Death

by George Pendle

  “Er…Death,” He boomed.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “You haven’t seen those humans anywhere, have you?”

  “No. No, I haven’t.”

  “Oh,” boomed the voice unhappily. “Do you think something could have eaten them?”

  “Not that I know of,” I said. “There’s been some ingestion over in the Copse of Erudition, but I think that’s largely due to the Tree of Hunger being placed between the Tree of Sharp Teeth and the Tree of Putting Two and Two Together.”

  “Ho hum,” boomed God. “Well, where on Earth could they be?”

  God always struck me as a strangely impotent omnipotent. You could often catch Him humming uncertainly to Himself as He floated through the Garden, sometimes stumbling on the odd root, apologizing frequently, desperately trying to make friends with the animals, who out of a sense of obligation nodded their heads, but whose impatience with Him was clear. I felt quite sorry for Him at times. Creation was all too busy being alive, chasing and being chased, and, of course, rutting like wild animals. It simply didn’t have time to deal with some lonely supreme being.

  As it was, I soon came across Adam and Eve. The fairies that had lived at the bottom of the Garden of Eden had been torn apart by a horde of hungry dachshunds, and I was spiriting their fey souls to the nether, when I heard voices coming from a well-appointed cave overlooking a charming swamp. A sign at its entrance read DUNFALLIN. I peeked inside and saw Adam and Eve, but the clueless Neanderthals of my first acquaintance were long gone.

  “Fairies are all very well,” I heard Adam say as he stoked the fire that roared in the cave, “but not in my backyard.”

  “Yes, dear,” said Eve, bending down to pat the head of one of the pack of dachshunds that swarmed around her. “Who’s a good boy?” she said to the dog. “We shall have to start feeding you again.”

  “No need,” interrupted Adam. “Fairy meat’s good enough for them.”

  Adam and Eve had gained language, and with it snobbery and entitlement (I noticed the laminated tag from the Tree of Conceit woven into their clothes). When I introduced myself, they looked me up and down with cold, judgmental eyes, and when I tried to explain how despondent God was, they said that that was no concern of theirs. Well, I didn’t know what to say. I stayed for a while, pleading my case, but they virtually ignored me, and then started making fun of the Darkness, calling it “vacuous” and “dim.” I left before its feelings could be hurt.

  Dachshunds: The Reason There Are No Fairies in the World.

  When God eventually caught up with them, it was extremely awkward. I was in the neighborhood collecting the last of the gnomes who also had been savaged by Adam and Eve’s dog pack. God said that He felt injured by their behavior. Adam and Eve said they regretted God’s unhappiness in the most formal of tones. God said He loved them, but Adam and Eve declared that they thought His love for them was rather vulgar, and certainly not fitting for one who aspired to the divine. In fact, they said, they were beginning to wonder if paying homage to Him was really the best use of their time. Could He, they asked, show them any proof of His divinity that would make Him worthy of their worship? So it was that God decreed a parade of Creation should be put on for the pair. It did not go well.

  I remember Adam rolling his eyes at the elephant, calling it “shallow” and “insubstantial,” and Eve laughing unkindly at the lions and tigers, declaring, in a hushed tone just loud enough for God to hear, that they were “deliciously kitsch.” When He showed them the vast pools of magma surging red-hot beneath the earth’s crust, Adam affected a yawn, and when He showed them the bluest of blue skies, Eve simply checked her sundial and said they should be getting on. Finally, when God laid bare for them the vast expanse of the Universe, the dark firmament lit with gleaming and wandering stars, the wondrous vastness of Creation, the couple pretended to be distracted by a rock. “That’s mine too,” boomed God, a little too eagerly, allowing Eve to say that they were sure of it, considering how hideous it was.

  Returned to their cave, Adam and Eve went inside without a second look at their Creator. He waved to them forlornly from the entrance.

  “Pray to Me!” He boomed. “I’m always around!” But His gravitas was undercut by what sounded like a choked sob.

