Death: A Life (26 page)

But who am I trying to kid? I hadn’t wrapped myself in the Darkness for years. It now seemed more of a ball and chain than the old friend who had comforted me during my first days on Earth. Each day that went by I felt less and less connected to it.

“You don’t understand me,” I’d say to the Darkness.

As ever, there was no reply.

“We’ve grown apart.”

It looked at me blankly.

“Why don’t we talk anymore?”

It said nothing.

“Okay, you’re right, we never talked, but maybe we should.”

It remained silent.

“No, no. It’s not you; it’s me.”

Silence.

“But you haven’t helped.”

Silence.

“I just think, maybe it would be best if…”

Silence.

“I just need something…”

The Darkness moved toward me, to envelop me like it did in the old days, but I thrust it back.

“Something! Not nothing!” I shouted, and stormed off, leaving it splashed across the ground, whimpering silently.

The Darkness Had Changed.

It was during this period of uncertainty that I ran into Maud again. She was being starved to death in a Roman prison cell, having recently poisoned the emperor Claudius. Her body was emaciated and she waved to me weakly and whispered that she was actually feeling a lot better than she looked and expected to be let out very soon. It was that old game of ours, the game of Life, but I was reluctant to play along. I knew that I was being watched.

But how could I be unmoved when I saw that she had hidden a single cherry just for my arrival. She announced that she was going to eat it now unless someone—at this her eyes flickered to me—unless someone knocked it from her hands.

“Perhaps this cherry,” she whispered, her mouth salivating uncontrollably, “will let me survive until I am reprieved?”

She looked at me expectantly—her beautiful jaundiced brown eyes with their slowly dilating pupils made me shudder with Joy. “Thank the gods,” she repeated with an extreme effort, “that there is no one to knock this cherry out of my hand as I do not think I could survive another moment without it.”

At this she weakly waggled the cherry by its stem, enticing me to act, to intervene, to enter Life for a second. Her cracked lips now lingered on the cherry’s taut flesh. She looked at me again, puzzled this time.

As I stood there, torn between my love for her and caution for myself, I felt a wave of sadness sweep over me. Why couldn’t I spend eternity with Maud? Was I doomed to go through the endless years without a single companion? I watched Maud fumble the cherry and fall backward, a massive hemorrhage now rocking her body back and forth in graceful epileptic spasms. She coughed up a bouquet of blood, and her eyelids flickered daintily. She was so very beautiful, and dead.

“Do you have any idea how hard it was not to eat that cherry? Wasn’t I convincing?” she said, as I released her soul from her withered body. “Anyway, let’s go and haunt the jailor for a while. The bastard ate his supper outside my cell every day just so I could smell it.”

“Look, Maud, I’m sorry. I don’t know if I can this time.”

“Why ever not?”

“It’s just that…”

“You look strange,” she said, peering at me. “Have you put on weight?”

“I can’t spend any more time with you,” I replied, avoiding her gaze. I gave the signal, and the Darkness reluctantly began to creep forward. Maud looked shocked.

“Is it someone else?” she said. “Is it someone else who dies better than me?” Tears formed in her eyes.

“No,” I hissed, “not at all. Look, you’ve just got to go to the other side. I think I’m being watched.”

“Well,” said Maud, wiping her eyes, “if that’s the case, I don’t want to cause you any trouble.”

“Maud…”

“No. No. I don’t want to and I won’t. I’ll see you around,” she said. And with that she leapt into the Darkness before I could stop her. I peered into it after her but of course I could see nothing. Nothing, the once-beloved nothing, which had kept me safe and cold in its emptiness, now filled me with utter loneliness. I could no longer relate to this hollowness, this fruitless abyss from whence none returned. And as I contemplated my alienation from the null, from out of the socket of one of my eyes rolled a globular ball of clear salty liquid that rested quivering on my cheek before splashing to the ground.

What was happening to me?

The Lost Weekend

T
he decline
and fall of the Roman Empire should have been the best of times for any self-respecting herald of the void, but despite the volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, slave revolts, and gladiatorial combats, I felt a malaise spreading through my system.

One awful day, as I was transporting the last of many thousands of souls slaughtered during yet another violent subjugation, I heard someone whisper from behind me in a voice as soft as the rustle of leaves, “Love…your…work.”

I spun around, but no one was there; only a few torn flags fluttered in the wind. I went back over my steps to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything—the Darkness had been showing increasing signs of dyspepsia—but the battlefield was picked clean. As usual, none had survived.

