“It seems to me,” he said softly, “that you are the one who will make this thing work.”
She considered the alternatives, then nodded.
“If we go,” he went on, indicating with his chin the subdued Visigoths, “where our lives on earth dictate, my loyal friends will without doubt be subjected to horrors which even we cannot imagine. Although I do not know what a Jehovah’s Witness is.” Mary thought it best not to educate him as to what that particular horror may entail.
“We have done other things here. We have learned many things, tongues, struggled with Fermat’s last theorem. We have protected people and only fought when they were threatened. We have eaten Battenburg. If this Afternet begins to work, how long before everyone here goes to their eternity?”
Mary looked into the big man’s worried face. “There are centuries of souls here. Even when we fix the Afternet, it will take a lot of years for everyone to be taken in, considering that the place is filling up at a pretty solid rate.”
“I know you can’t stop it, but can you make us the last? We like it here, and I think my people have earned some respite. When we lived, we lived only as we knew. Now we know how to live.”
“I will do whatever I can.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Minutes later, the invisible cleft in this reality had swallowed up Marcel, Geoffrey, Mary and Justin. Those who remained stared at the darkening uninterrupted landscape and then silently travelled on to face whatever fate they were thrown.
CHAPTER 14
The long dark corridor in the backrooms of the Afterworld held a welcoming silence after the vicious hubbub of Devil’s Docks. The four walked in silence back towards the Control Room, each deep in their own thoughts, and three attempting to keep ahead of Geoffrey to avoid the unsettling sight of the melted clothing and pink blistered skin running up the middle of his back.
They became aware, as they reached the Control Room door, that their domain was not unoccupied, a sound of scrabbling and a low voice leaking through the hole in the wall left from the impact of Hermes’ arrival, which now seemed so long ago. Marcel held up a hand and they all stopped to listen but could only hear the words “I can barely see myself in this, it’s useless!”
Marcel looked at Geoffrey. “O great. You know who that is?”
Geoffrey, who had already forgotten who the proprietor of the Pint and Prejudice was, smiled vacantly and shook his head.
“O come on Geoffrey! Convinced of his own beauty against all visual evidence? Endlessly seeking compliments? Obsessed with finding places to look at himself and then preening when he does?”
Mary watched Geoffrey think, a process which involved both a great deal of effort and a selection of facial tics which could equally have been the enthusiastic sucking of a very sharp sherbert lemon. His face brightened.
“Is it you, Marcel?”
The Frenchman ignored the snigger from Justin and shook his head despairingly. “I’m here, Geoff. The person we are talking about is in there.”
“Ah. Yes.” Geoffrey gave all the signs of re-launching the process, but Marcel turned away in desperation and opened the door. The others followed him inside. The grubby room still exuded its grim dinginess, but there was the scent of gardenia in the air. A tall, willowy figure in a long lemon-coloured sheath toga, his hair in tight golden blonde curls, was staring into one of the dead screens in the bank of VDUs above the desks. He turned at the sound of the door opening, and drew himself up to a not very impressive height. Two nymphs fluttered to his side and shared his observation of the returning controllers and their colleagues.
“How do you make this work?” He gestured towards the dull screen. “I can barely get a reflection. What kind of mirror is that?”
Marcel, Geoffrey, and Mary stared at the man before them. He was a vision, it has to be admitted. Apart from the enormous pustule at the joint of his nose and cheek, that is. Justin, on the other hand, stared at the nymphs, whose nubile forms were given modesty only by small ferns clinging to the appropriate areas. He wondered when autumn came around here.
Marcel broke the silence. “It’s not a mirror, Narcissus. It’s the kind of mirror that isn’t a mirror.”
“What’s the point of that?” He gestured gracefully at the bank of screens. “You have twenty mirrors which aren’t mirrors! Where do you look at yourselves?”
Marcel gestured towards Geoffrey. “Sometimes it’s better not to.”
