Managing Death Read online

  ‘My mistress says she met with you last evening, Mr de Selby.’ He gives Tim a pained look, and Tim nods sympathetically. I wonder what Ankous say about their bosses when they’re not around. Hell, Morrigan ran over Mr D with an SUV. Maybe we push them to it.

  ‘Yes, we had an interesting chat.’

  ‘Unfortunately, since I have not been appraised of your chat,’ another pained look in Tim’s direction, ‘I can only tell you what it is that I was briefed on, and hope that our topics of conversation are in some way sympathetic.’

  He opens his folder, extracts a single sheet of paper, and slides it towards me, pushing aside a half-dozen unopened envelopes, a Mars Bar wrapper, and a scrunched up packet of salt and vinegar chips. We all jump back a little when a cockroach scurries out of the chip packet. Tim whacks it with a packet of envelopes, misses, and the insect’s off and running towards a distant corner of the room. Tim glances at me. OK, so I need to clean up a little. Cerbo doesn’t say a word (his pursed lips and raised eyebrows are enough) and deposits the sheet of paper in front of me.

  The number 10 is written across the sheet in black marker.

  I look from it, to Cerbo, then to Tim, then back to the paper. I shrug. ‘And this means what? You’re shifting to the metric system?’

  Cerbo gives out a rather theatrical sigh, as though it’s painfully obvious what the number represents. ‘That, Mr de Selby, is the number of Pomps Ms Whitman is willing to add to your ranks from her own.’

  I raise an eyebrow and lean across the desk, my elbow crunching down on the chip packet. ‘And what is expected of me if I accept?’

  Cerbo clears his throat, makes a little nervous gesture with his hands as though he’s shooing away flies. ‘Time, Mr de Selby. You are to give her your time. An hour for each Pomp. Ten hours, in total, of your undivided attention, before the Death Moot begins.’

  ‘It’s a generous offer,’ I say.

  Cerbo’s lips curl in a grimace. ‘It is more than generous. Ms Whitman doesn’t want you to fail in your work. Power vacuums are something of a danger in this business.’

  ‘And what do you think the odds are of that?’

  Cerbo doesn’t answer. ‘I’ll consider it,’ I say.

  I get the feeling that he was expecting a response, and an enthusiastically positive one, at that. But I’m not ready to answer, and Cerbo can tell. He’s disappointed, and not all of that seems to be about going home to his RM empty-handed.

  He dons his hat. Slips his folder beneath his arm, and stands. ‘Don’t be too long in considering it. That may be regarded as an insult.’

  I nod. ‘I am aware of that. Believe me, I’ve no desire to put anyone’s nose out of joint. But this is my region, and I’ll take as long as I need.’

  He glances at Tim. Tim shrugs and gives him his most ‘my boss is crazy’ look. Cerbo sighs again. ‘Good day, gentlemen.’

  He shifts, and there’s nothing but air filling the space he’s left. The sheet of paper flutters on my desk, the Mars Bar wrapper falls to the floor.

  ‘How the hell did he do that?’ Tim asks enviously.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I throw my hands up in the air, and the throne tips. Both it and me end up on the ground.

  Tim laughs.

  My face burning, I get to my feet. The chair looks very smug. Bloody throne. I drop back in it, heavily. ‘You told me you’d do the talking.’

  ‘Sometimes listening is better than talking.’

  I want to say that he knows nothing of listening, that he knows nothing of the things I can hear, of the things bodies tell me – beating hearts and closing veins, the stealthy drift of a clot towards the brain. But I’m just not that petulant.

  ‘You did good, I think,’ Tim says. ‘The game’s started. Opening gambit, all that shit.’

  ‘Whose game are we playing?’

  ‘It was never going to be ours, at the beginning. Someone else had to make the first move. We’re too new. We don’t even know what pieces we’ve got, or what the game is.’

  ‘Ten Pomps. We could do with ten Pomps,’ I say.

  ‘But they wouldn’t really be yours. They’d be doing her bidding.’

  ‘But they’d know what they’re doing.’

  Tim gets to his feet. ‘That’s what worries me.’ He glances at his watch. ‘Shift change. Things are about to get crazy. We’ll discuss this tonight, eh?’

