Between Worlds: A Reaper's Heart

15 min read · Paranormal romance · Free, complete, 18+

Death had a schedule, and Tess Lindley was late.

Not Death with the hood and the hourglass. The working kind, with a list, in the small hours of a wet Tuesday in November. Tess was one of four hundred and twelve Reapers attached to the North of England office, which covered everything from the Tweed to the Trent and shared a stationery cupboard with Scotland. She had held the post for four years, which by Department standards made her an infant, and she had never once kept anyone waiting. The senior Reaper for the North had been collecting since Ur and still took every bank holiday off on principle.

She was late because of a poltergeist. It had tried to change lanes on the M62 near Saddleworth — not the motorway the living used, but the one that ran a hand’s breadth above it, where the dead and the people who moved them went about their business — and the pile-up had held her for twenty minutes. By the time she came up the hill to Brackenhill Hospice, above Halifax, at a quarter past two in the morning, her collection was eleven minutes overdue.

Eleven minutes overdue was a form. R-11: Notice of Late Attendance, in triplicate. She was composing it in her head as she went through the fourth door on the left, and found that it did not matter, because the man in the bed was not ready to go.

He was dying; that much was plain. Cancer of the pancreas, said the notes at the foot of the bed in a nurse’s round hand, and his body said it every other way. But his soul, which Tess could see lying over him like a second exposure on an old film, already loose at the edges, was bright. Not the grey, guttering light most people had by then. It was the light of a kitchen left on for someone coming home late.

His name was Jonah Cole and he was thirty-four. He taught music at a comprehensive in Sowerby Bridge. A photograph of a school choir was taped to the wall, every mouth wide open, and on the bedside table sat a stack of manuscript paper with a red pen clipped to the top. He was dying, and he was marking.

“You’re late,” he said, and looked straight at her.

Tess stopped where she was.

The living could not see Reapers. It was the first thing they told you, on the first morning, in the training room above the bus depot in Wakefield, under a motto carved in a language nobody had spoken since Ur. (It meant, roughly, Nobody Is Kept Waiting.) You are not seen. You are not heard. And you do not touch. A Reaper’s hand on a living person, or a living hand on a Reaper, was not a gesture; it was a collection. Touch, either way, and you took them.

“You can see me,” she said.

“About a week now. Shapes in the corridor. A woman in a green raincoat who walks through the linen cupboard at four every afternoon.” He shifted on the pillows, slowly, holding his breath against something. “I put it down to the morphine. Then I put it down to dying. Am I wrong?”

“No. Some people get the sight near the end. It’s rare.”

“Lucky me.” His eyes were dark brown and very awake in a face worn down to the bone. He smiled, crooked, as if she were a supply teacher who had turned up halfway through the lesson. “So. Have you come to take me?”

“Your body’s still alive. I’ve come to wait.”

“Sounds dull.” He lifted the manuscript paper. “Want a chair? Timothy Morrison, Year Eleven, has written me a fugue, and I need a second opinion before I tell him it’s a crime.”

She took the chair. That was against protocol. She took the red pen as well, which was so far against protocol that it was in another protocol’s jurisdiction, and then she spent forty minutes on Timothy Morrison’s fugue, because the subject was good and the third entry was a disaster and she had never been able to leave a disaster alone.

“He’s brought the answer in a key it has no business in,” she said. “On purpose, I think. It’s rude. I like it.”

“You read music.”

“I’ve collected a lot of musicians. You pick things up.”

“Tell me one.”

She told him about the jazz pianist in Bradford who had played his own send-off on the edge of the bed, both hands in the air, before he would stand up and come. About the soprano in Harrogate whose last breath had been a top C that nobody in the room could hear. About the cornet player from a brass band in Slaithwaite who had asked, very politely, whether he might bring his instrument, and had been told by Tess, after a telephone call to the office, that there was no rule against it.

Jonah listened the way good teachers listen, with his whole face. When she ran out, he said, “You like your job.”

“I do.”

“Most people would hate it.”

“Most Reapers do, after a while. They ask for a transfer to Records.” She turned the pen over in her fingers. “I was a registrar before. Births, deaths and marriages, the register office in Leeds, ten years. I always liked that part. Somebody arrives, somebody goes, and you write it down properly so that it counts.”

“Before,” he said. “Before what?”

“Before a Tuesday in March, at my desk, halfway through a death certificate. A blood vessel in my head. I was thirty-six.” She gave it to him the way she gave everything, as a fact for the record. “I’m still thirty-six. The Department considers that a perk.”

He was quiet for a while. Then: “Whose certificate was it?”

Nobody had ever asked. “A Mr Albert Haigh, ninety-one. I’d got as far as his occupation.”

“Did somebody finish it?”

“Somebody always finishes it.”

That was the rule she lived by. It was why she liked the work, and why she meant to do it well until the end of her term, when the Threshold would open for her as it opened for everyone she carried to it. Every Reaper could see their own. Hers waited at the end of whatever corridor she walked down when a shift was over: a square of warm light about the size of a door, patient as a lamp in a window. She looked at it every night before she signed off. It was the only thing in either world that was hers.

Jonah did not die that night, or the next, or the one after.

By every line on the charts his body should have stopped. The doctors came in pairs and read the numbers twice. His sister Gemma came every evening after work with her two girls and a bag of satsumas; his friends came in a loud, kind crowd with cans he could not drink and jokes he could still laugh at; and all of them began, cautiously, to hope. Tess knew better. A soul that bright, unwilling to leave, could hold a failing body together far longer than any chart allowed.

