The door was thrown open and a short figure tottered in as if on high heels, skittering on the shiny floor of the room. His squat upper torso was muscled and he wore long curled hair and a pointed beard; his lower half was the thick hefty legs of a goat, hair matted and grey, ending in pointed cloven hooves. A pair of stubby horns sat atop the curly haired head and he held a ridged wooden object in one hand as he grasped the corner of a filing cabinet with the other. Pan’s feet weren’t built for modern interiors.
Justin looked up from his screen even as Geoffrey slid from his seat, adopting a kneeling position from which he could bend at the waist to pay respect.
“What do you want?” Justin asked tetchily. There was a vague whimper from the prostrate turnip farmer. The visitor held tight to the corner of the filing cabinet.
“Why do you have these shiny floors? I couldn’t even bloody stop in the corridor. Ended up all the way down at Complaints.”
“There’s a Complaints?”
“Sign on the door said they’d gone to lunch. Back 1845.”
Justin glanced at his fake Patek Phillippe. “That’s only twenty minutes.”
“Don’t think so. The note was dated 1791. What’s he doing?” He pointed to the floor, where Geoffrey pivoted up and down like a flapping sheet.
“He’s got a thing about gods. Worship and all that.”
“Blimey, that brings back a few memories.” He glanced to Justin’s screen. “Oooh. You’ve been looking at that Faithbook strand. Clever, isn’t it? Mind you, Mercury would have been here today if he hadn’t immersed himself in, well, mercury. Covered in blotches, apparently.”
“Can I get up, O great God?” The voice from the floor was muffled.
Pan thought about it for a moment. In recent times he was more likely to end up in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not than gaze upon a believer, and it seemed a shame to abbreviate the episode unnecessarily. He did, nevertheless, have a job to do, so he murmured assent. Geoffrey rose and pointlessly brushed the front of his clothing with his hands. This removed the odd clump of dust but the remnants of meals, inveigled into the fabric over decades, were made of sterner stuff. You could have fed undiscerning families from one of his sweaters.
“I was thinking of doing it myself actually.” Pan said. “You know, post a picture of myself on that thread. Up to my neck in cooking pots. What do you think?”
“Oh, go for it mate.” said Justin. “Nothing likelier to gain additional respect for a deity than knowing he uses Le Creuset.”
“Why are we privileged with your presence, O Pan?” Geoffrey asked, in his ‘talking to a God’ voice.
“Do you mean philosophically or literally?” asked the God, his hooves sliding momentarily away from him, causing him to lunge at a desk as he skated across the floor.
“Yes.” said Geoffrey.
“Well, I’ve got a message. From God.”
“That’s what they all say.” Justin said. Pan gave him a stern look.
“You are Marcel, right? He’s Geoffrey, I can tell. He was described to me as a walking rubbish dump. They said you were stylish, handsome and reprehensible. I can only see the last one of those.”
“That’s, er, not Marcel.” Geoffrey said.
“Well, where is he? He should be here. It’s in his contract.”
“He’s, er, in the toilet.”
“I’ll wait, then.”
“Oh,” said Justin, “I wouldn’t do that. He’s got a bit of a problem. Could be hours.”
Pan gripped the corner of the desk and sniffed, considering his options. This place, especially the slippery floor, was not the ideal environment for a half man half goat (there isn’t one, in truth).
“Well. I’ll give you the message, but he had better be involved in doing what it asks. That’s what the contract says. It needs this old bloke with the spillage down his front and the Frenchman. Or else.”
“Or else what?” asked Geoffrey, well aware that he was dead and ‘else’ therefore lacked some jeopardy.
“Not for me to say really.” Said Pan. “Never good, though, is it? Else?”
“What’s the message?” asked Justin, a tad impatient to get back to his computer.
“It’s in my pocket. One of you needs to get it.” Pan said.
Geoffrey and Justin looked at him. The hand holding the cabinet was white-knuckled, gripping it tightly. Even so, one hoof or other would every now and then slide away and he would reaffirm his grip. The wooden object was clasped in the other hand just as tightly. Firm upper body, fairly grubby, matted hindquarters. No obvious pocket. The beast stared at them and then gestured with his eyes and head to his thigh.
