The Road From Death

by Tobias Wade

  Noah paused; he watched a new boy sit down on his other side. The boy had dark skin and a cleanly shaven head, and he was nervously fidgeting and looking about all over the place.

  “Hey, excuse me,” the boy said. “Did you see where the imps went?”

  Noah shrugged. They’d disappeared from the stairways, though he could still hear the scampering of their claws against the wooden flooring somewhere.

  “Hey, imps!” the boy shouted. “Get your furry asses over here. I need something.”

  “No shouting!” boomed the echo which reverberated from the railing.

  Claws immediately appeared to latch onto the platform, and two imps crawled over the edge to glare suspiciously at the boy. He glanced uncertainly at Jamie’s wounded hand before clearing his throat.

  “Yeah, hi, thanks,” he said. “My name’s Walter, my girlfriend’s name is Natasha. We lived together at 423 E Ventmore Street, and I was hoping you could send her a message.”

  The imps looked at one another slyly. They started speaking an awful guttural, chirping sound rapidly back and forth. After a moment they faced Walter again with rather wicked grins spreading across their faces.

  “So, um, you can do it?” Walter asked.

  Both imps nodded enthusiastically, their grin spreading even wider to reveal at least two layers of razor sharp teeth.

  “You’re wasting your time,” yipped a voice from behind. The golden retriever puppy was sitting there with a human girl on either side, both unable to keep their hands off him. “They don’t understand a word you’re saying.”

  “Didn’t anyone read the pamphlet?” Jamie asked. “Demons are very intelligent and can understand every human language, even if they don’t speak it themselves.”

  “What are you defending them for?” The dog asked. “You were the first one to be bitten.”

  “It doesn’t hurt much, and it was my own fault for not asking first,” Jamie huffed.

  Walter cleared his throat again, embarrassed. “I just want you to tell her that I love her, and that she should wait for me. A few years at the most, tell her I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  The dog behind them snickered, and Walter looked even more embarrassed.

  “Even if you do make it back, you’re going to be a baby again. You won’t remember a thing.”

  “You don’t know anything, Bowser,” Walter replied stubbornly. “I can possess someone else’s body who is fully grown, now can’t I? Or I can make myself remember a spell to grow up again real quick.”

  “Not unless you’re a Chainer, and those are super rare.” Bowser said. “Did you remember your other times?”

  Walter’s face soured. He shook his head.

  “So what makes you think you’ll remember next time?” Bowser asked. Walter turned back around in his chair to face the imps.

  “Just tell her I love her then. That I didn’t—that I won’t ever forget her.”

  “You will,” Bowser gloated. The two girls sitting beside him giggled, although Noah couldn’t quite find the joke.

  The imps didn’t budge and only continued to stand there grinning.

  “Go on then, you ugly little twerps,” Walter said angrily, waving them away. “And don’t let her see you. Just put it in a letter, or burn it in a piece of toast, I don’t care. As long as she knows.”

  The imps darted along the wooden bridge and begun chasing one another in circles, chittering and laughing.

  “They aren’t going to do it, I can tell,” Walter sighed.

  “You didn’t have to be so rude to them,” Jamie said. “Not even a please or thank you…if I were them I’d never do it.”

  “You don’t have to be nice to imps,” Walter sounded doubtful. “They’ve got contracts to obey, they don’t have a choice. I know the contract isn’t with me, but I figured whoever did own it would have ordered them to serve the students.”

  The prospective students alternated between nervous chatter and reflective silence for some time before a sudden commotion on the stairs brought the next disruption. Noah and Jamie rushed to lean over the railing to see what was going on above. Brandon was bounding down the stairs after a pair of imps with Teresa chasing after him. The imps were cackling gleefully and seemed to be the only ones having a good time.

  “Why are you so slow?” Brandon scolded Teresa. “Catch that little monster!”

  “I’m trying!” Teresa whined. She lunged awkwardly at one of the creatures who dodged off the side of the stairs, scampering along the bottom with careless agility.