“Not for me,” said Narcissus, “I don’t know how you can stand this dull, miserable place. With no mirrors! I would paint it yellow, and have mirrors there, there, there, there and there.” He gestured towards the walls and the ceiling. The spot on his nose pulsed. “I gain strength from the sight of my perfection.”
“I’d stay weak for a while, mate.” Marchant muttered.
“Look, it’s lovely that you came by, and thanks for the interior decorating consultancy,” said Marcel, “but we’re on quite a tight timeline, actually, so unless there’s anything else…”
“Well there is. If you’re thinking of going down there…” He nodded knowingly towards the floor, which Geoffrey began to inspect for clues, “…you need approval. That’s what they sent me to say, although why they couldn’t pick someone who didn’t care whether there were any reflections I don’t know.”
“What do you mean approval? We were told to fix it, and we don’t have much time. Approval from whom?”
“The Accidental Apparitions Subcommittee.”
“AAS? O please, just because someone might notice! This is a crisis.”
“Process is process.” Said Narcissus, with the air of one who knew.
“When do they sit?” said Geoffrey. “We don‘t have long to get Mary back to where she belongs.”
Narcissus told them that the Committee sat all of the time, given that none of them had anything better to do, in his opinion, and since they didn’t even take any time out to change or anything you wouldn’t believe how terrible they looked, and there were only mirrors in the toilets, (which stank!) because one of the members was a snake, and in the end Marcel was moved to stop him with a hand over his mouth, which he had to do very carefully since he was very concerned that the large yellow growth on Narcissus’ face could just explode and deposit some horrible mess on him.
While there was quiet, he stole a look at the clock. A dung-eating variant of Strimple’s Ionian Leech had, the extinction meter told him, just keeled over for the last time somewhere on Earth, but in terms of the looming end of his lifestyle, the key number was the fourteen hours remaining to return Mary to her previous existence. The episode at Capone’s had been longer than planned, and there was always time lost, sloughed into some excess minute bin, every time you went into a parallel universe. Fourteen hours, nonetheless, with the prospect of going before one of the notoriously slow-moving sub-committees, was going to be tight.
Geoffrey had switched on the VDUs. The Afternet screens simply read ‘Busy-please try later’ so he had engaged in debate with the new arrivals as to the reality or otherwise of the TV programmes which flickered upon the other screens. This had clearly stimulated some debate whilst Marcel absorbed the news delivered by Narcissus. Geoffrey was pointing at an episode of Doctor Who, in which the Doctor was confronted yet again by a horde of murderous Daleks.
“He’s amazing, isn’t he? Will we meet him when we go back there?”
“It’s not real Geoffrey,” said Justin, having adopted amazingly quickly some of the tiredness Marcel felt when explaining this fact for the millionth time, “he’s a fiction. He’ll make them dizzy by turning them round and then he’ll run up stairs. It’s just a story.”
Geoffrey looked hurt – usually a sign that he was thinking – then pointed to another screen, where khaki clad soldiers huddled behind a wall which gave onto a god-forsaken landscape over which only the mad or press-ganged would fight.
“Okay, then.” He said, “tell me how that en
ds then.”
Justin, nonplussed, looked to Mary, who provided the answer.
“That’s the war in Afghanistan, Geoffrey. It doesn’t end.”
“You’d better come with me.” Narcissus’ voice was muffled by the perfumed handkerchief he was holding in front of his mouth, like some French courtesan who had happened upon a gaggle of peasants. “I shall go quite mad, and possibly less than perfect if I stay in this terrible place- with no mirrors- for any longer.” He sashayed to the door and they fell in to follow.
Marcel grabbed the elbow of one of the nymphs as he passed, and pointed to the dense custard coloured growth on Narcissus’ face, which seemed to be larger each time he looked.
“Have you told him?” he asked
“No, would you? I’m just a jobbing nymph mate, and this gig’s as good as any other.”
