Death

by George Pendle

  “Death, I need to speak to you,” He boomed. “These people are driving Me crazy. Samson is obsessed with his hair, Solomon is cutting everything in two, and I can barely speak to Job with that persecution complex of his.”

  “Well, Lord God Sir,” I said, “You have been rather rough on Job.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, You had the Sabeans kill all his servants.”

  “Many suffer misfortune, Death.”

  “Yes, but then lightning killed all his sheep.”

  “A mere coincidence,” boomed God.

  “And the Chaldeans ran off with his camels.”

  “Who can answer for the Chaldeans?”

  “Well, who can answer for the mighty wind that blew down his house and killed all his children?”

  “Do you have a problem with My ways, Death?”

  “Oh, don’t get me wrong, O Lord, I don’t mind. It’s all grist to the mill. But were the boils really necessary?”

  “The man should have washed.”

  “And the all-over body rash, that was a bit nasty, wasn’t it? I mean, he was scraping himself with shards of crockery. Crockery that had been broken when a mysterious earthquake destroyed the cave he was hiding in.”

  “Look,” boomed God, “Job was such a goody-goody. Always praising My name or sacrificing in My honor. I couldn’t stand it. Besides, your father said…oh.” The orb drooped.

  I put an arm around the most shoulderlike part of the divine light. “Perhaps You should take some time off, Lord God Sir,” I suggested.

  “Maybe you’re right,” boomed God. “I just feel like everything’s rushing out of My control, that I’m not connecting with people anymore. I used to be able to spot evil a mile off, but I’m losing My touch. Perhaps Creation needs a whole new direction, something less primeval, more ancient. Something the youth can relate to.”

  Job: “You Should See the Other Guy!”

  And with that the divine light turned and slowly disappeared. “I’ll be back in an era or two,” boomed His voice. I noticed that pinned to His back was a note that read TAKE MY NAME IN VAIN. Father had indeed been busy.

  So the Biblical Age ended and was replaced by the Age of Myth, an era of fearful monsters and ironic demises. Sons slew their fathers and married their mothers, wives slew their husbands and were in turn slain by their daughters, uncles killed nieces, nephews murdered aunts, brothers married sisters, and so on and so on. Despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth that accompanied such moments, I was happy to be kept so busy. Transmuting souls into the Darkness calmed me and made me feel part of Creation. My unconventional upbringing had left me with low self-esteem and needy for the approval of others. Now I had the chance to get the approval of every living being that ever existed! By the Age of Myth even the most begrudging of the dead had to admit I was good at my job. Plus it kept me in great shape. One being’s ultimate tragedy is another being’s extreme calisthenics.

  Before He had departed, God had subcontracted His divinity out to a host of minor gods. Interviews had been held in which prospective deities put forward their plans for their respective fields of expertise, and before long a whole new pantheon was created.

  It was confusing at first. There were now gods of love, of war, of rivers, and of trees. There were gods of the hearth, of the threshold, of the alcove, and of the niche. There were even gods for things that had yet to exist. Velocipede, god of the bicycle, spent most of his time causing horses to bolt and carts to overturn in a vain attempt to prompt the development of his chosen phenomena. What’s more, many of the gods had demanded a contractual rider that allowed them to create new beings, and God, being in such a rush to quit the earth, had agreed. I thought these new creations were lacking somewhat. Minotaurs and Centaurs, Sphinxes and Mermaids…they were little more than jumbled-up versions of already existing animals. I wasn’t the only one to feel aggrieved. Disappointment among humans at these new chimerical beasts saw the formation of a reactionary group who yearned for the simplicity of the first Creation and sought to rectify the problem by wiping these new creatures off the face of the planet. This group called themselves “Heroes.”

  Minotaur: Derivative.

  To the Heroes, any beast of mixed progeny was fit only for the slaughter. Such radical originalist creationists as Hercules, Perseus, and Theseus were soon laying down trails of sugar cubes with which to lure Centaurs into ambushes, while Minotaurs were tricked into entering china shops, where their human interest in tableware conflicted with their bullish urge for demolition, leaving the animal confused and easy to slay.

