Heaven can Wait Read online

  "I had plenty of time to come to terms with the thought of being dead before the end." There was no sadness in his 'voice', he was simply stating a fact.

  I nodded my head, knowing that even though Gregory was only with me in spirit he would be able to recognise the gesture, coming as it was from somebody who was also only really present in a spiritual form.

  For my part I was perfectly alive, and, as far as I knew, perfectly healthy and going to stay that way for a very long time. Although from my experiences I was all too well aware that a hale and hearty body gave no guarantee for a long life. Even those who, like me, had been gifted a shot at what was to all intents and purposes, immortality, could be cut down in their prime. And in my case I wasn't very confident about the welcome I would receive whenever the end came, wherever I went.

  The reason Gregory had had ample opportunity to come to terms with his death even when alive was that his death had not been sudden. His daughter, the reason I was there conversing with the dead man, had given me most of the details surrounding her father’s demise. He had been a lifelong smoker and his habit had caught up with him in the end. By the time he went to the doctors he had let the cancer get too far advanced for them to do anything about it. He had kept his condition hidden from his family for as long as possible, gradually distancing himself from all of his loved ones, family and friends, in preparation for the inevitable. His apparent reasoning being that if he forced them away then they would be less hurt when his time came.

  When he went into hospital for the last time he had let the medical staff convince him to get in touch with his family before it was too late. All his loved ones had gathered around at the end, his children and grandchildren had visited him in hospital for the last time. All of them except for his youngest daughter, the daughter who had contacted me and contracted my services. She had been on her way home on a train several miles outside the city at the time of his passing.

  The first I had heard from Gregory’s youngest daughter was over the telephone. I had been in the small shower that adjoined the bathroom in the back of my office at the time. It was midafternoon and I had felt the need to shower after spending the morning working with Selene, the half-demon bounty hunter, as a consultant on one of her cases. I wasn’t actually dirty, I had been able to work from the office and telephone Selene with the information she needed. I wasn't physically dirty but the man I had been contacting had been an unpleasant fellow to say the least. Lecherous men were bad enough for me, lecherous dead men were worse.

  I had just finished in the shower and was wrapping my long straight white-blond hair in a coarse blue towel, matching the one that was already tied around my body, when I heard the phone ringing back in the office proper. Obviously I had closed and locked the door to the office before getting into the shower, and the blinds on the window on the door and the small proper window on the next wall were closed, so I left the bathroom and walked across to the desk. I did not have far to walk because in the office there was not room enough to ever have to move far. A dark trail marked the thin, some would say thread-bare, faded blue carpet where my feet had walked.

  The ringing telephone sat on one side of a cheap wooden desk, a flat-pack thing I had purchased from a catalogue shop and spent most of a day putting together. To my delight, and private surprise, it came out pretty well. On the other side of the desk was an ancient computer with a bulky monitor. The unit had started all white but the plastic had yellowed at the corners and dirt had blackened the areas around the vents. There was a chair on either side of the desk, a coat rack next to the door and a small chest of drawers which was intended as bedroom furniture but that I had put to use instead of a filing cabinet. The waste basket was hidden away underneath the desk.

  I reached the phone before the answering machine could take over with my message, just a simple ‘You have reached Faith Jones consulting. Leave your message at the tone.’ That was it, I couldn’t exactly explain what it was I really did in a thirty second message, whenever I had tried I had always ended up sounding like a nut. I grabbed up the phone and answered it. I was plenty used to receiving crank calls, so when I answered the phone and heard only a muffled sound coming from the other end I could easily have slammed the phone back down. But I was also well used to receiving calls from emotionally fragile people who were a little sceptical of me and my talents. In this case it was one of those talents, in particular my empathy, that gave me the understanding that this wasn’t some malicious prankster taking a twisted joy in trying to hack me off. This was someone who was in a good deal of hurt and wanting some way to try and alleviate the pain. Someone who was so desperate to get some help with their distress that they sought help even though, deep down, they didn’t really believe there was anyone who could help them.

  I had sensed her need and so I had stuck with the call, eventually convincing Annabelle to come to the office and speak with me in person. I had finished drying myself off and got redressed in a grey knee-length skirt and blouse, serious functional stuff of the type I always wore when I was at the office. The last thing I needed was to put off prospective clients by presenting anything other than a professional image, most people were distrustful enough of me in the first place. At least half of the people who stepped through the office’s door were openly sceptical and a lot of the others harboured secret doubts about my abilities. The fact that I was a registered non-human possibly helped some of the people believe in my talents but I was certain that it turned away more people than it brought to my door.

  Gregory’s daughter must have been close by because when the chime sounded to announce her arrival I was only just finishing getting dressed. My hair was still damp but there was nothing I could do to fix it at the time, I pulled it back into a ponytail and that would have to suffice. I opened the door to welcome Gregory’s daughter and got my first look at what had until then been just a voice.

  “Hello, I’m Annabelle Chimes.”

