Death

by George Pendle

  The Academy was home to cutting-edge research in every field. Loud explosions could be heard emanating from the school, as the mathematician Archimedes attempted to calculate his law of buoyancy in a lead-lined bathtub buried deep beneath the ground. Similarly the animal psychologist, Aristophanes, accidentally discovered the world’s first joke while inquiring into the hitherto mysterious motivations of pathway-traversing fowl. The results, read out in a paper to the academicians, caused such convulsions (later diagnosed as “laughter” by Hippocrates) that Aristophanes was believed to be a witch and was set on fire.

  The philosophers may have thought hard, but they also played hard, and the Academy soon developed a reputation as a wine-soaked party college. Astronomy classes sought to pinpoint those stars that only revealed themselves when the viewer was drunk. Geometry classes attempted to understand the sudden increase in the earth’s revolutions after an amphora of wine had been imbibed, while Ethics classes considered the least offensive places in which to vomit (this was also covered in Retcheric).

  The debauched lifestyle of the philosophers enraged prudish Athenian society, and when Philip of Opus, the Academy’s music instructor, composed a groundbreaking new dirge entitled “Fuck the Polis,” battle lines were drawn.

  Pericles, himself a great political innovator and the democratically elected dictator for life of Athens, decreed that he would tear down the Academy and construct a giant new building on the site—the Acropolis—which would be open only to idiots and nonthinkers. He even had the Academy’s top sage and mixer of drinks, Socrates, imprisoned and sentenced to death for refusing to empty his mind of all thoughts.

  Philip of Opus: Philosopha with Attitude.

  As it was, Pericles needn’t have bothered. The Academy was ultimately destroyed by a vast explosion, the result of Archimedes’ attempts to square the circle, and Socrates died soon after, while attempting to incorporate hemlock into a new drink that he named the “Politan.”

  When I met Socrates, he was remarkably calm. I asked him how he could be so serene even when facing me, and he replied that he had studied his life and was happy with it.

  “The unexamined life,” he said, as the Darkness consumed him, “is not worth living.”

  I didn’t have time to ask him about the unexamined Death.

  By then almost all the mythical creatures had disappeared, and those that remained were having a hard time adapting to this new, more rational world. The last Sphinx had fled Egypt on a boat to Greece, posing as both the ship’s cat and first mate. When it arrived, it immediately became swept up in the philosophical fashion of the country. Combining the incessant questioning that defined the Socratic Method with a healthy carnivorous appetite, the Sphinx came up with a deadly riddle—“What has one voice but walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at midday, and three legs in the evening?”—that it would spring on unsuspecting Greeks as they went about their daily business. Failure to answer correctly, or within the allotted time period, or if there was any pause or hesitation at all, would result in the Sphinx biting the answerer’s head clean off.

  A frightened populace implored the remaining members of Plato’s Academy to come up with a solution to the Sphinx’s riddle. Hippocrates, the father of medicine; Herophilus, the father of anatomy; and Galen, the father of experimental physiology, began by removing two limbs from a cow at midday, and then attempting to reattach one of them again in the evening. The results were grisly, and the various solutions to the riddle rarely survived. Work soon shifted to ponies, and then deer, and eventually a collection of hobbled and mutilated animals were paraded in front of the Sphinx. None passed muster, although all were eaten.

  Eventually, as the Sphinx’s riddle claimed more and more lives, a desperate appeal was sent to Oedipus, the fabled eccentric, who had married his own mother so that he would never have to clean up his bedroom ever again (although it did mean he had to be in bed by seven o’clock). After some thought, a tantrum, and a little surreptitious help from his wife, Oedipus told the Sphinx that the answer was “man” (“an octopus with a limp” would also have been acceptable).

  The Sphinx, however, was not satisfied.

  “When is a door not a door?” it snapped.

  “When it’s ajar,” replied Oedipus quickly.

  “What’s brown and sounds like a bell?”

  “Dung.”

  “What’s black and white and red all over?”

  “A zebra with sunburn.”

