Forever After (a dark and funny fantasy novel) Read online

  Michael shrugged his shoulders and the last words Neil heard before entering the room were: “I have no idea.”

  ****

  The smile of contentment that Neil had seen on the face of the stubby man, was moments later plastered on the face of Michael Holland. It was a smile of relief, of a day’s work completed.

  He took his slip of paper to a small computer terminal embedded in the wall near the reception area. When prompted he typed his serial number onto the touch screen and inserted the paper into the slot provided. A series of electronic beeps followed before the details of Neil Simon’s life flashed onto the screen.

  His date of birth, his date of death: The cause of his death was listed as “Accidental Suicide”. His destination as “to be decided”. In the end that was all it came down to; four snippets of information, leaving Michael feeling that he got more out of their life than they did.

  Moments later the details dropped away, replaced with a notice stating: “Thank you. Your account has been credited” before the screen returned to default, retaining the slip of paper.

  Michael walked past the waiting room without a glance. He felt the sneering eyes of the receptionist on his right shoulder; the snobbish glares of fellow reapers on his right. He made for the exit, but before he could slip out, and back into whatever part of his world he chose, he bumped into someone who regarded him with equal degrees of snobbish sneering.

  The tall foreboding figure stood defiantly in front of a line of teenagers all wearing expensive clothes and sombre expressions. As Michael took an instinctive step backwards, the spindly giant shifted forward, looming over him.

  “Anything good this evening Michael?” he asked. His sunken eyes glared down at Michael like a warden studying a new arrival.

  Michael didn’t like the man, but he couldn’t help but feel meek in his presence. “Hey Seers. No, not really,” he answered submissively

  Jonathan Seers stepped back. His bandy legs shifted sideways to expose the line of sullen teenagers that had all but vanished in his shadow. They all looked up at their warden expectantly.

  “I gate-crashed a party,” Seers announced smugly.

  He grabbed the boy at the head of the line, his thick, long fingers tightly grasping his shoulder length hair. He pulled him forward with a hard yank and held him in front of Michael like a prized turkey.

  “Freddy here turned 18 today,” Seers explained as the boy capitulated to the overbearing presence still grasping his hair. “He wanted to be popular. Wanted to give his friends a night they wouldn’t forget. He tried to buy some pills,” he pulled harder on the teenager’s hair, lifting his tiptoes off the floor and holding him up by the mangy locks. “Smart-arse ended up with a batch of rat poison from a dealer who didn’t take too kindly to being talked down to.”

  Seers grinned. Michael feigned a smile.

  He yanked the boy backwards, back into his prominent shadow. The boy toppled and fell over his own heels, but he seemed relieved to be out of the grasp of the derisive behemoth.

  “Another exciting day in the Heights,” Seers gloated, the smirk still smeared on his bony face. “Maybe you’ll join me someday.”

  “Maybe,” Michael replied without conviction.

  Seers grinned one last time and then shoved his way past Michael into the waiting room. Michael held his ground until the last of the followers had sulked their way past. In the waiting room he could hear the greetings and arse-kissing that Seers received, even the glum receptionist was up on her feet with an adoring smile on her face, as Seers worked his way around the room like a King addressing his loyal and adoring subjects.

  Michael whispered under his breath: “Fucking prick,” before scooping the hood of his jacket over his head and walking out of the little piece of Purgatory.

  2

  On streets rife with despair, where the pavements were murky with ash from a million smokers and the gutters clogged with the wares of the downtrodden -- condoms, cigarette ends, needles -- Michael walked with his head down and his hands stuffed deep into his pockets.

  In life he lived in mediocrity, never achieving success or comfort, but was content with his under-accomplishment. He had been happy with what he had: his one bedroom flat, his frozen meals-for-one, his weekends down the pub. In death he found himself in a metaphorical hell, on the lowest rung of society; mixing with the worst of the worst.

