Grim

by Gavin McCallion

  'Now I'm going to march out there, and I'm going to find my daughter, and we're going to have a g-great wee day. We'll watch Star Wars together, the new one. The new one in 1999. And I'm sorry if you won't join us, but before I leave, are you able to tell me...' He took his finger from Tom's face and pointed at the tablet. 'Is this some kind of map?'

  After a tense moment in which Grim held the tablet away from his head like it might explode or bite him, Tom laughed. In that little rant, Grim said the words 'my daughter' twice, and he had no right to. So he laughed for a bit. 'Y'know what I've always wanted to do?' he asked between chortles.

  Grim looked around the room for the source of his amusement before answering. 'No, no I don't.'

  Tom loaded a punch with about twenty years of frustration and fired it right into Grim's face. Twenty years in which he couldn't punch him because of May or because he had the cheek to go and die before he got the chance.

  Shortly after, he put Grim out the door on his arse.

  Back in the living room, amongst the mess The Reaper created when he and his spectacular limbs went crashing to earth, was his tablet.

  With a smile, Tom picked it up.

  Like a cherry on top of the punch, Tom now had a computer for his "computer" room.

  For a second, he thought the day would start to go his way. 'His way' in this sense, referred to his desire to collapse on the couch, look at weird stuff on his new computer, then fall asleep until the pub opened.

  ~

  The day was not about to go his way.

  Jesus, to think that the 26th November was the most important day of my life and he almost spent it sleeping, drinking and wanking.

  C'mon Dad.

  ~

  Fourteen

  Death of a Boxer

  When Jo McIvor was thirteen, she got into a fight at school.

  Hayley Whatserface found out Jo stuck her tongue in Hayley's boyfriend's mouth. It was true, she did. The boy didn't exactly fight her off, but nobody cared. Ten minutes later, Hayley had Jo by the hair amongst a circle of blood-thirsty teenagers. Hayley Whatserface scratched her and clawed her and slapped her and kicked her... and the crowd went nuts.

  They were having the time of their lives watching Jo get ragdolled around the playground. She was the bad guy in this story, after all. Everybody wanted her to suffer.

  She did not.

  Jo used her fists for the first time in her career and Hayley ended up unconscious in seconds.

  Everyone went quiet for a bit, and then they started to cheer.

  Jo learned what she wanted to do for a living.

  Jo McIvor had a gift for punching people. She broke jaws, she broke teeth, she broke everything she touched with a savage ferocity. She joined a gym with a ring. She destroyed everyone. This wasn't an underdog story; the underdog who rarely swung a fist; the underdog who simply lived for the mantra of just get back up; no, she hated the underdog. She took that mantra as a personal fucking challenge. Nobody got back up if she hit them.

  The gym recommended her for some amateur fights on the mainland.

  She won them all comfortably.

  Bigger names scouted her. Killer women from elsewhere in the world that wanted a swing.

  She ripped them apart. She could not be stopped. She was indestructible, a force of nature, a star shining brightly in the dim of Wilson's Well with nothing but fame ahead of her.

  She died on the 26th of November 2016.

  ~

  Jo lived in a lovely house on the island's coastline, not too far from the port. She picked a decent-sized home, decorated like a full family lived there - with photo frames, pine woods, big furniture and big technology. Jo wanted to retire young and start a family, so she set up her home to accommodate it.

  Attached to the side of the house was a garage that had been ripped out and replaced with a training room. Every morning Jo got up, ate a good breakfast and entered the garage via the side door. She always opened the shutter, regardless of the weather; the fresh air was nice when she started training. There was a selection of weights and mats, a fridge stocked with cold water, a treadmill, a cross-trainer, and a heavy punch-bag strung up from the joists in the middle. She built the rest of the house for her future, she built her garage for now - every inch designed to keep her on track, nothing out of place, broken, rotten or wrong.

  Jo knocked the hell out of her punch-bag on the morning she died.

  Some mornings she had an extra instinct making her hit harder. She worked fast, dancing around the bag. Not an inch of it went unpunished.