  Brandon knelt to peer beneath the stairs. “I’ll have your skin hanging in my room. Or are you too stupid to even understand? Get back here!”

  One of the imps popped its head back above the stair to stick its tongue out at Brandon who was peeping over the opposite side. Brandon didn’t appear to notice and continued to shout underneath the stairs on the other side.

  “I used to have a whole room just for the animals I’ve killed. I’m going to start a new one on this side just for you and your family. Assuming you even have one and didn’t crawl out of a cesspool somewhere.”

  The imp grew emboldened and crawled right behind Brandon who remained oblivious to it. The little demon was silently dancing now, obscenely thrusting its hips in Brandon’s direction much to the delight of the other imps. The distracted creature didn’t notice Teresa charging from the side until she launched into a flying tackle which pinned it to the floor.

  There was a chittering uproar as the onlooking imps gnashed their teeth in fury, but none of them came to the aid of the pinned creature. It buckled and thrashed on the floor and looked about to wriggle free until Brandon joined Teresa to help secure her hold.

  “What’s the meaning of this racket?”

  The voice came from a tall thin man mounting the stairs who Noah hadn’t noticed board the bus. The skin on his face seemed to be pulled much too tight and was discolored in places as though he’d found it and tried it on rather than having grown it himself. This had the side-effect of pulling his eyes into narrow slits, barely wide enough to see the red iris within. He was dressed in a perfectly fitted black suit with a black silk vest and tie which commanded a sense of power despite his sickly appearance. A long, thin dog trotted submissively at his heels, although instead of fur it only had black leathery skin which wrinkled up when it moved.

  “They trapped us on the roof!” Brandon raged, his face twisting into the ugliest livid shade Noah had ever seen. “There isn’t any top floor at all. As soon as we stepped up there, the beastly things locked the door and wouldn’t let us down until…” He grimaced and turned away, too angry to even finish the thought. “They ought to be killed for this, or banished at the least.”

  “Until what?” the emaciated figure asked, apparently bemused. Nearly a dozen other imps had leapt and bound from the other floors to gather on the stairs behind him. They peered around him or through his legs, leering and giggling to each other in their strange tongue.

  Brandon scowled and turned away. Teresa had to answer for him. “We had to do the apology dance,” she sniffed indignantly. “Right on top of the bus for everyone below to see. I’ve never been so humiliated in my life.”

  The imps began to howl with laughter, even the one that was still pinned to the ground. Brandon’s face contorted into a darker shade of purple. Without warning he rose and stomped on the imp that Teresa still held to the ground. There was a loud crack like snapping twigs when his foot impacted against it. The rest of the imps immediately stopped laughing in unnatural unison. The boisterous atmosphere was replaced with a sudden eerie silence.

  Most of the children were on their feet now, peering over balconies several floors above and below to watch the drama. The imp on the ground gave a pitiful little moan.

  “How could he!” Jamie hissed, outraged. “They’re so small! And so what if they played a harmless trick? It served him right after how he’s behaved.”

  “Apsolvo,” the thin man sa
id at once.

  The imp on the ground began to dissolve into a thick black smoke. Its moan grew louder, turning into something like a shriek before it stopped abruptly. Brandon and Teresa gagged on the smoke and hurried up the stairs to get away from it. By the time the smoke had cleared, the imp was gone.

  “Where did he go?” Brandon demanded of the thin man.

  “The first lesson students in my class learn is that the demons we summon are our partners, not our servants,” the man replied severely. “When one has been wounded in our service, it is our obligation to release them. To do anything other would be less than human. What is your name, boy?”

  “Brandon Hides,” he replied mistrustfully. “And I—”

  “And you, girl?” the skeleton man interrupted.

  “Teresa Hides,” she replied, standing protectively in front of Brandon. “His mother.”

  “They look the same age though,” Walter muttered. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that.”

