He pounded on the doors—was the elevator air growing stale?
“Hello?” Another finger snap. He pounded the door again. “Anyone out there?” He wedged his fingers in between the seams of the cold metal doors and pulled with all his might. The lights came on, the music resumed, the doors slid open.
A long hallway stretched before him, filled with light. Spotless white walls with no paintings, no markings, just pure white. At the end of the hallway one small sign hung above the white twin doors. He couldn’t read it from this distance so he walked close enough to see the sign clearly. Two bold capital letters:
Beneath them, in small print:
Even before his knuckles reached the surface of the doors, they yawned open. The unmitigated whiteness enveloped everything within to the point that Nick couldn’t see the floor, wall, ceiling, or anything in the room that seemed to have just swallowed him.
He spun around and could no longer see the door. A physically void space would not have fazed him ordinarily, but to return to the elevator he needed to find that door. In this room he could see nothing—couldn’t even tell it was a room. But out of nowhere someone suddenly appeared to join him in it.
A bespectacled gentleman dressed in a white suit, white shirt, and white tie sat at a desk, his hands folded before him. He had a full head of white hair, and looked quite harmless, which made Nick suspicious.
“May I help you?” he said.
“I seemed to have come to the wrong level.”
He lowered his bifocals and looked at Nick over the rims. “Ah, yes! Nikolai. We’ve been expecting you.” He extended his hand. Nick shook it.
“Expecting?”
“Yes, of course.” He pointed to Nick’s left. “Won’t you please make yourself comfortable?” A plush white chair appeared. Nick sat. “Your first time, I see.”
Nick leaned back into the wonderfully soft upholstery.
“It appears so, Mr…” He craned his neck to read the brass nameplate on the desk. “Mr. Morloch?”
“Why don’t you just call me Harold, hmmm? It’s a lot easier to remember. Tea?”
“Thank you.” The chair was so comfortable he felt he might actually fall asleep—whatever that was like. “Earl Grey, please.”
A delicate porcelain cup and saucer appeared in his hands, the cup steaming with aromatic tea. The ability to enjoy it was perhaps a happy byproduct of “spending too much time” with mortals. He took a delicious sip, then leaned back into the chair, surprisingly soothed.
Harold sipped from an identical teacup, his little finger pointing as he tilted it to his lips, then set it down in its saucer on the desk.
“So, Nikolai, welcome to A.R.”
Until now, he hadn’t known such a division existed. At which point did this cease to be his construct and become someone else’s, if indeed it were? He took a considerable sip of the Earl Grey and finished it. As he set the cup in its saucer, both vanished.
“You said you were expecting me?”
“Yes, well… Let’s see now, how best to explain?” Harold steepled his fingers. “You’ve had countless centennial performance reviews, no?”
“Countless.”
“A couple of millennial reviews?”
“And?”
“We’re privy to more than just metrics, Nikolai. Your dossier contains data on your behavioral tendencies, noteworthy remarks, as well as your self-evals.”
“I didn’t plan on coming here.”
Harold peered over his horn-rimmed eyeglasses.
“Didn’t you?”
“Look, I’ve no time for games. What’s this all about?”
“No time? Fascinating expression.” For an instant Harold’s eyes burned with thinly veiled annoyance. And then, just as quickly, they returned to their placid state. “I take it you’re tired of the menial work.”
“Wouldn’t you be?”
“Fed up with the meaningless deaths.”
Nick sat up straight and leaned forward.
“You got all this from my doss—”
“Done with watching your efforts go unrecognized while younger, less experienced reapers pass you up.” His words accelerated. “You’re a warrior of the cosmos, yet relegated to—”
“Non-corporeal babysitting.” They said it at the same time.
“Precisely!” Nick said. “That’s why I’m tendering my resig—”
“Tut-tut!” Harold held up a hand. “There’s no need to resign, my young friend.”
“Young? I’ll have you know—”
“How would you like to get fast-tracked?”
This was clearly Harold’s construct, the way he commanded every element—the furniture, the monitors, the tea.
“I’m listening,” Nick said.
“Consider it a lateral move, initially. We’ll get you out of that dead-end department.”
“Oh?”
“For starters, how would you like to begin dealing with meaningful deaths?”
Interesting.
“I’d still be a reaper, though, wouldn’t I?”
“Only in the interim. We’d promote you to more meaningful projects soon enough. You’re sick of taking innocent children, good people who never did anything to deserve it. What if you took those who really do deserve it?”
Nick leaned back, crossed his arms. He liked it but wasn’t ready to let that show.
“Go on.”
Harold stood up, waved him over, and with two hands traced the outline of a large rectangle. A flat-screen television filled the space—looked like a 92-inch, 3D (rather, 4D or more), ultra high-def screen.
“Take a good look at all the people in the world who are dying, Nick.”
The screen flashed by with scenes of earthquakes, tsunamis, war, disease. Starving children, deathly sick families in Africa, India, homeless people in the United States freezing to death in dark alleys… It was hard to discern relative time in someone else’s construct, but as the scenes went by faster and faster Nick could swear that at one point a frame stood still for an extra nano-second: Victoria Station, where a little girl—
He blinked, and the screen showed image after image of evil people throughout history. From the likes of Adolph Hitler and Osama Bin Laden to a drug dealer, a child molester, a serial killer sitting amongst his trophy collection—
Harold passed a hand over the screen and it disappeared.
“All right, Nick. What did you see just now?”
“The scum of the earth, essentially.”
“Those are the souls we take pleasure in harvesting.”
It was brilliant. A transfer. No need to resign. Perhaps he had already passed probation. Perhaps the promise that all things work together for the good applied not only to humans but to angels, too. In any case, it beat the tar out of reaper work.
“This I can do.”
“Splendid! You start immediately. Hands-on training will take place on the job. Sign the transfer docs and you’re on your way.” A thick stack of papers in a black leather binder appeared in Harold’s hand. He set it down on the desk, pulled a black fountain pen from his breast pocket, handed it to Nick, and opened the contract to the last page.
“Sign here.”
“I suppose I ought to read it first.”
“Be my guest, Nick. We have all the time in the…” A sheepish grin. “We have time.”
For the most part the terms, warranties, and stipulations looked acceptable. There was one clause that mentioned a temporary abdication of angelic methodology, explained in language so dense he found himself skimming it. Finally he reached the signature line, clicked the black fountain pen, signed his name—in red ink!—and handed the contract to Harold.
“Very good,” Harold said after a close look at the final page. “This contract is hereby executed and binding.”