Death, the Devil, and the Goldfish

by Andrew Buckley

  The man squinted as he noticed Nigel and fixed pleading eyes on him. Nigel could only stare back in horror. The man tried to struggle ineffectively against the bonds that held him so tightly he could barely move.

  The elf stopped giggling for a second as he dragged the man past Nigel's hiding place and out of sight down the hallway.

  "Don't worry," said the elf in a cheery, chipmunk sort of voice, "it won't be long now, the Master will be here soon." This was followed by more maniacal giggling and more muffled screaming.

  Nigel closed the closet door and stood in the dark for what seemed like an eternity. He breathed heavily and tried to sort out in his mind what he had just seen, but he just couldn't. It was all too much. Resolutely, he decided that he should find the lunchroom, which meant leaving the safety of the janitor's closet. The most basic animal instinct rose to the surface of Nigel's mind and he started fumbling around in the dark for some sort of weapon. He emerged two minutes later, in one hand a heavy-duty flashlight, in the other, a mop.

  Twenty-Five.

  As anyone who has tried to get out of Heathrow Airport alive knew from experience, that was not an easy task. Death and Gerald, having never been through Heathrow, mainly because Gerald was once a penguin and Death was once a semi-omnipotent being, had a bit of trouble finding the exit.

  Many experts believed that Heathrow Airport may very well have contained some sort of nexus of the universe, a sort of Bermuda Triangle without all the sun and sandy beaches, and may possibly lead to another dimension entirely if one only located the right door. In 1993, an elderly, severely malnourished gentleman wearing grubby clothes and a serious amount of facial growth emerged from the south exit doors of Terminal 3 at Heathrow and screamed at the top of his lungs, "Frreeddoomm!"

  The gentleman's screaming attracted the attention of security personnel who dragged him, kicking and screaming, back into the airport. Fingerprints were taken, files were filed, and a lot of coffee was drunk until finally the gentleman was identified as one Alfred McEvoy of Shropshire, reported missing in the mid-seventies.

  He claimed to have flown into Heathrow from Greece and tried to navigate his way through Customs in order to proceed to his connecting flight to Manchester. It turned out that the Customs Department of Heathrow had swallowed him up and slowly began to suck his life and good sense right out of his body. Anyone who's ever had to claim anything at Customs before can surely testify that the feelings and emotional state described by Alfred McEvoy are completely accurate.

  Every door he tried led him to another room or another section of the airport, or, in some cases, he found himself in a deep and lush jungle; upon discovering this, he would close the door immediately and try another one, as the thought of trekking through a dense jungle was slightly less desirable than trekking through Heathrow Airport. He tried following people around, as anyone would logically expect sooner or later they'd have to leave the airport, but just when it seemed he'd found the exit, he'd get caught up in a rush of people and lose the original person he had been following.

  He finally resigned himself to wandering around aimlessly as a non-entity, never acknowledged by anyone, feeding on whatever scraps he could find. Seemingly, this had gone on for almost twenty years before he accidentally tripped backward over a suitcase and fell out into the open air. The only detailed record of this event and Alfred McEvoy's testimony remained locked in a dusty filing cabinet in the basement area of the Heathrow security station at Terminal 3. The key for the filing cabinet was lost when the then head of security took a day trip to the south of France. On the return trip, his plane exploded and the key was lost somewhere over La Rochelle, a small winemaking village that suffered greatly when a plane exploded over it.

  Upon his release, Alfred McEvoy, shortly after giving his testimony, stepped out of the terminal and breathed fresh air for the first time in twenty years. He looked around at the people, at the alien world around him, at a dog peeing on a fire hydrant, the birds in the air, and behind the birds, the wide open space most people referred to as the sky.

  At that moment, Alfred McEvoy felt the grip of fear tighten around him and he quickly turned and ran, screaming and deranged, back into the airport. Security searched the terminal from top to bottom but there was no trace of Alfred anywhere.

