by Lila Huff
“I found us a new recruit.” Jack said as I felt a heavily booted foot kick into my back. “He knew the one that got away.” What on earth did he mean by that? I had been mortally wounded, there was no way that I would be a recruit for anyone.
There was a snickering noise from in front of me and I heard her sigh heavily. “He’ll do.”
“What would you have me do, to redeem myself, Gallu?” Jack said and I felt him kneel behind me. “I seek only to be worthy of being your servant.”
Groveling. The woman was in charge. Perhaps she was some sort of Mafioso. Well, if they were thieves, they’d find little in my pockets; my killer had undoubtedly cleaned them out. And Gallu? What an odd name. It sounded like it should belong to a mythical Greek beast, not a woman.
“My pet,” Gallu’s words were condescending. “You are worthy of doing my work. I would not keep you if you weren’t. Deal with this situation as we did Demetrius. I will leave the particulars of the task to your discretion.”
“It will be done.” Jack’s voice was close to my ear, as though he had prostrated himself beside me.
A burst of heat brushed against the front of me, but still I did not move or open my eyes, how could I? I was dead. There was no energy left in me.
“Up you get.” The gruff voice said as I was picked up by two massive hands and set on my feet.
I opened my eyes slightly, but couldn’t make sense of what I saw. Jack shook me roughly and I opened my eyes a bit further this time and was met with glowing red eyes. I froze, rigid, every muscle tensing. Had I been a bad enough person in my life to have been sent to Hell?
Feeling my feet sway I realized that I was being raised off the ground by the creature in front of me. He looked human in every respect other than his menacing size and his eyes.
“Fear, good.” He said as he set me down. “It is the correct response when one encounters a demon.” And then with a smile that could easily be described as demonic, he added, “you will come to see it in the faces of many that you encounter in the future.”
I swallowed quite loudly and waited for whatever would come next. He didn’t seem like he was going to be hostile toward me, and I found the courage to speak, though my words came out a little shakier than I would have liked. “Who… who are you?”
“Name’s Jack.” He said as he shrunk into the shadows while the street lamps relit themselves. “I’d suggest you get out of the light before someone sees you.”
“What?” I asked as his massive hand reached out and pulled me into the alcove that he had found refuge in.
I was about to accost him for his rough treatment when I heard whistling. A man in the uniform of a nineteen twenties constable waltzed by the alleyway’s entrance twirling his billy-club as he went. Odd, I thought, but then again, what about this night hadn’t been odd?
Jack snarled in the darkness. “Demons… There’s no code anymore…” He shook his black hair out of the knot at the back of his head and grabbed me roughly around my bicep. “Close your eyes.”
“Why?” I asked too late as everything around me burst into flames and was snuffed.
I patted the front of my coat trying to discern how much damage had been done, but it wasn’t singed, or even warm. Further inspection showed me that there was nothing wrong with it, the flames that surrounded me had not affected my person at all.
“You’re going to want to lie down.” Jack said to me before I could notice my new surroundings.
We were no longer in the alley. The walls that surrounded me looked like a cave, but the stone walls were glassy and I as I looked toward my distorted reflection, the fun-house-mirror effect of it made me extremely dizzy. I suddenly felt my last meal returning to me.
“Told ya. Welcome to the afterlife.” Jack said with a booming laugh. “You really need to at least sit down kid. You’re going to be hurting for a while.”
I looked up at him as I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. He was beginning to appear distorted and I blinked rapidly trying to make the room stop spinning, but it turned to a kaleidoscope of fractured pieces in front of me. I sat down on the bed-like cut-out in the rock next to me, and put my head in my hands. “Welcome to Hell,” I said dryly as I blew out a breath of hot air.
“This isn’t Hell,” my new host said with a sardonic bray. “Far from it, lad.”
“But you said you’re a demon.” I managed to get out, still breathing heavily and compelling the room to stop its spinning. My chest was searing, it was quite a bit more painful than heartburn.