  Slowly Eden began to empty out of creatures, most of whom had eaten from the Tree of Restlessness, or the Tree of Leaving Home Without a Backward Glance. The grass picked itself up and germinated to pastures new, and the trees that remained withered and died. Urizel, the angel I had met while traversing the void, was sent down to act as a sort of night watchman, guarding the remains of Eden, although I wasn’t quite sure what there was left to guard. He greeted me fondly, still wielding his fiery, ever-turning sword, and I congratulated him on his reassignment.

  “Just like you said, I’ll be an archangel one day! A definite promotion! Look at all this matter! Ah, to feel something under your feet again instead of the abysmal void.” I don’t think he realized quite how far from Heaven he was.

  I didn’t see God for months, but I soon saw Adam and Eve again. They and their dachshunds were being attacked by a pack of saber-toothed tigers still smarting from their comments about the tastelessness of their stripes. As I came upon them they were complaining bitterly about being eaten.

  “It’s just too, too much,” said Adam as a tiger tore off part of his shoulder.

  “I agree,” said Eve, her back being clawed to ribbons. “Tooth and claw is so, well, so prehistoric.”

  “Simply stone age, dear,” said Adam, his head now fully inside one of the tigers’ jaws. And so the first humans on Earth died (their dachshunds survived, however, and could be seen hunting woolly mammoths alongside the saber-toothed tigers for years to come).

  I found human souls required special attention. Their toes and fingers make them particularly tricky to pop cleanly out of their bodies. In fact, many of my early human souls went into the void missing a digit or two. Being my first, Adam and Eve caused me all sorts of trouble.

  “Oh, do come on,” they cried as their souls slipped and snapped out of my grasp. “I mean, if this is dying, what hope for the hereafter?” After much grunting and pulling, I finally worked them free and hustled them into the Darkness. If the truth be told, I was glad to see the back of them.

  At that moment I heard a booming sneeze come from behind a boulder, and a bright radiance suddenly burst forth. God had obviously been watching the whole time.

  “Well done, Death,” He boomed. “Good work. Those two had definitely overstayed their welcome. And well done, you,” He boomed to the saber-toothed tigers, who pointedly ignored Him as they settled down to feast on Adam and Eve’s innards. “I shall honor your work,” He boomed. He seemed desperate to ingratiate Himself with the animals, who paid Him no attention whatsoever. “I shall make you all…extinct!”

  “Are you certain?” said I.

  “Why yes! All good deeds should be praised, so sayest I.”

  “But extinct?” I queried.

  “Yes.” boomed God.

  “Well, I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

  At that moment a high-pitched cry came from Adam and Eve’s cave. God looked at me and I at Him, and we both peered inside. There, on the ground, were two small creatures, bawling and screaming.

  “Ah,” boomed God. “So they were not so proper after all.”

  Murder in Paradise

  The years passed, and I kept an eye on the two boys. They had been named Cain and Abel because they had been found lying close to two laminated tags that read SUGAR CANE and ABALONE. Thankfully, they showed none of the haughtiness of their parents; indeed, they seemed quite the opposite. They prayed to God constantly and were always going on about how much He liked them. In fact, they could often be found lording it over the other animals, calling them “stupid” and “unloved” and boasting that the two of them were God’s favorites. It didn’t make them terribly popular.

  But Go
d did like them. He was forever fooling around with them, playing hide-and-seek, laughing and singing with them. It was quite a sight to see the three of them—the two muscled young men and the all-powerful oscillating light—walking arm in arm across the earth together. Sometimes the three of them would disappear for hours and come back rosy cheeked and panting, as if from a long journey.

  I thought nothing of this. I was happy for God, so I simply continued with my work. I collected the souls of dead crickets and dead cauliflowers, dead rocks and dead sticks, dead tigers and dead elephants, dead everything. Every day a new creature would die, and I would make its acquaintance. To tell the truth, I liked meeting things and finding out how their lives had been, listening to what regrets they had and what they hoped for in the afterlife. In fact, all seemed well with the world, until I felt myself being drawn irresistibly toward the brothers’ fields.

  Cain and Abel: Games of “Uncle” Dragged on Forever Since Neither Knew What the Word Meant.

