by Tara West
A rat scurried past me, so I hastened my step. As I approached the door, it appeared to be made out of textured glass, as it gave off a good amount of light. I was about to pull the handle when the door opened and a man stepped outside.
My jaw dropped when I looked up at his muscular silhouette. He had to be about as tall as Grim, but his shoulders were broader, his chest beefier.
When he looked down at me and revealed a dimpled, boyish smile, my heart unraveled right there in that moldy, rat infested hallway.
Well, hello, handsome!
“Allow me, miss,” he said in a Midwest, corn-fed, and cute-as-pie accent as he held open the door.
It was much brighter inside, and I spied several other people sitting in the reception room, but they didn’t interest me at the moment.
“Why, thank you, sir.” I batted my lashes and flashed a coy smile. Finally, things were looking up for me in Purgatory.
As I passed under the arch of a well-toned arm, I caught sight of a long wooden handle protruding from the top of Mr. Corn-fed’s head.
Momentarily caught off guard, I stumbled, nearly falling on the worn shag carpet before Mr. Tall, Dark, and Brain Damaged grabbed underneath my shoulder. My purse and business card fluttered to the floor, but that was the least of my worries. What the hell was lodged in his head?
Too afraid to look up at him, I mumbled thanks as I shook out of his grip and bent to pick up my purse. I reached for the business card next to it, but then quickly dropped it with a shriek. It was smeared with blood!
“Uh, sorry about that.” Corn-fed picked up the card and wiped it on his jeans.
I didn’t want to look. I really didn’t, but curiosity, or maybe stupidity, won over, and my gaze darted to the slender object stuck inside his skull. And then I couldn’t look away if I tried. Blood matted his dark blond hair and dripped down the side of his face, splattering his shoulder, before it trickled down his arm.
I raised my hand with a silent scream, pointing at that thing as blood continued to ooze from the deep puncture. Panic seized my brain of all sense of reason, and I blurted the first thing that came to mind. “You have a hammer in your head!”
He nodded. “I know, miss.”
I had no idea what morbid force of nature compelled me to reach up and touch the metallic piece of rust, but I did. As I moved the end of the hammer, I could hear the matter inside his skull squish around as if I was cutting into a raw sausage. More blood oozed out of the wound, pooling around the blade and dripping down his ear.
“Ewww!” I pulled back and stared at my bloody fingertips in horror. “I touched it! Why did I touch it?”
He reached up and adjusted the handle until the ebb of blood slowed to a trickle. “I don’t know, miss.”
I gaped at his head and then at my bloody fingers. Then I frantically shook my hand as if it was on fire. “Omigod! Omigod!”
“It’s just blood,” he said through a sigh.
The blood wasn’t shaking off. Damn. Inés’s dress was going to have to take one for the team. Hopefully, she wouldn’t notice the smear in the obnoxious floral print. “Shouldn’t you go to a doctor?” I made a face as I wiped my hand down the side of my dress.
“Plastic surgeons take too many credits,” he said matter-of-factly, as if dripping blood all over people was no big deal.
“So you’re just going to walk around with that thing stuck in your head?” I didn’t mean to sound like a hissing cat when I said it, but come on! This wasn’t a simple vain cosmetic procedure like removing a wart from your lip or enhancing triple-As to double-Ds. I didn’t care how many credits it took. I was pretty sure removing a hammer from one’s head fell under the umbrella of absolutely-fucking-necessary cosmetic procedures.
“I don’t have a lot of choice, miss.” He shrugged. “Have a nice day.”
What was it with people telling each other to have a nice day? The term was starting to grate on my nerves. I grimaced as the handle came within a breath of scraping the doorway when he turned and walked out without another glance.
Holy-freaking-moly! Just when I thought death couldn’t get any weirder. I shook my head as the door shut.
“Poor soul. He’s such a nice young man.” I spun on my heel to see an elderly woman scowling at me before she turned her attention back to crocheting a sweater.
I briefly scanned the other people in the room. Everyone was scowling at me as if it was my fault the guy walked around with a bloody hammer in his head.
