The Pen-Ultimate

It was a bit of a shock to see Sophie again at the door, on a Thursday evening during the pre-news sitcoms, because by all accounts she was quite dead. Peter Lander distinctly recalled kissing her passionately – bittersweetly, even, because it was their last kiss, and he knew it even if she didn’t – right before he blew her brains out with his Colt Python.

He knew he was right because Eileen made a big fuss.

“Why the hell did you kiss her?”

“She’s my wife.”

“Not anymore!”

True. And given the insides of her skull confettied all over the living room, and that later that week they put the rest of the package six feet under, and then a day after that they collected on the staggering life insurance – yes, Sophie was dead. She had to be.

And yet…

“Hello, Peter,” said Sophie, standing at their door.

“Um,” said Peter. Dirt dribbled from her dress and hair and – actually, she was covered in dirt. No makeup, but her hair was done up, and frankly she looked like she might just have gotten back from a rainy rugby match, which she for some reason played in her funeral dress. And maybe she was a little paler than usual. Oh, and she had that gaping hole in her forehead, of course.

Sophie rolled her eyes, pushed past him, and muttered something about, “Why don’t I let myself in.”

Peter followed her to the kitchen, where Eileen was making herself a vodka-cranberry.

“Oh my god!” said Eileen. Her tone was shocked, but not the kind of shocked you get when you see a dead person walking around, but rather when you see the wrong dead person walking around, like when you’re in line at the express checkout but the old guy in front has more than ten items and it’s noisy and the AC doesn’t work and a greasy tween elbows you in the boob and doesn’t even notice, much less apologize. “Peter! What the hell?”

“She just showed up,” he said, with a shrug. “What do you want from me?”

“Right,” said Sophie. She placed a briefcase on the kitchen table – her lawyering briefcase, from back when she was alive and a-lawyering – and unclasped it. “Gather round. Family meeting time.”

Peter and Eileen sat, though she huffed and crossed her arms and kept the vodka at hand.

“Are you even part of our family anymore?” Eileen asked.

Sophie glared her silent. Then she pulled out piles of papers – old, yellow paper, covered in horrid red ink – all over the table.

“Soph,” Peter said, and then he winced. He never really knew how to broach deeper topics with her, which was maybe why their marriage was so-so. “Um. What’s happened to you? Are you a… a ghost?”

“She’s obviously a zombie!” Eileen snapped. “I told you to use the shotgun, but did you listen? No!”

Sophie drew herself up and sniffed. “I am not a ghost, Peter. Ghosts aren’t real.” Out of her briefcase, she pulled out, reverently, a ruby-red fountain pen – except it wasn’t merely ruby-red, it was ruby, with a gold nib – and placed it gently beside her. “Neither am I anything so gauche as a zombie.”

Eileen pouted.

“I am a revenant.”

Peter and Eileen shared a look. “What’s a revenant?” he asked.

“I’ll put it this way. When I ran into the devil in Hell–”

“Told you lawyers went to Hell!” Eileen said, sneering.

Sophie cleared her throat. “When I ran into the devil, I made a deal with him. He’d let me come back as an undead murder machine, so that I could wreak unholy vengeance on those who wronged me. You know, tear you limb from limb, eat your heart, and drag your sorry soul back down with me. Kind of one last big hurrah in the world of the living.”

Peter gulped. Eileen dropped her glass, which wobbled on the table and spilled all over her lap.

“Thing is,” Sophie continued, holding up a parchment covered in bloody writing, “I’ve gone over this contract hundreds of times, and as soon as I kill you, I go back too. But, not until.”

She took a couple fresher-looking sheets of yellow paper and slid them across the table, one each for Peter and Eileen. “So, I’m willing to offer you a deal. Feel free to read over that, but the gist is, I don’t murder you, and in exchange I get to live here, and get access to the millions from my life insurance policy.”

Peter looked at his paper and gulped. “Is this written in blood?”

