Funeral Guilt

                                                     

Todd Flesk was riding in a taxicab to the museum district of Ole Zork City. Smoking heavily, he was bearing up considering—on top of his own woes—the cabdriver’s plangent whine which filled the car with an air of great miserableness. The problem for the driver was a constant stream of cyclists whizzing to within a whisker of his bonnet before veering off from it as quickly as they’d arrived. Todd sensed the poor fellow had reached a tipping point to full mental breakdown and could relate to the man’s state quite readily. A raft of unsettling thoughts raced in and out of the Flesk brain and a sardonic smile grazed his lips at how similar it all seemed to the bicycles brushing the chrome so perilously.

—“Of course it’ll all be my fault,” El Wheels keened, and he slapped his hand off the wheel in a show of frustration. “If one of ‘em dies it’s always the driver’s fault!”

Yada, yada, Todd thought, and tried to look at trees on the street to distract his mind from what he knew was coming; and sure enough it came: a jolt of guilt which bolted him upright in the cab’s capacious, black, back seat. At that, to accompany the jolt, one more cyclist had a narrow miss ‘gainst the polished hood of the vehicle in which Todd Flesk sat enmeshed going, as he was, to Angela Gonne’s funeral.

—“Just here,” he interrupted the driver’s rant and the dark hulking machine parked at the kerb on Flint Street.

Relieved, Todd stepped out and felt a frisson of pleasure at the presence of so many marvellous treasures housed nearby in the district’s two museums of note—that of Modern Artefacts and the Musée des Arts Noirs. But the frisson quickly subsided when he realized he would be skipping any cultural visits this morning. His sole purpose in the zone was to attend, at the chapel of Saint Philip in the Meadows, the funeral mass for the dear departed Angela.

Her death, of which Todd was the inadvertent cause, had occurred three days previously. This fact, having finally sunk in, had rendered him pale, crestfallen and chronically guilt-ridden as he stepped out onto the sun-dappled sidewalk in front of the church.

And so, treasured reader, with Todd suspended anxiously in the sunlight, allow me some moments to explain how Angela Gonne came to die.

The press had referred to it as a jaywalking incident. The Evening Lies unfurled a ‘Jaywalker Causes Gruesome Death’ headline. A jaywalking incident? Was it in the same ballpark as a hit-and-run, Todd wondered, and what penalties were there for souls who caused death through jaywalking? Where did the law stand re those who led sheeplike pedestrians to their messy ends in traffic? Our hero flinched just thinking of the question, for he, Todd, had been the jay doing the walking whom Angela had followed trustfully across University Green with such fatal results. He’d made it safely over but poor Ms Gonne had finished mashed between the road and a juggernaut’s wheel; CCTV capturing a shadowy figure darting into the traffic, ahead of the deceased, not waiting for the green man signal that it was safe to cross. The footage, however, was of poor quality, having been recorded on cameras installed in the year___ which seemed, at this point, like a distant age to Todd.

Despite its weakness, the police had gotten the footage shown on LIE TV along with a sombre voiceover imploring the “shadowman” to come forward. Todd, though, was having none of it; under no circumstances would he offer himself into the hands of the Inquisitors—simple gut fear prevented him.

He had spent the days since the accident as a proverbial nervous wreck. Hit the cigarettes after nine years and was chaining them. El Wheels, the whingeing cabbie, would find a surfeit of holes on his seats and floor. Todd stubbed one out now as he prepared to enter the House of God; belted his habit on the head once more and in fact would never smoke again.

He had realized it upon reaching his maisonette, looking at the screen in the gloom of the kitchenette. Instinct told him that he was the grainy figure being sought by the police.

It was as simple as this: Todd had seen a gap in the traffic and, though the signal was red, he’d bolted across the road; had heard the impact behind him—a frightening thud clearly audible despite the beating iPod in his ears. He remembered the fleeting human touch–almost imperceptible—that had skimmed him at the kerb minutes earlier; and felt sure that the selfsame person was now lying injured—or worse—on the roadway behind him.

Then, overwhelmed by a strong intuition that he had caused this collision, he was impelled to move onward and flee the hubbub.

