Rest for the Wicked

Rest for the Wicked was the oldest restaurant in the city, if not the country. It was also one of the most unpopular because the bigoted landlord didn’t serve anyone who couldn’t demonstrate their magic.

            The owner, Alan, was all skin and bone. Everything else had shrivelled away during his mumification eight hundred years before.

            If he loved one thing in this world, and it was possible that he loved only one, it was yelling. He called them mundane when he was in a good mood. The insults he threw about when he was upset are both illegal and an automatic ‘Go straight to your religion’s version of hell.’

            “Why is it they think I’m joking?” Alan asked. “I’ve got signs that say MAGIC USERS AND MAGICAL BEINGS ONLY. Can’t they read hieroglyphs?”

            “Education is underfunded Alan,” said Joshua, “no one even learns Latin now.” Joshua adjusted his black trench coat because it was catching on the bar stool. “Half of the artists I resurrect now don’t even know the major pantheons. They spend all their time in school practicing for tests that are all paper based and then they never use the knowledge again.

            Not like in my day. Here’s your shovel, that’s the field. Dig. Put potatoes in. Repeat. That was my education. Solid. Practical.” He set his black bowler hat on the bar. He put his red sunglasses inside the hat to keep the lenses from getting scratched.

            “Exactly,” said Alan, too loudly. “It’s not like regular people can’t learn magic if they spend their whole life dedicated to it. Then I’d let them in no problem. It’s the idiots who think this place is a zoo where they can take photos and pose with us like we work in a resort.”

            “Mayflies.” Joshua nodded. “Born yesterday, dead in fifty to eighty years. Maybe that’s not long enough to learn respect. I don’t know. I don’t deal with the living much these days. I resurrected my assistant and all my lawyers. Best move I ever made. They don’t sleep now, and I pay them less because they don’t have to eat.”

            Adam raised a glass of whiskey, “cheers to that.”

            They clinked glasses together.

            “This is why I stay here.” The barman looked around at the assortment of necro-kinetics, vampires, warlocks, witches, and zombies. “Loyal customers. Some of you have been coming here for five hundred years.” He raised his glass and his voice. “I LOVE YOU ALL.”

            Cheers, some genuine, some from pity, echoed off the walls and died abruptly.

            “They have all of this technology now. First the printing press, now it’s watches that can receive email. Who wants email in their watch?” Joshua shrugged to his own question.

            “What is email? Does the e stand for enemy?” Alan fixed the necro-kinetic with a hard stare from his empty sockets.

            “It means electric mail. It’s like a parchment that’s invisible that travels through the air into your phone or computer or whatever.” Joshua stopped talking when he realised Adam didn’t understand a word. “Anyway, stupid mundanes.”

            “Yeah,” said Alan, raising his pint to the first thing he’d understood since the word technology. Living forever was great but time had a way of changing things that he’d grown bored of seven hundred years ago. As far as he was concerned there was nothing that couldn’t be ruined by making it more convenient. “Life is too easy for them all now. Water coming from taps. Education for the poor. Doctors that can help you before you die. It’s societal development gone mad.”

            Death walked in through the door wearing a Marvel hoodie. He also wore a batman belt worn by Christian Bale. A necklace of vampire teeth given to him by Vanessa Hellsing jangled on his neck. One of the vampires who had been sitting peacefully in the corner got up to question the reaper about his fashion choices. The immortal then realised who it was and sat down again.

            “Midlife crisis?” Joshua asked, looking at his friend.

            “I’m only a few billion years old,” Death said. “I’m not middle aged yet. If only. I’ve got a lot of crap to deal with before then. For now though,” he looked up and down the bar. “I want to get hammered. Bring me your strongest alcohol. Enough to kill the toughest god.”

            “Odin’s whiskey is pretty wild.” Adam found a dusty bottle on his highest shelf. He floated up to the brown glass, bandages flapping a little in a magical yellow breeze that glowed. “Supposedly catching a whiff of this stuff turned Hod blind.”

            “Never stopped Loki taking credit for it. Uppity little shit.” Alan spat into a bucket behind the bar. He’d been using the same bucket for the last eighty years or so. If not for evaporation it would have overflowed decades before. If he moved it, he would know what colour that patch of floorboard had been when he’d put the bucket down. He didn’t want to know.

            Death sniffed the shot Alan poured for him. “Woof, that’s quite something. Here goes.” He lifted the shot glass.

            “Hold on a moment.” The barman held up a hand then looked around the bar. “We’ve got another idiot trying Odin’s Own.”

            Murmurs stirred around the room. People and other things that looked less and less like people crowded around to watch the act of bravado.

            “Can I drink it now?” Death looked at Alan.

            “Go ahead. It killed the last one to drink it. Guy named Xochipili. Centuries old vampire. Drank it. Coughed. Dead.”

            “I remember him,” the Reaper smiled again. It was frustrating for people not to know you were smiling. The teeth were there, either way.

            He downed the shot.

            “Oooooh.” The crowd leaned in.

            Death coughed and smacked the bar with a closed fist.

            “Damn. That’s strong stuff for sure. A bottle in a single shot. Give me another. A double please Alam.” He shook his skull.

            “Alan. My name’s Alan.”

            “That’s what I said isn’t it?”

            “You said Alam.”

            “Adam, yeah. A double please.” He held up two skeletal fingers, or three. He was struggling to focus.

            “A double. Sure.” Alan poured a double shot for the skeletal embodiment of death.

            As soon as it was in the glass and the reaper made spinning eye contact with the barman, he threw back the shot glass and gasped.

            He banged his ribs with his fist.

            The world was spinning.

            Dull.

            He felt the world and gravity jerk him at an odd angle and fell from the stool into the crowd of onlookers.

            They cheered.

            Death threw up a clenched fist in victory. Then he passed out.

            “Idiot,” said Alan. “What a moron.”