“It’s Lucifer Ink, by Lucifer, Inc.,” Sophie said. Then with a distant look in her eyes, and an unsubtle tremble, she added, “Blood tends to boil down there.”

“Oh.”

“It is written on human leather though.”

Peter and Eileen dropped their papers.

“What if we don’t sign?” Eileen asked.

“Then I murder you now and drag your soul down to Hell.”

“Can we just shoot you again?” Peter asked.

“Technically, yes, but come on Peter, use your thinking brain. I’m already dead. Even if you managed to destroy my body by blowing it up or something, I’d just come right back, like some cheesy slasher flick. And the neighbours would probably complain about the noise.”

“Oh.”

Peter and Eileen held quiet council for just a moment, wiggling their eyebrows and making meaningful expressions at each other. Of course, since Sophie knew them both intimately – one as a husband, and the other also as a mistress – their secret language was no secret to her.

She lay her ruby pen before them.

“What kind of pen is that?” asked Eileen.

“A pen par excellence, the pen-ultimate – the devil’s very own quill. Utterly binding on a soul level. I might have swiped it from his desk. What? Don’t look at me like that. It’s not like I can possibly get into even more trouble.”

What choice did they have? They signed. Then for a second, they shimmered in a red glow and experienced a pang of bowel distress, and it was done.

And Sophie moved back into the house she paid for.

Her old firm wouldn’t take her back when she called.

“No offense, Soph – and I mean that! You were one of the best, for sure. It’s just, people already see us as ghoulish, and if we brought you back, well, it’d no longer be libel, would it?”

So she plopped herself down on the living room couch, right in the middle, so Peter and Eileen couldn’t cuddle up on it while watching a nice romcom or something. Not that they watched romcoms, because Sophie had control of the remote, and she binged trashy reality TV twenty-four hours a day.

“Maybe someone else would want to watch something,” Eileen said.

“Maybe someone else should get a job and buy the TV,” Sophie snapped.

And twenty-four hours a day really was twenty-four hours a day, since Sophie didn’t sleep.

“You mind turning that down at night?” Peter asked, after he caught himself humming a reality theme song in the shower. “It’s just, I can’t sleep.”

“Yes, Peter,” said Sophie. “I do mind.” And then she cranked the volume up.

The only thing that competed with the blaring TV was the shrill ding of the doorbell, going off like clockwork, also at all hours of the day. Having some free time for perhaps the first time in her life, Sophie crawled the online shopping sites and splurged on whatever caught her eye. After all, her life insurance money was as much hers as anyone else’s, and given this was her retirement, she had nothing to save for.

The lack of responsibility felt liberating.

The living room was soon filled with unread books, unworn clothes, unwatched movies, unexcercised workout machines, and uneaten chocolate. Somewhere she even found a life-size alabaster unicorn, whose horn scratched up the low ceiling. And because she refused to budge from the couch – muttering something about the sentimental value of it being the place her brain was ejected – it fell to Peter and Eileen to get the deliveries.

It was exhausting.

In their spare moments, Peter and Eileen mostly stuck to the kitchen, where the blaring TV was at least a little muted. Having company over was difficult, because all their friends understandably kept bringing up “the Sophie situation”, and frankly it was getting embarrassing explaining themselves over and over, and stressing that “the living room was Sophie’s room” and so it was best to leave it be.

Eileen hit the bottle increasingly hard, and Peter took up smoking again. Easy, since Sophie no longer nagged him about it.

“This isn’t working for me,” Eileen said one night.

Peter nodded.

“This isn’t how I pictured our early retirement.”

Peter nodded again.

“Are you listening to me?”

“Christ, yes. What do you want from me?”

“I want the life of luxury I was promised! I want to be able to host our friends with swanky parties!” She pouted. “I want my yacht!”

Peter rolled his eyes–

“Don’t you dare!”

He sighed and massaged the bridge of his nose. “It’s not ideal, is it?”

