Death and the Maiden

This is something different that's been knocking around my head for a month or two. I was originally going to write a story about Death, in the style of Neil Gaiman's Sandman character who I've always had a secret love for. But Gwenhwyfar turned out to be someone different altogether. I enjoyed writing this one. Hopefully you enjoy reading it.

With endless thanks to EmilyMiller for the proof-reading and for providing the original nudge to write this one.

I closed the door with a sigh.

A hard habit to break, breathing.

Angels don't need to do it, see - though we have everything we need to do it with.

I still haven't learned how not to, though. Lucius always jokes that I'm still a "fresh" one, and that I'll eventually forget.

I smiled wryly to myself, and turned to face the corridor.

I tugged my shawl, settled it more comfortably around my shoulders, took another habitual breath, and sighed it out again.

Old habits die hard.

Like living.

I glanced once more at the unremarkable wooden surface of the door, then ambled away.

Stanley Lee Pearson had gone out quietly, in the end. Old, alone - his only surviving child estranged since his wife died seven years before. In... I ran the numbers... two days time, it would have been, actually.

Sad, but not as sad as it might have been. He'd had a life to do with as he pleased. He'd never really faced any grave crisis, if you'll pardon the pun. And on the whole he'd tried to be a good man. He'd loved his wife, though he had cheated on her once with that younger woman from the bar down in Galveston. An hour or two of hot, furtive sex in a seedy Motel and a light dusting of UTI for his sins. A small taint on an otherwise unremarkable soul - the sort usually recorded with two dates and some pithy little annotation in Azrael's neat Copperplate.

Not even within sniffing distance of Hell from downwind, that was for sure.

Oh no.

You had to work hard to earn a hole down there.

Most of the dead simply get to make the Choice - when they are ready.

What is the Choice, you ask?

Technically, I suppose, there are three.

You could choose to go back to the World - forget everything and be born again, in the most accurate and exact sense of the phrase.

Or you could, like me, opt to wait for a while and get a pair of wings - to do what you could to help in whatever way suited you. Or not, if you fancied the idle non-life. As far as I could tell, nobody seemed to care very much what we did - Ineffability or some such nonsense, I supposed.

The third choice, you ask?

Oblivion; the ultimate Omega. The final fullstop on your brief little tale.

The good old Trinity again - the Boss did so love doing things in threes.

I had known some who'd chosen the third way, driven there by the endless unchanging Above and too damaged to wish to go back Below.

We didn't talk of them once they had gone. A standing stone would be set up on the vast plain beyond the Gates of Dusk, and that would be that.

Every once in a while someone might visit it.

But mostly not.

Leave the truly departed in peace, was the unspoken agreement.

I sighed again.

Two souls done today. Two more to go. Then back to the Reliquary for debriefing, as Azrael insisted on calling it.

He never lets me see to more than four travellers in a "shift".

He's fond of me for some strange reason, see.

Helping the dead move on takes its toll on us all, even on Lucius, who'd once been a bigwig of the 5th century Coptic church in Ethiopia - he plays at being dapper and jaded but I know he flirts with that big old Nothing all the time.

Just two more to usher on. And then I would be done - for this cycle, at least. I'd take a break, take some time to walk the fields of Arcadia under the gentle warmth of the Sun, time to talk with those few others like me that I'd befriended in my hundred and fifty-seven years of... being.

Azrael had insisted I take a break, take some extended time, blow off some steam. According to him I was looking tattered.

I made a face at the memory.

Azrael. Almost as old as Heaven, older than the World; the record-keeper for the lives of the departed, he was not an entity I would ever dream of saying "No" to.

You might forget who he was, might be swept in by his neat, meticulous, ordered way and his minor vanity of the tailored off-white Armani suit...

But he was the Angel of Death, and he could be terrifying when crossed.

Oh well.

Time to go.

I paused, concentrated, shifted... my wings beating downwards, the powerful thrust driving me slantwise through the dream of existence from the clear morning of Memphis to the overcast just-about-lunch of my beloved Wales.

I furled my wings, managed for once to de-manifest them, and stepped out from behind the bin shed I'd used to occlude my arrival.

Then I closed my eyes, found my bearings, breathed in the clean air of home.

