Dark Entities

by David Dunwoody

  Miles and years down the tunnel he saw a new candle sprouting to life. It couldn’t possibly be any shorter. Already, the newborn flame was failing in a pool of wax. The boy would die without a name. Death stood watch until the candle burned out.

  Time passed, marked only by the irregular patter of candlewax. Time was inconsequential to him.

  So it was that Death was walking through the tunnel when one candle among hundreds of billions went out. He reached to pluck the wick from its center and snatched his hand back. Something he’d never felt before – heat scorching his fingertips. And something he’d never seen in all of eternity – a blue flame embracing the wick.

  Rubbing his tender fingers and watching them blister in response, Death backed off from the candle. He tried to see in his mind the soul which had been bound to it, but all that came was an impenetrable fog. He watched the blue flame for a while. It burned strong yet showed no signs of wearing down that nub of a wick. Several times he held his open hand over the flame and let the heat penetrate his white flesh. It wasn’t true flesh, but a construct devoid of bone and nerves and arteries; yet the pain and reddening of his hand was an irrefutable truth. After a time, he made the decision to venture into the living world for the first time in what must have been centuries. Though unable to grasp the identity of this flame’s bearer, Death could still divine his or her bloodline.

  Pulling a black cloak over his naked form, he passed through space into a city in the Western Hemisphere. The living bustled around him in their insignificant business. He peered high above their heads at the architecture that strained skyward and framed great steel canyons atop a suffocated wilderness. Death admired the creative side of Man, admired the uniqueness of their microcosm, even if it was a mere prelude to greater worlds beyond. Unable either to create or understand the concept of imagination, Death was enamored by featureless skyscrapers as much as he was by the greatest cathedrals.

  He entered a bookstore tucked between office buildings. A spry man in his later years looked up, and was allowed to see the Grim Reaper at his threshold. “Have you finally come for me?” He asked, an inexplicable edge of humor to his voice. “No,” came the answer. “Then you’re here to pick my brain again.” Sweeping the tiny store with his eyes to be sure there were no customers watching him talk to himself, Rip Baker locked the door and flipped over the CLOSED sign.

  “How should I address you?” He asked Death. “There is no need to call me by any name,” the specter said flatly, “and I have no name besides. I am an instrument, not a person.”

  “You don’t believe that.” Baker scoffed and beckoned for Death to follow him. So arrogant, the living, so quick to assign their own insecurities and quirks to dogs and spirits alike. Baker leaned on a cane as he led the way through a red curtain, past a hand-lettered sign that said Private Readings.

  “The Hindu Vedas call you Yama.” The old man told him. “Through Chinese Buddhism you became Yanluo, then the Japanese Enma. The Aztecs, I think called you Mictlantecuhtli” – he butchered the pronunciation – “and in Greek mythology you’re Thanatos. The Celtic Mórríghan is female. Not an uncommon personification. Do you- -”

  “I have no true gender,” Death cut him off. “Are you an angel, then?” Baker pressed. “Islam says so. Azrael, angel of death. They also say you yourself will die when your work is finished.” Baker loved to prod at Death during these appointments. He was probably lucky that his visitor was possessed of infinite patience.

  “I’ve lost a soul.” The specter presented his problem. Baker stared at him from across a card table covered by a frilly cloth. “Lost…?”

  “There is a child bound by blood to the soul in question.” Death went on, ignoring the man’s puzzlement. “Ma-ri-Bron-li.”

  “You want me to reach out to her mind?” Baker shrugged. “I need a lot more to go on.”

  His breath stopped, albeit momentarily, as Death produced the child’s candle from beneath his cloak.

  “Is that- -”

  “Yes. Don’t touch it.”

  He set the candle on the table. The flame, though untouched by the air, flickered – no, the entire thing flickered, like a ghost.

  Baker held his open hands as close to the flame as he dared. “Ma-ri…Mary. Mary Brownlee. She doesn’t know that he’s died, and frankly I don’t know that she’d care.”

  “His name?”

