Eleemosynary.

Death checked his watch. This would, perhaps, be the oddest timepiece in the universe – rather than a typical clock face, there was simply an inscription saying “TIME” in the center of the round ivory casing, a very scythe-like needle hand parted a small section of the North-Western, held in place by an obsidian stone in the very highest point. Time seemed to part ironically around the figure, who remained stoic in the brunt of the high wind of costal Britain, while about him the inhabitants of Whimsy-on-Tallow hurried about, clutching umbrellas, scuttling away from the elements that battered their homes. The rain sleeted down, cold and unforgiving, slashing freezing water that seemed to bite deep into the skin, straight to the bone, but Death seemed somehow immune – perfectly dry and, what would pass unexcused as, calm. In front of him the world was wet anarchy. Speeding cars parted waves like Moses’s will literally splashing pedestrians in their haste, who in turn swore at the motorists, but were drowned out, by the surge.1

The fish and chip shop was a sort of beacon with its lights shining light sirens out into the haze. Death leaned against its wall and checked his watch again. If Death could frown, he would be scowling, but his blank, bald skull could emulate no such emotion – his fleshless face was a permanent wide grin, the only emotive feature of his face was his deep blue, pupil-less eyes. The street was being pounded by rain – a loose chunk of cement floated down an impromptu stream, a terrified rat coasting atop it, its body flattened against the raft. Death clicked his bony, fleshless fingers, and time stood still. He glanced down at the strange watch, which was frozen with the needle halfway across it’s face, the tiny scythe inside caught between the “I” and the “M”, leaving a blurred shadow. He studied the scene, his deep blue eyes taking in every detail of his surroundings, flicking back and forth; absorbing the shards of water, frozen in mid-fall, or some breaking against the ground, like frozen bolts, and the rat welded to the stone was affixed, oozing water down its coat, beady eyes half-coated with dew-like water. A car was up the street, saved from the water by the incline of the hill, two beams of light from the headlamps were gulfs in the haze, casting rainbows across the scene with the water frozen like a perfect crystal prism.2

He took out a compass that seemed like it was etched straight out of a rock face and tapped its inanimate surface. The landscape faltered and melted away simultaneously, squeezed and boiled away from a new backdrop – the insides of a small, quaint cottage, the old veil of a different environment hissing and running away into the gaps of the kitchen floor, sifting away into the cracks in the cold stone. A man stood tapping a solid spire of water that was issuing from his tap. He was around five foot six and lanky, with short, greased back ginger hair and a long bony nose. His sharp features worked synergistically with his pin-prick pupil brown eyes, which scanned the water spear intently.3

“Geoffrey Palmer,” Death intoned with a voice like a pillar of lead falling. “You are late.”4

The man spun around, a serrated bread knife in his hand, a look of madness in his strange, humming bird-like figure, which contorted with the twisting at the waist. He lunged at Death, the blade carried curved like a fat moth of steel and swiped through the ragged silk of his robe, then a bony wrist flexed out and caught Geoffrey by the forearm. He released the handle of the dagger, which hurled with the momentum of his swing, slapping unnervingly into the palm of his left hand. He sunk the shaft into Death’s ribs and pulled out, then screamed in pain as searing agony worked through his held arm – the skin around the skeletal digits gripping it hand turned black and dead, sagging on the muscle. He dropped the blade which hung in mid air in the exact spot, and ploughed a foot into Death’s sternum, cracking some bones and withdrawing. Death threw him by the arm bodily into the kitchen cupboard, but the plywood remained unnaturally resilient in the midst of being pounded by the full-ground man, who groaned and slid down the polished Ikea sideboard, his face a broken latticework of black veins which bulged hideously as he gasped for air. Death pulled the blade out of where his stomach would’ve been and threw it without looking into its slot in the knife rack, where it slid in without hesitation, or jostling of its companions. The man named Geoffrey slapped his hands on the stone work floor and lifted himself painfully to his feet, back creaking and boots squeaking clean against the floor. The man leaned back against the wood, wincing. He squinted at Death, then patted his pockets, drew a cigarette, and lit it.5

“Are you..?” he began, and then trailed off expectantly.6

“Death? Yes,” Death replied, watching the man inhale and exhale, who watched back with suspicion, rubbing the black patch of skin around his right wrist.7

“So, why are you here? I mean, aside from the obvious reason. I didn’t think it was your job to beat up and kill the dead yourself; doesn’t that kind of make you the judge, jury and executioner?” Geoffrey Palmer asked bitterly.8

