Forever After (a dark and funny fantasy novel) (18 page)

             
His face turned red. His eyes bulged. He pushed back in his chair; the legs grated against the floor and screamed a shrieking wail. He lowered his head, punched his chest again and then, with a dramatic gulp and a relieved sigh, he finally forced the food down his throat.

             
He looked pleased with himself as he pulled his seat forward again and picked up his newspaper. He looked around to see if anyone had witnessed his struggle. He gave Michael a sly smile, Michael returned it with a sigh and a shake of his head.

             
He pushed himself off the edge of the table and turned towards the kitchen. The profile of the pretty waitress had gone. In her place, looking horrified and unsure, was the stern-faced waitress who had taken Michael’s order.

             
He trotted up to her. In front of her, flat on the kitchen floor, her head inches from the scuffed shoes of her fellow waitress, was the corpse of the pretty brunette: a pained expression on her face, a hand loosely clasped towards her breast.

             
“It’s okay, I’m fine.”

             
Michael looked up. The waitress was in the kitchen, smiling politely behind her friend. Trying to console her.

             
She saw Michael standing there, returning her smile. “She won’t listen to me,” she said. “Can you tell her I’ll be okay?”

             
The stern-faced waitress was trembling, her whole body shook. She was crying, wailing gently in shock and horror. She held her hands to her face to hold back the tears and to suppress her quivering mutterings; her eyes stared horrifyingly at the body beyond her flayed fingers.

             
“She needs to know I’ll be okay,” the spirit of the waitress said with concern that came from a contented place.

             
Michael held out his hand. “She’ll be fine,” he assured her. She looked at his hand, hesitated, her eyes on her former friend and colleague, and then she took it. The beaming, radiant smile back on her beautiful face.

             
“What happens now?” she asked pleasantly as Michael guided her towards the back door.

             
Besides Hilda, the stone-faced bitch in the waiting room, the only women he conversed with were the dead or the soon to be. He didn’t mind it. There was a finality to the dead that he respected. He couldn’t hurt a dead woman and he certainly couldn’t alter the course of her life for the worst. As a reaper he was there as their first stop on an unknown journey, an important part of their eternity but one which couldn’t effect their existence ether way.

             
It hadn’t always been that way, even since that fateful night when he gave up his own ticket to that unknown land in exchange for immortality.  A girl, a beautiful girl, had changed him. After meeting her nothing had ever felt the same.

2

             
The night Michael Holland met the girl that changed his new life; he was hunched solemnly over a pint of cheap cider. He had been sitting in the same spot for a couple of hours, his slumped posture cutting a depressed figure on the corner seat of the corner table in the quiet pub.

             
He had been nursing the same pint for over an hour. A small fly had flown in at one point, possibly when he was in the bathroom, he wasn’t sure; he didn’t care.

             
He brought the glass to his lips and stared at the wallowing fly. It beat a buoyant path on the edge of the flat drink, its wings draped by its side in a soggy crucifix. He grimaced and took a long drink, consuming the cider-drenched fly in the process.

             
He raised his eyes for the first time in twenty minutes, and what he saw nearly caused him to choke on the fermented fly.

             
The pub was all but empty when he had arrived. It was Friday, mid-afternoon: too early for pub crawlers and weekend drinkers, too late for those stopping by for a lunchtime drink. Other than the bartender -- a gruff, abrupt man who spoke in a succession of grunts -- there was one customer in the pub: a stereotype of the perpetual elderly drunk who has nothing better to do but while away his final days slowly drinking strong ale and perusing the betting form.

             
The elderly man was still there, fading into the shadows at the back -- his first pint of ale still clutched in the arthritic fist of his right hand, the heavily scribbled betting form in his left -- but there were now two women at the bar. The sight of them had failed to cheer up the grunting bartender, but it had certainly piqued Michael’s interests. He straightened up, kicked the hump out of his fatigued body, and leaned back. Trying to look casual and cool.

             
The women talked happily to each other. The shorter of the two, with long curly blonde hair, a tight figure and large hips, gave her orders to the bartender and leaned on the bar whilst she waited. The other girl seemed much more timid, she spoke with a soft chime, her voice barely travelling the fifteen or so feet to where Michael sat. She had fiery red hair which cascaded down to the middle of her back, and deep, dark, intelligent eyes.

             
The red haired girl was facing Michael as she spoke to her friend. She caught his eye a few times -- a sheepish, shy look on her dimpled smile. There was a brief, instinctive twitch in her features when she caught him looking at her.

             
They took their drinks and shuffled away from the bar. Michael heard the softly spoken red head say something to her friend, acknowledging him with a furtive glance in the process; they exchanged a giggle and then took their seats.

             
Michael drained the cider in his glass, waited for a few moments -- stealing a glance in the process -- and then sauntered confidently over to their table.

