Death

by George Pendle

  As the number of civilizations grew, so did the number of gods, and scuffles began to break out in the desert between rival bands of believers. For the most part the gods themselves didn’t have anything to prove. It was their followers who were the problem.

  I remember one time a god named Yahweh, one of the many minor manifestations of God who had been left to look after things in His absence, was dragged out into the desert by his followers to battle the god Baal. The problem was that the two gods were on friendly terms.

  “Hello, Baal,” rumbled Yahweh. “How’s tricks?”

  “Not bad thanks, Yahweh,” roared Baal. “Same old, same old. Yamm sends his best.”

  “Still god of the sea, is he?”

  “Yes, he’s sharing it with Poseidon. Yamm’s doing waves at the moment while Poseidon’s busy with the creatures of the deep. I believe there was some argument about who controlled long-shore drift, but I think that’s settled now.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” rumbled Yahweh. “Look, I am sorry about all this, Baal, but my boys are so damned devout.”

  “Oh, I understand,” roared Baal. “You let them build a couple of temples to you and suddenly they think they own you.”

  While the gods chatted, their worshippers were brokering rules for a contest between the two supreme beings. Baal’s priests had pushed for a pentathlon, but this was swiftly ruled out by Yahweh, who was nursing an old harvest-festival injury. After a while, the prophet Elijah, who was leading the supporters of Yahweh, approached his god.

  “If you’re the greatest god, the one true god,” said Elijah, “then you must crush the false god Baal into the dust.”

  “But he’s my friend,” rumbled Yahweh. “Besides, if I’m the one true god, what’s he doing standing right there?”

  Baal gave a friendly wave at Elijah.

  “This isn’t funny, you know,” snapped Elijah. “Would you prefer we didn’t believe in you?”

  “Oh, stop being such a stick-in-the-mud,” Yahweh rumbled, and turned back to Baal to resume his conversation. “You know, Baal, wouldn’t it be fine if we could somehow get rid of worshippers?”

  “Well,” roared Baal, “I hear it said that soon they’ll have belief machines that pray much faster than humans, and with more feeling, too. Plus they’ll be much smaller, so you can just carry them around in your pocket—Hey! You’re disappearing!”

  Yahweh had indeed started to shrink.

  “Stop that!” rumbled Yahweh, spinning around to Elijah, who stood there smiling smugly.

  “I’ve told them not to have faith in you until you crush Baal in your mighty hand, O Great One.”

  “But you’re talking to him!” cried Baal, desperately trying to stretch Yahweh back to his full size.

  “That doesn’t mean that I have to believe in him,” said Elijah.

  I must admit I felt quite sorry for the gods, regardless of which mythology they came from. To begin with, they had wowed humans with tricks and miracles and sopped up the spiritual adoration. Slowly but surely, however, the believers came to realize that the real power resided with them. As I’ve mentioned before, gods theoretically can’t die, but they need to be believed in, otherwise they just blink out of existence. Wary of this, many of the more cunning gods had a devout hermit or two tucked away in desert caves, just in case their entire belief system suddenly went apostate.

  So it was that Yahweh and Baal were soon bullied into facing off against each other. It wasn’t pretty. The air rang with obscenities and incense from both sets of supporters as they threw rocks at one another and then hid behind the hems of their gods’ garments. Taking a deep breath, Baal turned to Yahweh’s believers and roared, “I am Baal, son of Dagon and Ashtoreth, bull-horned king of gods, destroyer of Mot! Feel my wrath, unbelievers!” He bared his teeth and flames shot from his eyes. He winked at Yahweh who gave him a surreptitious thumbs-up.

  Hermits: Spiritual Backup.

  “Well, set fire to these logs then,” cried out Elijah. On one side of the battleground lay a pile of logs in a pool of water.

  Baal looked upset. “But they’ve been soaked in water!” he roared.

  “He’s right, you know, Elijah,” rumbled Yahweh. “They’re completely drenched.”

  “That’s the point,” said Elijah sharply.

  “Oh, very well,” roared Baal, and sitting his giant form down, picked up two sticks and began to rub them together. His followers began to look at one another.

