by Devon Taylor
“Like I said, mate,” Basil continued, “it’s not an exact science. Plenty of people die in horrible ways, but only a fraction of them turn into syllektors.”
The room was full of a bloated quiet, heavy with Rhett’s silent mourning and Basil’s discomforting calm.
After a moment Basil went on: “Our job now is to go out and collect souls. Thousands of syllektors on board, grouped into teams, tasked with bringing the dead back to the Harbinger until it reaches its destination.”
“Which is where?” Rhett asked, finally looking up again.
Basil lifted his shoulders, then let them drop heavily. “That’s a question that no one here can answer for you, mate. Even if they wanted to.”
Rhett’s mind wandered back to his spot in the driver’s seat of his parents’ car, his hands gripping the steering wheel until his knuckles were the color of steam, the world twisting around them, filled with glass and rubber and occasionally a beautiful sky. What had he been thinking then? Did he expect to die? Had he been prepared for his life to be stamped out, for the last shreds of his existence to be flung out into blackness, into silence?
Maybe. But no matter what he had been thinking while the car was still in the air, he could never have imagined the Harbinger or its crew.
“So now we get put to work,” he said. “Is that it? We all die in terrible, horrifying ways and our compensation for that is a job? I’m not even sure you can call it a job. It’s … it’s a punishment.”
“It’s a second chance.” A new voice. Rhett started at the sound of it and looked up.
He stood in the doorway, tall and broad-shouldered, almost as big as Theo but not quite. He was dressed in a dark uniform that was pristine, angular, creased to perfection. It was more like a geometric shape than an article of clothing. The skin of his face was coated in a gray beard and lined with age. There was a captain’s hat on his head that matched the rest of his uniform, straight and true, not a speck of dirt or dust anywhere. His eyes were alert, smoldering into Rhett with the intensity of the sun.
“Captain Trier,” Basil said, stepping back, immediately handing the room over to the newcomer.
“Mr. Winthrop,” the man—the apparent captain—said. His voice was gravelly, yet dense with power. “How’s our new arrival?”
“Acclimating,” Basil replied. He shot Rhett an uncertain look. Rhett’s outburst probably hadn’t done much for Basil’s confidence, but Rhett was far from concerned about that.
“So this thing does have a captain,” Rhett said. “Who’d you have to kill to get that job?” All at once, the fire and the petulance that had so plagued Rhett during the last few years was back in full force. It was this same challenging attitude that had landed him—and his parents—here. But once he got going, it was nearly impossible to stop, like a snowball that eventually rolls itself into a full-fledged avalanche.
Captain Trier only smirked. “I know this is all pretty overwhelming, Mr. Snyder. But—”
“Overwhelming?” Rhett said, his voice cracking. “We passed overwhelming the second I didn’t just poof out of existence. Where we’re at now is … unreal.”
There was another long span of quiet in the room, with Theo and Basil watching Trier nervously and Treeny seeming unfazed.
Trier maintained his slanted smirk, though. It seemed his calm was unshakable.
“So you think that being on this ship is some kind of purgatory,” Trier said. His hands were clasped behind his back, his shoulders jutting like perfectly straight shore cliffs.
Rhett thought about that word—purgatory. He’d used it earlier with Basil on the rock. He’d cracked a joke about being stuck there with Basil forever, and Basil had genuinely smiled. Rhett’s stubbornness dimmed. What kind of purgatory was it when someone could crack a smile like that?
“I … I don’t know,” Rhett said, feeling defeated. “Maybe purgatory is an overstatement. But having to work as a spiritual tour guide for the rest of eternity definitely sounds like a punishment to me.”
“Punishment for what?” Trier asked.
Rhett didn’t want to think about the answer to that. He knew what his punishment was for. The rest of them didn’t need to know. He said nothing.
“Punishment from whom?” Trier pushed. “Certainly not me. I only give punishments to crew members who have made vastly unwise decisions aboard this ship.”
