Long Live Death: Welcome To The Afterlife Read online

  I made my way up to the podium and there was an empty chair beside the King’s that I hadn’t noticed before. To all intents and purposes, it had appeared out of thin air. As soon as I’d turned to face the open space with hundreds of thousands of souls from different life-systems standing behind cordons, I took a slow deep breath. A band started to play music, loud, welcoming, lively Jazz. “I apologize from the depth of my soul, Your Majesty. Things did not go according to plan.”

  “It’s not your fault, Helidon. I know Von Heisen power play when I see it.” The confusion on my face must have been clear. “The only way to keep an eye on the powerful is to give them power. It tags along responsibility and paperwork. To the right eye,” and here his molten-gold ones shone especially strongly, “any mischief can be detected. It’s how I knew they were back to their old tricks when they had that woman Carina Jelva be shown to you. If—and I am prone to being a bit paranoid, Helidon—” It was a blatantly casual side of Death I hadn’t seen before. “If they start an uprising or something as useless as that, they can say they brought unjust afterlife conditions to the attention of one my most important courtiers. That would be the Reincarnator.” He paused, I frowned. “They must have had their spy tag you everywhere you went in that castle to make sure you weren’t spying on my behalf. You are capable of many things, Helidon, but undercover work isn’t one of them.” He gave me a sidelong look and I felt the side of my neck grow warmer.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to terrorise you in subtle ways.” Dracula’s room popped to mind. “I wouldn’t put it above them to use that carriage entry to display their family crest to all the people and plant a subliminal message in their heads that the Von Heisen’s are not afraid of, well, me.” He paused again and went as still as stone. “They like millions of others before them vy for my throne. What they failt to understand, Helidon, is that it’s not the throne that gives a being their power. It’s the power of the being that gives the throne its worth.” He went still again. “Anyway, I’ve invited the Baron and Baroness Von Heisen for tea later this afternoon. I’d like for you to be present. They seem to have taken a liking to you. By liking, of course, they plan to figure out how they can use you against me.”

  “Why, Your Majesty? I’m not important.”

  “No, Helidon, you’re not. But the office you hold is. At the end of the day, Reincarnator is the second most sought after position following King.”

  I gulped. I knew what he meant. My life, throughout all of yesterday’s feasting, laughing, enjoying and merrymaking, had been in perilous danger. I had, if my assumptions about what Death said were true, become the Von Heisen’s second kill on a hit list I’m guessing goes on for pages. After three whole months being Reincarnator, I only now began to understand how power attracts ambition and how ambition inspires greed. The vampires wanted Death’s power and even though they didn’t even come close to his potential they saw his throne and blindly coveted it. Whoever sat on it could drown or burn for all they cared. They put their dreams on a piece of furniture, which was a dangerous lack of foresight. Nobody messed with Death, nobody. The more casual he sounded, the more calculative he was. The more angry he became, the more intent his meaning. There was a mystery to the being who now stood and raised his right arm. The music died and the people who’d been clapping to the tune went silent.

  “Get ready, Reincarnator. You of all people have to see this.”

  The courtiers stood with Death who looked at the ocean and waited for something or someone, I’m not sure. A mist rolled in from the horizon. Everyone but me seemed to know what was going on. The wind stopped and I felt that if I breathed too hard I might cause an avalanche somewhere. The first thing I spotted, although the mist made them hard to see, was sails. Not one but many, several sailed ships. They made their way like a funeral procession, slow and solemn. All the ships were as red as poison frogs except for the sails that were white as pearls. The contrast resulted in an intense flash of color on one’s senses and almost all of us winced or shaded our eyes except those with eyesight issues and of course our perfect and all-glorious King who stared on. This was either a war or a marriage ceremony, I couldn’t decide which one was grand enough to warrant such a sight.

