Out of time part 3
George was pretty certain that he’d fallen asleep somewhere along the line, possibly more than once. In fact, it seemed to him that all along the eternal line, people were dozing and daydreaming and not doing a hell of a lot else. No one was talking certainly, no one seemed to be that interested at all in the people round about them. He couldn’t even remember looking at their faces, or perhaps he had looked and all that had stared back was a blankness, the empty memory of a face and a person now outside its existence. He wondered, with a start, if Annie would look like that now, and if she did, how he would ever find her in all that sea of hazy skin.
He wondered also if, after enough time had passed, he would care.
Certainly, everything seemed to have changed since he’d come through the door. He had to struggle to remember why he was there and what he was doing, and even, sometimes and scarily, who he was.
“George Sands?”
“Mm?”
George looked up, completely amazed to discover that he’d actually managed to make his way to the front of the queue. Part of him had wondered if the queue even had a front, and if it was all just a ploy to make the dead stand around for the rest of time.
Apparently not.
He had a sense that people round about him were looking his way expectantly, waiting for him to move forward and acknowledge who he was, following the voice.
Seemed like a reasonable idea.
“George Sands?”
“Yes.”
There was a rustling of paper and George felt himself being unpleasantly scrutinized.
“Drowned did you. That was a bit stupid.”
George was incredulous. “Hey!” he exclaimed in what he hoped wasn’t too much of a girly scream. “I’ve just died here! You could show a bit more sensitivity.”
“Yeah, the thing is, everyone’s just died here, love. I lost my sensitive side back somewhere during the last millennium.”
“Well - just…”
“Here’s your number.”
“What?”
“Your number. Take this form and go through that door. Go into the next room, fill out the form and wait to be called. Peter Vandergold!”
“What?”
“Look love, for a man who knows languages, you seem to be having an awful problem understanding what I’m saying. Form. Go. Fill in. Wait. Next!”
“Are you seriously telling me I just waited for what I can only and realistically describe as an eternity to be given a number and a form!”
He had a brief jolt, suddenly, a sense more than anything else that he was back in the tunnel with the men, that they were around him, poking at him, tying rope around him, and there was pressure and pain and terror.
And then it was gone, and he was back at the front of the endless queue with empty faces all around, and a weighty sheaf of papers hanging in the air in front of him.
He took them quickly.
“Good boy. Next!”
He breathed, walking away towards the door that had been indicated, and remembering briefly, that he couldn’t breathe, that he was dead, that everyone around him was dead. He clung on to the thought that he didn’t need to stay here, that all he needed to do was sort out why he’d come and then he could go back. Go back to what he had before, to his friends, whoever they were, to something.
He was here to do something.
He looked at the form, stumbling slightly as he walked. It was huge, the questions complicated and with tiny boxes after them for his answers. How was he ever going to fill it in? Did they even have pencils?
He looked around again, realizing he was through the door. Another endless space was before him, this time with rows and rows of what looked like cheap, plastic chairs, all occupied by blurred figures clutching forms and bent over, filling them in. He couldn’t see an empty place for him anywhere, so he began to walk.
And walk.
---
Mitchell hadn’t seen this part of the other world before. Last time he’d been here, almost a hundred years before (but still very clear in his head, like a home movie he’d watched over and over again) he’d been kicked out by the guardians before he’d gotten anywhere near here. The music was continuing, and it was still bloody cold, but at least there were other people around now, shuffling past with wide eyes, as if living in a constant terror of something he couldn’t see.
He swallowed, feeling nervous. This wasn’t what he’d expected. From what Annie had told them, and from what little he’d heard from others who’d been in the same situation, the afterlife was a bureaucratic hell of forms and numbers and bells and whistles and waiting. But there was none of that here, only a mindless fear and endless scratching stimuli that, even after a short period of time were starting to do his head in.
He stopped.
