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All Chapters of The Reaper's Pet : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

40 Chapters

Chapter 1: This Damned Timer in my Brain

They exist among us in secret. Their ancient war has spilled across the borders into our world, and what passed for blood from their undying energies inked the provisions for a halfhearted truce. They are the two great primal forces; the superpowers of the afterlife. One spawned by light, the other by darkness. One tasked with repurposing everlasting souls into mortal shells, the other with banishing them into a perfect, lightless prison. They come in many forms but all of them discreet, misleading. Some mortals regard them as angels. Others worship them as gods of destiny. All reduce them into familiar myth and superstition to dull the world-shattering implications of their existence. Ultimately, the two warring camps take their most consistent and harmless forms: stalwart storks and ravenous ravens. Any human word or symbol would be a cliché because they’re as familiar as the laws of physics or the number of fingers on one’s hand. The true mistake is man’s habit to value one to the
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Chapter 2: Raptures of the Deep

All at once I’m in the kitchen getting ready for a dive. It’s like this when the infernal timer is abuzz in my brain; I move around in a fog. I decide to leave a note for Sol because she might arrive this morning as per the old schedule. {How can we be soulmates}, I write, {if I don't have a soul of my own?} I pin the note under a fridge magnet before I can chicken out. Our slow falling-out is hurting both of us. The timer inside my head and my oneiric visions have given birth to a secret third presence. Like a fat black Buddha sitting cross-legged between Sol and I, it keeps growing and pushing us apart. But maybe that’s for the best. Sol awakens in people a thirst for life they never knew they had. Sol; her skin baked to a golden-brown heaven so every time she smiles there’s the jarring contrast of pearly teeth. I can never resist freediving for those underwater gems that beckon for three-minute breath holds. A part-time influencer and full-time vet in an animal shelter, Sol’s Fili
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Chapter 3: Welcome to the Flip Side

With a jolt that’s more mental than physical, I slip through the solid bottom of the boat and back into the water. I sink like a statue flanked by the erratic blackbirds. The medium’s completely wrong but I’m falling backwards at a skydiver’s terminal velocity: sixty meters per second. I can tell because I used to be into motorcycles. But riding is nothing compared to this. Nothing can ever compare to this. I’m being sucked down a maelstrom of hissing, exploding water; a human bowling ball down a slide that stretches all the way to the bottom of the sea. I feel an intolerable amount of pressure and pain building against the tissues of my middle ear. Then I hear a light pop – hard to tell if real or imagined – followed by a gushing feeling of relief as cool water flows past the bleeding eardrum on either side of my skull. I slide out of the sunlight into the twilight zone, two hundred meters below surface, and on till I finally pass the bluest zone of the sea that divers only dream of
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Chapter 4: The Terminal of the Dead

Wet and warm sensations all over my face, in a slobbery, affectionate way that for a moment I think I’m back at Nuestra Señora de la Buen Viaje and being woken up by Gamby. Then I remember the stray puppy has been dead over a decade ago and my eyes snap open. A bear of a dog is licking my face – or rather, the blood dripping out of the open wounds in my face – while something close is making a hissing sound like a pit of snakes. I drag my ass through the muddy bank and scream. Another dog turns to snarl at me and then a third, till my brain registers that all three heads are attached to the same giant, thickly-muscled neck. {Kerberos}. Greek mythology from high school floods over me and I whimper. {The Hellhound. Sibling to the monsters Chimaera and Hydra}. All three heads are barking a volley of thunder so I press my hands over my ears to protect them from further damage, but then my eyes fall on the curious mane down the dog’s broad back. I note how the hair is sort of glistening,
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Chapter 5: The Elevator Ride

No two objects of mass can occupy the same space at the same time, and yet, just as it was at my sentencing, I become partly conscious of other people undergoing the torture along with me. Apart from my own, I can hear wails screeching into mad laughter as we’re all, slowly but confidently, dragged towards our darkest nightmare. Our backs slam against the back wall of the elevator and stay there as though we were in the rotor ride of an amusement park. As much as I want to glimpse my fellow victims, I can’t even turn my head as I hang restrained by all the weird g-forces and the superfluous chains that smell of either rust or dried blood. There’s an elevator operator who calls out each floor, all of them going downwards and deeper to the true essence of terror. Only it doesn’t look like there are buttons to control the box; instead, the operator manipulates ropes that disappear into a hole in the ceiling. Eventually, no matter how hard my sanity refuses to accept it, the thing that’s
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Chapter 6: Mr. Beaky

