The Innocence of Death Read online

  The Innocence of Death

  On Behalf of Death, Book I

  E.G Stone

  Tarney Brae Creative Endeavours

  Copyright © 2021 by E.G Stone

  A Tarney Brae Creative Endeavours Production

  Cover design by Fae Lane

  Editing by Michael Evan

  ISBN 978-1-7347965-6-8

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  For D, in thanks for the lasagna

  Contents

  1. The Instant of Death

  2. Death Warmed Over

  3. Death at the Office

  4. Life and Death

  5. Dead Man Walking

  6. Life After Death

  7. Over My Dead Body

  8. Knock ‘Em Dead

  9. Under Pain of Death

  10. Liberty or Death

  11. Dead to Rights

  12. Dead Wrong

  13. Waiting for Death

  14. Death and Taxes

  15. Drop Dead

  16. Kiss of Death

  17. Old Man Death

  18. Beyond the Grave

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by E.G Stone

  The Instant of Death

  Have you ever had a time where you thought things were going really, really well and life could hardly be better? Have you walked around with a smile on your face, knowing precisely where things are going to end up? The world is about to be laid at your feet. Everything is good. Fantastic, even. That’s usually right about the time when Life likes to kick you in the shins, let me tell you.

  I’ve met Life. She delights in being unfair and favours only those who fight her. Death, on the other hand is far more of a gentleman, if slightly scarier…well, perhaps I’d better start at the beginning.

  My name is Cal Thorpe. Of Harcourt Marketing? I was their top marketing manager and public relations agent, well on my way up the ladder. I had been in this job about four years, and I was doing good. No, not good. Spectacular. I had just finished up a highly-successful marketing campaign for a sports medicine doctor who had written a book about some journey in some foreign country where he discovered the secret to life or some such nonsense. It was an overdone idea, but I had marketed it and done fantastically well. The sales had hit the New York Times bestseller list in a week, and his social media following was enormous. He had talks scheduled with all the national shows and there were even whispers of an international tour. I was just that good.

  Anyways, on this particular night, I was walking through the park on a shortcut to a celebratory dinner, likely to do with my recent success. Old lady Harcourt—the widow of the original owner—was being generous enough to treat me and a few of the other executives at a steak house across the city. Ostensibly, the dinner was to celebrate the firm’s mention in one of the top business associations, but I think everyone in attendance really knew what was going on. When you got in with her, you were in. I could see a vice presidency in my near future.

  Basically, things were going well for me. Really well. I was making money faster than I could spend it. I was practically rolling in new clients. Even now, my phone was vibrating with requests from people to take them on. My assistant had stepped in months ago to field most of those, but even the ones that went through kept me busy at all hours. I had a fancy apartment that had more space than your average big-city digs and a view that photographers would envy. Not that I actually needed the space, since I didn’t have a girlfriend or even a cat, but it was worth every penny. I wore tailored suits. Patent leather shoes. Had designer glasses. My social media pages were growing exponentially, and I was about to have dinner with someone who thought her diamond bracelet was casual wear.

  I was on top of the world.

  And then, I wasn’t.

  “Give me your wallet.” A pressure in my side.

  I panicked.

  There was a man mugging me in the middle of the park. He had a gun. “Give it to me!”

  “A-alright,” I said, holding up my hands. All the success in the world couldn’t stop them from shaking. I reached into my jacket pocket and tried not to pass out.

  “No funny business,” the man growled, pressing his gun deeper into my side.

  “N-no o-o-of course n-not,” I stammered. I was reaching into my pocket when a dog barked from not far away. My mugger cursed violently and jerked against me. I felt time slow down. My heart beat once in my ears, blocking out all noise. For that fleeting moment, I was certain everything would be alright. The mugger would run. I would call the police. Go to dinner. Then, there was a spectacular roaring clap and I was even more certain that I was going to die.

  “Good evening, Mr. Thorpe.”

  I gaped at the figure in the three-piece suit. He had a hat on—one of those wool fedoras from the 1940s—and it shaded most of his features. All I could see was that he was tall, slim, dressed in clothes that cost more than my last pay check—a three-piece suit with an embroidered silk waistcoat that matched his bright red pocket square—and that he was floating two inches above the ground. Oh, and he hadn’t been there two seconds before.

  “I’m dead,” I said stupidly.

  “No, not yet,” the figure said, striding casually forwards. His feet touched lightly on the ground as he moved towards me, like he was fully appearing in this time and this place. His hands were in his pockets, completely relaxed and at ease. Didn’t he realise that there was a man with a gun right here? That I had been shot?

  “I’ve been shot!” I’m fairly certain my intelligence had flown out the window. Apparently I didn’t do well in life-or-death situations.

  “No, not yet. You are about to be shot. There is a difference.” His voice was kind and gentle, not at all judgemental, despite my panic and incoherence. “Look. See.”