  Oedipus: “Why Don’t You Tell Me About Your Mother.”

  “Why is six afraid of seven?”

  “Because seven eight nine.”

  In desperation the Sphinx finally asked, “What have I got in my pocket?” which was not exactly a riddle according to the ancient rules.

  But Oedipus was unfazed.

  “You don’t have any pockets,” he said, and the Sphinx, realizing its era was over, threw itself from its rocky perch to its doom.

  I asked it afterward, “Why all the questions?”

  “What questions?” it replied.

  “All the questions you’ve been asking?”

  “I was asking questions?”

  “Weren’t you?”

  “Was I?”

  “Did you just say something?”

  “Did I just slay something?”

  This went on for some time.

  Incident at Golgotha

  I relate all the previous incidents to you to show you that, after an anxious start, I was quite content with my job. I was surrounded by interesting fatalities, a high mortality rate, and the perennial affection of my beloved Maud. So you can see that it was not unhappiness that made me act the way I eventually did; it was quite the opposite. As I watched tribes rise and fall, empires expand and shrivel, species be born and grow extinct, as I listened to countless last words gasped through innumerable contorted mouths I found myself becoming increasingly engrossed in the plot of Life. I saw how thrilling a Beginning and a Middle could be when combined with my usual province, the End. Increasingly I found myself wanting to be swept up in the whirligig of time, to jump and bound on the mortal coil, to leap aboard the crazy merry-go-round. No, it was not unhappiness that undid me, but delight.

  I first noticed something was wrong when the date in the Book changed, for no apparent reason, to A.D. 1. I flicked to the index—no easy thing in a never-ending volume—and saw that there was a “Help” sigil. No sooner had I drawn the sign in the air with my finger than a fat little cherub winged into view from some far-off part of Paradise and fluttered to the ground in front of me. He looked out of breath and unenthusiastic. I showed him the Book and he said it was a “revision in the epoch,” a “new eon update,” a “Y-zero problem,” or some such technical jargon, and that it probably wouldn’t affect me in my day-to-day Death. He made me sign a chit and then disappeared. I would soon find out that he was quite wrong—it would affect me very much.

  I quickly became distracted from this calendrical peculiarity by the even more peculiar opinions of King Herod of Judea. Herod was entering his dotage and had replaced the sagacity and wisdom of his early years with a paranoid depression centered on the threat posed to his reign by babies.

  It was while viewing his own children and their increasing facility at walking and talking that Herod came to the terrifying conclusion that these blubbering bags of mucus, who could barely sit upright and putrefied the air with their effluence, were increasingly coming to resemble actual human beings. Herod’s mind spun wild with the consequences. Soon, he ventured, these physical duplicates would not only start to look like real human beings but might take on human jobs, shop at human markets, grow human beards, and go on to be completely indistinguishable from adult human beings.

  Whether Herod’s madness stemmed from the tortures he had suffered at the hands of his own father—whose sadistic nurturing techniques had seen him labeled “the Antipater”—or whether it was just due to his crown being on too tight cannot be known for cert
ain. But the more Herod walked the streets of Judea, the more his suspicions were confirmed. He saw children everywhere growing larger, heard fathers and mothers claiming that their children “would be the death of them,” and saw those same children eventually burying their parents, their faces contorted in adultlike grief. Faced with such evidence, Herod came to the shocking conclusion that if children carried on in this manner they would soon take over the entire world. Gathering his advisers around him, Herod realized that there was only one way to prevent this from happening—kill all the babies in the world.

  The Massacre of the Innocents was rather tedious for me, because the souls of babies aren’t the greatest conversationalists. At that time I wanted to hear stories of Life, of love, of experience. Instead I got thousands of tributes to breasts, with the only variation being the preference for right or left.

  The Horror! The Horror!