  A shoulder moist with body odour and thin to the bone with malnourishment, brushed past him on the street. The man didn’t apologise to Michael, didn’t even acknowledge him.

  Michael sighed and shook his head.

  Ahead the street was alive with skimpily clad women offering their bodies for the price of a fix. Their flesh tight to their bones, bruised and blackened; their eyes sunken deep in their skulls; their lips a mixture of cracked, dried, blue and diseased, all covered over with lashings of lipstick which shone a defiant shade of black and red against their pale skin.

  “Want me to show you a good time?”

  “Hey cutie.”

  “What, you not even going to look at me?”

  Michael brushed past without raising his head. It was better not to acknowledge them; better to avoid their Medusa stares. Not because they exuded a powerful seduction over him, but because they depressed him, they reminded him just how low he had sunk. These were the women he knew now; these were the women he worked with. He had reaped the souls of their friends and soon he would reap them as well. His old life had been a conveyer belt of beautiful women, he had been popular with the ladies, they loved him and he loved as many of them as he could. Now they sickened him.

  He slalomed through an assortment of beggars, prostitutes and clusters of those who could have been both but were too inebriated to be either.

  Michael dreamed of the day when he could work in a place like the Heights. Where the streets were paved with gold and not splattered with vomit. He wanted to collect the souls of the successful and educated. To mingle amongst the intelligent, the well-bred, the well-off and the over-privileged.

  In a back alley, a darker slice of this dark town, Michael paused. A motionless man lay slumped up against the wall like a broken puppet. The sleeve of his right arm had been rolled up, his pale flesh exposed to the cold. A needle hung loosely from a vein at the top of his forearm. A small trickle of blood ran down from a pinprick opening, stretched wider under the pull of gravity.

  Michael removed a small electronic device from his pocket and glared at it with a twinge of curiosity on his face. The figure stirred slightly, cackling a vomitus groan. Michael nodded, stuffed the electronic timer -- his database of the dead and soon to be -- into his pocket and continued down the alley, stepping over the intoxicated man.

  These were his streets; these were his people, and every one of them disgusted him.

  He entered a grotty flat through a stained, flaked and graffitied door. There were crushed beer cans and the tell-tale stains of piss, expectorant and vomit outside of the door. It stank of sickly putrefaction, and that smell didn’t much improve when he opened the door and entered the two bedroom flat.

  He had lived in the flat since his death. This was his heaven, his hell; the place he had been confined to. A definitive example of a bachelor's flat, it was dark, gloomy and it stank of stale body odour and melancholic masturbation, most of the smells provided by Michael’s flatmate in eternity: Chip.

  Chip was slouched on the sofa when Michael entered, a stumpy hairy man who appeared to be of hobbit and Neanderthal parentage. His face was small and compact, his features squeezed together by a vice. A flat head, flat chin, protruding forehead, bulbous nose. The colour of his skin was hard to decipher, in reality it was probably a ghostly pale, but with the layers of dirt and masses of hair -- which didn’t seem to grow from anywhere specific, but rather just seemed to stick all over his sweaty skin like loose hair on soap -- he looked apish.

  A joint was held loosely between his protruding lips. The billowing smoke rose into a
pathetic, redlined eyes that watched Michael as he sauntered over to take a seat opposite.

  “Are you not working tonight?” Michael wondered, half glancing at the television where a talent show played on low volume. A pompous judge was displaying his distaste for a devastated singer.

  With a thick trowel-like hand, Chip removed a small bag from his pocket, thrusting his hip upwards to jam the hand into the material. He pulled the top of the drawstring bag and emptied the contents onto a nearby coffee table, where they were acquainted with a half-eaten slice of pepperoni pizza, an outdated TV guide and a mobile phone which had run out of battery three weeks ago.

  Michael watched the assortment of teeth cascade from the bag. They bounced against the solid top like sleet before settling in ragged piles on the dusty surface.

  “Finished,” Chip declared, managing a proud smile as he gestured to the teeth with a wave of the empty bag.

