Checkmate, Death

by Cobyboy

  First of all, I actually hadn't gotten that much worse. I could still beat everyone I was able to beat before. Perhaps the games were closer, the wins came a little harder, but they still came. I felt confident that, if I just kept playing and practicing, I could regain my supremacy in a few short weeks. Or sooner.

  But I had to face the problem of Lydia. I had to accept the fact that my loss against her wasn't because I had gotten significantly worse at the game, although that was a small factor. The main reason I lost was because she was better than me. Even at my best, I am not completely sure I would have beaten her.

  Once I realized this, I took a moment to feel sad and then I set about determining my next step. I had to move forward. The longer I wallowed in self-pity, the further my capabilities and confidence would wither.

  It was time to return to Earth and set about learning how to beat Lydia.

  13

  Several weeks passed. I kept up my daily routine of reapings. I made every appointment, just as before. But now I would not turn down the offer of a challenge. I played thousands of games. Most of them were laughably easy, but every now and then I played against someone who knew what they were doing, and it was those games that re-sharpened my skills.

  Instead of going back to Heaven to unwind after my daily reapings, I would go to the hospital where Lydia was recovering. She had already moved rooms on several occasions, each time getting closer and closer to that magical moment when she would be discharged. Except, if the two of us had our way, that would never happen. Sounds morbid and cruel, but it really isn't; you can't say such things about the wishes of a dying person.

  Every night, I would come into Lydia's room. She would greet me like an old friend - which is kind of what we were, by the end - and then we would play chess until she was too tired to go on. By now my ego was in check, for the most part, so I didn't shatter too badly every time she beat me. Which is to say, every single game we played. She always won. But rather than feeling frustrated, I merely felt curious and more than a little confused. And determined to learn her secrets.

  ***

  One night, as I walked into her room steeled for a thrashing, I saw that Lydia was in a strange mood. So I asked her about it.

  "Remember the man I told you about?" she said. "His name is Stefan. A great chess player. He has won second or third place in ever major championship in recent years. A lot of prize money... Well, one of my friends just called."

  "What happened?" I asked.

  She shook her head in disbelief. "It seems he was using his winnings to run a drug empire. Lots of bad, illegal stuff. He was making millions, but the police caught on. His operation was raided last night. He was shot in the head and now he's in a coma, nearly dead..."

  "Sounds like he'll probably end up in Hell," I said. "But I'm surprised I haven't reaped him already. I guess he must be tough."

  Lydia shrugged. She wasn't sad or anything, but it was obvious the news had disturbed her. I thought maybe this would allow me to finally beat her, but no dice; she won every game we played that night.

  During our last game, as I was put in the all-too-familiar position of desperately searching for a safe square to move my king to, I had another familiar feeling. A little tickle of premonition. It meant another soul was ready to reap. If I had gone back to Heaven, it would have been left until my next foray to Earth. But now it was here, and I had to go to it.

  I pulled my book out, already knowing which name I would see there, waiting for me to trace it.

  "Stefan," I said.

  "He died?" Lydia asked.

  "Not yet. Not until I get over to see him. Do you mind?"

  She shook her head. Of course she didn't mind; she had won enough games for tonight. I helped put away the chess board and then I was off, leaping out of her window and soaring through the night.

  ***

  Stefan was in a different hospital on the other side of the city. A darker place, quieter and less busy. His room was being guarded by a few cops, waiting for the bastard to stop breathing so they could go home.

  I crept into the room. It was filled with the beeping and sighing of the various machines that were keeping Stefan alive. He was a mess, covered in bandages, his face slack and a bunch of tubes going into his mouth and nose. Not a pretty sight. But it sounds like he probably deserved it.

  As I stood there watching, the cops came wandering into the room with paper coffee cups. They stayed far back from the bed, but I could tell it was the main focus of their attention.

  "Stupid bastard," one of them said. "He's just lucky none of those bullets he fired hit one of my boys. Or I'd unplug that machine myself."