  “Louis Brownlee, her dad. She never knew him. He was in a federal penitentiary. I’m getting all this from her mother.” Baker rolled his head to one side, then the other. “His soul is departed…yet not. Not exactly. I can’t reach him at all. The cord’s severed but he still walks.”

  Death took all this in quietly. He eventually spoke. “You desire payment, Baker? Another ten years of health?”

  “I’d really rather you didn’t.” The old man replied. “I’ve been lonely since you took Linda from me.”

  “I don’t take anyone.” Death said quickly; was there a bit of defensiveness there? “I only mark their passing.”

  He left without a proper farewell.

  Mary Brownlee’s mother Stacy was an open book, but not the key. Death sat on a bench in a lovely park and shut one eye so that he could remain seated here while at the same time watching his candles; and time breezed gently by. Five, ten, fifteen years.

  Mary was twenty-three now. Louis Brownlee’s blue flame was strong as ever. Resurrection wasn’t unheard of, but it was always with purpose, always serving the Order of things. Death always knew when a flame was meant to rekindle itself in space. This abnormality – dare he call it a mistake – had escaped him entirely. He stood on the lawn of Mary Brownlee’s house and watched insects blink in and out of existence, a constant tide unnoticed by men.

  She stepped through the rusty screen door, and he saw that her face was pale and thin, prematurely aged. Was it her father’s stolen lease on life that had hollowed her out, or simply the wear and tear of everyday existence? Death compared his skin to hers as she walked past him to the mailbox. Troubling in its likeness.

  He looked over his shoulder and saw someone in the window of a vacant house across the street: a silhouette, stock-still, focused on Mary.

  No, he realized.

  It was watching him.

  The silhouette refused to resolve into a discernable figure as night fell. It didn’t even move. Death stood rooted in the grass and waited. As each second ticked by, the Reaper felt impatience taking hold in his temples, his ankles. He marked the hours with a growing weariness. This abomination in the window was forcing him to abide by its timetable.

  It took him a moment to realize the silhouette was gone.

  It was after midnight, and Louis Brownlee took pains to open and shut quietly the door of the vacant house. He walked across the yard and stopped in the middle of the street, so that a lamp overhead showed all the gruesome definition of his being. His body was emaciated underneath a damp dress shirt and slacks. A tie, like an afterthought, was looped carelessly around his neck. Gloves covered his gnarled hands but thin gray wrists were visible, empty veins within.

  Brownlee’s face, shrunken and cruel, skin like parchment covering all but his teeth and the cavity between his yellow eyes – it was a corpse’s face. Creases deepened around an alien smile. He spoke from a throat filled with rot.

  “Why are you here? Go away.”

  Rip Baker, who was dying of cancer in Boston, would’ve reminded Death that his Hindu incarnation carried a lasso with which to bind the dead. Perhaps Baker would have been surprised, or just disappointed, to see the traditional scythe appear in Death’s hand.

  “You shouldn’t be here.” He took the scythe in both hands and stood in Brownlee’s path. “How is it that you are?”

  “I asked first.” Brownlee’s dead eyes absorbed the streetlight’s glow and reflected nothing. Death, watching them intently, swung, and felt his blade pass through Brownlee’s midsection without the slightest resistance. He severed nothing.

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nbsp; Brownlee’s hand exuded an aura that struck Death before the dead flesh did. He flew back, powerless, his scythe cutting a swath of decay through the grass; meanwhile the undead let his hand hover before him, bewildered. He’d just knocked the Grim Reaper on his ass.

  And then his eyes did reflect something, something older than Louis Brownlee could ever hope to be in his farce of a resurrection body.

  “Flames darker than this dance in your halls,” he spat. He stepped over Death and headed into the house.

  Were he a man and consumed by emotion, Death might have pursued Brownlee. He’d once witnessed a warrior in a forgotten kingdom that, covered head to toe in seeping bone-deep wounds, had wrested the axe from his assassin and turned him to pulp. The warrior, bloodless, with nothing but adrenaline in his body, was stubbornly unyielding to Death’s touch until he was satisfied. As it was, the Reaper was more concerned by Brownlee’s words than he was offended. He parted the night fabric and stepped into his cave.

