Death's Mantle

by Harmon Cooper

  “Come,” the old man said, motioning Lucian forward. “This is where it gets interesting.”

  A child passed right through Lucian, causing him to stop. He brought his hands to his chest, bothered and confused by what had just happened.

  “You’ll get used to things like that,” Old Death said as they floated up a flight of stairs. “They are alive and you are not. There isn’t much you can do about that.”

  “When you put it like that…” Lucian pressed his hand through the railing, still not sure of how he should take what he was experiencing. Part of him felt like it was a dream, an entirely surreal experience.

  He had gone from sitting in his living room to battling demons, with little time to process what had happened.

  “A lot of people have a misconception about what we do,” Old Death said as he moved into a dimly lit hallway, the stink of fried animal fat heavy in the air. “Most people don’t need guidance to die, but some people overstay their welcome through the help of a parasite.”

  “A parasite?” Lucian asked him.

  “Your heart condition. How long were you given to live?”

  “A year. But it had been about two and a half when you came...”

  “Precisely, my boy. The parasite I came for was keeping you alive.”

  Lucian paused. “I didn’t see a parasite.”

  “No one sees their own parasites, even those that become us.”

  “And it was this parasite that I couldn’t see keeping me alive past my death date?”

  “Affirmative.” Old Death stopped in front of a large metal door with a hand-painted number on it. “Ironically, it was you who ended up saving my life in the end. But that is partially my fault: I’ve been growing weaker as of late, and injuresouls are relentless in their pursuit of weak Deaths.”

  “Why are you growing weaker?”

  “I haven’t always been this way. There was a time when I could take on everything from a fallen angel to a horde of injuresouls. But those times are long gone.” Old Death looked at Lucian, a dullness to his eyes. “I’ve been hunting less and less as of late. I could grow strong again if I wanted, but…” He brought his hand to his chin. “I’m ready.”

  “To officially die?”

  The elderly man nodded. “But that discussion can be had another day. It’s time to see what happens when you let a person’s death be postponed, when you let a parasite get hold of them.”

  Lucian was expecting to see something rotting in the next room, maybe a corpse lying there, maggots crawling out of its eyes, or a person half-devoured by demons, bite marks on their ribs, discarded entrails all that remained.

  Instead, Old Death opened the door to reveal an old Asian woman sitting by the window, staring out at the courtyard below. Lucian was just about to ask what was off about the woman when something caught his eye.

  An insect-like being with peach-colored skin and a pulsating stomach was attached to the woman. As it fed, dozens of eyes slowly started to rise from its body, all of them focusing on Lucian and Old Death.

  “What in the fuck is that thing?” Lucian asked as he took in the monster.

  “This is what we’re here to do.” Old Death drew his blade. “Kill the parasite.”

  “You’re going to kill that thing?” Lucian asked.

  “No, you are.”

  A vein pulsed on the side of the woman’s neck as the parasite flopped onto the ground, taking the lamp and the sofa with it.

  It waddled towards Lucian, tentacles ripping out of the side of its body, centipede legs sprouting from its grotesque underbelly.

  It was one of the most horrifying things Lucian had ever seen. But rather than panic, he felt a sudden hatred for the creature, a desire to fight back.

  His sword appeared in his hands.

  “Good, now go!” Old Death shouted.

  Lucian took off toward the parasite, driving his blade into what he thought was the creature’s face.

  A boil on the parasite’s body popped, squirting Lucian with a burning goo that seared through his robes. Circling back around, he tossed his sword aside and went with his shotgun again, the one he’d conjured earlier.

  Click, click, boom!

  Lucian fired slug after slug at the parasite, shells flying all around him, the blasts ringing in his ears as the monster hissed and screeched.

  An odd realization came to Lucian as he avoided the creature’s barbed tail.

  He got the notion that he couldn’t die again, that he was already dead.

  There was nothing this goddamn thing could do that would actually kill him.

  And with this in mind, Lucian ran right at the terrible creature just as it was opening its giant mouth.

  He pressed off his heels and dove straight into its open maw, two grenades appearing in his hands, the pins already pulled.

  The explosion tore both his arms off and a part of his shoulder. It also tore a huge hole in the monster’s stomach. The parasite wheezed as Lucian squirmed his way out of the newly made opening.

  Now on his side, Lucian looked down to the stubs that used to be his arms.

  As gruesome as it was to see his own tendons and shattered bones, he was equally impressed when he noticed a tingling sensation at his elbow, that his arms were starting to regrow, that the only pain he felt was akin to an itch.

  By the time Lucian rocked himself up to his knees, his arms had already regrown all the way to his wrists. His hands reformed and his fingers took shape.

  The monster started to fizzle away, a surge of energy exploding from its core and pressing into Lucian’s chest.

  “That’s it?” he asked. “Did I win?”

  “What do you mean?” Old Death asked, a look of both horror and amusement on his face. “Of course you won. And what kind of attack was that?”

  “You told me to kill it; I killed it.”