  "No kidding," the other cop replied. "He thought he was real smart. Beat all those people at chess. But he couldn't beat death."

  They walked out, chuckling at the misfortune of the man in the bed.

  He couldn't beat death. I guess we would see about that.

  I was in the mode of playing every game of chess possible, against every opponent. If this Stefan guy was capable of challenging Lydia, I wanted nothing more than to meet him.

  He was a drug dealer and obviously a good chess player. A wild character. Perhaps unpredictable. I didn't often meet his sort. Oh, I reaped petty, violent criminals aplenty. But it wasn't too common to meet someone as strange as this. I would need to be careful. It's all too easy to underestimate people like this. And the last thing I needed was a third immortal walking around, especially not if it was someone wicked. The world could use more people like Mahendra and Lydia. And less like Stefan.

  Perhaps I should just write his name in the book, release him from his flesh, and be done with the whole thing. That would be the prudent way to go about it. But if I did that, I would learn nothing. He was going to play me in chess whether he wanted to or not.

  But there was a small problem. An obvious one. He was in a coma. I couldn't just walk up and wait for him, in his human lust for life, to challenge me.

  Luckily, there are workarounds which I have access to.

  ***

  What is Heaven?

  Well, throughout this text, we have come to an understanding that Heaven is an actual place, somewhere beyond the folds of the human reality. You can walk into Heaven, have a look around, and stop in at the Café for a bite to eat (the smoked salmon is exquisite).

  But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the version of Heaven that you, the human denizen, will experience. To you, the Heaven I spend my time in is nothing but a pit stop. A refueling station you step into every now and then on your journeys, about as familiar to you as your favorite fast food restaurant.

  The real Heaven, as far as you're concerned, is the private version you spend the majority of your time in. That's what I'm talking about here.

  They are, basically speaking, simulations. As you are immersed in them they feel big and real, but they're really just condensed, coded sims running from a tiny pocket of folded space-time...

  Before I get too technical, let's move on.

  It's the same with Satan's torture chambers. They're a more old-fashioned version of what God uses. Each Hell simulation requires an actual stage, a room to be filled by the subconscious of the cursed soul.

  But the principles are the same; nested realities, pockets that exist almost entirely in the mind.

  We do not use technology or science to build these simulations. We merely tap into the flow of a weird in-between realm that we simply call Dreamland, for lack of a better term. It's the same place, if it can be called a place, that you go to in your dreams. Except when you're dreaming, the flow is not directed or buffered by a Celestial hand. It's unadulterated, unfiltered, filled with whatever wild things your brain can come up with, whether good or bad.

  Dreams are a celestial constant, much like chess.

  ***

  Now that we understand this, maybe you can see how I was going to go about playing against Stefan.

  First, I had to verify that h
e had enough brain activity to even tap into Dreamland. Using the thumb and middle finger of one long, spidery hand, I pressed and squeezed against both of his temples. Yes, I could feel there the cold touch of Dreamland passing through him. He was there now.

  There was no telling what sort of bizarre, disturbing dream he was having. I wouldn't know until I was there.

  Sometimes, quite rarely, it is necessary for me to know the last words of someone who is incapable of speaking. So, God gave me a way to tap into and experience the thoughts of humans. It's a simple trick; I simply use my ethereal qualities, the ones that let me melt through doors, and lay or stand in such a way that the person's body overlaps my own. Then, as soon as I close my eyes, I can see what they see.

  I did this now, climbing into the hospital bed among the beeps and hums of machines. I was careful not to move the bed around and make a bunch of noise. Otherwise the cops outside would think their man was waking from his coma. Unfortunately and accidentally, my clumsiness has resulted in a lot of ghost stories being spawned and propagated. I generally try to avoid that nowadays. Humankind is less superstitious than ever, and that's a good thing for God's purposes.

