Reaper School

Chapter 5: Love Macabre

Aris wasn't sure whether to feel relieved or cheated when he found underneath the black hood, the mother of all anticlimaxes: the face of a Goth rock star, sickly white but thankfully human. Somehow he felt he knew the reason behind this diluted form. No shape could ever truly contain the deep and pervasive horror that Death inspired, and to see it in all its raw potential was to literally explode his head.

Aris guessed this marvel of a man was of European descent and young; he couldn't have been more than 25 years old, around Aris' own age in fact. He also thought the reaper was sort of good-looking in that androgynous way that had become popular with the young generation. His black hair was a mix of Mohawk and dreads, with the strip of hair in the middle hanging down in matted coils and the sides not shaven but cut short and dyed silver. The black eyeliner around his eyes was sharp, reptilian, even the eyebrows were slanted and pointed upwards.

Then, in one fluid, over-rehearsed motion, Sephtimus whirled his cloak off and into the air and a spirit stepped right out of one of the walls of monitors to become a coat-stand. This spirit was fully skeletal; tragically its head was missing so there was nothing but its spine protruding between the shoulder-blades, which was anyway perfect for this moment as a peg. Sephtimus tossed his violin case in the same direction and the decapitated skeleton also caught this out of reflex, before stiffening ramrod straight like a foot guard at Buckingham Palace. Now Aris could see that the reaper wore a black leather trench coat with crisscrossing metal-studded straps sewn on the shoulders and the chest, suggestive of a straitjacket ironically restricting hell's warden. And the coat's lining reached all the way to the floor, which was for the best as there seemed to be no sign of feet whatsoever under it.

When Sephtimus finally sat behind his desk – more like threw himself down in total abandon – another apparition scurried on all fours to catch him while three more jumped from behind to support his back and arms; all four of them melding into one grand throne made entirely of human bones. Sephtimus then took a pack of cigarettes out of a drawer and one of his melded assistants dislocated and twisted up its forearm to light his stick with one hinged finger. Apparently, everything in this room was a living extension of the Chief Astral Deporter and existed to serve at his every whim.

"I swear, nicotine and caffeine are going to be the death of me," he said to himself while smoking in the fraction of space above his coat's stand-up collar. But he sounded so pleased and satisfied with himself that Aris doubted if he meant what he said. At either corner of his lips, he had this thin black line of makeup extending upward to create an outstretched smile...

All at once it came to Aris with an almost physical shock; this most amazing discovery: Death had pursed his human lips when he took a drag on his cigarette but for any other purpose than this, his mouth didn't budge. His lips were a frozen ornament while he spoke; Death had been communicating with him through telepathy!

"Bravo!" Sephtimus hissed. "Faster than the others."

Others? What does he mean others?

"One question at a time, meatball. First, let me reward your sloppy question with a proper answer." He motioned with his thin and delicate fingers holding the cigarette to the now lively, constantly shifting and flickering mosaic of the mystery girl at the coffee shop. The effect was just slightly different from the stuff created in photo studios where very tiny images of a person were gathered and the way these tiny pixels were arranged made up the same person's enlarged face.

"This," Sephtimus rasped, "this is my Venus de Milo, as you would say in your tongue, my Helen, my Juliet Capulet." His metaphors sounded as though they had been pilfered from comprehensive summaries, highly suspicious and out of place. Who could've imagined listening to Death quote from English literature.