  Michael stared absently at the piles.

  He had been dead and confused for thirty years, but even as little as seven years ago this would have surprised him. Back then he hadn’t known Chip, hadn’t known that tooth fairies even existed, and if he had he certainly wouldn’t have expected them to look like Chip, otherwise he might have entertained the idea of an eternity spent living with one.

  Chip spent his nights patrolling the same area as Michael, but where Michael took souls and left empty corpses; Chip took teeth and left money. It was his job to take every spent tooth from every child throughout their adolescence, but it was only the first tooth that mattered, the rest were just complimentary. The teeth were taken back to the Collector Headquarters where they were ground, analysed, and destroyed, but not before the organisation had collected and filled the child’s DNA to maintain a database that the government would kill for, but one they didn’t even know existed.

  “I told you to stop bringing those back here,” Michael said. “It’s fucking disgusting; can’t you drop them off at the office?”

  Chip didn’t seem to be in the mood for trudging the two miles to his workplace, he barely looked capable of making it to the toilet without tripping over his own stupidity. “I’ll do it tomorrow,” he said indefinitely. He took a long toke from the joint as if to emphasis his lack of mobility and then he offered the burning stick to his friend.

  Michael watched the ember spill smoke into the dim room. The simpleton face of his grinning flatmate appeared expectantly through the hazy, ragged lines. He shrugged, conceded, and took the joint, settling back to watch television as an entire country cheered the antics of a dancing dog, knowing that he was just a few tokes away from understanding their enjoyment.

  “How was your pick up?” Chip said half-heartedly, his smiling eyes on the television, enjoying the performance as much as the squealing audience.

  “Demented.”

  “Drugs?” Chip wondered, the scent of degeneracy piquing his interest.

  Michael turned distastefully away from the television; there wasn’t enough dope in the world. “Adultery,” he explained. “He tried to kill his wife for having an affair, ended up killing himself.”

  Chip laughed, a little too enthusiastically. He slammed his fists into the side of the couch. “Classic,” he said, his voice strained with hysterics. “You have a great fucking life mate.”

  Michael twisted his face and leant back, sinking into the chair as he tried to let the dope take over him before the memories and the regrets of when he really did have a great life swarmed over him.

  3

  “I’m telling you--” any story Michael told, anything he had to say, always took centre stage. That night he had been joined by his closest friends Del and Adam, one either side of him at the bar, both, as always, enthralled by what he had to say. They hovered around him like a revered deity. “--If you ever get the chance to fuck twins, you’ve gotta go for it.”

  They smiled simultaneously as Michael ducked forward to take a thirsty swig from his pint of beer. The pub wasn’t full that night, but there were enough people, enough conversation, to fade out the pop music that blasted an offensive drawl from a jukebox.

  In one corner of the pub a group of men hovered around a pool table, drinking, joking, laughing and shoving each other in masculine acts of aggression between shots. In another corner a group of a dozen women, from their late teens to their early forties, celebrated the start of a boisterous hen party -- their symphonic voices halting only to lap up cheap cocktails.

  Between the two largest collectives, amongst the drabs of men on the pull, women looking seductive and teenagers looking nervous, were Michael and his friends.

  “You really did it Mickey?” Del wondered.

  Michael shrugged impassively, “Would I lie?”

  Adam grunted and shook his head, a sign of upmost respect and jealously. “And both of them think you’re only dating them?” he wanted to know.

  Michael nodded proudly, winking at his friend over the rim of his glass as he took another long drink.

  “Nice one Mickey,” he slapped his friend lightly on the shoulder. “Which one was better in the sack?”

  Michael shrugged and then pondered the question. He put his half-full glass down on the bar and ran a thoughtful finger across the rim, wiping a fleck of froth. “Hard to say,” he said. “They both had subtle differences. Susie was a little hairier downstairs, a little too hairy for my liking. That shit was like Velcro when we finished.”