  ‘Yeah. Holding off until tomorrow is long enough to piss her off, but only a little.’

  ‘Annoying people isn’t the greatest tactic, Steve.’

  I grin at him. ‘You use what gifts you’re given.’

  ‘Oh, you use that one all right, and it’s a rough instrument.’ He closes the door behind him.

  ‘I didn’t get this job because I was subtle,’ I say to the door. ‘I got it because I was stupid.’

  The chair beneath me shivers, as though it is dreaming. Three people die in a car accident. Someone clutches at his chest. His heart beneath races, shudders, halts. I look at the corner where the cockroach ran. There’s been enough death already. I let it be.

  I’m Death, not an exterminator.

  7

  With Tim and Cerbo gone I get to work.

  Well, I try to.

  First I pick up the chip packet and toss it in the bin. The chocolate wrapper goes the same way. I straighten a few papers, open some letters, but I’m not really reading them. I switch on my MP3 and listen to some Black Flag. Henry Rollins gets me in the right headspace today.

  Complacency’s a killer, Morrigan used to say. He should know. He used it to kill most of Australia’s Pomps. But it took him down, too, in the end. He certainly hadn’t expected me to win the Negotiation.

  If I’m honest, neither had I.

  Here I am sitting in the throne. An RM with all the responsibilities that entails. Staff beneath me, a region and a world to save from Stirrers, as well as a commitment to good returns for our shareholders.

  I think about those ten Pomps and just how helpful they would be, not to mention Suzanne’s knowledge. The black bakelite phone sits there. This is the sort of thing Mr D could advise me on. But I need to start making my own decisions. I’ll talk to him this afternoon, once I work out exactly how I feel about this offer.

  I type up a couple of emails, then text Lissa: Interesting morning, how about you?

  No response. So I send another one, creaking backwards and forwards in my throne: Wish you were here. Naked.

  No response. I play the crossword in the Courier-Mail – only cheat half the time.

  Then I consider the paperwork on my desk. There’s a whole bunch of stuff I sign off on.

  A car accident on the Pacific Highway chills me with eight deaths. It’s just a gentle chill, but their deaths come so suddenly – I worry that there is no one there to facilitate their way into the Underworld. That there is, and that it is done, brings a tight smile to my lips. A seventy-five-year-old woman in her garden in Hobart clutches at her chest and tumbles among her rhododendrons. Two children jump off a bridge in some northern New South Wales town: only one surfaces. Someone takes a hammer to their husband, claw end first. Death. Death. Death. And my people are close by at every one.

  It sounds terrible. But there’s life before those endings, and existence after. It’s not the world ending, but lives. The world’s ending, though … I need to find out more about that Stirrer god.

  Still no response from Lissa, so while I work I follow her via my Avian Pomps.

  A crow witnesses her stalling a Stirrer in the Valley – the corpse had somehow escaped the Royal Brisbane Hospital. She lays the body gently against a bench and makes a call. An ambulance will be along soon. They’ll ship the body back to the morgue and it will be as though it never happened. She binds the wound in her palm quickly and efficiently.

  A sparrow watches as she eats a kebab for lunch, sitting in a mall, just a few streets from where she lay the body down. I can almost smell the garlic. I want to reach out and touch her
, and the sparrow, misinterpreting this desire, flies at the back of her head. I manage to convince it otherwise an instant or two before contact.

  An ibis ostensibly digs in a bin as she attends an open-air funeral service and pomps a soul, that of an elderly gentleman, whom she charms utterly. I can see his posture shift from scared, to guarded, to a chuckling disregard as she reaches out to touch his arm. He is gone in a flash – I feel the echo of the pomp through me. And Lissa is standing there, on the very fringes of the funeral service, alone.

  Lissa’s the ultimate professional. She talks to the dead so easily. Knows how to bring them around from loss to acceptance. She is the best Pomp I’ve ever seen.

  After a while, she walks up to the ibis. I stare at her through its dark eyes. ‘Steven, I love you, but this is creepy. Don’t you have work to do?’

  I’m out of there in an instant, my face flushed.