  Annabelle was pretty much what I had expected from our conversation on the telephone. A slightly plump, matronly sort of a woman, her hair was tied up and out of the way, her red-rimmed eyes were partly hidden behind the thin frames of her half-glasses. Through the course of the meeting she would have to repeatedly remove those glasses to dab at her eyes with a small cream hanky with an embroidered edge.

  I invited the seemingly older woman inside with a friendly smile and offered her a hot drink while she took a seat. It was then that Annabelle had given me all the details about her father and asked for my help.

  And that was how I had come to be there chatting away with a dead man. There was an overgrown plot of a garden hidden from the neighbouring plots by fencing on two sides and a thick bush hedge that was just starting to grow out of its shape on the third. There was a gravel path snaking along from the door of the house, cutting through the slightly overgrown lawn and passing in front of me on its way up to the flower beds at the opposite end of the garden. I was ‘sitting’, for want of a better description, on a black metal bench under sunlight dappled by the leaves of a pair of unkempt trees. I imagined that the breeze that had those leaves dancing was pleasantly warm to fit the brightly lit scene. I imagined that the breeze was warm because in my current state I couldn’t actually feel it. I couldn’t feel the touch of the air or the warmth of the sun when it came through the leaves. I couldn’t feel the cold firmness of the bench under my rear and on the backs of my thighs. The garden was real enough, it was I who was, again for want of a better description, imaginary.

  “I always liked it here,” Gregory was telling me. “It was always so peaceful. And so rewarding to help create something so beautiful through your efforts. I used to think I’d like to be some sort of an artist, but I had no talent for drawing or painting. But this, this was somewhere I could sculpt with nature. But at the end I physically couldn’t come out here, and now I can sense all my effort coming undone.”

  Now there was some regret in his tone.

  I l
ooked around the surroundings again, re-evaluating. It would take only a little effort of imagination to see what it must have looked like before being left to grow out of control. The flower beds had become an unkempt selection, overgrown and invaded by weeds, but I could see the original plantings struggling to keep their places. Somehow in the midst of tangled plants some of the flowers remained standing with something like dignity.

  “It must have been very beautiful.”

  Gregory agreed. “Apart from my children it was the best thing I ever did. But it’s because of one of my kids that you’re here isn’t it?”

  Again I nodded my non-corporeal head. “It’s Annabelle, she wasn’t able to get to see you before you passed on. It’s hurting her that she never got to say goodbye to you.”

  “There’s more.” He wasn’t asking a question.

  “Yes,” I said. “She is afraid that you don’t understand. That at the end you saw that she wasn’t there and that you felt badly towards her because of it.” I knew my mouth and throat weren’t real so the fact that they were suddenly desert dry shouldn’t really be bothering me in my current state. I also knew that the act of swallowing wouldn’t do anything to stop it, but I swallowed anyway. “She thinks you died believing that she didn’t care.”

  Gregory took his time before responding to that. “How could she think that?”

  I shrugged my imaginary shoulders. “Grief can make people believe some strange things. Whatever the reason, you need to know that she really does believe this.”

  Gregory was silent, contemplative. “I would do anything to help her, but what can I do?”

  “I hope that simply by coming to me to ask for my help in contacting you that the healing process will have already begun,” I told him without pride. “She also asked me to ask you if there is anyway she can make it up to you.”

  “There is nothing for her to make up for. I don’t blame her for not seeing me at the end,” Gregory ‘said’. “She was around plenty when I was alive and able to enjoy it. It’s my fault she moved away in the first place so that she couldn’t make it back in time.”

  “I’ll tell her,” I replied. “But in cases like this it can sometimes help if you can give some small job, some simple task for them to undertake. Can you think of something like that that she could do for you? Some way for her to channel and work through this grieving process. Some way for her to say goodbye.”

  There was only a slight hesitation. “Yes,” Gregory’s voice was no longer so sad now that he had thought of a way to help his daughter.

  “Yes,” I agreed after he told me. “That’s perfect.”

  I stayed with Gregory a little while longer just talking with him. When I could help it I tried to avoid just barging in on the dead, getting what I wanted and then leaving them alone, it was simple manners. I took a non-corporeal stroll through the garden with Gregory as my guide. My feet had no effect on the gravel path and I could stand up to my knees in the flower bed without disturbing any of the plants. When the time came for us to say goodbye Gregory gave me one final simple message to pass along to Annabelle.

  “Tell her I love her, I love them all.”

  I jerked upright. As usual the first breath back in my body felt like it was the first one I had taken period, kind of a death rattle in reverse. I was no longer in a sunny garden under the shadow of green trees. The only sunlight was that which spilled in through the window of the mortuary’s visitor’s room. The light fell on bare stone walls, the only plants in here were some faded flowers in a basic vase in the corner. This was where Annabelle had brought me to contact her father, it was where his ashes were being kept but it wasn’t where his spirit had gone to rest, residing in peace until the day of his judgement.

