Chapter 97

He didn’t really feel like dwelling on the nitty-gritty details of what a hanged corpse was like just at the moment, but he could tell this much: It certainly didn’t look like a pretty way to die. As he took in the example swaying there in front of him, he briefly pondered what might happen if he hanged himself. Sure, he probably wouldn’t die, but his face was bound to look pretty bad while his respiration and circulation were temporarily cut off, and he might wind up with a broken cervix. Considering he couldn’t die from it, there were way too many drawbacks. Huh…yeah, I wouldn’t want to hang. “D-don’t just stand there like an idiot; help me! Help me, quick!” a voice yelled imperiously, breaking into his thoughts. He didn’t even try to stifle the irritated cluck of his tongue. The man with his neck wedged between the blades of the ceiling fans flailed both legs wildly, kicking up the hem of his long robes as he struggled. Watching this geezer in his black robes adorned with their golden ornaments—his scalp was as light on hair as his waistline was ridiculously heavy on fat—Joachim seriously questioned why the man thought he was the one who had the advantage in the current situation…and yet he was actually being more pompous than usual. “Hurry up and do something about this! What else do you think I brought you back into my service for?!” The hysterical cries grated at Joachim’s ears, making him wince. “What exactly would you like me to help you with, sir?” Joachim questioned in return, keeping his words polite. Offensively so, in fact. He made a show of tilting his head in confusion. “What would I…?! Damn you! Have your eyes rotted like the rest of you?!” the old man shrieked even louder, enraged. “Obviously I want you to get me down from—” “You see, the thing is”—Joachim interrupted him in the same matter-of-fact tone he might use to discuss the weather—“you’re already dead.” He jerked his chin at what was behind the old man to illustrate his point. Stunned speechless, the geezer stopped struggling and very nervously turned to look. His head twisted around between the fan blades at an angle that looked quite unnatural on a human body, and a beat later the rest of his body swung limply to follow it, until all of him faced the other direction. Behind that old man, who looked faintly transparent in the darkness, dangled the corpse of an old man with the same face. His neck was caught between the propellers of the room’s two ceiling fans where their orbits met each other; his darkened, bloated face was frozen in a mask of pain, and a mixture of blood and froth and drool dripped from both corners of his half-open mouth (Aw, I really didn’t want to think about the gritty details…). A dull screech-screech-screech echoed faintly in the dimness overhead, as though the ceiling fans were trying to snap apart the obstruction and keep on turning. Staring at his own corpse, the old man babbled garbled variations of the same words in strings. “Wha…what wha-wha-wha what’s…” Slither… And that was when a bunch of people-shaped things appeared. The color of darkness, they seemed to bleed out of the room’s own darkness from every direction. The old man’s face twitched with shock as they gathered at his feet, squirming along the floor on all fours until they reached up with thin, eerily long arms like bony tentacles, twined them around his legs and torso and, one by one, began to climb. The old man’s bloodshot eyes widened in terror. The people-shapes opened their mouths in unison and tore into his spirit body. The body’s severed legs and hands dissolved into black static, vanishing into nothingness. “What…h-help me, please, help me! I don’t want to die yet! Help me…!” “As I said, sir, that’s impossible. Didn’t I just tell you?” Joachim shot a disgusted look at the old man pawing the air, clearly unwilling to let go. Why didn’t he get that the first time? Has he got as few brain cells inside his head as he has hairs on top of it? The Elder’s face, contorted with shock and fear and despair— “You’re already dead.” —disappeared into the gaping-wide mouth of a person-shape, swallowed whole. Fragments shattered into static. Tasty…Tasty… Their low, thin whispers and the smacking noises they made gobbling up what remained of the ghost sank through the air down to the floor, as if the sounds themselves had weight. Tasty…Chubby, fatty souls are tasty… Souls that scream “I don’t want to die” are tasty… Then, when they had sucked up all of the geezer’s spirit, the people-shapes’ attention turned to Joachim. Joachim