  She had something to work for. The night before, her agent informed her a man wanted to take her on in a gym fight that couldn't officially be sanctioned.

  Naturally, she accepted. Gender wouldn't stop her. Jo didn't have limits.

  But unfortunately, her heart did.

  Her condition wasn't life-threatening, only limiting her use of substances designed to accelerate her heart rate. The doctor told her, early on, she wouldn't be affected at all if she treated herself right. That was, of course, before she got herself involved in a profession begging her adrenaline to be constantly up in the air.

  That morning, with that new fight in her, she felt her heart struggle. She fought through. She wouldn't stop. She wouldn't be stopped. She wouldn't be held back by the limitations of her stupid body.

  If anything, when she began to struggle, she pushed harder. Her breathing turned to jabs, sweat poured from her skin, the blood pulsing in her ears deafened her.

  She didn't hear Grim wander up her driveway towards the garage.

  ~

  Back in Height, Grim listened as Judge Rabbit explained some key points to him about his job for the day.

  First up, he handed Grim the suitcase which held his cloak. He asked Grim to put it on and promise never to take it off.

  'This cloak, my boy, this cloak will make sure you're where you're supposed to be when you're supposed to be there. If you let the cloak guide you, you'll show up where someone will be dying.'

  'O-okay...' Grim replied, and then he swung it on over his suit, buttoned it to the top and pulled the hood up.

  'Grand.' The Judge then directed him to the other thing in the case: the schedule, AKA the tablet he didn't know he would leave at his arse when Tom kicked him out.

  Judge Rabbit explained that the schedule was his calendar for the day. The schedule would tell him who was dying and at what time they were dying, as well as a whole host of information to be used in conjunction with the cloak.

  Grim looked at the surface - to him, just a piece of flat, black plastic that 1999 didn't see coming - as though it were alien technology from any of his sci-fi flicks. 'R-right...'

  'Grand.' The Judge carried on again, pulling Grim's attention back to himself as he told him that to send a ghost, he only had to touch them. 'The ghosts will pop out of the corpse after death, and it'll be at the time shown on the schedule, to the second, do you understand? The cloak will tell you where, but the tablet will tell you the exact time to arrive. Ghost pops out, tap-tap-tap, ghost pops off. Cricket?'

  'Y-yes...'

  ~

  I'm afraid I have to side with the lunatic for a minute here. For all of Judge Rabbit's flaws, he couldn't be faulted on his clarity during that conversation.

  Still, Grim made a complete arse of it.

  In fairness to him, he didn't know how to use the schedule, nor did he remember to pick it up before Tom escorted him from the McKay house. All he had to guide him was the cloak, but it only knew roughly where to be and at what time. The cloak could tell what time it was, and when he wasn't near enough to the send to make it on time. To correct the issue, it made Grim shake, stutter, hot, bothered and uncomfortable until he moved in the direction of his next send.

  The cloak led him by the hand to the garage of Jo McIvor; he was early.

  If he had the schedule, he would've shown up just in time to see Jo's spirit pop out of her body. She would already be dead
. Death designed the schedule to operate this way. It provided The Reaper with the exact window in which he should sneak into the hospital room. The exact moment where the grieving family around the corpse have all shut their eyes or are blinded by tears. The exact moment, to the second, when a Reaper could make the send without being bothered. Death built the schedule in such a way that arriving precisely when it said would guarantee complete anonymity.

  It needed training, practice and a firm hand on the schedule.

  Grim had none of them.

  He didn't know where he was supposed to be, when he was supposed to be there or even who he was supposed to send. He was a big goofy labrador in a black cloak, expected to send the ghost of a semi-pro boxer.

  ~

  As Grim wandered up the drive, Jo parried back, dodged left and swung in with a big shot to the jaw of the punch-bag. She celebrated, eyes closed, dancing around with her hands in the air, taking the applause in and spinning amongst a screaming crowd that adored her. When she opened her eyes, Grim was standing at the entrance to her garage.

  The Reaper of Wilson's Well, cloak and all, waved at her. 'Eh, hello.'

