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

  She was pretty, which was a rarity in this part of town. She also had a job, another rarity, and a sign that she probably didn’t live around here. Years ago Michael would have been all over her, but this was the eighth time he had sat opposite her and he had barely said more than a few words to her, none of which had referenced anything other than his appointment or her job.

  He watched her blue eyes pore over a file, watched her thin lips unconsciously mouth the words she read, watched a smile tweak a fine wrinkle at the corner of her mouth when she read something she found amusing. She picked up the stack of papers and bounced them on her desk to align them. She yelped in discomfort as one of the papers slid against the nib of her forefinger, opening up a wound that dripped a drop of crimson onto the desk.

  She glanced up at Michael, met his gaze with her beautiful eyes. Michael smiled back; she turned away. She lifted the wounded finger to her lips and opened her mouth to expose a powerful set of canines, out of place on such a small and delicate face.

  Michael turned away, inwardly disgusted. He knew of course, when the angle was right, and the door was open, he could see behind the reception desk through a mirror in the doctor’s room, and she had never appeared in it. He knew it bothered him, turning some inner part of him against her, but it didn’t surprise him, no one in the surgery was alive, patients and Doctor alike.

  The door to the Doctor’s room opened and Michael turned to greet whoever opened it, but there was no one there. He saw straight through into the doctor’s office; saw the folded legs of the doctor poking out from under her desk. The door closed, the handle lifting up and down as if clicked in place by an invisible hand.

  Michael felt a cold air brush past him, he sensed someone in front of him and then heard that someone’s’ footsteps as they crossed his path, walked to the other end of the waiting room and then left through the main door which opened and closed in the same ghostly manner.

  Michael turned to the receptionist again, the blood sucked dry from her finger; her garish teeth hidden behind beautiful lips. She was staring straight back at him with a soft smile on her soft face. She answered his quizzical expression: “The world needs a bogeyman right?”

  He shrugged, “Does it?”

  Before the receptionist had time to reply a buzzer sounded on her desk, followed by the static-shrouded words of the Doctor: “You can let Mr Holland in now.”

  The receptionist beamed at Michael. Her true nature hidden behind an endearing smile that wouldn’t hurt a fly. “You’re up” she said happily.

  ****

  In the adjoining room Michael sat down opposite the doctor, immediately withdrawing his gaze when he felt her penetrating eyes boring into his.

  It was light, bright and far from inviting. He felt cold within the confines of the room, it was clinical and sterilised; he would have preferred claustrophobic and dark.

  “Mr Holland,” Doctor Khan began. “How are you today?”

  Michael dragged his eyes to the doctor. He could never meet her gaze for long, so he divided his attention between her eyes and an encyclopaedia of doctorates and degrees on the wall behind her.

  She was an accomplished psychiatrist, she had been in the business longer than Michael had been dead and alive combined. She was the go-to woman in the district, spending her time treating a multitude of patients between four offices in the country. She was a pleasant woman, clearly very professional and certainly very sought-after, but there was something about her that Michael found intimidating. She had a constant beaming smile on her face, a smile that hid her own thoughts and exposed those of others. It put him on edge.

  “I’m fine,” he said guardedly, adding: “I think.”

  “If you were fine you wouldn’t be here.”

  He shrugged his shoulders dolefully.

  The doctor looked away, just as Michael's ill ease at her penetrating eyes began to grow to discomforting levels.

  “So, what’s bothering you?” she asked, pretending to look over a few notes on her lap.

  “Do I really need to tell you?”

  She made eye contact again, briefly this time -- her eyes doing all the smiling for her face. “No, but I prefer it that way.”

  Michael wasn’t going for it. “It would save a lot of time if you just did your thing,” he told her.

  “Because the art of psychiatry is about building a relationship.”

  “I mean why do you even bother communicating with your--” Michael paused, hesitated and then frowned. His eyebrows narrowed disapprovingly at the grinning psychiatrist.

  Unprompted the doctor said: “no, but I wanted to prove a point.”

  “Did you have to do--” again Michael stopped himself, this time he wasn’t frowning. He shifted agitatedly on his chair, glanced this way and that around the spaciously isolated room and then finally relaxed, albeit with feigned comfort.

  “Okay,” he said. “We’ll do it the normal way. No mind reading. It’s off-putting.”

  The doctor seemed pleased. She made a few notes. Michael stared absently at the nib of her pen as it scrawled its shorthanded squiggles.

  “So,” she said, slowly lowering the pen and Michaels’ eyes. “How are things at work?”

  He raised his eyes to meet her. “A nightmare,” he explained with a reflective nod of his lethargic head. “I’m still on the bottom rung, working with the worst; the scum of society.”

  “Aren’t all people equal?” she wondered. “You deal with death all the time; you should know that better than anyone.”

  Michael shrugged his shoulders apathetically. “Dead, everyone is the same. It’s their life that depresses me. Some of them have so little to lose that they see death as a minor distraction.” He slumped back, lowered his gaze. “Last week I picked up a drunk driver, he drove straight into a wall and died on impact, when I found him he was so fucking cheery that I wanted to kill him again.” He sighed heavily and wrapped his arms across his chest.