“I’ll take it from here, fleshie,” Death whispers in a voice oozing with menace, enough to turn a sumo wrestler’s knees into jelly. Unlike Kharon’s voice which sounded like it was borrowed from an ogre, Death’s works on a whole different level of threat-making. Its calmness will paralyze you right where you stand. It’s the perfect voice from beyond the grave: gravelly and frosty,giving the impression that Death is a gangster of the literal underworld. The elevator operator makes the big mistake of doubting what he has just heard and looks over his shoulder for the first time. Like an owl, he swivels his head 180 degrees so I see that for a face he has nothing but two dots for eyes and one eternal frown, basically an upside-down smile, all slit into a smooth, round mass of flesh. The face is as heartrendingly crude as a stickman’s face traced in dirt by a preschooler. But once those inanimate peepers lock on Death, they bulge. No sight could be more apt for the expression “eye-popping
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Chapter 7: Those Left Behind

Sol’s Umballicus-bearing image is sitting on a bed in a room that looks vaguely familiar because of the band posters on the walls. She’s hugging my dusty, stringless acoustic guitar and sobbing piteously. Back on Sub-level 5, I must’ve drunk some of the River Lethe’s water mixed in with the slime of the River Styx because it still takes a moment for me to put two and two together and realize that Sol’s grieving. For me. All at once through another psychic sitrep, this time with the speed and force of a hundred grams of ecstasy, I come to have a very vivid picture of everything that has transpired in my absence: {In the hospital, the sight and sound of all those machines surrounding my bed reminds Sol that the substantial part of me, that which once made me me is in danger. The woman lying in the hospital bed is Jan but at the same time not her. Right now a very thin line divides the person from an empty shell. She’s grown familiar with those additions to my body. They’re her best pal
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Chapter 8: Love Macabre

I don’t know whether I should feel relieved or cheated when I find under the wide-brimmed hat, the mother of all anticlimaxes: a beak doctor’s mask, the kind that medieval doctors wore during the Black Plague in Europe and what modern-day revelers sport at the Venetian Carnival. Still, I can divine the reason behind this diluted image. No shape could ever truly contain the deep and pervasive horror that Death inspires and to behold it in all its extradimensional glory is to spontaneously fry your brain. In one fluid, memorized motion, Septimus whirls his overcoat off and into the air and a spirit steps out of a wall of monitors to assume the role of a coat-stand. This spirit is fully skeletal; tragically its head is missing so there’s nothing but its spine protruding between the shoulder-blades, making it otherwise perfect as a peg. Septimus tosses his guitar case in the same direction and the decapitated skeleton also catches this out of habit before stiffening ramrod straight like a
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Chapter 9: The Deal

“As a child, Oriana was no stranger to death,” Septimus suddenly starts narrating in my head yet also from somewhere {inside} the father’s bedroom. The words sound disembodied and the fact that the personification of death is talking about himself as a separate phenomenon isn’t lost on me. I catch the faint smell of his cigarette like the fading echo of an echo. “There had been far too many partings around her, as always there are around each and every fleshie. First, there was Granny’s stroke. Next, Uncle Tony’s lung cancer. Then her mother’s traffic accident. It was difficult enough watching the people who make up your world leave one by one, the constant fear of being left all by yourself, but it was even more difficult not understanding what was going on and not being able to talk about it with anyone. It was all the grownups' fault thinking they could hide death by not mentioning it, when death was in every drop of water they drank, every breath of air they took, every wisp of
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Chapter 10: The Embattled King

“Does she remember…” I blurt out. Completely spellbound by the story, I forget who I’m speaking to; at the same time there’s a kind of millisecond delay because of the time-travelesque illusion and it feels like I’m being slammed back into Death’s office. “… the promise that she made?” “What do you think? Humans are Janus-faced creatures. At times of need they shall call upon the names of all the saints and then take back what they promised as soon as they are out of harm’s way. Even more so with Death. Naturally no one remembers me. I am the Ever Uninvited Guest; the one thing no mortal thinks of unless it is absolutely certain and can no longer be postponed. Never mind that I am the most constant friend you have, second only to your shadow.” Septimus puts out his cigarette in the most unlikely ash tray. Another skeletal arm, this one sort of elongated, bursts upward out of the floor and opens its bone fingers like petals. The osseous ash tray then slips away in the same manner it h
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