Forever After (a dark and funny fantasy novel) (19 page)

             
“Who are you?” she demanded to know when he approached her. She looked content, as they all always did, but there was a touch of trepidation in her voice.

             
“I’m here to pick you up,” Michael said. He couldn’t help but smile as he reran his comment through his head and watched as she peeled her scantily clad figure away from the lamppost.

             
“Is that a joke?” she asked genuinely.

             
Michael shook his head. “I’m--”

             
“You’re going to take me to the other side?” she interrupted.

             
“I think so.”

             
“You
think
so?”

             
He frowned. The dead usually weren’t so quizzical.

             
“Why weren’t you here before?” she wanted to know, growing increasingly impatient and uneasy. “I’ve been here for ages. Three people went by over there,” she nodded to the other side of the road, brightly lit under the fluorescent glow of a streetlight. “Not one of them stopped. Not one of them replied. It’s like they couldn’t even hear me.”

             
Michael thought about replying but quickly swallowed his words. It didn’t matter that they couldn’t see or hear her needful spirit; they all had probably seen her corpse and not one of them had stopped to check if she was alive.

             
“So, where were you?”

             
He had been caught up in his own idleness, drinking stale coffee at a nearby cafe and absently staring into his own thoughts. Most of those thoughts had been about Jessica, she had dominated his mind since he had met her.

             
“I’m sorry,” he said honestly. “But I’m here now.”

             
Samson had told him that he would develop a second intuition. He said he would know the whens, where’s and how’s of his victims’ deaths. He said it would come as a second nature, gradually birthing in him from the moment he took the job a year ago. But he hadn’t felt a thing, he never knew anything; their deaths came as a complete mystery to him until he read their impending doom on the screen of the timer.

             
He didn’t know if the intuition would come to him and he couldn’t ask. Samson had seen him twice since his death, and on neither occasions had he stayed long enough to answer any probing questions. The only other higher authority that he spoke to was a repugnant receptionist who wouldn’t stop glaring at him and a psychiatrist who read his mind but offered no solutions to the problems within.

             
He held out his hand to the woman. She looked into his eyes, then at the proffered appendage. “Where are you taking me?”

             
Michael smiled. They all asked the same thing and he didn’t know what to tell any of them.

             
“To a better place,” he assured her.

3

             
He was living in a bed and breakfast on the outskirts of town. He paid minimal board and was fed, watered and sheltered by the elderly couple who owned and managed the six-room guesthouse.

             
Their names were Mary and Joseph, and although unconnected to the Biblical pair who begot the son of God, they had been dead just as long and were just as compassionate and kind. They had links to a side of the afterlife that Michael didn’t know anything about, they knew things he couldn’t even dream of knowing, and, like everyone who knew more than he did, they refused to tell him any of it.

             
“But there is a God right?” Michael asked Joseph once. They had been drinking on a deck which overlooked a small back garden. It was Michael's birthday, a birthday for a life he no longer had, and Joseph had bought an expensive single malt whiskey to celebrate and to ease the passing of his first redundant birthday in the afterlife.

             
Joseph hummed and hared at the question. He lifted his tumbler to his lips and stared absently at the contents. He stroked the lip of the crystal glass with his forefinger, took a small sip, savoured the taste with a sigh and then lowered the glass with a shrug. “That’s a tricky one,” he explained eventually.

             
“You don’t know?”

             
“Definitively?” Joseph turned to Michael, lifted his eyes to the blackened skies where a multitude of stars danced in the darkness. “No. But I know enough to hazard a guess.”

             
“And what is that guess?”

             
Joseph laughed softly. “That guess is just that,” he said vaguely. “It’s a guess.”

             
Michael sighed. He had been dead for six months at that point, spent most of that time wondering around losing souls, forgetting his timer and getting frustrated at the lack of help and supervision. Mary and Joseph were his only saving graces, and even they failed to sooth all of his woes.

             
“You see Michael,” Joseph said, throwing a reassuring pat on his shoulder. “Death is a lot like life. No one really knows what’s going on and no one can really explain everything that happens, but some people know how to handle the unknown more than others. Does that make sense?”

             
“But there
are
some people who know everything right?”

             
“I suppose there has to be, but I have yet to meet them.”

             
The night Michael returned home after meeting Jessica and then disposing of the murdered man and the drunken woman, he found Mary and Joseph waiting patiently by the fire in the main room. Mary was sitting with folded legs on the edge of the sofa, a crossword puzzle resting on her thighs. Joseph sat silently in the corner drinking brandy.