  Jo's heart hurt. She hadn't noticed it before.

  She lowered her arms. 'Alright. Need somethin'?'

  'No, I don't think I do. I eh, I might be at the wrong house.'

  Amongst laboured breathing, Jo nodded. 'Think so.'

  'Kay.' Grim took a couple of steps backwards down the drive, but he tensed up as he did. He made a strange noise like someone had unexpectedly pinched his arse. 'HNG!' He shook his head. 'Nope, nope. This is the right house.'

  'No, it's not.'

  Grim looked around. 'M-maybe. Does anyone else live here?'

  'Nope.'

  'Right. Do you... have any pets?'

  'Nope.'

  'Right, well...' Grim scratched his ear. 'You eh... you feel okay?'

  'Great.' Jo lied. 'Now fuck off.' She tried to take a deep breath. She tried to calm down. She tried to ignore the instinctive fear of death that kicked in around The Reaper. She tried to ignore the horrible shift in temperature in her garage, but her sweat started to freeze to her skin.

  Grim took a nervous step forward. 'Listen, I'm sorry, but-'

  'Nah, I don't die today.'

  'It would certainly seem that way, yes, but... I'm struggling to see an alternative.'

  'Nah.' Jo made fists. She stepped forward. 'Nah.'

  'I'm so very sorry about this.'

  Jo ran at him.

  She ran at The Reaper.

  'Not the face!' Grim cried, lifting his arms.

  Yes, the face. Jo McIvor knocked out The Reaper. It was the last thing she did. She stood above her fallen foe with her heart thumping hard enough to crack ribs, snarling at him. 'OH! Shut down!' She spun and ran back to the punch-bag. 'It's young McIvor against The Reaper himself, and Death doesn't stand a chance!'

  She hit the punch-bag and brought the ceiling down on her head.

  ~

  And that was the death of Jo McIvor.

  I don't want to dwell on the timing thing too much, but had Grim showed up right there, when the ceiling fell, the boy across the road wouldn't have seen it. This boy (a teenager, by the way) liked to watch Jo - sweaty and half-naked - train.

  His Mum needed him for something and summoned him downstairs just before the ceiling fell. He would have missed the whole thing. But because Grim showed up early, this kid saw The Reaper, grabbed his phone, and ignored his Mum when she called.

  It wasn't a peep-show anymore, it was something worth recording.

  Jo McIvor's last act alive was to knock out her constituent Reaper, and she got her fame for it on the internet within the hour.

  Life is cruel like that, sometimes.

  ~

  Fifteen

  Not the Most Grateful Band in the World

  Listen, not to call Grim a wimp or anything, but I took two punches from a giant before I blacked out.

  He woke up with a sore face, I woke up with cracked ribs.

  I think I won, even if I didn't feel like it when I got up.

  I had never felt hurt like it, and my elbow's been broken in so many different places it bends a little in the wrong direction. I lay in my bunk, on my back, perfectly still, because moving felt like being set on fire from the inside out.

  Mute broke me, but I survived.

  A key point of understanding in our little band: fuck-ups weren't tolerated, not when we'd been practising together for as long as we had. That giant bastard once put down a guitarist for breaking a string. A pianist held a note an extra beat, and Mute stomped on him until he stopped moving. Mistakes were not tolerated. Hence why I made sure they didn't happen.

  Until that morning, of course.

  I wasn't quite suicidal (quite). I had a plan: make a mistake, don't die, and prove that for one day we would not be killed. It was the day of the show, our captors didn't have time to kidnap another drummer and integrate them into the band. I had a hunch he wouldn't kill me, and I went for it.

  I had been around since the start and seen a lot of escape attempts; they always ended the same way: Mute caught them, Mute killed them, Mute replaced them.

  Our living space had one unlocked exit - an open invitation to test our luck. There was a maze on the other end of that door, an endless jumble of pitch-black corridors Mute seemed able to navigate with no trouble (we thought he could see in the dark, among his other considerable skills). Nobody lasted longer than a minute out there.

  In a few seconds, the footsteps would start.

