How to be Death

by Amber Benson

  Daniel’s question caught me unaware. It was so pointed, so real, that it distracted me from the weird sense of internal entrapment I was experiencing.

  “Uhm …” I started to say then stopped, wanting to answer him honestly. “Actually, not so great, really. If you want to know the truth.”

  He nodded like he’d expected as much.

  “Me, too,” he confided, finally looking me in the eye. “Not so great.”

  My throat constricted, the soft flesh of my tongue pressing firmly against my upper palate as I tried not to cry. It was a useless dodge; I wasn’t strong enough to fight back the wave of utter misery that overwhelmed me.

  “I, uh …” The words wouldn’t come without bringing tears.

  Daniel nodded again as if he knew what I was thinking. As if, in fact, he had the exact same emotions coursing inside him, too—though he seemed to have a much better handle on the crying part. He let out a shaky breath and grinned, but there was no happiness in his eyes, only my misery mirrored back at me. We stood like that, two people experiencing a shared, bone-aching pain, and in that moment, we were the only two people left in all of the world. I could feel my heart thunking like sludge, its steady beat drowning out all other sound as I stared into Daniel’s eyes. We were in a vacuum, a lonely place of our own making, where nothing else existed but each other.

  Then the moment was lost as he sighed and looked away. I sensed him trying to recollect his emotions, to blot out this brave new world our misspent love had created. When he looked back up at me, the connection had been severed, the thrum between us, which had been so strong that it shook me from the inside out, was gone and I was back in my own body, the itch to climb out of myself, no more.

  “OMG! Is that Calliope Reaper-Jones?!”

  The voice was loud and unmistakably feminine. I turned around to find its saucy-looking owner barreling toward me, her large, braless breasts jiggling inside a tight, blue spandex minidress that barely grazed the tops of her very tanned upper thighs. She was tiny, barely five feet on a good day, I guessed. Yet the dangerously high wedge heels she’d strapped on to her dainty feet made her much closer to my height.

  “You didn’t tell me you knew her,” the girl chided Daniel as she slid between us and possessively took his arm, letting me know, without words, he belonged to her.

  It was like a punch in the gut to see the girl hanging all over Daniel like he was her own personal jungle gym. She was laying on the classless sexual mojo act with a trowel, letting me know exactly where I stood as far as Daniel was concerned. And at least he had the decency to look embarrassed by the show.

  “Aren’t you going to introduce us?” she cooed, oblivious to the fact neither Daniel nor I had said a word since she’d sashayed her perky butt over and interrupted our little … whatever it was.

  “Calliope, this is Coy.”

  She stuck her hand out and the charm bracelets she wore looped around her wrist jangled in concert.

  “Hiya!” she chirped, her pouty red lips bunched together in what I realized, belatedly, was a smile.

  With a feeling of resignation, I took her delicate brown fingers in mine and let her pump my arm up and down.

  “Nice to meet you.”

  She did that pout/smile thing again, the corners of her eyes bunching up adorably around creamy, chocolate milk–colored irises and dark fringed lashes.

  “Oh, it’s just amazing to finally meet you,” she giggled. “I’ve been following your career and you’re, like, amazing.”

  My career? I thought to myself. Amazing?

  “And what’s so amazing about it?” I found myself saying, the snarky words snaking past my lips against my better judgment.

  Coy missed the sarcasm.

  “You’re just a real inspiration, ya know? You were, like, nothing and then you were, like, something—it was amazing! Even in Mexico City we know all about the new Death girl!”

  I tried to catch Daniel’s eye, but the coward was too busy staring at his feet to acknowledge me.

  “And how did you meet Daniel, Coy?” I asked, ignoring her overuse of the word “amazing” and steering us to what I hoped was a more banal topic of conversation.

  Coy laughed, covering her mouth with her hand, in a move straight out of Anime Land. I’d seen a bajillion Japanese girls sport the same gesture to great effect, but it just seemed twee when Coy did it.

  “Oh, Daniel and I just happened to run into each other one day. He was just so adorable I couldn’t help myself.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Isn’t he just precious?” she purred, reaching up and wrapping her fingers around Daniel’s chin so she could turn his face in her direction and plant her cherry red lips right onto his.

  Daniel looked startled and tried to pull away, but she held him firm. I wanted to barf. No, I wanted to punch her in the face. But the whole thing made me feel so horribly conflicted, I, therefore, could do absolutely nothing at all. Instead, I just stood there and grinned stupidly at Daniel and his new lover.

  “Precious,” I heard myself agreeing as I stared at the red lipstick imprint she’d left on Daniel’s lips.

  All I could think was: Damn it, those are my lips!

  “I’m so excited to be here for the Death Dinner and Masquerade Ball,” I tuned back in to hear Coy saying. “I couldn’t believe it when Daniel asked me to be his date. Have you seen our room? OMG, it’s just amazing.”

  They’re sharing a room?! my brain screamed at me.

  “And I brought the cutest little minibikini to wear,” Coy was babbling. “It’s white with tiny silver rhinestones … so adorable. I got it at Saks Fifth Avenue.”