  Old Death shook his head. “You have a lot to learn, my boy, but… it was an interesting way to handle the task. I’ll give you that. Be careful going forward with a strategy like that; it is a surefire way to be captured by one of these creatures. Had there been another parasite lurking around, it would have latched onto you and fed off your body until an injuresoul came.”

  “Really?”

  Old Death nodded.

  “Noted.”

  “And while it is possible to grenade a parasite, it also weakens you in a number of ways. For one, you are semi-immobile without arms.”

  “They grew back quickly,” Lucian said as he swung his arms.

  Old Death shook his head. “Yes, but wait until there are stronger parasites. My best advice: don’t sacrifice yourself to kill one of these things.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” Lucian approached the old Asian woman. There was something unsettling about the way she looked now, a glaze to her eyes. “Did I kill her?”

  “No, you didn’t kill her; you killed what was feeding off her and keeping her alive past her expiry date.” Old Death took a small notebook from his robes and flipped to one of the pages. “Her name is Zhang Wei, she was born on August 21st, 1950, and she was scheduled to die on April 15th of this year.”

  “You know all of that?” Lucian asked as he examined the woman.

  “Thanks to my little book, yes. It’s a hard concept to process, but all humans have a date on which they are supposed to expire. Those that have lived past these dates are the ones that come onto our radar.”

  “So I was living past my due date?”

  “Correct.” Old Death ran his hand through his long gray hair and turned to the door. “And when I came to square things away, you were able to see me, which is one of the reasons you’re here now, why you deserve my mantle.”

  Lucian looked to the woman again, who had started to nod off, her mouth open, rotten molars exposed. “So, I’m basically different because I fought back?”

  Old Death motioned him forward. “Correct again. I wish there was a trophy for what I’m about to say next, but I didn�
��t plan ahead, and you probably don’t want a trophy anyway, so here goes: Lucian North, you have passed the trials. In fact, there weren’t trials, I just wanted to see how good you would be. I was pretty sure you had it in you the moment you pointed your gun at me. It does get more complicated and more challenging than what we’ve just done, but that’s the gist of it.” Old Death squinted at a space near the door. “Now come, injuresouls may be here soon.”

  Chapter Three: Drinking with Death

  “You see, my boy, people have us misconstrued. They think we’re out to get them, when in actuality, we’re out to help them. I, and now you, have been tasked with helping people die.”

  Lucian walked over to the window of Old Death’s otherworldly apartment.

  A flying vehicle wrapped in silver slowly moved by the window. The saber-shaped buildings in the distance loomed over the horizon, but they also seemed close for some reason, almost as if he could reach out and touch them. The man still hadn’t told Lucian what city it was, or for that matter, what planet they were on.

  “Helping people die just doesn’t sound right.”

  “You are the new Death, and with this mantle comes a power the likes of which you’ve never experienced before. It is not the most glamorous job, but someone has to do it,” he said with a chuckle. “Think of it this way: over fifty million people die each year across the planet, and even more die on other planets across the galaxy.”

  “Other planets?”

  “You thought Earth was the only inhabited planet? It’s mathematically impossible!”

  “What city is this anyway?” Lucian asked as he looked out the window. It didn’t look like any city he’d seen on Earth.

  “Don’t worry about that; just know that you are safe here. Now, as I was saying, your parasitic targets will be on Earth. Of those fifty million people who die every year, many don’t need to be shepherded, but those who have been infected need our guidance.”

  Lucian turned back to the man.

  “Remember the old woman in the apartment who was well past her expiry date? Those parasites, those leeches, are what you’ll be going after. And I’m telling you this again to emphasize the fact that there are others in our world, and by our world, I mean the spiritual world, who do not understand this about us. You are going to encounter beings who are trying to kill you, who do not understand you, and who do not see what you are doing as helpful.”

  “I thought I couldn’t be killed.”

  Old Death laughed. “If only that were the case! There are things that can kill you, like injuresouls, and parasites can feed off you until injuresouls come. And Life. Life considers us demons and will do anything to stop us.” He cast his eyes down to the ground.

  “Life?”

  “You may be more familiar with their colloquial name, angels.”

  “Angels?” Lucian asked, raising one of his eyebrows.

  “Yes, commonly referred to by Deaths everywhere as ‘Life.’ Beautiful but terrible,” Old Death said, waving his hand at the thought. “But I’ll get to them in a minute. Let’s start with what you saw back at your apartment, back to the beginning.”

  Lucian recalled the strange demons that had come into his home, their faces covered in gauze-like bandanas that were splashed with blood. Their sharp teeth. The way they held themselves. Their emaciated yet muscular forms.

  What an image.

  “Many of the religions of your world, and of my former world, have hinted at injuresouls right in their texts, yet only the Asian religions have come close to describing the harrowing creatures. Injuresouls stem from a Death that once went rogue. She used her power to make herself tangible, and told a powerful sadhu about the terrible beings, thus creating them into reality.”

  “Sadhu?”

