Death: A Life (11 page)

Who would want to kill Abel? I asked myself. Who but everything in Creation. They all had a reason to dislike him. My first suspects were, of course, his animals. Abel had been a shepherd, and the bleating in the pasture said he was a harsh one. I had recognized the lamb being sacrificed—I had transmitted him into the great beyond only that afternoon, just another in the boy’s long line of sacrifices. He was called Cyril. He had been popular.

My first stop was the cliff face above Abel’s farm. It was where the goats liked to sit.

“Any of you kids know what happened to Abel?” I asked.

“Get lost,” said a Ram, “We don’t want to hear about Abel. He’s always telling us where to go and what to eat. We’re sick of him.”

“Sick enough to kill him?” I asked.

That got their attention.

“What do you mean? He’s dead?” bleated the Ram. I couldn’t tell whether he was feigning surprise or not.

“Don’t play patsy with me,” I snapped. “The big man’s going to be disappointed, and I’m not going to be the one taking the heat.”

The goats looked at one another. I had them rattled.

“Okay, okay,” said the Ram. “It wasn’t us, but we were told to look the other way, if you know what I mean.”

“Maybe I don’t,” I said. I didn’t.

“Look, we were pretty sick and tired of being part of Abel’s herd. Some of us had started thinking of branching out, of becoming an agrarian collective. And after all the sacrifices recently, who could blame us?”

“But what did you mean by looking the other way?”

“Well, Gary here—step forward, Gary—Gary says that he wakes up in the night to the sound of somebody telling him to stay away from the altar before sunset. Now, none of us particularly liked hanging round the altar for obvious reasons, so we do as we’re told. We never thought he’d actually be killed, just roughed up a little.”

“Who spoke to you, Gary?” I asked. “Was it the dinosaurs? Was it the lettuce? Who was it, Gary?”

“Me and the lettuce don’t get on,” said Gary, a young goat. He looked smart, but not too smart. “And it didn’t sound like a dinosaur. There was no mention of red meat, or tenderness. Dinosaurs are very picky about what they eat.”

Tyrannosaurus Anorexic.

That was true. Dinosaurs were such picky eaters sometimes they’d starve to death rather than eat anything that wasn’t done just so.

“But what did he look like?”

“I couldn’t see,” said Gary, blushing a little. “The thing grabbed my forelock and pulled it over my eyes.”

“What did the voice sound like?”

“Well, the funny thing is, I thought it was Abel, Death, I swear.”

“Stupid goats,” said Abel’s soul, before I could stop him. I knocked him halfway into the Darkness.

“What was that?” said Gary, tilting his head at me. He had stopped chewing.

“Nothing, Gary. Nothing. Well, thanks for your help.”

Gary walked off, looking sheepish, which was odd for a goat. He knew he had been talking too much. Most goats were taciturn, obeying a code of silence known as “the omeeeerta.” I wondered if he would get into trouble. (He did, as it turned out. I found him at the bottom of a tar pit three weeks later, his hooves encased in heavy terra-cotta.)

“It needed to have been something with hands,” said Abel’s soul, hurrying behind me as we left the goats. “How else could they have grabbed Gary’s forelock? Perhaps it was one of the great apes?”

“Or one of the not-so-great ones,” I murmured to myself. “That would be consistent with the club theory. Only someone with opposable thumbs could operate such advanced technology. Let’s try the gorillas.”

By the time we got to the forest in which the gorillas lived, it was pitch-dark. I heard wild shrieking and beating of chests as huge numbers of apes engaged in their favorite occupation, the oldest sport in existence—thumb wrestling.

The other creatures of the jungle looked on enviously as two giant silverbacks clasped each other’s hands and attempted to pin their opponent’s thumb down with their own. Both apes were baring their teeth as they tumbled back and forth across the jungle floor, with the crowd of animals around them hooting and screeching encouragement. It was not the cleanest of matches.

“Bunch of bananas!” grunted one of the gorillas as he found his thumb trapped, distracting his opponent momentarily and allowing him to wriggle his thumb free. There was much use of the index finger, a common trick, and only through sheer exhaustion was the match finally settled.

I went to speak to the losing knuckle walker. He was sucking on his mangled thumb.

“Hello, Bonobo,” I said. “You’d better watch that doesn’t get infected.”

“Oh, hi Death,” said Bonobo. We had had a run-in a few months before when he had fallen from a tree and lain in a coma for a few days. I had played a few hands of pinochle with his soul while we waited to see the outcome.

“Any of the apes have a grudge against Abel?” I asked.

“Abel?” said Bonobo. “That spoiled brat? Why do you ask?”

“Because he’s dead, and someone with opposable thumbs did it.”

“Well, look,” said Bonobo. “None of us liked him, it’s true. Or his brother. I mean they spent so much time with God they thought they were better than us.”

“Stupid monkeys,” said Abel’s soul.

“Did you say something?” said Bonobo. I cast the Darkness thickly around Abel. Perhaps the brothers were not so different from their parents after all.