             
Michael sat down on the opposite side of the sofa. The elderly couple looked up from their respective activities with welcoming smiles.

             
“How are things?” Joseph beamed. He rose to his feet, headed straight for a drinks cabinet in the corner and poured Michael a drink without prompt. He handed it to him and then returned to his seat, offering Michael an air salute with his glass.

             
“OK,” Michael said before taking his first soothing sip. “Actually, a little better than OK.”

             
Mary put down her puzzle, unfolded her legs. “You look a lot better,” she noted with genuine glee.

             
“I am,” Michael sat back and threw his arm over the edge of the sofa, dangling the brandy glass between two fingers. “I met a girl today.”

             
Mary and Joseph exchanged a glance. Michael detected concern in their faces, but they were quick to hide it.

             
“Congratulations” Mary said genuinely. “What’s she like?”

             
Michael told them and they listened to every word. When he started speaking about Jessica he found it difficult to stop. He only ceased his glorifying when he realised he was gushing like a teenage girl and, although Mary delighted in his revelry, Joseph was looking a little embarrassed for him.

             
“I’m thinking of taking her to the pictures next week,” he said.

             
There was that look again, flickering between them like an unshared secret. Michael caught it fully this time. “Is everything OK?” he asked.

             
Joseph leaned forward and put his glass down on a nearby coffee table. “I don’t want to lower the mood, but you might want to be careful dating the living.”

             
“It’s OK,” Michael assured. “I know not to tell her I’m dead. She won’t suspect anything.”

             
Mary jumped in at that point, “The problem is, sweetie,” she said in her soft, reassuring voice. “If anything were to happen to her, it would be your job to
collect
her.”

             
Michael shook it off with a grin. “She’s fine,” he said confidently. “Long time before anything like that happens.”

             
“Of course,” Mary jumped in jovially. “Just so you know.”

             
Michael nodded and stood. He drained the brandy, put down the empty glass and wished the pair goodnight before ascending the stairs to his small room at the back of the house.

             
That night he thought about what Mary had said and he struggled to get the thought out of his head. Not just for Jessica, but for every girl he met -- how was he supposed to find someone if he was always going to outlive them and then be forced to assist with their demise?

             
He struggled to sleep.

4

              He awoke in a sweat, breathless. His heart raced frantically inside his chest. He pushed himself up against the headboard and looked down at his naked body. The few hairs on his chest had matted together with the sweat; a glossy sheen covered his skin like oil. He could feel the sheets sticking to his legs, his stomach and his groin. He peeled them off and flung them to the floor, savouring the cool air that rushed over his body and cooled the moisture into a sticky dryness.

             
He took in a deep breath and tried to settle the rhythm of his runaway heart.

             
He’d had a dream, a nightmare. It was fading fast in his conscious but vivid parts of it were still fresh in his mind. Jessica was there, he was sure of it, but it wasn’t exactly her, at least not throughout the entirety of the dream. She had transformed into someone else, some
thing
else. Beautiful and elegant at first and then--

             
He shook his head and struck a palm to his temple. The images had vanished. He struggled to recall, feeling a pinprick headache developing at the base of his skull.

             
Were they in a car together? Was that it? Happily driving; happy in each other’s company, and then something unexpected, something terrible. He remembered seeing blood, seeing Jessica looking annoyed, seeing someone dead.

             
He shivered at the recall and tried to refresh it regardless, but the more he tried the quicker it faded.

             
When his heart had settled, his breath had been restored, the sweat on his body had dried and the chill under his flesh had ceased, he had forgotten every aspect of the dream. It was about Jessica, of that much he was sure, but he couldn’t remember anything else.

             
He had gone to sleep worrying about reaping the corpse of whichever girl he chose to spend his, or rather
her
, life with. That thought had clearly prayed on his subconscious during his sleep, festering inside his mind and throwing an assortment of morbid images and anxious feelings his way.

             
He dressed, showered, shaved and made his way downstairs for breakfast, which he usually shared with one or two guests in the spacious dining room.

             
A sullen looking business man sat on his lonesome in the corner, thinking deeply into a steaming cup of coffee whilst absently chewing a slice of toast. On the other side of the room, waiting for Michael with a smile on his face, was Samson. There were two cups of hot coffee on the table in front of him and he was gesturing for Michael to sit down.