  “Not like that,” yelled Elijah. “Use your so-called divine powers, false god!”

  Baal looked at Elijah as if he could just devour him then and there.

  “I did mention the logs were wet, didn’t I?” he roared, before stepping toward the woodpile and staring at it very hard. There was a divine grunt, and a tiny wisp of steam wafted up from the top of the logs.

  “Oh, well done!” rumbled Yahweh. “That was good, wasn’t it?”

  “No, it wasn’t,” said Elijah. “That was probably just evaporation caused by the sun.”

  “Oh, give him a break,” rumbled Yahweh, as Baal sat down on the ground with his head in his hands. “What do you want from us?”

  “Look,” said Elijah, “all we need to know is which one of you is the greater god.”

  Yahweh and Baal looked at each other. You could see what they were thinking: “Bloody humans. Never content with what they have.” I had always found that the saying that all gods were jealous was not true. Many gods rarely minded who their followers worshipped as long as there was enough belief to go around. Nevertheless, there was a certain divine code that had to be followed in situations such as this. Sighing, the two gods rumbled and roared in unison, “I am.”

  A murmur broke through the crowd, and I could see the gods beginning to flicker a little as belief in them wavered.

  “Oh, this is ridiculous!” roared Baal. “Why do you have to choose between one of us? Why can’t you see that we’re both special in our own different ways? Why can’t you appreciate us for what we are, rather than what you want us to be? Why can’t we just rule over our people as before? Those who like horns can worship me, and those who like beards can worship him. Why not?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Elijah, “that’s not going to cut it anymore.”

  “But there’s enough room for both of us in the heavens,” rumbled Yahweh.

  “No can do,” said Elijah. “We’re cutting our costs and downsizing to monotheism. Everyone’s doing it. All those sacrifices add up, you know?”

  “Well, if you insist that one of us must perish, let us go about this in the ancient manner,” rumbled Yahweh. “The way that was foretold in the scriptures, that was marked by the mystical stones, that was seen painted in the sky by the desert prophets millennia ago.” With some flair, Yahweh pulled a coin out from behind Elijah’s ear and declared, “Heads or aqueducts?” before flicking it into the air.

  “Aqueducts,” roared Baal. The coin fell to the ground. Elijah stepped forward. “It’s heads, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh, fiddlesticks,” roared Baal as Yahweh’s followers cheered, and whooped, and hoisted Elijah onto their shoulders. Yahweh was quite forgotten about. The chief priest of Baal dropped dead from disappointment, and I quickly went to work on his soul. Meanwhile the other Baalites began to drift away, tearing off their talismans and scouring themselves with thorns. Already peddlers were running among them, selling garments emblazoned with the legend I BELIEVED IN BAAL AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY HAIR SHIRT. As for Baal, he was shrinking by the second.

  “I hear there are some positions opening up in Inuit mythology,” rumbled Yahweh consolingly. “Drop my name if it helps.”

  “But it’s freezing in the Aleutians,” said Baal, who was by now the size of a normal human being. “I’m not manifested for it.”

  I didn’t give Baal much of a chance in the Arctic. The denizens of the North Pole were incredibly self-absorbed. They thought the world revolved around them. A Baal cult wouldn’t last a
decade.

  I watched in sadness with Yahweh as Baal continued to shrink. By now he was the size of a large mouse.

  “Doesn’t anyone believe in me anymore?” he squeaked.

  Suddenly, a voice popped up from the desert floor. “I still believe in you,” it said. A small boy walked forward. He was carrying some of the bejeweled icons left by the defeated Baal worshippers. Baal looked at him with tears in his now tiny eyes.

  “Well…that’s very kind of you, sonny,” he piped.

  “When I saw you best Osiris in that earthquake contest last year,” enthused the boy, “with your Pin-Baal Flying Headlock, I knew you were the best.”

  “Well, thank you, thank you. It was a good show, wasn’t it?” Baal had by now stopped shrinking. He was the size of a grasshopper.

  “You see, Baal?” rumbled Yahweh. “Don’t get disappointed. Even He didn’t have any worshippers at one point.”

