I'm probably going to get shouted at for this, all for my love of yogurt. She shook her head sadly.
Celina had overheard one of the guards during her rush to the cafeteria. The last thing security saw on the monitors before the power went off was a black shape climbing the high, electrified security fence. And then everything had gone to hell. Alarms started going on and off; the electric doors began locking and unlocking themselves at will and had great fun doing it.
Having the paranoid disposition of believing she was responsible for everything that went wrong, Celina decided to slip out of the control room, hide in the cafeteria, and get some yogurt while she was at it. She hadn’t counted on the automatic locks trapping her inside the cafeteria or the vast amounts of yogurt that completed failed to be in the fridge. And so here she sat. Wishing she had yogurt.
"I wonder if this has anything to do with the elves," she said aloud to the empty room.
"Pull!" shouted Neville Bartholomew Snell Jr III.
Splash went the Mexican into the pool.
Thanks to an automated alarm warning system, Neville knew about the security breach at his Majestic Technologies lab just outside of London. He knew very little about the event details, but one thing he knew for sure was that he was definitely not sending the police in there. Not with his top-secret project in the works. The situation was frustrating.
Neville was a marvel of a human being, from the standpoint of most outside observers. Many people threw a tantrum when angry, some sat quietly and fume, others reacted violently, some had outbursts, a lot shouted and screamed, a few broke down and cried. But not Neville. Neville had more interesting and extravagant ways of dealing with his anger. Being one of the top ten richest men in the world gave him the profound right to act completely weird and get away with it without question. When poor people acted weird, they were simply written off as weird and often arrested. Rich people who acted weird were not weird at all. They were eccentric.
"Pull," shouted Neville again.
Splash went the second Mexican into the pool.
Neville originally made his money from a large glue factory in southern Brazil. The factory was supposed to be making a super-strong glue that would place as a fierce competitor for every other glue on the market at the time. The air-conditioning on the factory floor gave out two hours after production started, and the relentlessly hot Brazilian weather heated the vats of glue too high, rendering it completely useless as high-strength glue.
An astoundingly ugly gentleman from New York, whose face always looked like it was at war with itself, had just come up with an ingenious plan that would revolutionize the office stationery and memo-taking industry. He discovered the concept quite by accident while he was on a blind date. A mutual friend had set him up with a rather nice woman whose only fault appeared to be an embarrassing and messy snorting sound she made every time she laughed, which was something she did often, mostly to cover up uncomfortable silences.
The date wasn't going especially well, and when the ugly gentleman excused himself to go to the bathroom, it got worse as a piece of toilet paper firmly attached itself to the bottom of his left foot. Upon returning to his table, he found the woman gone and the other restaurant patrons and staff laughing at him due to his lack of date and his addition of stick-on toilet paper. A particularly ill mannered waiter sauntered up to him and with a gallon of cynicism said, "Get the message, you're a loser."
The restaurant patrons who had been politely tittering to themselves burst into all-out laughter, causing the ugly gentleman enough embarrassment to last a lifetime.
It was during that moment of pure embarrassment that his brain gave out on him, and all he could think of was message, paper, and stuck. No one suspected a thing, and the moment never really became common knowledge, but that was the instant the sticky note, a very clever pad of paper used to relay messages or reminders to anyone by sticking them all over the place, was invented.
The ugly gentleman encountered only two problems while inventing the now-famous stationary: 1) no money. He solved this by suing the restaurant for severe emotional damage, the settlement of which was rather substantial. And, 2) as hard as he tried, he never could get the glue consistency just right, until one day, he ran into a weird man who owned a Brazilian glue factory, and the rest was history.
Neville sold the ugly man defective glue which worked great for sticky notes, and in turn the ugly gentleman paid Neville vast amounts of money, turning him from just being weird into being superbly eccentric.
"Pull," shouted Neville. Although the security breach at Majestic seemed suspicious, Neville decided the best course of action was to await further information regarding the situation.
Splash went the third Mexican, as the fourth Mexican climbed into the medieval catapult.
"Beatrice?" said Neville.
"Mr. Snell," replied Beatrice, who just happened to be a six-foot former body builder with a Harvard business degree, legs like tree trunks, and Neville's personal assistant. His real name was Matthew, but Neville insisted on calling people by whatever name he felt they should have at the time. No one argued; he was just eccentric, after all.
"Beatrice, I think we'll wait and see what happens with the situation in London. Keep me updated," and then as an afterthought, he added, "but, just in case worse should come to worst, put the lawyers on yellow alert." The thought of Celina McMannis trapped in the building did concern him a little but the thought was fleeting; she'd turned down his advances one too many times anyway.
"As you wish, sir. Should we keep firing the Mexican cleaning staff into the pool, sir, or have you had enough?"
Neville had many strange ways of dealing with his problems and more somber moods. Firing members of his staff from a medieval-style catapult into his swimming pool was one of his favorites and always seemed to brighten him up. Today, it was the cleaning staff's turn, a group of Mexican men and women who worked hard to abolish every speck of dust from Neville's many mansions and, in turn, were paid handsomely.
"No, I think that's enough for today. That last one got some good height, didn't he?"