  One expert in particular, a charming yet disgraced professor with a penchant for ancient theology living in a small village called Lees in the northwest of England, formed a theory that Heathrow Airport had been built right in the middle of an inter-dimensional vortex, a sort of semi-black hole where, if someone was to get caught inside, it would begin to remove them from time and history altogether until, by sheer accident, they fell out of the vortex.

  The once-renowned professor believed that such a thing had happened to Alfred McEvoy and may very well have happened to many others still trapped inside, people removed from reality, walking hither and thither, unable to escape, and completely oblivious of why they were stuck there. The professor concluded that being inside a vortex may not have been an entirely bad thing, as it provided a gateway to other dimensions if they could find the right door.

  Of course, this was all just a theory from a man whom no one believed anymore as he'd been disgraced and the only person to back him up was a rambling testimony locked in the basement of Heathrow's security station at Terminal 3from a man who appeared to have disappeared off the face of the Earth.

  Thankfully, Death and Gerald did not get caught up in any sort of interdimensional vortex; they simply followed the signs and eventually found the exit. As they drove away in a shiny black taxicab driven by a man named Rupert who appeared to be obsessed with the little bars of hotel soap, a large truck and trailer pulled up to the airport terminal.

  Two men exited the truck, followed by an angry-looking cat.

  Nigel, armed with his mop, had finally fallen upon the cafeteria only to find an unconscious lab technician whose nametag identified her to be the woman who left the message on his machine and an elf who appeared to be tap dancing.

  "Get back!" said Nigel to the dancing elf. "I'm armed," he said, tightening his grip on the mop, and then, with very little confidence, "and quite, quite dangerous!"

  The elf stopped dancing and grinned at Nigel. The smile was not the same evil maniacal grin that Nigel had seen on the other elf; it seemed more innocent than anything else. Not knowing what a first conversation with a cybernetic elf would entail, Nigel was at somewhat of a loss. But being that Celina still lay unconscious, he decided to give it a go. The conversation went something like this.

  "So, err, you're an elf then?" said Nigel.

  "Yes," said Eggnog.

  "Oh good, good. Do you have a name?"

  "Umm, Eggnog," said Eggnog.

  "Eggnog?"

  "Yes, I'm fairly certain it's Eggnog," said Eggnog, nodding enthusiastically.

  "Right then," said Nigel.

  There followed a lengthy pause. Eggnog stared at Nigel, all the while grinning, and Nigel stared back, trying to think of something productive to say.

  "So," said Nigel, "You wouldn't happen to be deranged, would you?"

  Eggnog seemed to ponder this question while his mainframe onboard dictionary looked up the word deranged, then reported that he definitely was not.

  "No," said Eggnog and began to dance a little jig.

  Whatever Nigel's definition of a deranged elf would be, a short, grinning elf, doing the jig did not strike him as deranged so much as just plain weird, but in a delightfully amusing way.

  He decided to leave the elf to his dancing and try and wake up Celina instead, who would probably prove more helpful, or at least, he hoped.

  It'd been a while since Celina had passed out. The last time was two years ago at the Majestic Technologies New Year's party where Celina had managed to consume, to the great pleasure of her dead Scottish ancestors, almost two kegs of beer over the course of seven hours. The result of that evening's festivities involved Celina waking u
p in the monkey cage at The London Zoo wearing nothing but a lab coat and the words I love bananas tattooed on her rear end. The monkeys were not impressed.

  When Celina woke up this time, she did not find herself in a cage, monkeys were not staring angrily at her, and to the best of her knowledge, no new tattoos had appeared anywhere on her body. However, through the bright haze of a flashlight, two figures stared intently at her. One was a rather rugged and intelligent-looking gentleman; the other was a round, chubby-faced elf, grinning broadly.

  She first looked to Nigel and then to the elf, who had stopped dancing. Horror spread across her face and she began scrambling backward like a spider monkey who had just come to terms with the fact that he was face to face with a large, hungry lion, while a sort of primal shriek emerged from her vocal chords.