  “Yes, I suppose you’re right,” cheeped Baal, blowing his nose noisily and looking at his new, much-reduced size. “Maybe I should go to South America. I’ve always fancied being a beetle god.”

  “Yes!” shouted the little boy. “A big black beetle with giant pincers and a taste for guts!” Picking up the great god Baal in the palm of his hand, they walked off together, Baal nodding attentively as the little boy spewed out ideas on human sacrifices and colorful headdresses. I noticed that spindly insect legs were beginning to grow out of the sides of Baal’s body, and he was already attempting to make a rudimentary clicking noise.

  Naturally I had cause to see the little boy again some seventy years later, by which time he had become high priest of the new cult of Baal, which claimed some thirty thousand followers along the foothills of the Andes. The boy now had a beard that reached down to his feet, and a tattoo of a beetle covered his face, chest, and stomach. His faith in Baal had never wavered. Baal was by now back to his old size, if not his old shape. He clacked his pincers loudly over the boy’s dead body.

  “He was a good boy,” roared Baal when he saw me approach.

  “Oh? Well then, just out of curiosity,” I asked, “why did you bite his head off?”

  “He wanted me to,” roared Baal. “He said it would instill fear and awe in the others.”

  “Has it?”

  “Oh yes. They’re thinking of making it an annual tradition.”

  I removed the little boy’s soul from the old man’s body. It immediately turned to Baal.

  “Did the blood spurt everywhere like we hoped?”

  “Oh yes!” roared Baal.

  “Excellent. Now, try to remember to be a little crueler. You can’t be kind and gentle all the time, otherwise they’ll lose respect for you.”

  “Right-o,” roared Baal, snapping his mandibles happily. “And thank you, little one.”

  “It was an honor,” said the priest as he began to disappear into the Darkness. “Oh, one more thing. I left some sacrifices on the altar. It’s your favorite. Virgins.”

  “You think of everything,” roared Baal.

  The dilemma of the gods prompted me to think about my own situation. What would happen to me once everything was dead? It seemed improbably far off, even when you considered that I existed outside time, but it was an unsettling thought nonetheless. Would I spend my days vainly scrabbling around the earth, searching carcasses for the odd missed soul? Would I twiddle my thumbs and wait indefinitely for Life to begin again? Or would I in turn be absorbed into the Darkness, folding in upon myself until, with a slight pop, I disappeared into my own ether?

  You would have thought that such a vision of utter annihilation would make me happy, but curiously it did not. I found the fact that there would be no one to remember me after I was gone strangely unsettling. Even the thought that I would be sent back to Hell was not as pleasing to me as it had once seemed. I imagined what my own torture might look like, and pictured myself surrounded by the living, unable to extract souls no matter how hard I tried, confronted on all sides by gloating existence and virulent being. It wasn’t so terrifying. In fact, it was strangely thrilling, and after a while I grew confused as to whether I was imagining my Hell or my Heaven.

  With the rise of monotheism in the western parts of Earth, over two thousand Egyptian and Greek gods were left unemployed, surviving solely on the belief of a handful of eccentrics, occultists, and rebellious teenagers trying to irritate their parents. Some gods offered their services for private functions, and among the wealthy and faithful it became de rigueur to have a god or two attending your dinner parties or bar mitzvahs. The majority, however, emigrated. Many found gainful employment in India, whose large population had always been willing to believe in anything as long as it diverted their minds from the abject misery of their day-to-day lives. Being blue and having lots of arms was generally recognized as a fail-safe way of succeeding there.

  Fail-Safe Steps to Divine Popularity: Trunk, Tusks, Tutu.

  India had always proved troublesome for me due to the widespread belief in reincarnation. “I want to be a bee,” I remember one soul demanding of me after another mass trampling at the Kumbha Mela. “A little honeybee, buzz, buzz, buzzing all around and collecting honey, and if someone tries to stop me, I sting!”

  I tried to explain that returns were outside my jurisdiction, but before I could, another one of the dead chimed in, “I want to be a strawberry. Juicy, firm, red! So delicious. The perfect fruit! Make me a strawberry, please!”