"Yes, sir," said Beatrice, "very good height indeed." Beatrice waved a hand toward the Mexican staff who quickly disbanded and went back to their duties.
An assistant gardener working for Neville once questioned the head gardener as to the safety issue surrounding the firing of human beings from a catapult and the sanity of their boss. The head gardener simply reminded the assistant that they all received good wages and an excellent benefit package, and as to the sanity question he replied, "Well, he's just eccentric, ain't he?
Five.
Nigel spent a good part of the morning hanging upside down off the edge of a building.
Celina spent the better part of her morning locked in a deserted lunchroom.
Both individuals were blissfully unaware of the sudden and frightening waves of information flying from satellite to satellite far above their heads, transmitting the news around the world.
A lone journalist in the darkest southern regions of Brazil was the first person to pick up on the subject of the news. It came as quite a shock to him in much the same way it had to the world that woke up to the fact that people all over the place, even in Manchester, had simply stopped dying. The regional newspaper in Brazil received the news from the same shocked journalist an hour or so after the first several occurrences. The national newspapers got the reports mere minutes after that. Information shot out of Brazil at an astonishing rate and crisscrossed reports of similar happenings all over the world.
By breakfast time, the media moguls everywhere made even larger fortunes spreading the information and searching for theories. Some said that it was a miracle, an act of God. A group of Australian scientists believed they had inadvertently found the cure for death while experimenting with a new nerve gas on a group of ducks. The group of nervous ducks disagreed and quacked accordingly.
Religious fanatics around the wo
rld, believing that the Second Coming was upon them, went wild. Many of them formed study groups, others danced in the streets, ministers began scheduling church meetings, and somebody woke up the Pope.
The Sons and Daughters of the Lemming Order, an over-dramatic and sensational religious cult, were about to achieve ultimate enlightenment by committing suicide. The plan was to race through the local coastal village shouting and screaming about their impending enlightenment and how very upset everyone else should be that they were not going to be achieving it, and then run off the nearest extremely high cliff to certain death. They were all considerably shocked to find that ultimate enlightenment consisted of them lying on a bunch of sharp rocks protruding from the ocean below a very high cliff.
A group of American scientists tried their very best to give some scientific explanation for the event but for the life of them couldn't think of anything.
A Belgian media mogul named Boris dubbed the all-newly-common occurrence The Lazarus Effect.
The real reason for the sudden amount of people waking up in large refrigerators or on their deathbeds was not anything to do with science, or nervous ducks, and had nothing do to, really, with a direct act of God. The real reason was due to an unusual happening in a small pub in Ireland the night before, involving a young man named Seth, a lot of fermented vegetable juice, a disgruntled lamppost, a talking cat, and the Angel of Death. Strange combinations produced strange results. That result, however, sent the entire world into a light chaos. As of around eleven the previous night, no one in the entire world had died.
Sure, people were still passing away, but they would be gone for only a few minutes before coming back and declaring that there was really not much happening on the Other Side, and, despite a collection of shiny directional signs with lovely large neon arrows, they didn't know where to go. So everyone had been turning round and going back the way they had come.
It would appear that Death just wasn't home anymore and if he was, he wasn't in any mood to be answering the door. Actually, that statement was truer than anyone actually knew. Death wasn't home.
At the precise moment that the news went international, Death was sitting on a quiet beach in the Bahamas trying to decide what flavor of margarita he should try next. He already had a nice collection of little paper umbrellas sticking in the sand next to him and he was determined to build a bigger collection.
After the incident at the pub, after shouting at the lamppost, after the mailbox proved unresponsive, Death didn't know where he should go. He wanted to quit but he just couldn't take that final step and actually do it.
"Kiwi and orange please," said Death to the thong-clad waitress.
The waitress turned and headed back to the bar. After a few steps, she forgot what the strange-looking gentleman in the dark robe had ordered. Then she thought it a bit peculiar that he wore a dark robe in such a hot climate. Then she totally forgot that she had just taken an order, that she had just talked to anyone, and began to wonder why she was thinking about dark robes in hot climates, and for absolutely no reason she could fathom, a dark tingly feeling ran down her spine. She walked over to another gentleman who wanted to order a drink and took his order instead.
This had been happening to Death all day. The problem with being an angel is that, as a defense to the heavenly realm, anyone who saw an angel or talk to one would later forget the encounter completely, leaving only the slightest echo that anything ever happened. The only exception to the rule was messenger Angels, where memory retention was rather important. And so the waitress was constantly forgetting Death's drink orders. This made it difficult to just sit and relax, as he had to keep walking to the bar and getting his own drinks.
On his little visits to the bar, Death would complain about the waitress to the bartender, who in turn shouted at the waitress for a reason that he suddenly couldn't remember. It then took Death a few tries before the bartender could hold the drink information in his head long enough to actually make the margarita.
Death thought back to the night before.
While he had been standing outside the pub in Ireland, he’d begun to think that quitting might not be one of his best ideas. That was, up until that nice cat told Death that he deserved a break and asked had he ever considered visiting the Bahamas.