  So, to set the scene for my downfall: the Romans were up, the Greeks were down, the Jews were in and out of captivity, the Chinese were building walls, and the Aborigines were eating so many colored mushrooms it was doubtful they were even on this planet at all. It was a warm day in the Middle East and I was touring Earth picking up my usual quota of beggars, lepers, princes, merchants, leeks, kestrels, and kumquats when I found myself drawn to the site of a crucifixion. I knew from experience that there’s no point loitering around these sites waiting for someone to die because the crucified could linger for days. Indeed, there was one occasion when a crucified man lingered for so long he actually got better and went home.

  Nevertheless, on that afternoon one of the crucified didn’t look as though He was going to be hanging around for too long at all. He was very pale and had that traditional crucified look on His face—covered in blood, grumpy—but the funny thing was that when I looked in the Book, there was no sign of Him. Three people had been crucified that day, yet the Book only accounted for the deaths of two of them.

  I did a double take. And then a triple one. I could not quite believe what I was seeing. In the millennia of casualties that had come before this, the Book of Endings had never made a mistake. It just didn’t happen. Admittedly a few folk have had extremely close brushes with me, but I pride myself on knowing a thing or two about when people are going to die. There’s a certain look they get that pretty much signals it’s my time to shine. Even those who are about to get hit by a bus without knowing it have that look on their faces. It’s a reflex look the body gives when it senses Life’s end hurtling toward it. It’s similar to the kind of look people get when someone hands them a new work project at five o’ clock in the afternoon on a Friday. I call it the five o’ clock shadow of Death. What I’m trying to say is that I knew this guy on the cross was toast, but the Book didn’t.

  Well, this crucified man starts having His side poked by a Roman centurion, and all sorts of blood and water are gushing out, and you could see His guts and He’s not moving or saying a word, so I decide—Book or no Book—I’d better take a look for His soul. But when I checked, it wasn’t there. I looked all over, in His spleen, gall bladder, kidneys, appendix, but this guy was as empty as the Darkness.

  I looked around the foot of the cross in case it had dropped out, and even retraced His steps just to make sure it hadn’t escaped along the way, but not a thing. Now listen. I’m no soft touch. I’ve dealt with beggars and babies, the weak and the infirm. People have pleaded with me, offered me all manner of bribes—gold, jewels, erotic pottery—to get them off the hook. I’ve heard it all before, but I don’t make exceptions. Admittedly with Maud I bent a few rules, but I never let her live. There was an unspoken agreement between us that that was impossible, and although I had been growing increasingly remorseful at sending her into the Darkness, I never dreamed of not doing it. At least not then.

  So I stood and scratched my head for a bit as the man’s family and friends took Him down from the cross. First He doesn’t appear in the Book. Then He hasn’t got a soul. It was unbelievable. Where had He come from? What was He doing here? Millions of years had gone by and every soul—even the pesky dinosaur souls—had eventually been accounted for. And now some soulless John Doe was about to screw the whole thing up. I looked at Him ruefully as His head was being covered in a shroud and, just for a second, I could have sworn He winked at me! But no, I thought, I must have been seeing things. I looked again and the body seemed still now. Bodies without souls don’t wink, I told myself. Then again, bodies should be in the Book. I had to get to the bottom of this.

  Golgotha, A.D. 33: The (Cruci)fix Was In.

  I started off with the usual suspects: the witch doctors, the soothsayers, the desert prophets, the hoodoo bone-men. Occasionally they’d accidentally say the right words in the right order and a certain soul would become sticky, or slippery, and I’d be fumbling with it all over the place. Creation, you have to remember, was somewhat imperfect; update had been added to update, patch added to patch. It wasn’t too hard to hack into it with some pretty basic magic.

  I cracked a few skulls but turned up nothing on the soulless man and was forced to call off my search as the number of uncollected souls began to build up. As I hurried to attend to a huge cholera outbreak in China, I was briefly waylaid by a random suicide in Jerusalem by the name of Judas. He was one of those remorseful types who wouldn’t stop talking about some terrible sin he had committed.

  “What sin was that?” I asked absentmindedly.

  “I kissed Him,” said Judas’s soul, before promptly bursting into tears.