  I get out of my chair and, as I do every day about this time, pull open the blinds to the rear windows. These face the Underworld. My office is immediately lit with a reddish light. The One Tree isn’t far away. Down below, the traffic of the Underworld moves slowly, in a stately reflection of the living world’s traffic. The various bends of the river that I can see are busy with catamarans and ferries. Traffic, cars and buildings are almost identical to the living city, except everything is that little bit ornate. Mr D says that’s his fault. I haven’t bothered to change it, yet. I’m not sure how, but I’m certain it’s a lot of work.

  With the blind open, the sunlight and unlight battle it out over my desk. They’re equally matched. Where they strike my desk there’s a patch of gloom, neutralised only when I turn on my lamp. I’ve read that the living and the dead worlds occupy the same place, but I don’t really understand how that’s possible. I prefer to think of them as two skins of the same onion.

  A shrill screech startles me. I flinch, then glance over at the window leading to Hell. Someone’s hanging from a harness and cleaning the glass from the outside with one of those big plastic squeegees. He’s slowly sinking into view. This is a first. He’s a big fella, pale skin, long black hair pulled back into a ponytail, a strong jaw marked with stubble. The harness digs into his shoulders. What is a living person doing in Hell?

  He waves, I wave back.

  Then he pulls out a gun and fires. It’s such a casual movement that I hardly notice it. Don’t even react until it’s done. My stomach flips, I throw my hands in the air, and stumble backwards, then catch my balance on the back of a chair.

  The window stars, but doesn’t implode. You have more than double-glazing when your office faces Hell.

  Through the fragmentation of the glass, I see the ‘cleaner’ frown.

  I look at the door; I’m much further from it than the window. If I run that way I’ll probably get a shot or two in the back and, while I’m at it, lead him into the office. Enough people have died in here this year already. It seems clear that he’s only after me – and if this is about me, I want to keep it that way. Besides, I’ve taken bullets before and survived them easily. I lift up a chair. Not the throne, that weighs a bloody tonne.

  He fires again. The window shatters this time, glass going everywhere. The bullet thwacks against the wall behind me. Alarms sound throughout the building and the One Tree’s creaking intensifies to a dull roar now there’s no glass to block it out. Hell has entered the building.

  My arm tingles, then burns. Wal extrudes from my flesh. He pulls the most impressive double-take I have ever seen, his wings fluttering madly.

  ‘What the hell?’

  ‘Gun!’ I shout. ‘Assassination attempt!’

  ‘Right, then. Shouldn’t you be running the other way?’

  ‘Shut up and help!’ I yell.

  I charge towards the gunman, the chair gripped in my hands as though it’s some sort of medieval weapon. Here’s a guy with a pistol, and me with something that I bought from IKEA. My boots crunch over glass, a big chunk of which slides through the side of my shoe and into my foot. It should hurt more, and it will, I’m sure, but right now all it does is make me angry.

  I jab the chair at his head. He leaps back with all the grace of a gymnast. Fires again.

  Misses.

  But not quite, my ear stings. I resist the urge to slap a hand over the wound. It hurts more than the last time I was shot.

  Wal’s already buzzing around the bastard’s head, and the gunman slaps him away easily, but Wal is back just as fast.

  The gunman arcs out on the end of the rope, a pendulum packing a pistol. As he hurtles back in, I hurl the chair at him. He struggles to weave out of the way and the backrest hits him in the head with a sickening crunch. He swings in, then out, and in again, hanging limp.

  I hobble over to him and reach out, but suddenly he falls, a long tail of rope following him. I peer down into the Underworld and watch him tumble, his limbs twitching. It’s a bit of a mess when he hits. The mess itself is gone a moment later, back to the living world. He wasn’t from the Underworld, that’s for sure. Someone’s just received a very nasty, splattery surprise.

  ‘Watch it!’ Wal yells. ‘There’s someone on the roof!’

  Who the hell is that? I swing my head up – stupid, stupid, that’s the best way to lose your face, but I have to look – and someone ducks for cover. But I catch a glimpse of the stork-like beak of a plague mask.