“Well, I’m not fumbling about in there.” Said Justin.
“One of you has to get it.” He stared at them, eyes simply black pupils. “Or I play my pipes.” He waved the wood. The threat was clear. They may not be able to characterise ‘else’, but this was clear and present danger. The wooden pipes were held up for them to see; the prospect of this figure honking through Enya’s greatest hits in the near future was too much to take.
“Oh, bloody hell.” Justin said, and took the couple of paces to where the God clung to the desk. He tentatively teased the indicated area on Pan’s thigh, pulling aside greasy fleece, and then locating an opening. He slipped the tips of his fingers in, and looked up at the bearded face. Pan nodded.
Justin looked to the floor and slid his fingers deeper into the fleece. It was warm and oily, but he couldn’t feel anything else, although he moved his hand around. He glanced up, and noted that Pan had his head thrown slightly back, so that he could see the mottled throat beneath the curled beard. He saw the Adam’s apple rise and plunge.
“That’s it.” said Pan, throatily, “Just there.”
Justin thrust his hand in deeper, puzzled. The pocket seemed empty. He was vaguely aware of a groan above him.
“Where is it? I can’t find it.” He pulled his hand from the pocket. He was suddenly aware of the quickness of Pan’s breath.
“It’s in the other one.” Pan said.
Geoffrey held the folded papers, looking at Justin, at his terminal, a blank look on his face. Pan had tottered back down the corridor, one hand upon the wall all the way, a satisfied look on his face.
“Are you alright?” Asked Geoffrey.
“I think I’ve just wanked off a god.”
“I’m not sure he actually…you know.”
“How would you tell, with all that hair?” Justin shivered, grimaced.
“Anyway,” Geoffrey waved the sheaf of paper. “We got the message. That’s the important thing. Just took a bit of rummaging.”
Justin glared at him.
“By me. What does it say?”
Geoffrey opened up the paper and scanned it quickly.
“Something to do with the apocalypse.” He said.
Justin extended a hand and took the papers from the old man. He read the pages, and looked up to Geoffrey, who was staring at him expectantly.
“Bloody Hell. It’s only the apocalypse.” He said.
“That’s what I said.” said Geoffrey. “What’s an apocalypse?”
Messages from God. As you would suspect, sheer passage of time would dictate that they are manifold. Some of them may even have been messages from God.
Moses kicked it off, and you have to have respect for the effort involved whether the message was genuine or a fraud. It could be supposed that etching a few stones is no big deal for The Supreme Being, but let’s face it, he’s not Superman. No X-Ray vision or eyes that send out hot rays to carve stone. W have to assume God would have had to set apart a few days to chip away at the tablets, because as any monumental mason would tell you, not every Tom, Dick, or Yahweh can just pitch up and keep a straight line with a chisel.
The Hebrew prophets claimed direct communication, but there is a pretty good chance they were on the make; Joan of Arc heard the voice of God (‘Can you smell that? Have you left the gas on?”); don’t even th
ink of listing the heads of ludicrous 20th century churches; Popes have full-on conversations, allegedly; almost any American Evangelist will actually give you instruction online to hear the voice of God; there is a Facebook page that allows you to save messages from God so that you don’t forget them. On the last point. Is that likely? Shopping list, prescription, PIN, message from God…
Justin and Geoffrey actually had one. A real one. The Antiques Roadshow would have killed for it, a fact Justin had not overlooked, but before he could make any money from it, the message suggested there was a little matter of an apocalypse to sort out.
“We are, apparently, approaching the End Times.” Justin looked from the paper to Geoffrey, adopting a serious look that didn’t mask lack of knowledge.
“That’s nice; isn’t it?” Geoffrey asked.
They looked it up. Final battle between Good and Evil; many slaughtered; dead rise up, and so on.
“So. I think that sounds quite serious.” Justin had reseated himself and was once more waving the message in front of him. Geoffrey nodded.
“It appears that we. No! Haha! You. And Marcel. Are to play a key part in the final battle.”
“He’s not here, is he?” said Geoffrey.
“Well, we know that Geoff, but there’s nothing we can do about it is there?”