  None of the ships dropped anchor but came to a complete stop. They faced forward like the water around them had turned to cement. They didn’t move with the tide nor turn with the current. There was an extensive space right in the middle of all these hundreds of red ships with white sails. A deafening foghorn sounded. Everyone shut their ears against it. Only His Majesty stood calm. From the horizon, a veritable monster ship ploughed its way through the waters. It was far from ugly but it was intimidating in every way. Intense silver sails decked a ship as black as the heart of cruelty. It moved as though it didn’t have any care in the world but that of its own shady purpose.

  How could something that big float on water? It was ten times the size of the other ships, like a jumbo version only bigger. As it came closer I could see that its sails pointed in the oddest directions. The foghorn sounded again and after a period of time came again, like an enormously loud knell. The mist cleared all around it and crawled back into the ocean. Each time the foghorn sounded all of us shut our ears but kept our eyes wide open. I think none of us even blinked for the duration the ship took to reach the Imperial Harbor, grand wharf number one. The great ship dropped anchor by the pier and a group of harbor personnel got to work mooring it and rolling an ornamented set of stairs forward for the dignitary on board.

  I was wondering how they were going to get anyone off when the stairs had more than four feet of space between them and the top deck. Just then the ship made an impossible turn where it floated, bringing its starboard side parallel to the wharf. The stairs aligned perfectly. A dark figure moved at the highest point on the tallest mast. I at first mistook it to be a flag but none of these ships carried flags. They were clearly loyal to Death and the fact that they had no guild symbol to prove it meant even more that they served the one who needed no introductions.

  The tall gangly being somersaulted like it were about to dive into a lagoon. From that high vantage, what would the person achieve but a serious injury or splatter the pier with its soul fluids? Before I could judge the person for being rash they made a flawless acrobat’s landing and stood up. They started to walk from the end of the wharf and the crew who helped rig the ship leaped off the side and into the water. There was nobody else aboard the magnificent silver-sailed vessel. As they came closer I could see it was a woman with a thin and somewhat strong body. She barely had breasts or shapely hips but I simply knew, even despite the strong deportment, that it was a woman but not technically so. She had hair as limp as seaweed but long enough to reach her ankles. Those long silver strands caught and reflected the sunlight.

  Speaking of reflection, her shoulders weren’t normal in any sense of the word. Like two adjacent cliffs, bony outgrowth sprouted up to either side of her head. They went up a few feet and spread out in opposite directions. Upto there the growths were bone and sinew but where they spread horizontally out to both sides they became long highly polished steel scythes. The sharp tips came to rest at a point parallel to her narrow waist. These reflected the sun in earnest.

  I still couldn’t imagine how she balanced all this on one body. Just when I thought I had completed my study of her, I spotted six giant tentacles growing out of her spine, three from the left half of her body and three from her right. They seemed to sprout from her spinal cord. They were so long that sections of them were still in the ocean as she walked on. When all of them were out under the open sun, they sprang up like agile pythons and moved in such a way off the ground that it was all the people could do not to scream. This was the first time so many of us in Quadrant City had laid eyes on this monster. She was naked but for black and green splotches that seemed to impart some form of dignity to her body. There was no weakness in her walk.

  She finally looked up, br
ining her chin from a vertical to a horizontal position. Her eyebrows were horns, her chin had two entwined downward facing prongs and what I mistook for a fancy helm was actually her skull. Bony outgrowths went up from between her scythe shoulders and when they made it up over the peak they spread to either side of her and pointed a vast array of antlers to the gloomy sky.

  “Welcome,” said His Majesty the King. His voice carried over the entire city. “At long last, welcome. Citizens of Quadrant City, join me in welcoming Captain Charon, the Reaper of Souls. Kith brought you here and kith will take you away where I send you. For none may cross into afterlife dimensions but through the captain who knows its waters.” I later came to learn that they neither called Charon a he, she or it, but used the respectful word ‘kith’.

