“Get up, Sloot, get up!” Roman sounded very far away. It was getting hard to breathe, for all the weight of the goblins-versus-undead brawl that was happening on top of him. The mad screams, the maniacal laughter—it all went sort of muddy, like someone was packing cotton into his ears.
Like when Mrs. Knife stabbed me that time, thought Sloot. Yep, it’s a lot like that.
No Rest for the Worried
“Well you were wrong about one thing,” said the most reassuring voice that Sloot had ever heard. It seemed to be all around him, which he found very comforting.
“Yes? And what was that?”
“There is an afterlife.”
“Oh.” Sloot paused. “So I’m dead, then?”
“So to speak,” replied the voice, “but there’s no need to sound so dour about it.”
“Isn’t there? My life is over!”
“Well the one, yes. But you’ll get to start your new one soon.”
“So I’m not dead?”
“I wish you’d stop using that word.”
“What, dead?”
“Yes, that one.”
“But I am dead. I find myself in the condition that the word was invented to describe.”
“From the point of view of the living, yes; but you’ve left that realm.”
“Well, I’ll have to take your word for it. I can’t see anything.”
“There’s not really anything to see. Not yet.”
“But there will be?”
“Of course! You’ll be in the afterlife soon.”
“Oh,” said Sloot. “I thought this was it.”
“Not just yet. This is the aether, you’re not a fully-formed ghost yet.”
“And then I’ll be … what? Undead? Afteralive?”
“I wouldn’t want to steer you wrong,” said the voice. “There will be a word for it, but it keeps changing. I find it hard to keep up. Suffice it to say that ‘dead’ is kind of … I dunno, derogatory at the moment.”
“All right. Sorry.”
“No problem. You did just get here, after all.”
After all. That was it, wasn’t it? Sloot supposed he should take some comfort in being d- well, not alive anymore, but comfort was a luxury in which undiluted worriers never learned to indulge.
“How long does this take?”
“I couldn’t say. Time passes here, but we don’t really mark it down or anything.”
Sloot nodded, or rather his social instinct to nod lurched in the general direction of his head, which he no longer possessed. He resolved then to sit and wait; or at least to wait, as sitting required appendages that he presently lacked. He settled for thinking about sitting, how he’d have done it if he still had all his what-do-you-call-thems. Legs and such.
Even that proved difficult. He was having a hard time with the concept of the body he’d left behind, recalling which way the elbows bent, how many digits on each of the appendages, whether an exceptionally large nose could fill in for the ears if they went on vacation—that sort of thing.
He sighed, or rather, didn’t.
“You must have questions,” said the voice.
“What? No one told me!”
“I meant that you’re likely to have questions.”
“Oh. Well yes, but there are too many.”
“Just pick one,” said the voice.
“All right. Who are you?”
“Oh, that’s a popular one! Some of your brothers and sisters have told me about fairy godmothers. Have you heard of those?”
“I have. You’re my fairy godmother?”
“Not at all,” said the voice, “but it’s sort of like that.”
“How?”
“Well, I don’t grant wishes or anything.”
“Then why bring it up at all?”
“Well, I sort of bring you into the world and watch over you.”
“Like a mother, then.”
“That would be confusing.”
“Right,” said Sloot, “and we’re doing such a good job of avoiding confusion otherwise.”
“They don’t appreciate sarcasm in the afterlife either, you know. I meant that you’ve already got a mother.”
“The same one?”
“She doesn’t stop being your mother over a silly thing like departing the realm of the living.”
“Oh. Well, that’s nice.”
“Isn’t it? So I’m not your mother, but the roles overlap a bit.”
“What do I call you?”
“Anything you want.”
“So I could call you … call you … oh dear, I’ve forgotten things!”
“What things?”
“All of them!”
“Oh, that,” said the voice. “Don’t worry, it’s part of the process. It’ll all come back to you.”
“Right.” Telling him not to worry, even in his ethereal state, had roughly the same chance of success as asking the cat to help out with the laundry.