  The budding monster conservationist movement was appalled. But no matter how hard they tried to humanize these new, unfamiliar creatures, there was something about Harpies, the hideous foul-smelling birds with women’s faces, razor-sharp teeth, and earsplitting shrieks that made them distinctly unsympathetic to the general populace. Soon the monster population had been all but decimated, and the Heroes began to broaden their horizons.

  The duck-billed platypus’s strange combination of ducklike snout, webbed feet, beaverlike tail, and egg-laying capabilities was considered exceedingly unnatural, and it soon found itself besieged by legions of underemployed Heroes.

  “Grievous the Shouts of the Many Men Killed, / by the Snapping Beak of the Beast Duck-Billed.”—Ovid

  Attacks on giraffes, whom the Heroes thought were half-leopard and half-camel, and on leopards, which were said to be half-panther and half-lion, soon followed. When it was whispered that many of the Heroes themselves were demigods, the Age of Heroes ended in a wave of bloody internal purges.

  I could hardly claim to be upset by the unceasing slaughter. The Darkness happily accepted all regardless of race, creed, or plausibility, but the new gods were forever interfering in my business, and that I could not abide. At the Battle of Troy the gods were diving in and out of the action like lifeguards at a whirlpool, saving each of their favorite warriors and whisking them to safety. The goddess Athena was always interrupting me, claiming that this soldier or that soldier was her personal favorite and could I make an exception and not send him into the Darkness. The Book of Endings swiftly became filled with strikethroughs and erasures.

  I didn’t like this. Each morning I would carefully mark out the soon-to-be-dead by region and then work out how long each area would take me. The meddling of the gods threw my calculations off completely. By now I considered myself something of a perfectionist. I reckoned that if a job had to be done, it was better that it be done quickly, and efficiently, than in a haphazard manner. Neither was I biased in my work. Be you prince or pauper, porpoise or penguin, I treated everyone much the same. I saw no difference between the brief lives of worms, or the long spans of turtles, the death of babies and the dying of nonagenarians. But now, on the battlefields of the Mediterranean, I could tell that those who weren’t the gods’ favorites were starting to get suspicious of my impartiality. After all, the buck stopped with me.

  “Where’s Achilles?” a dead soul would say.

  “Standing over there,” I’d say.

  “Are you sure he didn’t die?”

  “Quite sure.”

  “But he was in the same chariot as me, you know?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the chariot did go over the edge of a cliff.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then how did he survive?” he’d ask, pointing to the mangled wreckage of the chariot and his own dismembered body.

  “Luck?” I’d venture, and the eyes of the dead soul would narrow suspiciously as the Darkness consumed him.

  Furthermore, the gods were always competing with one another. They would often wait for me next to the souls of dead warriors whom they had drowned in a storm or had stabbed in battle and insist that they be given the credit for the kill.

  “Mark it down for me, Death,” I recall Aphrodite telling me as I hurried through a village decimated by an earthquake. “That’ll show that tart Hera. What’s the sc
ore at present?”

  “Well, ma’am,” I said, for I always thought it wise to stay on the good side of any divine presence, “that places you at eighty-four thousand and ninety-six.”

  “And Hera?”

  “Still ahead of you, ma’am. One hundred and sixty-four thousand.”

  “Damn. Any big disasters planned for the future?”

  I dipped into the Book.

  “Well, there is a volcanic eruption at Vesuvius scheduled for next month.”

  “How many?”

  “Over two thousand.”

  “Any chance I can help out? You know, divinely freeze them to the spot, or turn them all into statues or something?”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “For failing to sacrifice to me?”

  “Have they forgotten to sacrifice to you?” I asked.

  “Oh no. No, not at all. They’re very good with their sacrifices at Pompeii. Always on time, always very plump cattle.”

