The Devil, the Grim Reaper, and a Ghost

by Sean M. Hogan

  The Devil tilted his head like a dog who just heard a strange, unfamiliar sound. “Then how about hers?” He pointed over to the woman on the couch wearing a fox mask.

  “Who is she?” Alex asked the Devil.

  “Just some fox I picked up at a costume party. She was looking for a little fun and sin. Something her husband couldn’t give her. Something I could. So, what do you say, shall we continue this dance with a stranger’s life on the line instead of your own? You’ve already killed one stranger tonight, what’s one more?”

  Alex stalked toward the couch, his hands shaking with all the terror of Sodom and Gomorrah the night they fell, stopping when he stood almost on top of her. She was still out of it, sleeping a black, dreamless, intoxicating slumber. He knelt down beside her, brushed aside her red hair, and pressed the barrel of the gun against her temple. He braced himself and tightened all his muscles, but he couldn’t will his finger to squeeze.

  “This ain’t right,” Alex told himself.

  “No such thing,” replied the Devil.

  “I can’t justify this.”

  “No need, Alex. We’re all sinners here.”

  “I could never forgive myself if—”

  The Devil cut him off with a hiss. “How can one forgive instinct?”

  Alex pulled the trigger. The hammer struck down like an executioner’s ax, igniting the gunpowder with a blinding flash and a thunderous boom. The gun kicked out of Alex’s hands and onto the floor. Blood sprayed everywhere. The couch was coated with the woman’s brains. She slumped down like a bag of potatoes, sliding to a peaceful rest against the couch cushions. A gaping hole now showed on both sides of her skull. Alex stared back with all the horror of a man who just felt a strange bump while driving through a preschool parking lot.

  “Looks like I win,” said the Devil as he packed the stacks of cash back into his suitcase, including Alex’s five grand. “Pity, she was quite the fox.”

  Alex swallowed the swelling knot in his throat. “What was her name?” An odd question to ask, given the events that just transpired, but the only one Alex could form into words.

  “You really want to know?” asked the Devil.

  “Please,” Alex begged.

  The Devil laughed a cruel crackling heckle. Like he was an old woman being driven mad by evil spirits. “The bitch said her name was Nicole.”

  Alex’s face went white as a sightless cave spider. He removed the fox mask from the woman’s face. His gaze rose to meet Jack’s. Their eyes were the same. Mirror reflections of bottomless void.

  The Devil, grinning ear to pointy ear, walked over to retrieve his gun. As he leaned down he tilted his head toward Alex. “I can dispose of the body for you, Alex, if you so desire. For my usual rate, of course. Seven grand.”

  The Grim Adventures of Meryl & Doug

  THERE WAS AN INVISIBLE digital alarm clock floating above Meryl’s head that only she could see and, to her dismay, the numbers were counting down. She had 23 hours and two minutes left until her precious time ran out.

  As she waited at the bus stop the clock hit the 23rd hour and started vibrating like a furious bee high on a wicked cocktail of speed, pop rocks, and red bull. After a few seconds, a voice rang out.

  “This is your friendly, hourly, reminder,” a cheerful woman’s voice spoke through the speakers of the clock. “You have exactly 23 hours until your mortal soul is ripped from your meat-sack of a body and cast down into the depths of the nether-realms to roast in the hellish hellfire of hell for the remainder of this eternity.” The woman’s voice melted into something that can only be described as demonic. “I will fuck out your eyeballs, chew off your face, and piss down your throat hole, you filthy—”

  Meryl smacked the snooze button and the clock went silent.

  She let out a defeated exhale of breath and went back to sulking while snow sprinkled down on her blonde hair and brown winter jacket like horrid cold dandruff and lice. The murky clouds matched her disposition and an empty car-less street matched her present mood: a mind-numbing case of purgatory. That pretty much described the whole of Indiana that Christmas Eve morning, or any morning for that matter, but for Meryl this morning came with it an extra jolt of dread crawling down her spine. For this morning was to be her last.

  “Sexy robot,” said a voice behind.

  “Hey, Doug,” she replied without turning, without blinking, without caring.