The legion sub-committees of the Afterlife were to a great extent brought together to keep some of the hundreds of ‘gods’ occupied. For some of them, it had been a long time since they had heard a prayer offered, let alone a sacrifice. Even in the hotbed of religious lunacy which much of life had become, it had become rare to see some tight-trousered poseur in the Piazza del Popoli step from his Vespa to ask Vulcan, the God of beneficial fire (whatever that may be) for a light. By and large, the Swedes were now too busy creating the perfect welfare state and making alcohol prohibitively expensive, to kneel to Vidar, son of Odin and the Norse patron of leatherworkers, to ask if there was any chance of a decent pair of boots for the winter.
It had become far easier for the modern day chancers who wanted to entice young women to have sex with them despite their uniformly unappealing appearance to invent some new way of worshipping ‘God’ rather than one of the ‘gods’. It is doubtful whether David Koresh would have enticed so many of the Branch Davidian offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventists to first lay with him and then lay down their lives if he had been promoting the worship of Nut, the Egyptian cow-headed Goddess of the Sky, not least because Branch Nuttians doesn’t have the same ring. This didn’t help Nut, who wandered through the firmament as the butt of ‘feeling horny?’ jokes, but who at least had a position on the Committee formed to advise on Preferred Cloud Types For Use By The Heavenly Choir. After 800 years the Committee had narrowed it down to Cumulus or Cumulo-Nimbus, although there remained a strong lobby for Stratus where Choirs preferred a linear grouping.
The sub-committee with the power over Earthly Excursions was one of the busier governance meetings, since a spell away from eternity was much in demand amongst the gods who hadn’t got a job on a quango as well as amongst those who did. The committee worked on the basis that the answer was ‘no’ and then moved on to consider the question. Guidance from above suggested that allowing a god no longer worshipped, often with many arms, some kind of animal part inherent, and the power to cleave people in twain, to pitch up at a Barmitzvah in an Israeli settlement may set back the Middle East Peace Process.
Worse perhaps was where the god in question, against all odds, retained a significant role in the life of those who would be exposed to its apparition in the land of the living. The Virgin Mary was forever getting a pass to cause blood to spring from the hands of a statue in some poverty-stricken dustbowl. Gama, the Japanese God of longevity, had caused many a hilltop village to fall to its knees by riding through a wedding on a stag carrying a scroll of secret wisdom with the gift of which he taunted the crowd. The demons, and other followers of the Devil who managed to somehow scrape a pass, generally ran out of ideas when they emerged on Earth and confined themselves to making the face of Jesus appear on a Belgian waffle or an Ikea desktop in order to generate ridicule for their enemy.
By and large, having begun with a denial, the committee found itself now and again having to grant access simply to justify its own existence. Such passes were more common around the time of the Glastonbury festival, when the recollection of the sight of an eight armed naked man with the legs of a goat was likely to be attributed to a surfeit of mind-altering substances and thereafter an ill-advised sexual encounter with ugly quadruplets.
It was to this wise group that the Afternet controllers were referred, and after a long walk behind a moaning Narcissus, who thought the air too heavy, the light too dim, the lack of mirrors a positive torture, they arrived in the waiting room. Various ‘C’ list deities were in the queue, along with a group of four satyrs trying to get the OK for a golf weekend in Killarney. This spooked the nymphs, who now had to add the twenty minutes of sexual harassment they had withstood from Marchant to the aeons of leering and touching from the satyrs. They whimpered softly and squeezed together into a corner of the room, unsuccessfully hiding their near-nakedness behind dog-eared centrefolds from very old copies of PlayGod.
Geoffrey looked at the queue and then at Marcel, and both shook their heads. Time was not of the essence for an afterlife sub-committee, and it was immediately apparent that the less then fourteen hours they had available, plus some decades, could well be spent in this very room.
“We need to jump this queue, Marcel. We haven’t got time.” Geoffrey hopped from foot to foot.
“I know. Give me a minute to think.” Marcel walked to a board at the end of the room which listed the rotating members of the committee. Under ‘Gods’, and next to the name ‘Hephaestus’, a small slider had been positioned to reveal the word ‘IN’. All committees were of course comprised of one representative from each side of the post-death split, and today the board revealed that Lucifer was represented by the Imp Krake, who Marcel remembered having had a particular liking for the application of superheated brands during his own stay in the fiery depths.