Okay, so religious mythology wasn’t exactly his thing - certainly not since he’d been bitten - but from his rudimentary knowledge of those things, most belief systems had the other world, the places we went after death, divided somehow. Now, he knew as well as anyone that most of that stuff was total bollocks, but he had enough respect for myth to know that some of it was bound to be based on truth; that ideas of heaven and hell or whatever you wanted to call them, were probably being played out in some similar aspect by those who collected souls in the afterlife. And if he was here, and as someone who could only really be described as a mass murderer, he was unlikely to be where the good souls went.
“Shit.”
So this was hell? Lift music and bright lights and wordless dread? And that’s why George wasn’t with him, of course, no way his pure soul was going to be condemned to all this.
“Oh crap.”
How the hell (he almost laughed at his own pun) was he ever going to find him again? How the hell was he going to get them both out of there? Okay so he was going to be cast out at some point, but could the guardians send him back without a door, or was he going to end up in some weird limbo somewhere, or even worse, get vomited back out into reality on his own and have to face telling Nina that he’d left her boyfriend behind in the afterlife?
Hm, maybe hell wasn’t so bad after all.
But he didn’t imagine Annie would be here either, and with a slight buzz, Mitchell told himself that surely her and George would meet up in some heaveny part of all of this. They’d meet up, go back through the door, and it would all be fine. He might get stuck here, but he did sort of deserve it. He’d killed people, after all, lots of people. Thinking there would be no retribution for that, thinking that he could just go on with it forever and ever… well, it just wasn’t right was it? This was payback.
Mitchell smiled. In an odd way it made him feel better.
Then he frowned again.
So who was it the guardian had sent him to see: the girl who died with you in her thoughts and in her eyes?
He’d followed the directions, and by all rights was now standing in what had been called the grey room - not that it looked much different from anywhere else. It was full of people, who, now he was actually looking at them, were acting pretty strangely. It was reminiscent, in fact, of being in a lunatic asylum, but silent. Even the music had stopped, he realized with relief. No one was talking; people were sitting facing the walls, or rocking, or scratching at their faces.
Mitchell tried not to look too closely - it was acutely disturbing to see people in this state with no obvious cause - but he did allow himself to glance at every face he passed to see if any of them meant anything to him. Too long at this and he could see himself going mad. Maybe that’s why he’d been sent here. Another punishment.
No, that wasn’t it.
“Jesus!” He muttered it softly, but still some of the people round about turned to him with hope in their shattered faces, a few even started to crawl his way. One grabbed his ankle, and he stumbled, feeling the terror start to eat into his soul, and feverishly trying to stop from falling as he attempted to get away.
“Mitchell?”
The figure he’d seen in front of him, the one that had caused him to utter the word that had provoked such a reaction from the tortured beings around about, got up from her position on the floor and rushed to help him, pulling him away from the clasping hands.
The two of them moved quickly out of reach and turned to see if anyone was following, but the figures immediately gave up and went back to their previous self-destructive actions.
Mitchell sighed in relief and turned to his saviour.
“What are you doing here?”
He smiled. “Hello Lucy,” he replied.
---
Time stretched.
It yawned.
It meant nothing.
There was nothing and nobody and nowhere.
Only a blank haze.
He’d filled in his form (which may have taken a year to do, or something, certainly a long time) and he’d sat on it, and curled it in his hands, and chewed his nails and stared into the void.
And time stretched.
Nobody spoke, or not really. He thought he’d maybe heard one or two soft voices, hushed in the silence, clandestine. But they weren’t speaking to him. He noticed people disappearing, numbers being called. Sometimes there was a bell and numbers seemed to float in the air, but never his number - not that he could quite remember what it was…
Everything was just fine. It was nothing. It was just as it was, and he didn’t have anywhere to go or anything to do. There was just this.
“Have you been here long?”
The voice was hushed like the others had been. But the words were suddenly clear. And he knew that they were being addressed to him.
“Hm?”
“Have you been here long?”
His mouth felt like he’d never used it, and he tried to remember words, linking words with thought and speaking, and communicating.
“I don’t know,” was all could think to say.
“It’s an odd place this.”
“I suppose.”
“And time gets a bit - shaken up.”
“Mm.” Why was he being spoken to? Was he supposed to do something? Was he in the wrong place maybe? He closed his eyes, confused.