  “Isn’t it good to see that?” Doctor Khan wondered. “Doesn’t it make a nice change?

  Michael shook his head for a few seconds before answering. “You come to expect a certain something from the dead. A mix of anger, fear and loss. It’s a happy ritual that they all abide by. It’s the only part of the job I feel comfortable with, as disturbing as that may sound.”

  “Is this man the reason for your visit?”

  He shook his head, unfolded his arms and leant forward listlessly. “I want to know what I’m doing here. That’s why I’m here; I want you to tell me. I should be dead.”

  The doctor didn’t flinch, didn’t lower eye contact. Michael had hoped for a note of sympathy, something different from the norm, but he got the answer he had been expecting: “You chose to work. You chose to live on.”

  He sagged back in his seat. “Fine.”

  “Immortality not good enough for you?”

  He shrugged nonchalantly. “At the time it sounded like a good idea,” he explained. “But I expected a little, I don’t know, just...more. I guess.”

  “More?”

  “Naked virgins and free whiskey on tap,” Michael explained with a wry grin. “A constant state of euphoria, a body that never feels pain or disease.”

  “It didn’t live up to your expectations then?”

  “No. I’m on the breadline. I live in filth. Last week I had the biggest haemorrhoids I’ve ever seen. It was like a grape vine growing out of my arse,” he shook his head disconsolately. “How the hell do dead people get fucking piles?”

  “It is a complicated world.”

  “Too complicated. None of it makes any sense and every time I ask about something, every time I complain; you know what they tell me?

  The doctor nodded. She had said the same thing to him before.

  “In time you will learn,” she recited.

  “Exactly,” Michael spat distastefully.

  “And they are right,” Doctor Khan told him. “This world has to be experienced to be unders
tood. You may think thirty years is a long time, but in the scheme of things, here, it isn’t.”

  “So they keep saying.”

  “It’s true. I’ve been around a long time and I’m still learning.”

  Michael deflated in the chair. He hadn’t gotten what he wanted and once again he was going to leave just as clueless as he was when he arrived.

  The doctor continued. “My advice to you Michael, is to relax. Stop wondering, stop asking questions and just let it be.”

  “Fine,” Michael said with the stubborn and unconvincing tone of someone who certainly wasn’t going to relax and definitely was going to ask more questions.

  He stood up, straightened his jacket, smiled appreciatively and turned to leave.

  Doctor Khan called to him before he exited the room: “And lay off the dope.”

  3

  On the night of his death Michael had experienced the same contented sobriety that he had since glimpsed in the eyes of so many of the recently deceased.

  That night, when the final rain drop splattered on his pale face and his soul slipped out of his body, he felt empty. He felt like he was the body his soul had left, and not the other way around.

  The man who had spoken to him before his death and then watched him die, extended a hand.

  “Samson,” he offered with a smile.

  Michael looked at the proffered appendage and then at his own lifeless body. “I’m dead?”

  Samson withdrew his hand, tucking it into his jacket. “I’m afraid so.”

  “You knew this was going to happen?”

  Samson nodded apologetically.

  “So what now?” Michael clambered to his feet and looked around the dim alleyway. There were no bright lights at the end, no ethereal melodies. “Is this it?”

  “It doesn’t have to be if you don’t want it to be,” Samson said cryptically. “That’s what I’m here for. My offer still stands.”

  Michael took a step back and rested a hand on his forehead. Dying and then being offered a job was a lot to take in at once, but what bothered him was that he wasn’t stressing out over it; his conscious had been sedated.

  “Does it always feel like this?” He asked. His eyes picked out the glinting police lights in the distance as they sparkled against the freshly fallen rain. “Death, I mean.”

  “I guess so,” Samson said.

  Michael turned to the older man. “You don’t know? Didn’t you die?”

  Samson shrugged. “Technically I’m dead. But I didn’t die.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s not important.” Samson carefully stepped over Michael’s dead body and put an arm around the shoulder of his living one. “Come with me,” he said.

  They walked out of the alleyway and into the street where the rain beat a staccato rhythm on the road and the streetlights spilled their sickly glow onto the pavement.

  They walked slowly past the closed shops, quiet bars and simmering houses. Beyond the pub where old alcoholics drank their sorrows away; the nightclubs where the young danced and drugged the night away. They passed a beggar on the street who looked up at them both, shook a tin cup that rattled with the lonely sounds of a solitary coin, and then groaned when they passed by unsympathetically.

  They walked for ten minutes before Samson spoke again. “You like this part of town?”

  Michael laughed scornfully. “It’s a fucking dive. Never seen anything so disgusting in my life.” As if to add emphasis to his statement a short fat man stumbled out of a pub further up the road with an empty pizza box in his hand. He vomited all the way down his jumper with the ease and comfort of a baby, then, finding the pizza box empty, he began to tuck into the vomit; mistaking it for spilt pizza topping. “We come here for a bit of down-an’-out,” Michael added, sneering at the drunken man who had now stumbled into the street, still chewing on a slice of regurgitated pepperoni. “A laugh. A rumble. A slag.”