The web identified her instantly: Angela Gonne (41). Todd called down the Dead List to get the arrangements. The picture they dug out would add to his sense of tragedy and responsibility. He saw a smiling, attractive blonde; as a matter of record, she looked younger than her forty-one years. Angela, who’d been standing behind him on the sidewalk, had followed her herd instincts and dashed out after his hurrying frame.

SPLAT!!

As in comedy, timing is all. The articulated vehicle got the measure of her. The head, in a twist of cartoonish freakishness, expanded the length and breadth of the truck’s tyre. Poor, poor, Angela. The rest of her was scraped from the ground at University Green. The embalmers had been excellent, doing a skilful job; somehow reassembling the whole lot into something which was now boxed and reposed at the foot of the altar (although she did remain “closed casket” at the parlour and was billed as such on the Dead List).

The guilt was killing him; at this rate, it would be his funeral next.

Such damn impatience! If only he’d waited till the lights had changed, those bits in the box might still be alive in the form of Ms Gonne. But as the angels go to the sea in the morning, so went Angela to her death by jaywalking.

Still hanging fretfully on the sidewalk, Todd resolved to stop beating about the bush. His last ever cigarette extinguished, he stole into the church as the priest, Father Samuel O’Talker, was intoning the opening prayer.

Fr O’Talker was an alcoholic who’d been sober some twenty-seven years; and made no secret of the fact—telling anyone who’d listen of his painful battle with the booze and of the joy he now knew in being drink-free.

Certain people present in the chapel, having known Sam in his drinking days, still made a point of praying that he would not decide to have a sherry after the burial.

Sam O’Talker was also a long-time friend of Angela’s. He could be counted on to give a non-generic lament when it came to the eulogy. He would not treat it like some speech he carried around in a briefcase, along with communion host and a chalice, to be taken out from one burial to the next and—having inserted the name of the relevant person—delivered sans any passion whatsoever. The congregation, which incidentally did not include any relatives of Angela’s, knew that the priest’s speech would come from the heart and his fondness for the deceased. The mourners were relishing the prospect of some fine oratory from Samuel.

This is as far as I’m going, Todd decided, as he reached the back pew. His inner voice stilled now, as did his frame, sitting into the hard church seat. But Todd’s inner voice never stayed still for long. He was forever telling himself happy, snappy little tales; most of them untrue.

The cab ride, and the tobacco smoking on said ride, had set him thinking. Seeing from the cab some of the city’s homeless, huddled under trees on Cramdin Street, had brought money to his mind. Watching the indigents, huddled in homogenous hopelessness, reminded him that the currency was very real and that, amongst these bereft souls of Ole Zork, it consisted of tobacco and alcohol. With a mixture of pride and surprise (if he was to be honest, there was even a tinge of regret), he considered how he no longer partook of firewater or, until three days prior, smoking. Then, realising he was on his twentieth cigarette that morning, he proceeded to castigate himself for this fact (it was a welcome change from castigating himself over Angela’s death).

Cramdin Street, along with its collection of loitering bums, was also strongly associated (one could say rife) with the homosexual community. Todd often suspected a commune stood somewhere nearby, just off the serpentine length of Cramdin. He saw a banner-bedecked tenement in his mind’s eye with emblazoned blankets proclaiming gay pride.

I mention gays to you, beloved reader, in order to show that for Todd Flesk they were nothing but detractors; and the Cramdin Street gays, notorious for their bitchiness, were his biggest detractors of all.

Recalling the queens now from the back seat of the chapel, with the funeral mass underway, he wondered if his pride had needed to be chopped down and if that was all the sweet dears had meant when they’d shouted “Go home cop-sucker!” to him at the tea dance.

He’d felt like taking to his steed brandishing a bone-handled riding crop. He didn’t, I might add, possess a steed or such a crop; nor, while we’re talking of possessions, academic qualifications. Things had been arranged but he was left bereft of even the slightest credential. It was on his mind (in a persistent way) forever; he would never go to the Alumni Ball. The miracle he’d attempted at the hospital, three days earlier, had been a patent failure. He was looking at her casket now; there she lay, cleaned up no doubt, but dead nonetheless.