And wrinkled my nose at the diesel fumes from a passing bus.

I could almost imagine Jezebel's mocking grin.

I stared up at the beige brick exterior of the "managed End-of-life-care facility".

Not my favourite type of place by any means, but still much better than other ways to die...

I parked that thought. Self-pity was for later, when I was on my own time.

I squinted at the entrance foyer through the sliding glass doors.

The planters full of bright yellow Daffodils on either side of the door were a nice if slightly twee touch. Annuals. Here for a season, then gone.

Like the girl in the room upstairs.

Time to go.

I tugged my shawl straight so it stopped scratching my neck, and stepped through the doors that hissed so slowly apart for me.

Nobody paid any attention to me - not the middle-aged receptionist, not a sombre Physician, not the neat and efficient nurses... I'm not invisible, in the strictest sense of the word. It's just that you've all hardwired yourselves to not to notice me; I'm a background character, someone unimportant to your narrative... until the final paragraph of your story, that is. I can interact with you but if I'm careful about it you probably won't remember me except as a quiet young girl in some unremarkable clothes that you spoke to briefly but can't really remember why...

You're all very good at ignoring reality when you need to.

I pressed the elevator button and slipped into the cabin.

Up one floor, out the door, then a right turn. Seventeen slow steps down the corridor between its comforting nature scenes, my adorable pink unicorn sneakers kissing the clean linoleum.

It was another private room in another private ward. A small mercy - death with some measure of privacy and dignity.

I walked slowly but with purpose. My charge awaited.

Rhiannon Eira Jones.

She was twenty three, and loved horses, and was just about done with stage four Myeloma.

I'd volunteered to help her move on.

It was always voluntary, especially when the soul belonged to someone so close in "age" to me.

Azrael's gentle meddling was all-pervasive in my work.

But I always chose to be there for the Rhiannons of the world. Barely beyond being a girl and already done with this time round the wheel.

A cousin to me in so many sad, little ways.

Sometimes I wondered if the Boss knew what the fuck he was doing, or if he was just making it up as he went along.

I sighed, kicked at an imaginary pebble, pretended it skittered down the long, clean corridor.

Benevolent didn't have to mean kind, I reminded myself. The bearings do not love the axle and they probably don't even know about the wheel.

I paused at the door and bowed my head briefly - another habit I had, a mark of respect for the girl who was about to die.

Then I touched the door and gently pushed it open.

This was always the worst bit for me - I knew who would be here, mostly, it was intrinsic knowledge that came with the job.

But there's a wide ocean's distance between reading about fire and being consumed by it.

Rhiannon lay at peace, with the machines all at last disconnected and covered with discreet white cotton drapes in the corner. She had her family around her; Mum and Gran crying the broken hopeless tears of those who've given up hope, Dad trying to be brave for sixteen-year-old Branwen who stood there, blank-faced, too far gone to feel anything any more.

We can't read the future, but sometimes there are signs. I knew someone like me would meet with Branwen sooner rather than later.

A little stab of pain to my heart; that. She deserved better than this. They both did.

I am not heartless. Oh no. I am not at all. It would all be far, far easier if I were.

I still feel pity, and sadness, and helpless rage and...

Someone grabbed my arm and barged me out of the room.

I found myself pinned to the wall by a furious girl in a black cotton dress and indigo denim jacket, a girl whose jet-black hair hang in disordered curls like a veil over her nearly-emerald eyes.

Eyes that were red and raw, cheeks that were wet with tears, face pale with Hell's own fury...

"Who the fuck are you?" she demanded, her voice gravel-rough with grief and rage.

I am one of maybe a thousand.

Lucius tried to count us once and ended up with a migraine. Yes, we still get migraines. Yes, they still suck. No, we can't miracle them away. Miracles are inventoried and, if you want to get technical, are the province of the Archangels and Saints and upwards alone.

Jezebel - I've mentioned her already, I think, she's a stunningly lovely demoness and very close... friend... who hangs out in the City on her off days - anyway, Jezebel says that it's a bit more laissez-faire Down Under. She had to tell me what laissez-faire meant; I think she felt a little bit sorry for me at first. Now we're closer than sisters - well, than most sisters, anyway.

She's off-shift today as well, we've planned to meet up and play cards and drink Tequila and, maybe, other things.

