The Death of Death by K. N. Parker - HTML preview

2

The Story of Three

The figure in black arrived back in her own realm. She was in a room that was devoid of any detail or color––unless you would consider skull-white a color––and the room had no door or furnishings of any kind, save for a lone chair in the corner, and one window; a window she stared out of while deep in thought about something. In fact, it was someone who had gotten the wheels in her head spinning, spinning much too fast for her liking. For some reason, her recent visit with Tabitha Wilkinson had affected her deeply. So many questions the little girl had for her, and so unprepared was she to receive them. But she had begun to wonder what her story actually was. How did she come to be in this state? Who or what exactly killed her, if something or someone had killed her at all? Or perhaps she choked to death on a random food item in some random restaurant in some random town. She could have even drowned in the ocean while the sea life looked on, not lifting a finger or fin to help. Or maybe she had committed that one unspeakable act, the act of removing oneself from the life of the living, the act of suicide.

As she stared out into the billowing gray tufts of what resembled clouds that slowly passed in the area above her that could only be sky, she thought and thought to herself but nothing manifested. This affected her more than she anticipated. Perhaps a stroll would clear my mind, she thought, and she glided straight ahead, through the window and the wall that it was built into, and floated down to the ethereal plateau that resembled a ground. Many guides were leaving the premises in exactly the same fashion from windows next to, above and below hers and she observed every single one of them. She had known many of them for as long as she had been there, she did share the same dormitory after all, and ran into them from time to time, but this was the first time she had given any of them any thought.

When she landed, she paused for a moment, then turned and pondered her living quarters. It was great and tall, yet old fashioned in design. It was decrepit and it slanted from every side. It seemed as if it were going to collapse under the weight of whatever ghostly material that was used to build it––it strongly resembled rotting wood. Even trees come here when they die, she thought. This also caused other thoughts to come to her. She felt neither cold nor hot when in her quarters. When outside, she felt neither strong winds nor intense heat to compel her to hide from such conditions. Why then, did shelter exist in this realm at all?

She passed many of her peers on her afternoon stride. As she replied to the many good afternoons and how are yous that her contemporaries offered her as she strolled along, she could not help but stare and wonder––as she had never had before because she had no reason to––how they had all reached their ends.

One particular young looking male guide was pale in complexion, but other than this, had no visible signs of trauma. How had he died, she wondered? Maybe he perished peacefully in his sleep, a sickness perhaps?

Another, much older man, had a large gash in the side of his head, his face decorated with gobs of blood. Aside from this, he had a very cheerful expression, as he offered a smile as he passed her by. She gave a cordial nod. Surely he was murdered by meat cleaver, she had surmised.

The figure then studied a female guide who seemed to be in a hurry. The woman had her hair in a bun, displaying a rather large, red and blotchy bite wound on her neck. She remembered that she had once learned about the venom of snakes. The venom from a snake’s bite did that one in, she thought very assuredly.

She then paused in her tracks once more, extremely startled by the fact that she was able to remember anything from her previous life at all. If she was able to remember arbitrary facts about snakes, let alone what a snake is in the first place, why then was she unable to remember something as monumental as the way she had died. The thoughts in her head were all too much to handle in an upright position and she felt the need to sit and ponder.

She approached a hill covered in decaying blades of what had once been grass, and scattered among the grass were gray stems and wilted petals of what used to be considered flowers, and upon this hill sat a long and decrepit piece of something that was once possibly called a log.

Upon the far end of this log sat three guides deep in conversation about something that she could not clearly hear. She had much rather had been alone, but the appeal of something to sit down on and think was too strong for her to ignore, so she sat on the far other end of the log and had chosen to ignore the guides instead. Upon sitting, she had noticed that she was facing a river of water. Did water come here when dead as well? She half thought. Then the other half of her thought remembered that she had not been as daft as to think such silly things as water dying. But she did not feel thirsty, nor did she feel the need for a nice, cool dip in a large body of water. Why then, was the reason for its existence here? As she watched, she began to see the bones of things that were most likely fish jumping in and out of the river. Interesting, she thought. Fish cannot walk so of course they would need water to swim in, and she was sure of how they came to be in this situation. People killed and ate fish; that much she was sure of. But more importantly, she still had no recollection of her own death.

