The Business Of Death, Death Works Trilogy

by Trent Jamieson

  “This is her room,” Cerbo says. “And all she owned.”

  “Suzanne lived here?” Even more surprising, I could almost have imagined Suzanne Whitman using this as a quiet room, but …

  “Yes. I believe you would find the same situation with the other RMs, a few centuries and the gathering of possessions seems to lose its appeal. The job itself is its own reward.”

  Mr. D obviously hadn’t reached that kind of corporate Zen state, what with his boat and his houses along the coast. I’d always expected Suzanne to live in a Brownstone in some exclusive neighbourhood in Boston, with a library taking up several rooms. The smell of dust and books. Not this tiny room, smelling just so faintly of must and time passing slowly, inching into eons.

  The bed is made up, a single pillow, a single thin blanket. For a moment I feel a twinge of sadness. A made bed and this tiny room. All that’s left of her.

  “It was here that she would stay, if she needed rest, in those few times that she needed rest. Suzanne gave the End of Days far more thought and time than any mortal could. And she believed that it would start in your region.”

  “Another reason why she manipulated me into becoming Orcus?” I hadn’t heard this one before, though it makes sense. Why else would the Stirrers have been so anxious to deal with the last two Australian Ankous? I wonder if the threat had been expected to start in another region if I’d still be alive or if someone else would be Orcus. I open my mouth to speak, but Cerbo seems to have anticipated the thought.

  “The least of reasons, believe me, Steven, but no doubt a factor.”

  I look down at the book, Huckleberry Finn. Who’d have thought! Each to their own. I want to pick it up, have a look (see if it’s signed) but to do so seems somehow disrespectful.

  “I don’t like coming into this room,” Cerbo says. “But here, under the book…” He pushes it gently to one side.

  There, carved in the table is a date and the letter M. The wound is relatively fresh. I run my hands over it, cut so smooth you’d have thought she used a really tiny router. This meant something, it was important.

  May 24. M

  It’s only a week away. So close. Surely not, and yet, it feels…right. Shit. I don’t know whether or not to feel frightened or relieved. My skin prickles. HD slides around inside me with a new urgency. There’s something else, too. Something familiar about that date. I can’t quite put my finger on it. The only M-word I can think of right now is “marriage.” No, this is much more ominous. But then again…marriage. Did they know something that I didn’t?

  I look over at Cerbo. “What does it mean?”

  Cerbo shrugs. “I was hoping Suzanne would have told you. She didn’t tell me. If I hadn’t been cleaning up in here, dusting, I wouldn’t have found it.”

  “You do your own dusting?”

  Cerbo puffs up to full height: it’s almost threatening. “Of course I do, as if I would trust the job to anyone else. Dust holds too many secrets.”

  I smile at him. “But, hang on, Suzanne died over four months ago…”

  Cerbo blushes, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him blush before. “I—I haven’t been able to bring myself to come in here. Today was the first day I’ve managed to walk through that door.”

  “It’s all right,” I say, wishing that he had, and that we had more than a handful of days to work out the significance of the date, if there is any significance at all. “She must have wanted you to find it.”

  “Yes. One doesn’t carve into a fifteenth-century side table for no reason.”

  But that doesn’t make complete sense. Suzanne was a woman who planned everything. To leave such a clue and not to provide any context seems very unlike her.

  Perhaps she really hadn’t expected to die.

  “Did Suzanne ever write a diary?”

  Cerbo laughs. “Not that I am aware.”

  “Have you ever looked?” He blushes again. OK, so he has. “And you never found anything?”

  “Not a thing,” he says. I leave it at that. I can imagine why this may not have come up in conversation at the Death Moot, the last day Suzanne was alive. Things had been crazy then, all she had planned was coming to fruition, including her own death. There’s no way she couldn’t have been anything but distracted. And in my experience, nothing ever goes as smoothly as planned. And yet she left this final mark.

  May 24. Why is that date niggling me? “See if you can find anything. Any reference at all to do with the twenty-fourth. Get in touch with the other Ankous, just be subtle about it.” I say.