Are you shocked?

You shouldn't be - as I said, nobody bats an eyelid around here, and everyone needs a little comfort now and then.

I feel that I may have got ahead of myself, and that some exposition is in order.

Here's what Azrael always calls the Org chart. He always does ironic air quotes around it to; it's really quite insufferable...

Anyway.

Pay attention.

At the top there's the Creator. We call him the Boss, the Big Guy, and other less appropriate names. Apparently only Jeshua, Gabriel and Michael see much of him, though there's a running rumour that the four of them play cards twice or more a week with Lucifer.

(Yes, Lucifer plays cards against the Creator. No, they don't play for souls. No, it's not poker. People get that bit so wrong it's funny. It's Rummy and they wager matchsticks. Long story.)

So. Anyway... the Boss, the Archangels, the Saints (mostly complete mentalists, even after nearly two millennia in some cases), Seraphim, Cherubim, all the serried Host of Heaven...

And us.

The Revenants. Those who are Somehow Not Quite As Dead As They Should Rightly Be. Angels in most ways, but... not created that way. And not permanent, either; we're a bit like awkward guests who hang around for a bit, help ourselves to the expensive booze, then piss off to somewhere else. I always get the feeling the Cherubim are gossiping about us, the cheeky little sods.

It's all very bureaucratic. Not a harp in sight, unless you're that way inclined.

It's the ultimate in self-employment. A Renaissance fair writ large. Do what comes naturally because nobody really cares.

And my place in this pantomime?

I'm with the bureau of Mortality. If there's one thing I know it's how horrible it can be to die. So... so once I'd done my time in Limbo and... I won't say been healed because that would be an outright lie, rather... once I'd learned to stop screaming and...

No.

This is all going wrong. I'm fucking it up.

Typical.

Let's try a different tack.

My name is Gwenhwyfar Carew - that's more-or-less Jennifer to those of you not blessed enough to be a countrywoman of mine. I was born in the hamlet of Kilryden in the year of your Lord 1793. I was eighteen when it was my time to go - stabbed twice (among other, less pleasant things) and buried alive (briefly) in a shallow woodland grave. The only flowers that ever grew for me were Celandine. No stone ever marked me, no parents got to cry over my shrouded and shriven corpse - I was a foundling girl, a ward of the Methodist Church, missed maybe only by the local priest who had loved me and raised me as best he could in his own imperfect way.

I woke up here. I'd been left a few decades to "ferment" as Lucius so flippantly called it. I woke in a clean white shift on a clean white feather bed in a plain little apartment, body free of the pox marks and the badly-broken-and-worse-healed leg and the eventually-mortal punctures from my killers' knives.

I'd had clothes of quality utterly foreign to me, and food that seemed fit for a king, and wine enough to bathe in. And a mirror, in which I'd beheld for the first time my terrifying but ultimately quite fetching grey gull wings.

Everybody screams and shits themselves (metaphorically, mostly) the first time they see their wings. It's just how it is.

Also, wings are bloody inconvenient, so mostly we don't bother manifesting them.

And sometimes they seem to have a mind of their own.

But they are very pretty...

Anyway, so, I was healed in body.

My mind, of course, was not quite ready for all this.

There are no therapists in the afterlife. "True" Angels don't need therapy, Demons wet themselves with laughter at the concept, and Revenants like me are mostly too broken to be helped by others.

All that really helps is time. Time, alcohol (yes, it still works on me, and the inability to get cirrhosis is a nice bonus), gallows humour...

And a sense of purpose, if you can find one.

Or a sense of porpoise, as Lucius is always so quick to pun.

Very few become like us - and nobody's ever bothered to tell me the criteria. If there are any.

I'm not sure even Azrael knows.

So... that's us. We work for a time - we help, we organise, we fix, we guide, we mend. The choice is always there for us - we can choose to continue as we are, or to forget and go back to the World and try again... or to take the final step and flicker out forever.

It is not much of a choice, when you stop to think about it. I'm not quite sure what the point is.

But... I've stayed. For now.

It's better than 18th century Wales was, that's for sure.

So...

I am Jennifer Carew. I'm almost, but not quite, an hemi-demi-semi angel of Death. Clerk of Death is as good a description as any; Azrael rather flippantly calls me his Usher.

