Death's Messenger

I wasn’t sure when I gained the ability to talk to the dead. People said that I was a normal child, happy, talkative, carefree, as young children tend to be. It was only after the fire that had permanently scarred half of my face that I became quiet, looking into the distance as if I could see another world invisible to everyone but me. I didn’t remember the accident. It was rumored that I died that night, that I passed through death’s door and somehow evaded death’s grasp to return to the land of the living. The rumors weren’t far off from the truth. Part of me had died that night. The girl I had been before the fire was gone, and all that was left was a ghost girl who saw the fires of the underworld when she closed her eyes.

I knew the rumors about me that passed subtly through the undertones of conversation in my town. Angel of death, people whispered as I passed them. Soul riser. When I walked in the street, my black veil fluttering in front of my face to hide my scars, people parted to make way for me. They thought I couldn’t see the looks of curiosity or disdain they gave one another, but the black veil wasn’t enough to mask their whispers. Perhaps they feared me or perhaps they simply didn’t understand the power with which I was imbued, but they all came to me in my small office with its soft amber light. They came to me with peeling photographs and mementos, old shirts and tear-stained journals, objects which I used to locate their loved ones in the land of the dead and bring them to the boundary between that realm and the realm of the living so that they could talk.

People often asked me what the underworld was like, but I had stopped replying to this question long ago. The answer was less dramatic than one might expect. When I closed my eyes, I crossed to the other side, a world that was a mirror image of our own with a few changes. The world generally appeared the same, but heavy greyness overshadowed everything. There was no color in the underworld, just as there wasn’t any taste or smell or sound. Infinite silence draped over barren wastelands scattered with bones, a glaring contrast to the incessant noise of the living world. Part of me longed for this silence. I felt the weariness of age creaking in my bones, longing for respite. Ever since that night, the night I died, I sensed I didn’t belong in this world anymore. I was a creature in slow motion compared to the rest of the world’s inhabitants, too colorless and drained and tired to pass for human. I could only hope that when I finally crossed the gate permanently into the shadow world behind my eyelids, I would belong there just as I had once belonged here.

The years passed in this manner. I summoned the dead and allowed them brief passage into the light; I summoned the living and allowed them brief passage into the dark. It wasn’t until I met him that everything changed. He was tall and slender, his black hair slicked back and his deep-set eyes in shadow. Though his appearance was youthful, he leaned on a cane when he walked. When he sat down across from me, I nearly gasped. I sensed the yawning abyss of eternity in his eyes, cyclical eras of creation and destruction written into his obsidian-colored irises. He leaned his cane against my table and calmly folded his hands together.

“Do you know who I am, necromancer?” he started in a voice that carried the power of a thousand exploding volcanos and the silence of a million falling snowflakes.

When I slowly shook my head, he leaned forward and placed his wrist on mine, the same technique I used to bring my clients to their loved ones. Instantly, I was transported to that other world that came to me so easily. But it was different than what I usually saw. Whereas the boundary lines between this world and that one were crystal-clear to me, the borders in this vision weren’t sharp at all. The two worlds were one and the same in this man’s mind; the world he occupied at any one time was decided merely by his point of view. I saw the first death, the moment at the beginning of the world when humans became aware of their own mortality. The first human breathed out his last breath and the world mourned as it lost its innocence. I saw the deaths of millions over thousands of years played out in a matter of seconds and, in each instance, the man in front of me was there. He carefully picked up each soul from its body as if it was made of glass and guided that soul across the border into the underworld, his cane clattering on the ground in a never-changing rhythm. And in that moment, I knew that the fleeting glimpses I caught of the underworld were just that: glimpses. Even though I felt that I occupied both worlds simultaneously, I could never comprehend the forces that kept these worlds enmeshed with one another.

“You’re Death,” I gasped when he removed his wrist from mine and I jolted back into the world of the living.

           He merely smiled at that. How many times had he heard that sentence in his millions of years of existence?

           “And people call you the Angel of Death,” he answered instead. “Is that who you are?”

           “I prefer ‘Death’s messenger.’”

           “You call yourself my messenger, yet you do not know if I have sanctioned any of your actions,” he said serenely.

           “Why have you come here?” I forced myself to ask through a dry throat.

           Death shifted in his chair, and I sensed unease in his infinite eyes.

           “What you are doing is against the laws of nature,” he explained. “Your people shouldn’t be able to go to and from my realm when they please. You aren’t supposed to understand that the two realms exist so close to one another. Only I am allowed to cross from one to the other.”

           Despite myself, I felt a sense of pride buoying me. The accident that had cost me my sense of self had upset the balance at the heart of the world.

           “I don’t bring people back,” I protested. “I just let them talk to their loved ones for a while.”

           “You must understand,” Death reasoned with me. “Because of you, the people in this town know that death isn’t final. Of course, their loved ones can’t return to this world, but they know they can come to you whenever they want to talk. Can you imagine what would happen if this knowledge leaked out of this town?”  He picked up his cane and ran his thumb absent-mindedly over its skeleton head. “Death would no longer carry the simplicity it once had; it would no longer be permanent. I have a reputation to maintain.”

           “What are you asking, then? That I stop?”

           “I have come here to ask for a favor,” he replied, and I saw a strange hunger in his gaze. “I want to understand. To me, the world is simply a tally. There are so many people on this side and so many people on the other side. I want to see myself through your eyes.”

           He once again extended his wrists toward me. There was a brief moment of hesitation, and then I placed my wrists on his. I showed him the frothing pits of fire in the underworld making the air humid and hot, the endless fields filled with nothing but bones. I showed him the grey expanses of emptiness and the dark crevices where I found people still new to his domain. I showed him the emptiness of the people left behind on this side of the boundary, the grief that tore at their souls with merciless talons. I showed him my searches through his world, flying over the voiceless landscapes like a crow seeking out its prey, and I showed him the hope that I helped create when I reunited loved ones at the border between the realms.

           In that moment, I understood why Death had let me live after the fire. I needed a messenger, he told me in his calm, ancient voice. He existed only in the underworld and he had wanted me to give him a glimpse of the world he didn’t fully control, a world with color and life and music. He had needed me to understand the world from which his subjects came and to help the people in this world understand his domain.

           When I removed my wrists, Death sat silently for a long moment. He reached up to touch the crystalline tears gathering on his cheeks and stared at the wetness on his fingers in disbelief. When he finally looked up at me, his expression was unreadable.

           “Perhaps there are things that I have yet to learn about your people,” he said quietly and stood. “Nevertheless, I think you know what has to happen now.”

           I didn’t have to think about it; I already knew. My body inhabited the world of the living, but when I closed my eyes, I saw the infinite expanses of the world of the dead. I had one foot in this realm and one in the next, walking the narrow bridge between them and an outsider in both. I had lived as Death’s messenger for long enough, and it was time to cross into his domain for good.

           “You have one last message to deliver,” he told me, and I understood.

           When I stood and took his arm, I felt something in me shift and unsettle, a part of me left behind in that room. He escorted me across the border one last time, and I entered the underworld. For years, I had wondered why I had survived, what purpose I had served with my clairvoyance. Now I finally understood. That day, the day Death visited me and the day I truly died, I taught Death to grieve for the souls he had commandeered and those he would one day take.