“Yes, I’m a demon. Christ kid, you’re a demon now.” He continued to laugh at my ignorance. “But Hell is reserved for those who are no longer able to serve a purpose on Earth. We few, we lucky few, are chosen for the honor of becoming an Asakku. Those of us with a sense of humor about the whole thing refer to it as purgatory.”
At the present moment I didn’t feel particularly lucky or humorous, I was feeling particularly sickly. “I didn’t think that death would be so… nauseating.”
“That’s just the change.” He said, not laughing now. “Just lie back and let it happen.”
I did as I was told and immediately began to feel better. “Let what happen? What exactly is this change?” I wasn’t happy enough about my settled stomach to assuage my curiosity, the room still spun, but it was tolerable now.
“Well… in order to do what you need to do, you’re going to have to get thicker skin.” As he spoke I held my hand up in front of my eyes.
It was, indeed, starting to thicken, the once pliable, pale white flesh that spread across the back of my hand now felt as thick as the rind of a honeydew melon, and it had darkened slightly, to an odd yellow. I rubbed the skin on the back of my hand, the soft, malleable flesh now felt like rubbery latex. The top layer of it crumbled off like dried paint.
I watched it darken further, it reminded me of roasting marshmallows when I was a boy. My skin first turned golden brown and then turned black as the top lay crumpled into a feathery paper like ash.
“You know,” Jack said from my side. “You’ll remember this for the rest of your existence. It’s been over ten centuries and it still gives me goose pimples. Well, it would if we were able to get such things.” He laughed from farther away as the room went dark.
Above my face my hand glowed red. It wasn’t painful, it was mesmerizing. Like a live x-ray I could see through my skin and into my arm, as though it was hollow. I watched the blood that was coursing through my veins as it slowly stopped pumping toward my fingers and drained from my arm.
I realized then, when there stopped being any motion in my body, that I truly was dead. It was a bit difficult to grasp at first. I’ll admit it: I lay there for a few moments with my index and middle finger at my throat trying to find the pulse that I knew wasn’t there. I just continued to look at my arm, it was strange to know that I glowed in the dark. It didn’t seem like it would last, Jack wasn’t as luminescent as I was.
I could hear the roar of a fire somewhere in the distance. Maybe Hell was a little closer than Jack was letting on. It sounded like the kiln in the museum I had once worked in for a summer, only it was much, much louder.
The museum, I would never work in a museum again. What a waste my Oxford tuition had been…. Money shouldn’t matter to me now, I was not going to need it anymore. You can’t take it with you, right?
I sighed heavily and had to blink when a pillar of fire shot forth from my mouth toward the ceiling. I had to laugh as my mind went directly to those silly children’s cartoons where someone eats a pepper and breathes fire. I inhaled again and blew out another tall stream of fire. It lit up the glassy room around me and turned into small beads of flame that fell in a shower around me.
“Talk about heartburn…” I laughed quietly.
“There will be time to play later.” The room was suddenly lit again and I saw that another of the Asakku had come to get me. His eyes glowed just as red as Jack’s had.
I hadn’t paid t
oo much attention to Jacks skin, but the memory of him was still vivid in my mind, though neither he nor the one who was with me know glowed as I had, they both had black, charcoal like scrape marks on their torso and arms. Jack’s were more abundant, covering most of his body, while the Asakku who stood in front of me had considerably fewer.
“Come on glow boy, time to meet your master.” He said as he turned from me. “There’s some pants to your left. They’re fireproof,” he said, the last bit with a laugh.
I sat up as he spoke, realizing that my clothes were now ashes that clung to my body, and looked to my left. Sure enough, there was a pair of black pants, very similar to the pairs that I had seen Jack and my new guide wearing. As my new thicker, glowing skin shifted with my movement, black and grey flecks of burnt skin floated away from me. There was a towel on top of the pants that I quickly used to rub off the remaining blackened patches of burnt-off skin, and shoved my feet through the pant legs. I followed after my guide as I fastened the belt that had been laid with them.