  Old Death nodded. “A holy man. This sadhu labeled injuresouls as pretas, a term which means ‘hungry ghost.’ My point is: these hungry ghosts, which we call injuresouls, hunt Deaths everywhere. They have no power over a mortal, which was why they spared you, but this doesn’t explain how you were able to fight back against them. And the only reason I was able to even stop one was because of the power I have cultivated in this role. If that group had attacked a new Death, or you hadn’t been there, then…” The old man cleared his throat. “Then I wouldn’t be here right now.”

  “Why do they hunt us?”

  Lucian was still getting used to using the pronoun ‘us’ to describe his new form. He hadn’t quite accepted the fact that he was Death, even though he’d been able to call weapons out of thin air and fight in a way that he’d only seen in movies and video games.

  Old Death ran his hand through his gray hair as he continued his explanation. “Injuresouls hunt for the same reason we hunt parasites. They feed off us. If there are injuresouls, leave. You won’t be able to stop them in the same way you can kill a parasite. Maybe one day, but not now.”

  “And Life? You mentioned angels.”

  “Do not fall into an angel’s trap either. I pray you never come across one,” he said, smiling at his pun. “But in all seriousness, while I would argue they are much worse than us and therefore shouldn’t be labeled as ‘angels,’ the terminology has stuck.”

  “And Life is our enemy?”

  “Yes, but only because Life sees us as their enemy. That’s the confusion in all this. No one has ever been able to unite Life and Death, and by this, I mean unite all the Lifes out there and all the Deaths, to help them come to some sort of agreement. I thought it would be possible,” he sighed miserably, “and I even fell for Life. Once. Oh, Leliel.”

  “You speak of Life like it was a single person.”

  “To me, Life was a single person, an absolutely stunning angel, the true Progeny of Light, and it is because of her that I’m glad to give these powers to you.”

  “Did she fight you?”

  Old Death sighed miserably. “She nearly killed me. But I loved her, and I still believe part of her loved me and maybe… never mind. If we had united, and if she could have truly understood what it is I do, it could have changed the course of history. And I’m talking about the history of the universe, not just your world. But I’m a helpless romantic at heart, so maybe that’s an exaggeration.”

  “This is a lot to take in,” Lucian finally said, a sense of anxiety washing over him.

  “It is, which is why I suggest we have a drink and discuss it for a while.” He motioned Lucian over to the couch.

  “I think I’ll go with a beer.”

  As soon as he stopped overanalyzing all of this, Lucian’s new role started to make sense to him.

  His job was to help people.

  It was easier to think about it like that.

  People were supposed to die at a certain time, and when they didn’t die as they were supposed to, that meant something was keeping them alive. As it turned out, this something was actually feeding off of them, thus keeping them artificially alive.

  Before his heart condition sent him to his deathbed, Lucian had been in construction, where he mostly worked on remodeling homes in Salem, Massachusetts. He liked to work with his hands, and he was always the first guy out there to dig in and start working.

  He had to stop working after his diagnosis, turning to video games to keep himself entertained. MMOs, RPGs, first-person shooters, anything really. There were a few days that he spent over twenty-four hours gaming online, just wasting away.

  Because of his interest in gaming, there was a fledging part of him that liked the new role that he had just been given.

  It gave him purpose.

  But there was another part of Lucian that didn’t sit so well with him.

  Old Death said that he was three hundred years old.

  Lucian couldn’t even imagine being that old, having seen so many things happen to the world. And that was just to the planet Earth, not the other planets in the galaxy that were inhabited.

  Lucian finished his beer, and it filled up again, a cap appearing and twisting shut.r />
  He snapped the cap off and chugged the cold beer, still not satiated.

  Sure, he could sort of feel the effects of the beer, but he also felt a sense of emptiness the likes of which he’d never experienced before.

  The beer filled up for the third time, a new cap tightening on. He dropped the beer to the ground once it was finished, the bottle disappearing. Lucian then conjured up a margarita. It was as simple as thinking about the object, holding his hand out, and watching it take shape.

  “I see you like to drink,” Old Death commented.

  “Not normally,” Lucian said before draining his margarita, “but in a situation like this, sure. I’ve got a couple more questions for you. Actually, I have a lot more questions for you, but I’ll keep it simple for now. How does this work exactly? I guess we should start there. I mean, how do you know which people you need to go after? As you said, there are millions of people that die every year, how do you know if someone’s death is going to be a regular death, or one that needs your assistance?”

  “I was wondering when you’d ask about the mechanics of all this. Deaths operate through what some of us old timers call the Mark System. There is a Council of Death that oversees these marks, but you don’t want to get involved with them.” Old Death procured a small notebook from his robes. “All that information is available here. Even more handy, I’m able to look at someone and then use my book to see their date of birth and date of death.”

  “And how do I access this ‘Mark System,’ as you call it?”

  Old Death took a sip of his tea. “It is constantly available to you. I prefer to use my notebook, but you can also just lift your hand and request it.”

  Not believing this was possible, Lucian did as instructed and was surprised to see a menu appear before him.

  [Choose your mark by location.]

  “You can also view the Mark System through an ever-changing pamphlet, or a scroll, or in a leather-bound book like I have here. It’s really up to you.” A black notebook appeared on the table in front of Lucian. “That one is for you, if you decide to use it in this way.”