  “I am the very definition of subtlety.”

  Unlike, Ari, apparently, I want to say, but I hold my tongue.

  I look back to his office door. “How are things here?”

  “Running smoothly,” Cerbo says guardedly.

  “Yeah, but what’s the mood?”

  Cerbo’s silence is answer enough.

  “We can all feel it coming now,” I say.

  “Yes. It’s not far away. The twenty-fourth or not.”

  “Are we ready?”

  “Do you want me to lie to you? It’d help if we knew what we needed to be ready for. But we don’t.”

  “We can bleed. We can stall. Maybe that will be enough.”

  Cerbo smiles as bright and false a smile as I have ever seen, and I shift from Suzanne’s chamber back to my office.

  May 24. That doesn’t leave much time, this could be nothing more than a coincidence, but that cold hard certainty is growing inside me. My hands are shaking. I peer at the calendar under the mess on my desk. Seven days, an interminable length of time, and not nearly enough. Not if it’s true, and truth is what I require. I need more than a sense of anxiety inside me to believe that this is actually going to happen. Much more.

  I’ve been tossed around by other people’s truths these past few months, just taken them as fait accompli, including this job. It’s time I made a few of my own. Or at least found them myself.

  I’ve a hunch that if this date is important it might show up somewhere else.

  A place I’ve been avoiding because of the memory it evokes, and the brutal mess that I last saw there. A bloody, almost offhand scattering of limbs and flesh, and that was only the beginning.

  Aunt Neti had kept meticulous records of the goings-in and goings-out of the Underworld. If anyone is likely to have left information corresponding with Suzanne’s date, it would be Neti. A second reference to that date will certainly suggest that my worry is well founded.

  But that means going to her rooms.

  I wasn’t fond of them when she was alive. Sometimes things get worse after people die, and not just because of the hole they leave. I don’t think Neti’s rooms are going to have gotten any better.

  6

  When you decide to do something. You’re better off just doing it.

  That was my mum’s philosophy.

  Mine was, and still is: think about it, procrastinate, check email, post a couple of witty tweets, check email, check hair in the mirror by my filing cabinet, consider filing, consider employing someone to do my filing, see if anyone’s relationship status has changed on Facebook. Normally I was a star at the whole thing, but not today. I only got as far as opening the Twitter app on my phone.

  I need to sort this out, see if there is anything connecting Suzanne’s scribbling with Aunt Neti. Maybe their nearness to death had made them both somewhat prescient. Not that I’ve ever come across anything like that before, other than the insane or extremely senile All-Death, but there is always a first time. What worries me more is if they both had, if all the RMs had seen this date as a probable starting point, all the RMs except me. I mean, why hadn’t I?

  Ah, fuck it!

  I get out of my throne and walk to the door.

  The moment I open it, heart rates in the space beyond quicken, and not in a “happy to see me” kind of way. Tim scares them, but my presence can invoke a deeper back-brain sort of terror. And today I can really feel it.
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br />   I don’t like this reaction in my staff at all. Maybe it is partly exacerbated by my own anxiety. It’s hardly as if I’m a punitive sort of boss—even if HD would like to get swinging with the scythe. People cast furtive glances in my direction, and I try and smile harmlessly. Doesn’t seem to do much good though.

  To everyone outside the offices of Mortmax International, I’m just a guy in a suit with great hair. Here, people know I’m Death, and some of them even understand what that means. I want people to treat me normally, but I suppose, when I think about it, this is how people would treat me normally.

  I remember how I’d try and avoid my old boss, Mr. D—hey, the one that I am avoiding now—he made me very…uncomfortable. Sure, he liked to change his face a lot, shifting from skull, to splatter, to smiling middle-aged man in the space of seconds, and that was kind of threatening—Dad said the trick was to talk to his hairline, because it rarely changed—but Mr. D was never as powerful as I have become.

  I stroll through the room.