“There is when the alternative is ‘else’.”
“It’s probably not that bad.” Justin was unconcerned.
“’Else’ is always bad. Or why would it always be used? This, or else. That, or else. ‘Else’ is bad, that’s just a truth. We need to find Marcel.” He paused. “What have we got to do?”
“Oh, some old bollocks concerning those tossers in the Afterworld. It’s all here anyway, if you’re bothered.” He tossed the paper onto the nearest desk.
“Aren’t you bothered? End of the world, good or evil, all that?”
“Not really.” Justin sneered. “Never actually ends up that way does it? Apple versus Microsoft? Still going aren’t they? Ali versus Frasier? The ultimate fight? Been plenty of others since. Margarine or butter? Just fats, aren’t they?”
“I don’t know what any of that means, but we need to find Marcel. You can help me because you are a computer expert.”
“Oh. Wow, bit busy at the moment, Geoff. Got a glitch in my Cobol architecture. If I don’t fix it I could lose all my Ramage.”
“I don’t know what that means, either.”
Justin was loath to admit that he made it up. Instead, he just gave Geoffrey a serious look and a point of his finger, before turning back to his screen. The Cumbrian stared at the pieces of paper bearing the message. Marcel had taught him to read, but only in two categories: the words that appeared on the screens of the Afternet, which were highly subject-oriented; and the English subtitles from a Spanish version of Poldark, because Marcel found the translation hilarious and scatological.
He flicked back on his screen to the last sighting of Marcel, pinned to the floor by some enormous men in loin cloths apparently in retribution for pouring a vat of coconut juice over the head of the Sumatran god of Mercy. This in a Heaven devoted to Morris Dancing. A band of men in white shirts and trousers, bells around their knees, hats decked with sheaves of grain, handkerchiefs in hand, looked on in some astonishment from behind.
That was weeks ago. Where had his friend been since then? Perhaps he was dead? Well, deader? Geoffrey ran through the latest messages on the news feed from DNN, to see if there was any mention of random acts of violence or confrontation taking place, but apart from a general alert concerning a Reaper who had caused a major fuck up and was now on the run, there was nothing of interest. He sat back and ran his fingers through his hair, dislodging several chunks of detritus that fell softly to the floor around his chair, then for want of anything else to do, clicked on the story about the errant bringer of death. He jerked forward.
Everybody in the Afterworld had met death, but not all had met Death. A visitation from one of the army of harvesters was reserved in the main for those with an inherent sense of drama, whilst most people simply preferred to void their bowels and make the transition. Geoffrey, for example, freezing to death with his penis in an icy pond, had rather floated out of life, a fact for which he was grateful, having no exhibitionist tendencies. Those who are ‘blessed’ with a visitation, just so that they know what is happening to them, will never forget the face, shrouded though it is in the dark cowl, of the figure signifying their end. Geoffrey would never forget the features of the incompetent Reaper he and Marcel had hired to procure them a computer expert to fix the Afternet; the one who brought them the man now sitting behind him trying to figure out where his mouse had gone, and who knew as much about fixing a computer as the 7th century turnip farmer knew about cooking beef sous-vide.
The gods, and indeed those at the summit of AARGH (Allied Association of Reapers, Grim and Horrible), took little time to consider what was actually going on in death, or the bit in-between, and certainly not life. The Afternet was a pretty vague thing for most of them. So now, there were folks running around trying to find an errant Reaper, when they had a computer system that could actually locate every single one. The Afternet ran a sub-routine that kept track of all of those bringing about termination by apparition, and could locate them whether they were pushing some sucker off a mountain in Nepal or having a cup of tea at the Association’s Social Club.
Geoffrey pulled up Deathfinder and typed in the ID of the useless associate, waiting for the machine to work through the massive number of variables. To his right, the flashing stream of processed dead slowed marginally, and to his right the news that Davidge’s Earmite was no longer in the game registered on the Extinction Clock. A large egg-timer rotated on the blue screen.
When it stopped, a new screen told Geoffrey that the Reaper, this Reaper, had found himself a hideaway somewhere in the heavens to escape the opprobrium of his governing body. It was hard though, in the Faithbook age, to find a Heaven where there wasn’t some errant deity flashing your image onto screens throughout the Afternet, and the old man, intrigued, clicked on the location for further information.
