Death Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  I

  The Beginning of The End

  Earthly Desires

  First Blood

  Dead Man Talking

  Murder in Paradise

  The Age of Myth

  Heart of Darkness

  II

  Odd Gods

  Maudness

  Incident at Golgotha

  Paradise

  Addicted to Life

  The Lost Weekend

  My Day with Maud

  Interlude

  III

  The Clinic

  Visitations

  Homecoming

  Second Goings and Comings

  Last Judgment

  The End

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Picture Credits

  Copyright

  “And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it;

  and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.”

  —REVELATION 9:6

  INTRODUCTION

  For someone who is set to play such a pivotal role in each of our lives, it seems strange that we know so little about Death. A deeply private figure, never interviewed or photographed, Death has been content to let his vast body of work do the talking. Now, for the first time, Death speaks out.

  Death: A Life is a highly personal chronicle that not only provides insights into the upbringing and character of one of our planet’s most interesting and unusual beings, but also sheds a fascinating light on the world in which we die. Up until now the sheer dearth of information on Death has meant that rumors and gossip have long been left to fill the factual void. Sensationalism and prejudice have triumphed; sobriety and accuracy have fallen by the wayside. As such, the Death that has been handed down to us through the generations is a monstrous and unfair confabulation of superstition, hearsay, and deep-seated instinctual fears.

  Death has been variously described as the humorless Grim Reaper and the benevolent Father Time; as a destroying angel and a dancing skeleton; as Thanatos, son of Night; and Anubis, son of Ra; but who is he really? Where did he come from? And why does he do the things that he does?

  Within these pages such questions will be laid to rest, for in this book, Death finally reveals to us the skin above the skull. He recounts his childhood in the lowest pits of Hell; the mental and physical cruelty he suffered at the hands of his demiurge parents; the insecurity and neurosis that wracked him at the Dawn of Time; his friendships with the great civilizations of antiquity; his enmities with the mythical gods; and his gradual, blithe descent down the shelving beach of curiosity into the deepening sea of addiction.

  Readers will find it hard not to be shocked and amazed by the revelation of the “lost weekend” he spent with the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or his magnificent but ultimately doomed rebellion against the Grand Scheme of Things, not to mention his wrenching institutionalization at the hands of angelic rivals, and his slow and painful recovery. The unsettling honesty, shocking candor, and mordant humor that characterizes his tale sheds a bright new light on the darkness that lies at the end of our lives.

  But why, you may ask, has Death decided to write his book now? Who can fathom the mind of the world’s first truly omniscient narrator, but certain hints are provided throughout this book. First, there is the need to set the record straight, to answer some of his detractors’ taunts, and to correct the narrow-minded bigotry that has grown around his name. Second, there are the undoubted therapeutic benefits to be gained from recanting his travails to an audience. Third, and perhaps most important, is the chance to redress what Death sees as the fundamental misconception of Creation—that it is not Death that should be feared, but rather the dreadful possibilities of Life.

  It is hoped that Death: A Life will provide not merely an interesting record of one of the world’s most famed personalities but also a constructive perspective to those struggling with similar problems of self-doubt and addiction. It can safely be said that no one has touched more lives, more deeply, than Death. Through this devastating memoir, it is hoped he will touch many, many more.

  As for my own role in bringing Death’s remarkable memoir to light, I can only say that it stems from a long-seated attraction toward the lives of others, undoubtedly prompted by my own unremarkable existence.

  Unlike the vast majority of memoirists, I was the recipient of a happy childhood. My parents, it seems, loved me. They fed me, clothed me, and schooled me in precise accord with prevailing morality.

  My dealings with my relatives were equally avuncular. I feared none of their visits and even under hypnosis could not manage to unearth a single false memory of abuse at their hands. I slept soundly at night and did not wet the sheets.

  As I grew into my teens I became an outgoing child, not insular in the slightest. I did not pull the wings off flies or cut myself with broken glass. I found existentialism dull, and the works of Edvard Munch gloomy. I performed well at school, if avoiding scholarly distinction, and neglected to become addicted to alcohol, drugs, or even masturbation.

  My summer jobs did not consist of turning tricks as a truck-stop prostitute or being the experimental subject of a disbarred doctor of medicine. My friends, of whom I had many, often remarked on my well-balanced character and all-round reliability, and my girlfriends were neither members of occultist groups, nor addicts of crack cocaine.

  As I grew I discovered a singular lack of skeletons in the familial closet. Everything was exactly as I thought it was. By the time I entered adult life I could class myself as fit, happy, content, untroubled, and willfully ignorant of the many troubles that can befall humankind.

  Ironically, however, I longed to write about myself. I yearned to put the real “me” down on paper for the world to see. But who would read such a memoir of contentment? By the time I realized my calling, it was too late for me to endure a terrible upbringing, too late to be scarred by childhood abuse. I knew that no one was looked down upon more in memoirist circles than the wrist-cutting arriviste. A certain pedigree of mistreatment was demanded—sustained, brutal, and given by those who should have loved one most. Here, as within the aristocracy, one’s family was all important.