  Del and Adam recoiled in synchronisation. Michael grinned and called to the bartender, holding up three fingers and pointing to his pint.

  “She had a better body though,” he continued. “A little slimmer around the waist, tighter arse.” He drew her form in the air with his palms. “Nicky had bigger tits, but Susie also had the energy and flexibility. I’m telling you, they may look identical on the surface, but once you get underneath it’s like shagging a split personality.”

  Adam looked momentary solemn. “Never mind both,” he said with a weighted sigh into his glass. “I’d be happy with either of them.”

  Del and Michael laughed boisterously at their friend who wore a cheeky smile.

  “We need to get you laid,” Michael told him.

  “Agreed,” Del toned in. “Sick of your fucking moping. Would you be happy with a prostitute?”

  Adam looked offended. “I ain’t paying for it.”

  Michael sighed. “Then I’ll fucking pay for it.”

  He shook his head. “There’s something not right about paying for sex.”

  “Fuck it,” Michael said with a shake of his disagreeing head. “It’s a service. They’re the receptacle and you have something you need to empty.”

  “Nice image mate,” Del said.

  The three men laughed together and then turned around on their stools, facing away from the bar where an elderly bartender had just finished pouring their drinks.

  Michael’s stare was immediately attracted to the hen party. He caught flirtatious glances from a couple of the drunken women. One he deemed too old, an unhappily married woman looking for a drunken fling. The other, in her mid-thirties, was better looking, but too drunk. He had no problems with drunk women but there was a line and it looked like she was about to throw up on it.

  He turned his attention to the pool table where the group of men were still enjoying their game; all of them were silently watching the smallest of the group who was eyeing up a long shot on the black.

  They were all dressed in tight fitting leather jackets -- strewn with cheap patches and emblems -- that struggled to engulf their large frames. They were all bigger than Michael; bigger than his friends. They looked like they wouldn’t move if asked, they probably wouldn’t have moved if someone drove a car through them.

  With a sly smile tweaking the corners of his mouth Michael asked, “Fancy a game of pool?”

  Del snapped a short and mocking laugh. “You seen those guys?” he said, appalled at the suggestion. “They’ll break our fucking necks just for asking.”
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  Michael shrugged off the comment and jumped down. “We’ll be fine,” he declared confidently. “Come on.”

  Del and Adam followed apprehensively behind their friend as he strode towards the table.

  The small man had sunk the black to equal quantities of applause and distaste. He was receiving a mixture of curses and high-fives from his friends when Michael interrupted them.

  He stood in front of the table, waited until he had everyone’s attention and then addressed the biggest man there: a bearded man made purely of muscle and fat, with sweat patches staining his tee-shirt and tattoos colouring his bulbous arms.

  “You guys finishing any time soon?” Michael asked him.

  The big man looked Michael up and down derisively. He sucked in his protruding stomach -- concealed under a stretched, sweat stained tee-shirt and angled by the flaps of his sleeveless jacket -- and shifted forward, hugging the floor with his heavy boots.

  “Fuck off kid,” he spat.

  Inches away from the big man Michael felt like he was choking on his odour, a morbid concoction of sweat, tobacco and beer. Despite the smell he shifted forward until he could feel the moistened touch of the biker’s stomach against his own.

  “Kid?” Michael said, smiling wryly. “Just because I’m smaller than you doesn’t make me younger.” He paused to reciprocate a curious cross-examination. “Although judging by those wrinkled biceps of yours, I probably am.”

  There was a wave of hushed silence through the group as everyone took a sharp intake of breath.

  Del mumbled apathetically from behind his friend, “Here we go again,” and the silence erupted into chaos.

  The big man swung for Michael but he saw the monstrous arm working its way backwards long before it had time to connect. He ducked out of the way, feeling a rush of air dust his nose as the thick fist swept by. The big man toppled with the force of his own missed-swing, just managing to save himself from hitting the floor.