  HD feeds on the discomfort, like it’s a pack of pork rinds—light, tasty, and ultimately unsatisfying. It suggests we take out the particularly timorous ones now, like right now, they’re going to be no use in the coming war—and it’s ravenous—can’t it just kill a few?

  I smile. Avoid eye contact. Let people get on with their work, and focus on my own.

  There are things I’m frightened of too.

  There’s a hallway that I don’t like to look down. That I like to imagine doesn’t even exist.

  It leads to what used to be Aunt Neti’s rooms, and those rooms lead, via corridors, to all of Mortmax’s offices. My Ankous can all shift, so the corridors haven’t been used in a while, and Neti’s rooms are empty. Aunt Neti, guardian of the gates of Hell, was murdered. And nothing has come to replace her. That worries me. Maybe her replacement’s waiting to see how everything pans out with the Stirrer god. Or it could just think that there’s no point.

  When the entire population is thrown into the Underworld, and the living world itself becomes almost indistinguishable from the dead, who’s going to require someone to open the gate?

  It could just be that whatever will replace her doesn’t like me: I wasn’t Aunt Neti’s biggest fan. And she certainly wasn’t mine. We had our differences of opinion. Ha, she hated me!

  And all because I’d performed an Orpheus Maneuver without her. I’d used the agency of Charon instead. Like a lot of things, I really hadn’t known any better—and when you’re in Hell you take what you can get. Not that it would have mattered, she was really angry with Mr. D and since he was no longer part of the living world she had used me as a whipping boy. After all it was the second time that he had crossed her. The first time, he’d denied Rillman his own chance at an Orpheus Maneuver, and sent Rillman’s wife back to the Underworld.

  Though I’d been shocked at Neti’s betrayal, I probably should have seen it coming. Everyone else must have, because through that betrayal Suzanne’s plans had been affected. Without it, I wouldn’t be the only member of the Orcus. I wouldn’t have crows bowing at me every time I go for a jog in the park.

  And she really did terrify me. Her eyes (and she had dozens of them) were too hungry as they scanned my face. Her many hands too touchy-feely and pinchy, as though she were the witch in Hansel and Gretel—just waiting for me to be plump enough.

  The door projects menace, and it’s far too silent. Though I didn’t like it at the time, I miss the occasional echoing cackle coming from Aunt Neti’s rooms—as she yelled at one of her game shows. That doorway is an eye, staring blankly out.

  I’m safe. I have HD. I have Mog. I am Death. But regardless of that, I’m not comfortable doing this. It’s not like I’ve been Orcus for centuries. I haven’t forgotten what it is to fear: can’t even pretend that I have.

  Last time I visited Neti I had my inkling, Wal, for company. But we’re not talking, or I’m not ready to talk to him, so he remains a tattoo stuck silently to my arm—keeping him there is a trick I picked up from Suzanne. Sure, I could release him—his irritation alone might be enough of a distraction—but I’m a big boy, some things you have to do by yourself. It’s time I engaged with that concept properly.

  The door isn’t locked. I open it and peer into Aunt Neti’s parlor. The whole room used to smell of scones. Now it’s fusty and stale, with just a hint of the charnel house behind it all

  The light is off.

  I reach for the switch and something runs across the back of my hand.

  I pull my arm away from the wall fast enough that my elbow clips my ribs. Winded, I check my fingers. Nothing, I reach around again. There’s a loud hissing. I hesitate. Did Neti have gas in here? Surely not. But I can’t just hover outside the room forever, and there’s no way I’m walking back into the office without finding what I need.

  Either this light comes on, or I’m going to have to stumble through a dark and hissing room, feeling blindly around before me. Who knows what I’ll find, or what will find me.

  You’d think Death could see in the dark. Nope. Not this sort of darkness anyway. This is cave dark. A bottom of the ocean, never touched by sunlight, blacker than coal sort of dark.

  I take a deep breath. One. Two. Three.

  I reach around and flick the switch.

  Right, then.

