On a Pale Horse (21 page)

A new vehicle was pulling up, with the emblem of the State Social Services on its side. It seemed the commotion had attracted the notice of the relevant authorities, and there was about to be an inspection of the nursing home facility and operation.

Zane allowed himself a private smile. They would discover one or more dead men, tied to their chairs, in a room reeking of urine where no music or entertainment was permitted—these strictures so absolute that the police had been summoned to enforce them. Zane doubted that would make a favorable impression on the inspectors. Substantial reform was about to come to one nursing home, and the lot of the surviving inmates would be improved.

He glanced once more around the neighborhood before he left. There stood the church, nursing home, and dance hall in a row. Surely the fate of all three would improve, now that they had interacted in this fashion and discovered what each had to offer the others, and there would be music for everyone! Maybe the entire city of Miami would experience a gradual renovation as the spirit of this hour spread.

His next client was in the country. Mortis changed to Deathmobile form and drove along the superhighway, as they were not pinched for time. Zane read the billboards and realized there was an ad war on here.

WHY DRIVE A LANDBOUND CAR WHEN YOU
CAN RIDE A CARPET? the first billboard demanded in huge, shining print. The picture was of a car struggling through a traffic jam, while a magic carpet sailed blithely over, its handsome family smiling.

Zane also smiled. He was at the moment carbound—but he would never be trapped in a traffic jam. Not with Mortis! “Did you show me this just to make me appreciate you properly?”

The car did not answer, but the motor purred.

The next billboard proclaimed DRIVE IN COMFORT. The picture was of a family huddled on a flying carpet in a rainstorm. The man looked grim and uncomfortable, the woman’s once-elegant hairdo was a wet mess plastered about her ears, and one child was sliding off the rear, about to fall. The material was evidently wrinkling and shrinking in the rain, heightening the family’s discomfort and peril. Below, the same family could be seen happily in a closed car, safely seat-belted, untouched by the rain.

“So the car fights back,” Zane remarked. “I can see it.” He glanced at his watch. Still several minutes to go.

The next billboard showed the carpet sailing blithely over the rain cloud that largely obscured the traffic jam below. BABYLON CARPETS OUTPERFORM ANY LANDBOUND VEHICLE! it proclaimed. MORE DISTANCE PER SPELL.

But the auto maker came right back with a picture of the family gasping for air aboard the high-flying carpet, while the car zoomed along the open highway. KEEP SAFE, KEEP COZY, it advised. USE A CAR INSTEAD OF A CARPET.

Perhaps the ad war continued, but Zane had to turn off to approach his client. This was a residential enclave in the countryside; the houses were very similar to one another, the lawn manicured. Zane wondered why people bothered to live in the country when all they did was take the city with them. He turned into the appropriate drive and parked in the limited shade of a medium pine tree. He noticed there was a
disabled
sticker on the owner’s car; evidently the disablement was terminal.

Zane entered and made his way to the bathroom. There
was a young, fairly muscular man taking a deep bath. He looked relaxed.

The man did not react to Zane’s appearance and did not seem to be in trouble, yet the gem-arrow identified him as the client. “Hello,” Zane said, uncertain how to proceed.

The man glanced up languidly. “Please leave,” he said, his voice mild.

“First I must do my job,” Zane said.

“Job? Perhaps you are in uniform, and assume I recognize your business. I can not see you, for I am blind.”

Oh. That accounted for the
disabled
sticker. But mere sightlessness wouldn’t kill this man, unless some bad accident were coming up. “I suspect you will be able to see me, if you try,” Zane said.

“You are a faith healer? Go away. I am an atheist, and have no traffic with your kind.”

An atheist! One who did not believe in God or Satan, or in their related artifacts. How could Death have been summoned for a nonbeliever?

Two answers offered. It was possible that this man was not as cynical as he professed and really did believe in Eternity perhaps unconsciously. Or it could be that there had been another glitch, and that the Powers that Be had not realized that no service was required for this particular client.

Well, Zane was here, and the case would have to be played through to whatever conclusion was fated. He looked at the water in the bath and saw that it was discolored by a cloud of darkness. “You are committing suicide,” he stated.