  “You may call me Professor Salice,” the man continued smoothly. “If I have the misfortune of meeting either you in my class, then a humiliating dance will be the least of your concerns. From what I’ve seen so far, I would not be surprised if you fail the weighing ceremony and are sent home at once though. You will behave yourself on the remainder of this trip.”

  The dog at his side opened its mouth, and instead of teeth a blossoming of cornflower blue tentacles emerged to spread impressively around its face. Brandon’s mouth dropped open in dumb terror.

  “How much longer is it, professor?” a brown haired, frightened looking girl on the opposite platform asked.

  “We have two stops to make at Genesis General Hospital and the Rainbow Valley Vet,” Professor Salice replied. “Make yourselves comfortable, and let us hope the freshly dead are more grateful for their second chance than you lot.”

  Professor Salice turned indignantly and swept down the stairs, his demonic dog and a small army of imps swirling around him and chattering amongst each other, some casting mistrustful glares back in Brandon’s direction. The mood in the bus was more subdued after that, and Brandon and his mother Teresa found isolated seats in the back of a platform and showed no interest in talking to the others. Jamie, Walter, and Noah passed the time reviewing the pamphlet which Jamie had brought with her. Big purple letters at the top read: “The Road From Death.”

  The pamphlet folded out considerably like a road map with each square devoted to a different topic. “Cassandra’s Corpse Comforting” offered counseling for traumatic deaths, and there was a special on “Wallace’s Whimsical Windows” which promised such a “realistic view of home that you’d forget you were dead.” There were magical stones that possessed various powers, including the “Eternal Spring Aquamarine Line” which allowed the transference of life force such as what the woman selling bus tickets used.

  “These are all advertisements!” Walter complained. “I don’t want to waste my death on these things.”

  “That’s because you’re looking at the wrong part. All the stuff about the school is over here,” Jamie pointed out patiently. “Look here’s a bit about the professors. It says that Salice is the new demonology teacher this year. He’s credited as the inventor of the modern contract which has revolutionized the whole demon industry. They used to be forced to trust the demons at their words, which it says here was about as ‘smart as making an omelette with harpy eggs’. I’m not sure what that means, though.”

  “But look on the other page!” Noah said, flipping back. “They’re actually selling Harpy eggs on the first page.”

  “Yeah, but they say ‘for external use only’,” Walter said. “Do we still need to eat over here? I haven’t felt hungry since I… well, you know.”

  Noah suddenly regretted not taking a hot chocolate of his own. As it were, the last meal he’d eaten was just a boring ham sandwich at noon. Was that the last thing he’d ever eat? Perhaps the others were reflecting on similar things, because most fell into silent introspection after that. Walter kept bringing up his girlfriend without being prompted, but he didn’t seem to be expecting an answer from anyone and seemed more intent on preserving every detail about her to make sure he wouldn’t forget.

  The Daymare 7 made two more stops as promised, several children or animals boarding each time. Some were laughing, others crying, others wide-eyed with speechless amazement. Ludyard bellowed his short welcome speech verbatim each time, and the empty seats filled up with the freshly dead. The newcomers gave Noah a sense of confidence as he realized that as little as he knew about this new world, at least there were others who knew even less.

  The general chatter faded again as the road wound on. The city thinned into suburbs, then to isolated houses dotting the countryside. The bus barreled directly down the streets regardless of whatever traffic might be going in the opposite direction, sliding straight through the other cars more gently than a passing mist. The rest of the world was still going about its business, completely oblivious to the spirits going about their own.

  The first shafts of morning light were amplifying into a bright, warm day when Ludyard blared his next announcement through the brass railing.

  “Look ahead, and to your right. Behold the only known island entirely within the spirit world, completely imperceptible to the living. Welcome to Barbaros!”

  All the children on the left side of the bus hustled toward the right or stood on their chairs to see out the porthole windows. The bus was driving along the beach, rumbling through families and their umbrellas and sunbathers stretched out on blankets. Noah was almost trampled to a second death as several people strained to look past him, and he only got the smallest glimpse out of the bottom of the window.