Rhett could only look at him, his body unable to provide a response to the emotions that thrashed and gnawed at his mind.
“The question, Rhett,” Trier continued, “is whether or not you think you deserve a punishment.”
The words hit the room like an anvil into dirt, thumping into the heart that Rhett now knew he could feel beating in his chest. The rest of his body was inept at feeling anything, but the heart was there. Rhett hated it more and more with every squeeze of its pulse.
“You don’t have to answer that right now, Rhett. You don’t have to answer it at all. Because either way, we’re not here to punish you.” Trier turned to the glass wall, hands still held together behind his back, as if addressing the ship as a whole. “Basil, how about you? Do you feel like your time on the Harbinger has been a punishment?”
“No, sir,” Basil replied without hesitation.
“Oh wow,” Rhett said. “Now I’m convinced.”
Trier chuckled. “You and Basil will get along very well, I think.”
“I apologize, Captain,” Basil said through the side of his mouth. “I didn’t realize he was such a cheeky bastard until just now.”
“Rhett,” Trier went on, waving Basil off, “the syllektors aboard this ship are doing the most important work there is. They are a guiding light. Without them, the souls of the dead would be left to wander the world. Alone. Afraid. Confused. You know how it felt right after your death. Imagine feeling that way forever.”
Rhett had no reply for that, either.
“You can be angry, Rhett. You can be sad. You can be whatever you want to be. But you have a chance to shape your death into something meaningful. This is a second chance. Use it.”
Heavy silence again, as if all the oxygen in the room had been replaced with damp gauze.
Finally, Rhett shook his head.
“I’m not interested,” he said. He stood, unsure of what was going to happen next. Were they going to make him walk the plank or something? Lock him up somewhere? Strangely, he was more afraid now than he had been at the prospect of having to collect souls forever. He started for the door, hoping that he could slip out and find a way back to New York before Trier started offering him the consolation prize.
Trier sighed. Not impatiently, but with a certain amount of flustered surrender. The words I didn’t want to have to do this seemed locked behind his lips somewhere.
“What about Roger and Ilene?” he said.
Rhett stopped, head down, chest heaving. If he opened his mouth, nothing but a haunted, horrified scream would come out. So he kept it clamped shut.
“They’re on board,” Trier said. “Not in this form, unfortunately—they’re not syllektors. But they are on the ship, Rhett. I could help you find them. I could help you communicate with them. If you help us, if you perform the duties that you were obviously chosen to perform, I can help you.”
Rhett looked back at the captain, who stood in that same insanely rigid position, waiting. Rhett searched for the sincerity in his eyes. He couldn’t find sincerity, exactly, but he found no deceit, either. His eyes flitted over to Basil, looking anxious and confused. Apparently, Trier’s proposition was something that he hadn’t expected.
Roger and Ilene, Rhett thought. His parents. The words repeated themselves, running through his head on a constant loop, like a radio station tuned to static or an orchestra perpetually caught in those first few seconds when they’re warming up their instruments. Eventually the names would go from having actual meaning to just being noise, a scream slicing into him like a piece of glass. If he let them.
Rhett
stood up straight, taking in a deep breath of whatever passed for air around here, and tried to think with some version of clarity.
“Okay,” he said after a moment. “I’m in.”
* * *
They stepped out of the room, back into the tumult of the complex, seemingly unnoticed. There were a few brief glances in their direction, specifically aimed at Rhett, of course—the new and strange face among them. But otherwise, the crew appeared to keep to themselves.
Captain Trier gave Rhett and the others a stiff little bow, hands still behind his back as if they had been glued together, then went to a spiral staircase at the other end of the floor. He ascended into some other darker part of the ship, consumed partly by shadow, and then vanished completely.
“That’s the bridge,” Basil murmured in Rhett’s ear. He must have caught him staring. “You’ll have to check it out sometime. Great view.”