             
He had been dead for a year and had spent that time trying to become accustomed to his newfound existence, but he still had the charm he possessed when he was alive. Within minutes he had them at ease in his presence and before long he had learned everything he wished to know about the beautiful redhead.

             
Her name was Jessica and she was twenty-two. She was a law student attending college in the area, out for a few drinks with her friend before retiring for an early night. She was soft mannered, intelligent, passionate and humorous. He fell for her instantly and there was a suggestion in her eyes that she felt the same way about him.

             
They spoke for an hour. He addressed them both at first, not wanting to alienate her friend -- a dominant and standoffish girl with suspicious eyes -- but after an hour of idle chatter she drew him in and they both forgot about the friend.

             
After saying a brief farewell the dejected friend left, firing an insidious glance at Michael before departing in feigned good spirits.

             
They talked even more when they were alone. He found out she loved classic literature, impressionist art, 60’s pop music, modern punk, day-trips to the seaside, holidays in winter. She adored takeaway food and it adored her hips. She loved ice cream but hated any flavours other than vanilla; loved politics but hated politicians. She had a thing for Michael Jackson but also had a secret crush on Elton John.

             
They talked until the pub filled up. Michael avoided any taxing questions about his life, but his clandestine veil was unwrapped when the skies outside the windows had burned the last ember of sunshine and dwindled into blackness.

             
“So, why were you looking so depressed earlier?” she asked him.

             
He feigned bemusement.

             
“When I came in with Julie,” Jessica clarified, indicating her arrival with the friend that had left annoyed and lonely four hours earlier.

             
He shrugged his shoulders, stared down at the floor. He didn’t know what to tell her. He certainly couldn’t tell her the truth but he also didn’t want to lie to her, so he opted for something in between.

             
“It’s an anniversary,” he said vaguely. “It’s complicated, but let’s just say that one year ago today, something
life
changing happened.” He explained, quickly wondering why he had emphasised the word ‘life’.

             
“Do you want to tell me about it?” Jessica asked politely, offering her sympathetic shoulder as she lifted her wine glass to her pursed lips.

             
Michael grinned and tried to shake the question off. “Not important,” he said. “Well, not now anyway. Maybe another time.”

             
That night they said their goodbyes, exchanged numbers and a brief kiss, and parted ways outside the pub.

             
Michael’s mood changed. He was happy, he had a hop in his step as he strode down the street, bypassing the clubbers and revellers drunkenly making their way from club to club.

             
His timer told him that he was going to have a busy night, two dead within half an hour and one mile of each other, but he didn’t care. He would sleep an excited and happy sleep that night.

****

              The corpse looked familiar. He had seen that face before. A spark of recognition fired in his brain and was immediately extinguished by a voice from behind him.

             
“Hello,” it said happily.

             
Michael turned away from the bloodied, broken body to face a happy, beaming spirit. The spirit didn’t look familiar, didn’t spark the same recognition. Although he hazarded a guess that if he did know this man, he probably knew him as the mournful, dole-faced person looking shocked and broken on the floor, and not the smiling simpleton in front of him. In Brittleside only the dead smiled.

             
“Good evening,” Michael said with an acknowledging nod. He paused before offering his assistance. He glanced at the corpse again. “Do I know you?” he asked.

             
The spirit shrugged his ethereal shoulders, the smile still fastened onto his face.

             
“I’m sure I’ve seen you somewhere before,” Michael persisted.

             
“Maybe I just have one of them faces.”

             
Michael made a humming noise.
One of those faces
, in this instance, happened to be very ugly, almost impish features with a thick set jaw, bulbous nose, long, stubbly chin and eyes that refused to line up. If
one of those faces
happened to be the grotesque sort fit only for a mother’s love and a villainous role in a horror movie, then he definitely had it.

             
“Maybe.”

             
A group of alcohol scented revellers spilled out of the nearby clubs and began to crowd around the body. Excited whispers, female screams, male bravado. Michael escorted the spirit away as his body became a sideshow attraction for the drunk and the idiotic. In the distance the sirens from an ambulance and a police car collided to create an approaching cacophony.

             
“Seems you pissed someone off,” Michael told the spirit. “Technically you’re my first suicide you know.”

             
“I didn’t kill myself.”

             
“Oh.” Michael paused, looking a touch perplexed. “What were you doing on the roof of a club?”

             
“I lost my Frisbee.”

             
Michael laughed, the spirit didn’t flinch. He stared at him, waiting for his grinning stupidity to shift and break into a vein of sarcasm. It didn’t budge. He turned away with a blasé shrug.

             
“Fair enough.”

             
He thought he recognised the second soul as well. A female, dead on the street. She had choked on her own vomit after ingesting an assortment of cheap cocaine and cheaper vodka. She was alone when he found her, her spirit was waiting by her body, leaning against a lamppost with the casualness of someone waiting for a bus.