  Yet my wish to be a memoir writer did not dim. Of course, it was too late for me, but with so much suffering in the world, why couldn’t I live vicariously through another’s misery? So I placed advertisements in newspapers and magazines, calling on people with stories of personal tragedy to come forward. Together, I explained, we could transmute their leaden suffering into bestselling gold.

  I was immediately contacted by a forty-five-year-old man who told me a horrifying story that would become my first book, Case 463/E>9. The only child of experimental psychologists, the subject had been referred to throughout his youth by his case number, and his every move had been studied and recorded. When he had found a wounded pigeon in his garden, his parents had bludgeoned it to death in front of his eyes to gauge his reaction. On Christmas Day, after he had unwrapped his presents, his parents had forced him to take them into the garden and set fire to them. In both cases his response, his parents recorded, was “negative.” Case 463/E>9 told me that his terrible upbringing had led him to loathe the laughter and happiness of children, a crippling phobia that he finally learned to manage by becoming the successful headmaster of a prestigious boarding school. The ensuing book was a minor bestseller and was excerpted in the New York Review of Books and People magazine.

  With that the floodgates opened, and I was subsumed under a tidal wave of other people’s misery. I became expert at mixing the horrific detail of tortures suffered with touching recollections of lost innocence, and for many of my subjects, my house be
came a home away from broken home.

  So good was I at my job that, with each new commission, I felt that I was understanding my subjects’ suffering somewhat better than they were themselves. Each inappropriate medical treatment, double-murder orphaning, and unjust consignment to a lunatic asylum was like a dagger through my own, unbroken heart. Soon I developed a tolerance for man’s inhumanity to man. My subjects’ stories began to seem pedestrian and formulaic. A childhood abduction by religious fundamentalists barely raised a shiver. A single mother’s drunken alcoholism and descent into prostitution left me yawning. I was suffering from a trauma glut.

  I was thinking of packing it all in and returning to my university thesis topic—a study of the similarities of the even-numbered presidents of the United States—when I was awoken late one night by a strange telephone call. It began in silence before a voice that was barely there at all spoke my name, referred to one of my advertisements, and said he wanted to tell his story.

  The man’s voice was so peculiar that I thought he must be a foreigner. This boded well. Tales of cold Slavic upbringings or African child-soldiering inevitably led to the subjects finding their way to a Western metropolis and a good, uplifting, profitable ending. But as I gazed at the magnificent statue I had recently installed in my bedroom of an unconscious Thomas De Quincey, I sensed there was something about this voice on the telephone that seemed to have greater depths of sorrow behind it than even the Albanian white slave trade could offer. I agreed to meet my subject the following week.

  I was somewhat disappointed, upon arriving at the designated address, to find myself at a run-down apartment block located in one of the less salubrious areas of the city. This would seem to preclude any hope of a happy ending. But already I began fitting this story into one of my many formulas—“A Promising Life Ruined” perhaps, with a dash of “Survival Is the Greatest Achievement” tacked onto the end.

  Picking my way around the overturned shopping carts and broken glass, I took a urine-scented elevator to the thirteenth floor. I was just about to knock on apartment number 66F when the door swung open as if of its own accord. I edged inside.

  “Sit down,” I was told.

  The voice seemed to come from the far corner of the room, which, despite all the lights being on and the sunlight streaming through the south-facing windows, was draped in a funereal darkness. Throughout our subsequent talk, no matter how hard I squinted, I could barely make out a distinct shape.

  “I want you to tell my story,” said the voice. This was promising. It usually took hours of cajoling and sympathy for my subjects to open up. “For centuries I’ve been mistreated, abused, had tales told about me that are quite untrue. Now I want to set the record straight.”

  I presumed this was just exaggeration and started jotting down notes. Then he said something that made me stop in my tracks.

  “I’m Death, you see.”

  What an unusual name, I thought to myself. Was it Belgian? When I asked him his first name, he shook his head and repeated it again, more slowly this time.

  “I…am …Death.”

  I put down my pen, took off my glasses, and began polishing them with my tie. I had faced crazies before, all desperate to tell you how they had been raised by devils and were in fact lords of the eighth level of Hell. These people usually had suffered some sort of abuse, of course, but they were generally incoherent and presented certain libel situations—Oprah Winfrey sinisterly controlling their minds from the television set was a particular favorite—that I could not afford to deal with. I thanked “Mr. Death” for his time, looked at my watch, regretted that I had another appointment, and got up to leave when my body was gripped by seizures and the lightbulb over my head began to bleed. As my body pinballed from wall to wall, the voice continued to speak.

  “For millennia I’ve had to listen to your pathetic human suffering. The same old stories, time after time, ‘I’m so miserable!’ ‘Life is unfair!’ ‘I don’t deserve this!’ Well, let me tell you that being Death is no picnic either. I’ve suffered heartache, cruelty, maltreatment, neglect. I’ve wanted to end it all, but suicide’s hardly an option. I’ve read what you believe me to be. I’ve seen the pictures. You think I’m all grins and dance macabres, and interminable games of chess on deserted beaches. Well, it’s not like that. I didn’t always want to do this, you know? I have feelings too.”