  I jumped away from my attacker and stared, mouth open like an idiot. The mugger—hood up, jeans torn, gun shining—was perfectly still, desperation twisting his features. Where I had been standing, was a single piece of metal. A bullet, suspended in mid-air, not moving. Had it continued on its path, I would most certainly be dead.

  But I wasn’t.

  “Am I hallucinating?” I asked carefully.

  “That depends,” the figure said, shrugging. “How creative are you?”

  “Uh-huh. I’m lying on the ground, bleeding out and this is what my brain comes up with to make it all better.” I patted myself down desperately, afraid that I was going to feel blood. Afraid that I wasn’t.

  “If you like. How about we go sit on that bench and have a talk.” He nodded to a spot not a hundred feet away, pleasantly lit by the street lights along the path. There were even flowers growing by the bench. “This might make things clearer.”

  “Alright,” I agreed. It wasn’t as though I had much else better to do. I was never going to make my dinner, now. I was going to give up everything I had worked to achieve, by missing this dinner, by being almost shot in the park. Somehow, I doubted that the old bat would take dying as an excuse. Oddly enough, though, I didn’t really mind.

  We sat on the bench. The light from the lamp post filtered down so that my companion’s face was still completely in shadow. I could see his hands though. They were long, elegant and blacker than charcoal. It seemed an unnatural colour, not quite human. I knew and was friends with plenty of black men and women and had never seen someone whose skin seemed to just absorb light.

  “I have come to offer you a j
ob,” the figure said. He brushed some dust from his knee. I blinked.

  “Really? My hallucination offers me a job?”

  “I would like you to be my publicist or marketing specialist or whatever the term is.” He ignored my dig about being a hallucination. I wasn’t sure what that meant.

  “You want me to be your PR guy?” I scuffed my shoe over the concrete, flattening a few blades of grass that managed to spring through the tough material. “Are you having image problems? Bad publicity can kill a career, you know.”

  “Oh, I am well aware.” I got the impression that he was smiling. I wanted to see his face, but the part of me that had learned good manners—some clients would bite your head off for asking anything remotely personal—wouldn’t ask. So I just nodded blithely.

  “You sure picked a bad time to ask me to represent you.” I jerked my head back to where the mugger stood, frozen. Maybe my good manners weren’t all that well developed, after all.

  “It was the only time I could ask you, I’m afraid. I am bound by certain rules. But here, in my domain, I can do as I wish,” the figure said. I frowned. His domain? I was beginning to think that I wasn’t hallucinating. I wasn’t nearly this creative. I had failed my creative writing course during my undergraduate degree, with a note from the professor stating ’this is impressively terrible’ on the final exam. It was supposed to be impossible to fail that course.

  “Who are you?” I asked, a bit rudely.

  “You don’t want to guess? I think you could come up with some very interesting answers. No? Very well.” He reached up with those long fingers and removed his hat. Some part of my mind started screaming, but I was too well trained in image preservation to do more than raise my eyebrows in surprise. Though, I fear I did whimper.

  Like his hands, his skin was blacker than black. Shadows seemed to wreath around him, keeping the light away. His face was thin, gaunt almost, and he had a pleasant smile, though his teeth were not showing. He had no hair, no eyebrows or beard or anything. But that wasn’t the most startling thing. No, it was the fact that he had no eyes. Not just skin where eyes should be, not lids closed permanently shut, but empty sockets. The darkness was vast in those two holes, and if I stared far enough for long enough, I would probably start seeing the end of the world. As it was, I saw my own life flash before my eyes. Several times. It was the same all the way through, except it ended in several different ways, all gruesomely laid out before me.

  Shot.

  Diseased.

  Car Accident.

  Drunk.

  Drugs.

  Violent murder.

  Suicide by jumping.

  Drowning.

  I gasped and forced myself to blink, breaking whatever hold this thing had on me. I put my head between my knees and tried hard not to vomit. After a moment, I sat back up, my mouth dry. My terrifying companion just raised his brows, an unusual expression from what was basically a skin-covered skull. “Do you understand, now?” he asked kindly.

  “Why don’t you spell it out for me,” I rasped, my heart racing. There was no doubt in my mind that I was not lying on the ground bleeding out after being mugged. Whatever this was, it was horrific and far too real.

  “I am Death,” he said gently.

  “Ah,” I said. I fought the urge to put my head back between my knees and breathe slowly. Instead, I clenched my hands into fists on my knees. “I see.”

  “Do you? So many have a difficult time accepting this,” Death replied, obviously pleased. I swallowed down another whimper.

  “I can’t believe I’m sitting here with Death. And that you’re offering me a job. Aren’t you supposed to, well, I don’t know what, actually. I can’t believe this. I can’t,” I muttered. I could believe it, actually. Despite living a perfectly normal life up until this moment, disbelieving things like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, I found I could believe this. I just didn’t want to.

