The Complete Afternet: All 3 Volumes In One Place (The Afternet)

by Peter Empringham

  After some more digging, Geoffrey managed to locate the parallel dimension Marcel currently occupied, and located the final occupant, who was actually the only one supposed to be there. He was as far away from the others as it was possible to be, but he was at least close to the Everywhere Door and its postbox. Geoffrey turned to Justin to ask for help writing a note explaining everything to his colleague, but he was sound asleep. Leaning forward on the desk he exhaled in a low drone, every now and then jerking his head up from his arms and exclaiming “Millions! Millions!”.

  He grabbed a piece of paper from amongst the mess on his desk and wiped some congealed hummus from the corner, then tentatively picked up the stub of pencil he kept handy for cleaning his ears. With the tip of his tongue flicking across his lower lip and his face tensed in concentration, he bent close to the paper and slowly formed the curls and lines he thought made up the words he needed Marcel to read. It was slow and painstaking but in his mind’s eye he saw the Spanish Demelza, bosoms cantilevered beyond natural science, hair flaring in the distinctly non-Cornwall breeze as her mouth moved rapidly to pronounce whatever Catalan words might add up to the ones he pictured on the screen.

  His body was rigid with the effort when he had done. His shoulders had become pinched and his fingers gripped the stubby pencil as though he were hanging onto a handhold on K2. He felt the stiffening of the muscles across his back and the ache in his forearms, but most of all the tension in his head as if the concentration were shrinking his cranium, pushing it inwards to force out the memory of what the words looked like. He shook himself, shivered involuntarily. Hands shaking, he gazed at the words as if he could make them come to life, pronounce themselves out loud to him to prove that they were the ones he needed. Justin snuffled and whimpered, perhaps the millions were drifting away. Geoffrey folded the paper. It would have to do.

  17

  “It was my own fault, really,” said the Reaper, warming his hands on a mug of Earl Grey, “I just got out of practice, living the good life; well, you saw me. Lured by the hedonism of the living.”

  They had indeed seen him, in a shabby shared house in London, air thick with dope, holding down a job in some people-pestering call centre. It was grubby and onanistic, hardly the Bohemian high-living he seemed to be suggesting.

  “I had to reap the odd punter now and again, just to keep my licence, or I would have had to leave AARGH, and when you’re a bringer of death it’s tough to move jobs. Even though you know you want to move on, people still look at you as if you’re going to strike them down at any moment.”

  They did look at him. His cloak swept onto the floor, the cowl hooded his face which, when the candles flickered in the right direction, was eerily lit in white and shadow, eyes dark-ringed.

  “Do you have a change of clothing?” asked Marcel.

  “Well, I’ve just got loads of these really.” He pinched at the fabric of his sweeping gown. “Standard issue. Although I reckon they’re cutting back on the fabric. The new ones are poly/cotton, but the older guys used to get hundred percent ratwool.”

  “Ratwool? Is there such a thing?”

  “If you get enough rats. Really fine weave and very hard wearing. This, on the other hand, is just a cost-cutting exercise. Any arterial blood and the thing is in shreds.”

  “So you’ve been going to job interviews dressed like that. With the scythe and all?”

  “People need to take me as I am, Mary.”

  “In my experience that has never been a realistic approach to getting a job, even if you aren’t dressed as Death. Anyway, you were telling us how you happened to be here, in the middle of nowhere, hiding in a cave.”

  “Oh, yes. Well, there was a bit of a cock-up on the death front.”

  “Another one?” He seemed befuddled and then his black-ringed eyes widened as he looked back at her.

  “Ah. Yes, well. Anyway there was a misunderstanding with some German bloke. Their alphabet is really hard to read, isn’t it?”

  “It’s the same alphabet.”

  “Really? That probably explains it. Anyway, bad brief, all that, took out the wrong person in rather horrific circumstances, fire, defenestration and the like, you know, snakes. Somehow it all came to be my fault.”