  Even though I had been physically inactive for a long while, or possibly because of it, my body ached. I brought my left hand up to see exactly how much time had passed, I always found it impossible to keep track of the passage of time when I was outside of my body, it was even more difficult when I was conversing with the dead as well. Apparently my talk with Gregory had taken a little under an hour and a half.

  “Did, er, did you talk to him?” Annabelle still didn’t believe that I could do what I had claimed but she wanted to believe. I didn’t need her belief either way for my ‘gift’ to work, but for Annabelle’s sake it was good that she wanted to keep an open mind.

  I got myself up off the floor, I had used a thin blanket to make it a little more comfortable while I was lying down but it hadn’t really helped, it never did. Now I gently stamped my feet to get the feeling back in my body and work out the aches in my muscles. I stood at one end of the blanket and started rolling it up. The pattern on the rug was a selection of loony tunes characters, probably not the most appropriate design when one was using it to contact the dead but whenever I had used something with another pattern people assumed it had some religious or arcane magical significance. Nobody ever made assumptions that I was drawing my power through Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck.

  I nodded in answer to Annabelle’s question and came around to face her. The other woman had insisted on staying in the visitors room with me, despite me having explained to her that there would be nothing for her to see or hear. In order to be able to talk to the dead and to hear them reply I had to approach them as though I was partway dead myself. I had to use my ability for astral projection to leave my body behind, it was only as a spirit that the dead would have any contact with me. That said I hadn’t been surprised when Annabelle told me that she wanted to stay and watch, it was often that way with the doubtful. Even though there would be nothing to see they wanted to see that nothing with their own eyes to try and convince themselves that I wasn’t, or in some cases that I was, some sort of charlatan.

  “I did,” I spoke softly, guiding Annabelle to one of the seats that lined the walls of the waiting room. “He says there is nothing for you to be sorry for, nothing you need to make up for.” I moved into the seat next to her.

  Moisture formed in Annabelle’s eyes but in the back of her mind there was a voice telling her that I was making all this up and just telling her what she wanted to hear.

  Before she could give voice to those doubts I continued. “But he said that if you wanted to do something for him, if it would make you feel better to be able to help him, you could give his garden a bit of a tidy. He doesn’t expect you to maintain it on any sort of a permanent basis, but just to make it look at its best one last time.”

  Now the tears rolled down Annabelle’s plump cheeks. “How . . . did you know about . . ?”

  “That was where he spoke with me, on the bench in the shade of the two trees.”

  The tears came freely now as all of the older woman’s doubts were washed away. I stepped up from the seat and hunched down in front of her. She leaned forwards and held me in a friendly embrace. Annabelle was soundless as she sobbed away on my shoulder but her body shook gently. Over her shoulder I granted myself a smile, my empathic talent was telling me that Annabelle was already starting to heal.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Selene stood face to face with the dripping thing. Well face to face was a little misleading as descriptions went because the thing stood almost twice her height and massed well over two times as much as her. It was impossible for her to make an accurate estimate of the demon's weight because it kept dropping slimy little globules of itself all over the warehouse's floor. The most liquid portions of the gunk ran past her feet to a single grate-covered drain that was already ferrying copious amounts of blood away down into the sewers.

  Not all of that blood was the thick, almost black, blood of the demon guards Selene had killed. There was plenty of the thinner stuff left over from the demon's various victims. The most recent was still leaking out of one of the prostitutes that Selene had used to locate this lair. The surviving hooker was curled up on the floor next to where her recently deceased colleague was sprawled. The live hooker had her chin tucked into her chest and was mut
tering and mumbling incoherently. It was only by virtue of her being down so close to the floor that she had survived Selene's entrance. The entrance that had seen her twin pistols filling the warehouse with silver bullets of death.

  Selene had eliminated the demonic guards in seconds but her bullets had had no effect on their master. She had paced calmly towards the slimy creature unleashing a hail of weapons fire at him. Her bullets had penetrated his doughy body without visible effect. As first one and then the second weapon clicked dry she stood with her head tilted back and looked up at the demon.

  The demon's wide mouth formed up into a smile. The material of his triple chins wobbled with the motion and some of him dripped loose and combined with his stomach where it landed. Despite that he continued to loose bits of himself where he dripped on the floor, the demon never seemed to diminish in size.

  "Your mortal weapons cannot harm me little girl." His voice was water travelling down a drain.

  Selene remained standing where she was and made no response.

  The demon blinked his large amber eyes and then flicked the orbs over the carnage Selene had wrought. "You have cost me here." Now his eyes rotated to look her up and down. "I can think of a way to extract some payment from you."

  The demon gave his lips a lecherous lick with a thick tongue. Further down his body a portion of his semi-liquid flesh extended to form a gradually stiffening phallus.

  Selene only gave her head a slow shake. "I don't think so."

  She opened her hands and dropped the useless pistols to clatter on the floor. Before they hit she had the hilt of her blade in her right hand. With a flick of her wrist the short blade of her extendable sword was ready for business.