  And so it went in India—within seconds there would be a cacophony of souls all pleading me to bring them back as their favorite thing. I later found out that most of these souls found themselves being reincarnated into beings that didn’t believe in reincarnation at all, which tended to make my bookkeeping easier.

  It was a matter of curious timing that, just as my hands were full with the first wave of Hindus, I saw Maud again. She was much changed—taller, darker skinned, not hanging upside down—but I recognized her in an instant. She was one of a tribe of fearsome Amazons who were slowly torturing a rival tribesman. I did not speak, but watched her from a distance, drinking in her every movement. To begin with, Maud caught the tribesman’s left hand in her grip, and planting her foot upon her victim’s chest, tore the shoulder from its socket. Then she and the others went to work rending his flesh, and slowly but surely his ribs were stripped clean by the Amazons’ fingernails. The women began tossing his limbs about with blood-soaked hands, and the screams from the tribesman grew louder and louder until Maud chopped off his head and affixed it to a spear. A knowing smile played across her lips.

  I hurried forward to the tribesman’s mangled body to uncap his soul, and I felt her eyes on me throughout. As I set the soul free, I suddenly felt her hand touch mine. An onlooker, if one could have seen me, might have thought it no more than an accidental caress, but I knew what it was. I looked up from the dead body, and Maud was staring directly at me.

  “Oh, the torture continues, does it?” interjected the soul of the dead tribesman.

  “What?” I said, turning to look at him. The spell was broken, but Maud’s touch had left me vibrating with excitement.

  “I mean, it’s not enough to have been tortured in life, I now have to watch this filth when I’m dead?” His soul rolled its lustrous eyes at me.

  “What filth?” I asked defensively.

  “You know exactly what I mean. All those lovey-dovey eyes between you and her.”

  “I can assure you that I never so much as…”

  “Yeah, yeah,” snorted the tribesman. “I may come from a stone-age jungle tribe that doesn’t have a word for tomorrow, but I wasn’t born the day before today.”

  I blushed. He was right. I turned to see if Maud had overheard, but she and her Amazonian colleagues had smeared one another in the tribesman’s viscera and melted back into the forest.

  Soon, however, Maud’s tribe began to die one by one, poisoned by their food. Some of the Amazons blamed the gods, but since I found Maud waiting by the dead
bodies on each occasion, I had a sneaking suspicion she was the one responsible.

  “Thanks for the dead,” I would bashfully say as I went to work.

  “Oh, it wasn’t me,” she’d reply, fluttering her eyelids in a pretense at innocence.

  “I just wanted to see you again,” she admitted the next time. “Amazons are so boring. They’re always going on about women’s oppression and men being awful, and they insist on chopping off their own breasts, which I don’t think really helps their cause. I wanted to talk to you.”

  Amazons: Boring.

  “You’ll see me eventually,” I said, tapping the Book. “Everyone does.”

  “I know,” she said, blushing. “But can’t you stay for a moment? Leave her.” She gestured at the soul of the poisoned Amazon who glistened in my hands.

  “Don’t you lay a finger on her,” snapped the soul, “unless you want to be eating your meals through a thin, hollow paper tube. Which reminds me, don’t eat her soup.”

  So I left the soul there, and Maud and I walked through the jungle together, ducking under creepers and clambering over fallen trees, she alive, me Death. I cannot recall our conversation now, so light-headed was I, but it ranged across space and time, taking in the dying fashions of the day, and the new and up-and-coming viruses.

  “When was the last time you took a day off?” said Maud, her eyes dark in the jungle light.

  “Well,” I said, “never. Something has always been dying, you know. That’s what defines the earth, the fact that everything is always dying.”

  “And living,” said Maud. “Don’t forget, we’re all living, too. Maybe you should try living one of these days.”

  I laughed, thinking it a joke, but she seemed serious, and so I imagined how strange it must be to have a soul, to be a part of the union of the living. How odd it must be to live within time and be beholden to a body. How curious to have a finite duration and a vulnerability to sharp objects. But this was mere fantasy. I sighed. Yes, I could console myself with the fact that I was immortal. But I didn’t have a Life.