  The bus hissed, releasing great gouts of purple steam which spread across the water before it. Collective gasps resounded as the bus turned from the beach to drive directly onto the water, apparently buoyed by the purple clouds which it continued to dispense.

  “It looks like a tombstone,” Walter remarked in a somber tone.

  “Only because you’re thinking about being dead,” Jamie replied.

  One side of the island was dominated by a sheer stone cliff which produced the effect. Lush grass and thickly wooded areas covered the top however, rolling down in gentle slopes along the other side of the island until it met with a black sand beach which glistened in the sun. Thatch roofed cottages and long wooden houses littered the grassy hills which grew more densely populated as they neared the cliff. There, at the edge, a single prominent stone building which resembled a cathedral loomed over the precipitous drop.

  Noah would have liked to watch for longer, but there was too much bustling for the window and he soon grew tired of being pushed and stepped on. He pulled himself through the forest of legs until he emerged near the stairs, face-to-face with Mrs. Robinson again. Noah thought she looked rather forlorn and moved to pet her, but she dashed away again before he had the chance.

  “Well don’t just sit there counting your toes,” Jamie said, pursuing Mrs. Robinson. “We have to make sure she gets off the bus.”

  “Why?” Noah asked, following her down the stairs. “She can follow the instructions as well as anyone else.”

  Jamie’s expression over her shoulder clearly stated that Noah was speaking nonsense, but she answered anyway. “She’s so frightened! She needs someone to look after her. This world must be even more confusing for an animal which hasn’t learned to think like humans have.”

  Noah could have rightly pointed out that none of the other animals seemed to be having trouble adjusting, or that Mrs. Robinson clearly wanted nothing to do with them and would refuse their help even if she needed it. The bus would be arriving at the island soon and they’d need to be downstairs anyway though, so he kept those thoughts to himself and followed Jamie downward.

  Mrs. Robinson paused at each landing as though to verify that her pursuers were keeping up before bounding off again whenever Jamie was almost
within reach. Others noticed their movement and were quick to follow, so that by the time they reached the bottom of the stairs there was already a crowd of other children pressing for the doors.

  Mrs. Robinson was the first out as soon as the doors were opened. She vanished into the final blast of purple steam which flooded around the bus as it reached a complete stop. Before Noah could even think of pursuing her, he collided with a wall of noise blasting from all directions through the open door. A pounding sound—roaring and shouting, then a scream. All his budding fantasies about the other side seemed to evaporate, replaced by the nameless dread of the macabre unknown.

  Qari Olandesca Illustrations

  The Weighing Ceremony

  Screaming, stomping, pounding, and… cheering? The scented smoke cleared to reveal a large crowd of howling and clapping people who formed a semi-circle around the bus. It hadn’t looked like there were that many houses on the entire island from a distance, so the whole town must have turned out to welcome the new arrivals.

  “Happy death day and welcome to The Mortuary!”

  An elderly lady with the rigid posture of a drill sergeant stood at the front of the assembly to greet them. She was dressed all in red from her exaggerated high-heels to her black buttoned coat and wide-brimmed red hat which was tied with a black silk ribbon.

  “Oh, I know that some of you aren’t so fresh,” she continued in a warm, velvet voice, “but even if you had to wait a whole year for the bus I promise you’ll be glad you came. Don’t be shy—and don’t block the exit, please and thank you—come on out everyone. Feel the sun on your new skin and the grass between your toes. There’s never been a better place to be dead.”

  The children were hesitant at first, but the lady’s gracious smile and the cheering of the people behind her created an infectious, electric atmosphere. The bus quickly emptied onto the grass still heavy with the swirling vapors of grape flavored steam.

  “Still in one piece, eh?” shouted a sturdy woman from the crowd. “Death wasn’t so bad, now was it?”