  Doug inched his lips up to her ear. “It’s my new cologne. You like?” He lifted his finger to Meryl’s nose to give her a whiff.

  Meryl’s nostrils burned and her eyes watered. His finger smelt like a dead muskrat that someone shoved up a skunk’s ass. She swatted his hand back. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?” She turned to stare down his adorably rotten, smug face. “Right, dumb question.”

  Doug stood in his lucky novelty blue Hawaiian snow jacket with dozens of pictures of cocktails stamped all over it. “Say it with me. Sexy Robot,” he said like one of those French models in a black and white perfume commercial. “Doesn’t it just make you all hot and sweaty hearing those erotic words leaping off my moist lips?”

  “If only the English language had the capacity I needed to express the emotions I feel in mere words.” She let out all the air in her lungs.

  He sighed an exaggerated pout to match hers. “Is Meryl the sad little rain cloud this festive morning? Does Doug need to whip out his rainbow of joy?” He made an invisible arch with his fingers.

  She shook her head. “I just found out that I have one day to live.”

  He shrugged. “Wow, that blows.”

  “Yes, Doug, it does indeed blow. And I’m serious.”

  “Is it the aids? The bad ones—not the cool ones my mom makes?”

  “There’s nothing cool about aids—Doug—despite what a giant red glass-pitcher tells you. But no, it’s not aids.”

  “Harpies?”

  “You mean herpes, and no,” she said, massaging the bridge of her nose. “Herpes isn’t even lethal.”

  “Have you been targeted for assassination by an elite squad of super-secret ninjas?” He enacted a kung fu battle, kicking and punching at imaginary foes. He was twenty-two.

  “How about you sit down, shut up, and I’ll just tell you?”

  He shrugged again and plopped down on the curb of the sidewalk. “Works for me.”

  Meryl took in a fresh breath of cold air and sat down next to him. “You see, it all started this morning...”

  ***

  After Meryl had just finished up with her morning routine, brushing her teeth and hair, she headed for the kitchen to make herself breakfast. She made it about halfway across the living room when the faint odor of smoldering ash and roasting coal stopped her dead in her tracks. And sure enough—before her very eyes—the ground shook and the walls rattled with a thunderous boom as the flames of hell ripped through her apartment floor.

  Out of her own personal hell mouth the darkness rose up and consumed what little crappy lighting her apartment possessed. Meryl fell to her knees in the only religious gesture of her short sinful career of twenty-one years and gazed up as the darkness formed into an ominous ghastly figure draped in robes of black satin.

  The phantom’s face was merely an empty hood that housed infinite screaming void. The phantom stretched out his skeleton hand and conjured up a medieval scythe with a long curving, razor-sharp blade. And with the other hand he stretched out his bony finger and pointed toward Meryl.

  “Prepare yourself mortal, for I, the Grim Reaper, have come to reap your soul,” he shouted. “Your judgment day has—” The Grim Reaper stopped himself short when he noticed Meryl was texting. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Updating my Facebook status to deceased,” Meryl said, without raising her gaze from her phone. “Are you sure I’m dead? I don’t feel dead.”

  He slapped Meryl’s smart phone from her hands.

  The phone hit the lamp and exploded in a ball of hellfire.

&nbs
p; “Such insolence! You dare interrupt the Grim Reaper’s speech?”

  Meryl stared back as the flames rose with the Grim Reaper’s rage, sounding off in a chorus of hissing fiery screams. “Sorry?”

  “Quite alright,” he said calmly, the flames dying with his temper. “Now where was I? Ah, yes.” He cleared his throat and continued. “Your judgment day has arrived! Soon you shall meet your fate at the gates of—”

  A series of annoying beeps cut him short. The sounds came from Meryl’s pocket.

  “What now?”

  “Sorry, I forgot to feed my Tamagotchi,” she said, pulling out her little keychain video game.

  He shook his head. “Seriously?”

  “Hey, being a single mother is a 24-hour job,” she snapped back.

  “What are you, five and Asian?” The Grim Reaper waved his bony hand over Meryl’s game and the digital creature keeled over. A pixelated gravestone flashed across the screen.

  “No, Garfield P. Washington, no,” she shrieked, before gazing up at the Grim Reaper with fiery eyes. “Murderer!”