  My gut clenched. Not only had the Mexican strumpet stolen my man, she’d totally usurped my slutster bikini, too. It was like I’d stepped into some alternate-universe version of Single White Female, only to find myself in the Jennifer Jason Leigh role—one more push from Coy and I’d be going all crazy attack bitch on her ass.

  “Well, I gotta go,” I said abruptly, turning on my heel and heading blindly in the opposite direction.

  “Callie!” I heard Daniel call out behind me, but I ignored him. I had absolutely zero intention of letting him see how much he’d hurt me.

  As soon as I was out of their line of vision, I started to run, stumbling into another one of the Castle’s many sculpture gardens as the wet, hot tears began to course down my cheeks. My lungs burned from holding my breath as I fought back the racking sobs that threatened to spill out of me if I relaxed my vigilance for even a second.

  I was so crushed by emotion I didn’t see the old woman until I was on top of her. We collided with a bone-crunching thwunk and then I was sprawled on the ground at her feet, the back of my head throbbing in time to my heartbeat. How the old woman had managed to stay upright after our run-in, I had no idea, but there she was, looking down at me like I was intentionally blocking her path with my prostrate body.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled, cradling the back of my head with my hand as I tried to pick myself up.

  The old woman reached out an emaciated mocha arm, her thin gray hair falling forward and across her weather-beaten face as she offered to help me up. I didn’t want to offend her, so I grabbed the proffered hand, surprised when she easily pulled me to my feet. I’d misjudged her strength completely; this was not some fragile old lady with tissue paper skin and a delicate constitution.

  She smiled at me, revealing two rows of solid white teeth that were all her own, though her dark skin was layered with the wrinkled folds of age and sun damage.

  “Best be careful where you’re going, Mistress Death,” the old woman said, her words slow as honey dripping from a spoon. “There are evil spirits loose tonight.”

  I swallowed hard then nodded as the creepy feeling I’d been fighting all day returned with the old woman’s words.

  “You know what I mean,” she continued, her Aboriginal accent giving her speech an undulating lilt. “Careful now.”

  She
released my hand—I hadn’t even realized she was still holding it—and made a funny clicking sound in the back of her throat. In my peripheral vision I saw a flurry of brown wings as a small owlet arced across the sky and gracefully landed on the old woman’s shoulder. I took a step back and the creature’s large amber eyes blinked thoughtfully at me, as if to let me know I had nothing to fear from it.

  The old woman petted the top of the owlet’s head and the bird turned its neck to get into a better position for scratching. It reminded me of some of the odd pretzel poses Runt wriggled herself into in order to have just the right spot scratched.

  “Who are you?” I asked as the old woman cooed at the owlet, her dark eyes almost glowing in the twilight. She ignored my question, just continued ministering to her bird’s needs as if I wasn’t there. Maybe to her, I wasn’t.

  I tried another tack.

  “I’m Calliope Reaper-Jones.”

  At this, the old Aboriginal woman finally looked up at me, her sturdy mud brown eyes locking onto my own with a fierce intensity.

  “I know what you are.”

  The flat tone of her voice made my skin crawl. It was more than a statement. It was a pronouncement of something wicked yet to come.

  “Okay,” I said quietly, starting to back away. “I gotta go now.”

  My fear seemed to amuse the old woman and she started to cackle, the rich honey of her voice turning to tar in her throat. I took off, not bothering to find out what other words of wisdom the old woman might be looking to impart to me.

  But as I made my way down the mottled path, my feet speeding me away from the unsettling old woman as fast as they could carry me, I swear I heard these words drifting behind me like a malevolent curse:

  “Best mind your head, Calliope Reaper-Jones.”

  four

  I got back to my room without further incident, though it did take me twenty minutes to find Casa de la Luna, the building that housed the guest suite I was sharing with Runt. I had to wander through two more sculpture gardens full of ancient Roman statuary—misshapen marble ladies and gentlemen without their arms, and in some cases heads, perched precariously among an assortment of flowering greenery—before I finally stumbled onto the main path.

  It was once true that all roads led to Rome—and to borrow the adage: At the Haunted Hearts Castle all paths led to Casa del Amo, or the Master’s House.

  Aptly named, it loomed large over the rest of the compound, a quiet sentry composed of a bland limestone gray façade, but offset by a backdrop of startling azure sky. Inside, it housed a library, a massive room lined from floor to ceiling with dark wood bookcases, each crammed full of rare tomes from every continent, including an original vellum copy of the Guttenberg Bible sitting on a glass-enclosed pedestal near the door; the kitchen—the only modern space in the whole Castle—which was a bastion of efficiency with its stainless steel fixtures and industrial ovens, and the capacity to serve over seventy-five guests at one time; and, lastly, a formal dining room with heavy African blackwood paneling and a long, rectangular oak table that could comfortably seat up to fifty.

  There were over ten guest rooms in the Castle, as well as Donald Ali’s master suite, which took over the whole of the top floor of the building and was only reached via a twisting, hand-carved circular oak staircase near the front entrance. I hadn’t been up there, but from what Jarvis said, it was like a Moroccan palace—lots of Moorish details and hand-painted mosaic tile work mixed with medieval tapestries and curling Oriental rugs.