  WHOMP. WHOMP. WHOMP.

  When he made his catch, he dragged them back to the living space for the kill. He made us watch.

  A couple of days later, he came back with a replacement.

  Run alone, run in pairs, run in threes.

  Sneak, scream, fight.

  It always ended the same way.

  Catch. Kill. Replace.

  So yeah, I might've proven that Mute wouldn't kill us on game day, but convincing the rest of the band would still take some doing.

  The team lined up as follows:

  I had Bass on my side because he fancied me. He didn't know I like girls; he never asked. Vox - that beautiful, unshaggable minx with the voice of four angels, skipping around the basement like half its population wouldn't climb her like a tree - would more or less go with majority vote. Keys too, but he'd hate the idea vocally (nothing made Keys happy).

  It was Six, my guitarist, who would be the problem. He took umbrage with leadership. He thought himself a rebel, full of snarky remarks, grand bravado, swishy hair and a square jaw with an impossibly well-kept beard for a prisoner in a basement. He liked to argue, and he was going to be a problem.

  I got up.

  It was slow. It was painful. I edged my legs out of bed and my ribcage exploded. I'm too excellent to scream, so I grit my teeth. On my feet, I gave my poor nerve-endings a break for a second before I hobbled to the door.

  A door handle had never given me so much grief in my life.

  It was funny (sort of, but not really). Mute expected me to play a soundcheck and a full three-hour show behind a drum-kit later on, and I struggled to open a door. I don't know what he was thinking when he did this to me. Surely, the show would be in safer hands if he killed me and got a new drummer in, regardless of how unprepared she'd be.

  I managed the door and shuffled out into the living space. In its middle, amongst the sphere of light the little bulb gave us, was a table and a few chairs. Two sets of bunk-beds lived against two of the walls, the bathroom lived against the third, and the escape door was on the back wall. At the back-right of the room sat a small couch and a couple of armchairs, to give the illusion of a comfortable living space, I suppose. On the walls was the entire food chain in action: pictures of predators picking off prey, frozen at the moment of bloody impact. Lion over zebra, shark over bird (in mid-air!), spider over fly, and so on and so on. Two perfect rows of A3 portraits running aroun
d the room. They were unsettling, to say the least. By my room, and beneath the bear swiping a fish out of a river, was a plastered-over and filled-in dumb-waiter. The dumb-waiter travelled up through the house, and when I first discovered it, I almost managed to escape. Almost.

  Three of the band - Vox, Keys and Bass - sat around the table in the centre of the room and turned to me as the door opened.

  I moved with ginger precision. Each step sent a jolt up my side.

  Bass got to his feet. 'Kit, you're up.'

  They called me Kit. Drum-kit. See?

  'Barely,' I grunted.

  Bass hurried over for support, but I waved him off before he got too close.

  He feared my temper at the best of times, so he backed off. Instead, as I approached the communal table, he dragged one of the arm-chairs over and eased me down into it.

  Sometimes he did okay.

  Looking around at the bunks, where light ran out, I saw Six lying on his bed. He faced the wall, probably pretending to be asleep.

  Bass crouched down beside me, closer than I liked. 'How are you feeling?'

  'Fucking grand.' I steered my head from his breath and added, 'you've got a toothbrush, right?'

  Vox produced a box of pills from her pocket, passing them over the table. 'The big man left these. Painkillers, I think.'

  Bass took them from her and handed them to me.

  'Start with the pills.' I glared at him. 'Always start with the pills.' I opened out two of them into my palm and threw them down my throat. 'Fucking idiot.'

  Bass flashed me a good-looking smile. 'You sound fine,' he said, and then returned to his chair at the table.

  Keys spoke up from my left, exclusively through his nose. For a few weeks, I wanted to kill him every time he opened his mouth. 'What happened back there, Kit?' he whined.

  'I eh... I got beat up.'

  'Yeah, but... the crash cymbals? How? Did you just, I dunno, miss?'

  Six decided he was awake. 'She did it on purpose,' he said from his bunk in the shadows.