  I slammed back into my chair, and the dark shape in the corner seemed to stand up. I gulped. But the darkness merely leaned over and picked up a bucket, which it placed beneath the still-bleeding lightbulb. It then got me a glass of water and an aspirin. My mouth filled with steam as the liquid hit my red-hot fillings.

  “Comfortable?” he asked me as he sat back down.

  “No,” I replied.

  “Good,” he said. “That is probably for the best.”

  “Why don’t you start at the beginning?” I suggested, as I tried to steady my shaking hand over my notepad.

  “Oh,” said Death, “I’ll start before that.”

  So began the most horrific story I have ever heard.

  George Pendle

  February 2008

  I

  The Beginning of The End

  My earliest memory is of my mother. She was a heavyset lady, the size of a small mountain. Everyone knew her as Sin.

  I remember her standing in front of a glistening pool of molten rock, making sure that her scales were oozing and slime covered. “I look horrible,” she would say, turning to me confidingly, “quite, quite horrible.” She would go back to combing through her snakes and vomiting bile down her chest, and I would watch enraptured. Fangs glistened in her mouth, empty eye sockets brought out the sickly pallor of her skin, the familiar odor of decay hung heavy around her. That was Mother.

  My father was Satan. He was Mother’s father too, which led to some awkward introductions at parties. This never bothered me too much. It was, after all, the Dawn of Creation, and exotic family trees were fairly commonplace. I recall Father explaining to me, once I had reached a certain age, that the options for a sincere and honest relationship before time began were severely limited. The cherubim and seraphim were prudes who kept their legs crossed, Night was available but impossible to find, and Chaos was a total wreck (and I mean wreck).

  My mother’s pregnancy with me had been difficult. There was the morning sickness, the swollenness, the aching joints, and the fact that I was gnawing on her entrails constantly. Mother would sometimes look at me, and then down at the gaping holes in her belly, and I knew she was wondering whether it had all been worth it.

  Of course Father was never around. Today you would call him an absent father (and husband). I only got to see him on the occasional eon when he’d fly by, all flames and bluster, with a red-lipped demoness in tow. Mother put on a brave face—she had plenty of them lying around—but I knew something wasn’t quite right in our home.

  The one day in my childhood that I remember spending with Father was when I helped him mirror Hell’s firmament. There I was, passing him slabs of glass, desperately seeking his approval, and all the while he kept looking at me as if he couldn’t quite place who I was, or what I was doing there, or what, ultimately, I was for. There are things that happen to you in your existence that you just don’t question, maybe because you’re afraid of what the answer will be. Father’s abandonment of Mother and me was one of those things. I never dared asked why.

  As a result, Mother and I were very close. One might almost say too close. No sooner had I been born than we began rutting. For me there were no glimpses of her getting changed in the bathroom stirring strange and complicated feelings. There were no ambivalent memories of being spanked, or of dressing up in her clothes while she was away. No. For me it was simply wham, bam, thank you Mom.

  I know what you’re thinking. We’re only two pages in and already we’ve covered rape, incest, mutilation, and abandonment. But in my family’s defense you should remember that we were in Hell, Mother wa
s the embodiment of Sin, and Father was Satan, Master of Misrule and Lord of Lies. Finger painting wasn’t really an option.

  It’s true that if Father had been around, he might have stopped me from doing what I was doing. But he wasn’t around, and from the get-go I struggled with the concepts of right and wrong. Maybe it was Mother’s influence on me. Whenever anybody spent any time around her they would always end up doing something very, very bad. Anyhow, with all the rutting it wasn’t long before Mother gave birth to a pair of monstrous dogs. Well, I was quite surprised too. Now I don’t know if I was responsible or whether Cerberus had something to do with it—he was always humping anything that moved—but the dogs kept running back and forth into Mother’s womb causing her no end of problems. Is it any wonder, I ask you, that I grew up to be somewhat suspicious of intimacy?

  Daddy.

  I was an only child. In fact, I was the only child. Hell wasn’t considered a particularly good place to raise children at the time. Playgrounds were specifically designed to grind up those who played in them, babysitters were required by hellish law to actually sit on babies, and the schools were just terrible. When I asked Mother why I was the only being who had actually been born in Hell as opposed to being exiled there, she admitted that I had been a mistake. She had forgotten to wear protection one night—her spiked suit of armor—and Father had leapt on her.

  I was left largely to look after myself, but Hell was an interesting place in which to grow up. I recall crawling around the Palace of Pandemonium playing with my demonic toys—sharp, flinty combustible objects that burst into flame whenever I held them close—while around me the Dukes of Hell plotted and schemed new ways to revenge themselves upon Heaven. Sometimes, when the Dukes were being particularly devious in their machinations, I was ushered outside to feed the Ducks of Hell who floated in a pool of acid, having been damned for their pride in their plumage and their refusal to quack on command.