  “Sorry, but fire, defenestration, snakes? Where was this?”

  “Small village on the Rhine. Turns out it should have been some perv missionary in the Congo. Hence the snakes. Try finding them in Bad Godesberg; not an easy task, I can tell you.”

  “So you’re on the run?”

  “Desperado, that’s me. I needed somewhere to gather my thoughts, you know, figure out whether I’m really cut out for the death business. I wanted somewhere quiet, so I went on blissadvisor.com and found this place. Only supposed to have one inhabitant, so I don’t know what you’re doing here tripling the population.”

  “There’s a website?” Mary was incredulous.

  “Of course. One thing I learned living on earth is that there is nothing so niche that there isn’t a website for it. Anyway, what are you two up to? I don’t know much, but it seems that whenever I see you there’s some major shit going down.”

  “Just a break.” said Marcel, firmly, “Change of scenery.”

  “Oh, yeah, right.” said the Reaper, with a bundle of disbelief.

  There’s a massive advantage to a Heaven, even if it is the product of someone else’s imagination, and that is, rather like Alice’s restaurant, you can get anything you want (excepting Alice). The interior of the Hermit’s cave demonstrated perfectly that just because you want to live entirely on your own in a desert wasteland it doesn’t mean you can’t have a decent stereo. The hermit nudged that door ajar, and the other, unwelcome, inhabitants of his solitude were only too happy to give it a really hard shove and walk into whatever emporium of delights may lie beyond.

  Mary and Marcel managed to equip their own accommodation with a decent fridge and self-replenishing contents, as well as a restaurant-grade cooking range. The latter was chosen on the back of the Reaper’s claims that one of the many talents he had picked up in his stay in the live world (along with a love for afternoon television and the ability to make the noise of a fart by putting his hand in his armpit) was the art of creative cooking. Of course the last time they had met him he was living in what was essentially a student squat- they should have known that what passed for haute cuisine in that milieu would have been rejected out of hand by any self-respecting kebab turner.

  The disparity in understanding became evident the first night he cooked for them. They sat on the ledge watching the sinking sun, listening, impressed, to the whooshing of flame and sizzling of pans, accompanied by foul-mouthed bollockings aimed at imaginary staff. The delivered result was a grey mixture with something sloppy spooned on top of something else sloppy.

  “Voila!” declaimed the Reaper, “Haché avec ris gris!”

  Marcel held the plate in front of him, watching the slow wobble of the outpouring it bore.

  “Do you speak French, Reaper?” he asked.

  “Only in culinary terms.”

  “Have you served this to anyone who can speak French?”

  “There was Sago, back at the flat in London. He was a right card. He could speak French but only under the influence of Diazepam. I think it was French.”

  “So where did you get the name for this?”

  “Gogol. The search engine? It just has an amazing translate function. Really useful when you’ve got to knock over a Portugese cleaner in Lambeth. Ease their passing, you know?”

  Marcel looked at The Reaper, massive and white-faced, cape billowing and hood throwing moving shadows across his skull-like face. He wondered whether the search engine would be able to come up with any description, in any language, to make this figure seem more palatable.

  “This…” Marcel flicked a small amount of the turgid food with his fingernail, “…is like nothing I’ve ever seen. However, I have to give Gogol some credit. It is indeed ‘mi
nce with grey rice’. I have never heard of grey rice. There is no such thing as grey rice.”

  The Reaper pointed to the plate, his eyebrows raised. There obviously is, was his intimation, and you are looking at it right now.

  “In any case,” The Reaper said, “it doesn’t matter to you. Everything tastes disgusting.” His observation was correct. To Marcel, everything tasted vile, putrescent, stale, poisonous. However that wasn’t his central point here.

  “Reaper. There are three elements to the enjoyment of food, and I have only been robbed of one of them. They are: appearance, aroma, and taste. Taste is the one we come to last having been lured in by the first two. I already know how this is going to taste. It is a remarkable achievement to match that foulness with its predecessors, but you have done it. I’m not going to taste it, but if I did, I believe I would finally discover what ‘grey’ tastes like; an ambition I have never had and therefore feel no urge to fulfil.”