I and those like me are gentle. We come, almost never when wanted, but we're almost always there at the end.

We're the first person you might meet, afterwards, sometimes.

If you're lucky, though, you get to skip our part. Again, I'm not sure how it works. And I've never cared enough to dig.

The important thing is that you're not supposed to really notice that we're there until you see us waiting for you, and by then it's all over anyway.

So you can probably imagine just how shocked I was when five foot nine of incandescent girl got me spread-eagled against a wall without so much as buying me a drink first.

"I... I..." I stammered, totally off guard.

"I said... who the fuck are you? Did I stutter? Are you fucking deaf? Who the fuck do you think you are, barging in to Annie's room like that, you fucking... fucker! She's... she's leaving us, and you come and... and stick your nose in...and... and..."

And then she began to sob; harsh, horrible, end-of-the-World tears of the sort I was only too familiar with.

She released me and buried her face in her hands and made noises that hurt even me.

I watched her for a moment, off guard, confused by the intense conflict I felt within me.

The almost overwhelming need to escape, to run.

And the even stronger compulsion to offer comfort...

We're not supposed to bother the living more than we absolutely have to. People can't deal with our true Aspects, it fucks them up to a farcical degree and the end results are, apparently, spectacular.

So of course I did the instinctive thing.

The wrong thing.

I wrapped my arms around her and held her close.

I took a breath to tell her how sorry I was...

And someone screamed in the room behind us - the unforgettable sound only ever made by a mother witnessing her child's final breath.

I knew that Rhiannon had departed.

I should have been there for her to hold her metaphysical hand and help her take her first step.

But I also knew that it wasn't necessary; the process would take place were I there or not. I wasn't required for her to leave Below. I was just a nice little warm-and-fuzzy on the side.

And for the first time in my own afterlife I abandoned my self-appointed duty to the dead and spent my attention wholly on the living.

Because if I'd thought the girl in my arms was broken before...

Well.

I had only been this spectacularly wrong once before.

She folded in on herself as if something had just torn her insides out and thrown them away.

The soft, low sound of desolation she made raised chills on my back and made me - Azrael's little helper, murder victim, hard as nails, Tough Cookie wotzit - tear up like a broken-hearted five year old who'd just been beaten for the first time.

And I held her and cradled her to me and rocked her gently and stroked her back and felt neither shame nor any desire to let her go.

Nor much of anything else, really - just horrible blankness.

I'm not admitting that I cried.

But I'm not going to try to deny it either.

She took a sobbing breath, and then another.

I watched her carefully from the other side of one of the Hospice cafe's grey melamine tables.

Barely keeping it together, I thought wretchedly. Barely present in the now, sunk deep in the what was and what might have been.

Thankfully there were no hints of a... visitation... in her near future.

I was eternally grateful for that.

I somehow doubted that I would have been able to accept that, Ineffable plan or no.

I'd bought her tea; it had seemed appropriate. Tea Pigs even - pricey, or would have been had I not had some unfair tricks up my ethereal sleeve.

Money was easy to come by if I needed it for some reason.

So I sipped my own Arabica and guarded her from all creatures great and small.

"Who are you," she whispered, at last. "And why didn't you at least... knock..."

"I'm... Jen," I said, softly. "I... help out. I was given the wrong room number; I should have double checked but I was late."

"Fucking arseholes," she gulped. "Can't anyone in the fucking NHS just get stuff right."

"What do you mean..."

Her hands tightened spasmodically into small, wretched fists.

"They missed her diagnosis is what I mean! They missed it! It was right fucking there, on the page, here I am, I'm Annie's fucking cancer you bitches, yoohoo, over here!"

People around us stared at her. One or two of them gave me odd looks before glancing hurriedly away again.

"People make... mistakes. You're just human, after all," I said, quietly. I shifted, uncomfortable that I was clearly becoming more apparent here.

"They killed her," she snarled. Then she made a sound, jammed her fist into her mouth, bit down...

I winced, hesitated, then reached out.

"Stop," I said, gently. "Don't. You're hurting yourself. It doesn't help."

"She's gone. And... and I'm... not."

She wrapped her arms around herself and began to rock slowly back and forth.