  Eggnog looked at Nigel, and then back at Celina, and then, with a little more confusion in his features, he looked at Nigel again.

  Celina backed herself into a corner and resembled a human raised away from society by llamas recently discovered by an international explorer researching llamas. She stopped shrieking, and Nigel approached her carefully and summoned his calmest possible voice.

  "Celina McMannis? Hi. My name's Nigel, you left a message on my answering machine and—"

  But Nigel got no further as a look of relief flew across Celina's face and she dived straight at him and gave him a big hug. Celina's fear suddenly returned as she noticed Eggnog perched on a chair smiling broadly; she gripped Nigel by the neck tightly.

  "Don't let him hurt me!" She spun Nigel around and pointed repeatedly at Eggnog ferociously.

  Nigel eased out of Celina's grip and smoothed himself off.

  "I don't actually think he's dangerous. I've seen one of the other elves, and this one seems a little different."

  Celina's eyebrows arose suspiciously, and she crinkled her nose, as if a bad smell had just entered the room.

  "Why do you think he's so different?"

  "Well," said Nigel carefully, "for one thing he doesn't look quite as dangerous, and he, err, well, he keeps dancing."

  Celina swept her red hair away from her face and fixed Eggnog with a fierce stare.

  "What do you want, elf?"

  "Eggnog, actually," said Nigel helpfully.

  "What?" said Celina.

  "Apparently, his name is Eggnog."

  "I know what his name is!" said Celina a little too loudly, "I named half of them."

  Eggnog, happy to finally be given some attention, gurgled cheerfully.

  "I was told to find the nearest technician," he said.

  Celina moved closer to Eggnog with a little less hesitation. "What are your mission parameters?"

  Eggnog gave a sort of shrug. "Don't know, they won't load."

  "Try," said Celina.

  Eggnog closed his eyes. He tried once again to load his mission parameters, and yet again the error message flashed behind his eyes and the overwhelming urge to tango took over his body.

  "Strange," said Celina.

  Nigel watched the whole spectacle before him with a certain unease. This moody, yet quite beautiful technician was talking to a very real-looking elf who was actually a robot, but not one of the dangerous ones, today Nigel had been held upside down off a building, fired from his job, had horrible flashbacks to happier times, and the constant beware the elf was just getting frustrating. He then remembered that he had completely forgotten to turn off the coffee pot that morning and this unnerved him further. Then there was the whole dead not dying fiasco, the possessed cat, and the rather unfortunate death of a bird, possibly two.

  "Nigel," said Celina and snapped him back to reality. "You look perplexed."

  "Yes, I often do," said Nigel. "How did you get my phone number?"

  "Oh, well, I . . .it just came into my mind, as clear as day. It's a strange feeling," said Celina, "I don't think you could really understand it unless it happened to you."

  Nigel pulled up a chair and sat down as Eggnog foxtrotted past him.

  "Actually, a similar thing has been happening to me all day. These messages keep pouring into my head. All in all, it's been a rather unusual day."

  "You're telling me. I've been trapped in here all bloody day."

  "What happened here? How did you end up trapped in here? Where's everyone else, and"—pointing a questioning finger at Eggnog as he executed a tricky-looking break-dance maneuver—"what exactly is that thing?"

  Celina let out a sigh and perched herself on the edge of a table.

  "I don't even know how to explain it. The day began normally, everyone showed up a little late as usual, and then security alarms started to get tripped all over the place. The last thing we saw on the security cameras was a fuzzy black shape climbing over one of our fences and then everything went haywire."

  Nigel processed all the information as quickly as his brain would allow under the circumstances, but something clicked when Celina said fuzzy black shape. He let out a sort of half laugh.

  "I don't suppose the black shape could have been a cat?"

  "I really don't know," said Celina, "we'd have to check the video feed."

  "And where is that located, exactly?"

  "The security centre, one floor up. But what about everyone else? I don't even know if they're still alive."