Trying my best to ignore their heavy stares, I made my way to the plump woman at the reception desk. She looked to have died at the cusp of her golden years, and quite possibly sometime in the 1950s. Her silvery-blonde hair was piled on top of her head in a beehive. She wore a pale pink sweater with pearl buttons and a floral scarf around her neck. Those pink glasses, though, with the bejeweled points at each end, looked vintage thrift shop. Either she was channeling her favorite Grease character or she’d been stuck in Purgatory for sixty years.
If that was the case, I had no idea how she’d managed, especially considering just about every available bit of space covering the wall behind her desk was filled with a cuckoo clock. I could only imagine how obnoxious the it sounded at noon. If I’d been stuck in Purgatory that long, I would have smashed every bird’s head years ago.
“I’m here for my appointment,” I said, and then cringed as I looked at one of the clock dials. Noon was five minutes away.
“Well, isn’t that obvious, sweetheart?” she said with a smile, but there was no doubting the snarling wolf behind her sharp gaze. “Have a seat, and you will be called shortly.”
I found a spot in the corner. The unforgiving, hard plastic chairs looked like they’d been pilfered from a bus station. The shiny plastic squeaked as I shifted in my seat. Turning my chin up high, and pretending to be a lot more confident than I felt, I crossed one leg over the other and waited. I desperately wanted nothing more than to find a bathroom and wash my hands, but I didn’t want to risk any more glares from the others.
Inés’s warning about always being nice reverberated in my mind. I guessed the the hammer incident wasn’t my most altruistic moment, but sheesh! Though I supposed Inés didn’t mean for me to single out people who bled all over me when she’d told me to be nice. Okay, lesson learned. No more gawking at otherwise gorgeous studs who are in obvious need of plastic surgery. My shoulders slumped as I shook my head. My life would have been so much easier if Grim had left me in Heaven.
Three freaking hours. That’s how long I had been waiting in my creditor’s office for my noon appointment. My gaze kept flitting to one of the dusty clocks hanging on the faded paisley wallpaper behind the secretary’s head. That woman seemed oblivious to my suffering as she filed and painted her nails and ate nearly an entire bag of jumbo marshmallows while I sat uncomfortably in that hard, squeaky chair. I tried letting her know I was an unsatisfied customer. I sighed loudly at least ten times. I crossed and uncrossed my legs until the squeaks from the unforgiving plastic had gotten on my last nerve. I paced the floor, practically wearing a hole in the already worn carpet. But it did no good. Those stupid clocks had gone off every quarter hour while everyone else had already been seen.
I’d already chewed my nails to the quick, worrying Inés would get tired of waiting and leave me alone on the bottom rung of Purgatory. I’d read just about every magazine in the place, circa 1954-1976, and I now knew how to pamper my husband with the perfect pot roast, entertain guests with fantastic fondue, and feather my bangs like Farrah Fawcett.
Finally, I’d had enough, and I stormed up to the secretary, determined to get some service. She was already leering at me from beneath heavily painted eyelashes. The same leer everyone else in the office had given me after the hammer incident.
Geez, Louise! Can’t a dead girl get a break?
Before I could give Miss Marshmallow a piece of my mind, she looked beyond my shoulder and called my name.
I swept my arm to th
e empty chairs behind me. “Hello. I’m the only one here,” I said in my not-so-sweet voice, but since I’d skipped lunch, I was all out of sugar… and patience.
“Follow me,” she said dryly, not even bothering to make eye contact as she heaved herself out of her chair.
My stomach chose that moment to rumble loudly from either hunger or apprehension, and I didn’t know if I wanted to vomit or scarf down an entire cheesecake.
Mmm, cheesecake. I sure missed that triple-chocolate delight from my Penthouse party last night.
Damn. Was I determined to spend every waking minute in Purgatory pining for another night of perfection?
I followed the secretary to the back room, wondering if all of those marshmallows had made her butt so wide or maybe it had been flattened by a steam roller. But then I noticed the back of her head looked as if it had been smashed by an iron. Her wiry hair was fanned out and smushed like trampled grass, and the center of her head was bald with angry red welts.