Maybe he could try something, some sort of semi-marvel; but that optimistic thought was deflated instantly when he realized that today, first and foremost, was burial day.

A gospel reading was underway. Father O’Talker’s voice reaching Todd loud and clear in his back row vantage point.

Then Jesus said “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?”

The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen.

Jesus said to them “Take off the grave clothes and let him go.”

Todd knew it straight away. It was the Lazarus tale. The priest injecting a good dose of fabulous hope, it seemed.

No such luck for Ms Gonne.

After calling down the arrangements on the web, he’d ascertained that she lay cooling in Queen’s School Hospital and had hotfooted it to that renowned medical establishment. A brief query, along with a friendly look, to the nurse on reception confirmed to Todd the mortuary’s location in the basement. When he got down there, granting himself permission to enter the cool confines of the morgue by shooting the security guard an imperious stare, he had located the mashed and ruined Angela through a quick alphabetic check; and, cripes, what a mess she was! Todd could make out neither a face nor a body among the squashed bits and parts assembled on the slab. And when it came to his reason for being there, well, it was no use. He’d waved his hands and had come out with the spotless words summoned with all his might; had uttered oaths, pieties and plain old-fashioned prayers—all to no avail. Nothing stirred, nothing budged. Angela Gonne (or what passed for her in that unsightly selection of shapelessness) remained unmoved and colder than the brown earth into which she was bound. Todd pictured a freshly dug receptacle: the grave in all its chillness; and he’d scurried from the mortuary (bought forty cigarettes in the hospital shop and started smoking them in shock) chiding himself mercilessly for his inability to revive the corpse. “You’re a fucking failure, Flesk,” his core voice spat at him. “You can’t even perform a miracle!”

His eyes blinked in the pew now with what he thought were tears welling up. It was the gloomy church and the priest’s solemn intonation. But, in a most specific sense, Todd was close to tears for having caused the woman’s death; and it seemed there was nothing in the Creator’s earthly domain he could do to change that fact.

And no, it must be repeated: he would not surrender himself into the hands of the Inquisitors. To walk past the hanging baskets on Macdona Street to the barracks on Begat Street, to be man-handled and harangued (and that was just for starters). Offering himself up was completely out of the question.

He paused for a moment, from reflecting on his guilt, to move the chip about his life, which he bore with such constancy, from his left shoulder to his right. Todd Flesk was a believer in evenness. The medics advised him to move the chip twice daily.

He was also a believer in God; and possessed that most noble of attributes, namely, a strong belief in his own worth.

With the chip sitting snugly in his right shoulder blade, he remembered how, in the early days, the doctors had tried to have it inserted into his mind but had ceased their attempt after several goes. Today’s modern seraphs are proof that mind-insertion is now a reality. But Todd had gotten a switching-shoulder deal. Despite his sorrow today, he found himself tolerable in the main; as a being, he was working okay. Though he did ponder whether or not he was a minstrel or a pamphleteer? In fact he often wondered thus and was at a complete loss to the answer.

But did he believe in this mass? He decided to pay attention.

—“We will now have some prayers of the faithful,” Samuel O’Talker said.

Todd observed several doleful souls rising from pews to go to the lectern. A little procession formed of four individuals, some familiar to him in a flashgun kind of way. Is that GD Grant? I know that face from the internet this past year.

Each of the four carried a crumpled slip of paper. He could see the priest, with an intense happiness writ upon his face, waiting for them to reach the altar. The padre began to rattle some beads and chant in a monkish manner before breaking into English.

—“My darlings of the congregation, please welcome at my podium some friends of Angela’s.”

And the four formed a neat line next to the microphone.

Down in his seat, Todd’s mind was a swirl of anxiety and trouble. He tried to believe the Lord would lift his sorrow from him, weighing him down as it was like a cramp in a swimmer’s leg—and he was in such deep water.

He felt like a beast of the field; of burden in the tracts around Bludgeon city, where Blair borrowed Christ to tweak man’s conscience; an elephant perhaps, with an unwieldy log curled in its trunk ad infinitum; or a dreary dray-horse dragging the cart from day to day.