  Revelation clawed at his eyes.

  In those spaces between, where there were no candles, suddenly there were – black, with twitching blue-purple flames. And he knew, now, that they had been there all along.

  And Death now also knew fear, as he saw his impermanence in the light of another’s charges. These things, squirming like grubs, had been lying in wait to take the place of his flames. But for how long? Brownlee had to have been the first. Had to. So how long had these others been here, and why make themselves known only now?

  He had read many of Rip Baker’s books over the years. He knew the names and faces of all his avatars without the old man’s teasing. And he knew a common thread in Man’s most prevalent mythologies: an end to both life and death. Apocalypse.

  Nevertheless, he hadn’t really considered a day when his purpose would come to an end. But as still more squirming flames crept into view, Death saw the dawning of Apocalypse, and it cast its cold blue light over him.

  Brownlee had removed his clothes and sat on the carpet in his daughter’s living room. She was spread open on the couch. He tugged a soft bit from her abdomen and chewed thoughtfully.

  “Why?”

  He answered without turning. “She knew me. She said didn’t love me. She knew I’d come back, for her, and she told me I was wrong to do it.” Brownlee sucked the blood from his fingertips. The warmth of Death at his back was almost comforting now; it was coming off the scythe’s blade, coated in the dark wax that ran from his candle.

  “Such things happen,” Death said before driving the scythe into Brownlee’s back. The wax from the aberrant candle was able to snag whatever had slipped into the body after the departure of Brownlee’s soul, whatever had become this pale mockery of him. It squirmed on the end of the scythe, black and crumbling – then gone.

  A shallow breath ruptured the blood bubble between Mary’s lips. She found herself naked and alone, unable to move, unable to see or feel the troughs carved into her belly. Death stood over her and rested the point of the scythe on her forehead. From some place deep in her shattered mind she whispered, “Daddy?”

  He placed both hands on the back of the blade and pushed.

  His last visit to Rip Baker was one month later. “I thought you didn’t take anyone,” the old man said. “I no longer have a choice,” Death replied. In traveling the world he had seen the plague of the blue flames taking hold of the newly dead. He was now in constant competition with a mindless, nameless thief; in fact, this Boston hospital was startlingly peaceful compared to where he’d come from. “So,” Baker asked, unafraid, “How does this work?”

  The old man watched Death reveal a coil of rope, tying a lasso and narrowing its mouth to fit snug over Baker’s head. He laughed. “You remembered.”

  “I thought you might like that.” Death tightened the noose around Baker’s neck now. “What is your wife’s name?”

  “Linda- -”

  Death yanked hard, but Baker felt only the slightest tug, and by then it was over. The specter had distracted him before wrenching out his spirit, just like the dentist had done to pull a tooth when Rip was a kid.

  Three hundred years later, even the hospital’s foundations are gone. Within the walls of the forgotten city, the only shelters affording the living are a few skeletons of buildings with neither windows nor power. Most who pass through keep going.

  The undead hear the throaty groans of their brethren and converge on the city center. A haggard young woman, all skin and bones, is surrounded in an intersection. Those who can speak call to her. “Come here, to me.” “No, me.” “I won’t hurt you.” All the while thick spittle runs down their chins.

  She stares horror-struck at the encroaching horde. Then, something shudders at the rear of the mob, and bodies erupt into the air. They twist like rag dolls and land lifeless. The girl sees nothing behind the assault; but the undead, turning, see a pale horse charging, and his name that sits upon him is Death and his face is aflame with newfound passion.

  The Ambrosia Supper Club

  The original owner of the Ambrosia Supper Club wanted the building to look like “a drop of nectar cascading down the side of the mountain,” the mountain in question being part of the Klamath range in northwest California. The owner’s brother covered the joint’s walls with chalk-white stucco and placed spotlights on the ground around the building, so that the club would be visible from the mountain’s base – and it did indeed resemble a glowing teardrop sliding over the mountainside, flanked by dark rock.