Then, just a few years later, as I scooped up hundreds of souls devastated by a plague and catapulted them unthinkingly into the great beyond, I heard another voice murmur into my ear, “Splendid…top-class…well done.”

Again I turned around and again there was no one to be seen, just the buzzing of flies and the cries of the birds of carrion.

And then again, quite soon after, while collecting the souls of a tribe decimated by starvation, I heard yet another voice, clearer than the others, say, “Black…it really suits you, you know.”

It got worse from then on. As I traversed Earth’s fields of devastation I heard more and more strange compliments winging to my ears on the wind. I received congratulations on a job well done, and sometimes even a smattering of applause when I wrested a particularly troublesome soul out of its body. Had the stress of recent events begun to warp my mind?

Things eventually came to a head when I was directed to a city whose inhabitants had been besieged by a rival army, grown weak from disease, and eventually wasted away. I looked upon the multitude of souls in need of collecting and felt strangely tired. This was a new feeling. As massacres go, I’d had much worse. When earthquakes had swallowed up whole civilizations in the past, I had not been overawed by the scale of the devastation. When tidal waves had swept entire countries to their doom, I had taken it in my stride. Yet now I felt a strange and intolerable weight pressing down on me as the low murmur of souls began their carping.

I remember blowing out my cheeks, rolling up my sleeves, and hitching the increasingly ill-tempered Darkness to me in preparation, when a conversation broke out in my head.

“…always a pleasure to watch…”

“…that time in Scythia, I can tell you…”

“…we were impressed…”

“…very impressed…”

“…we’d be nothing without you…”

“…nothing…”

“…nothing…”

There was only one thing for it.

I ran.

I ran as fast as I could away from the city. Ran, despite the irresistible pull of the dead clawing me back toward them. I ran as if my very existence depended upon it, as if by staying I would be forced to confront something that was unendurable. Yet the voices followed me.

“What’s he doing?”

“Running away…”

“From what?”

“Us, I think.”

“Why?”

“Too good for us?”

“Who does he think he is?”

“Who does he think he is?” The question reverberated through my mind, stopping me in my tracks. How I wish I had known the answer. I cried out, “Show yourselves!” and from out of the air around me three figures began to emerge.

The first was a tall, mustachioed man riding a horse. He wore armor, dented and rusted by heavy use, and a horned helmet stuck with arrows. He was covered head to toe in blood and seemed vaguely familiar.

“Have we met before?” I asked.

“I should say!” chortled the man, and a thousand swords seemed to clash within his laughter.

“I’m War,” he said, and extended a gore-soaked hand. “How do you do?” He had very good manners. I was obviously hallucinating.

“War?” I said. “I thought War was a condition of open, armed, often prolonged conflict carried on between nations, states, or parties. You’re not a proper noun. You’re not even a real person.”

“Well that may be, old fellow,” said War, twirling the tips of his mustache, “but considering you’re the final cessation of vital functions in an organism, I think that’s rather a case of the pot calling the kettle black, right?”

The hallucination had a point. If this was a figment of my imagination, it was a pretty sharp one. A second figure began to appear next to him, doubled over in a coughing fit, a cloud of flies buzzing around him, blurring his edges, lending him a soft-edged hue that could not quite disguise the figure’s rotting flesh bulging through his ill-fitting chain mail. A sickly horse stood knock-kneed behind him.

“That’s Pestilence,” said War, slapping the figure on the back, and sending a shower of maggots over the both of us. “And that,” said War, gesturing to another appearing figure, “that’s Famine.” A woman appeared on a black horse wearing voluminous robes that hung lightly off her stick-thin frame. A skeletal arm kept rubbing her nose, and she kept turning round in her saddle, asking, “Does my bottom look big in this? It does, doesn’t it? Oh, I’m a whale!”

I chatted with the three of them. It was actually quite nice to have some company, and the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as they referred to themselves, were keen to tell me how much I had influenced them when they were just three young entities named Skirmish, Allergy, and Going to Bed Without Any Supper.

The Horses of the Apocalypse:
(from top left)
Precious, Waterbiscuit, Blackie, and Mr. Jenkins.

It was strangely enjoyable to talk to beings who shared in my hopeless situation, and I was just about to ask them if they ever felt that there was more to their existence than mindless slaughter when a voice from out of nowhere cried, “Fellas! Fellas! Wait for me!”