But something was whispering to him to tap into his strength and make proper use of it. He didn’t want to be forever aware of its being there, never harnessed and wasting; that way you’re exploited for eternity, he told himself.

The failure of the miracle, he resolved, is but a setback and then he pricked up his ears as the first of the four readers blew on the microphone.

—“Hi, I’m Lettice Puray,” a youthful, upbeat accent charmed its way into the mass-goers’ minds. “I’ve been a friend of Angela’s since our college days. She was the most wonderful woman.”

Todd could sense real pain just below the surface of Lettice’s chirpy delivery. He looked ahead to several attendees; all seemed rapt by the spell of Ms Puray. With a name like that, he supposed, it’s her destiny to intone from a pulpit; praying for the happy flight of Angela’s soul has let her assume her role in this small ill-lit play.

He listened as she finished her devotion.

—“We trust You dear Lord to carry Angela’s soul safely into Your Kingdom. Let us pray.”

The neat line shuffled slightly as Lettice stepped aside. A thoughtful-looking, prepossessing fellow was up next. Todd instantly recognized the face. Gadzooks, he thought, it is George Douglas Grant. There was no mistaking that chiselled jawline. Photos of Grant flooded the web. His stickysitu.com site was the phenomenon of the past year. Todd wondered what the tie-in was to Angela?

George Douglas Grant spoke.                                                                                                                                           

—“I got to know Angela Gonne when she requested some work through my website (and ever the self-publicist, GD name-checked stickysitu). I don’t think a more decent woman existed. We’ve got to root out jaywalking. Just yesterday I spoke with the mayor and he has assured me of prompt action in this regard. Stringent new laws are being drawn up in City Hall as I am speaking to you today. Let there be no doubt that we, the dauntless denizens of Ole Zork City, will put an end to this evil practice. Permit me to quote the prophet Eric: Don’t let it happen, it depends on you! Eric was speaking in the context of a jackboot stamping on a human face forever. It was his vision of the future. I say jaywalking, if not checked, will do far more damage than the jackboot. God bless Angela!”

And the handsome mouth closed and George D Grant walked to the edge of the line of readers.

Todd plunged into a state of terror from which he feared he might never recover.

His crime was hated and Grant was whipping up the odium, goodo, from the podium; boasting of his discussions with the mayor and their plans to enact swingeing new measures. A bold bid by officialdom to stop people going, at will, into traffic.

Well, they won’t stop the seraphs or cherubs or whatever kind of angels floating wherever they so wish. Though Todd wasn’t sure if the Ancient of Days would countenance harsh statutes from City Hall. What was the idea, anyway, of giving these fools the power to clip his wings? He wasn’t a damn insect.

He knew this much: he would be asking some probing questions in his prayers. Besides, if God did let it come to pass and Todd was to be punished, he would stick hard to his principles. God might be God but surrendering to His will, just like surrender to the Inquisitors, was not an option.

This notion of belief in God’s plan for your life, he’d become familiar with it during all those meetings he’d been forced to attend following his “admission”. The people at the gatherings enthused about abandoning themselves and living by blind faith, but Todd Flesk, much as he tried, could not follow such a philosophy.

He looked again at the four gathered for prayer. His eyes drifted towards the coffin and, all the while, a great grimness gripped his heart.

Suddenly, however, atop the pine box, a hovering light caught his eye. Todd’s breath came faster and his heart soared. As he stared, the light darted to the floor leaving a trail in its wake which put him in mind of a comet. What is this presence, he wondered, this racing wraith? He was frightened and excited for the sprite was real, not something conjured in the Flesk imagination. I hope it’s holy and I hope it stays, he thought, I’m going to need all the good spirits I can muster.

Up next to the podium was Ole Zork’s Baron of Burlesque, Brise Soothsay, who puffed on the PA and intoned.

—“Yo, wha’s bin happenin’ sweetly beloved? Ange she jus gon an already she mizzed. I tell y’all I loved that gal. Sho did. Angie Gonne. But she didna go cos she wanna go. She was led astray. Po stray chile. I is soo gonna mizz her. Lez laugh and pray fo Angela. And lez fine the bad man who done the jaywalkin’! He shouldna be out there loose. Shouldna be loose. No sireeee!”