  “What is it with your generation? I swear you’re all high on cough syrup and whiteout or something.”

  She got up to her feet in a defiant pout. “You’re the one who barged into my living room.”

  He just stared her down. “I have to. I’m the Grim Reaper and you’re dead. You do the math!”

  “Right, then how’d I die, smart guy?” She crossed her arms over her chest, feeling perfectly healthy.

  The Grim Reaper opened his long black sleeve and pulled out a scroll from the dark void inside. He unraveled the scroll and dragged his bony finger down the list of names, stopping when he landed on Meryl’s. “Fluoride poisoning,” he read off.

  “Fluoride poisoning?” Meryl was flabbergasted beyond all measure. “Do you know how insane that sounds?”

  He sighed. “You’d be surprised how lethal common household toothpaste is. Just yesterday I had five cases.”

  She sunk to her knees as the reality set in. “I’m dead. Just like that. No glorious last speech before my execution, no last stand at the Alamo, not even the classic Hollywood drug overdose with hookers. Death by toothpaste.”

  He shrugged. “That’s the breaks, kid. Now take my hand and we shall—”

  “Wait,” she shouted.

  “What now?”

  “Loopholes, there’s always a loophole to these things,” she insisted, wagging her finger at him.

  “Loopholes?” he groaned.

  “Yeah, like I could challenge you to a game or a contest for my mortal soul.”

  Meryl then set about a great pondering and contemplation on what game she should play to bet her eternity on. Chess perhaps? She was once grand champion of the local chess club, leaving countless victims running home with their sleeves soaked with tears. Though, admittedly, it was a club for autistic children under the age of seven. Maybe the newest version of Halo or Call of Duty? But there’s always a chance they get Xbox Live in the underworld—best not to leave things to chance. Who knows what deal with the devil Bill Gates made for his fortune?

  The Grim Reaper cut her meditation short. “Don’t be ridiculous, there is no such—” Just then something caught his attention. He turned to stare down a pasty white ginger bundled up in an ugly turtle neck Christmas sweater named Jennifer.

  “Rise and shine, sleepy head,” said Jennifer. “Guess what I baked for my favorite roomie, Christmas cookies!” She held up a tray of cookies shaped and decorated like little brown reindeers. She set her sights on the Grim Reaper, twirling one of her curly ginger locks and tilting her head to the side the way dogs and blondes do when they hear an unfamiliar sound. “Is this a bad time?”

  “You dare interrupt the Grim Reaper, the collector of souls, master of...”

  Jennifer started to tip toe back out the front door.

  “Wait, what kind of cookies?” he asked in a sudden rush of panic. “Are they mint chip or lemon? Because lemon cookies make me all bloated and gassy. Honestly, who eats lemon cookies?”

  Jennifer stared awkwardly back. “All I got is peanut butter.”

  “Ooooh, I’m super allergic to peanut butter,” he said. “Sorry, I’ll have to pass.”

  Jennifer smiled. “No problem.”

  “Though I do appreciate the offer. No hard feelings?”

  “None taken.”

  He raised his boney hand. “High-five.”

  Jennifer stepped over and high-fived the Grim Reaper. When their hands connected, she dropped to the floor in a horrid convulsive seizure before curling up like a dead spider.

  “Oops.” He massaged the back of his neck. “Forgot about the whole ‘touch of death’ thing.”

  “Somehow I don’t believe you.” Meryl fumed. “Great, now who’s gonna pay my rent?”

  He nudged Jennifer’s foaming corpse with his foot and sighed. “Pity, she was such a nice and supple girl. A moment of silence for the recently departed.”

  Meryl bowed her head.

  “Now where was I?” he asked, interrupting the two seconds of silence. “Ah yes, loop holes!” He snapped his fingers.

  A large ancient book rose from the flames of the underworld to a gentle rest between his bony hands. The book’s leather cover twisted and wrinkled into a monstrous face with gnashing teeth and empty eye sockets that blinked with hunger.