“You aren’t dead, Mr. Palmer. Rather, you aren’t not not dead – We have both come to a bridge which one of us must cross, and the other must stand and signal.”9

“You say I’m ‘Not not not dead’? So, that means I’m alive, right?” suggested Geoffrey, a tone of hope in his voice.10

“No. You are both not dead and not alive at the same time. You are no longer a contestant in the human race. You are an ex-homo sapien.” Death elaborated further, watching the curls of toxic smoke unfurl blue and hazy through the air, drifting to the roof slowly and bouncing off of the untouchable barrier.” You slip through the cracks Mr. Palmer, like a tiny gecko, or a wood louse. I can see you don’t understand, and that, in itself, is understandable, or at least, it is to me. Your species has a knack for complete ignorance, and few of you abandon it in death, let alone life.”11

“I’m... dead... and alive?” Geoffrey groped for a chair, which, surprisingly, came away from the table. He sat down on it and knuckled his forehead. “I’m Undead? What am I?”12

“You are not ‘Undead’. Don’t be the epitomes of your race, Mr. Palmer; use your imagination for once in your disgusting existence. You are not dead. You are not alive. You were not ‘made’ as an element, so, what are you? You are less than nothing, you are worse than nothing. Up until this point you have been perfect in your timing, reaching your deadlines of life. But now, you’ve disappointed me, Geoffrey: you’ve disappointed the universe, because you were late for your own death, and now you can’t exist, but you do. Do you see how upset you are making me? This is not a lateness that is excusable – this is the type of lateness of you turning up at the end of your meeting’s scheduled time and telling everyone how difficult it was to tie your shoelaces.” Death drew back, pulled another chair out up the other end of the small wooden table and sat down. “Do you see now, Mr. Palmer? You have let down everything. You’ve become less than nothing, and have become everything instead. You missed your death, Mr. Palmer, and now we have to fix the situation.”13

“Fix… The situation? I… God, my head,” Geoffrey moaned, clutching at it, “But how? I don’t know… What is happening to me? I feel so tired, this is too much. What… Why don’t you just… Let me live? Carry on going, I don’t know why… Why is this happening to me? What did I do to deserve this?”14

“Do I have to explain everything to you? The universe works by its own set of rules. It was created to be created, and it works on that set of rules to exist. The universe created me to enforce those rules, and I flush out all the things that have served their function. Everything has its end, Palmer, and yours was to be hit by a car while travelling to the local fish and chip shop. Your skull would fracture on the bitumen, your neck would be broken, and you would bleed to death before the ambulance arrived to save you and stop you bleeding, but no, not this one time. I have existed for billions of years, since the dawn of time. I have waited that entire time while this little rock teemed with life, and all the people did their part, but you’ve messed up.” Death looked Geoffrey straight in the eye with a deathly cold stare, “There is nothing special about you, but at the same time, you are everything. If one cog misses a rung, the entire system collapses. So consider yourself a blood cell that clots inside the body, more cells clot, and more, because you’re there, near them, the whole chain is disrupted, soon the whole thing is rusted, corroded, infected, and it fails. It takes about a second, and then everything stops, like it never was. Can you understand what that is? When there is no universe for nothing to exist? And it’ll all be because of you.” 15

“How did this happen? If the universe is everything, and everything inside It has its purpose in a grand scheme, how do I… be like this? How can I be all that’s left…?” Reality was wrapping itself around him like a choking, flaming fist, burning away the tethers of sanity and peaceful disillusionment. They sat there for a while, Death watching Geoffrey as Geoffrey sat thinking.16

“So, I need to die, don’t I?” Geoffrey concluded eventually, palming down his hair until it stuck17

back to his scalp, “That’s why you came, to kill me?”18

“But I can’t kill you. I can only end your existence. If you’re not alive, you can’t die. Have you heard the maxim ‘That which is not dead can eternal lie’? This is your situation. I stopped time the instant before your supposed demise to stop the universe imploding, which I am certain it would have.” Death added, seeing the doubt on Geoffrey’s face. “But you can do the right thing, Mr. Palmer; you can live, and then you can die.”19

“But.. I … I don’t want to die. I want to live! I’m only twenty-four! I have so much time left! Tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after all that – they’re all mine!” A look of manic glee started to spread across his face, and he gripped the edge of the table, smiling, “I can live, and you can’t stop me! That’s why you won’t unstop time! You have to keep it this way until I come with you, because those are the rules, aren’t they? Answer me, you skinless son of a bitch!”20

