Death, the Devil, and the Goldfish

by Andrew Buckley

  "Harriet!" said Nigel. "I have the most amazing news."

  Harriet quickly held up a finger and flashed a look that would silence any male, human or animal.

  "May I talk to you for a moment, Nigel?" said the silky voice.

  Nigel stepped over the mess of clothes, traffic cones, and various broken objects.

  "Of course," he said in a highly enthusiastic voice.

  He bounced out of the room after the blonde hair but not before raising Giles and Herbert off the ground and sticking them to the ceiling. In response to which they both burst into hysterical laughter.

  "Nigel, dear," Harriet said somewhat sadly.

  "Harriet is something the matter? You won't believe what happened today!" said Nigel, still humming with newfound energy.

  Harriet yet again raised a finger, an annoying habit she picked up from her mother who was highly pompous and rich.

  "I have something to tell you, and I don't want you take it the wrong way, but I've met someone else."

  Nigel's enthusiasm suddenly dropped a few inches.

  "His name is Troy and he's a Genetic Fruitarian and you ought to know that we love each other very much and are getting married."

  Nigel's enthusiasm, if it still could be called that, dropped another few feet, along with his face.

  "I know this must come as a bit of a shock but it all kind of happened last night after I went home and I know that I said I loved you but a girl can change her mind. And I think it'd show a lot of understanding and maturity on your part if you'd come to the wedding. It's this Saturday at St Ethel's." Harriet pursed her lips, signaling the end of the monologue.

  Nigel's enthusiasm took a flying leap off an imaginary cliff. The humming in his brain stopped abruptly, followed by two loud thumps from the inside of his apartment that he could only presume meant his roommates fell from the ceiling. Perfection, it would appear, is fleeting.

  After the fits of rage subsided. After his heart started beating again. After the realization that he'd suddenly lost his power of telekinesis as quickly as he'd got it. After realizing that his day had turned into the exact opposite of perfection, Nigel found himself moping along the River Thames. All because of a disaster in a mini-skirt.

  Fourteen.

  Celina found herself on hold again. After doing battle with the chirpy switchboard lady another four times, after she'd been transferred to homicide, auto theft, the special tactics unit, and the bakery on Melville Street, she'd finally been transferred to general enquiries.

  The hold music for general enquiries was of the electric jazzy style that most British teenagers were so fond of. In fact, they would stand in large rooms for hours on end, wearing next to nothing, dancing to this music they could hardly hear over the sound of their own pulse while bright lights bounced off the walls.

  Celina was in no mood for dancing. She was more in the mood for possibly maiming small animals. Her Scottish roots allowed her to go from not angry to absolutely raging furiously in under a minute. At one time, she had taken classes to learn to control her anger, and in the end, she had been thrown out of the group due to a negative and violent attitude. As a consequence, she had thrown a chair through a window to prove that she was well in control of her anger and that she could stop whenever she liked. The point was ill proven. The arresting officer was a nice gentleman who actually succeeded in calming her down. She remembered his name to be Nigel or something.

  A strange, nasally, female voice that sounded like it had two pencils shoved up its nose popped onto the line just as the music reached a particularly low point.

  "Hello, general enquiries, my name is Rhonda, do you need a squad car sent out to your house?"

  Celina breathed and counted to ten quickly.

  "I'm not at my house, I'm locked in the cafeteria at work, now listen carefully to me—"

  "Would you like me to send a locksmith, madam?"

  Celina counted from eleven to twenty.

  "No, thank you. I don't need a locksmith. What I'm trying to tell you—"

  "Let me transfer you to the fire department, this is more their area. One moment, please."

  "Now wait a bloody second!"

  Somewhere in the northern Highlands of Scotland, the chilling sound of bagpipes floated across the misty grass. The long dead and buried ancestral ghosts of Celina McMannis stirred, if only a little, to the battle cry. A few of the ghosts thought that wait a bloody second wasn't so much of a battle cry, more like a statement, but the anger and want for battle indicated in the voice was undeniable. The dead McMannis Clan smiled to themselves. Their warrior brood was alive and well and threatening war. Or, that's what it sounded like, at least. This was not entirely the case. Although Celina was definitely done with counting to ten.

  "Now, listen to me! Or I swear the second I get out of here I'm going to hunt you down and rip out your nose hairs. I am trapped at Majestic Technologies Research and Development Lab; the address is in the phone book. I am locked in the cafeteria. This morning there was a security breach and—"

  "Uhh, madam, I think that—"

  "Let me finish!"

  A round of applause rose from the Scottish Highlands.

  "This morning there was a security breach; something climbed over the fence and triggered the security systems. The building is locked down."

  "Umm, madam? I don't suppose you'd like a squad car to come round, would you?"

  There was a long pause while Celina weighed up the consequences of possibly exposing her work to the world. And then, on the other hand, she didn't really want to be trapped in the cafeteria forever. But what would happen if the elves got out? What would Neville think about all of this? Surely he was aware of the situation.

  The operator didn't want to prod but the pause became excessively long. "Madam?"

