In a study, laden with dust and covered by the collected papers of countless of lifetimes, two strangers had met for the first time and, after moving past the polite amount of small talk, were now regarding each other with a protracted silence.
A bookshelf of neatly stacked jars softly flickered their firelight into the study and casted a tense air across the forms of the two strangers, illuminating them and giving both the appearance of chess players locked in thought and forgeting whose turn it was.
The desk that separated them was large and had been varnished by the labour of work fathomless to a mortal mind. Books lay in unorganised piles but remained close to hand of a wizened figure, who had recently lost interest in the new stranger and had gone back to scrawling upon a parchment unending.
‘Grimm is that your name? As in the Grim-Reaper?’ the new stranger gestured to an off-centre name card laying auspiciously on the desk and picked it up to inspect it closer. His words seemed to echo in this room a little more that he would have liked, and the apparent cavernous nature of this diminutive study had begun to concern him a lot more than he thought was possible.
‘I have no name, but I suppose Grimm works in the end. It was a joke that a humorous little man clucked at me back when language was more primitive, he wasn’t the last and trust me, the humour of it has become tired,’ twirling his pen as punctuation and regarding the stranger again for a moment, the old figure took pause and the faint traces of a smile began to creep their way across his face, ‘there must have been something in the way he said it that stuck with me, and now I seem to be stuck to it in a sense; life always finds a way to be grim in the end doesn’t isn’t it? If it makes you feel more at ease you could call me Desmond if you like.’
‘Desmond!?’
‘Yes,’ the old man, and avatar of finality, croaked with his Delphic kind of accent, ‘that was the name of the last chap through here, horrible fellow, he was tallied into the maw of what he believed to be hell; is it not a nice name?’
There was something about the way this old man pronounced the word ‘tallied’ that scared the new stranger in the same, detached, way that tax accountants always managed to bother him, and the bookends of life and taxes had left him conveniently in the middle of a realisation.
‘Wait, am I dead?’
‘In a sense, yes,’ the old man had finally rolled up the parchment and had placed his pen down upon the desk with the unexpected resonance of rather high-quality stationary, ‘and if I’m allowed to be blunt for a moment, I suppose that you are, in fact, quite firmly dead, although I’m not really one to worry about the little details of things like death.’
‘But isn’t that your job?’ asked the new stranger, defaulting to the human standard of a rapid succession of questions without stopping to collect the answers.
The old man furrowed his brow, humans were tricky. Every answer, no matter how delicately put, always opened a succession of further questions that then doubled back to that pesky demon known as philosophy.
He had spent a good forty years conversing with that clever Socrates lad and he eventually had to file the Greek into a draw marked ‘To Be Considered’ as the forthcoming backlog of a war had threatened to place him behind in his work.
‘I suppose death is part of my job,’ the old man began, ‘but the bit before and what is to be after is more what I’m interested in. Now,’ the old man reached for a small book marked with the name of the new stranger, ‘what have you been up to recently?’ he said thumbing through the pages in reverse order.
The book was thin, embarrassingly so in the new stranger’s mind, each one of its pages held a memory and slowly became older as they flicked past, seasons and blurred faces sped by until his recollection could no longer reach them.
The old man was reading slowly, worry dotting his wrinkled face and grimace of contemplation hidden behind his unkept beard.
What have I done? The stranger suddenly panicked, how many times could he have lied, stolen, spat at cats, how many collected misdeeds could he have accrued in his pitiful life? What if it was only memory that was to be his judge? Was forgetfulness the loophole that could be his saviour? Pushing thought from his mind, the new stranger attempted to focus on the room around him and tried to escape from the misdeeds of his past.’
‘Where is the afterlife for you?’ the old man suddenly asked, closing the book and removing his small spectacles too look plainly at this new stranger: his eyes were tired, like two motes of ember seconds before their dying light.
‘Uh, heaven,’ the new stranger stuttered in reply, ‘clouds, angles, tranquillity?’ he was unsure of himself in this moment, he hadn’t paid enough attention in life to know if heaven was somewhere that you would actually want to spend an infinity in. Surely it was though? That’s why they called it heaven…
Seeing the internal conflict consuming the recently departed stranger, the old man replaced his glasses and returned to his parchment.
‘Unfortunately, you’ve already been allotted to a different fate, a very boring one in fact,’ reaching for the correct words he gestured a small circle in the air with his pen, ‘You made a promise that you would watch over a person by the name of Abagail until the end of eternity, so I’m afraid you are to be sent back to her as a ghost. Could be worse though,’ he tactfully added–humans loved knowing there was somehow a worse situation.
Shocked the stranger searched his life for a person named Abagail.
‘You mean the girl from the other town? I was Fifteen!’ he exclaimed loudly, already noticing that the room was becoming less and less corporeal.
‘Promises are unfortunate, aren’t they? But worry not you could have been imprisoned in a haunted clothes-peg if you were less forthcoming with your choice of afterlife.’
The stranger was beginning to plead, swear, bargain, all the common things that a human usually would do before their wick was trimmed and the fire went out, but the old man could not hear him.
Lifting a jar from the many shelves behind him, Grimm regarded the small fire trapped within.
‘I might tally up a few dogs next,’ he spoke aloud to infinite emptiness of his study, ‘they always seem to cheer me up.’
J.McCray
2021
Sunday Short Stories 