Death

by George Pendle

  The Roman leaders were extremely difficult to deal with. I remember the indecisiveness of Julius Caesar when he was faced with crossing the Rubicon. Thousands stood ready to be slaughtered, and I had steeled myself for the task, but Caesar was mystified as to how he could transport his pet chicken, pet fox, and pet bag of grain across the river in his little one-man boat without the fox eating the chicken or the chicken eating the grain. As it was, the fox died of dropsy, the chicken was sacrificed, and the bag of grain was eventually made praetor by the emperor Caligula shortly before being eaten by Consul Incitatus, the emperor’s horse (the children’s song “Old Caligula Had a Senate” was one of the most popular of the age).

  If they weren’t being indecisive, the Roman emperors were paranoid delusional.

  “Who sent you?” asked Emperor Tiberius when I appeared to his soul.

  “No one,” I said, through gritted teeth. “I am Death.”

  “Was it Naevius Sutorius Macro? Or Tiberius Gemellus? Yes, yes, my own grandson, he sent you, didn’t he?” He drew out his sword’s soul from the soul of its scabbard and waggled it in front of my face. What was I doing here?

  “Now look,” I said, struggling to instill some understanding into the man, although finding it hard enough to convince myself. “I am the End of Days, the Destroyer of All Things!”

  “Or was it Gaius Caligula?” continued Tiberius, pacing back and forth frantically. “Yes, he would do something like this.”

  “Do something like what?” I said. My patience was wearing thin. “You died peacefully in your sleep.”

  “I’m sure that’s what you’ll tell the people, isn’t it?” crowed Tiberius. “Died in his sleep, happily ever after! Then how do you explain the position of that pillow?” He pointed at the pillow on which his body’s head rested. “I was smothered to death.”

  “But it’s beneath your head,” I said, growing infuriated. “Your head is on top of the pillow, how could you have been smothered with it?”

  But Tiberius’s soul was not listening. “I should never have poisoned you, Germanicus! If only Drusus was here to see this infamy, he would avenge me. Why did I order Sejanus to poison him? Or maybe he never died. Maybe it was Drusus all along, who killed me in revenge for my ill treatment of Livia Julia, who betrayed me to…”

  This went on for some time, although I finally tricked him into hiding in the Darkness by pretending the Praetorian Guard were about to burst into the room to torture his soul.

  Speaking of the Darkness, I had noticed changes in it, too. It lagged behind me and had trouble digesting souls. Although it was still as black as night, there was somehow something less dark about it. Admittedly you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face when you were wrapped within it. But you could now imagine that a hand might be in the general vicinity of your face. This was worrying.

  But who am I trying to kid? I hadn’t wrapped myself in the Darkness for years. It now seemed more of a ball and chain than the old friend who had comforted me during my first days on Earth. Each day that went by I felt less and less connected to it.

  “You don’t understand me,” I’d say to the Darkness.

  As ever, there was no reply.

  “We’ve grown apart.”

  It looked at me blankly.

  “Why don’t we talk anymore?”

  It said nothing.

  “Okay, you’re right, we never talked, but maybe we should.”

  It remained silent.

  “No, no. It’s not you; it’s me.”

  Silence.

  “But you haven’t helped.”

  Silence.

  “I just think, maybe it would be best if…”

  Silence.

  “I just need something…”

  The Darkness moved toward me, to envelop me like it did in the old days, but I thrust it back.

  “Something! Not nothing!” I shouted, and stormed off, leaving it splashed across the ground, whimpering silently.

  The Darkness Had Changed.

  It was during this period of uncertainty that I ran into Maud again. She was being starved to death in a Roman prison cell, having recently poisoned the emperor Claudius. Her body was emaciated and she waved to me weakly and whispered that she was actually feeling a lot better than she looked and expected to be let out very soon. It was that old game of ours, the game of Life, but I was reluctant to play along. I knew that I was being watched.

  But how could I be unmoved when I saw that she had hidden a single cherry just for my arrival. She announced that she was going to eat it now unless someone—at this her eyes flickered to me—unless someone knocked it from her hands.

