Death of a runner

It was raining heavily, but there was no rain falling.

 

Simon Tattersloe looked down on his body, his bloody corpse, puddles of his own blood beginning to mingle with the surrounding puddles of water.

 

It was the rain, the noise of the rain and the thick blackness of the rain, which had caused him to miss the car, to run straight in front of the car, which was speeding along without headlights. The rain had killed him.

 

And then it stopped. Silence. His blood stopped pouring out, the rain stopped falling, the shouting from the car driver stopped, the noise of the rain came to an abrupt halt. It was as if time had ended. Simon was left floating above the static, silent world.

 

Then Simon noticed an unusual sight. There, sitting on the roof of the car, looking at nothing, was the figure of Death, a substantial figure in a dark cloak, holding, and the myths were true about this, holding a scythe.

 

Death was just sitting there, as if it was pure coincidence that he had appeared at exactly the same time that Simon had been knocked into a bloody mess by a high-speed car and had left his own body. He made no effort whatsoever to approach Simon, he just sat there, on the roof of the car, doing nothing.

 

After waiting what seemed forever Simon decided to take the initiative, and approached the figure of Death.

 

“Are you here for me?” he asked.

 

Death raised his face and stared at him through hollow eyes, but said nothing.

 

“Only you don’t seem to be doing much. Should you be, you know, swinging the scythe and stuff?”

 

Again Death responded with silence, the level of silence that only Death can achieve, during which time he reached into the deep, dark recess of his cloak, from which he retrieved a cigarette, which he lit by clicking his bony fingers and creating a brief, contained flash of lighting, which struck the tip of the cigarette. He leant back on the car and let out an unearthly sigh, a deathly contentment.

 

“My client isn’t ready yet,” he finally said.

 

“Your client? You mean me?”

 

Death again reached into his cloak, this time retrieving a clipboard, which he gazed at casually. “Simon Tattensloe?” he asked.

 

“Yes. That’s me.”

 

Death nodded, but said nothing.

 

Simon fidgeted with impatience. “Only, that body on the ground below us. That’s mine isn’t it?”

 

“It is.”

 

“My dead body.”

 

Death blew a puff of smoke that formed an image so sinister that it would certainly be regarded as an omen of death by those that were inclined to think that way. Eventually he spoke.

 

“That is correct,” he said.

 

“And I’m my soul, aren’t I? My immortal soul. That’s why I’m floating about up here, I’m the me looking down on me.”

 

“That is so.”

 

“I’m my immortal soul, waiting to be collected by Death, to be released to go wherever it is I go.”

 

A bony finger beckoned. “Do you want to see something few mortals see?” Death asked.

 

Simon nodded, trying to hide his nerves. “Yeah, why not?”

 

The bony finger pointed at the bloody corpse on the road below them.

 

“You see that thin blue line shining within the body?” Death said.

“Yes.”

 

“That’s the lifeline connecting your soul to your body. It is visible because your time is spent. My job is to slice through the line, freeing your soul.”

 

“So, I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but what are you waiting for? I’m dead, my lifeline is waiting to be cut, and my soul is hanging around with nothing to do.”

 

Death blew another ring of smoke, thick black, thicker and blacker than any smoke ever blown by a mortal.

 

“Where are you planning to go exactly?”

 

“Well, you tell me. I’m an atheist. This is all a shock, I genuinely believed that when you died that was it. I thought you were just made up. A story. If you could point me where I need to go …”

 

Death shook his head.

 

“I’m not waiting for you to die. I’m not waiting for your lifeline to become ripe for cutting. I’m waiting for you to decide where you’re going. Look around you, haven’t you noticed that I have stopped time?”

 

“I thought it was a bit quiet.”

 

“I have frozen time so that you are able to make a decision. You need to decide where you want to go.”

 

“I see. Sort of. Erm, could you help? What are my choices?”

 

Death paused to extract another cigarette from deep inside his cloak, which he again lit with a lightning spark from his clicking fingers. The process seemed to take forever, or possibly no time at all.