Buoyed up by emotion and the power of Brise’s delivery, the congregation broke into applause. Todd remained a bag of nerves. He didn’t get to hear the final prayer, as the fourth reader collapsed into a heap of grief just as the clapping for Brise Soothsay was dying out. Brise, GD Grant and Lettice carried number four back to a central pew to continue his or her (the gender was unclear to Todd) soft blubbing and allow the service to proceed. Although he couldn’t put a name to this whimpering individual, Todd felt certain it was someone of note. After all, Grant and Soothsay had turned up as mourners—perhaps the crybaby was royalty or an emissary of state. But, then again, maybe they were nobody; just a saddened friend who’d come to show respect.

Leaving the unidentified non-reader sobbing in a seat, the other three returned to their various rows; satisfied now that their task was done, their pleas proffered heavenwards.

Todd decided to scrutinize the crowd a little closer. If GD Grant was here, then anyone could be.

Looking round he saw mainly the backs of heads and shoulders; though over to the left, where the seating curved somewhat, he could view people in profile. Roving thus, his eyes blinked in surprise as they fell upon the redoubtable Gaynor Mann and the intense Zak Levi praying together with an entire pew to themselves. The profile of this pair could not be higher; they were a constant feature on hundreds of websites. Looking at Zak, Todd was impressed by the man’s air of oblivion towards the poison talk that portrayed his relationship with Gaynor in such lurid detail; shocking stories were abroad of cathouses, whips, circus animals, all that sort of thing.

Yet Zak Levi in church, with Gaynor Mann by his side, was a vision of peacefulness. Mine enemies do seek my destruction, Levi was thinking, these pernicious images are just another weapon (The Moon had acquired exclusive footage taken at the house where the couple held a weekly debauch). Zak’s face grew increasingly placid as he pictured again that golden, glorious, eternal footstool, comprised of the editor’s head.

Over in Todd’s head, sorrow reigned supreme as he recollected Angela: the smiling face and the forty-one years.

Fr O’Talker coughed and spoke to the murmuring, mourning, morning mass-goers.

—“Let me quote the Holy Bible now my friends, before this here service ends.”

There was a long pause. Then the priest spoke as though with a new voice:

Then the angel who talked with me returned and wakened me. He asked me

“What do you see?”

I answered

“I see a solid gold lampstand with a bowl at the top and seven lights on it, with seven channels to the lights. Also there are two olive trees by it, one on the right of the bowl and the other on its left.”

I asked the angel

“What are these, my lord?”

He said to me

“This is the word of the Lord: ‘Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit.’”

Todd was not so quick to recognize this excerpt. Was it Old Testament? They could have indoctrinated us better, he thought, before flinging us back down here. I wanted to stay at the Gossip’s Hectare—a great graveyard. The fun I had with the officers, when they weren’t reposing across the pathway in those imposing vaults. In fact, we all had plush plots up at the Gossip’s. Far superior graves, like Lake Superiorside graves. But it didn’t last; it never does. I was flung through the arch and set to work—of which I grumble daily. Though I do love that moment when thought swings into action.                          

Fr O’Talker had spoken “spirit”, the last word of his biblical extract, with a resounding finality that rendered Todd rapt in his seat. Its echo—Spirit, Spirit, Spirit—rang in the ears of all present.

Just then, Todd saw the presence for a second time. The comet tail trailing as it circled the coffin left him wide-eyed. As far as he could see, no one else in the church was aware of its being there. He felt a twinge of hope, thinking that he may at last pull it off—the something marvellous that he so wished to accomplish.

He knew he would have to act fast, in one prayerful push. He felt certain the playful sprite was benign and that it wanted him to begin immediately. Nevertheless, Todd kept his powder dry and bided his time a tad longer.

At the lectern Samuel O’Talker was in high-flown mode, dazzling the crowd with his silver tongue.

—“Beloved humans, I want to talk to you a little now about Angela, the Angela I knew.”

Todd wriggled his forehead in expectation of a good eulogy from the priest, who went on.

—“Angela Gonne was an angel by name and an angel by nature.”

