On A Pale Horse (20 page)

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, and, 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 other 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.

Deja 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.

After a moment, the man spoke again. “If it was me, Death, know what I'd do?”

“That old woman, my client,” Zane said. “She reminds me of my mother.” And what a mass of guilt lay there, tying into his conscience like the lines of the hospital machines.

“She's somebody's mother,” the man agreed. “It's her son who pays for all this foolery. Thinks he's doing her a favor, making her live beyond her time or will. If he really loved her, he'd let her go.”

“Doesn't he love her?” Zane had killed his own mother because he loved her, but then had doubted.

“Maybe he thinks so. But he's really just getting even. He's a mean man, and she brought him into this world, and I guess he just never forgave her for that. So he won't let her leave.”

Something snapped. “Death shall not be denied!” Zane said. He marched back to his client's section. He found switches on the equipment and clicked them off.

“Oops!” The nurse was on it immediately, as the machinery bleeped alarm. She turned the switches on again.

Zane ripped out wires and tubes. Fluid spurted.

Now the nurse became aware of him. “You did it!” she cried, horrified. “You must stop!”

Zane caught her in his arms and kissed her on the lips. She felt the skeletal embrace and fainted. He set her down carefully on the floor.

He saw that automatic failsafes were stopping the leaks in the torn tubes. The bleep-bleep alarm was more strident; soon other nurses would hear and come. He could not be sure the job was done.

Zane picked up a chair and smashed it into the stand supporting the bottles of life-preserving fluids. Glass shattered, and colored liquids coursed across the floor. He put his foot against a console and shoved it over, indulging in an orgy of destruction that was the overt expression of his long-suppressed emotion.

At last he stood over the old woman, chair raised to bash in her skull if need be—but he saw that now the job had been done.

He set down the chair and lifted out her soul, gently. There was a smattering of applause from the other patients as he put away the soul and walked out through the ward. All these people were on artificially extended time, so were able to perceive him for what he was.

“But I am a murderer—again,” Zane protested weakly, now suffering reaction. Never before had he actually killed in his role of Death. There had been grim satisfaction in the act—but surely he had added an awful burden of sin to his soul.

“I wish it was me you come for,” one of the others muttered.

“You can't murder our kind,” the old man said. “Any more'n you can rape a willing gal.”

Zane paused. “How many of you feel that way?” he asked. “How many really want to die now?”

A murmur traveled along the ward, like a ripple of water. “We all do,” the old man said, and the others agreed.