  “So why do you want to help kill them?”

  “Two thousand could really put me back in the game, Death. Don’t you understand?”

  That’s the problem of having a pantheon of all-powerful beings; everyone wants to show that they’re more all-powerful than the other.

  “I think the lava and fumes will do just fine, thanks,” I said.

  “How about if my wrath just causes the volcano to erupt?”

  “I’m afraid you used your wrath last week on that landslide in Thebes.”

  “Oh, but that wasn’t really my wrath, more my irritation. And, besides, it only killed twenty or thirty.”

  “Twenty or thirty members of the Theban royal family, who were, you may recall, beloved of Poseidon.”

  “Oh yes. He’ll be sinking my ships again, I’m sure. Still, is there no way I can be worked into the Vesuvius eruption?”

  When a goddess bats her eyelashes at you, it is an unsettling experience. I buried my head in the Book.

  “Well, I suppose I could write off a few as having suffered just vengeance after having cursed your name, but I must inform you that the majority of the deaths are already allocated to Apollo.”

  “What!” squawked Aphrodite. “How so?”

  “Well, some of their young defaced his temple the other day. They said they didn’t believe in him.”

  “Good for them!” said Aphrodite. “Sometimes I don’t believe him either.”

  “In him,” I corrected. “They said they didn’t believe in him.”

  “Oh,” said Aphrodite. “Well, okay then.”

  Not believing in a god was a very serious affair, especially with faith now being spread so thinly across the massive pantheon. Without faith in their existence, gods slowly shrank and disappeared.

  The same was true for God Himself, but He had circumvented this problem by inhabiting everything in Creation. If you believed in the rock in front of you, a percentage of that belief went to God. This usually ranged from 15 percent to 50 percent depending on the size of the object, with the rest of the belief going toward substantiating the object’s own existence. (Even this fail-safe plan had its problems. When the eighteenth-century philosopher Bishop Berkeley suggested that there were no “real” objects at all but only ideas, faith in the world of the senses wavered. The very God Berkeley had devoted his life to serving almost winked out of existence as people stopped believing in trees, rocks, and the rest of Creation. Fortunately for God, Berkeley’s theorem was refuted in 1753 when an idea fell on his head.)

  Bishop Berkeley: Destroyer of Gods, Wearer of Hats.

  To make matters worse, the number of gods was growing at an unbelievable rate. We all knew why this was. Olympus, where the new pantheon had their headquarters, had come to be known as “Mount” Olympus, so regularly was it shaken with the thunderous passions of the deities. The countryside surrounding it had become a quagmire of heavenly fluids, and vast, dirty underwear could be seen snagged in trees across half the earth. It was only the sudden onset of an ice age that prevented the entire planet from having to be dry-cleaned.

  Heart of Darkness

  I was fond of glaciers, slow but amiable giants that bulldozed all the monocular and snake-haired skulls of the Age of Myth beneath them. I used to like watching them as they flowed into the sea to calve, the infant icebergs squealing and squawking with delight as they drifted away from the shore, while the mother glaciers broke out in bergschrunds and shed meltwater from every moulin in their fringe.

  Ice, Ice Babies.

  After the initial attack of hypothermia, the ensuing bouts of deadly frostbite, and the subsequent starvation of millions of people, my workload slackened. Humankind was forced to regress and regroup, and I was intrigued to watch the adaptations and innovations this new situation prompted. In my opinion, the most notable advance that the Ice Age fostered came with the rise of the Evil Villain.