But rather than pay attention to the good father’s speech, as he had hoped to do, Todd found his mind drifting, as was so often the case in recent days. He thought of his earth ID: Todd Flesk, maker of household furniture. Not a bad man, but quite unremarkable. His true being had been seared at the point of his most recent birth; the ashes scattered back to the dawn of time; far from this place of objects with names, behaviours with rules, people with purposes. It was not vain to think that one belonged in the primordial slime. There was no messianic gleam in Todd’s eyes. The nearest he got to prophecy was when his co-workers asked him to predict football scores, during canteen breaks, at the furniture factory. And he was certainly, to use an old phrase, no angel (well, in some respects at least). His history of drug-taking and sexual wantonness was testimony to that fact.

Yet something was, in a manner of speaking, nudging at the elbow of his consciousness. The ghost was a glaring reality to Todd, flitting about the coffin and egging him on to awaken Angela. But he kept the pressure at bay by stopping the drift of his thoughts and directing his attention back to Fr O’Talker who continued thus re Angela Gonne.

—“So, my cherished chums, throughout my friendship with Angela I was to witness, on not less than seventeen occasions, the performance by her of angelic actions. But, let me explain to you, my magnificent mates, the happy fact that I will encounter a celestial creature of such stature again. The selfsame creature we knew as Angela Gonne. Yes, my boon buddies, I will meet her for a further time. For I know—full sure—that Angela will rise again.”

He gestured to the wooden overcoat and went on.

—“These are mere bones we are praying over and burying today. Angela’s spirit is already preparing to float forever more, amongst us. God rest her dead body. The snake has shed its final skin and the dry husk’s gone to dust. And may the Good Shepherd shield her rising soul.”                                                                                                                                    

Samuel O’Talker fell silent nor did the audience applaud, but stayed in dead silence too.

Todd mulled it over. The padre is revealing things. That’s a given. But where’s the surprise in a priest who believes in the resurrection? They’ve been preaching that stuff for two thousand years. Although, it must be said, he spoke with real certitude that he would see her breath being borne on the blowing breeze. He as good as roared: “She’s on her way!” Has that been her apparition toying with my vision this last hour? However, Todd knew the sprite was not Angela but rather some message bearer—from far in the ether—exhorting him to work.

So he set about his task and began to recite, in so faint a way as to be invisible on his lips, the words he had so often rehearsed in the minutes, hours, days, months, years—aeons!—leading up to this moment; the same words that had not worked for him, standing over the destroyed corpse of Angela Gonne, in the hospital morgue. But he was now, of a sudden, renewed and imbued:

“They can no longer die; for they are like the angels.”

Todd repeated this whispered incantation thrice and in an instant felt his sorrow dispel. He didn’t have a mirror to hand but knew, if he were to glance in a glass, he would see colour racing back to his face. The cadaverous pallor of recent days was gone, as though in a puff of smoke. And boy, did he feel so much the better.

There, I’ve done it, he thought. If she’s up, she’s up. After all, I am but a furniture maker in a city; a little life; nothing to be ashamed of but nothing to be ostentatious or boastful about either in these facts of my existence.

He allowed himself a moment to bask in the good feeling which had come over him upon issuing his practised prayer.

He saw the mass-goers now flock to O’Talker, who was distributing communion host from a chalice poised in his left hand.

So the “body and blood” have come to the ceremony, Todd mused, the Transubstantiation Train has pulled into the station. Well it’s not before time, I certainly needed a miracle.

                                    

As his mind turned over thus, Todd noticed a man and woman, some pews ahead, whispering to one other and stealing glances in his direction. His good feeling waned and a tenseness seized him. He sensed the pair were police or Inquisitors and knew, with the clarity of an alcoholic at the end of a bender, that he was about to be rumbled. The woman, in particular, began to give him dagger glares.

What have I been thinking, he inwardly screamed as he recalled the newsprint of the previous week and what he’d read therein. The Looking Glass had reported on a new procedure to be adopted by the Inquisitors whereby funeral congregations would be scoured in cases where a death was caused by a negligent suit of skin. As he recalled the piece, they would search in particular for shifty, guilt-racked types; of course the police had been scouring funeral congregations for centuries, as the guilty oft showed up at their victims’ burials. But for the Inquisitors themselves to get into this field, well, that was a new departure indeed.