  “Perhaps this cherry,” she whispered, her mouth salivating uncontrollably, “will let me survive until I am reprieved?”

  She looked at me expectantly—her beautiful jaundiced brown eyes with their slowly dilating pupils made me shudder with Joy. “Thank the gods,” she repeated with an extreme effort, “that there is no one to knock this cherry out of my hand as I do not think I could survive another moment without it.”

  At this she weakly waggled the cherry by its stem, enticing me to act, to intervene, to enter Life for a second. Her cracked lips now lingered on the cherry’s taut flesh. She looked at me again, puzzled this time.

  As I stood there, torn between my love for her and caution for myself, I felt a wave of sadness sweep over me. Why couldn’t I spend eternity with Maud? Was I doomed to go through the endless years without a single companion? I watched Maud fumble the cherry and fall backward, a massive hemorrhage now rocking her body back and forth in graceful epileptic spasms. She coughed up a bouquet of blood, and her eyelids flickered daintily. She was so very beautiful, and dead.

  “Do you have any idea how hard it was not to eat that cherry? Wasn’t I convincing?” she said, as I released her soul from her withered body. “Anyway, let’s go and haunt the jailor for a while. The bastard ate his supper outside my cell every day just so I could smell it.”

  “Look, Maud, I’m sorry. I don’t know if I can this time.”

  “Why ever not?”

  “It’s just that…”

  “You look strange,” she said, peering at me. “Have you put on weight?”

  “I can’t spend any more time with you,” I replied, avoiding her gaze. I gave the signal, and the Darkness reluctantly began to creep forward. Maud looked shocked.

  “Is it someone else?” she said. “Is it someone else who dies better than me?” Tears formed in her eyes.

  “No,” I hissed, “not at all. Look, you’ve just got to go to the other side. I think I’m being watched.”

  “Well,” said Maud, wiping her eyes, “if that’s the case, I don’t want to cause you any trouble.”

  “Maud…”

  “No. No. I don’t want to and I won’t. I’ll see you around,” she said. And with that she leapt into the Darkness before I could stop her. I peered into it after her but of course I could see nothing. Nothing, the once-beloved nothing, which had kept me safe and cold in its emptiness, now filled me with utter loneliness. I could no longer relate to this hollowness, this fruitless abyss from whence none returned. And as I contemplated my alienation from the null, from out of the socket of one of my eyes rolled a globular ball of clear salty liquid that rested quivering on my cheek before splashing to the ground.

  What was happening to me?

  The Lost Weekend

  The decline and fall of the Roman Empire should have been the best of times for any self-respecting herald of the void, but despite the volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, slave revolts, and gladiatorial combats, I felt a malaise spreading through my system.

  One awful day, as I was transporting the last of many thousands of souls slaughtered during yet another violent subjugation, I heard someone whisper from behind me in a voice as soft as the rustle of leaves, “Love…your…work.”

  I spun around, but no one was there; only a few torn flags fluttered in the wind. I went back over m
y steps to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything—the Darkness had been showing increasing signs of dyspepsia—but the battlefield was picked clean. As usual, none had survived.

  Then, just a few years later, as I scooped up hundreds of souls devastated by a plague and catapulted them unthinkingly into the great beyond, I heard another voice murmur into my ear, “Splendid…top-class…well done.”

  Again I turned around and again there was no one to be seen, just the buzzing of flies and the cries of the birds of carrion.

  And then again, quite soon after, while collecting the souls of a tribe decimated by starvation, I heard yet another voice, clearer than the others, say, “Black…it really suits you, you know.”

  It got worse from then on. As I traversed Earth’s fields of devastation I heard more and more strange compliments winging to my ears on the wind. I received congratulations on a job well done, and sometimes even a smattering of applause when I wrested a particularly troublesome soul out of its body. Had the stress of recent events begun to warp my mind?