“What’s your name kid?” he asked as I got closer.
“I’m Paul,” I said. I was too busy observing my surroundings to care much about what he was asking me. The hall that he was guiding me down was like a glass tube through the rocks, the walls glimmered with my reflection.
“Name’s Mike and I run this joint.” He said with a New York accent. “Gallu’s the only one I answer to, don’t you let nobody tell you otherwise.”
“I’ll be sure not to.” I assured him. I took a closer look at him as an individual now. He was only about an inch shorter than I was, he seemed to be of Latin descent, and he was certainly no more than ten or fifteen years older than me, but his hands shook and his movements were nervous, like he was agitated by something.
“How old do you think I am, Paul?” He asked suddenly. He spoke quickly, as though he was worried someone was listening.
“I’m sorry?” I said. I was stalling for time; the question had caught me off guard, though not as much as the paranoid behavior.
“How old, Paul, do you think that I am?” He had stopped and turned to me expectantly.
“Thirty-two?” I had learned long ago that it was always best to guess low if you thought someone was over thirty and I though Mike looked about forty, so I was playing dumb.
“That’s not bad.” He said sticking out his chin as he thought about it. “You’re only off by forty years. I’m actually seventy-two.”
I let out a long whistle. I suppose I might have been surprised if Jack hadn’t let it slip that he was over a thousand. Mike, I’m pretty sure, was nowhere near being in charge. He was most likely just trying to force me into a subordinate role before I had the chance to find out otherwise.
“Yeah, you wouldn’t know it, would ya? I don’t look a day over forty-five.” Mike continued on as he walked down the long corridor with his chest puffed out a little more than it had been before. “That’s one of the perks about this life. You get to stay the age you were when you died. Pretty sweet if you ask me.”
“I didn’t know this was considered life.” I wasn’t averse to the idea of staying twenty nine for the rest of my existence, but I wasn’t so sure about the company. I had never been much for the guys who told you just how cool they were. It wasn’t my crowd. Luckily for me, I wasn’t with Mike much longer,
He stopped at a corridor, pointing down it. “You gotta go have a chat with Gallu. I’ll wait here for you.”
I followed his finger and looked down the corridor, it was dark and I couldn’t see its end. “At the end of this corridor?” I pointed, making a joke at his expense, though I doubt he caught it. He was treating me like a child, so I was more than willing to oblige him, by acting ignorant.
“Yeah, this corridor.” He assured me, speaking slowly, as though I was dense. “You’ll be fine. She doesn’t bite, glow boy.” As I left he added. “Christ, aren’t the Brits supposed to be well educated?” I doubt he thought I could hear him.
I walked down the hall, my red glowing skin reflecting five times, in the walls to either side of me, the ceiling and floor and then again in the door I walked toward. I stopped for a moment looking at the elongated version of myself in the wall. Aside from my incorrectly reflected height, and the red glow to my skin, I still looked the same. I could still use my driver’s license, my face had not changed, and it was still topped with a mop of dark blonde hair.
The only difference in my face was my eyes. The once blue eyes that had stared back at me were now completely black. It was unsettling, but I preferred it to the red of Jack or Mike’s. I smiled then and saw them: the pointed teeth where my cuspids had once resided. How very vampiric, I thought with a laugh. I had no thirst for blood, so I knew that I could not actually be a vampire.
I turned back to the tunnel and continued toward its end. The image of myself that walked toward me as I approached it split in half as the door opened into the room that Gallu waited for me in. I wondered what she would look like: if the voice or the name would more appropriately fit her.
The circular room I entered looked like its walls were covered in dull brass plates, except for the side opposite me, where Gallu waited. She sat in a golden throne atop a ten foot platform.
She was spellbindingly beautiful, as she sat in her gilded throne. Light radiated outward from her, causing the brass to shine like gold. Her dark red hair flowed down her back, moving ever-so slightly like a flame lapping at the air. Her eyes were closed and she sat poised in the chair as though she were on display. She was more stunning than any air-brushed model I had ever seen between the covers of a magazine.