  I jerk back in from the window, and shake my head at Wal, who grimaces and then shoots up past me, hurtling towards the roof. He’s gone a moment, before swooping back. He tears past me and hits the carpet hard, but is back in the air almost at once.

  ‘Shit,’ he hisses. ‘That hurt. Not enough Hell here for me to fly properly.’

  ‘Did you see who it was?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, I’m all right. And no, I didn’t, they were gone.’

  Then the first bastard’s soul arrives, lit with the bluish pallor of the dead. I’m the nearest entity capable of pomping him. I should have expected him.

  He blinks – like the dead do, and his death was more sudden than most – surprised, perhaps, at who he’s ended up with. He snarls at me, his every movement a blur, as though he can’t find traction here. There’s a terrible weight of anger in him. It’s holding him here where his lack of flesh can’t. I try to use it to my advantage.

  ‘You’re not going anywhere until you tell me who sent you.’

  ‘You’ll find out soon enough.’ His voice is quiet, controlled, and then he’s running at me, a final act of defiance, and one I’m not expecting. I can’t stop the pomp from happening. He tears through me, a scrambling fury of claws. This fellow didn’t expect to die, and he’s mad about it, but not enough to betray his boss. In fact, I can tell he blames me. After all, I didn’t die and I was supposed to.

  Well, he doesn’t have my sympathy.

  The pomp is painful, but fast, then he’s gone, and I’m left standing, feeling dizzy. Rubbing at my limbs. No one should die with such rage inside them. It leaves me hurting, and angry. Dissatisfied on every level.

  ‘You really should clean up in here,’ Wal says, picking up another chip packet.

  ‘Don’t you start,’ I growl.

  My mobile chirps. I drag it from my pocket. It’s a text from Lissa: Of course you do.

  What?

  My office door swings open and Wal slips from air to arm. The ratio of earth to Hell has shifted in earth’s favour. There are shouts, another ringing alarm, and Tim and a couple of the bigger guys from the office rush in. They look at me then at the broken glass. All this mess. It’s the first time I have a real excuse for it.

  ‘Naked.’ I lift the phone up in the air. ‘Of course!’

  ‘What the – Steven, are you right?’ Tim demands, then his eyes widen. ‘What the fuck happened to your ear?’

  Oh, I’d forgotten about that. I reach up and touch it. My fingers come back bloody. I’m aflood with wooziness. Jesus.

  ‘Someone just tried to kill me. And a second someone kil
led them, from upstairs, on the roof – Hellside, but you should check the real roof, just in case …’

  Tim looks at the men with him, nods, and they run off. Leaving him, me and the phone.

  I sway near the broken window. Perhaps I should move away from that drop. ‘Sorry about the mess.’ And then I remember the glass in my foot.

  ‘Watch your step,’ I say, as darkness swallows me.

  8

  I’m rushing through the creaking, mumbling dark. Knives whisper and flash around me, winding and slashing at each other. In their wake, smoke trails and bodies fall where there were none – as though the knives have knitted their victims’ existence and demise in the same instant.

  My boots crunch on ash and bone.

  A man gibbers on the hill. He sees me, comes rushing down. I stand and wait, uneasy, my belly cold. But I will not run. I recognise him at last.

  Morrigan.

  ‘You didn’t think you had it that easy, did you?’ he says.

  The earth is a mouth, a great swallowing mouth. Morrigan tumbles and is gone.

  I am rushing through the dark. The knives a circle of stone around me.

  A hand closes on mine and I can’t get free.

  Another hand, and then another grabs me. Someone pulls out my index finger, and cuts. Severs the digit from the palm.

  ‘One by one. That’s how it works.’ It’s Morrigan again. He brings his face close to mine. ‘You never should have won. The job’s too big for you. Your feet are too small for the boots you’re clomping in.’

  I push him away. He slashes out with a whispering knife. Another finger falls.

  I’m awake. I check my fingers.

  All there.

  Someone is stitching up my foot. There’s that uncomfortable sensation of skin being pulled tight, without the pain. Not that I want the pain, but my body is all too aware it’s going on somewhere, that trauma is being had whether I can feel it or not.

  I’m lying on a bed in Brooker’s room, which has to be the best fitted-out sick bay in any workplace in Australia.