“I’m in a fever of anticipation.”
“Oh yes, that’s it! Would you both like some tea?”
“If it’ll get rid of you, yes please.”
“Normal, green, white, rooibos, oolong, camomile, ginseng or fruits of the forest?”
“Do we look like a pair of middle-class ponces to you?”
“Is the right answer! Two normal teas coming up.”
The door closed.
“Thank the stars. Now—”
The door reopened.
“I was just pulling your leg,” said Tim or whoever. “We only have normal.”
The door closed again, a fraction of a second before Melody’s box file crashed into it. Cosmo retrieved the battered file and put it back on the table in front of the lamia, who had slumped forward with her head in her arms.
It was the first time Cosmo had seen her in her default human form. If anything, he found the tall woman with the scarred, sharp-featured face and the piercing green eyes more frightening than the giant snake.
Melody straightened.
“So, young man, excepting only The Unfortunate Episode Of Which We Do Not Speak, how do you feel your secondment to our merry band has gone?”
“Well,” said Cosmo, “excepting only The Unfortunate Episode Of Which We Do Not Speak, I think it went… okay?”
Melody opened the box file and took out a number of sheets of paper stapled together.
“That’s more or less what you’ve written in your report. I took the liberty of correcting a few typos and grammatical errors. Here.”
She threw the papers across the table to him. Cosmo picked them up and studied them. Almost everything he’d typed was crossed out in green ink, and neatly handwritten sentences were appended underneath. But it was the content of those sentences that astonished him.
“I can’t put that in my report!” he exclaimed.
“Why not?”
“Because it… it sounds like bragging. Nobody would believe it!”
“Listen, petal,” said Melody, “only three people are ever going to read this scribble of yours – you, me and your line manager. And he either shares my perversely positive opinion of your limited worth, or he holds to the majority view that you’re a mentally suboptimal waste of space. Either way, this isn’t going to change his mind, so you might as well ensure that you don’t write something lame about yourself in a document which is going to end up in your personnel file. The only thing that matters to your future career is what I write in the space reserved for your mentor’s comments.”
“Can I… can I ask what you’ll write?”
“Certainly!” said Melody. “I have a rough draft here.” She fished a sheet of paper out of her box file. “Ahem… ‘Over the past months, Cosmo has exceeded my expectations in every aspect of his work and character. His grasp of treatment protocols and practices, as dished out in the Eleventh Level of Hell, is as unerring as it is instinctive. In the all-too-brief time of his secondment to Nether Parts Punishments, he did not merely perform the duties of a lamia, he was a lamia. He is a precious asset to all Afterlife Services and I’ll bite anyone who says different.’ That’s the gist – I’ll tidy it up, pad it out a bit and maybe leave out the part about biting people. Good enough for you?”
“I don’t know what to say,” said Cosmo.
“That’s a bonus,” said Melody. “So I take it we’re done here?”
“I guess.”
“Then let’s gather up our stuff and skedaddle before that pain-in-the-arse manticore bursts in with our tea.”
They stood up, and Melody put her papers back in her box file.
“I hear you and April are planning to go out to celebrate this evening,” she remarked quietly, almost as an aside.
“Yes,” Cosmo enthused, “I’m taking her to see a movie.” He hesitated, wondering if he’d detected an undercurrent of disapproval. “That is, er… that’s all right, isn’t it?”
“Oh, sure – no problem! Have a nice time. Just one thing…”
“Yes?”
“Hurt her feelings in any way whatsoever and you’re so dead.”
“Understood.”
EPILOGUE
“And did you have a nice time?” I asked April.
“Not bad,” she replied, her face a picture of studied enigmatic glee.
“So you’ll you be seeing young Cosmo again?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, have a nice time then too. But I fail to see what any of this has to do with the Apocalypse.”
“Eh?” April looked puzzled.
“The Apocalypse,” I explained. “You know – seven seals, four horsemen, one whore of Babylon, Armageddon – all that end of the world stuff.”
“Who said anything about the Apocalypse?”
“This is the Rapture, isn’t it? That’s what the tattoos are about, right? The Apocalypse follows.” Her talk of Hell and the afterlife had jogged my memory as it pertained to raptures.
“No it doesn’t!” exclaimed April. “We have raptures every hundred years or so, to tidy things up. Kind of like how, you know, every few years you have to clear out the attic because it’s all full up of junk.”
I confess I didn’t take this revelation well.
“Are you telling me I have to have my forehead tattooed because you’re clearing out the attic?” I demanded.
“It’s not my attic,” April pointed out.
