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Chapter 12: The Reluctant Reaper
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The Reaper's Pet Chapter 13: Love After Death
The Lachesis monitors have a mind of their own. If I’m not careful, they’ll steal, twist and corrupt my own memories. As Septimus demonstrated, the monitors zoom in on any person anywhere in the world, on ground level and at real time, but they can also show scenes from both the past and the future, proving conclusively that human lives are all predestined. {Hundreds of billions of people have walked this earth since the dawn of time. At present alone there are eight billion people on the planet. And inside the human DNA, billions of gene pairs construct themselves to create two eyes, a nose, a heart, two legs...} {I am unique. I am not insignificant. There’s a genetic symphony inside me, a clockwork that sets off its designs at such precise timing, including the very senescence of cells. I am a book capable of writing its own stories. I have the capacity to love and I, too, shall be loved. There is a corner in this universe where I am wanted, where I am needed, where I belong, and
The Reaper's Pet Chapter 14: A Vision of Balloons
The question on the mind of every other child in the children’s home was what made a psychic like me different and how to get their hands on the stuff. Many started faking visions of ghosts and conversations with dead relatives or even possession by the devil (the more creative and ADD ones). But they had it all wrong because people like me didn’t only see the spirits of departed people or otherworldly entities. In my case, what I saw was balloons. And not your regular birthday-party type either; no, these balloons were sort of ethereal. Ghost-balloons. They were beautiful yet eerily alien, like jellyfish floating in air, invisible to everyone but to me. There was one for every living, breathing creature on earth, including animals, insects and even plants, though always proportionate to their size. The balloons all looked identical except for the size of their heads and the length of their stems. With perfect clarity, I walked in this astral world. I even thought at first that everyo
The Reaper's Pet Chapter 15: The Nonperson
The senior nuns at the children’s home said they discovered me inside a cardboard box on the porch. Oldest sob story in the book. Except when you were the main character of that story, it was a whole lot tougher to accept. There were nights when lying in bed at night the loneliness would come so fiercely I wondered if I wouldn’t be doing the world a favor if I ceased to exist, and I’d stifle my crying with the pillow. Or sometimes at my hideout on the roof of Nuestra Señora de la Buen Viaje, a voice would urge me to jump off the tiles onto the courtyard four stories below. As in any other institution, there was a great deal of brainwashing involved in the business of children’s homes. All the other orphans spoke of a “forever family” like it was the most natural thing in the world, like there was nothing wrong with every one of them in the first place. They would pose to have their pictures taken like right-as-rain puppies with their eyes eating up half their faces. I imagined if I ch
The Reaper's Pet Chapter 16: The Raven Man
Day by day, my abilities grew. Being one of a kind, I felt as though I had been cast down a dried-up well where I was to spend the rest of my life in solitary confinement. Looking back, I can’t help but marvel at myself for surviving the isolation with a maturity and courage rare among children. On the other hand, it also feels as though most of my childhood passed me by while I was in some sort of trance. On my own, I learned how to control my talents and to avoid exerting myself. I became wary of very old items that had passed through too many hands as these could be damaging to both mind and spirit. During the couple of times I had to learn the hard way, I was invariably left drained. I also learned to stay away from objects that belonged to those who had already crossed over. In the same way I chose to keep silent about the balloons and their morbid significance, I knew there were things humans weren’t supposed to meddle with. Because of my extreme unconventionality, the supervis
The Reaper's Pet Chapter 17: A Glimpse of Fate
I gingerly lowered my body into a crouch and my hand trembled as I reached for the thrown glove. My fingertips grazed the black leather. It was enough. This was the reading I had: At some unknown juncture in time, the whole sky would be covered by a flock of ravenlike creatures as far as the eye could see. They formed an endless, waving parade of dark flags as if to call forth armies against a weakened ruler. This deluge swept and flowed ceaselessly with an entomo-mechanical roar and in its heart, a flame-wrapped titan was laying waste to human cities. It was an Apocalyptic sight and sound. All sources of light were missing in the heavens and the days of darkness stretched on to eternity. The weakened lord was being engulfed by the swarm of ravens and he was crying out in an alien yet universal plea for help. Within earshot a figure, shadowy and contorted, turned its back on him. A sinking feeling told me I knew exactly who the figure was. It was me. Many psychic experiences had give
The Reaper's Pet Chapter 18: Homeschool Hell
“Good evening,” I greet, walking on my hocked hind legs into Death’s office. Septimus utters a stream of obscenities in classical Latin and ancient Greek. If sentences could consist entirely of abuse, he’s producing exactly those. I can tell even if the ubiquitous skeletons (My Helter-Skeltals, as Septimus fondly calls them) hadn’t erupted in braying laughter. I feel like an exorcist about to face the biggest demon-possession case of all time, but then it’s probably no more than what inner-city school teachers face every day, I try to reassure myself. As soon as I think this, Septimus generates a ball of fire and flings it straight at me. I scream and escape incineration by the skin of my teeth. Probably not. I’m hissing and spitting like only an actual threatened feline can. Then I notice my backside has been charred and there’s this small matter of a flame on the small tip past my ball tail. A hyperactive skeleton races to put the tremulous fire out. It runs screaming and dragging
The Reaper's Pet Chapter 19: Infernal Affairs
First, a short history lesson from the Lachesis monitors: {In the beginning was darkness. From it, light and life were born. Light was varied, free and unpredictable as embodied by the Spirits of Creation, the Storks. On the other hand, darkness was clean, still and barren as embodied by the Spirits of Destruction, the Ravens. {Between these two camps, a pact was made to govern the comings and goings of life into the mortal realm. The Fates, or the Wyrd Ones, arose upon the principle of three counter-balancing forces: {First was Clotho, who spun the thread of life, the Umballicus, to grant entry into the world by birth or reincarnation. {Second was Lachesis, who calculated and measured that which was duly apportioned and owed. {Third was Atropos, also called the Grim One, who inflexibly cut the thread of life to bring forth death.} I recognize the three characters from Greek mythology and again marvel at how close the ancient Greeks got to actual fact. I assume Septimus is Atro
The Reaper's Pet Chapter 20: Dark Horse
Once in your life you’ll find the perfect love and it’ll be everything you imagined, whether or not you stayed a believer. You’ll find it at the most unexpected time and in the most unassuming place. It masquerades as something commonplace, neither remarkable nor memorable. It just happens. This is the beauty of the whole thing because later when you look back, there’s no landmark by which you can say, “Here it is. This is where love started.” Just this faint recognition of a dream you forgot you ever had and an inescapable, almost frightening sense of rightness, like the softest scrape of tumblers shifting into place as the key fits the lock. This is what Sol and I had. We WERE soulmates, and it pains me now to think I had to lose her for good before I would start believing. Worse, this is the same effect Septimus and I aim to recreate and trap Oriana Conti with. I don’t intend to teach Septimus any of those reverse-psychology seduction techniques that are peddled by pick-up artists
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