Crud! She just may have been run over by a steam roller.
I understood why she’d made me wait. My outburst probably didn’t go over well with someone who’d suffered from head trauma drama.
I really needed to learn to keep my mouth shut.
Without uttering a word, she cracked open a door and nodded for me to go inside, then turned on her heel and waddled back to the front office, but not before giving me one last scowl.
A small, pale man with black, slicked-back hair and Coke-bottle glasses that made his eyes look buggy, popped up from behind an old, bulky, computer monitor. “Come in. Hurry up. I haven’t got all day.” He beckoned me forward with an impatient wave.
I hesitantly sat in front of his desk. Though I couldn’t put my finger on it, there was something not right with this situation. Then again, my whole day had pretty much been shit, so I had no idea why I was expecting the meeting with my creditor to be any different. I reminded myself this was the guy who’d given me false hope, and yet here he was scowling at me. I searched delicate features for any sign of remorse, but the more I looked at him, the more I realized this man wasn’t a man. He couldn’t have been older than sixteen. Oh, great. No wonder he’d screwed up my credits. He probably hadn’t even finished algebra.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Loveass,” I said through a barely restrained growl, “but I’ve been waiting here for three hours.”
His face twisted up as if it was caving in on itself, his hollow cheeks turned bright red, and I’m fairly certain I saw steam shooting out of his ears.
“Lovelace,” he said through clenched teeth. “The name is Lovelace.” He motioned to a faded gold plate in front of his desk, and sure enough, the word “Lovelace” was etched across the top.
Well, didn’t I feel like a moron?
I felt the heat creep into my chest and fan my face as I sank low in my chair. So much for me giving the guy a piece of my mind. That was hard to do with my foot lodged in my mouth.
When I got hold of Grim, I was so going to throttle him.
“I’m sorry. Grim told me it was Loveass. Your name was smeared.” I dug through my purse and held up the card. It was coated with Hammerhead’s old, crusty blood.
One thin brow shot up. “You don’t remember me?”
“No.” I shook my head. “Am I supposed to?”
“We went to the same high school.”
He gave me another long look, but I was still coming up blank.
He grabbed a pencil off the desk, clutching it so tightly, I feared it would snap in two. “We had third period chemistry together. You sat catty-corner to me. We were lab partners.” He leaned forward and shot me this expectant, almost demanding glare, his dark eyes magnified beneath the lenses making him look angrier.
“We were?” Surely I would have remembered a guy as dorky as Lovelace.
“For three assignments.” He held up three bony fingers for emphasis.
I struggled to jog my memory. Asshole or not, it was starting to dawn on me I probably needed to be on this guy’s good side if I wanted to get into Heaven faster.
“Sorry.” I shrugged. “My high school years are sort of blurry.”
At least senior year was. That was the year my volleyball teammate's brother turned twenty-one, and he thought he could get into the team’s pants if he bought us beer. It worked on a few players, but not me. Believe it or not, I had standards back then. I never said no to the beer, though, until the night after playoffs. I’d drunk myself into a stupor and woken up in a pile of my own vomit.
Two weeks of uncontrollable diarrhea and barfing later, doctors diagnosed me with Celiac Disease, and then no more beer for me. I spent the rest of my senior year in a gluten-withdrawal coma. The last thing on my mind would have been a skinny bug-eyed nerd when I was mourning the loss of Budweiser, Captain Crunch, and Oreos. My GPA took a nosedive, too. In fact, if it hadn’t been for a few sympathetic teachers and hired tutors, I would have failed.
An image flashed through my mind: a kid with big head gear and high-water jeans whose zipper was always halfway down. He’d tutored me after school with Periodic Table of the Elements flash cards he'd made himself. He used to yell at me in this nasal voice that sounded more squeak than scream every time I interrupted his rehearsed lecture to ask a question.