  Nigel stood and picked up his mop. "Oh, I wouldn't worry about that."

  "And why not?" said Celina, a little hurt that this seemingly nice gentleman didn't seem to care about her colleagues.

  "Because no one's dying today," he said matter-of-factly. "We need to get to this security room, and on the way I think it'd be a good idea if we kept very quiet."

  "What about him?" asked Celina. Both of them looked at Eggnog, who was doing the Funky Chicken with remarkable grace.

  "Bring him," said Nigel.

  Twenty-Six.

  Chester Kronkel sat lazily in his favorite chair for two simple reasons: firstly, he had absolutely nothing better to do, and secondly, he was in mourning. Incidentally, Chester's chair was located in a lovely little cottage in Upper Ramsbottom. When caught in civilized conversation, which Chester made a habit of avoiding, people often asked where he lived, and he would automatically reply, "Upper Ramsbottom."

  After forty-three years of life, the joke had worn thin, to the point where he'd begun ignoring the whole thing. Chester Kronkel was the manager of a prominent bank that had international ties and political endorsements that would make the Prime Minister of England blush. Chester had not gone into work today, as he was still mourning, much like the previous week and a half. The reason he was mourning was because Chester had gone and lost his biggest and most important client somewhere, who so far showed no signs of being found.

  Chester flicked the channels and stopped on a channel that featured a wolverine taking apart some sort of water rat. For a brief moment, Chester wished he was a rat, then decided he'd rather be the wolverine, and then did a complete turnaround and tried to decide what he should have for dinner.

  The client in question was none other than Raymond Miller; once an Olympic swimmer, inherited lots of money from his drug-dealing grandmother, hit by a bus in Portugal and whisked away in an orange swirly thing before trading bodies with an unhappy penguin.

  Chester did not know this.

  Mr. Miller had made a it a sacred tradition to check in with Chester every couple of days or so and in turn, Chester would cater to whatever needs Mr. Miller had with regard to his vast fortune that was carefully scattered all over the world, and to which, together, Chester and Raymond were the key.

  Raymond trusted only Chester to move his money and Chester could not access Raymond's money without one of his voice-activated passwords, which could be delivered over the phone from anywhere in the world. Chester was mourning because the last he had heard from Raymond was a week and a half ago when he had checked in and then, later that day, a report faxed to Chester stated that Raymond Miller met the nasty end of a bus and vanishe
d into thin air.

  Over the past four years, Chester made it his life's mission to ensure that Mr. Miller's accounts ran like clockwork; in fact, the mission had become more of an obsession.

  Chester changed channels and settled on the national news; he let out a depressed sigh and wondered where in the world his most important client could be. The name Ian Grubman appeared at the bottom of the television screen and the camera came to focus on a slightly balding man with sharp, little eyes and a crooked nose.

  "You're watching the National News, I'm Ian Grubman," said Ian Grubman importantly.

  He shuffled the pile of papers that all newscasters keep in front of them, although no one really understood why. Ian Grubman first did a recap of the day's big news of the dead not dying and the new theories proposed, which included some sort of claim of responsibility from the IRA. Funnily enough, at that exact moment, the IRA was planning a bomb attack and had claimed responsibility for the dead not dying in order to distract the world away from their impending attack.

  Ian Grubman finished talking, shuffled his papers again, took the top sheet, quickly folded it into a swan and threw it off camera somewhere.

  "In other news today," he said, "two fugitives are being sought after their escape from a hospital in the Bahamas. The two men were being held for questioning before overpowering guards and escaping onto a plane to London's Heathrow Airport."

  Chester's leg began to itch so he scratched it accordingly. He fumbled around for the remote control and was about to change channels when his entire body froze solid. A hand-drawn sketch which looked unmistakably like Raymond Miller filled the television screen while Ian Grubman droned on.

  "The two fugitives, one pictured here, are believed to be in London somewhere. If anyone has any information, please contact your local police department. A picture of the second fugitive will be made available as soon as someone can clearly remember what he looked like."