I stood in the middle of the room and waited, but she did not move, she seemed to be a porcelain statue. I cleared my throat, hoping that it would speed up the process – not that I had anywhere to go – and at the sound she opened her eyes and the entire room seemed to be gilt.
“Paul,” she said quietly – though I could hear her quite clearly – while her mouth widened into a smile. “I am pleased that you were able to come.”
I wanted to laugh. It was an odd comment. As though she had invited me and been worried that I would have flaked. A bit odd considering what I had become in death.
My manners told me that I should have responded with “I’m pleased to be here,” but my thoughts assured me that it would most certainly be a lie, and so I just nodded with a cautious smile. I knew nothing of the woman in front of me and was still not entirely sanguine about my current prospects.
“What has happened to me, if you don’t mind?” I asked, as I stood before her.
“Paul,” she said – like I was a small child – as she descended the stairs toward me. “I am Gallu. Forgive me for my failing manners. As for what has happened to you, you have been chosen to become a member of the Asakku. In your life you may have heard of the Grim Reaper?” she asked tilting her head to the side. “The Asakku serve that purpose. You will now be charged with the millennia old task of reaping souls.” She held her arms out to me. “Welcome to the fold.”
I didn’t move toward her outstretched arms as she most likely wanted. I was too fixated by her eyes. It was as though the sockets held two glass orbs that were filled with flames, light radiated from them but so did malice and deceit. “Are you the Devil?” I asked quietly, I was not afraid. I was already dead… I wasn’t sure there was much else she could do to me, but curiosity burned within me, the flames in my mind burned more fiercely than those in her eyes.
She laughed and smiled coyly. “I am somewhat of a lesser evil.” The flames in her eyes flickered as she laughed. “Tell me about yourself Paul,” she probed, her voice seemed sticky-sweet.
There was something about this woman, or demon, that I didn’t trust. “What would you like to know?” I asked, annoyance seeping through my reserve, “Vital statistics seem to be out.”
She just smiled at me like I was being a petulant child. “Fine. I’ll ask specific questions.” She said in a teasing tone, I almost
thought she would stick her tongue out at me. “How tall are you?”
“Five feet, nine inches.” I responded curtly. It seemed a stupid question. Why would she care about my height? What was she playing at?
She just continued to smile, “When was your birthday?” It was another nonsensical question.
“October third, nineteen-eighty.”I was beginning to sound like a military recruit, barking answers to his Sergeant. Name, rank and serial number might be coming next.
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
I balked at this question. “I believe you mean ‘did I have a girlfriend?’ and the answer is no.”
Her eyes narrowed as the corners of her mouth turned up. “A handsome young man like you? I find that hard to believe.” She snickered. “Haven’t found the right girl?” she postulated.
“I had found the right girl, she just didn’t think of me in that way.” I thought back to the night I died – to how mad she had been when she’d left. “It doesn’t really matter now does it?”
“I guess not,” she frowned. “I do feel terribly sorry that you did not get your happy ending. Though none of us really do.” She sighed, though I didn’t feel any sincerity in her words. I could not believe that she had ever been human.
“Was she pretty?” she asked, breaking into my scrutiny.
“She was gorgeous.” I said, hearing the irritation in my voice. “What does this have to do with anything?” She was toying with me and I didn’t appreciate it.
“I just like to know my employees.” She smirked as though she was pleased with my annoyance. “You should go rest now. You will be extremely vulnerable for the next few months.”
“And how much longer will I be a glow worm?”
An evil smile spread across her face, “Give yourself a few months and your skin will harden, hiding the fire that courses through you now.”
I set my jaw and waited to be dismissed again. I wouldn’t give her any more enjoyment by asking questions of her.
“Go.” She said waiving me away, “Mike will tell you all that you need to know.”