“They refused to thumb-wrestle with us,” continued Bonobo. “They said it wasn’t what God’s chosen should be doing. God’s chosen! Pah! We know what they were chosen for. But what motive would we have to kill them?”

“Pride. Greed. Hunger. Boredom,” I said.

Bonobo shifted on his rock uncomfortably.

“Hey, I’m not saying we’re as good as gold, but come on, Death, we’re vegetarians.”

Vegetarians with a grudge, I thought to myself. “Do you know what a club is?” I asked Bonobo.

“A club?” Bonobo mulled the word over. “A club? Is it a long yellow fruit with a peelable skin?” The look of stupidity was too real to have been faked. It would be some time before the apes got into tools.

I told Bonobo I’d be back and warned him not to leave the jungle. But I was pretty sure it wasn’t him or any of his ape friends.

Apes of Wrath?

I returned to the field in which Abel’s body lay. It was thick with flies.

“Hey, Death,” they buzzed. “You want us to save you a piece?”

“No thanks, fellas,” I said, and leaned over the body. My work habits coincided with their eating habits, so we saw quite a lot of one another. I picked up the bloodstained club and examined it. It was too complex to be the work of the animals, and too simple to be the work of Mother or Father. I was mulling over this dilemma when a tall brunette walked over to me. It was Cain.

“Why hello, Death,” he said, cool as a cucumber.

“Hello, Cain,” I replied. “Sorry about your brother.”

“What brother?” said Cain.

“Abel,” I said pointing at the dead body.

“Oh. My. God!” screamed Cain.

“Yes, darling?” boomed a voice. A blinding light enveloped us.

“There’s been a problem,” I interjected quickly. I didn’t want things to get out of control.

“Me in Heaven above!” boomed God. “What’s happened to Abel?”

“He’s been murdered, God. I’m trying to find out who did it.”

“Hello, God!” said Abel’s soul excitedly from within my cloak. “I’ve missed You. I was in the middle of making You a sacrifice better than any You’d ever had before. Much better than Cain’s.”

“Oh, you…!” screeched Cain, spinning around wildly, trying to locate Abel’s voice. “Your sacrifices are unhealthy, greasy, meaty things, all high in polyunsaturated fat. And God doesn’t want to get fat, do You, God?”

“No,” boomed God bashfully. “No, I don’t. But there are only so many greens you can have sacrificed to you, Cain.”

“What are You saying?” cried Cain. “You don’t like my sacrifices? I knew it, I knew it!”

“That’s not what I said, Cain,” boomed God.

“You’ve always preferred Abel,” continued Cain. “That’s why I…”

“Go on,” I said. This was getting interesting.

“Oh!” cried Cain. “You just don’t understand.”

“I do, Cain,” I said. “I do.”

“Abel said You didn’t love me,” implored Cain as he swung round to face God.

“He doesn’t!” piped up Abel’s soul from the edge of the void.

“I love all things,” boomed God.

“But some things more than others, right, Lord?” said Abel’s soul. His face beamed with smug self-satisfaction. It had been a mistake to bring him along.

“Do you know what this is, Cain?” I held up the club.

“It’s a club,” cried Cain, in tears now. “The club I used to murder my brother, Abel!”

There was a shocked silence. I thought it best to leave so God and Cain could work things out between them and was doing so when I heard Abel’s voice pipe up.

“Hold on, Death, I want to see this. I knew it was him, I just knew it! Hey, where are you going, Death? I said turn around, I
said…
”

With a shrug of my shoulders I sent his soul cascading into the Darkness.

The Dawn of Time
was very much like this. Enmities commencing, relationships forming and breaking, blood spilling. Everyone was a little crazy, and as the years sped by, the holes in Creation began to show. God was a big-picture guy. He had been fine with the light and the darkness and the oceans and sky, but when it came to the details, like individual creatures, He was hopeless.

Take Methuselah, for example. Through some bookkeeping mistake Methuselah had not been given a time to die. For years he followed me around with a pleading look in his eyes. I would find him waiting for me at plague pits pretending to be dead. I’d see him screaming and rolling around on the ground during battles, feigning fatal injuries, but he never had a scratch on him. Even when he threw himself into flaming buildings, he would invariably come out the other side, a little charred, but alive. He would often stare longingly at me as I removed the soul from a body.

“That’s it, my boy,” he’d say, licking his lips. “Ease him out, send him off now. Off to the afterlife.”

The fact was that after a hundred years or so, Methuselah had done everything that a postprehistoric, antediluvian world had to offer. He had walked about, and whittled, contracted innumerable diseases, whittled some more, lost all his teeth, whittled new ones, and finally lost most of his sanity. Without a time to die scheduled, he was invulnerable. He could stand beneath an avalanche, and somehow the boulders would miss him. He could swim far out to sea until he was exhausted, only for the waves to wash him back to shore. He could smear himself in butter and dance in front of the carnivorous animals, but they would not lay a claw on him. Even when he resorted to taunting them, pulling their tails, and slapping their faces, they merely walked away as if he was not there.