Death sat at the old mahogany writing desk. He touched the old, almost black wood, sensing the years that this solid table had gone through. The surfaces were worn to a shine not unlike marble – these surfaces no longer needed polishing, the surfaces so worn smooth that all sharp edges had long left the construction. Where Death’s wrists and forearms rested on the front of that writing table, the single piece of black wood was similarly smoothed to subtle dips, ready to accept his hands. On the sloped surface sat a thick, hard leather-covered book. Each Velum sheet had been hand stitched into the spine – and yet the thickness of each sheet was as a gossamer wing, a thinness that would be almost imperceptible except through a microscope and yet solid enough to accept the quill ink that sat upon it and not show the ink that had been scratched on the opposite side. A red ribbon hung between two sheets about halfway into the thick ledger.
Death carefully opened the book and carefully leafed through to a specific page. His bony finger traced down the page – lightly touching every name, written in such tiny letters to almost hide between the fibres of each sheet. He tapped the page, and then carefully, with deep reverence, closed the ledger.
He stood up and reached for his cloak. For many, black will fade to a lighter grey-black, but for death this cloak faded to a deeper, darker, older black. As old black as the black of the mahogany of the desk, as old black as the deepest, darkest recesses of the universe, as dark and black as the emptiness of the darkest corner of the darkest cave. The heavy black cloak hung round his shoulders, the hood covering his face – revealing just his coal black burning eyes.
He then reached for that other tool of his trade, his scythe. Like the mahogany desk the wood had been worn smooth from years of work. Death looked at the metal curve of the scythe – scalpel sharp and without a nick, bend or damage along the whole length of the blade – and yet with a thickness of a scalpel blade. Death remembered when he had first made this scythe – and oh how thick he had made the blade. How heavy it had been to his early hands and how much effort it had taken to swing – and how the early reaping had been so … messy… But he had polished, he had sharpened, he had oiled that blade over the years; and with every stroke of the oilstone a little of the original imprecision had been removed. Now that blade was so thin, so finely balanced – so sharp – as he moved the scythe it sliced the molecules in the air.
Death shouldered the mighty scythe and walked through the open door.
In an instant, Death arrived at the destination written in that thick ledger. It was a modern house in a smart corner of the city; a recent build and the ground still had bare earth patches where the flowers and grass hadn’t spread to. The light coloured sandstone still gleamed, lighting the new tarmac on the road outside. Death walked up the stone pave way to the white UPVC plastic door and raised his hand to the frosted glazing. As his knuckles hit the door, the sound that resounded from that knock was deeper and resonated more than any human knocking on the door. It was a clarion call to the soul within the body – a specific resonance that only one soul would hear, only one soul would respond to. Death never needed to knock a second time – the soul that he called for would respond instinctively.
A few moments passed, and then the door opened. A small boy opened the door and looked up at Death. Death could see the soul’s eyes deep within the young boy – this was a soul that had been reincarnated many times before. Death gripped his scythe and raised it, ready.
“Wait.”
Death paused. Wait? Wait? Wait for What? Death lowered the scythe and the wood pole rested on the ground. Death stared at the small boy.
“I have a Caveat Card.”
Death pondered this. He remembered these cards – they were passed on to souls which would delay their death whilst they waited for a key point in time when they would then pass on. For some, the period of purgatory would be seen in the visual world as a body in a coma; for others it was because that person needed to go through a moment of death before recognising a moment of clarity – either for themselves or someone not quite connected to them.
The small boy handed the card over. No-one would get a second card and it was side line job that Death would collect the souls – or these cards. Indeed, he’d sewn a small pocket into the cloak to hang onto them until he got back later.
“See you soon” said the small boy and closed the door.
Death stood outside the new house build, staring at the front door with a sense of bewilderment. This was one aspect of the job he really didn’t like – it felt so unfulfilling somehow. Death turned and returned to his house.