  Kith had reached us by this time. Up close, the captain was as curious as kith was scary. “Long live His Majesty the King,” kith said and the voice was like that of a powerful man. “Long live Death.” It was a whisper that whooshed like the ocean breeze, a haunting tone that chilled all who heard it. Kith spoke slowly and deliberately, each word enunciated with painful lethargy. Kith didn’t bow, just stood there staring.

  Every inhabitant in Quadrant, including the three hundred fifty courtiers of whom I was one, felt the intense desire to bow before Captain Charon. We surrendered to that impulse and bowed before the being that had reaped our souls and brought us here just as kith reaped souls and took them to other places in the afterlife, wherever King Death demanded. How could we have forgotten? How is it possible that none of us remembered the captain? Just as kith could alone travel between dimensions, controlling the whole armada of ships filled with souls, Death ruled over all those dimensions. But even His Majesty needed Charon to ferry him across to them. I learned all this from talk among courtiers and citizens who knew these facts or read about it in Quadrant City’s library.

  “Come, Reincarnator. Meet the new souls you’ll be helping get settled. They have all taken their lives.” Quadrant City—and this fact I knew when I came here—was an afterlife dimension made solely for those who committed suicide, in the literal and technical sense. I dutifully followed His Majesty down the podium stairs and toward the wharf. Captain Charon moved to one side as King Death walked past him. I observed the King was much taller and more imposing than even the captain kithself. His bladed wings shone as if to compliment the reflections given off Charon. With the King taking point and the captain following fifteen paces behind, I took the rear and avoided those tentacles while trying not to look aloof.

  This was the first time in the three months I served as Reincarnator that I witnessed this event. I hadn’t learned of it even during the one preceding month I was taught my duties as Reincarnator, a role picked out for me by Death himself as soon as my soul left my body and waited in the Q-ternity, my own term for the eternal que of souls waiting to be sent to different afterlife dimensions. They called today’s event the Soul Ferry and I must admit it made me feel unduly heavy. Each moment that followed filled me with dread and a sense of dark importance.

  Death reached the wharf first but didn’t walk all the way to the end. Charon reached it next and kith stood beside Death. I arrived third and stood to His Majesty’s left. “Destination: Quadrant City,” said Charon in that bold wind-whisper voice. “Disembark.”

  Souls floated out of each of the red ships. The white sails folded themselves neatly and away to make room for their flight. It was nearly dark and their souls lit the harbor and a good portion of the city. These were raw non-orientated souls transported in Captain Charon’s armada. There were teams waiting to stand them in a series of lines. The first dimension was Purgatory where a department of His Majesty’s government lived and worked filing souls and stamping papers to tell them which sub-dimension they were to go. All the suicides came here every three or four months, depending on when the captain saw fit to travel.

  After only four months, more than half a million souls from all life-systems alighted. They didn’t have fleshified bodies yet. Once their orientation was over—I started to recall facts faster than I could question how—they would be given the most recent bodies they possessed when they died. That’s when dimension laws took hold of them and they would be able to stand, walk, eat, sleep and feel miserable about why they took their lives. One month of orientation will follow depending on what the Employmenters, the department tasked with finding suitable work for each soul in the city, saw fit for Death’s approval. His Majesty would use his light-speed vision to read all five hundred thousand and more files in less than a few seconds.

  The souls flew up out of cabins and cannons, from below decks and the brig, wherever they’d been stuffed for compact transport on the ship assigned to them. After one ship emptied, a roar of a sound accompanied its destruction. Wood broke, sails burned and the ship sank with an impossible crumbling of all its parts. One by one all the ships fell apart and left souls floating and moaning, crying and whimpering, shivering and shaking above the surface of the waters. One and a half hours later, all the red ships with white sails had gone. Captain Charon reached out a clawed hand. His Majesty shook it with a strangely featured over-muscled one of his own. Two so-called forearms were gripped in a Roman style of greeting only this was goodbye, a job concluded, a deal closed.