  Things eventually came to a head when I was directed to a city whose inhabitants had been besieged by a rival army, grown weak from disease, and eventually wasted away. I looked upon the multitude of souls in need of collecting and felt strangely tired. This was a new feeling. As massacres go, I’d had much worse. When earthquakes had swallowed up whole civilizations in the past, I had not been overawed by the scale of the devastation. When tidal waves had swept entire countries to their doom, I had taken it in my stride. Yet now I felt a strange and intolerable weight pressing down on me as the low murmur of souls began their carping.

  I remember blowing out my cheeks, rolling up my sleeves, and hitching the increasingly ill-tempered Darkness to me in preparation, when a conversation broke out in my head.

  “…always a pleasure to watch…”

  “…that time in Scythia, I can tell you…”

  “…we were impressed…”

  “…very impressed…”

  “…we’d be nothing without you…”

  “…nothing…”

  “…nothing…”

  There was only one thing for it.

  I ran.

  I ran as fast as I could away from the city. Ran, despite the irresistible pull of the dead clawing me back toward them. I ran as if my very existence depended upon it, as if by staying I would be forced to confront something that was unendurable. Yet the voices followed me.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Running away…”

  “From what?”

  “Us, I think.”

  “Why?”

  “Too good for us?”

  “Who does he think he is?”

  “Who does he think he is?” The question reverberated through my mind, stopping me in my tracks. How I wish I had known the answer. I cried out, “Show yourselves!” and from out of the air around me three figures began to emerge.

  The first was a tall, mustachioed man riding a horse. He wore armor, dented and rusted by heavy use, and a horned helmet stuck with arrows. He was covered head to toe in blood and seemed vaguely familiar.

  “Have we met before?” I asked.

  “I should say!” chortled the man, and a thousand swords seemed to clash within his laughter.

  “I’m War,” he said, and extended a gore-soaked hand. “How do you do?” He had very good manners. I was obviously hallucinating.

  “War?” I said. “I thought War was a condition of open, armed, often prolonged conflict carried on between nations, states, or parties. You’re not a proper noun. You’re not even a real person.”

  “Well that may be, old fellow,” said War, twirling the tips of his mustache, “but considering you’re the final cessation of vital functions in an organism, I think that’s rather a case of the pot calling the kettle black, right?”

  The hallucination had a point. If this was a figment of my imagination, it was a pretty sharp one. A second figure began to appear next to him, doubled over in a coughing fit, a cloud of flies buzzing around him, blurring his edges, lending him a soft-edged hue that could not quite disguise the figure’s rotting flesh bulging through his ill-fitting chain mail. A sickly horse stood knock-kneed behind him.

  “That’s Pestilence,” said War, slapping the figure on the back, and sending a shower of maggots over the both of us. “And that,” said War, gesturing to another appearing figure, “that’s Famine.” A woman appeared on a black horse wearing voluminous robes that hung lightly off her stick-thin frame. A skeletal arm kept rubbing her nose, and she kept turning round in her saddle, asking, “Does my bottom look big in this? It does, doesn’t it? Oh, I’m a whale!”

  I chatted with the three of them. It was actually quite nice to have some company, and the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as they referred to themselves, were keen to tell me how much I had influenced them when they were just three young entities named Skirmish, Allergy, and Going to Bed Without Any Supper.

  The Horses of the Apocalypse: (from top left) Precious, Waterbiscuit, Blackie, and Mr. Jenkins.

  It was strangely enjoyable to talk to beings who shared in my hopeless situation, and I was just about to ask them if they ever felt that there was more to their existence than mindless slaughter when a voice from out of nowhere cried, “Fellas! Fellas! Wait for me!”

  A fourth figure was now appearing, a creature that was bright pink and covered in an inflamed rash. His skin was fiery red, his hair was dry and frizzy, his lips horribly chapped. He rode a sickly pale horse that smelled strangely of coconut oil.

  “Who’s he?” I asked.

  “Sunburn,” replied War, shaking his head.

  “Sunburn?”

  Pestilence shrugged his shoulders. “We thought we’d lost him. We’ve been trying to get rid of him for years.”

  “Oh yes, yes, very nice,” said Sunburn, picking over the dead that surrounded us. “Come look at this, War. I wager a good number died from old Sunburn. They should have stayed in the shade!” He raised a fist to the sky. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! Cover up all you like!”

