Death: A Life (22 page)

I cracked a few skulls but turned up nothing on the soulless man and was forced to call off my search as the number of uncollected souls began to build up. As I hurried to attend to a huge cholera outbreak in China, I was briefly waylaid by a random suicide in Jerusalem by the name of Judas. He was one of those remorseful types who wouldn’t stop talking about some terrible sin he had committed.

“What sin was that?” I asked absentmindedly.

“I kissed Him,” said Judas’s soul, before promptly bursting into tears.

“Oh, come on now,” I said. “We’re not in the Bronze Age anymore.”

I had heard his story before. It happened to a lot of first-century men. They sat around and watched the gladiatorial combats, had a little too much wine, shouted a little too loudly, started playfighting, and then, when they didn’t know what else to do, began kissing each other.

I tried to tell Judas that these were Classical times, and that lots of men kissed other men, but this didn’t seem to calm him down.

“I betrayed Him!” he moaned. This was getting complicated.

“You slept with someone else?”

“I betrayed Him with a kiss,” groaned Judas.

“Now, look,” I said. “I may be a supernatural force beyond your comprehension, but from what I’ve seen of humankind, a kiss doesn’t mean anything. These days it doesn’t even count as cheating. You were just…trying out other options.”

Judas sniffed and ran a hand under his nose. “But there are no other options. He was the one true Lord!”

Whoever Judas’s boyfriend was, He had really done a number on him.

“You were a fisherman weren’t you, Judas?” He certainly smelled like it. “What’s that old saying: ‘There’s plenty more fish in the sea’?”

“But He was the Almighty.”

Admittedly I may not have known a lot about love, but I knew a sap when I saw one. If only I had paid more attention to him, I could have saved myself a lot of trouble. But I was in a rush, and he was dead, so I heaved his soul into the Darkness without a second thought.

The case
of the missing soul weighed heavily on me the next day. Since it wasn’t logged in the
Book of Endings,
I couldn’t get into any trouble, but I had no doubt that Gabriel would hear about it sooner or later. I had a strange feeling. It felt like someone was walking over my grave, even though this was impossible on a number of metaphorical levels. I was so perturbed by the lost soul that I even popped in to see Father, just to make sure there hadn’t been some prearranged sale that he’d been hiding from me.

Following his flirtation with radical socialism in Heaven, Father had rejected the foibles of his youth and embraced capitalism. He had taken to buying souls as investments, to sell to other demons for torture, and his recent founding of the Soul Exchange allowed him to set the price of souls according to their sins. Venial sinners were cheap, since their torture was usually limited to blunt, manual, rust-free instruments, while mortal sinners carried a premium, demon buyers much preferring the wide scope such malefactors allowed in terms of general all-round nastiness. During times of virtue—when miracles and good weather led people to believe all was well with the world—sinful souls skyrocketed in value. In times of war or political elections, there was always a sin surplus, and the sinner would be quite unable to sell his soul for love, money, or even halfway decent guitar-playing skills.

As the years went by, the sin trade grew more complex. You could now buy malefactor-backed insecurities, or trade on the eternal transgression markets. Futures could be bought in the yet-to-be-damned, and slightly tainted souls were packaged together into heavily doomed bonds. Such was the rampant speculation that a “Sin Bubble” was created, a huge monstrous sphere of evil that ended up crushing Hell’s investors against the Soul Exchange’s spiky walls, leading to rapid deflation.

On the Floor of the Soul Exchange, Insider Trading Was Rife.

Many changes had been wrought in my absence from Hell. The gates now opened automatically, and the vast fields of the damned that I remembered had been subdivided into uncountable personal hells. There was a Hell of Stones, in which pickaxed demons smashed stones into gravel. The Hell of Gravel lay next to it, in which gravel was smashed into pebbles. While in the Hell of Pebbles, which lay next to that, pebbles were ruthlessly mocked by larger stones—pebbles being notoriously insecure about their size.

There were tiny hells for the claustrophobic, huge hells for the agoraphobic, and a spacious antechamber reserved for Oscar Wilde, in which the great wit was scheduled to be seated at a mammoth dinner table populated by everyone who had ever chosen him as a hypothetical dining companion. In the distance I vaguely caught sight of a Unicorn being chased across a rainbow by a horde of prepubescent girls who were pulling at his mane and tail and squealing at him to let them ride him. “I think I’m going to be sick!” I heard him cry. “Fuck off, you little turds. Leave me alone!”

I arrived at the Palace of Pandemonium and was directed to my father’s office. He was sitting behind a vast obsidian desk and immediately asked me whether I was there about the sub-damned soul debacle.

“Father?” I said. “It’s me. Death.”

I could almost hear the vast, fiery Rolodex of his brain twirl, and then he remembered.

“Oh,” he said. He picked up a large cigar. “What are you doing here?”

I told him that I had come upon a body without a soul and wondered if he was in any way responsible. He mused over this news with a frown.

