of my feet, through the soil. Above the faint whit
eness of her skull and below the shadow of the coffin, Lucy’s grey face was frozen into a grimace. Her arms and legs were quivering. Her white eyes were wide open. I sensed something was wrong, and the tiny skeleton confirmed it by abruptly ceasing his inane humming.

  ‘Know those days when everything goes right? When you feel proud of your achievement? When you just know you’ve done a good job?’

  The giant skeleton sighed. ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘This isn’t one of those days.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘That is.’ The small skeleton pointed at a dark grey blockage about two-thirds of the way down the air-pipe.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Blockage.’

  ‘I can see that. What’s causing it?’

  ‘Leaf, maybe. Can’t tell.’

  The giant tapped his bony fingers against his skull, and looked as depressed as any death’s head can. He stared at the grave, and at both of us, before announcing his decision.

  ‘Nothing we can do,’ he said.

  * * *

  I removed my sunglasses and put them in my pocket. The world reassumed colour and three dimensions. The skeletons fleshed out, became Death and Famine. Both were standing by a mound of earth from which a yellow plastic pipe rose like a periscope. I could no longer watch my friend dying. I was glad not to see the terror on her pale face, or the involuntary spasms of her limbs.

  ‘She’s not getting enough air,’ Famine observed, staring at the ground.

  ‘But she’s still breathing,’ Death said. ‘I suppose it would be kinder if we blocked off the supply completely; but it’s a couple of hours too soon. I don’t know what the repercussions would be. The Chief said nothing about this.’

  I felt nauseous. I remembered the warmth of her body against mine. I could trace every inch of her with my hands, even now. I remembered the sweet taste of her mouth, the cute angles of her crooked teeth, the deep blue sparkle of her eyes. I could still hear her laughter; and when she laughed, her mouth opened like a flower, revealing everything that she was, inviting you inside. She didn’t want to know you, but it didn’t matter.