  With a single bound, Captain Charon landed on deck, right behind the wheel. Kith adjusted his weight so one scythe slipped into a raised groove beside the wheel, port side. The other scythe tip went into a similar groove on the starboard side. Chugging and grinding sounds breathed life back into the ship and the sails billowed in the absence of a wind. Kith’s tentacles extended incredible lengths and adjusted moorings, toggled consoles and tied knots. Captain Charon got his giant ship to turn around as if on an invisible pivot. The mist rolled in and everyone who was present to witness the moment waited until it went out of sight.

  Over the next few hours everyone dispersed, the courtiers returned to their respective government buildings, and the King took to the sky and flew back to the throne room. Those who remained were the orientation crew who already got to work classifying the souls and having them stand in lines that floated over the waters. The soul-medics set up stalls to give each soul a physical and med check up. Then there was me, dumbstruck, dumbfounded and dazzled. I stood there looking at the waters lap the pier and waited for someone to tell me what the gulakalata I was supposed to do.

  I grew increasingly aware of someone looking at me. I had a feeling about who it was. Lady Life, always present for the Soul Ferry but never on the podium, never for all the suicides in the city and in the ships to see. She hated giving us the benefit of her company after we—how did she put it—‘so daringly decided to take matters into our own hands with no regard for the cost, paperwork, effort and consistency of programming’.

  She was somewhere in the crowd, or maybe hiding on a rooftop with a scope, or perhaps she was the air itself, I wouldn’t know. But she was watching alright, and she took especial note of me whose job it was to see to it that everyone in Quadrant City was approved for reincarnation and all those who were yet to come here didn’t have a reason to. No pressure.

  8

  It’s been a little more than a day since I saw my apartment. I was surprised I hadn’t lost the key. I entered, locked the door behind me and took inventory of my chores. This was my day off. Cleaning was number one, as usual, on my list. The dust was incessant, it gathered in all the hard to reach places. There was item dusting to be done, followed by sweeping, then mopping. After that came the kitchen tile clean up followed in the tile series by the toilet. I created my schedule on what kind of gloves I had to wear and what kind of chemicals I had to use. It made things less of a clutter. Rich or poor, young or old, King Death banned the word ‘servant’ from the lives of his courtiers. ‘You all live to serve me.’

  Except for his three hundred fifty courtiers, everyone else could have servants if they could afford the credits to pay them and said servan
ts can join or leave their employ after filling the proper forms and getting them approved of course. He wanted to keep us courtiers humble to the point of insanity. Jodha forbid the closest people to him, namely us, let their power get to their heads. It’s why we all maintain apartments, they’re easier to clean.

  I’d have pondered my existence but this was the afterlife I existed in. Thus began my day off as I told myself joke after joke, most of them my own, that I found really funny. I should have gone into stand-up. As if something else heard me and didn’t like me feeling this confident, it showed me sad images, low memories and reminded me of the despair I only knew too well. I dusted, swept, mopped, scrubbed and washed. At the end of the day I ran a nice hot bath and couldn’t wait for the tub to fill.

  “Helidon, Helidon, what are we going to do with our afterlife?” It was my concluding statement of self-talk for the day.

  I couldn’t believe what was happening when I woke up in the tub an hour later to sounds of my door breaking down. I tied a towel around myself and ran out to see who dared assault a courtier of Death in his own home. Weren’t they afraid of my boss? Crime was a very real thing in Quadrant City and there were judicial hearings for them too, only the judge, jury and executioner was Death himself who saw the paperwork, put a tick on one of several punishment options and went on his way. Suffice to say there were no lawyers. But the crime rate was low, thankfully so. Death didn’t really care to erase crime and when I’d voiced my concern he said to me ‘People need something to do every once in a while.’ That was during one of my first meetings with him and I remember how cruel I thought he was. So crime, in my apartment? Not that farfetched a possibility. I opened the bathroom door only to be hit by a voluminous cloud of smoke. I coughed, gasped, writhed and wanted to dive into the tub of water, anything to get away from the invading smoke.