  The club’s original clientele consisted both of local folk and tourists lured north to catch a glimpse of the building, described far and wide in near-mythical terms by its owner – “Just a bit of the nectar of Olympus, fallen to Earth.” The interior was simply decorated, with a modest-sized dining area and an open kitchen where customers could watch the staff prepare their gourmet meals. A spiral staircase in the corner of the room led to the offices upstairs.

  The Ambrosia Supper Club’s financial take eventually tapered to a sustainable but unimpressive point, though the legend of the place never died at all – still, it was enough that the owner was ready to hang it up and head south in hopes of creating a new sensation. The club shut it doors for a brief period, and was then purchased and reopened, with little fanfare and little changes to the design or the menu. The new owner, a man named Mister Chith, never came down from his office over the dining floor and never the displayed showman attitude of his predecessor. The club still survived on its reputation, never again the tourist boon it had once been but a survivor nonetheless.

  The present-day clientele were mostly older locals. Younger people made up the staff including one Vetta Lewis, chief hostess, an ebony-skinned beauty with a shining smile. On the last night of the Ambrosia Supper Club’s operation – an unplanned event, mind you – Vetta descended the spiral staircase from Mister Chith’s office at six o’clock PM, the restaurant’s peak hour, and made her way to the podium at the entrance to greet those who’d made their reservations. “Well, if you don’t look ten years younger!” She exclaimed as Mrs. Donahue was escorted in on her husband’s arm. “You’re too kind,” came the reply. “It must just be the occasion – fifty years for Edward and I.”

  “Congratulations! Let’s bring you right over to your usual table.” As Vetta led them into the dining area, she unpinned from her lapel a note Mister Chith had just given her. Sure enough, in his strange left-leaning scrawl, he’d written Donahue silver anniversary – on the house – serve raspberry cheesecake for dessert.

  Chith was an odd, quiet man but neither his kindness nor memory ever ceased to amaze Vetta. The oddness of his character wasn’t just due to his name – awkward to say, like the sound one made biting off their own tongue – it was his appearance too. The man had no face. There was only a yawning snarl of scar tissue where his eyes and nose should have been, and beneath that, a toothless gaping mouth that no longer produced sound. He communicated only with notes penned in that unusual scrawl, the same scr
awl he used to keep the books. How did the sightless Chith manage to write at all, let alone handle the club’s receipts on his own? Just another of the many mysteries surrounding him. Vetta was long-used to his look, though it had never really bothered her. He emanated such a gentle calm that it was difficult to do anything but wonder at the man. And the cats – he had several felines that wandered the offices upstairs, all of whom adored him. It seemed like every day there was another cat that Vetta had never seen before – as if ferals simply came in and out of the club as they pleased, or at Chith’s pleasure.

  After seating the Donahues, Vetta rushed to answer the phone at the podium. A man was trying to make a last-minute reservation. “I might be able to get you in at eight thirty…” She began.

  “Party of ten.” The man rasped. “Oh, there’s no way we can manage that. You should have called much sooner.” Vetta frowned into the receiver. “I’m sorry.”

  “Party of ten at eight-thirty.” The man said. He didn’t sound old or infirm; maybe just stubborn. “I’m sorry,” Vetta repeated, “there’s no way I can fit you in tonight. Not at all.”

  “We’ll be eating steak, all of us – steak tartar, no sides. And we want one table. All of us at one table.”

  “Sir, again I’m sorry but we can’t fit you in at all. Good night.” Vetta hung up and turned to receive a young couple.

  The phone rang. It almost seemed to have an insistent, nagging tone, and she knew immediately who it was. “Ambrosia Supper Club, this is Vetta, how may I help you.”

  “Party of ten. For eight-thirty. The name is Lugal.”

  “Sir, I can’t help you. Goodbye.”

  She hung up. The phone jumped in its cradle with a shrill ring.

  “Ambrosia—“

  “I want a table tonight, you hear me? We’ll be coming one way or another and we want a table to sit at! A table for ten!”

  She slammed the phone down, giving the couple before her an apologetic look. “Right this way.” She ignored the next ring.