  “Yes, now you see my problem. Why I want to hire you?” Death folded his hands neatly in his lap.

  “You definitely need a PR specialist,” I agreed. My heart was racing, I was probably seconds away from passing out, and I was talking calmly with Death about marketing. Maybe being shot was the better option. “I…I can’t just take you on as a client through Harcourt, you know.”

  “Of course not. Your world is not ready for such things,” Death scoffed, brushing his fingers over his hat. “No, you would have to come with me. You will be well compensated. I can offer you a place to live, staff, resources, whatever you need.”

  I was quiet for a moment, running the implications through my mind. Work for Death. And not through normal means. I would have to go with Death.

  “I’d have to leave here, wouldn’t I?” I said. “I couldn’t just…freelance for you?”

  “Unfortunately, that is not how this works.” Death’s voice grew colder. He nodded over to the frozen mugger. “I stopped you in the Instant of Death. I have only two options. Either I take you into my employ, which means that you are bound to me and my realm, or I return you to die. That is how this works. That is all I can offer.”

  I swallowed, feeling a pain in my chest. “I’d never get to come back here?”

  “Not as you were. I could, occasionally, allow you back under a special dispensation, but you would not be as you are now.”

  “Why not?” Great plan, Cal. Ask stupid questions. If I go with Death, of course I wouldn’t be the same. Well, I could hope, couldn’t I? I was still young and invincible, wasn’t I?

  “Because I will have removed you from the fate of the mortal realms, the world here. I could not simply let you return, to play havoc with the fate of the future. You would be separate, removed. And that requires certain changes.”

  I swallowed again, leaning back against the bench and looking at the sky. There were no stars. It was just shadow, reflecting the lights of the city. It might be my last time looking at the sky, and there weren’t even stars to look at. “I don’t want to die.”

  “Not many do.”

  “I mean, I’ve just gotten to the good part of my life. I’m doing well. I’m a success! I have a purpose and a reason to get up in the morning,” I pleaded. Death looked at me and I suddenly felt very, very small. Okay, sure I wasn’t as tall as he was. I was an average person, with an average life and average looks. My hair was even an average shade of brown and I wore glasses. But it was my average life. I was doing well at it. No, not well. Spectacular. I didn’t want to give it up.

  “You would still have a life,” Death pointed out. “You would still be marketing, still have a purpose. It would just be in a different place. With wonders to occupy your every moment. And magic most people never even dream about.”

  “But I would have to give up everything I have here,” I said.

  “Yes,” Death nodded. He paused, then, “Well, not everything. I could let you take your belongings with you.”

  “But everything else. Friends. Family. All gone.”

  “Yes,” Death nodded again, still infuriatingly calm. “Though it does not much matter, really. Your choice is not between a life working for me and a life working for Harcourt. Your choice is between life and death, as it were. No pun intended.”

  “Mmmm,” I smiled weakly. I took a deep breath and tried to be reasonable. Think logically. My options were death or Death. Obviously, there wasn’t much of a choice. “Alright,” I said. “But I have to tell you, there are a few things we need to agree on. First, I’m your PR agent and marketing specialist. All your decisions that might be seen by anybody and analysed or criticised or even noticed, you run through me. I’ll be needing as much information as possible about your activities. That way, I can make sure they’re painted in a good light…Do you have social media wherever it is we’re going?”

  “Indeed,” Death said, frowning. “It is a pervasive thing to spread so far from this realm.”

  “Good. I’ll get started on your accounts first thing.”

  �
��So you agree?”

  “Didn’t I just say I agreed?” I snapped. Snapping at your new boss, Death or not, is probably never a good idea. In my defence, I was having a bad day. He did not seem to mind, though, as he just sat there as calm and cool as ever. I shivered.

  “Very well,” Death smiled again. “Then I insist we shake hands.”

  He held out his shadowy appendage and I could feel the raw power coming off of his skin. I coughed nervously. “Is that strictly necessary?”

  “Actually, yes,” Death said. “It binds you to me and seals the contract. It will not kill you.”

  “Ha ha,” I replied drily. I took his hand.

  Power flooded through me, touching every nerve ending I had and setting each and every one of them on fire. I was pretty sure I screamed, but my brain was too overwhelmed by whatever was happening to take note. I saw colours swirling around me that didn’t exist in nature. There were sounds running through my head, somewhere between a scream and a song. I could see Death, as calm as ever, sitting there, looking not at all regretful about what was happening. The corners of his mouth twitched in a smile.

  Then, I passed out.

  Death Warmed Over

  When I woke up, everything hurt. Not in the, “oh, let me take stock of what is still functioning after I ran that 10k yesterday” way. No, everything hurt, in the “I think I’m going to die and I can’t tell anyone because I can’t breathe and the phone is across the room” way. My limbs were on fire and there was some sort of pointed hammer pounding in my head. A weight lay on my chest and I was fairly certain I couldn’t move my toes.