“Huh” was all Rhett could think to say. His brain felt like an avocado that had just had its pit gouged out. He wondered faintly if he might be going into shock. His body would never respond to such a thing. But his head felt empty and light, as if someone had just taken him by the neck and shook him until all of the gray, wormy matter that made up who he was had come spilling out of his ears. In fact, this whole thing felt a lot like having hands around his throat.
“Anyway, you’ll probably want to eat and get some rest,” Basil said. “Allow me to show you to your quarters. Since it appears that I’m also now your bellboy as well as your orientation trainer.” He was watching Theo and Treeny, who had given cringe-y smiles and curt waves before retreating toward the lower decks of the ship. It was just Rhett and Basil again.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Rhett said, putting his hands in a T shape like an NFL referee. “Back in New York you said it … it’s all sensation and no feeling. I’m not hungry or tired. And I could probably jog two hundred laps around this ship without ever needing to catch my breath.”
Basil chuckled. “That’s true. You don’t have to do anything. None of us do. We don’t need food. We don’t need sleep. But we do those things anyway.”
“Why?”
“Sanity, mate. It helps keep you feeling normal. You’ve already figured out how to sort of make your body react, yes?”
Rhett’s mouth dropped open slightly.
Basil laughed again. “Don’t look so shocked. You didn’t think you were the only one who figured out that little trick, did you? You’ve only been dead for, like, five minutes. There’s plenty left for you to understand.”
“So even though you don’t have to, you still eat,” Rhett said, trying to redirect the conversation back to its starting point. “And sleep and everything else to … what? Keep from totally cracking up?”
Basil cocked a finger at him.
“You got it, chap,” he said. “Imagine another three or four days of just sitting in your room, trapped in your own head without any desire to do anything. You’d tear your own eyes out before a week was up.”
They were moving down the staircase now, descending through the middle of the Column, with Basil subtly leading the way. Rhett wasn’t sure what time it was—there didn’t appear to be any windows to the outside—but the number of crew members milling about the atrium seemed to be thinning out. How could anyone tell when they were supposed to do anything?
“And what exactly would that do?” Rhett asked, reeling himself back in.
“What would what do?” Basil said over his shoulder.
“What would tearing my own eyes out do? Would a new pair just appear? Would they grow back over time?”
Now Basil was actually laughing out loud in short, barklike yips. “You would just go bloody blind, mate,” he said. He ditched the stairs three or four decks down and made his way to another pair of doors.
“What do you mean? I thought we were … invincible or whatever.” Rhett was genuinely curious.
Basil stopped and turned to face him.
“Listen, man,” he said, letting his chuckles die off. “It’s obvious you watched waaaayyyy too much TV as a living person. But that’s not how it works. You might not feel the pain, but this version of yourself—this vessel that’s mostly made up of your soul—operates under the same principles as your living body did. If I were to rip your arm off right now, you might not be all that bothered by it mentally. Physically, though? You’d be down an arm.”
Rhett was trying to make sense of it. If they were invisible to the living and were no longer made up of any kind of physical matter, how could they still be hurt the same way?
“So … what happens if this vessel were to be destroyed completely?” he asked.
“Ugh! You ask a lot of bloody questions.” Basil threw his hands up and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I am not cut out for this part of the process,” he murmured under his breath. “Listen, how about we table this for now, okay? The bottom line is this: Don’t get hurt. Your spirit body heals itself the same way your physical body did. Period. And if your head gets lobbed off?” He shrugged.
“Got it,” Rhett replied. There was poison in the way he said it. Why would Basil bring him here if he wasn’t willing to answer any of his questions? Basil wasn’t hiding his annoyance, and neither was Mak. Treeny and Theo seemed indifferent, but still, the only one who seemed to want him here was the one person who had genuinely gotten under Rhett’s skin: Captain Trier. But it wasn’t even that Trier just got under his skin; he had probed into the most sensitive part of Rhett’s life, and then he’d used it against him.