I remembered choosing him as my lab partner because he did all the work, even though he belittled me at every opportunity. But then something happened to him. Something tragic, like he’d committed suicide. I’d fallen off the gluten-free wagon and gone on a Pizza Hut deep-dish pizza and Olive Garden breadsticks binge the weekend it happened, so I’d been too sick to attend the funeral.
I briefly remembered lying in bed and reading about his death. I think I may have even cried, because though he was always calling me a moron, I’d felt sorry for the kid. He’d climbed to the top of the water tower and spray-painted the words “I love ass” before jumping to his death.
It dawned on me why Grim called him Loveass. Oh, the jerk was so going to pay for making me look insensitive.
“I remember who you are now.” I jutted a finger at him. “You’re the guy who loved butt and then committed suicide.”
“Loved butt?” He jerked back as if I’d just spit all over his face, which I hadn’t.
Because even though my words project, I keep my saliva within the confines of my mouth, thank you very much.
I looked over my shoulder to make sure Miss Marshmallow had shut the door behind me, and then I dropped my voice to a nearly audible whisper. “You wrote ‘I love ass’ on the water tower and jumped to your death.”
His face colored, first red, then a bright shade of fuchsia. “I fell. I didn’t jump,” he snapped. “And I didn’t mean to write ‘ass.’ My hand slipped when I fell.”
“Oh?” I asked. “What were you trying to write?”
“Never mind.” He snapped the pencil in his grip and dropped the splintered pieces on his desk before disappearing behind the bulky computer monitor.
I guess I’d breached some Purgatory code of ethics by asking about his death. I had no idea why he’d gotten so upset. It’s not like I hadn’t already had to fend off humiliating blow-dryer questions.
He cleared his throat loudly while he tapped on his keyboard. “So, about the mix-up yesterday.”
Really? That’s what he’s calling the crushing of my dreams? A mix-up?
“Yeah, what happened? One minute I’m floating and eating cheesecake, and the next minute I’m stuck in Purgatory,” I blurted, and then winced at the severity of my tone. But on second thought, maybe I hadn’t been severe enough.
I didn’t understand this whole credit system, but if it wasn’t for his sucky math skills I’d be, well, I’d be stuck on level two, but still, he could have ignored his mistake and left me in Heaven.
He stood up, looking like a bent beanstalk as he leaned over his computer and pointed a finger at me. “You got a pass to the thirteenth floor, from what I understand, even though you didn’t ear
n it,” he snarled like a hungry bear, a really skinny hungry bear.
I shrank back a little. “That’s not the point.” My confidence burst like a balloon under the razor-sharp intensity of his bug-eyed glare.
He swept a hand at the blackened window behind him. “Would you rather be stuck in the dark and breathing sewage?”
Even though I probably outweighed this guy by thirty pounds, how did he manage to make me feel smaller than a speck of dirt?
I shook my head.
“Then don’t complain.” He slammed back into his chair so hard, the desk rattled. “I live on the fifth floor, which isn’t a whole lot better than this hellhole, but at least I earned my way there.” He tapped something on his keyboard and an ancient printer started making all kinds of noise as it slowly spat out a printout from a ream of paper. I waited for a stretch of time that seemed too long, even by eternity standards, before the printer was finished. He ripped the pages from the spool and handed them to me. “Here is your work assignment. Report there at 8:00 a.m. sharp on Monday.”
My hand shook as I scanned the printout of my history on Earth, from my C-minus in high school geometry to my defaulted law school student loan, and finally, my five-year employment, which had felt more like a life sentence, at Schwartz, Parker and Boone. The ream of paper stretched toward my feet, and as I hastily reached the bottom, there was a job title I didn’t remember on my resume: entry level prayer call center clerk.
I gaped at him. “My work assignment?”
He swore as he stumbled into his chair before walking around the desk. “You want to earn your way back into the Penthouse, don’t you?” he said as he sneered down at me.
I had to stifle a laugh when I looked at him. He had to be wearing the jeans he’d died in. They were at least two inches too short, and again, his zipper was halfway down. One tail of his button-down striped shirt was hanging out of his pants, and his ugly yellow tie was stained with either ketchup or barbeque sauce.