“What can we do? I thought we were rid of her.”

“Be nice.”

“No,” said Eileen. “I’m sick of this. I wish we never signed that stupid contract.”

“Well, she would have murdered us. And, you know, the whole Hell thing.”

“Whatever.” Then Eileen’s eyes lit up. “Hey! Maybe there’s a loophole. Where’s the contract?”

Stealing Sophie’s briefcase wasn’t too hard, what with the TV blaring and her attention focused entirely on the very real antics of the very real people on display. They brought it back to the kitchen for some privacy, and started going through the papers. Sophie’s contract with the devil was huge. It took them a solid week to go through it, a week made all the harder by the constant interruptions from deliveries – but finally, on Friday, they hit on something.

“Footnote 28397”, Peter read. “Note that the revenant has licence to seek revenge on exactly one (1) former aggressor. As soon as such an aggressor is slain the revenant contract is concluded, and both souls become the property of Lucifer, Inc. Note that collateral damage is permitted–”

“What’s that mean?” Eileen asked.

“I’m reading, hold on. Basically, if she blows us up or something, that’s fine too. The contract’s done when one of us dies, but there’s no penalty, I guess, if we’re both dead.”

“Super. So very encouraging–”

“Shh! Wait, there’s more.” Peter adjusted his glasses and took a drag on his cigarette. “Note also that the contract will be concluded if any of the aggressors should die by any means, whether caused by the revenant or not. This includes but is not limited to: traffic accidents, war, acts of God, peanut butter, old age, or being murdered by someone else.”

“Hmm,” said Eileen, setting her drink down.

“Hmm,” said Peter. “What do you suppose that means?”

“I guess,” Eileen hedged, “if one of us were to die, then…”

“Hmm.”

Peter set his cigarette down on the table.

He locked eyes with Eileen and neither blinked, as an ad for an energy drink roared in the background.

At once, she flew at the counter and he dived for the pantry, and they both kicked over their kitchen table.

Eileen grabbed the first things available to her: a cutting board covered in raw soon-to-be schnitzels and a gory meat tenderizer. She flung the floppy meat patties across the room and roared, hoisting her tenderizer into the air, and then with a shriek brought her cutting board up just in time to block the worst of a volley of canned pinto beans.

Peter charged her with a battlecry, holding a jumbo can of tomato juice with both hands. He leapt at her right as she swung. Her tenderizer savaged his temple, but he tackled her.

“I think we should see other people!” he roared, bringing his can of tomato juice down and down again.

Eileen screamed, desperately blocking with her cutting board and flailing her face tenderizer - until it finally connected with his jaw. It was enough for her to push him off and then roll on top, and now Peter was on the defensive.

“It’s not you, it’s me!” she cried, and each time her weapon came down, torrents of blood – or tomato, it was hard to tell – splattered everything.

They rolled again when Peter was able to get a hold of a raw schnitzel and shove it into her face, and then again when she managed to can-opener his ear, and on and on it went until they both flopped onto the kitchen floor, gasping for breath, covered in cuts and bruises and meat.

“Truce,” he wheeze.

“Yeah,” she managed, and then coughed. “I thought killing was supposed to get easier after the first one.”

“Hey, do you smell that?”

Eileen sniffed. “Is something burning?”

Laboriously, they both sat up and found their kitchen to be on fire. The worst of the blaze was their table, which had been covered in Sophie’s dry old contracts, Eileen’s liquor, and Peter’s lit cigarette.

“Aw, hell,” he muttered, as the flames drew closer. Then they both screamed for help.

Sophie ignored them at first, because their drama was just too much and nowhere near as interesting as TV, but it grated on her enough that she finally rose off the couch. By then the kitchen was a conflagration, with nary any raw meat in sight – neither schnitzel nor Peter and Eileen.

“Damn it!” she said, planting her hands on her hips. “You two are just the worst!”

And then she exploded into a cloud of sulphur and flame, and the house burned down.