“This is not life,” Death replied, elbows on the table, staring into Geoffrey’s face, “This is not an acceptable existence. You think that you will live your ‘life’ to the fullest, but you are simply trapped in this house, trapped in time,” Death gestured around, then rested his hand on a fly caught in mid-air, using its anchoring to pull himself to his skeletal feet. “Look around you, Mr. Palmer. This isn’t life – this is synthetic, this is a wooden prison.”21

Geoffrey’s grip loosened. He sank like a dummy into the pit of his seat, the cold plastic unfeeling and leprotic to his aching back. His eyelids slunk over to one another, bathing his face in shadow. He titled his head and cried for the first time in years. Warm embracing tears dribbling and oozing from his eyes, coating his cheeks with a sad, gossamer sheen. Drops of water ran off his long greasy nose and pointed, effeminate chin, and hung in mid air, crystalline beads that cast wraith-like rainbows along his home. He turned his head, squinting at the sink. Through the blurriness, and saw the sink full of freshly caught herring. They glared back, a look of shock and open-mouthed gasping by their narrow, soprano-like jaws. The spear of water trapped them and gave them purpose. It seemed. Death extended his hand, gnarly, stoic and white. “Do you still need convincing?”22

The field was sloping and narrow, ending with a shallow pond which housed several carp. It was nestled in a basin of mountains with white caps surrounding, and dotted with the Autumn components of all the paintings hung in large houses – Brown swathes of leaves coiled and still, lain about on top of the emerald grass at the bases of their naked respective trees. The old monastery was an innocuous carving of the mountainside’s granite stone, the face of which was draped with ivy and curtains of other vines that had grown into the cracks in the rock and gaps in the huge, head-sized bricks. Where the ancient crumbled mortar should have been, but was beaten into submission by the elements. The coming winter was apparent around the peaks near the boundaries summit, and, very occasionally, the cloistered world was touched with a single snowflake.23

On top of one of the larger trees, a single defiant curled leaf shook and shivered in the cold wind. Its tethering stem snapped, and it was lost to the beckoning ghosts. Or it should’ve been. Instead, it stood, as if paused, half torn from the branch, its inside fibers showed themselves as interlocking to the close observer, frozen cold. The leaf hung in a twisted ripple, reaching out to the snowflake and the ground. Death lead Geoffrey over to the bank of the pond and sat him down on a spindly bench covered in lichen and moss, and let him breathe in the mountain air. The cool ether seemed to curve around them, as if the two were surrounded by invisible spheres of force, but, such an idea was absurd, unless you looked into the depths of the taller figure’s cowl and saw the universe in his eyes. Loneliness was their friend. The smaller one looked up to the robed and spoke, choosing his words carefully;24

“Where are we?”25

“This is what humanity has dubbed ‘Shangri-La’, or paradise,” Death said in a tone like a lead coffin sealing for the last time. “As I have never considered it, I assumed this is correct, even though it is a complete matter of opinion.”26

“Why did you bring me here? Teasing me about something I can’t have?” Geoffrey asked bitterly, his shoe resting balanced on the adamantine blades of grass.27

“This is not about you. This is to see what you have condemned – nature creates beauty, humans snuff it out. Roles to play, actors in life. Speak your lines, leave the stage,” Death said casually, staring down at him, and then continued as if he had not paused at all, “Consider this place to be a metaphor of the universe – this leaf on the grass, speared next to my foot? Its tip’s edge is the Earth. As the size of the universe is infinite, and is moving in every conceivable direction in every sense, both metaphorically and physically, at an infinite and equal speed, this scale of the earth is already outdated, or, rather, it would be, had I not stopped time.28

“Now know that, no matter how big the field gets, no matter how many other leaves fall on top of it, and cover the field, that figment of the leaf is always there, just as it was when the Earth was formed, or the leaf was made. And though it may have turned brown and fallen to the ground, decayed and become part of the soil, food for the tree it was borne from, the figment remains, that atom, even if it is only in your imagination, and you die, it will have been witnessed and existed. So the atom becomes the soil, the tree, the leaf, and around again, so that it always exists in the form of the first leaf, the tree, and the soil, and the second leaf, at the same time, always.29

“No energy is created in the universe like this – Everything is recycled; a product of something else’s demise. All the energy that has existed, that will exist, and that exists right now is the same amount; it is just in a different form. If the tree were to produce a fruit, that fruit would cost two leaves, but the fruit is just an illusion of the same particles that make up the leaf; it is the same amount of energy in the changed form. If you pluck the fruit and eat it, you take in the energy, change its form into your own, and eventually you will die, and be buried beneath this tree.”30