“Hauntings,” said Sloot.
“Yes?”
“I know about hauntings.”
“You see? Coming back already! You’ll get the bits relevant to ghosts first, the rest may take awhile.”
Sloot thought to ask how long, but knew that there would be no satisfactory answers in that direction.
“Wait, how could it be coming back? I’ve never known anything about hauntings before.”
“Are you sure?”
“The living don’t haunt, though the lurking that teenagers do shares a lot of the hallmarks. I’m sure I remember that.”
“Not a lot of teenagers in the afterlife.”
Well, that was something. Sloot performed the spectral equivalent of a groan. Was this really all that there was to it? The afterlife was just the thing that comes next? That must have been why Arthur was so existential all the time. There’s no meaning of life, you’re just alive until you’re not.
All the time he’d wasted worrying! Who would do Willie’s accounts now? Doesn’t matter, Willie’s dead. Whose accounts would Sloot do? He wasn’t sure whether it would be more unsettling to learn that the formerly living have jobs, or that they don’t. He always thought he’d retire someday, but not before he’d gotten more mileage from all the math he’d learned.
Math! He remembered math, his old friend; only he didn’t really, he just remembered about it. It would come back to him, wouldn’t it? He was sure he’d have been hyperventilating if he still had a breathing apparatus.
It was too much. He needed to think about something else.
“I’ll be able to haunt people then?”
“If you must.”
“What if I just want to?”
“You’ll only want to if you must.”
“I think I want to.”
“Then I suppose you must.”
“Is everything in the afterlife so hedonistic?”
“It’s not hedonism, more like compulsion.”
Sloot was silent again, but whether for no time at all, an eternity, or somewhere in between, he couldn’t say. He’d liked to have twiddled his what-do-you-call-thems or something, but for lack of corporeal form, he simply was instead.
He was, and he thought he could still do that, anyway. He could probably even think about things other than haunting and appearing in mirrors, but he didn’t want to. He worried that he was a bit too interested in said ghostly pastimes, and that’s when the floodgates opened.
Worrying! Now that was familiar! To be comforted by feeling worried was the sort of duality that only a professional philosopher should ever attempt, but it wasn’t as though it would kill him. At that, the concept of smug chuckling drifted through his consciousness, but his worries were sufficiently severe to drown it out.
What about Uncle? What about t
he Domnitor, long may he reign? He always assumed that death would release one from duty, yet here he was, or rather wasn’t, feeling perhaps more compelled than ever to get on with things.
Purposes. He’d had so many! There was his position with Lord Hapsgalt, though Willie’s death may abrogate the need for accounting; unless the pragmatists were wrong, and you can take it with you.
There was also Carpathia. He still had a duty to Vlad, at least until he could ascertain whether she had lost her life as well. But if her death hadn’t released her from duty either, he’d probably still have to work for her. What do ghosts do for other ghosts?
Winking Bob. If he’d had blood, it would have run cold when he remembered that she still had his signature on a blank piece of paper!
“You’re doing the thing,” said the voice.
“What thing?”
“Unfinished business tends to make the former living a bit crazy.”
“Well, what am I supposed to―”
“Nothing,” said the voice. “Not at the moment. You’ve just had a nice long life, and you’ll be off to the next bit in … well, in a period of time. Why not just enjoy the silence for a bit?”
He’d never tried that. There had never been time. That was still the case, though in a far more literal sense. What could it hurt? Sloot surrendered to the utterly blank emptiness and did his best to avoid his thoughts.
He existed in the absence of everything, and experienced the spiritual equivalent of the color grey for what may or may not have been a length of time. And then, all of a sudden, Sloot received the distinct impression that something was about to happen.
About the Author
Sam Hooker writes darkly humorous fantasy novels. He lives in California with his wife and son, who he hopes are secretly amused by his howling at the moon with the dog at all hours of the night.
Read more about Sam at http://shooker.co.
Other Work
The Winter Riddle, 2016, Howling Hill Publishing
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