 

“You decide the choices as well.”

 

Simon looked down at the body below him. His body. His dead body.

 

“It’s a strange job you have. It’s always so simple in the stories about you: you appear, you cut the lifeline, you go to the next job. You’re never portrayed sitting on car roofs chain-smoking cigarettes.”

 

“It is usually as you say. But it’s like any job, some clients are more complex than others.  Most know where they are to go, most have a religion, or a belief. Others, like you, have no such conviction. You’re the spiritual equivalent of an old woman at a supermarket checkout trying to pay for her basket of goods with a hundred out-of-date vouchers and coupons.”

 

“But most people are atheist these days. I’m hardly unusual.”

 

“True, but most atheists have been raised in a religious context, they are Christian atheists, Muslim atheist, Jewish atheists. You are an atheist atheist, you have picked up your morality hither and thither, you have studied ancient philosophy, read up on Buddhism, Sikhism, Hinduism, Humanism. Your life has been one long spiritual buffet. Consequently you are a blank slate, you have no clear conviction, no clear beliefs. And until you have clear beliefs your soul can go nowhere.”

 

“I see.”

Simon looked down, at the car crash below him. At his car crash.

 

“So how long do I have to decide?”

 

“There is no time here. You have joined me in the sixth dimension. Take as long as you want.”

 

“It’s difficult. Could I, you know, go for a walk or something.”

Death nodded and pointed to the blue lifeline.

 

“You may go wheresoever you choose. I’ll be able to find you if I need you. You are in the sixth dimension, so there are no boundaries as to where you may go, only, I’d ask you not to visit any gods. They get annoyed, atheists knocking on their door after they’re dead.”

 

“Gods. Plural? You mean there’s more than one god?”

 

“There is only one god, if that is what you believe. Or there are a million gods, one for every function in the universe, if you so choose. Every soul is right, they will make their way to the heaven they believe in. There is no contradiction in that, the rules of the sixth dimension are not like the rules on Earth. The impossible is, well, not just possible, it is run of the mill you might say. So go, go for your walk, and use the occasion to think about what you believe.”

 

And so Simon’s soul left the scene of his own death, walking across the sky as if it was the most natural thing in the world. At first he walked at normal pace, but unconstrained by a physical body he found his pace naturally quickened and very soon he had broken into a run.

 

Simon had been a runner for all his adult life. He enjoyed the freedom of being able to just don shoes and tear away, to run wherever you chose. And here, in the sixth dimension, there were no constraints whatsoever. He felt no tiredness, no exhaustion, there were no muscles to strain, no restrictions. He ran at an incredible speed and because he was running through the air he ran where he chose, across rivers, over houses, over people, over cars. He ran and ran and ran, and when he reached the sea he didn’t stop, he ran off the edge off a cliff and across the ocean, like a jogging Jesus, he ran and ran, all the way to France, before he realised that he was in France, and turned and ran to somewhere more interesting.

 

There is no time in the sixth dimension, nobody was measuring how long he was gone, but it would have been for days, maybe weeks, running non-stop. He ran for hundreds of miles, maybe thousands. And in all that time he thought not at all about where he was going, nor about the problem he was running from. He gave not a single thought to god, to the afterlife, to his death. All he did was run.

 

But eventually he returned. He remembered making no conscious decision to return, but back he was, at the scene of his death, with Death still sitting on the roof of the car that killed him, smoking his Death cigarettes, his body still slumped in a pool of its own blood on the ground below them.

 

Upon his return, Death got up from the car roof, threw his fag on the floor and picked up his scythe.

 

“Right,” said Death, “to business.”

 

“But I thought you had to wait until I decided …” Simon started to say, but never finished. He understood that by running through the world, unattached to anything, just being part of the air, just by becoming a breeze on legs, he had found his heaven, his eternal destiny.

 

The figure of Death raised the scythe and brought it down with a well-practised flourish.