Death stopped talking, and the gentle hum of conversation evaporated. Geoffrey stood and puffed at his cigarette. The silken folds bent into sheets to inhabit the upper recesses of the invisible sphere, where he walked over to the edge of the shore, it followed. He stepped onto the water and felt an instinctive rush of adrenaline when his foot met the water. He rested his weight on the surface and tested it - it did not give way. If this was all a hallucination, then it wasn’t very convincing to him. He stepped back and stared at Death, whose eyes reflected his tiny portrait.31

“The universe is being very selfish,” he concluded after a few more puffs, then added, “I guess I’ll get lonely in a world that never moves.”32

Death grinned, but, then again, he had no choice in that matter. He grunted and sat next to Geoffrey, interlocking his hands with a gentle rustle of fabric and a clacking of bone, then turned to face him.33

“I don’t think you know what loneliness is, Geoffrey,” Death said in reply to this sad statement. Death suddenly looked very old to Geoffrey. He only just noticed how the black robe he was wearing was tattered, the deep creases in his bones, mottled at the ends where chips had flown off in use. Death is as old as time, he realized, and started at his boots. Older than the tree he prunes, even. He thought about how it was to be Death; a figure that has always been and always will, until the end of time – a cog in the wheel. For billions of years he had been alone, then what? He traveled all over the universe, just ending lives, so that more live could be, and he must be so hated, and so feared, and so very, very, alone. For a moment he felt nothing but sympathy for the being on the bench next to him.34

“How do you keep doing it? How do you stand being alone?” he blurted out, staring across the pond, because he couldn’t face the thing next to him.35

“It is my purpose. I will always be alone, just as I am alone, just as I was. You say that I am alone, and you ask me how I can stand it, because it is beyond your comprehension that this is just the way things are; you are a social simian.” The voice trawled on, hooking at the end with malice.36

“The big social monkey, huh? We aren’t perfect, I get that, but, I guess… Why rub it in?”37

“Why shouldn’t I? You say that I’m alone? I am alone. But you’ve made me feel alone. Humanity gave me this form, and so they gave me its emotions too. You all punish me because you’re afraid of yourselves; you invented the bogey-man, and then you act surprised that he lives in a cave. Humanity sickens me. Everywhere I go, all I can smell is rotting meat, all I can hear is crying and screaming, and I do these things because I don’t have a choice,” Death stated stoically. That was the end of the conversation. 38

Geoffrey grimaced in pain as he held the dead skin on his arm in place, which wobbled sickeningly and oozed in its pouch between his fingers. Death added; “If I let you live, you will draw energy in and not release it, like an endless black hole. Since this energy fuels everything, and everything depends on the equilibrium of energy, disrupting the flow anywhere destroys everything, since it can no longer function. This is not acceptable, so you must die.”39

The ash on the end of the cigarette was knocked off by a tear. The glob of ashy water fell to the floor, then curved and splattered against the edge of the sphere. It trickled slowly to the bottom, near his feet. Geoffrey wiped the back of his sleeve against his face.40

“It isn’t my fault, you know,” he said quietly. “I didn’t want this to happen.”41

“I am still alone, and you are still here,” Death replied simply. “Are you ready to go?”42

Geoffrey nodded and stamped out his cigarette. Death was grinning, perhaps even genuinely – you could never tell. He pulled out his stone compass from his robes and tapped it: The tranquil scene evaporated, bubbling and hissing into the space between the blades of grass, folding and slotting into the gaps in the bark of trees about the place, which melted into a pool of color itself, all of it becoming a green swirl as the grass joined the fray. Now the world was grey and dour with bitumen, and concrete walls, and shards of water volleying the soaked location. Geoffrey was shaking, but a stern hand on his shoulder marched him forward to a car frozen in time in the middle of the left hand side land – the driver was caught in a leering peer, trying to see out of his fogged-up windshield and into the world of wet anarchy around his car. The hand guided him to kneel in front of the front fender of the dark blue Volkswagen. His left thigh at a parallel angle underneath the chassis, his arms straight out, palms in front of him, in a macabre pantomime of trying to push him up. From this angle, there would be no doubt about the collision – an unavoidable accident.43

“Mr. Palmer?” Death asked.44

“Yes?”45

“There is no Shangri-La.” Death said, and snapped his fingers.