Death sat at his desk once more, the giant ledger open at that last page. His finger traced down the page until he arrived that the last name. He reached across and took the quill pen, the feathers having long since fallen from the metal tip. He dipped the quill into the ink and in equally small handwriting made his note against the name. He then reached back and replaced the quill in the holder and leaned back in his chair. He realised that he’d never thought about how the names got into the ledger – they’d always just appeared when he opened the ledger. He was sure that in the millennium of years that he had held his scythe that book had never filled to completeness, never emptied from contents – and yet the bookmark was always in the same place. He looked back down at the names on previous pages, recalling those times that he had arrived to gather the souls.
It was strange, he thought to himself, how each soul had dealt with that final moment. Some were reluctant, wishing they had a Caveat card that they could present; typically these were souls that had made a deep connection with the visual world around them, that moment of happiness that could never be recreated no matter how many times they revisited. In acceptance of their time, these souls asked – pleaded – to pass on to the ascension so that they would never encounter the visual world again, scared that the next time would never be the same and that the next time would not be as perfect, as wonderful as this incarnation. Then there were the souls who were ready and even before Death had knocked the door were swung open and the soul rushed out, ready to go again, eager to experience a better encounter with the visual world.
These were similar to those who wanted to experience the world from another view, such as through the eyes of a dog, or a rock. Then, there were the souls who shrugged their shoulders, recognising that this was the time that it was and happy that someone else would decide if and when they would reappear on the visual world. Then there was Mary. Death smiled at this thought as it happened so infrequently that it stuck in his mind; just like Robert centuries before. Mary had opened the door on the first knock and then insisted that Death join her in a final drink – Tea. Refusal was not accepted and death remembered sitting in the front room of that small Victorian-built terraced house, framed in that old Queen Mary style chair with the small metal coffee table in front of the fake fire, with the old pendulum mantelpiece clock ticking away the minutes. It was an uncomfortable ten minutes – nothing was said, nothing was asked and no conversation was offered until the teapot was finally empty, where upon Mary placed everything carefully on the tray, stood up and said,
“Come on then.”
Death looked back at the ledger. He was sure that he had not seen that new line on the page before. There was no name, just a location and a time. Death looked at this new line. It did not make sense, but this was his new assignment, so he gathered his things and walked through the door.
He arrived at the location seconds ahead of the time. Death knew that an early arrival at a location could be as catastrophic as being late; he remembered that time he had arrived early at a bus crash and witnessed those souls being reaped and gathered by something he had never seen before. He knew that he could not be the only Reaper, but not what the others looked like, or where they would take the souls. His souls were sat ready by the front of the mangled wreckage ready to be picked up – but because he had arrived early he’d also inadvertently taken a few additional souls with him… that had not been a happy day when his boss caught up with him. He had never been late, but he had been close once and saw another Reaper moving in on his souls, so Death knew that this was something he could not allow to happen.
Death stood and looked round. He’d been asked to be at the forest clearing and he stood in the middle of the open ground, the fir trees providing a tall secure wall for security that surrounded him. He looked at the ground – although the morning dew had been burnt off, there was still a mist hanging round the trunks of the trees – ready to roll across this open land and cover it with a light fog. But there was no-one there. Death looked up – he wondered if his soul would fall from the sky and land here. But it was a clear sky.
“You’re here.”
Death turned round, and saw a small boy standing in the clearing. It was that small boy from earlier – the one from earlier, the one with the card. It may have been hours, weeks even years – the visual time did not age souls if they didn’t want to age. The boy looked at Death.
“Everything has a start and an end at a point in time.”
The small boy smiled and held out his hand. Death smiled.
“And mine starts now”.
Death laid the scythe on the ground, and removed the cloak. The small boy picked up the scythe. It was much, much taller than him and almost looked comical. But as the boy’s fingers gripped that wooden shaft, it was as if the scythe sensed it had a new master – it shrunk to an appropriate length and the metal grew and thickened. The boy raised the scythe and sliced down for the first time. Almost instantly, the boy seemed to age to a timeless age and Death left the clearing to return to the ledger.
