Forever After - By David Jester Page 0,43

her, her spirit was waiting by her body, leaning against a lamppost with the casualness of someone waiting for a bus.

“Who are you?” she demanded to know when he approached her. She looked content, as they all always did, but there was a touch of trepidation in her voice.

“I’m here to pick you up,” Michael said. He couldn’t help but smile as he reran his comment through his head and watched as she peeled her scantily clad figure away from the lamppost.

“Is that a joke?” she asked genuinely.

Michael shook his head. “I’m--”

“You’re going to take me to the other side?” she interrupted.

“I think so.”

“You think so?”

He frowned. The dead usually weren’t so quizzical.

“Why weren’t you here before?” she wanted to know, growing increasingly impatient and uneasy. “I’ve been here for ages. Three people went by over there,” she nodded to the other side of the road, brightly lit under the fluorescent glow of a streetlight. “Not one of them stopped. Not one of them replied. It’s like they couldn’t even hear me.”

Michael thought about replying but quickly swallowed his words. It didn’t matter that they couldn’t see or hear her needful spirit; they all had probably seen her corpse and not one of them had stopped to check if she was alive.

“So, where were you?”

He had been caught up in his own idleness, drinking stale coffee at a nearby cafe and absently staring into his own thoughts. Most of those thoughts had been about Jessica, she had dominated his mind since he had met her.

“I’m sorry,” he said honestly. “But I’m here now.”

Samson had told him that he would develop a second intuition. He said he would know the whens, where’s and how’s of his victims’ deaths. He said it would come as a second nature, gradually birthing in him from the moment he took the job a year ago. But he hadn’t felt a thing, he never knew anything; their deaths came as a complete mystery to him until he read their impending doom on the screen of the timer.

He didn’t know if the intuition would come to him and he couldn’t ask. Samson had seen him twice since his death, and on neither occasions had he stayed long enough to answer any probing questions. The only other higher authority that he spoke to was a repugnant receptionist who wouldn’t stop glaring at him and a psychiatrist who read his mind but offered no solutions to the problems within.

He held out his hand to the woman. She looked into his eyes, then at the proffered appendage. “Where are you taking me?”

Michael smiled. They all asked the same thing and he didn’t know what to tell any of them.

“To a better place,” he assured her.

3

He was living in a bed and breakfast on the outskirts of town. He paid minimal board and was fed, watered and sheltered by the elderly couple who owned and managed the six-room guesthouse.

Their names were Mary and Joseph, and although unconnected to the Biblical pair who begot the son of God, they had been dead just as long and were just as compassionate and kind. They had links to a side of the afterlife that Michael didn’t know anything about, they knew things he couldn’t even dream of knowing, and, like everyone who knew more than he did, they refused to tell him any of it.

“But there is a God right?” Michael asked Joseph once. They had been drinking on a deck which overlooked a small back garden. It was Michael's birthday, a birthday for a life he no longer had, and Joseph had bought an expensive single malt whiskey to celebrate and to ease the passing of his first redundant birthday in the afterlife.

Joseph hummed and hared at the question. He lifted his tumbler to his lips and stared absently at the contents. He stroked the lip of the crystal glass with his forefinger, took a small sip, savoured the taste with a sigh and then lowered the glass with a shrug. “That’s a tricky one,” he explained eventually.

“You don’t know?”

“Definitively?” Joseph turned to Michael, lifted his eyes to the blackened skies where a multitude of stars danced in the darkness. “No. But I know enough to hazard a guess.”

“And what is that guess?”

Joseph laughed softly. “That guess is just that,” he said vaguely. “It’s a guess.”

Michael sighed. He had been dead for six months at that point, spent most of that time wondering around losing souls, forgetting his timer and getting frustrated at