Death: A Life (27 page)

A fourth figure was now appearing, a creature that was bright pink and covered in an inflamed rash. His skin was fiery red, his hair was dry and frizzy, his lips horribly chapped. He rode a sickly pale horse that smelled strangely of coconut oil.

“Who’s he?” I asked.

“Sunburn,” replied War, shaking his head.

“Sunburn?”

Pestilence shrugged his shoulders. “We thought we’d lost him. We’ve been trying to get rid of him for years.”

“Oh yes, yes, very nice,” said Sunburn, picking over the dead that surrounded us. “Come look at this, War. I wager a good number died from old Sunburn. They should have stayed in the shade!” He raised a fist to the sky. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! Cover up all you like!”

“Listen, Sunburn,” said War, “none of them died from you. Who dies from sunburn?”

“Lots of people,” said Sunburn, defensively. “What about Saint Eustace?”

“He was roasted to death,” said War.

“Same thing,” said Sunburn.

“No, it’s not,” said Famine. “He was locked in a brass bull and cooked.”

“Famine’s right,” said Pestilence, flies swarming from his mouth.

“Is not the sun made of flame?” spluttered Sunburn. “And was not Eustace roasted by flames? Was not his skin wracked with a hot prickly rash, blisters, and tenderness so that his sheets felt as if they were scratching him all through the night, and that prompted him to hide in the shade for the rest of the week wearing a large straw hat and applying lotion to his limbs?”

“No,” said the three.

Sunburn turned his peeling pink back on us and began to sulk.

“When many people die from the same cause, a little of us is created,” explained War. “But with Sunburn, we think it was millions of minor inconveniences.”

“I’m a killer, I tell you,” muttered Sunburn. “A stone-cold killer.”

“Well,” said War, “only Death can tell you for sure.” He turned to me. “Has anyone ever died from sunburn?”

The Horsemen looked at me expectantly. Sunburn swallowed.

“Well, it’s hard to say,” I said, stalling for time. I didn’t want to be the cause of any strife. “The
Book
only gives primary causes. Secondary causes are harder to judge.” Sunburn looked relieved, and I quickly changed the topic of conversation.

Saint Eustace Dies from Uncertain Causes.

“So, Death,” said Famine, cheerily, “do you fancy joining us on a global pandemic?”

“We could save you some time if you hung around with us,” said Pestilence.

“Two birds with one stone,” said War.

“And nice weather guaranteed,” said Sunburn.

I could see the Darkness was avoiding Sunburn as much as it could, shrinking away from his throbbing red body, but I didn’t care. The Darkness would just have to put up with it. Yes, perhaps I should have paid heed to it. Perhaps I should have said no. But this seemed to be the chance I needed to get back to my old self, to rekindle my love of dying and finally put paid to my unnatural dependence on Life. So I agreed to go with them. When, later on, the doctors told me that I had not tried hard enough to reject Life, I pointed to my days with the Horsemen as proof that I tried to break free from the cycle of addiction. It was my last-ditch effort, it was a shock treatment. I thought it would save me. As it turned out, it was the worst thing I could have possibly done.

They killed
and killed and killed some more and I followed in their wake. I was drunk on disaster, and there was a kind of intoxicated camaraderie between us all. Thousands died every day, in every way, in hideous, horrifying agony. The innocent and the guilty suffered alike. Screams, the like of which I’d never heard before, rang out in my ears. Fire and destruction ran wild across the continents, subsuming whole mountains in tidal waves of gore. I shoveled souls into the Darkness hundreds at a time with barely a word spoken. A febrile energy had gripped me, and I felt free of my previous uncertainties. If I concentrated solely on moving souls into the Darkness, I barely thought of Life at all. The Horsemen and I turned the earth into a charnel house, until the ocean foam was tinged with blood, the earth beneath our feet stained scarlet, and all this under bright sunny skies.

Amid the carnage and atrocities, the Horsemen would often play practical jokes on one another. Eventually they plucked up the courage to try them on me. I’d wake up in the morning to find myself impaled with arrows, or beset with oozing pustules. Terrible stomach cramps would double me over at the most inopportune times, and I was constantly breaking out in liver spots. To get even I set the Darkness on them when they least expected it, half-extinguishing them, pulling them back from the brink of the void only when they had almost melted from existence. This calmed them down a bit. War told me that he had gone so far into the void that he had seen his own personal Hell, a land of peace and friendship populated by devils who negotiated disputes in a calm and orderly fashion, never raised their voices, and gladly turned the other cheek. He shuddered at the memory. Luxuriating in all this bonhomie, for the first time in a long time, I felt as if I belonged.