  Celina shook her head dejectedly.

  "No, it’s fine, I'm sure it's nothing."

  "Are you sure? You seem rather distraught."

  "No, no I'm sure it was just a cat or something. No sense in worrying about it. I'm probably just overreacting."

  The ghosts lying in the Highlands let out the same sound that spectators at a soccer match made when there was only one minute to go and someone missed what very well could have been the winning goal.

  "Okay, madam. Have a nice day."

  Click—beep.

  Despite her red hair, her constant anger, and that sense she portrayed to everyone who talked to her that she was liable to kick them in the nuts even if they didn't have any, Celina sat down and began to sob quietly.

  Somewhere across the city, a prophetically blessed goldfish received a string of numbers, which he proceeded to fling out of his mind, as they proved of no use to him. He had the profound sense that someone else somewhere could make use of those numbers, and he hoped that he'd flung them in the right direction. And then, upon the discovery of a rather nice castle in his bowl, the goldfish forgot all about the numbers.

  Moments later, a string of numbers slammed into Celina's head, knocking her off the table where she had been sitting.

  Fifteen.

  Gerald groaned, blinked a few times, then bolted upright and screamed. Everything was dark. Gerald screamed again.

  "I'm blind!" he said. No, wait a second; he could just make out the faint image of the ocean lapping up on the beach about twenty feet away from him.

  The moon sent a silvery shimmer down across the water, and as Gerald's ears adjusted to being back in reality and not in a super-continental-semi-vortex, which is what the blue swirly thing consisted of, he could hear the waves breaking and feel the gentle warm night wind brush against his face.

  Warm wind? This was not the South Pole. He distinctly remembered being in the South Pole with ice, cold water, ice, penguins, and more ice. He was certain about that, and then he faintly remembered the swirly blue thing, and then it would appear he had landed on a beach.

  A warm beach. A warm beach with palm trees dotted here and there. Gerald
smiled. Then he thought for a moment; something wasn't sitting right with him. He felt a bit woozy; he'd just been hurtled up into the cosmos, traveled a few thousand miles, and ended up on a rather nice beach. But there was something else; something just didn't fit, like a wool sweater after it’s been washed at the wrong temperature.

  Then it hit him. Penguins couldn't scream. They just made an odd kind of chattery, quacking noise. He reached his hand up to where his beak would normally be, but never touched it. The reason being, not only was it not there, but he was too busy staring at his hand. He had a hand. He was sure that when he'd woken up on his cold block of ice this morning, he had two shiny flippers. Now he had a hand. He held up his other hand. Two of them! He wiggled his fingers. And there were arms attached to both of them.

  He touched his face with his newfound hands to find that it had more holes in it than normal and there was a strange kind of stringy fur on top of what was once a shiny-looking black head. This was all too much to handle; he had hands, with arms attached to them, and Gerald and his hands were all on a warm beach together.

  Gerald had seen humans before; they often passed by his lump of ice in search of cute furry seals to kill. Or sometimes a cruise liner would pass by with a large amount of drunken humans on it. They would wave and shout and sometime flash bright lights at him. That never made much sense, really. For the longest time, Gerald believed that it was a boat full of crazy people and that was just what humans did with their crazy people; put them on a boat and floated them off into the sunset. In fact, he still believed it.

  He was a human. He slowly took the time to examine the rest of his new body.

  Funnily enough, he discovered that he knew what a lot of the parts were called and what their functions were. Whatever had turned him into a human had also given him rudimentary knowledge of himself and his surroundings. Everything in the world seemed vague to him, kind of like someone's name that he just couldn’t remember but swore was on the tip of his tongue.

  "I suppose," said Gerald, testing his voice, "that everything will make sense sooner or later. Listen to me, I'm speaking, lalalalalala."

  His voice was quite deep and melodious.

  "Hey!" he said, and then jumped. "That was loud, I should speak quietly, I should stop speaking to myself, the other humans may think I'm crazy and put me on a boat. Look! I'm still talking to myself! Okay I'm going to stop now."

  He stood up and brushed the sand off himself. The beach was empty and completely quiet, aside from the sound of the water. A rock pond nearby looked like a good place where Gerald could take a look at himself, so he wandered over.

  Wandering over wasn't quite as easy as Gerald had expected. He just wasn't used to walking on human legs and so he looked very much like those newborn giraffes often seen on the nature channel.

  He staggered over to the pool and almost went in head first before he realized that he had inherited something that he was fairly sure should be called reflexes. He peered over the edge of the pool and came face to face with himself. Although Gerald had very little in terms of a basis for comparison, he was quite impressed with the way he looked. He looked good. In actual fact, the body that had been specially chosen for him had previously belonged to a rather handsome swimmer turned reclusive billionaire playboy reported missing around the same time that all the dead people started to get up.

  Despite his many downfalls in life, the handsome man in question had saved a young boy from getting hit by a bus by putting himself in harm's way. The impact killed him instantly, and his soul was the last one that Death guided to heaven before he quit. The body, moments after the impact, before anyone could get a good look at it, was sucked into an orange swirly thing and whisked up into the cosmos where it traveled around, been fully healed, swung once around the sun, and then collided with a blue swirly thing.