  Famous nowadays for tying damsels to train tracks, Evil Villains were not always so prevalent, or ingenious. Indeed, up until the Ice Age the early practitioners of Evil Villainy had been hampered in their calling by a lack of fast-moving locomotive devices with which to crush their victims in a suitably spectacular and horrifying manner. The rise of the glaciers, however, offered Evil Villains a temporary solution. Captive damsels were tied tightly to the snow line, and inch by inch, the giant tongues of ice slowly ran them over. Admittedly there were teething problems. The devilish process usually took from six months to two years, depending on the weather and the width of the damsel, and the Evil Villain was forced to keep his victim fed, watered, and warm throughout, if the full, shocking nature of his plan were to succeed. Many Evil Villains suffered hernias from having to sustain their diabolical cackling for months on end, and the lengthy intervening period between capture and slaughter meant rescues and escapes were common. I was assured, however, by the handful of people who were killed in such a manner that their ends had been “somewhat dastardly.”

  Trains: Represented a Significant Technological Advance over Glaciers.

  As all things must, even the glaciers had to die. I remember watching them retreating back to the poles, shrinking under the sun’s gaze, until in a lonely cwm, corrie, or cirque, they exhaled their final icy breaths and thawed into puddles, whereupon I popped out their dripping souls and sent them on their way. The earth returned to a more temperate clime, Evil Villains set to work creating the internal combustion engine, and the Age of Civilization finally began.

  It was the Sumerians who kicked things off. Imagine, if you can, an entire race of people grimly obsessed with the weather and you get some inkling of ancient Mesopotamia. Such meteorological obsessions seemed to stem from the fact that nascent society had located itself on a monotonous landscape of mudflats and marshland, the tedium of whose prospects was matched only by the certainty of its inundation. “Is it raining?” was the fashionable conversational entrée for more than fifteen hundred years (when it was eventually supplanted by the typical forthrightness of the Roman, “What do you do?” which retains the position to this day).

  Despite being perpetually damp or drowned, the Sumerians managed to invent the stylus, a remarkable innovation that transformed not only learning but also warfare. For centuries anything that left a mark had traditionally been classed as a weapon, and for some time the pen wasn’t just mightier than the sword, it was the sword. When the Sumerians discovered that such instruments could be used not just for slaughter but for scholarship, it radically reshaped their culture (although the rehabilitation of the typewriter, which they had invented as a particularly gruesome bludgeoning weapon, would not take place for many thousands of years).

  I noticed that the Sumerians were one of the first groups of humans to establish a firm belief in an afterlife. You would have thought that, considering the unremitting misery of their lives on Earth, they’d be sick and tired of Life in general, especially an afterlife. But they were gluttons for punishment, and with an imagination saturated by the dampness of their unfortuna
te situation, the Sumerians imagined a hereafter in which they would eat dust and clay in a dark room, forevermore. The idea of a happy afterlife, like the idea of a happy Life, was simply beyond their conception.

  Ancient Sumerian Warriors Depicted with Large Battle Typewriter (left) , and Small War-Bottle of Correction Fluid (right)

  And the gods they had! A bunch of second-rate minor elementals without a sliver of personality between them. There were gods of streams and rivers, of rivulets and creeks, of drizzle and humidity, all of whom were literally lining up to drown the Sumerians. At least these gods didn’t ask me for any favors and were moderately scrutable, unlike Him. For instance, when King Sargon was overthrown by the barbarians, everyone knew that the god Enlil had punished the land because Naram-Sin, a king of Sargon’s line, had sacked Nippur, plundered the Ekur, and humiliated Lugal-Zage-Si, such that when the Gutians invaded Akkad, Ur-Nammu was forced to seize power from Utukhegal. It was plain for all to see.

  As far as I was concerned, complex motives were unimportant as long as any major massacres were noted in the Book of Endings with plenty of time for me to prepare. Yes, I thought I had it all figured out in Sumeria, all under control. Little did I know that in those moist lands my existence would be changed forever.

  I remember the day well. How could I forget? The usual prognostications, fearful sacrifices, and portents of divine satisfaction had been swiftly followed by the customary great flood, and the temple priests, who had relocated themselves to high ground just in time, were questioning the quality of their prophetic entrails. The storm was still raging as I glided about the pale, bloated bodies that scattered the flooded plain like confetti. It was slow work as schools of Fish Supremacists crowded around the bodies in order to heckle the dead.