“Sometimes it’s hard to even remember stuff. All that time just seems to get in the way.”
“Yeah.”
Time.
“It just stretches out and onwards and backwards even. Sometimes I don’t even know who I am anymore, lost in all that time.”
Was he someone? “What?”
“I forget who I am. It’s easy to do.”
“Is it?”
“Oh yes. Everyone does it. It’s all part of the process.”
This was weird. “What process?”
“The being dead process.”
He was dead. He was dead?
“I suppose it’s natural really, helpful probably for most people. It’s easier to be dead and not remember.”
Dead. That’s right, he was dead. How had he forgotten that? How long had he been sat there? “How do you remember then?”
“I’m not sure. It’s all a bit complicated.”
Okay, something weird was definitely going on. He was dead. He was here to do something. “How do I remember?”
“Just one thing should do it, one memory.”
But if he couldn’t remember…? “But I can’t remember.”
“Try.”
There was too much fog. Too much nothing. He screwed up his face. The fog. What did that make him think of? There’d been fog when he first got here. It seemed weird to think there’d been a time when he wasn’t here, in fact so weird, he almost rejected it. But the weirdness was good. It was uncomfortable. It was something different.
“I can’t.”
“Just. One. Thing.”
The fog. What was in the fog? He’d been looking for something, something that he couldn’t find. He’d been calling a name, over and over. What was the name? What was it?
His eyes opened. Mitchell.
George spun quickly in his chair. Annie was sitting beside him, tears streaming down her face. It was the most beautiful sight he’d ever seen in the world.
“Annie!” he threw himself at her, and they wrapped their arms around each other desperately. “Oh Annie!” She felt different, solid somehow, and he grabbed handfuls of her clothes between his fingers, squeezing her tightly and never wanting to let go. But she pulled back.
“George,” she put both her hands to his face. “Why are you here? How are you here? You can’t be dead! You can’t be!”
“No, no, it’s okay,” he exclaimed, putting his hands over hers and taking them down into his lap. “I’m fine. We came, Mitchell and me, but I lost him somewhere. I don’t know where he is.” He looked around. “How did you find me?”
“Oh,” Annie wiped tears from her cheeks. “I just knew you were here somehow. It’s all a bit odd. Everyone here seems to forget who they are here and what’s happened to them, but I don’t. I don’t know why, but I just don’t. I just wander around all the time, waiting and waiting. And I suddenly felt something, something familiar. I can’t describe it. But I just knew you were here and that I had to find you. But when I did, you didn’t recognise me, you didn’t even know who you were. I’ve been sitting here for ages and ages trying to pull you out of it. You wouldn’t talk to me. I didn’t think you were ever going to come back.” She wiped away more tears, and his heart ached at her sorrow. “Then you did, you came back! But why are you here?”
He smiled through his own tears. “We came to get you out.”
“What?”
“Mitchell and I, we’ve come to take you back, back to the other world. Away from this.”
Annie looked shocked. “But - how did you get in?”
“Oh,” George threw that off. “It’s all a bit… Mitchell sorted something out. But we need to find him, Annie, and then get out as quickly as we can. I don’t know how much time we’ve got.”
“But,” she was confused. “We can’t get out without a door, George. And even with a door, the men aren’t just going to let me waltz out of here, or you. They’re not like that. They don’t let people go back.”
George shook his head. “They won’t have a choice,” he said. “We’ve set something up. But we have to get back to the corridor, away from here. And we have to find Mitchell. Have you seen him? If you knew I was here, maybe you can find him too?”
She sniffed sadly. “He’s not here,” she said, wiping away the last of her tears. “I would have known, and he’s not.”
“But?” George didn’t understand. “Where could he be then? He definitely came in with me.”
Annie looked uncomfortable. “He’s maybe in the other place, then,” she said. “I can’t sense there.”
“What other place?”
She shrugged. “As nightmarish as this place is,” she said. “These people are all people that have lived good lives. Not like Mitchell.”
Realization started to sink in. “You mean - this is like heaven?”
“Basically. After a fashion.”
“And there’s a - what a hell?”