She suddenly felt the familiar sensation of someone staring at her, and she turned her head to the left. The three guides had moved from their position at the far other end of the log and were now sat directly next to her, and after what seemed like an extremely awkward amount of time spent staring at one another, one of the guides finally spoke.

“Hello!” said the guide sat closest to the figure in black, enthusiastically. “And how are you today, my dear?”

“I’m quite well, thank you,” she answered.

“Are you? You don’t look well. You look quite the opposite,” he said back bluntly.

“Who are you to judge what I am feeling?”

“I meant nothing by it, love. You just seem rather down and thought maybe there was something we could do about it. Cheer you up, perhaps.”

“I don’t need cheering up, thank you very much.”

“Aww, love, we got off on the wrong foot. My apologies. Let’s start over. Name’s Nate, and these are my companions, Rowley and Jane.”

Nate was tall and very lanky and sat with a great slump. His face was white, as was the usual complexion in these parts, and his hair was jet black and unruly. But his most distinguishing feature was the very large and very bloody hole in the middle of his forehead, and as the figure turned to face him, she could very clearly see Rowley and Jane through the large hole in Nate’s head, and they very clearly saw her and waved. She waved back.

“Now, what seems to be the problem, love?” Nate asked. It seems he had taken a liking to calling her ‘love.’ She was not fond of that nickname, and the expression on her porcelain white face suggested her displeasure. She had much rather remained nameless than be called that, but she ignored it.

“Nothing,” she answered, coldly.

“Come on now, maybe we can help. We’re just trying to be friendly.”

She thought for moment and then decided that they could probably provide her with some much-needed insight. And so she answered, “I cannot remember how I died, and it’s bothering me quite a bit.”

“What a shame. Absolutely shameful, that is,” said Nate as he, Rowling, and Jane shook their heads in pity.

“Do you three remember your deaths?” she asked. Miss Wilkinson’s inquisitiveness most definitely rubbed off on the figure in black.

“Why, I sure do, and so do they. Would you like to hear our stories? Maybe if you heard our stories, it could remind you of yours.” The figure in black nodded.

“I’ll go first,” offered Nate.

“T’was tragic I tell ya. Right tragic and quite short. When I was alive I had a brother whom I loved and he loved me and he was quite young, eight or nine, I could never remember. And when I was alive, I had an affinity for guns. I had twelve of them. Of that I could always remember. And then one day I checked for them and I had eleven of them. And when I searched my house for the missing one, I found my brother in the kitchen with the very loaded missing gun. And when I called out his name it startled him and he turned around and he blasted a hole clear through my head as big as a lime,” Nate said as he pointed at the sizeable and bleeding wound in his head.

“And before I knew it, I was here in this lovely place, with this lovely lot, and here I am, sharing this story with you.”

“Oh my, that is rather tragic,” said the figure in black. The story gave her the sensation of sadness, and she would have cried if she could, but no tears formed in her eyes. Being dead eliminated the need to cry, she thought.

She then looked to Rowley, a bald figure with a bit of heft, but not so much as to be considered entirely fat. He also had a distinguishing feature, as every guide seemed to have: there was a small river of blood flowing from his mouth into his black robes, and he spat little specks of blood as he spoke.

“My story is also somewhat of a tragic one,” he started.

“When I was alive I also had a brother and I also had a sister, and of course that would lead you to the belief that we also had a mother, and you would be correct to believe so. And I believed my mother to love me, and as such, I loved her deeply. And my mother, so religious was she that she always carried with her a book of her beliefs and a crucifix round her neck, and it pained her so that I was not as pious as she. Now, my siblings were quite younger than I, and she did not want me to influence them in a direction away from her beliefs. And with each passing year her enthusiasm for her religion became stronger and stronger, and with it her disdain for my reluctance to adhere to its rules. And with each passing year, she grew into a woman that was no longer the woman I knew and loved, but I still loved her with all of my heart.”

“And so one day I come round for supper, and she served me mash, mash being my most favorite dish, and of course she knew this. She poured a heaping helping of beef gravy over the top of it, just how I liked it. Little did I know, the gravy was to mask the taste of the shards of glass she had mixed into my mash, ground not so finely as to resemble sand, but not left so large that I would notice, and definitely large enough to cut flesh. And as I looked at my mother I tried to ask why she had done this, but the blood that poured from my throat had impaired my ability to speak, and so I died face down in a bowl of my most favorite dish, made by my most favorite person that I believe had loved me.”