  Lying there on the ground, with blood streaming from his head, was Abel. A lamb was charring on the altar, a sacrifice to Him no doubt. Knowing how much the Creator thought of the boys, I began to feel slightly uneasy.

  “Speak to me, Abel,” I said, crouching down and resting his head on my lap. “What happened?”

  Abel coughed up a mouthful of blood and weakly whispered, “It was…”

  And then he died.

  I leaned over him, popped out his soul, and continued to listen.

  “…too dark to tell. I was busy tying up one of my stupid animals for sacrifice, and then nothing. Maybe I tripped.” He gestured toward his lifeless body. “Aw, look at me, my hair’s all mussed up.”

  I had already seen enough dying to know when foul play had occurred.

  “This was no accident, Abel,” I said. “Someone killed you.”

  “Killed me? But who? Why?”

  Whenever anything died there were always questions. Questions I couldn’t always answer.

  “Look at your skull,” I said to Abel, motioning him toward his former body. “That’s no accidental wound. Somebody hit you over the head with a rock, or some kind of club.”

  “A club?” Abel gaped. “What’s that?”

  The poor sap never even knew what hit him. I looked around and saw a thick branch that had been carved into a smaller, more manageable shape. Blood stained its tip.

  “That’s a club, Abel. I’ll start making some inquiries. In the meantime you’d better get going.”

  The Darkness began to envelop him.

  “Wait!” he cried. “You mean I don’t get to see who killed me? That’s a bit unfair.”

  Abel had a point. It was against the rules, sure, but this was a special case. Four humans had existed on Earth, and the murder rate was already 25 percent. I allowed him to tag along with me.

  Who would want to kill Abel? I asked myself. Who but everything in Creation. They all had a reason to dislike him. My first suspects were, of course, his animals. Abel had been a shepherd, and the bleating in the pasture said he was a harsh one. I had recognized the lamb being sacrificed—I had transmitted him into the great beyond only that afternoon, just another in the boy’s long line of sacrifices. He was called Cyril. He had been popular.

  My first stop was the cliff face above Abel’s farm. It was where the goats liked to sit.

  “Any of you kids know what happened to Abel?” I asked.

  “Get lost,” said a Ram, “We don’t want to hear about Abel. He’s always telling us where to go and what to eat. We’re sick of him.”

  “Sick enough to kill him?” I asked.

  That got their attention.

  “What do you mean? He’s dead?” bleated the Ram. I couldn’t tell whether he was feigning surprise or not.

  “Don’t play patsy with me,” I snapped. “The big man’s going to be disappointed, and I’m not going to be the one taking the heat.”

  The goats looked at one another. I had them rattled.

  “Okay, okay,” said the Ram. “It wasn’t us, but we were told to look the other way, if you know what I mean.”

  “Maybe I don’t,” I said. I didn’t.

  “Look, we were pretty sick and tired of being part of Abel’s herd. Some of us had started thinking of branching out, of becoming an agrarian collective. And after all the sacrifices recently, who could blame us?”

  “But what did you mean by looking the other way?”

  “Well, Gary here—step forward, Gary—Gary says that he wakes up in the night to the sound of somebody telling him to stay away from the altar before sunset. Now, none of us particularly liked hanging round the altar for obvious reasons, so we do as we’re told. We never thought he’d actually be killed, just roughed up a little.”

  “Who spoke to you, Gary?” I asked. “Was it the dinosaurs? Was it the lettuce? Who was it, Gary?”

  “Me and the lettuce don’t get on,” said Gary, a young goat. He looked smart, but not too smart. “And it didn’t sound like a dinosaur. There was no mention of red meat, or tenderness. Dinosaurs are very picky about what they eat.”

  Tyrannosaurus Anorexic.

  That was true. Dinosaurs were such picky eaters sometimes they’d starve to death rather than eat anything that wasn’t done just so.

  “But what did he look like?”

  “I couldn’t see,” said Gary, blushing a little. “The thing grabbed my forelock and pulled it over my eyes.”

