Death: A Life (2 page)

I presumed this was just exaggeration and started jotting down notes. Then he said something that made me stop in my tracks.

“I’m Death, you see.”

What an unusual name, I thought to myself. Was it Belgian? When I asked him his first name, he shook his head and repeated it again, more slowly this time.

“I…am
…Death.”

I put down my pen, took off my glasses, and began polishing them with my tie. I had faced crazies before, all desperate to tell you how they had been raised by devils and were in fact lords of the eighth level of Hell. These people usually had suffered some sort of abuse, of course, but they were generally incoherent and presented certain libel situations—Oprah Winfrey sinisterly controlling their minds from the television set was a particular favorite—that I could not afford to deal with. I thanked “Mr. Death” for his time, looked at my watch, regretted that I had another appointment, and got up to leave when my body was gripped by seizures and the lightbulb over my head began to bleed. As my body pinballed from wall to wall, the voice continued to speak.

“For millennia I’ve had to listen to your pathetic human suffering. The same old stories, time after time, ‘I’m so miserable!’ ‘Life is unfair!’ ‘I don’t deserve this!’ Well, let me tell you that being Death is no picnic either. I’ve suffered heartache, cruelty, maltreatment, neglect. I’ve wanted to end it all, but suicide’s hardly an option. I’ve read what you believe me to be. I’ve seen the pictures. You think I’m all grins and dance macabres, and interminable games of chess on deserted beaches. Well, it’s not like that. I didn’t always want to do this, you know? I have feelings too.”

I slammed back into my chair, and the dark shape in the corner seemed to stand up. I gulped. But the darkness merely leaned over and picked up a bucket, which it placed beneath the still-bleeding lightbulb. It then got me a glass of water and an aspirin. My mouth filled with steam as the liquid hit my red-hot fillings.

“Comfortable?” he asked me as he sat back down.

“No,” I replied.

“Good,” he said. “That is probably for the best.”

“Why don’t you start at the beginning?” I suggested, as I tried to steady my shaking hand over my notepad.

“Oh,” said Death, “I’ll start before that.”

So began the most horrific story I have ever heard.

George Pendle
February 2008

 
I
 

The Beginning of The End

M
y earliest
memory is of my mother. She was a heavyset lady, the size of a small mountain. Everyone knew her as Sin.

I remember her standing in front of a glistening pool of molten rock, making sure that her scales were oozing and slime covered. “I look horrible,” she would say, turning to me confidingly, “quite, quite horrible.” She would go back to combing through her snakes and vomiting bile down her chest, and I would watch enraptured. Fangs glistened in her mouth, empty eye sockets brought out the sickly pallor of her skin, the familiar odor of decay hung heavy around her. That was Mother.

My father was Satan. He was Mother’s father too, which led to some awkward introductions at parties. This never bothered me too much. It was, after all, the Dawn of Creation, and exotic family trees were fairly commonplace. I recall Father explaining to me, once I had reached a certain age, that the options for a sincere and honest relationship before time began were severely limited. The cherubim and seraphim were prudes who kept their legs crossed, Night was available but impossible to find, and Chaos was a total wreck (and I mean
wreck
).

My mother’s pregnancy with me had been difficult. There was the morning sickness, the swollenness, the aching joints, and the fact that I was gnawing on her entrails constantly. Mother would sometimes look at me, and then down at the gaping holes in her belly, and I knew she was wondering whether it had all been worth it.

Of course Father was never around. Today you would call him an absent father (and husband). I only got to see him on the occasional eon when he’d fly by, all flames and bluster, with a red-lipped demoness in tow. Mother put on a brave face—she had plenty of them lying around—but I knew something wasn’t quite right in our home.

The one day in my childhood that I remember spending with Father was when I helped him mirror Hell’s firmament. There I was, passing him slabs of glass, desperately seeking his approval, and all the while he kept looking at me as if he couldn’t quite place who I was, or what I was doing there, or what, ultimately, I was for. There are things that happen to you in your existence that you just don’t question, maybe because you’re afraid of what the answer will be. Father’s abandonment of Mother and me was one of those things. I never dared asked why.

As a result, Mother and I were very close. One might almost say too close. No sooner had I been born than we began rutting. For me there were no glimpses of her getting changed in the bathroom stirring strange and complicated feelings. There were no ambivalent memories of being spanked, or of dressing up in her clothes while she was away. No. For me it was simply wham, bam, thank you Mom.

I know what you’re thinking. We’re only two pages in and already we’ve covered rape, incest, mutilation, and abandonment. But in my family’s defense you should remember that we were in Hell, Mother was the embodiment of Sin, and Father was Satan, Master of Misrule and Lord of Lies. Finger painting wasn’t really an option.

It’s true that if Father had been around, he might have stopped me from doing what I was doing. But he wasn’t around, and from the get-go I struggled with the concepts of right and wrong. Maybe it was Mother’s influence on me. Whenever anybody spent any time around her they would always end up doing something very, very bad. Anyhow, with all the rutting it wasn’t long before Mother gave birth to a pair of monstrous dogs. Well, I was quite surprised too. Now I don’t know if I was responsible or whether Cerberus had something to do with it—he was always humping anything that moved—but the dogs kept running back and forth into Mother’s womb causing her no end of problems. Is it any wonder, I ask you, that I grew up to be somewhat suspicious of intimacy?

Daddy.

I was an only child. In fact, I was
the
only child. Hell wasn’t considered a particularly good place to raise children at the time. Playgrounds were specifically designed to grind up those who played in them, babysitters were required by hellish law to actually sit on babies, and the schools were just terrible. When I asked Mother why I was the only being who had actually been born in Hell as opposed to being exiled there, she admitted that I had been a mistake. She had forgotten to wear protection one night—her spiked suit of armor—and Father had leapt on her.

I was left largely to look after myself, but Hell was an interesting place in which to grow up. I recall crawling around the Palace of Pandemonium playing with my demonic toys—sharp, flinty combustible objects that burst into flame whenever I held them close—while around me the Dukes of Hell plotted and schemed new ways to revenge themselves upon Heaven. Sometimes, when the Dukes were being particularly devious in their machinations, I was ushered outside to feed the Ducks of Hell who floated in a pool of acid, having been damned for their pride in their plumage and their refusal to quack on command.

Feathered Fiend.

This isn’t to say I was completely alone. I had a number of paternal substitutes to wile away the hours before time began. I used to play hide-and-seek with Uncle Abaddon, captain of the Furies and leader of the Seventh Infernal Order. I remember one game going on for incalculable moments as I hid at the bottom of the Bottomless Pit and the poor old devil went into a rage, hurling thunderbolts, scouring canyons, frantic to find me before Father returned. Of course he needn’t have worried. Father was never home.

Lucifuge Rofocale, prime minister of Hell, was another guardian I clung to. An elderly demon, with fifteen wooden limbs and seventy-seven eye patches, he had fought bravely in the Battle of Heaven, and would often tell me stories of how he had been hurled headlong, flaming, from the ethereal sky.

“Clamor, such as heard in Heaven till then, was never!” he would splutter, swinging his rusted sword back and forth at his imagined enemies before collapsing into his throne of coal. Then again, everyone had a story to tell in Hell. The battle for Heaven had been a matter of principle, despite its eternal consequences, and the devils were proud of their role in it. “A chance to stand up for what was undeniably wrong,” recalled Lucifuge, absentmindedly crushing an imp in his massive hand and proceeding to bite off its head.