spared a glance at them as they crawled toward him and gave a little shrug of his shoulders. Aha, he thought. So these guys were behind all those incidents, eh? Now I can see why everyone’s whispering about assassins on the loose. The capital people never wanted to acknowledge the existence of things like these. They were at his feet now. Drawing their faces close, they made sniffing gestures, as if they were smelling him. The heads of the people-shapes twisted like warm taffy until they all took on the faces of the geezer they’d just eaten, lining up their annoying bald heads side by side and beginning to all clamor together. You’re…an Undying. Your jewel doesn’t smell good. It doesn’t seem tasty. We can’t eat you. There’s no soul to eat. We can’t eat you, so you’re boring… The bald old men slithered away from him, all rasping complaints as they went. “Gee, sorry for tasting so nasty,” Joachim spat, but the voices that could have answered him were already gone. His own lone voice echoed hollowly in the now-ownerless office and died away into nothing. It may have been a clergyman’s office, but it was far from anything you could describe as “simple” or “stoic”; every corner was embellished with expensive-looking yet tasteless furniture, paintings, and the like. He sank into the ridiculously large visitors’ sofa (which was so soft, he sank ridiculously far down), leaned his head back, and gazed up at the swaying legs of the corpse above him. Plip…plip…plip…Trails of saliva-clouded blood dribbled to the floor to form a spreading puddle there. Two cloudy eyes, widened reproachfully but not quite focusing on the same point, looked down on him from the ceiling. “Dammit…I’m the one who’s bored here. Now the work I was going to do is gone.” Joachim sighed. “How many senile old geezers are left that haven’t kicked the bucket yet?” he grumbled to himself, calling to mind the bald heads of each senile old geezer who was still out there in turn. A few of them might have protested that they weren’t bald, but their hair covered maybe ten or twenty percent of their heads at most, so it wasn’t like there was a big difference. At the very end of the list, one guy sprang to mind who wasn’t bald. Yet, anyway. “Father Sigri, eh?” He murmured a name that went with the face in his head, and then— “…Ha-ha-ha.” He couldn’t really say why, but all of a sudden he was laughing. A fit of coughing accompanied the laugh, and he spat up a soggy hunk of organ meat into the hand covering his mouth. It looked just like a rat run over by a car. It danced around in his palm like a pack of maggots for a while, covered in his viscous blood, and then abruptly shriveled up. “Dammit…” For a moment his vision darkened and he felt dizzy. He leaned against the back of the sofa, took a deep breath, and let it out. When he looked up at the ceiling, the hanged corpse was still peacefully swinging away. “Yeah, I wouldn’t want to hang,” Joachim mumbled with a sigh. His voice sounded strangely flat. It’s not as though he’d die just from hanging himself, after all. If he wanted to cease functioning, tearing his heart out and then either throwing himself into a raging fire or blowing himself up with a grenade would be the surest, quickest route. He knew others of his kind that had died that way after going off their rockers. With his head still lolling back against the sofa, he put his right hand to his chest just a little left of center, where his heart was. For rehearsal purposes, he channeled his strength into it and pushed hard with all five fingers. They actually dug down to somewhere around the first knuckle on the first go, and blood welled up under his clothes. “Huh.” He nodded to himself, impressed, and tried the same thing again. The fingers of his right hand sank even deeper into his skin. He’d have to successfully pull this act off with this very hand before he went off his own rocker, so he needed to train mechanical memory into his body now. Okay, then…Practice is taken care of. So, what shall I do now? From here on out, until I wash my hands of myself. “Hey, you…when you climbed up to that spot on the totem pole, what did you get? Did you get everything you wanted?” he carelessly asked the dead body above him. The body just dangled from the ceiling, staring emptily in his direction, and didn’t say anything. He raised his right hand, soiled with his own blood and guts, to eye level. Then he opened his palm wide and squeezed it tight, as if to grasp something invisible. His hand met no resistance; all it gripped was chilly nothingness.