  Stefan and I were different sizes. He was shorter and wider. But it's only important that the heads overlap to a satisfying degree. I nestled in, scooting and wiggling and glancing out of the corner of my eye until I was satisfied with my position. Then I shut my eyes, and immediately felt myself fall into a calm state not dissimilar to sleep.

  ***

  I was in a very dark place. A murky place. There was a sound of dripping water, plinking down onto the surface of a placid pool. The sound echoed from around some unseen corner, ahead of me in the darkness. I waded forward, feeling hot stinking water washing over my legs. Feeling mushy things bouncing off my thighs and bobbing away. I was very glad that I couldn't see what those things were.

  "Stefan?" I called. I knew his presence must be nearby. It had to be. This was his dream, after all. "Stefan!"

  A light came on above me. It was a bare, dangling bulb, like you see in spooky old basements. And that's pretty much where I was, a basement full of black water and floating body parts. They were half decayed, bloated, the skin sloughing off.

  The basement of Stefan's mind. The repository for his worst thoughts. And as far as worst thoughts went, I guess this was pretty high up the list. I could have stood there forever looking at the scene through the eyes of a psychologist, trying to figure out what it all meant. Maybe this wasn't just a dream but an actual experience. A memory.

  But I was freaked out, and the feeling of corpse juice soaking into my pants was very unpleasant. I set my sights on a doorway and waded toward it. Taking a left turn through it, I gazed up a long, narrow staircase to another door at the top.

  Stefan was there, naked except for a grungy pair of underwear. He looked like a mess. His hair was filthy and greasy. His skin was pale and sickly. He had track marks on both arms, purple and red. One of them was even black, a sure sign of necrotic tissue.

  "Stefan," I called up to him.

  What do you do when you see someone who looks like me in your dream? You assume I'm just another weird thing that is somehow normal, and you walk away. That's what he did.

  I bounded up the steps, flinging black water behind me, and chased him down.

  We were in an old house. There were bones everywhere. Dust and cobwebs. Everything looked like it had once been beautiful. This had, in the distant past, been a warm family home. A place to go when you needed to feel loved. Now it was a crypt and Stefan strode through it, leaving footprints in the dust.

  "Stefan," I called. "I'm here to offer you a choice. This is your chance to really cheat death. Don't you want to take it?"

  He vanished ahead of me. The house twisted and turned, contracting tight around me. The scene was slowly leeched of all color until I was standing in a bright, plain white environment, a hallway in some weird futuristic laboratory. Stefan was gone from sight, but I could still see his footprints. Now, rather than voids in the dust, they were dust. Remnants left by his filthy feet.

  I followed the prints.

  As the environment of dreams is wont to do, things kept changing around me. It seemed that with every corner I turned I found myself somewhere entirely different. At one point I was even walking along the bottom of a vast, possibly infinite Olympic swimming pool. Above me, thrashing around like they were making snow angels, were an endless array of children. They were drowning, face down in the water, all their little eyes focused on me and all their little mouths open wide in muffled screams. They were packed into the pool at peak efficiency, like shapes in a pattern, no space wasted. There were thousands of children. And they were all identical.

  Was I looking at another memory, a near-death experience from childhood? It didn't matter; I wasn't here for Stefan to bare his soul to me. I just wanted to get him into a corner so I could play him in a game of chess.

  I moved impatiently along, following him through an unfolding array of dreamscapes. Always he was just ahead, just around the next bend; the only thing I ever saw of him were footprints.

  Just as I was beginning to feel frustrated, I realized something. All around me were the nude, unguarded portions of his psyche. The man called Stefan was laid out, flayed flat and stretched to cover all these strange rooms I was walking through. I was in his mind, and if I paid attention I might learn a lot about the way his thinking worked.

  There were very few pleasant sights in this dream. The best of them were still surreal and nauseating. The worst were downright disturbing, things that would have made anyone lose a night or two of sleep.