  “Listen, Sunburn,” said War, “none of them died from you. Who dies from sunburn?”

  “Lots of people,” said Sunburn, defensively. “What about Saint Eustace?”

  “He was roasted to death,” said War.

  “Same thing,” said Sunburn.

  “No, it’s not,” said Famine. “He was locked in a brass bull and cooked.”

  “Famine’s right,” said Pestilence, flies swarming from his mouth.

  “Is not the sun made of flame?” spluttered Sunburn. “And was not Eustace roasted by flames? Was not his skin wracked with a hot prickly rash, blisters, and tenderness so that his sheets felt as if they were scratching him all through the night, and that prompted him to hide in the shade for the rest of the week wearing a large straw hat and applying lotion to his limbs?”

  “No,” said the three.

  Sunburn turned his peeling pink back on us and began to sulk.

  “When many people die from the same cause, a little of us is created,” explained War. “But with Sunburn, we think it was millions of minor inconveniences.”

  “I’m a killer, I tell you,” muttered Sunburn. “A stone-cold killer.”

  “Well,” said War, “only Death can tell you for sure.” He turned to me. “Has anyone ever died from sunburn?”

  The Horsemen looked at me expectantly. Sunburn swallowed.

  “Well, it’s hard to say,” I said, stalling for time. I didn’t want to be the cause of any strife. “The Book only gives primary causes. Secondary causes are harder to judge.” Sunburn looked relieved, and I quickly changed the topic of conversation.

  Saint Eustace Dies from Uncertain Causes.

  “So, Death,” said Famine, cheerily, “do you fancy joining us on a global pandemic?”

  “We could save you some time if you hung around with us,” said Pestilence.

  “Two birds with one stone,” said War
.

  “And nice weather guaranteed,” said Sunburn.

  I could see the Darkness was avoiding Sunburn as much as it could, shrinking away from his throbbing red body, but I didn’t care. The Darkness would just have to put up with it. Yes, perhaps I should have paid heed to it. Perhaps I should have said no. But this seemed to be the chance I needed to get back to my old self, to rekindle my love of dying and finally put paid to my unnatural dependence on Life. So I agreed to go with them. When, later on, the doctors told me that I had not tried hard enough to reject Life, I pointed to my days with the Horsemen as proof that I tried to break free from the cycle of addiction. It was my last-ditch effort, it was a shock treatment. I thought it would save me. As it turned out, it was the worst thing I could have possibly done.

  They killed and killed and killed some more and I followed in their wake. I was drunk on disaster, and there was a kind of intoxicated camaraderie between us all. Thousands died every day, in every way, in hideous, horrifying agony. The innocent and the guilty suffered alike. Screams, the like of which I’d never heard before, rang out in my ears. Fire and destruction ran wild across the continents, subsuming whole mountains in tidal waves of gore. I shoveled souls into the Darkness hundreds at a time with barely a word spoken. A febrile energy had gripped me, and I felt free of my previous uncertainties. If I concentrated solely on moving souls into the Darkness, I barely thought of Life at all. The Horsemen and I turned the earth into a charnel house, until the ocean foam was tinged with blood, the earth beneath our feet stained scarlet, and all this under bright sunny skies.

  Amid the carnage and atrocities, the Horsemen would often play practical jokes on one another. Eventually they plucked up the courage to try them on me. I’d wake up in the morning to find myself impaled with arrows, or beset with oozing pustules. Terrible stomach cramps would double me over at the most inopportune times, and I was constantly breaking out in liver spots. To get even I set the Darkness on them when they least expected it, half-extinguishing them, pulling them back from the brink of the void only when they had almost melted from existence. This calmed them down a bit. War told me that he had gone so far into the void that he had seen his own personal Hell, a land of peace and friendship populated by devils who negotiated disputes in a calm and orderly fashion, never raised their voices, and gladly turned the other cheek. He shuddered at the memory. Luxuriating in all this bonhomie, for the first time in a long time, I felt as if I belonged.