She nodded. “That’s what people say. The men whisper about it, about the other place, about the people there. But maybe he got sent back instead. Vampires aren’t supposed to be here, they’re not dead dead. They’re just kind of partly dead. The men talk about them too. They talk about a lot of things. Things I’m not supposed to hear. Things that only I can hear.”
“But,” George focussed on her for a second. “You’re okay, though?”
“Oh, I’m fine,” she said, smiling a wan and unconvincing smile. “Just tired. It’s endless here too. It thought maybe, things would be different somehow here. Things would move on for me. But they don’t. They do for other people, but I’m just - the same. Every day, well there aren’t really days here either, it’s just time. Endless time.”
“So you’ll come back? If we can get there. You’ll come back with me?”
She smiled again, taking his hands once more. “Yes, of course I will. And thank you, so much George, for coming to get me. It’s incredible. I really don’t know how you’ve done it.”
“Well, we’ll explain it all later. So how the hell do we get to hell to see if Mitchell’s there after all?”
---
“What are you doing here?” She was paler than he remembered, thinner too somehow, though he imagined that people probably didn’t get thinner or fatter here. Once you were dead, surely your physical body, or the impression of your physical body - which is all that ghosts and spirits were really, memories of self - stayed pretty much the same for all time. But Lucy didn’t look well. She seemed somehow - lost.
“We came looking for Annie,” he told her, searching her face for the woman he’d fallen in love with.
“We?”
“Me and George,” he expanded. “But it seems the powers that be think he’s good and I’m evil or something, because I’m here and he’s not.”
Lucy lifted her chin, her expression changing. “So this is hell. I wondered.”
“What, they didn’t tell you when you arrived?” he said. “No orientation talk?”
She laughed, but it was an odd laugh, as if she’d forgotten how and was forcing the sound from her innards using only the memory of happiness. “No orientation talk,” she said. “Nothing really, just this.” She gestured around herself.
“What is this place?” Mitchell looked around, glancing away as he caught sight of a woman methodically hitting her head off the wall.
“Well, it’s hell isn’t it?” Lucy guessed. “You just said so.”
“Yeah, but it’s not all like this,” he told her. “There’s corridors and people in other places. They’re not all mental like this lot. And how come you’re in here with all of them? You’re not like them. Whatever’s happened to them, it doesn’t seem to have affected you.”
She looked confused. “I’ve no idea,” she said. “I just thought this was it now, this was my punishment. Being in here. Being removed.”
“What do you mean?” Now it was Mitchell’s turn to look confused. “Removed from what?”
Lucy turned away from him, and moved away, sticking her hands into the pockets of her cardigan. She didn’t answer straight away, so he followed her, curious.
She glanced back at him, and smiled sadly. “It’s hard to say,” she tried to explain. “But, I don’t - I feel I’ve lost something here, some part of myself. Something I can never get back.”
“What?”
Lucy looked into his eyes, and he felt sorrow flowing from her. It was overwhelming, and pity stabbed his heart. As complicated and as fucked up as they were, he still had feelings for her.
“I know,” she started. “That you don’t get the ‘God’ thing, you in particular, but I know that most people don’t get it either. They used to think I was a crackpot at work, they’d say stuff about me behind my back. But I didn’t care, because I knew it was true. It’s not just words, Mitchell, the praying, the scriptures, you don’t just say it all, you feel it, in here,” she held her fist to her chest. “I felt his love, I felt his presence. He was with me, I knew he was, and all I wanted to do was his will. It was the fundamental part of everything I did.” He could see her lip trembling. “And now it’s gone. And it’s like I died and I found out the truth. And everything I’d been living, everything I’d lived for, was a lie. There is no God .There’s nothing here but blackness and… and absence.”
The room of absence. That’s what the guardian had called it. The grey room: the room of absence.
Mitchell looked about him, from one face to another, all those people in silent torment, tearing at their faces, trying to make some sense of the nothingness. He thought how they had responded to a single religious word, the twisted hope it had suddenly given them.
Lucy had turned away from him again, her body stooped as though empty, as though unable to cope with the forces pressing down upon her.