Despite the fact that the cat was just a cat and not only that, a talking cat, Death found him very convincing. In fact, the conversation with that cat landed him where he was now, staggering like a baby giraffe up to the beach bar with the beautiful Bahamian sun reflecting off the radiant, clear blue water behind him.
Death ordered another margarita from the bartender, this time with a green umbrella instead of a blue one, as he wanted to balance out the colours in his collection.
Oh what freedom, to be able to choose my own colour of umbrella.
The small TV mounted in the corner above the bar featured an overly broad man with fake-looking hair who introduced himself to be Martin Hitchcock and attempted to report the news. Not that anyone in the Bahamas cared what happened with the rest of the world, but the news was reported nevertheless, just in case anyone in the Bahamas suddenly decided to care what happened in the rest of the world, which probably wasn't sunny and didn't serve margaritas as tasty.
The subject Martin Hitchcock reported on was very serious. Death decided to pay attention to the news broadcast for a while, for the simple reason that he could.
Martin Hitchcock shuffled his papers.
"The top story again, dead people all over the world got up and walked around today." Martin Hitchcock adjusted his tie and shuffled his papers again for dramatic effect.
Death dropped his fresh, new margarita into the sand and stared open-mouthed at the TV, which was difficult, as theoretically, he didn't have a mouth.
Martin Hitchcock shuffled his papers once again, removed a sheet and, using the ancient art of origami, folded it into a swan before placing it next to him on his desk and then continued.
"Those occurrences began a little after eleven last night and have continued to shock the nation and indeed the world. The local government agencies have released a notice advising any relatives of the recently deceased to contact their local authorities as chances are, they're not entirely dead yet."
Martin Hitchcock then launched into some possible scientific explanations, but by that point Death had already passed out.
Jeremiah the goldfish swam around in his glass fish bowl in his little, uptown London apartment. Due to his three-second memory span, he found it very easy to entertain himself. He would swim across his bowl and see a castle.
"Oh, a castle," he would say to himself. He would swim around the bowl, come back to the same castle and say, "Oh, a castle!"
He could entertain himself like that for hours at a time, sometimes days. Things had been increasingly difficult for him lately, though. Strange thoughts and pictures would pop into his head at random times throughout the day or night, even when he slept. He would forget those three seconds later, but it would appear that he had been receiving premonitions. Not that he knew what a premonition was, and even if he did, he wouldn't remember it after three seconds anyway.
He tried making notes of them, using the little coloured rocks at the bottom of his bowl, but he was never quick enough to get whole words out before he forgot them. So all he ended up with were a few letters that didn't make sense to him. But what he found, although he couldn't remember finding them, was that he could take these thoughts that popped into his head and throw them out of his head, out of his bowl, and send them hurtling out of the apartment.
Sometimes he could even direct the thoughts at people. But after he'd sent the thoughts or pictures out of his head, he would forget that he ever received them and he never really knew who he sent them to, anyway.
"Oh, that's strange, there's a castle here," said Jeremiah.
All this started about two years ago and had been steadily increasing until he was at the point where he would
get frustrated. But then he would forget being frustrated and everything would be fine again.
"Oh, a castle," Jeremiah said to no one in particular.
Six.
Jiffy's newspaper stand existed when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, or at least that's what he told the kids who tried to steal candy from his little shack on the corner of Marylebone Road and Albany Street, next to Regent's Park. Whether the statement was true or not is a secret that probably died out with the dinosaurs.
"And I'll still be here when they come back an'all," he would shout as the children ran away.
Jiffy retired at the age of sixty-five and lasted all of two hours as a retiree before returning to work, claiming that living with his wife was a hell of a lot more stressful than selling papers from the crack of dawn to the dead of night.
When Nigel was fresh on the force, he was called out to Jiffy's newsstand twice a week due to constant reports of candy theft and dirty little buggers nickin' his walking stick when he wasn't looking. Nigel and Jiffy became fast friends, and even when the thefts were finally alleviated, Jiffy would still call twice a week so that Nigel would bring him a coffee and they could chat for a while about this or that.
Jiffy, an elderly man who despised youth, refused to admit that he had ever been that young and foolish. He often tried convincing people willing to listen that he was born, had been a toddler, then skipped the teenage and young adult years to mature into the five-foot-three-inch old codger he was today.
Nigel had come to see Jiffy as someone who was always up-to-date with the news, a streetwise gentleman who had seen the best of times and the worst of times and couldn't give a crap either way.
Jiffy had come to see Nigel as a friendly copper who brought him coffee.
Coffee was exactly what Nigel was on his way to pick up when he began to notice a slight change in the demeanor of London's people on this dreary, almost drizzly, morning. The homeless people weren't walking around muttering to themselves as they normally did. The average Londoners walked around with their heads down, not making eye contact with anyone and trying very hard to pretend that the world around them didn't exist. Today, everyone travelled around in excited little groups. People were actually talking to each other, which was practically unheard of in parts of southern England. The world around Nigel had changed, and he wanted to know why. He stopped in the little hippy-run coffee stall in the centre of Regent’s Park and bought himself a coffee and one for Jiffy. If something funny were going on with the world, then Jiffy would know about it.
Death, the Devil, and the Goldfish Page 4