  There was a quick trade made, and Gerald had inherited a rather nice body while his penguin body entered another dimension where humans worshipped penguins and would see the arrival of the penguin body as some kind of mystical sign from their Penguin God.

  Gerald ran his hands through his thick black hair. Gerald looked very much like the underwear model pictures often displayed in high-class department store windows. Short, curly hair covered various parts of his body but aside from that, everything seemed to be in order. He walked around a little more, trying to get the hang of his legs, when a thought hit him so hard that it knocked him onto his back. The thought had originated within a goldfish bowl, flung out across the world, specifically looking for Gerald. The thought was black robe. And that was it.

  Gerald committed it to memory and decided that this must be a human trait that he was just going to have to get used to. He jumped to his feet and rather nakedly walked off toward the group of bright lights at the far end of the beach. As he walked, he got the distinct impression that he should be covering his body up with something but as nothing sprang immediately to hand, he decided he'd just have to wing it.

  He laughed to himself.

  "Wing it," he said.

  This morning he had wings, not that he could ever fly with them, but even so, for a moment there, everything seemed strangely and amusingly ironic. Oh, how he wished the other penguins could see him now. Gerald was getting closer to the lights, and he could make out some words in front of a large building that was the source of the lights, which funnily enough, he found he could read. The building was apparently something called a hospital. There seemed to be some kind of a ruckus at the front of the building, and Gerald's memory suddenly sprang into action as a man in a black robe came sprinting out of the front of the building, followed closely by three large orderlies dressed in white.

  The Angel of Death skidded to a confused stop as he suddenly came face to face with a naked man who had once been a penguin and whose soul he was sure he had guided to heaven not too long ago. However, that was all he had time to think about as the orderlies tackled him, knocking him into the naked ex-penguin, who shrieked unhappily.

  Everyone, not really knowing what to do for the best, lay in a sort of disorganized mess as other orderlies came running from the building.

  The last thing the naked man yelled, probably a little too loudly was, "Please don’t put me on a boat!"

  Sixteen.

  Jeremiah the goldfish remained very still. He had suddenly noticed there was a castle in the middle of his goldfish bowl and he was remaining very still in case there was something inside it, and he didn't want to disturb it in case it turned out to be an angry and violent something.

  "Where had the castle come from in the first place?" he wondered. And then he began to wonder why he was staying very still. And then the castle slipped from his mind altogether as the large black squiggly object outside of his bowl began to ring.

  A recorded male voice clicked on, accompanied by a vast amount of hissing.

  "I'm obviously not here, otherwise I would have picked up. Just thought I'd leave a message telling you so. At this point I'd like to encourage you to leave me a message in return if you feel so inclined. If you don't, well, that's your decision, then, isn't it?"

  There was a sharp beep, then a frantic female voice popped into the atmosphere. Jeremiah glided around his watery kingdom, quite content not to be hearing the voice due the sound-dampening power of liquid. The answering machine message went something like this.

  "Uhh. Hi. I feel a bit stupid doing this, only I'm stuck in the lunchroom at work and, well, a group of deranged cyborg elves has taken over the building and I can't get out. And your number kinda just popped into my head out of nowhere, actually knocked me down on the floor. And since I can't get anyone else to help me I thought you might be able to. Anyway, I'm feeling more and more stupid the more I talk, so I'm going to shut up now. I'm at Majestic Technologies."

  There was a click, followed by a sick kind of whirring sound as the antique answering machine attempted to rewind the equally antique cassette tape.

  Completely ob
livious and suddenly in a most gleeful mood, Jeremiah the goldfish swam in and out of the castle that he had just discovered right there in his bowl.

  Seventeen.

  Feeling completely dejected, Celina sat down in the chair. The phone number had seemed like a completely sane idea at first, but after making the call, she thought it all rather ridiculous. She should know better than to go with her instincts. Receiving strange thought-waves that were definitely not her own was a fairly new concept to her.

  When she was younger, she was convinced that Prince was actually speaking to her, and only her, through his music. It was a theory that, in her younger years, quite often got her beaten up by the other girls.

  The lights in the kitchen flickered for a moment and tried to come back on, but to no avail. A chill suddenly ran down her spine and then carried on right down to her feet. When it reached her feet, the chill decided that there was still something to be chilly about so it ran right back up her legs and raced up her spine.

  There was always a part in horror movies where someone knew something bad was about to happen, everything else happened in the right order, the people were in the right places. The power went out, the phone lines were cut, and Sandra the blonde-haired, big-breasted co-star has been missing for over an hour in the creepy abandoned house that no one in their right mind would go into, not even a bunch of high school kids. If Celina had been in a movie, this would have been the point where she found herself at this particular moment. Although everything had been deadly quiet for the past six hours, suddenly everything seemed even quieter. And although the lights had been out for quite a while, everything seemed more chillingly dark. And then the click of the dining room door being unlocked made her heart pound loudly inside her chest.