He reached over and grabbed her, forcing her round to look at him. “No,” he said intently. “That’s not it.
“What?”
“This is the room of absence, Lucy, that’s what they called it, that’s where they told me you were. The room of absence. Jesus, I didn’t get it until now!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Okay,” he said. “All these people in here, and you, you’re all religious, right? I mean, I’m guessing but it makes sense. You’re all believers. But you’re all sinners as well.”
Lucy looked down, ashamed. Mitchell shook her slightly, and she looked up at him again.
“You’ve been trained,” he said. “To think of hell as fire and brimstone and all that shit, but what if hell wasn’t that. What if it wasn’t all pitchforks and demons? What if it was this? What if it was just an absence… of God?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well think about it. What was the greatest comfort in your life? It was knowing that God was there. Now personally, I think killing all those people with God in your heart is seriously fucked up, but you’re hardly the first person in history to use God as a central argument for murder. And now he’s gone, and all your crap, all your human failings, that’s all you’ve got left. You’ve been removed from the sight of God.”
Lucy stared at him, barely understanding what he was saying. “Removed?”
“Yeah! I’m not going to go so far as to say that God exists. I mean, what the fuck would I know? But all these people are probably under the very firm conviction that something fundamental to their lives was wrong, that they were living under false pretences and now they see the truth of it, or what they’re being told is the truth, and it’s driving them mad.”
“Now we see through a glass darkly,” she muttered obscurely. Then she met his gaze once more. “So… that’s my punishment?”
He shrugged. “Seems to be working doesn’t it?”
Lucy looked away, her gaze appearing to turn inwards as though searching herself. Then she became curious. “But why are you here?” she asked. “You said someone told you I was here? If you’re looking for Annie, why come here?”
Mitchell let go of her, slightly uncomfortable. “Well, I uh, didn’t realize,” he admitted. “I didn’t know who I was being sent to see.”
“Oh, she said, her face falling slightly.
“But I’m glad it was you,” he said, giving her a little cheeky smile that made her give the ghost of a smile back. “I suppose it gives us a chance to say goodbye properly - if nothing else.”
“Yeah,” she agreed, seeming ever so slightly more confident. “I guess it does.” She breathed out, pursing her lips slightly. “And it gives me a chance to say I’m sorry.”
He nodded, and glanced at his feet, uncomfortably. Since Lucy had come to him outside their cottage, he’d felt such a complicated mix of emotions about her that he wasn’t sure he’d ever understand them. As a murderer who’d repented, he knew how important mercy could be. But was he ready to offer it?
He remembered the first time they’d met, in the hospital, and it caused a small twinge in his innards as he realised that the whole thing - the cigarette in the toilet, the goldfish, all of it had been a set up, a trap that he’d fallen into with the innocence of a child. She’d been playing him from the start, with a cool calculated certainty that he found an odd respect for amongst his anger. But during that meeting she’d said probably the most truthful statement that she’d uttered during the whole time they’d known each other, though neither of them could have realised it at the time:
“I keep fucking up, Mitchell.”
Didn’t they all.
He’d fucked up with Lucy, George had fucked up with Sam and that daughter of hers. Annie had fucked up with Saul, Nina had fucked up - well just in general really. But here they all were trying to make amends, trying to make it better.
If they, small band of supernaturals searching for humanity, were deserving of forgiveness, maybe they weren’t the only ones.
“I forgive you,” he whispered.
“Really?” Lucy’s face was so needy, so hopefully, that he couldn’t do anything else other than gather her into his arms and rock her gently.
“Really,” he said, kissing the side of her head.
“I was so wrong,” she muttered into his shoulder. “But I did it from the best of motives - you have to believe that.”
“I do,” he said pulling back. “You had your reasons. But things are never as simple as they seem.”
There was a powerful rush of air suddenly, and the two of them stumbled, blinking and confused. Mitchell saw the beings closest to them scuttle away in fear. He whipped round to see what they were facing, the men or the guardians, or whatever the hell else they’d sent to drag him screaming back to where he belonged.
He gaped.
Then he surged forward in a rush.
TBC...