  “What did the voice sound like?”

  “Well, the funny thing is, I thought it was Abel, Death, I swear.”

  “Stupid goats,” said Abel’s soul, before I could stop him. I knocked him halfway into the Darkness.

  “What was that?” said Gary, tilting his head at me. He had stopped chewing.

  “Nothing, Gary. Nothing. Well, thanks for your help.”

  Gary walked off, looking sheepish, which was odd for a goat. He knew he had been talking too much. Most goats were taciturn, obeying a code of silence known as “the omeeeerta.” I wondered if he would get into trouble. (He did, as it turned out. I found him at the bottom of a tar pit three weeks later, his hooves encased in heavy terra-cotta.)

  “It needed to have been something with hands,” said Abel’s soul, hurrying behind me as we left the goats. “How else could they have grabbed Gary’s forelock? Perhaps it was one of the great apes?”

  “Or one of the not-so-great ones,” I murmured to myself. “That would be consistent with the club theory. Only someone with opposable thumbs could operate such advanced technology. Let’s try the gorillas.”

  By the time we got to the forest in which the gorillas lived, it was pitch-dark. I heard wild shrieking and beating of chests as huge numbers of apes engaged in their favorite occupation, the oldest sport in existence—thumb wrestling.

  The other creatures of the jungle looked on enviously as two giant silverbacks clasped each other’s hands and attempted to pin their opponent’s thumb down with their own. Both apes were baring their teeth as they tumbled back and forth across the jungle floor, with the crowd of animals around them hooting and screeching encouragement. It was not the cleanest of matches.

  “Bunch of bananas!” grunted one of the gorillas as he found his thumb trapped, distracting his opponent momentarily and allowing him to wriggle his thumb free. There was much use of the index finger, a common trick, and only through sheer exhaustion was the match finally settled.

  I went to speak to the losing knuckle walker. He was sucking on his mangled thumb.

  “Hello, Bonobo,” I said. “You’d better watch that doesn’t get infected.”

  “Oh, hi Death,” said Bonobo. We had had a run-in a few months before when he had fallen from a tree and lain in a coma for a few days. I had played a few hands of pinochle with his soul while we waited to see the outcome.

  “Any of the apes have a grudge against Abel?” I asked.

  “Abel?” said Bonobo. “That spoiled brat? Why do you ask?”

  “Beca
use he’s dead, and someone with opposable thumbs did it.”

  “Well, look,” said Bonobo. “None of us liked him, it’s true. Or his brother. I mean they spent so much time with God they thought they were better than us.”

  “Stupid monkeys,” said Abel’s soul.

  “Did you say something?” said Bonobo. I cast the Darkness thickly around Abel. Perhaps the brothers were not so different from their parents after all.

  “They refused to thumb-wrestle with us,” continued Bonobo. “They said it wasn’t what God’s chosen should be doing. God’s chosen! Pah! We know what they were chosen for. But what motive would we have to kill them?”

  “Pride. Greed. Hunger. Boredom,” I said.

  Bonobo shifted on his rock uncomfortably.

  “Hey, I’m not saying we’re as good as gold, but come on, Death, we’re vegetarians.”

  Vegetarians with a grudge, I thought to myself. “Do you know what a club is?” I asked Bonobo.

  “A club?” Bonobo mulled the word over. “A club? Is it a long yellow fruit with a peelable skin?” The look of stupidity was too real to have been faked. It would be some time before the apes got into tools.

  I told Bonobo I’d be back and warned him not to leave the jungle. But I was pretty sure it wasn’t him or any of his ape friends.

  Apes of Wrath?

  I returned to the field in which Abel’s body lay. It was thick with flies.

  “Hey, Death,” they buzzed. “You want us to save you a piece?”

  “No thanks, fellas,” I said, and leaned over the body. My work habits coincided with their eating habits, so we saw quite a lot of one another. I picked up the bloodstained club and examined it. It was too complex to be the work of the animals, and too simple to be the work of Mother or Father. I was mulling over this dilemma when a tall brunette walked over to me. It was Cain.