  It doesn’t look that bad.” His face, so blank, nonetheless twitched with an intimation of hurt. “I’m sure it will be lovely, Reaper.”

  He didn’t take his eyes off her as she forked into her mouth a globular mess of what might once have been meat mixed with over-boiled rice, and rolled her eyes upward as if giving it deep consideration.”

  “Mmmm.” she said, finally.

  “Thought you’d like it. One of my specialities.” The Reaper bounced back into the cave to get his own portion. Mary almost ran to the edge of the canyon and in a most unladylike manner projected the mouthful into the void. This was followed quickly by the glutinous mass covering the rest of her plate. It fell very slowly and eventually landed on the valley floor in a puff of dust, where it was studiously ignored by starving scavengers.

  “Christ.” she said. “I’ve never tasted anything like that.”

  “Welcome to my palate.” Marcel said, grimly.

  The days were a journey through the horror of student cooking as brought to fruition by Death himself. Ingredients of supreme quality and freshness were boiled, braised, and fried into submission until duckling, lobster, coté d’agneau, or fillet steak was served colourless and tasting of cloth, on beds of vegetables or pasta that due to some unidentifiable science, were uniformly grey. They drank ice cold beer, ate ready meals while the Reaper took his afternoon nap, and added the latest slurry to the growing heap at the foot of the canyon wall.

  It was early evening, a warm breeze whipping up tiny tornadoes of dust along the broad ledge in front of their caves, the only sounds the wind’s whisper through the sparse foliage clinging to the sides of the canyon and the stentorian grind of the Reaper snoring within the mountain behind them. Mary had a cold beer set in the dusty ground to her side, and sat barefoot, legs flat on the ground in a ‘v’, making small hills from the sandy earth.

  “Could you just stay here? You know, forever?” She squinted sideways to Marcel, who had relaxed enough to remove his suit jacket.

  “I’d want a different chef.”

  “You could learn to cook.”

  “Not if I only had forever. Apart from which, the only forever I am going to get involves boiling, flaying, and disembowelling. This is just delaying it all, really, isn’t it.” It wasn’t a question. He picked pebbles from the path and flipped them at intervals over the edge. She hadn’t really thought of it that way. When they ran from the Control Room Mary had assumed that there was some way out of his fate, that there really might be somewhere they could hide for eternity.

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “Oh, I look at in two ways. First I feel disappointed that a few short years on earth, admittedly behaving in a pretty appalling manner, get punished forever, and ever, and ever. Doesn’t matter what I think now, how I behave now, what I do to others.”

  He didn’t meet her gaze, just looked down to the earth and picked up the small stones before tossing them. She couldn’t remember seeing him like this, a self-awareness in him that was new and contemplative.

  “And second?” Without realising it, she was holding her breath.

  “Second I just hope I get one chance to get to that red-eyed horny bastard and rip his eyes out and burn his mother and his brothers and sisters if he has any and slaughter anyone who has anything to do with him.”

  This was delivered in the same measured tone. She exhaled.

  “Don’t you feel different towards people, after all this time?”

  “He’s not people.”

  “I didn’t mean him. Geoffrey for example. I know you pretend to dislike him; I know he is unbelievably frustrating. But still, two centuries? I saw you when you thought he was going to get burned to cinders by Al Capone.”

  “He’s alright. Can’t help being a half-wit.”

  “Justin?”

  “I knew he was a fraud as soon as he arrived. All that jargon. Poseur. Never stops thinking about making money, whoever suffers. Absolutely no morals whatsoever. Yeah, he’s alright I suppose.”

  “And me?”