“Yes, and I must ask you not to interfere. My folks are away for two days, so will not know until it is safely done. I have slashed veins in my ankles and am pleasantly bleeding to death in this hot water. There is no greater kindness you can do me than to let nature take its course.”

“I am here for that,” Zane said. “I am Death.”

The man laughed, becoming more animated as his attention focused. “An actual, physical personification of Death? You’re crazy!”

“You don’t believe in Death?”

“I believe in death, small d, obviously. I am about to experience it. Certainly I don’t believe in a spook with skull and crossbones and scythe.”

“Would you like to touch my hand and face?” Zane asked.

“You persist in this nonsense? Very well, while I still command my faculties, let me touch you.” The man lifted an arm from the water with some visible effort and extended it toward Zane.

Zane clasped that hand in his own gloved one, curious how the man would perceive it. He was hardly disappointed in the reaction.

“It’s true!” the man exclaimed. “A skeleton!”

“A glove,” Zane said, not wanting to deceive him. “And my face is a skull-mask generated by magic. Nevertheless, I am Death, and I have come to collect your soul.”

The man touched Zane’s face. “A mask? It could fool me! That’s a skull!”

Zane had been uncertain before whether his skull-face was tactile as well as visual; now he knew. “I am a living man performing an office. I wear a costume and have certain necessary powers, but I am alive and have the flesh and feelings of a man.”

The client took his hand again. “Yes, now I perceive the flesh, faintly, the way I do my own when my foot is asleep. Strange! Perhaps I do believe in you, or in your belief in the office. But I don’t believe in the soul, so your effort is wasted.”

“What do you believe happens when you die?” Zane asked, genuinely curious. This man seemed to have a good mind.

“My body will be inert and in time will dissolve into its chemical components. But that is not what you mean, is it? You want to know about my supposed soul. And I will answer. There is no soul. Death is simply the end of consciousness. After death, there is nothing. Like the flame of a candle snuffed out, the animation is gone. Extinction.”

“No afterlife? You do not consider death a translation to a spiritual existence?”

The man snorted. He was slowly sinking in the tub, as
loss of blood weakened him gradually, but his mind remained alert. “Death is a translation to intellectual nonexistence.”

“Does that frighten you?”

“Why should it? It is the deaths of others I should fear, for they can cause me inconvenience and grief. When I myself pass, I shall be out of it, completely uncaring.”

“You have not answered,” Zane said.

The man grimaced. “Damn it, you are putting my toes to the fire! Yes, my own death does frighten me. But I know that is merely my instinct of self-preservation manifesting, my body’s effort to survive. Subjectively, I do fear extinction, because instinct is irrational. Objectively, I do not. I have no terror of the nonexistence before I was conceived; why should I fear the nonexistence after I die? So I have overridden the foible of the flesh and am proceeding to my end.”

“Wouldn’t you be relieved to discover that life continues on the spiritual plane?”

“No! I do not want life to continue in any form! What uncertainties or tortures might I experience there? What tedium, existing for eternity with no reprieve in another person’s sterile conception of Heaven? No, my life is the only game, and the game has soured, and I want nothing more than to be able to lay it aside when its convenience is over. Oblivion is the greatest gift I can look forward to, and Heaven itself would be Hell to me if that gift were denied.”

“I hope you find it,” Zane said, shaken by this unusual view. A man who actually insisted on oblivion!

“I hope so, too.” Now the atheist was fading rapidly. The loss of blood was affecting his consciousness and soon he would faint.

“A man’s death is the most private part of his life,” Zane said. “You have the right to die as you wish.”

“That’s correct.” The voice was slow and faint. “Nobody’s business but mine.”

“Yet shouldn’t you be concerned about the meaning of your life, about your place in the greater scheme of things? Before you throw away your one chance to improve—”

“Why the hell should I care about improvement when I don’t believe in Heaven or Hell?” the atheist demanded weakly.

“Yet you assume that your own relief is all that matters,” Zane said. “What of those you love, who remain in life? Those who love you, and who will find your body here, a horror to them.
They
will still suffer. Don’t you owe them anything?”

