by Mon D Rea
He paces like a lion around my drenched form. I keep hiding my face, not meeting his eyes.
What did you say, you rotten, stinking, flatulent bag of meat?
For every word of abuse he hisses, Death turns a foot taller and grows horns that eventually curl up and around themselves. He’s the biggest, scariest, most dangerous force in the universe, whose rank breath is enough to shake me like a twig. Nevertheless, I stand my ground.
And as I make this single conscious choice I receive courage from a mantric resolution:
Out of the night that covers me
Black as the Pit from pole to pole
The words rise from the same part of me that has long been buried and forgotten, growing louder.
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul
Sephtimus is literally breathing down my neck, huffing and puffing on the threshold of my sanity. But already I’ve begun to see him in a different light. He’s no different from a human bully who feeds on the submission of others.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud
What keeps repeating in my head are the words of the poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley; something the Sisters taught me at Blessed Children’s and I memorized as a child. I used to recite the same words to myself in moments of extreme depression. I guess I forgot that I knew them, like many other parts of my childhood.
“I said… you’re wrong,” I tell Sephtimus, a little louder this time.
What? I can’t hear you. Humans cut off your tongue, little monster?
I actually open the mental door and step out to face him.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
“You’re wrong.” I finally raise my eyes. And what Sephtimus sees there is enough to make him do a double take.
My fish eyes, whose perfectly spherical lenses swallow the irises, give me a constant startled expression. Right now I picture a flash of defiance there that Sephtimus has encountered only a couple of times in all his perpetual existence.
The computer monitors around us all shut down as though cut off from Sephtimus’ thoughts and experiencing a black out.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It dawns on me that Sephtimus is incapable of understanding subtle human emotions. He could be a mind-reading and mimicking reaper of the worst kind but contradictory human sentiments, like hope in a hopeless situation, are unknown to him. In a word, my spirit is inscrutable to him.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
What are you doing? Sephtimus screams inside my head. In the darkness, a lone screen flickers to life.
This lone square of light projects a close-up of Sam’s wide smile and radiant face. If eyes are indeed windows to the soul, then Sam’s as they take me in are the clearest and most refractive.
Next, within a radius of two screens from the first, the other monitors switch on by themselves. They play scenes of the many precious moments I spent together with Sam – at the mall, at the park, in countless restaurants and coffee shops. And in all these images, our happiness is overflowing.
Get out of my head! Sephtimus wails.
You’re not the only one who can play this game, I speak telepathically while releasing a high-pitched, dulled boom out of my lips like a fish spouting water. In the receding dark, I watch Sephtimus bring both hands up to cover his ears.
Then, the whole room is bathed in light. The happiest and most meaningful segments of my past life are on every one of the monitors. And the genuine laughter from both me and Sam pierces Sephtimus’ heart.
Stop it! Stop it! You’re hurting me! he screams. A child throwing tantrums.
“Not yet. I’m not,” I speak with icy menace. “Now sit your ass down and let’s get started.”
Chapter XII: Infernal Affairs
First, a short history lesson from the Lachesis monitors:
In the beginning was darkness. And from it, light and life were born. Light was varied, free, and unpredictable as embodied by the Spirits of Creation, the Storks. On the other hand, darkness was clean, still, and barren as embodied by the Spirits of Destruction, the Crows.
Between these two camps, a pact was made to govern the comings and goings of life into the mortal realm. The Fates, or the Wyrd Ones, arose upon the principles of three counter-balancing functions:
First was Clotho, who spun the thread of life, the umballicus, to grant entry unto the world by birth or reincarnation.
Second was Lachesis, who calculated and measured that which was duly apportioned and owed.
Third was Atropos, also called the Grim One, who sternly cut the thread of life to bring forth death.
I recognize the three characters from Greek mythology and again marvel at how close the ancient Greeks got to actual fact. I assume Sephtimus is Atropos, the one with the Abhorred Shears. Clotho I’m yet to encounter. And Lachesis, well, Lachesis is supposed to be the supercomputer that gives out the half-electronic, half-insectile noise; the hum of death I’ve been so acquainted with since before I even crossed over.
****
The good thing is, language isn’t so different from mathematics and I can reduce it into patterns and formulas. With these building blocks for my diabolical project, we’re hoping we can accomplish in a week what human kids have their whole childhood to learn.
I’m constantly reminded of how my role as Death’s tutor is like that of a physical therapist. It’s dismal work directing monotonous, progressive exercises. Walking may be the epitome of easy; except if you had been severely injured in an accident then re-learning how to walk would be an almost miraculous feat. Tissues would’ve stiffened with scars and atrophied muscles needed to be stretched out and strengthened. Perhaps that is what I need to perform: a miracle.
For simulation purposes, Death summons one of the Helter-Skeletals and transforms it into an astonishing double of our target, Celestina “Lessa” Conti; which makes me wonder why with this kind of power at his command Sephtimus let his heart set on someone nearly unattainable. He could’ve just as easily recreated any other woman, celebrated or otherwise, living or dead.
Our surrogate Lessa places herself in the middle of a makeshift coffee shop complete with tables and gliding skeletal waiters. Sephtimus then goes in as grim as an F-16 pilot while I hover back as his wingman.