  “Oh, come on now,” I said. “We’re not in the Bronze Age anymore.”

  I had heard his story before. It happened to a lot of first-century men. They sat around and watched the gladiatorial combats, had a little too much wine, shouted a little too loudly, started playfighting, and then, when they didn’t know what else to do, began kissing each other.

  I tried to tell Judas that these were Classical times, and that lots of men kissed other men, but this didn’t seem to calm him down.

  “I betrayed Him!” he moaned. This was getting complicated.

  “You slept with someone else?”

  “I betrayed Him with a kiss,” groaned Judas.

  “Now, look,” I said. “I may be a supernatural force beyond your comprehension, but from what I’ve seen of humankind, a kiss doesn’t mean anything. These days it doesn’t even count as cheating. You were just…trying out other options.”

  Judas sniffed and ran a hand under his nose. “But there are no other options. He was the one true Lord!”

  Whoever Judas’s boyfriend was, He had really done a number on him.

  “You were a fisherman weren’t you, Judas?” He certainly smelled like it. “What’s that old saying: ‘There’s plenty more fish in the sea’?”

  “But He was the Almighty.”

  Admittedly I may not have known a lot about love, but I knew a sap when I saw one. If only I had paid more attention to him, I could have saved myself a lot of trouble. But I was in a rush, and he was dead, so I heaved his soul into the Darkness without a second thought.

  The case of the missing soul weighed heavily on me the next day. Since it wasn’t logged in the Book of Endings, I couldn’t get into any trouble, but I had no doubt that Gabriel would hear about it sooner or later. I had a strange feeling. It felt like someone was walking over my grave, even though this was impossible on a number of metaphorical levels. I was so perturbed by the lost soul that I even popped in to see Father, just to make sure there hadn’t been some prearranged sale that he’d been hiding from me.

  Following his flirtation with radical socialism in Heaven, Father had rejected the foibles of his youth and embraced capitalism. He had taken to buying souls as investments, to sell to other demons for torture, and his recent founding of the Soul Exchange allowed him to set the price of souls according to their sins. Venial sinners were cheap, since their torture was usually limited to blunt, manual, rust-free instruments, while mortal sinners carried a premium, de
mon buyers much preferring the wide scope such malefactors allowed in terms of general all-round nastiness. During times of virtue—when miracles and good weather led people to believe all was well with the world—sinful souls skyrocketed in value. In times of war or political elections, there was always a sin surplus, and the sinner would be quite unable to sell his soul for love, money, or even halfway decent guitar-playing skills.

  As the years went by, the sin trade grew more complex. You could now buy malefactor-backed insecurities, or trade on the eternal transgression markets. Futures could be bought in the yet-to-be-damned, and slightly tainted souls were packaged together into heavily doomed bonds. Such was the rampant speculation that a “Sin Bubble” was created, a huge monstrous sphere of evil that ended up crushing Hell’s investors against the Soul Exchange’s spiky walls, leading to rapid deflation.

  On the Floor of the Soul Exchange, Insider Trading Was Rife.

  Many changes had been wrought in my absence from Hell. The gates now opened automatically, and the vast fields of the damned that I remembered had been subdivided into uncountable personal hells. There was a Hell of Stones, in which pickaxed demons smashed stones into gravel. The Hell of Gravel lay next to it, in which gravel was smashed into pebbles. While in the Hell of Pebbles, which lay next to that, pebbles were ruthlessly mocked by larger stones—pebbles being notoriously insecure about their size.

  There were tiny hells for the claustrophobic, huge hells for the agoraphobic, and a spacious antechamber reserved for Oscar Wilde, in which the great wit was scheduled to be seated at a mammoth dinner table populated by everyone who had ever chosen him as a hypothetical dining companion. In the distance I vaguely caught sight of a Unicorn being chased across a rainbow by a horde of prepubescent girls who were pulling at his mane and tail and squealing at him to let them ride him. “I think I’m going to be sick!” I heard him cry. “Fuck off, you little turds. Leave me alone!”