But the atheist was too far gone. He had lost consciousness and no longer cared who else might suffer, if he ever had cared. In due course he died.

Zane reached in and drew out his soul. It was a typical mottled thing, good and evil spotting it in a complex mosaic. He started to fold it—and the soul disintegrated, falling apart into nothingness.

The atheist had his wish. He really had
not
believed, and so the Afterlife had been unable to hold him. He was beyond the reach of God or Satan. That did seem best.

It was best—but was it right? The atheist had not seemed to care about anyone except himself—and in that uncaring, perhaps had rendered his own existence meaningless.

Zane rejoined Mortis. “I think that man was half-right,” he said. “He is better off out of the game—but the game may not be better off without him. A man should not exist for himself alone. Life made an investment in him, and that investment was not paid off.” But Zane wasn’t sure.

His timer was going again. He oriented on the next client, wondering how he was going to account for the soul that disintegrated. The Purgatory News Center would have a ball with that one. He visualized the headline: THE FISH THAT GOT AWAY.

He arrived at a hospital. That was not unusual; the terminally sick tended to congregate there, and he had made a number of similar collections all over the world. But he still didn’t like hospitals very well, because of his lingering guilt relating to his mother.

At the edge of the parking lot was an ad, for once not Satanic. SHEEPSHEAD HORN O’ PLENTY—MORE FRUIT THAN BRANDS X, Y, AND Z HORNS. Just
the thing to buy for a hospitalized person recovering from stomach surgery.

Zane felt worse when he saw his client. It was an old woman, and she was embedded in a mass of lines and burbling devices. Some sort of bellows forced her to breathe rhythmically, and monitors clicked and bleeped to signal her heartbeat, digestion, and state of consciousness. Her blood coursed through the tubes of a dialysis machine. A nurse checked the equipment regularly, going on to the others in the ward. There were five other patients here, all similarly equipped.

The client’s hospital gown was draped awkwardly, as such things seemed to be designed to do, so that embarrassing portions of her wasted anatomy showed. She was in pain, Zane could see, though half-zonked on therapeutic drugs. She was overdue to die; only the relentlessly life-sustaining things enclosing her frail body prevented her from doing so.

Déjà vu!
His mother, all over again.

Zane approached. She spied him, and her bloodshot eyes tracked him erratically. The tubes running into her nose prevented her from turning her head conveniently, and the machine set up a clangor of protest when she tried to shift her body.

“Be at ease, lady,” Zane said. “I have come to take you away from this.”

She issued a weak hiss of a laugh. “Nothing can take me away,” she gasped, spittle dribbling from her mouth. “They will not let me go. All my pleading is in vain. I may rot in this contraption, but I will still be alive.”

“I am Death. I may not be denied.”

She peered more closely at him. “Why, so you are! I thought you looked familiar. I would gladly go with you—but they won’t give me the visa.”

Zane smiled. “It is your right to make the transformation. That right can not be abridged.” He reached into her body and caught her soul.

It didn’t come. The woman keened weakly with new agony until he let the soul go. It snapped back into place, and she relaxed.

“You see!” she whispered. “They have anchored me in life, though it isn’t worth it. You can’t take me, Death!”

Zane looked at his watch. It was fifteen seconds past time. The woman really was being held beyond her destiny.

“Let me consider,” Zane said, disgruntled. He walked down the ward, glancing at the other patients. He saw now that the details of their apparatus differed, but all were caught beyond their natural spans and all were similarly resigned to their fate. They might have no joy in life, but they would not be released from it one second before the machines gave out. This was one efficient hospital; there were no slip-ups.

“I see you, Death,” someone murmured nearby.

Zane looked. It was a male patient in the adjacent rig. Unlike some of the others, this one was fully alert.

“I can’t take her soul while that equipment functions,” Zane said, wondering why he was bothering to explain to a nonclient.

The old man shook his head, causing his own apparatus to protest. “Never thought I’d see the day when Death was denied. That leaves taxes as the only certainty.” He essayed a feeble laugh that made his dials quiver and alarmed the nurse on duty, who thought he was suffering a seizure. She seemed unaware of Zane.