Countless times Sephtimus insists I make a fixed set of dialogues that he can memorize. It’s only with the longest explanations that I manage to impress on him the dangers of mechanical speech.
****
Mind-reading is weird. It’s like listening to a really good ventriloquist cast his voice anywhere except his lips. Your brain registers the alien voice but you’re too slow and untrained to keep up. You keep looking over your shoulder for the source, struggling to collapse nature back into a familiar order.
I get more and more snatches of internal monologue as my ability grows, filling me with the guilt of a voyeur.
****
At every conceivable opportunity I cram my mind with human filth, this pitiful excuse for a language. Upon the counsel of the pedagogue, I have documented the most irksome concepts on bright yellow pieces of paper called “sticky notes” and attached them to the wall of my inner sanctum. The little patches grew in number to the point that, to my great consternation, they began to overrun the empty space: sideward and downwards, then heavenwards. They appear to me like the phalanxes of great armies.
During the few rare occasions that I retire to my sarcophagus, I gaze at the chamber’s ceiling to be reminded by these luminous “sticky notes” before I succumb to the habit of sleep. And when
I shut the lid to receive a moment’s rest, endless words still float luminous along the lining. You may say I wake and turn in as a scholar, so devoutly in fact that even in my dreams the syntactic affliction will not leave me in peace. My mind seeks out the elusive patterns of code, arranging and rearranging their structures in the vain hope of breaking and stealing away their secret.
Infinity is where all the broken pieces of Babel have been flung across, I understand this now. I suppose it is what the puny mortals have been endeavoring to reclaim for ages as they search for the one word that will bring back all the humans of earth under clear sky and banner. Ever since the day their God smote the tower of Babylon, the tribes of man have remained scattered, confused, and restless.
I sleep the sleep of the living. For the first time in my clockwork existence, I find myself in great need of rest yet finding no comfort whichever way I turn. And how I toss and turn in my coffin. How I long to go back to my former state of indifference wherein I could fall into a centuries-long slumber and lie still in a cocoon of dust.
Yet in one such fitful sleep, I vividly remember standing before a wall of yellow and witnessing esoteric symbols come to life. I take one of those human-made newspapers littered on the floor and behold the same tattooed characters peeling off to sacrifice their gossamer bodies to me.
****
Sephtimus’ methods are sadistic. He has had all the Helter-Skeletals tattooed from skull to metatarsals with practical yet formulaic greetings, idiomatic phrases and grammar equations from my stock. He even had the emergency evacuation map of Lessa’s favorite coffee shop inlaid in one cranium.
Everyone’s forbidden to speak Latin and ancient Greek now that we feel the deadline looming. Everyone mimics the tongue of man, English, no matter how broken their version of it is and how interspersed with body language. A big sign in the center of the office reads: English-Only Zone, Violators Will Be Cremated. So from this point on everyone sounds like an actor in a sitcom and there’s never a dull moment. Personally, I never imagined hell could be so bizarrely familiar.
To improve Sephtimus’ pronunciation, I advise him to relax his throat muscles but he takes it way too literally in his sometimes cartoony always topsy-turvy world. He dislocates and stretches his jaws to swallow an entire warhead smuggled out of a certain rogue state, and then lets it explode inside him to flush his throat like gargle. Afterwards, there does seem to be less of a throat cancer stuck down the pipeline and he starts rehearsing like a tireless opera singer or a news anchor with a mania for tongue-twisters.
A spare skull from the Helter-Skeletals comes in handy whenever I need to show the position of the tongue for a particular sound of English. I use a charmed owl as a projector and lay the skull in the grip of the talons. The owl’s bewildered eyes cast a larger-than-life 3-D image in the middle of the room and then I stand behind its giant mandible to demonstrate.
To hone his listening, I play dialogues of daily human interactions back and forth on the screens. We tune in on CNN all day and play a looped mix of American songs all night. Love songs naturally. And from the artists I guess would be popular for a girl of Lessa’s age: One Direction, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, even the Backstreet Boys (Everybody is the favorite of the Helter-Skeletals).
Lastly, we watch Hollywood movies in what little spare time we have. As expected, scary, gory flicks and global-scale disaster movies are Sephtimus’ favorites; especially zombie apocalypses. We also squeeze in a bit of time to figure out the social networks – Facebook, Twitter – and to familiarize him with modern devices like the laptop, smartphone, and other gadgets that bear the Apple logo (which I patiently explain isn’t the mark of Satan from way back in the Garden of Eden).
****
“What do… you do…” Sephtimus tests the words on his tongue as though he could feel their weight and texture. Then he asks telepathically: This feels strange to me. Are you sure you’re not teaching me wrong grammar?
Death always sounds fluent when he’s thinking instead of speaking.
“Considering where you started, I should be the one complaining because it feels like you’ve been sucking all the good grammar and vocabulary out of me.”
“What do you do… for a living.” And you say this is used to talk about one’s job?
“Yes.”
Hmm. Humans are indeed strange creatures. Why, in Necro City it’s absolutely pointless to ask anyone about their job.