  The walls and ceilings are carpeted thick with spiders.

  A scurrying, writhing, hissing mass. Spiders and spiders and spiders. Could be worse, could be cockroaches. At least spiders can’t fly. I step into the room, my boot crunches on the carpet. The hissing lifts a notch. I step very quickly back out the door, looking down at the floor. The carpet isn’t carpeted with spiders, just their leavings. That’s something at least.

  Now, I’m a Brisbane boy, I’ve got no issue with insects. We’ve a hot and humid environment, and some of the shit I’ve seen flit and scurry through my bedroom window, well…if it doesn’t bite me, I don’t go crazy with my cricket bat. But spiders and cockroaches, both of them…yeah, not that fond. At least these ones aren’t the palm-sized wolf spiders that like to creep about the house, or the gigantic golden-orb spiders with webs that look strong enough to catch the occasional early-morning or late-night jogger.

  No. These are tiny, thumbnail-sized and dark.

  As Neti’s creatures, they obviously continue to bear me some ill will. Maybe I don’t need to do this. But Neti’s calendar is there, just a few steps away. I know it’s several magnitudes of overkill, but I summon Mog (HD argues that there’s nothing at all overkill about it).

  “Hello. Hello.”

  The Knives of Negotiation interlock, and become my scythe. There’s a familiar cold that runs through my fingers and into my arms.

  I take a deep breath, as though I’m about to dive down and deep into something unpleasant, and walk towards the calendar. Strands of web brush my neck. Every step I take is attended to with a hiss.

  “I’m not staying long,” I breathe.

  The calendar is only partially covered with spiders. I’m as gentle as I can be in brushing them off. It’s a cute calendar: LOLcats—never really got them, can’t say that they make me LOL. And this is a death-themed one—where do people find this stuff?

  I flip open the calendar to May (a kitten wearing pink sunglasses curled up inside a skull) and there it is. That date again, circled, with an “M?” written beside it.

  The roof is getting lower. What does Neti have going on here? Then I realize what it is. The spiders, en masse, are sliding down on strands of web.

  I drop to a crouch, knees cracking, and run, as quickly as possible in that position, towards the door. The spiders hurry their descent. I can hear their spidery little limbs extruding more web. I swear their little mandibles are opening and snapping shut in unison. I’m almost there when the door closes.

  7

  The first of the spiders crawl in my hair and down my neck as I yank at the door handle. Nothing, its edges are bound up in web. Another hard pu
ll, one foot up against the frame, and the door doesn’t budge.

  The biting begins about five seconds later.

  Oh! This is enough!

  I bat at dozens of the things as they scramble over me, scurrying under my shirt, and skittering down my front and back. There are so many of them that I can’t tell where one begins and the others end. It’s just a scrambling, furry, biting mass.

  I swing my scythe about my head, the blade sings through the air. Around and around. All this seems to do is drop more spiders onto me.

  The long snath of the scythe tangles in web.

  I’d have been much better off with my Avian Pomps—they’d have had a feast, even if I’d have had to endure the sensation of spiders slithering down beaks and the taste of spidery guts.

  The hissing intensifies. I’ve managed to piss off more arachnids driving them to attack. But HD is taking a great delight in all of this. The scythe describes arcs left and right. I make contact with a china vase. It explodes against the wall. Packed with spiders they drop in a black and shuddery ball at my boots. They don’t stay there, but scurry up over my shoes and into my pants.

  Then I remember that I don’t need doors.

  Dolt!

  I shift into the hallway. I’m covered in web and spiders. I’m slapping at my hands and face. I roll onto my back. Spiders pop beneath me.

  The biting grows even more vicious. I struggle to my feet.

  Mog separates and becomes the Knives of Negotiation again. I stumble-rush down the hall. The spiders are crawling under my shirt, up and down under my pants. Boxers, why did I wear boxers? Something brushes against a testicle, that something quickly becomes many somethings. I try to shift, but this last sensation is too much: my concentration is shot.

  It’s quite the exit from the hallway.