  Marcel dropped the pebbles, briefly ran a finger through the dust and turned to look at her. In the lowering sun, now deep red, shimmering as it began its dip beneath the horizon, her skin seemed flawless and almost caramel in colour, as if you could dip your finger and find only liquid sweetness. Her hair, a testament to the failure of products promising control, lifted and swayed in the gentle breeze, revealing a long, delicate neck, a vein pulsing gently as he she stared at him awaiting his response.

  “And you, Mary?” Oh those dark eyes, unblinking. The black stubble, the hair flopping and flapping in the same breeze. Those eyes fixed on hers, and he proffered the hint of a smile. She leaned forward, just a centimetre, just an incline of the head, but a gesture that shortened the space between them, perhaps created a minute change in the pressure of the air. Marcel flicked his head to one side and back to her, began to open his mouth and then closed it again abruptly, looked again to the expanse of desert laid out before them.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  “What?” She thought he might be doing that thing where a prospective partner pretends to notice some iota of fibre or dust on your face, using that as an excuse to touch the cheek, turn the touch into a caress.

  “It’s something moving.” A deep sonorous voice came from the mouth of the cave behind them. She turned quickly and saw The Reaper, in grimy underwear, yawning and stretching his arms to the sky.

  “How long have you been there?” she asked. She didn’t really want Death appraising her misty eyes when looking at Marcel.

  “Couple of minutes. Great sleep. I dreamed that I won Masterchef.”

  “Not going to happen,” said Marcel, still gazing towards the sinking sun, “unless you’ve reaped all the other contestants. And the judges.”

  The Reaper looked hurt. Mary turned to look in the direction that had so fascinated Marcel, and sure enough, there was a tiny black shape bobbing against the red ball.

  “It’s just an animal of some sort. Coyote maybe.”

  The bobbing continued and eventually the shape began to look taller than it was wide, and after much more time took on the outline of a distant person in silhouette. The sun became ragged edged as its meniscus began to fringe the skyline, and the shape took on light and shade, portrayed a walk demonstrating some high dudgeon, thereafter definable as the hermit, and eventually stopped at the foot of the sheer cliff upon which they rested.

  “How do I get up?” His voice was thin and reedy, lost in the endless space beneath them.

  “You can’t.” Marcel said. “It’s impassable.”

  “Fuck off. None of this is in my heaven, you know, tossers turning up all the time and then being asked to carry messages for them.”

  “Get your bedpan, Reap, let’s give him the works.” said Marcel.

  “Just a minute, Marcel,” Mary grabbed his arm, “he says he has a message.”

  “Anyone would say that, wouldn’t they? If they thought they were going to get access to the
Michelin starred delights we have the pleasure of every night.” He leaned back and called over his shoulder to the pale, wraith-like figure scratching himself at the mouth of the cave. “What’s on the menu tonight, Heston?”

  “Fricasée du lapin,” the Reaper said with the French accent of a twelve year old in an underperforming school, “en croute.” Mary felt a hint of reflux in anticipation.

  “I don’t want your food.” The hermit yelled, squinting up at them. “I don’t want a conversation, and I don’t want you here. I have a horrible feeling that if you come here, some piss-ant god won’t be far behind, under the misapprehension that it’s some kind of dude ranch. I don’t even want to bring you the message, I just have a desperate hope it might remove you from my Heaven.”

  “We’re not exactly noisy neighbours, are we?” Mary said.

  “You’re neighbours. That’s problem enough.”

  “Bit anti-social, aren’t you?”

  “Well, duh! Look around at what I dreamed of. Look, I’m going to leave this here,” he waved a piece of paper, then bent and placed it on the orange desert soil, “and you can come and get it if you like. I wouldn’t leave it too long, though, because I also apparently dreamed of gusts of wind and small furry creatures happy to snack on paper.”

  “Oh, come on.” Marcel waved his beer bottle. “Come up and have a margarita. You wouldn’t believe it to look at him, but The Reaper does a passable Tom Cruise in Cocktail.”

  “Piss off. Both now and permanently.” He turned abruptly and began to retrace his steps. They watched the film rewind as his shape became less defined, then just bobbing black, a dot, gone.