I can see now that I was in denial. I was trying to cover up my doubts with a veil of callous brutality. But that is all it was—a veil. As the Horsemen romped across Earth for another century, that veil slowly began to slip. I was carrying out my work faster and faster and with a flamboyance that inspired awe in my fellow travelers, but the nausea was starting to return. Cold sweats wracked my body, and Pestilence swore that he wasn’t to blame. I tried to hide my tremors and continue my work with the same flair I’d been showing of late—juggling souls until they were dizzy, then kicking them callously into the Darkness—but I was losing focus. Life was once again growing inside me, reaching out through my thoughts, turning my once beloved work into a horrible, hateful, and monstrous thing.

To make matters worse, everywhere I turned, I was reminded of Jesus. People were being eaten by lions in His name, being crucified for saying they believed in Him, hurling themselves toward me all because of Him. What madness had He inspired to get the living to give up their most valuable commodity? I seethed inwardly. Why had He been allowed to have a Life and not me? What made Him so special? Why should He have known what it was like to run through the streets, to scab His knees, to fly a kite, even to fall in love, so the rumor went? It was nepotism, pure and simple.

Not even the invention of gunpowder could perk me up. In fact, it did the opposite. Propelled by guns, cannons, and bombs, Creation now came hurtling toward me at breakneck pace. I wanted to tell them all to slow down, to stop, to enjoy it! There was no need to fight. There was no need to kill one another. Life was a many-splendored thing that could satisfy all. The fact was that I longed for the Life that they seemed so happy to throw away. But I couldn’t stop them and I couldn’t join them. I was in the middle of a whirlwind of fatality.

By the twelfth century
A.D.,
I found, to my horror, that human souls had become completely unpalatable to me. I could no longer grin and bear it. My hands now began to shake as I tried to ease a soul out of its body, and when I saw it sitting there, glistening and gleaming with the evanescence of the eternal, I would often gag. The Horsemen began to exchange looks among themselves when they saw me with trembling hands stooping over the bodies, fumbling, unable and unwilling to squeeze their souls out.

One day, as I fumbled frantically with the soul of an orphan in front of the Horsemen, War put an arm around my shoulder and took me for a walk.

“What’s going on, old chap?” he said.

“Oh, nothing, nothing,” I said unconvincingly. The sweat dripped off my forehead.

“You can tell me, old boy,” said War. “We’re all in this together, you know?”

I decided to be straight with him.

“What are we doing here?” I asked. “What’s it all about?”

War rubbed his barbed-wire stubble.

“Killing everybody in the world, I imagine.”

“What’s the point of that?”

“Well, it’d be awfully crowded around here if we didn’t.”

“But don’t you ever want to stop killing and live a little?” I asked. “Aren’t you curious about Life in all its infinite variety?”

“Not really,” said War.
“Strife,
yes. Life, not so much.”

“But what about the birds and the bees and the coconut trees? The lambs in the field, the cows in the pasture, the kittens, the puppies. What about the puppies?”

War was staring at me.

“And the amoebas. What about them? The mitochondria? The box jellyfish? The screech monkey? The blue whale? The closed-bottle gentian? The long-spurred violet? The potato? The tomato? The goshawk? The newt?”

Puppies: What About Them?

“What about them?” said War. He was backing away from me slowly.

“O to be a pilchard—small, silvery and slender, spawned and schooled and then surfaced, salted and swallowed! O to be a persimmon, astringent and tart, a strikingly colored pheasant, a reeve, a reed, a ray…”

I felt a pressure pushing down on me, crushing me. And now I could feel the dead surrounding me. They pressed up to me. Swarmed over me. A million effervescent souls of pure being clambering on top of me—laughing at me, shouting at me, screeching at me. And something was beating in my chest. Beating so hard. Something wanted to get out of my chest. Through my mouth! But what was it? What was trying to escape? More souls now came flocking toward me. Hundreds. Thousands. The Darkness was quivering, helpless, shrinking, becoming little more than a stain, a tarnish, a tinge. I was being subsumed, subsumed under a mountain of Life.

I put my head down, shut my eyes, and for the second time in recent years, I ran.

My Day with Maud

W
hen I opened
my eyes again, I was standing on a beach. The Horsemen were nowhere to be seen—I was quite alone. Small white clouds scudded through the sky. Three children raced across the sands to bathe. White birds swooped down from above. A group of monks in long robes walked in single file down to the sea. The waves thundered, the children shouted, the birds sang out, and the monks lifted up their robes and began paddling gleefully in the shallows. I felt again that great unexplained pounding rising within me, like a jackhammer of affection. I turned my gaze to the ground, partly to control this peculiar sensation, but also because the view was so beautiful I felt I might hurt it by looking at it for too long.