  Built by a World War I war profiteer named Ezra Aaron Hearts in 1921, the Hearts Castle had been conceived as a Frankenstein’s monster, if you will, of old-world architecture; a cannibalization of the most famous buildings and antiquities Ezra Hearts had collected during his many travels, so that he might admire them all in one glorious setting.

  As a poor orphan eking out a hardscrabble existence as a breaker boy in Western Pennsylvania, he’d sworn that one day he would be rich beyond his wildest dreams, thus affording himself the opportunity to become the master of his own dominion. This was a seemingly unattainable dream for a dirt-poor boy from Pennsylvania, a boy whose life should never have included the realization of such a lofty goal, yet with the inception of the Hearts Castle, the confluence of all those fantabulous childhood imaginings was made real.

  Ezra had chosen the site, a large outcropping of land overlooking the Pacific Ocean on one side and the small harbor town of Saint Simon, California, on the other, for its majestic views and plentiful grazing land—he had high hopes of bringing the American buffalo back from the brink of extinction by mass breeding them for commercial meat consumption, but sadly that vision, among many others, was never realized.

  A construction worker discovered Ezra’s body on the grounds of Casa del Amo early one morning in 1929. The mysterious nature of his death—had he jumped from the building’s second-story turret window or had he been pushed—was never unraveled, but work was immediately halted on the munificent Castle. And when it was revealed that Ezra Hearts was bankrupt—even a war profiteer wasn’t immune to the fluctuations of the stock market—the property sat like an empty shell, unfinished and unloved, until 1955, when a young entrepreneur named Donald Ali saw it while on vacation in Saint Simon and fell in love with the dilapidated structure. He bought the compound and all the adjoining land, using the original architectural plans to finally finish what Ezra Hearts had begun.

  “Haunted” Hearts Castle had never been anyone’s idea of a name for the property, but during the 1950s reconstruction so many workers reported seeing odd, unexplainable things during their time there that the name just stuck. Donald Ali had taken it all in stride, even commissioning a large ranch sign with the words HAUNTED HEARTS CASTLE in swirling wrought iron above the entrance to the private road leading to the grounds.

  I was keen on picking up one of the battery-powered golf carts they kept for guests and going on a trip down the long private road so I could see the sign for myself. Gossip had it that the HEARTS—and only the HEARTS—part of the sign stayed a toxic rust red, no matter what anyone did to prevent it.

  Spooky!

  I followed the footpath until I reached Casa de la Luna, my emotions still running high as I threw open the door and found Jarvis sitting at the antique oak desk talking to Runt.

  “There’s a crazy lady attending this Death Dinner, isn’t there?” I asked as I stood in the doorway, hoping I didn’t look as unhinged as I felt.

  Jarvis crooked an eyebrow in my direction.

  “Describe her, please?” he said, crossing his legs and leaning forward thoughtfully.

  “Uhm, she’s crazy—”

  “You already said that,” Jarvis reminded me.

  “Okay, sorry. Uhm, she’s Australian and she has an owlet thing—”

  Runt sat up on her bed and barked.

  “Oh, oh! I know this one,” she said, her tail wagging a mile a minute. “It’s Anjea. She’s the Vice-President in Charge of the Australian continent. And the owlet is really a mud baby.”

  “A mud-what?” I said, wrinkling my brow in confusion—though all I really wanted to know was if I was going to have to sit next to the woman at the dinner table and make awkward conversation.

  “Her purveyance is mud, the creation of life from the primordial ooze if you will,” Jarvis said, looking at me like I was slow.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “That means I am totally gonna have to shoot the shit with her at dinner, doesn’t it?” I said, flopping down on the other bed and kicking my shoes off.

  “Actually,” Jarvis continued, “you will be sitting at the head of the table next to Kali—”

  I sat up, feeling excited about something for the first time since we’d arrived.

  “I didn’t know she was coming tonight,” I said, giddy that Kali was on board for the Death Dinner. If the Hindu Goddess of Death and Destruction was gonna be there, then the night was bound to get interesting.

  “She was
n’t supposed to attend, but Wodin found himself indisposed and Kali was selected to represent the Board of Death,” Jarvis said, pulling a pair of pince-nez from his suit coat pocket and sliding them up his proboscis of a nose.

  “Oh, please, not the pince-nez.” I squirmed, disliking the tiny, templeless glasses a little more each time I saw them. I hadn’t minded them so much when Jarvis was in his faun’s body—the Tom Selleck visage and small stature actually made the pince-nez seem kind of roguish—but on his new Brooklyn-hipster-cool face, they just looked ridiculous.

  “Am I going to have to use ‘the hand,’ Calliope?” Jarvis intoned, looking down his nose—and pince-nez—at me.

  Jarvis was referring to his favorite quote of all time: a Fran Drescher, Nanny-era bon mot he liked to whip out whenever possible, regardless of the fact it was about as très passé as Vanilla Ice. Now, as much as I loved to tease my Executive Assistant, I’d actually been dying for him to trot out the Drescher quote because I’d had a little “surprise” made for him and it was best shared while “in context.”