  The Grim Reaper thumbed through the weathered pages, scanning over them as they fluttered past his gaze. “Let’s see. How to cure male patterned baldness. How to make money at real estate. 101 ways to shave a badger. Ah, here we go.” He stopped midway through the book and planted his finger in the middle of the page. “It says here that there is only one way to cheat death. You must complete one good deed before the next sunrise.”

  Meryl cringed. The thought of actually doing something nice for someone else made her stomach turn. She had volunteered at an old folk’s home once—with disastrous results. An old perverted man kept trying to get her to give him a sponge bath. So, she replaced his oxygen tank with a helium one—with hilarious results. That is, until the seizure came. Then the paramedics. And then the coronary department came to take away the body…

  “On the scale of one to ten,” she asked, “how good does this deed have to be?”

  “Eleven,” he roared as he slammed the Necronomicon shut. “This deed has to be so good that it makes a lasting impact on the life you help. Thus, proving to the big man upstairs that you still have some use down here.”

  The Grim Reaper snapped his dead fingers and a digital clock puffed into existence above Meryl’s head.

  “And I’d hop to it, Rainbow Bright, because from this second forward you’ll be on the clock.” He laughed wickedly as he burst into a ball of fire and smoke and ash, filling Meryl’s apartment with absolute darkness.

  ***

  Meryl let out a long-winded sigh of utter defeat as she plopped backward into the snow behind the sidewalk curb. “So, there you have it. I’m screwed.” She flapped her arms back and forth, making herself angel wings in the snow.

  Doug nodded to himself. “Eerie, this is just like the Flintstones’ Christmas Carol.”

  “In what way?” She buried her face into her mittens and fought back the urge to scream.

  Doug got up to his feet and trudged over to the snow-covered lawn behind them, stopping at a drooping snowman. “You are forgetting one thing my sad little rain cloud named Meryl.”

  “And what’s that?” Meryl asked, turning her head his way.

  “Me.” He knelt down, picked up a long-twisted carrot, and stuck it into the snowman’s crotch. “With my help, you’ll be done in time for dinner.”

  “Fear and doubt plague my thoughts no more for my knight in shining armor has arrived.” Meryl stood up, walked over, removed the carrot, and stuck it back into its rightful place between the charcoal eyes and mouth of the snowman. “So, what’s your plan of action, Sir Doug the Valiant?”

  He grinned. “How abou
t you kill a Nazi?”

  She shook her head at him. “How is killing a Nazi a good thing?”

  “Just think about it.” He wrapped his arm around her shoulder. “Nazis are the worst people in the world. Not only have they tortured and killed millions but they’re German.”

  “Aren’t you half German?”

  He scratched at his chin. “48 percent, but who’s counting?”

  “Obviously not you.”

  “I ask you, Meryl, what could be more patriotic than murdering a Nazi?”

  “Eating dead pig intestine shaped as male genitalia on the Fourth of July?”

  “Besides that.”

  “Where are we gonna find a Nazi?” she asked. “Aren’t they all dead?”

  “All but one, Mr. Grovenweiser.”

  “Old man Grovenweiser from across the street—the same street we both grew up on—is a Nazi?” asked Meryl, with narrowing eyes.

  “It’s Mister Grovenweiser,” he said, gargling the name out. “You have to hock a loogy when you pronounce German, common mistake.”

  “Do you have any proof to back up your outlandish claim?”

  “He’s old and German,” Doug said, rolling his eyes. “The odds are like 80 percent in our favor.”

  “So, what am I gonna kill him with?” She gestured to her bright pink Hello Kitty snow boots. “My shoe laces?”

  “Too messy. I was thinking I could borrow a gun from my uncle.”

  “Your uncle packs heat?”

  Doug let out a chuckle. “He’s a public-school teacher. They all carry guns.”

  ***

  Meryl waited at Mr. Grovenweiser’s front door while Doug appropriated his uncle’s firearm. He showed up a half an hour later with a brown trash bag under his arm.

  “You’re late,” said Meryl.

  “That’s because I went to get these,” said Doug as he pulled out two ski masks, one black and one pink.

  She snatched up the black one before he could protest and slid it on.

  He frowned, gazing down at the bright pink ski mask. “Wanna trade?”

  “And look like a pussy?” she snorted. “No way.”