  Yes, I was beginning to learn. Stefan was a very troubled man. He had a victim complex. He was always afraid, always feeling vulnerable, and his main desire in life was to inflict that same fear upon others. But also, he was greedy. And he was envious. Envious of everyone who had more than he did. I got the feeling he would stop at nothing to achieve what he wanted. He did not have the same moral qualms as other people. He was entirely self-absorbed. The only soul he had ever felt pity or love for was his own. He was a sociopath.

  Could I beat a man like this in chess? I don't know. I don't know if I had ever played against someone with so dysfunctional a mind as this. I was beginning to feel worried. But I pressed on, refusing to his let his dark subconscious imagery conquer me.

  As with many dreams, this one tended to repeat itself. The same imagery kept coming back. And so I found myself in the pool again. This time I turned to the right and waded forward, moving as though I were wearing very heavy boots.

  The pool seemed endless. I didn't think I would ever find the edge.

  But then, there it was. A ladder, as well. I climbed up and out, rolling over onto the solid cement edge of the pool.

  Now there was only one child in the pool. And the pool was back to its normal size. There were puddles of water everywhere, as though a lot of people had just gotten out of the water and wandered off, but the area was deserted. I saw no one but the boy, drowning and kicking violently in the center.

  I got back into the water and swam toward him. I kept my eyes locked on him. In dreams, things tend to go fuzzy or vanish entirely if they are not the focus of your attention. This holds true even if you are in someone else's dream. Because, as I've said, dreams are a celestial constant that exist outside the mind, somewhere else; they exist whether you're asleep or not.

  As I reached the boy, I wrapped my arms around his chest and began kicking backward. He fought me, howling and spluttering in the water, but I was bigger and stronger. Using my elbows, I hauled both of us onto dry land and rolled until we were suitably far from the water.

  Suddenly, I realized that I was no longer holding a boy. I was holding a fully grown man. And the man was Stefan. He was staring at me, eyes red from chlorine, wet hair plastered over his forehead.

  "Who are you?" he asked, in the frightened tone of a little boy who thinks he has seen a monster
in the shadows of his bedroom.

  "I saved you," I said. "You're alright."

  Stefan sat up, facing away from me, rubbing his eyes and coughing up water.

  "I died that day," he said. "I went into the water to show off my diving. I went in and I never came back out. The boy they pulled out and resuscitated... that wasn't me. It was an impostor. I've been dead since that day. Everything past that point was a dream, an illusion, just a flash of imagery in the moment of death..."

  "You didn't die," I said. "I know for a fact you didn't, because I am Death Incarnate and I never reaped a boy at this pool. Everything was real, Stefan."

  He looked around at me. "But now I am dying."

  "That's why I'm here," I replied. "You're in a coma right now. Lying in a hospital bed. I could have just taken your soul there and sent it on its way. Sent it to Hell, where it belongs."

  "But you have entered my dreams," he said. "Why?"

  "To offer you a challenge," I said. "You are a man who thinks he is beyond life and death. You think you have already died, and so nothing matters... Well, how about this: I will give you a chance to gain life everlasting. Immortality. A chance to live forever. Isn't that what you really want?"

  I knew it was. Or at least I had a very good idea that it was. I had been wandering around in his mind long enough to suss some of these things out.

  He stared at me for a long moment. I could tell he was intrigued. And that he was also trying to figure out whether all this was real - whether Death had truly come to him - or if it was just another weird dream. If I was in his position, I would have gone with the latter. But Stefan was insane. His idea of reality was greatly distorted because he thought reality was the dream. So I knew he would accept. He had nothing to lose.

  "How do I win?" he asked.

  "It's simple," I told him. "We will play a game of chess. Just one single game. One last little game, like any of a thousand you've played before... no big deal. If I win, you will be reaped and sent to Hell. If you win, you'll wake up in hospital and make a full recovery from your wounds. You will never die."