“I’m sorry,” I said, performing the athletic feat of standing on my dignity whilst simultaneously getting on my high horse, all without leaving the settee, “but I’m not having that. If it got me out of being hit by a meteorite or stung to death by giant armour-clad scorpions, I could see the point. But I’m not willing to get myself rapted just to help whoever-it-is with the housekeeping. I’m sure my wife would say the same if she were here.”
April looked miffed. She struggled out of the armchair’s embrace, picked her bag up off the floor and took out an A4-sized pad.
“Well, you’re each going to have to fill in an exemption form then, giving the reasons for your non-compliance.” She tore off two sheets from the pad.
“And you could have told me earlier,” she added accusingly, as she handed them to me. “I told you I had a lot more people to do today. I’m well cross now.”
Her petulance was so endearing I wanted to lean over and ruffle her hair. It took a mental slap on the wrist to restrain myself. Plus also the thought that such patronising familiarity might be enough to land me on the receiving end of an April shower.
“I do apologise,” I said, trying hard to look contrite. “I was enjoying your tale too much.”
April closed her bag and got to her feet.
“I’m going now,” she announced haughtily, “but I’ll come back for the forms when I’ve done this area. Have them completed by then.”
“Yes, ma’m.”
I escorted my golden-eyed guest to the door. The rain had got heavier, so I lent her an umbrella, and watched her retreating dainty figure as it skipped down the road, umbrella in one hand, bag in the other. She stopped outside a door some forty yards on and rang the bell. I didn’t see the outcome, however, as I was starting to get quite wet so I went back inside. I began formulating thoughts about how I would explain the need to complete an exemption form to my wife.
The rain fell harder and harder as the afternoon progressed. Presently it turned to hail and fire mixed with blood. Typical bloody British summer weather.
THE END
Author’s Afterword
Three of the main characters in this story – Glenda, Melody and April – previously made a brief appearance in my novel All’s Hell That Ends Hell, itself a sequel to Death, I’ve Found Your Sting. Kindle versions of both are available to buy from Amazon for a very modest price; details are provided below.
If you haven’t enjoyed them, well, at least they didn’t set you back very much. I know I can never give you back the hours you wasted
ploughing through them but, on the bright side, they did prevent you reading Dan Brown’s Inferno or Katie Price’s latest autobiography instead, so there’s some consolation to be found in that.
Either way, I hope those parts of your life I haven’t robbed you of continue to be wonderful.
Richard Martinus, March 2014.
Death, I’ve
Found Your Sting
By
Richard Martinus
___________
Summary
Clive Wildgoose believes he's going through Hell on Earth – literally. He's dead, and he's suffering an endless series of bargain-basement torments dreamt up by some modern-day version of Hell based right here on Earth: no effort appears to have been made to segregate the living from the dead. With the help of his friend Sam Tillotson he’s determined to escape to a better afterlife, or at least gum up the works of his present one so thoroughly that The Powers That Be will be forced to show their hand. Unfortunately for Clive, not only are The Powers That Be considerably more devious than he has allowed for, but Sam’s attention is constantly being distracted by his new girlfriend Joy, who has an unnerving habit of bursting into tears whenever it looks like their relationship might finally get beyond first base. The result is a comic exploration of how to tell the difference between eternal punishment and everyday life in twenty-first century England.
Amazon: https://authl.it/B00BATXB6A
ALL’S HELL
THAT ENDS HELL
By
Richard Martinus
___________
Summary
Sam and Clive are good friends. Dead good friends. In fact, good friends who are dead. After spending some time in a temporary Hell here on Earth (the official eternal repositories having run out of space to accommodate new souls), each finds a way to fight back. With the help of his resourceful but insecure girlfriend Joy, Sam enlists as an agency demon so that he can better the lot of those around him, whilst falsifying his paperwork to make it look like he’s actually tormenting them. Clive, meanwhile, ends up in the underworld’s Knowledge Management department, where he gets the opportunity to expose the whole shoddy racket to the world of the living. What neither our heroes nor heroine realise is that they are being hunted by an implacable Compliance investigator, who will stop at nothing until the natural order of things is restored.
Set against the backdrop of a reorganisation of the afterlife establishment every bit as comprehensively cack-handed as the ones dished out at regular intervals to Britain’s National Health Service, Richard Martinus’ sequel to Death, I’ve Found Your Sting is possibly the most profound meditation on what happens to us after we die since Tim Burton’s Beetle Juice.
Amazon: https://authl.it/B00IBI9M7U
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