Basil could sense the irritation in Rhett’s voice, could probably see it in his eyes, too.
“Don’t be sour, mate,” Basil said. “It’s just been a while since we’ve had a new recruit. They used to come in all the time. We’re a little out of practice at the whole ‘welcome to the team’ thing. That’s all.”
Rhett nodded, clamping his mouth shut to keep more of his questions stifled.
They moved on.
Basil showed him the mess hall, which was weirdly reminiscent of the cafeteria at Rhett’s high school. It was all the same steel furnishings and chilly lighting, but there was actual hot food lined up at a buffet-style counter, steaming under the warm yellow beams of the heating lamps. Rhett didn’t know if any of the food was real and at first couldn’t smell it. But he willed his nose to take in the aromas. And then he willed his stomach to growl longingly. It was weird having to force himself to do the things that used to happen on their own, especially his hunger. But the perks were obvious. You could choose when to want food, when to want sleep. You could filter your emotions in a way that even the most apathetic sociopath among the living could not. In a strange way, it was kind of freeing.
Rhett and Basil made heaping plates for themselves, eating in silence, focused only on the task at hand, which was to wreck the hell out of all that food.
And despite everything that he had seen and experienced since the moment of his death, Rhett was still surprised when, after two plates of food, he still wasn’t full. He had stopped sending the signals to his stomach to act hungry a long time ago. He had eaten way past his normal, living capacity for intake. He was also afraid that if he forced his stomach into experiencing the sensation of all that food he’d just stuffed down his throat, he’d yack it all back up. Then again … if the food wasn’t actually there in the first place, if it was just some trick of the spiritual world, then had he really eaten anything at all?
He decided that line of thinking would only send him right down the rabbit hole into insanity.
After dinner, Basil showed Rhett a few of the Harbinger’s other amenities.
There was a gym, a café, a library, a movie theater. None of them were advertised in any grand fashion, only with metal plaques above their entrances. Yet it still made Rhett feel like he was taking a tour of a shopping mall.
“Who knew that turning into a grim reaper would be so … lavish,” he said to Basil.
“Lucky for you,” Basil
said gravely, “we’re not even close to grim reapers.”
There was something weird about the way he said it, and Rhett wanted to hear more. But Basil didn’t offer an explanation.
The final stop on the tour, obviously way past what qualified as bedtime since the hallways were all but deserted, was the living quarters. They were down on one of the lower decks of the Column, where hallways fanned out from every side and were lined with numbered doors.
Basil led Rhett down to the very end of one of the halls, to a door at its throat marked with the number 0312.
“Anyway, here you are,” Basil said. “I’ll deposit you here for now and … uh … meet me in the mess hall in the morning?”
“How am I supposed to know when it’s morning?”
“Well, most of us try to get on the same schedule. Every eight hours, give or take. When you can hear people moving around out here, you’re probably safe to head up.”
Rhett glanced at the door, suddenly nervous. He was about to be left here alone.
“Seriously, mate,” Basil said, putting a reassuring hand on Rhett’s shoulder. “Try to sleep. You might not feel like you need it. But up here?” He pointed at Rhett’s forehead. “You definitely do.”
With that, Basil turned on his heel and headed back down the hall.
Rhett watched him go for a moment, until he was out of sight. And then the silence fell in like a flood of water. He couldn’t even hear anyone snoring or talking in their sleep. And why would he? Death was not a translator of those strange quirks of the living.
He opened the door to his cabin and stepped inside.
At first he was delighted to see a porthole window, a thick eye staring out at the gray world. But then he could see the waves and the sky, still bubbling and frothing like a witch’s brew. Lightning chiseled down from the sky not too far away, illuminating the water … and the enormous creature turning over just beneath the surface. It was mostly just a shadow, but it was at least half as big as the Harbinger, with a long, serpentine tail that seemed barbed and jagged on the end. Rhett could just barely make out the shape of it. And then, with the lightning, it disappeared back into the dark.