  “You know these streets well though.”

  “I guess so.”

  Samson nodded as if he already knew.

  They crossed onto the bridge which marked the West end of the town, things became a little brighter on the other side, the council estates turned into middle-class suburban homes for the blue collared workers of the district.

  There was someone waiting ahead of them in the middle of the bridge, his attention on the blackness below, his head hung low. Michael watched him until he felt Samson’s hand gently squeeze his shoulder.

  “This is the deal Michael,” he said, stopping him. “I give you immortality. I give you another life, an infinite one. I give you a job, a reasonable pay. You give me your commitment and dedication.”

  Michael nodded, waiting for more.

  “What do you say?” Samson asked.

  “What job?” Michael asked. “I don’t understand, what do I do? Where do I do it?”

  “You collect the souls of the dead. Like I did with you tonight.”

  “Like the grim reaper?”

  Samson smiled broadly. “Something like that, but there isn’t just one Grim Reaper, there are thousands in this country alone.”

  “So why do you need me?”

  “I need you here.” He opened his arms around him, gesturing to the town as a whole. “I need you to work Brittleside.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  Samson slowly shook his head.

  “But this place is the fucking pits. What do I get in return?”

  Samson opened his mouth and then snapped it shut again, looking a little puzzled

  “Oh right, the immortality,” Michael recalled.

  Samson grinned.

  “But how does it work, I mean, will I be a ghost?”

  “Your other life, your other self, will still be dead. But you can live a normal life as you did before. Your friends and your colleagues may be a little,” he pondered for a moment, “different,” he said with enough emphasis to make Michael feel uneasy. “But everything else will be the same. You can function like a normal person for as long as you want.”

  “But I’ll be dead. My friends, my family...won’t they know? Won’t they go to my funeral?”

  “That Michael will remain dead. His friends, his family, his job and his memories are with you, but are redundant now. This Michael,” he said, gesturing to him. “Will be the same to you and to everyone that matters, but to everyone that doesn’t he’ll look like a completely different person.”

  Michael thought about this for a moment. He had never experienced such clarity in his life, but there was a lot to take in. A lot of thoughts threatened to cloud that clarity. “And my name? I mean this is only a few miles from where I live.”

  “Keep your first name. Your surname we can change in time, when it matters.”

  “To what?” Michael said quizzically.

  Samson shrugged. He seemed to be growing impatient. He peered over Michael's shoulder, towards the middle of the bridge. He checked his watch and then beamed at Michael again.

  “The surname’s not important,” he said. “Whatever you want.”

  Michael nodded acceptingly.

  “So, do we have a deal?” Samson said, stealing another look over Michael's shoulder.

  Michael turned around to see what he was looking at. “I guess so,” he said, seeing a solitary figure hugging the railings and peering into the blackness below.

  When he turned back around Samson was gone. He looked around, studied his surroundings. He wasn’t there and there was nowhere he could have run to so quickly.

  “Is that it?” Michael asked no one in particular. “What do I do now?”

  Seemingly hearing him, the man in the middle of the bridge shouted back. “It’s too late, you can’t stop me now!”

  He began climbing onto the railing, steadily lifting his legs until he was positioned on the other side. He leaned cautiously back onto the railing, his legs inches from the edge.

  “I wasn’t trying to,” Michael called o
ut, finding himself walking towards the man.

  “Too late!” he yelled.

  Michael walked closer. The stench of cheap alcohol clawed at his nostrils when he came to within a few feet of him.

  “You seriously going to jump?” he asked.

  The man turned around, glaring drunkenly; his eyes flooded with tears. “Of course! And don’t you try to stop me!”

  Michael held up his hands defensively.

  “My life is a joke,” the alcohol drenched despondent droned. “It’s pointless!”

  “It can’t be that bad mate,” Michael said as warmly as he could. “Come on, let’s go and have a coffee. It’s on me.”

  The man turned to him. Initially shocked and angry. A gradual sense of pleasant surprise swelled on his face. “Why do you care?”

  “Because I know what you’re going through. Life can be a bitch, trust me on that. But there’re ways around it. Ways to beat it.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure,” Michael stepped forward, smiling all the while. “Even in the bad there’s plenty of good, you just have to learn how to see it.”

  “I like the sound of that.”

  Michael was inches away. He reached out for the railing, slowly, as not to alarm. “Now come on, let’s go and have a drink, get you warmed up and cheered up huh?”

  The man smiled. “Okay.” He released himself from the railings and slowly turned, facing back towards the bridge.

  “What’s your name by the way?” Michael asked.

  “Me? I’m--” his foot slipped on the rain soaked lip. Michael saw the horror explode on his face as he felt himself falling backwards. He reached out for the railing; Michael reached out for the flailing hands, neither connected. The man fell backwards. The final thing Michael saw were his feet kicking aimlessly in the dark, before his body disappeared into the blackness.