The familiar feeling of sadness the story before his had brought to her had compounded, and if she hadn’t known better, she could have sworn that an actual tear had fallen from her eye socket. But one did not.

“I’m sorry,” was the only response she was able to give. She was much too choked up to say anything else.

She then looked at the figure sat to the left of Rowley.

“I’m sorry to say, but my story is no less tragic,” said a high and incredibly scratchy voice, a voice that sounded like rusty nails on an old chalkboard; a voice that came from Jane. Jane sat slightly hunched over, her bloodshot eyes oddly wide in her face. Her hair was displayed as a long and dark brown braid wrapped around her thin and pasty neck like a large and hairy python snake.

“When I was alive I had a sister and we loved each other so,” she spoke. “To say we were the best of friends would be a very true and accurate declaration. And when I was alive I had the same long hair as you see here, and I was the envy of many a female in my village because of it. And one day my sister became betrothed to a very handsome and strong young man, and on that day she became a woman consumed with jealousy, a trait she did not possess before this day, and it made her cold to me.”

“And then one day her betrothed had admired my hair so and he complimented my braid and did so on many an occasion after. This did not please my sister, as you can imagine. And then one day, a vile and very untrue rumor was spread throughout the village by someone unknown that her betrothed had another, and that the other was no other than I. And my sister, being so blinded by love and jealousy, believed it without good evidence and began to hate me because of it. And then one night a shadow had crept quietly into my bedroom whilst I slept and very quietly crawled onto my bed where I lay asleep, and when I opened my eyes to see whom or what had crawled into my bed, I looked into the eyes of the woman whom I had loved very much and I believed loved me, and she slowly strangled me to death with my very own hair, conveniently wrapped in a braid.”

By this time, the figure in black would have very much liked to shed a tear, and the thought of not being able to saddened her even more. She thought to dunk her head in the nearby river and fill her skull with water so that at least something resembling tears could trickle out of her sockets. She did not do this.

“Thank you for sharing your stories with me. They’ve touched me in a way I did not expect,” said the figure in black.

“Is your memory properly jogged then?” asked Nate. She thought for a moment before sorrowfully shaking her head. With hands stroking their chins the three guides then each began to ponder ways she could have died. Rowley took a long look at the figure in black and snapped his fingers.

“That crack on your forehead most definitely has something to do with it,” said Rowley. Nate and Jane nodded in agreement.

“Maybe you were bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat,” he continued.

“No, that’s definitely a cricket bat mark. Yep, a cricket bat done that,” said Nate.

“Perhaps it was a hammer,” squeaked Jane. “How positively idiotic. No hammer could have done that. Absolutely a cricket bat injury,” reiterated Nate.

“Maybe someone threw a brick at her. The mark is rather red.”

“I think that to be blood, Rowley. Besides, bricks used to come in all sorts of colors. Cricket bat I say,” said Nate, adamantly.

Whether a red brick, a baseball bat or a cricket bat, none of this bickering had brought up any memories of how she had died.

“Thank you, but none of this is helping,” said the figure in black as she stood to leave.

“It seems that you’re unsatisfied with our speculations,” said Nate.

“There is one individual who may be able to help,” spoke Rowley.

“And who might that be?” asked the figure in black, and the three guides all pointed to a rather tall and rather black structure off in the distance.

“It is common knowledge that Death himself resides there,” said Jane. “He would surely know your story.”

“He would surely know indeed,” added Rowley.

“You should visit him. I’ve heard no one visits. I would suspect he would appreciate the company,” said Nate, rather unsurely.

“And why does no one visit him?” asked the figure. Nate shrugged.

“Who knows? No reason to, I suppose. I haven’t had one. Have you two?” He posed the question to Rowley and Jane, and they shook their heads in unison.

“Then that is what I’ll do,” said the figure draped in black. “I shall pay him a visit. You have my gratitude, Nate, Rowley and Jane.”

Before she left, Nate kindly asked, “And you, you’ve not told us your name, love. What is it?”

And the figure in black stood for a moment and briefly considered taking on the nickname Nate had bestowed upon her. Love. But, as she thought about the notion it made her shiver, and not in a pleasant way.

And so, she turned her head and simply answered, “I have no such thing,” and with that, she made her way toward the structure in black in the distance, and the three guides returned to their conversation.