“Why’s that?”
Well, the whole of Necro is carved up into ditches or pockets –“Bolgias” in your Italian dialect. So it follows that a demon’s standing is measured by which hole he stands guard over and by how much access he enjoys. The deeper the hole, the tighter the security and the more prestigious.
I quickly tuck the thought away in what I hope is a safe corner of my mind; this rare piece of inside information about Hell’s prison system, for whatever doomed purpose it may serve.
Sephtimus continues explaining, Basically, we either just ask a straight question like “What temperature are you in?” or guess by the shade of tan the other guy has.
****
In fulfilling my other duties as fershee reaper, I’m taught to stand in the middle of the office and access the control console, also known as Hell’s Helm, which rises from the floor on demand like Sephtimus’ ash tray. Via Hell’s Helm, we’re able to mentally project ourselves into the screens.
It turns out reapers never really appear in flesh and blood in the mortal realm. In fact, extended stays on the surface world is fatal to any reaper that’s not Crow.
At the Helm, I’m joined by the three other reapers who I met at the way station on my first day and are summoned by Sephtimus with his variously styled gothic rings – talon, jester and scorpion. Respectively they are Kera, the evil Valkyrie, Ankou, the creepy clown, and Yama Ranger, the four-armed and blue-skinned cowboy.
Together they call themselves the Infernal Affairs Division. Not that they tell me things or they’re ever in a talkative mood. In fact, with the exception of Sephtimus and Ankou, the reapers are taciturn to the point of seeming mute. Ankou isn’t much of an improvement either with his posh British accent and eternally frozen Cheshire-cat grin. His voice sounds more of a recording than anything else.
Our job is to keep the Crows in check as hell-spawned herders, which explains Yama Ranger’s obsolete fashion sense. Kera has her wings, Yama Ranger a flying tar-black horse aptly called Nightmare, while Ankou drives a horseless wagon that creaks and groans as the whole thing flies across the sky; the sleigh of an unholy Saint Nick. It has the same physics-defying dimensions as a clown car in a circus in that it never gets filled no matter how many dead bodies we pile on it.
As for me, I’m able to levitate by riding the crest of an otherwise disembodied tsunami. My very own black-magic carpet.
Kera’s in charge of everyone who died a violent death, those riddled with shrapnel or disease and torn apart by a car crash or a cold-blooded murder. She would slash the umballicus with her razor-sharp talons or bite them off at the point where it’s attached, the cervical spine, laying claim to the origin of all vampire myths.
But generally, whenever a mortal with psychic abilities happens to witness a “reaping,” Ankou’s ready with his spine-whip or his ball of blood. Across the human’s eyes, either a whiplash or a splatter of magic blood is enough to wipe the memory clean.
Yama Ranger does most of the labor of controlling the volatile mass of Crows by trotting behind them and pushing them to forward, or riding alongside to make them turn this way or that. I do my part by releasing an ultrasonic, eardrum-shattering blast called the Purgatorius Cantus, the Cleansing Song. I sometimes act as a living shield, too, and would inhale deeply enough to pull a number of the Crows right into my mouth. Revolting as this may sound, this is sometimes necessary to keep them from preying on unscheduled mortals.
It doesn’t matter how we attack and hurt the Crows anyway; the pure embodiment of negative energ
y is indestructible. Its elements would disintegrate and vanish but would always come back.
I must admit it gives me a certain amount of pleasure to, more than protect innocent lives, inflict retribution on the Crows. I don’t care whether my identity and close encounter with them on my death-day are buried under all their voracious yet empty consciousness.
It’s certainly a much easier feat than coaching Sephtimus on the tongue and customs of man. In no time I come to be feared by the Crows and respected by the other Infernal Affairs agents. I’m living up to the name they’ve given me: Cyhyraeth (Tuh-huhreth), the Specter.
Chapter XIII: Graduation Day
Once in your life you’ll find the perfect love and it’ll be everything you imagined, whether or not you stayed a believer. You’ll find it at the most unexpected time and in the most unassuming place. It masquerades as something commonplace, neither remarkable nor memorable. It just happens.
This is the beauty of the whole thing because later when you look back, there’s no landmark by which you can say, “Here it is. This is where love started.” Just this faint recognition of a dream you forgot you ever had and an inescapable, almost frightening sense of rightness, like the softest scrape of tumblers shifting into place as the key fits the lock.
This is what Sam and I had. We are soulmates, and it pains me to think I had to lose her for good before I started believing. Worse, this is the same effect Sephtimus and I aim to recreate and trap Celestina Conti with.
I don’t intend to teach Sephtimus any of those reverse-psychology seduction techniques that are peddled by pick-up artists and have the accuracy of a BB gun at carnival. But if there was one thing he learned from our lessons together, I’d rather it was confidence; the spine to stand tall and speak like an attractive and desirable person (or whatever the hell he is).
I wish it were all up to me and being sure of oneself was something I could pass on. But apart from having unresolved identity issues of my own, I’m coaching a lover who hides 24 hours behind a mask, incinerates others as a knee-jerk response, and dresses and mopes like he expects rain to fall anytime.