“Humans without souls? This is very worrying. Very worrying indeed. The damage this could do to the market is incalculable, and our synthetic souls are nowhere near ready yet.”

“Have you come across anything that could explain this?” I asked.

He stood up and paced the room deep in thought, before leaning back on a filing cabinet that snorted and reared beneath him. Something seemed to be troubling him. He said that he had recently been tempting people in the desert, where it’s much easier to buy a soul at a knock-down price. He boasted that he could regularly pick up a soul for little more than some water and a sunhat. He paused again, playing with his flames.

“But there was one man…”—an unfamiliar look of discomfort played across Father’s brow. According to Father, this one man had claimed to be the Son of God. This was hardly an original proposition at the time. Hundreds of people were popping up every day claiming to be Nephews of God, Second Cousins of God, Old School Friends of God, People Who God Owed Money To, and so on. Such fantasists were grist to Father’s infernal mill. He said he liked to tease them by asking them to do miracles—turning rocks into water, throwing themselves onto the top of tall buildings—all the usual temptations. To begin with, this man seemed to be following the pattern of other so-called Messiahs. He was coming up with all sorts of excuses as to why He couldn’t use His “powers.” Usually these ran the gamut of medical reasons (“I’ve got a headache”) or mystical reasons (“because it’s a big secret”) to spur-of-the-moment explanations (“your orange sun saps my strength”).

“Usually I barely have to try,” said Father, shrugging his giant shoulders. “It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. But with this one it was different.”

“How was it different?” I asked.

“Well, He turned down every offer I made for His soul, even my good ones. I offered Him wealth, and power, and always having the exact change on you, but He wouldn’t budge at all. He said that I’d never get His soul out and started giggling. And when I asked if I could just take a look at it, He got all defensive and ran off.”

“What was His name?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Father. “Whenever I put the contract for His soul in front of Him, He kept drawing crosses on it as if it was all a big joke. And all the while…” His voice died off.

“What is it, Father? Tell me.”

“Well,” said Father. “All the while I was tempting Him, He just kept winking at me.”

Could Father’s winker be the same as my winker? Thoughts raced through my mind, and I left Father in an unusually anxious state. I was heading for the gates when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“Master Death?”

“Hello, Reginald.”

He looked terrible. His feathered wings were even filthier than before, the bags under his eyes more pronounced.

“It’s…it’s really very, very good to see you again,” he said slowly. “How are you?”

“Actually, I’m a little busy right now, Reginald.”

“Of course you are, Master Death, of course you are. I was just wondering if you could see your way toward helping me finally get out of here. You don’t know what I’ve been going through.” I saw Uncle Puruel stick his head out of Reginald’s ear, wave to me, and then crawl back inside. Reginald didn’t flinch, although his eyes grew watery.

“Look, Reginald, once I’ve dealt with this, I’ll see what I can do.”

“Oh thank you, Master Death, thank you. Do you know how long it might—”

“Good-bye, Reginald,” I said.

Things were
growing very strange indeed. Could the obstreperous being that Father had met in the desert be the same as my soulless body? Upon returning to Earth, I decided to go and visit the corpse to see whether I could pick up any clues. However, I was somewhat shocked upon my arrival to find that the cave in which my soulless body had been buried was empty. This wasn’t particularly unusual. Many people did strange things with bodies after the soul had left, but I didn’t normally concern myself with that. What worried me was that I might now never be able to solve the mystery. I was leaving the cave, feeling disconsolate, when I heard a hiss come from a nearby bush. This was odd, as bushes are usually quite polite. I walked over to it and who should suddenly spring to His feet but the soulless man Himself!

“Surprise!” He beamed.

He was very much alive. In fact, He seemed completely healed, barring the holes in His hands through which He kept peering at me in a rather disconcerting manner.

“How can You see me?” I asked.

“Well,” He beamed, “I look at you and there you are.”

“Where’s Your soul?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know!” He beamed at me. “I guess you didn’t do your job very well, did you?”

“What are You?” I asked. “Some kind of god? A zombie?” He didn’t look like a god. Gods are vain. They like to have manicures and haircuts, and this guy was a mess. Similarly, He was much chattier than your average zombie. “If You are, You know the rules; You’ve got to be in the
Book
or on Olympus.”

“Oh, but I am in the
Book,”
beamed the man. “Just not yours.”

Winker.

He was beginning to irritate me.

“Well, look, why don’t You come over here, let me take Your soul, and we can forget all about this.”

“You’ll have to catch me first!” He beamed, and started running away, looking over His shoulder at me and squeaking with excitement. And so it was that I found myself chasing a bearded madman halfway across Jerusalem. The strange thing was that no matter how fast I was, He was always a bit faster, ducking, diving, and parrying my grasp.

“Blessed be My feet!” He beamed as He vaulted a table of vegetables in the market. “Blessed be My athletic prowess!”