How he had palely loitered, alone, like a veritable sore thumb throughout the service!

Knowing he was about to be netted, Todd cried silently to the Lord of Hosts. Watch over me and keep me from harm, he pleaded, if this is your plan for me then so be it. He grudgingly acknowledged that he was surrendering to God’s will despite the principled stand he so often took against such a course of action.

The walls of his chest cavity received a pounding from his heart when he saw that the two whispering watchers had left their seats and were advancing, with brisk steps, towards him.

Fr O’Talker, at the altar, was wrapping things up, preparing the coffin for its final journey to Steelnever Cemetery. A hearse was idling at the kerb outside. A sexton appeared and handed the priest a censer, with which he dispensed incense to beat the band, while circling Angela’s casket. Todd felt the substance tickle his nostrils as the two Inquisitors—they must be!—reached him in the pew. His body began to tremble from head to toe.

The man—a poker-faced type in a cheap suit—addressed him in clipped tones, at the same time displaying a golden Ole Zork Inquisitorial badge.

—“Sir, could you accompany my partner and I? We believe you have information of value to us.”

Todd saw one or two souls in the congregation, having noticed the small commotion, turn to look his way. He knew there was no refusing Mr Gold Badge, so he rose from the church seat and followed the two Inquisitors out of the chapel and into the sunlight of Flint Street. Lady Inquisitive now addressed him.

—“Our car is parked over here,” she said pointing towards the Musée des Arts Noirs where the official vehicle, which would drive him to his fate, was waiting.

Her voice was firm and impassive—a voice well used to inspiring fear. He followed her footsteps and foresaw in his mind the cell where he would be held pre-Inquisition. He could see and smell the tiled damp walls of the container; the wretched box in which they’d make him sweat before launching their tirade. Such dread foreboding left him intensely afraid.

He saw the sprite, ole speedy wraith—the rollicking revenant—bringing up the rear in this little frogmarch to the car in which he was to be taken down.

My one hope, he thought, that ghost may just get me off this hook. I sensed its goodness inside the church. I’m bringing it with me to Begat Street.

The threesome—plus the hovering spirit—reached the black saloon parked in surly silence by the Musée.

—“Just sit in the back sir and remain calm,” Gold Badge instructed. “Ms Radgeworm will sit behind with you. Do not present her with any difficulties.”

The Inquisitor displayed a steely stare which demanded cooperation.

City traffic whizzed by—including so many bicycles—and Todd saw a party of tourists led by a blonde lady come down the sidewalk and turn in towards the Musée. The blonde carried a book and was reading, joyfully, excerpts on the museum’s history to the clear delight of the tourists; all of whom seemed enthralled by what was being said. Todd caught a snippet on the air

—“The Musée des Arts Noirs contains a wealth of exquisite treasures. You are going to see the most mind-blowing artefacts.”

It seemed to Todd the woman spoke to her listeners with an ecstatic lilt bejewelling her voice. She was also vaguely familiar to him in a way that he couldn’t quite pinpoint. Might be the last woman—bar Radgeworm—you’ll see for a spell, he reflected, as he climbed into the Inquisitors’ car. He was feeling strained from the attempted miracle he had just completed.

Oh my God! It clicked inside him, just as his eternal chip clicked also (time to switch it, he knew, to his left shoulder blade). With a wondrous clarity it dawned on Todd Flesk that Angela Gonne was the lady tour-guide.

He had done it! She was risen and was tripping, gleefully, along the path in her parallel universe. And what was more, she had found work already as a museum guide. How fantastic; explaining the ancient and treating strangers to fabulous accounts of history, no doubt about it.

Wouldn’t Todd love to be a moth on the tapestry?

It was a darn miracle! He felt his funeral guilt lifting. Looking into the face of Ms Radgeworm, in the back seat of the black car, terror replaced the guilt.

A resurrection had happened but there was hell to pay.

They hit Macdona Street, taking him down. Life on Earth continued apace.

© Brian Ahern 2009