It was a strange one. The overwhelming need of the dead is for company, and preferably like-minded company. They start with the idea that the company they really want is their significant other, the ‘Don’t worry Doris, we’ll be together in heaven’ kind of Heaven. Doris, of course, may have other ideas, and she could well clasp the hand as it turns cold, smile to give him the certainty of reunion, and then when she keels over head for something that looks very much like Ibiza. This heaven was much more like Tierra Del Fuego, only without the nuclear submarines.
There were four people there, he noted, one of whom was the AWOL Reaper. Unless this was a Heaven for someone who fancied a hand of bridge it was uncommonly sparsely populated. Three men, one woman. Strangely, only one of them had selected this as a location forever. The Reaper he knew, of course. The fugitive did not actually have an option to select the environment in which he would spend eternity, not least because he had a job delivering the opportunity to others. The others? Just some random nymphs or fauns, he thought.
He parked that and searched Heavens for the whole day. The sheer diversity of imagination that created these places made his head reel. Perhaps they had gone to a Hell? This seemed unlikely considering the efforts Marcel had made to stay out of it, or them. Behind him Justin muttered and banged his keyboard, and the clock continued to tick over its charting of the end of life on earth for something organic. LA Law flickered away on the TV screen above him, ignored. Even the lure of Susan Day was not enough to drag Geoffrey’s eyes from the system through which he searched.
He took his supper (beans, fried beans and refried beans; what he liked to call ‘Trio of Beans’) to his desk, where a screensaver gradually built a montage of the face of every Pope ever. He could hear gentle snoring from the desk behind him, the exhalation ruffling a sheaf of papers on Justin’s desk, like someone flicking
through a pack of cards. He spattered black bean sauce onto his beans, began shovelling them into his mouth with a spoon held like a hammer.
Geoffrey tapped his screen awake, looked through the line of open tabs, remembered the one regarding the whereabouts of The Reaper, opened it. He clicked onto the link for the Heaven and was rewarded with a close up of the nitwit, who was bending forward with his hand extended, a grin on his face possibly intended to be reassuring but actually deeply worrying. He was holding out a plate of food, but there was something wrong with the colour on the feed, making the dish appear in several shades of grey, perhaps forty short of a novel. There was movement behind the Reaper’s head, a shape pitching forward and back. Probably one of the other bridge partners, thought Geoffrey, clicking to zoom in, spoon upright in the same fist and dripping a melange of bean juice onto the keyboard.
The Reaper moved out of focus as whatever was occurring behind him became sharper. Geoffrey moved his hand to bring up sound, multi-bean ooze slithering across the back and over his wrist to where it formed long dark pearls pulled slowly downwards by gravity. There was a sharp coughing, gurgling noise. Beyond the fuzzy cowl of the Reaper’s cloak, the back of a head bobbed in and out of view in rhythm with the barking soundtrack. Finally, a bright red face rose into view, eyes bulging, tears pouring over its cheeks. It was a very odd colour, and looked as though it was on the top of a corpse hooked out of a canal after several days; strange slaver on its chin like a mad dog, hair upright and matted with sweat like a mad man. There was something familiar about it.
The pale, spattered lips moved and the sound emerged from the speaker slightly out of synch.
“Jesu Reppair! Whert did you poot een zat?”
Justin stirred, adjusted his head where it rested on his folded arms. “Hello Marcel.” Geoffrey muttered.
He hit pause. Of course! He stared at the vaguely blurred face, and realised that this was indeed Marcel. Sweating, strained, and covered in puke, but Marcel for all that. The accent was a bit of a shock. After the first few weeks of their two hundred years together, he had not really noticed that his companion was so French. He re-started the feed and zoomed out. The Reaper had turned to Marcel, who was on his knees in front of a pool of sick, and in the foreground, Mary was tipping the contents of a plate over the edge of a cliff. There was no sign of the fourth bloke. Perhaps he was washing up.
The Complete Afternet: All 3 Volumes In One Place (The Afternet) Page 78
