A Slice of an Afterlife

"All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier." - Walt Whitman.

"Bertie, my love, I am home!" Winnifred Mooney said in a singsong voice as she dragged her aching body inside the property she'd just purchased.

It was on the number 186 of Fleet Street. A quaint shop and adjacent home where the only man she'd ever loved, Mr. Albert Lovett, had lived and died over 10 years ago. More recently, it was where his widow, Eleanor Price—Mrs. Mooney refused to call her by her married name—and her barber lover had set up a horrific enterprise that had ended the lives of many Londoners, including their own, in a massacre the city was still talking about more than a year later. The barber, Mr. Sweeney Todd, was found with his throat slit and the dark widow, calcinated in the oven where she baked her infamous meat pies. In the building's basement that she-devil used as a bakehouse also lay the lifeless bodies of the honourable Judge Turpin and the esteemed Beadle Bamford, and more unidentified remains of the many men and women Mr. Todd savagely murdered in his tonsorial parlour for her to use as pie filling.

Yet Winnie wasn't bothered. How could she? Such tragedy prompted a significant lowering of the price! Besides, she was sure those demons were burning in hell—for the second time in Ms. Price's case—so she'd be free to spend the rest of her life with the love of her life, sharing a house like a proper married couple.

Ever since his tragic death left a void in her heart she'd been unable to fill no matter the many cats she adopted, Winnie had tried anything to bring him back. From the more mainstream séances to the more obscure practices and rituals she found in an old book her grandmother gave her when she was a child growing up in Scotland. But nothing seemed to work.

Eventually, Winnie theorised it might be because she didn't have his body. Bertie's evil widow decided to cremate him instead of giving his beautiful corpse proper rest, all to save a few pennies to buy more of her prostitute dresses or maybe to hide the evidence of her cold-blooded murder of Albert. So, even if Winnie managed to commune with his spirit, she couldn't bring him back to earth without a vessel for him to occupy—Frankenstein had taught her that much. Assembling a body for him out of remains she stole from cemeteries was out of the question, for it was too risky. She tried sacrificing one of her many felines for him, the one with the lusher coat and healthier appetite, but it was to no avail. She supposed that such a handsome and elegant man wouldn't want to be essentially reincarnated into a lowly street cat.

After some more research, she came across this theory gaining rapid popularity in the world of occultism: that some spirits—those that were neither too saintly to ascend to heaven nor too evil to secure a one-way ticket to hell—were attached to the homes they once inhabited. Clutching at straws to keep her dream alive, Winnie did everything to buy the property off Mrs. Lovett, even offering her to pay a much higher price than it was actually worth. The tart always refused, even when her meat pie commerce was failing, and she had to open a more lucrative business between her legs to keep herself alive. When a desperate Winnie asked her why so adamant on keeping the house when she could use the money to start over somewhere else, the late Eleanor Price informed her she was waiting for an old friend's return and had to be home for when that happened.

What a looney, Mrs. Mooney thought. As if she wasn't aware that the only old friend who'd probably be interested in visiting her was the devil himself.

In any case, she had to wait until the mad dollymop hopped the twig to buy the house she'd been dreaming of for over a decade. It'd been worth it. No one and nothing could tear her and Bertie apart now.

As soon as she set a foot in, she felt a cold current of air hit her in the face like a nasty slap, so strong it almost pushed her back outside. Must be my Bertie giving me a hug, he must have missed me so much, she thought. "I've missed you too, Bertie! And I'm here to stay! Forever!" she said, closing the door with a bang.