“Narcissus!” Marcel beckoned their chaperone with his chin. “You don’t want to have to wait here, do you?”
“I have to wait until you are seen. That’s what I have been sent to do, although this is a horrible place. Where can anyone see how they look?”
“I know you have to wait until we’re seen, but I’m going to get us ahead of this lot. If you turn a blind eye, I’ll get you something to allow you to look at yourself.”
“How can I look at myself if I am turning a blind eye?” sobbed Narcissus.
Marcel sighed. “It’s a figure of speech. Just look after your nymphs.” He walked towards the door, and gestured to Mary and Justin.
“We’re going in next.” Marcel carefully removed one of his beautiful Italian loafers and smashed the glass on the fire alarm; a shrill bell began to ring.
“Oh my God, a fire!” shrieked Narcissus, “Don’t let it burn my face!” Marcel grabbed him as the occupants of the waiting room dashed out and the nymphs whimpered in the corner. Justin went to comfort them.
“It’s not a fire you idiot! I’m just getting rid of this lot. Now pull yourself together.” The door to the committee room was flung open and two South Pacific Gods of some bulk waddled rapidly past. Had there been a real fire, they would have been rendered.
“Er Marcel?” Mary tugged at his sleeve, which prompted him to let go of Narcissus’ throat, a piece of good fortune given that the pressure of his grasp appeared to be having a worrying effect on the Greek hero’s facial carbuncle. “Brilliant, don’t get me wrong, but what about the committee? Won’t they want to get out too?”
“Not today. One’s the Greek God of fire and the other a bodily arsonist. They don‘t give a shit.”
They could still hear the distant sound of the fire alarm behind the closed door of the committee room. In the waiting room Narcissus was slumped in a grubby armchair with screwed up pages of an old copy of Goodbye! Magazine in his ears while the nymphs were so pleased that their legendary tormentors the Satyrs had legged it that the noise was a welcome irritation.
Hephaestus lounged back in his chair in front of them. The huge wing backed seat did no favours to his stature, and Justin baulked a little at the horribly malformed feet which the demi-God had stretched upon the table in front of him. It was hard to think, viewing this carbuncled
dwarf, that he could possibly be the son of Zeus and Hera, respectively the King and Queen of the Gods, but hey, DNA!
The imp actually appeared to be taller, although further inspection revealed that he was sitting on a number of pristine copies of the Red Pages, a huge tome of telephone numbers in Hades which had been printed when it had appeared for a while that The Afternet computer would actually stretch to a ‘phone system. The Devil had actually quite fancied being able to lie on a chaise longue somewhere, punch in a few numbers and listen to the screams of the damned. The Black Death saw to all that in one way or another.
Krake was picking his teeth with what looked a piece of someone’s femur. The debris seemed to be pieces of someone’s leg. Mary looked disgusted, but Marcel had a brief thought as to whether the femur and the leg may have somehow been single-sourced.
Geoffrey nudged Marcel.
“Marcel? Hephaestus. Isn’t he married to Aphrodite?” He was thinking of the Frenchman’s dalliance in that area and had a sudden concern as to how this might affect their request to the committee.
“He is.” Marcel whispered. “I thought she was ugly ‘til I saw him.”
“So,” said the god, without looking at the four applicants, “you want to have a little trip to Life, do you? What is it, haunting? Instruction to a relative to look behind the figurine on the mantelpiece to find the five pounds you left behind?”
“Left the gas on?” cackled Krake, looking directly at Mary.
“We need to get this woman back. Killed by mistake by an over-enthusiastic Reaper.” said Geoffrey, “And we need to get some stuff to help us fix the Afternet.”
“Ah, the Afternet.” Krake tugged some sinew from between his pointy incisors. “About time that piece of shit was sorted. My boss wants some new blood. Come to think of it,” he stared at a lump of gristle on the end of the bone in his hand, “so do I.”
The Complete Afternet: All 3 Volumes In One Place (The Afternet) Page 19