She ought to have reported it on the second night. Instead she came back. She worked her list — a farmer in Hebden Bridge, a retired bus driver in Elland, a woman in Huddersfield who apologised for the state of the bedroom — and when the list was done she climbed the hill to Brackenhill and sat in the chair, and they talked until the night nurse came round at five. He told her about his pupils, and the piano at home that his hands could no longer manage, and the fugue he was writing in his head instead: four voices, for his Year Elevens to sing at a spring concert he would not see. She told him about the Department. At first she told him the parts she was allowed to. Then she told him the rest.

On the sixth night she stayed too long.

Her list had a Mrs Doreen Oddie on it, eighty-eight, in a care home in Brighouse, due at ten past three. At ten to four Jonah was singing her the second voice of his fugue under his breath, because he had no breath for more, and Tess looked up at the clock above the door and ran.

Mrs Oddie had died on schedule. She had been alone with her own body for forty minutes when Tess came through the wall, and she was standing in the corner with her arms wrapped round her nightie and her teeth in a glass on the bedside table.

“I thought nobody was coming,” Mrs Oddie said. “I thought this was it. Just this room, for ever.”

Tess took both her hands — the dead you could touch; the dead were what you were for — and walked her to the Threshold and stood with her until she was steady enough to go through. Then she went to Wakefield, filled in an R-11 with a true account of where she had been, and got it back the following evening with two words across it in green ink: See me.

She did not go. She went to Brackenhill instead, which was how she knew it had gone past anything a form could hold.

On the eighth night Jonah said, “I think I’m staying because of you.”

She had the pen in her hand. She put it in her pocket.

“My body’s finished,” he said. “I know that. I’ve done my crying about it, mostly in front of Gemma, which she’ll never let me forget. But every time I feel it start to let go, you’re in that chair, and I can’t make myself go anywhere you aren’t.”

“Then I’m failing at the one thing I’m here for.”

“Or you’re doing something else.” He lifted his hand off the blanket. It shook. He held it out over the bed rail, palm up, an arm’s length from her knee. “So do it. I mean it, Tess. If it’s going to be anyone’s hand, I want it to be yours.”

Every part of her wanted to take it. She had not held a living hand in four years. She stood up so fast the chair went over.

“No.”

“Why not? It’s my death.”

“That’s why not.” She was shaking; she had not known she still could. “If I touch you, I’ve chosen. Not you. Me. And I won’t have it on the record that I chose this for you, Jonah. Not if you asked me nicely. Not even if I—”

She stopped. He let his hand fall.

And then she heard it, the way you hear a radio in another room and realise you have been humming along: his soul was making a sound. It was four voices, the fugue he had been writing in his head, the subject going out and the answer coming back in a key it had no business in, on purpose, rude. Under them ran a line she knew, because she had been humming it down every corridor in the North of England for a week.

“You can hear it,” he said.

“Yes.”

“It started the first night. You told me where the third entry should go.” He closed his eyes. “I’m not going to apologise for it.”

On the Wednesday Tess climbed to the top floor of the depot, where Senior Reaper Ennatum kept her office behind a door with no handle that opened when she felt like it. It opened at once. Ennatum had a desk the size of a canal barge, a kettle she claimed was older than Leeds, and Tess’s R-11 on the blotter in front of her with the green ink across it.

“Forty minutes,” she said. “Mrs Oddie. In the dark, with her teeth out.”

“Yes.”

“For a music teacher in a hospice above Halifax who can see you.”

“Yes.”

Ennatum got up and filled the kettle. She did this, Tess had heard, before every bad conversation, and the kettle took a quarter of an hour. They watched it together.

“You’ve fallen for a charge,” Ennatum said, pouring.

“He’s fallen for me. I may—” Tess looked at the tea. “Yes. I have.”

“Then there’s Regulation nine.” Ennatum opened a drawer and took out a form so old it was not paper. “A soul may remain. Not alive and not gone on. Between, with us. It’s called a remainder. It’s been done once in this Department’s history: a Reaper in Kamakura, in thirteen thirty-three, and a monk who wouldn’t leave her. Here is what it costs.” She laid her hand flat on the form. “A remainder needs a Reaper to stand surety, and the Reaper’s own crossing is struck. Not postponed. Struck. You’ll work this job for as long as there’s anyone to collect. And when he’s had enough of the between and wants to go on — they always want to go on, in the end — he goes. You don’t.”

“The monk?”

“Went on in nineteen forty-one. She still works Kamakura. Sends me a card every New Year.” Ennatum turned the form round to face her. “There’s more. You sign first. You may tell him what the between is, what the Threshold is and how he chooses, and nothing else. You may not tell him what you’ve signed; a soul who knows the price is a soul under influence. Pask from Records takes his declaration, alone, and you don’t hear it until it’s done. If he chooses to go on, you’ve struck your crossing for nothing, and that’s the end of it.”

“That’s cruel.”

“It’s honest. It’s so that you can’t buy him, and so that he can’t pay you back.” She pushed the form an inch nearer. “Mrs Oddie was the price you’ve already paid, Lindley. This is the one you haven’t.”

Tess read it twice, as she had read every form in her life, small print included. At the bottom was a line for a name and a line for a date. She signed with Jonah’s red pen, which was still in her coat pocket.

“Red,” Ennatum said. “Of course.”

The corridor at the bottom of the stairs was the corridor it had always been: lino, a noticeboard about the Christmas do, a fire door with wired glass. Tess stood there a good while and looked at the place where the light had been every night for four years. There was the fire door, and rain on the glass, and nothing else at all.

Then she pushed the bar and went out to tell him.

She told him at half past four on the Thursday morning, before the night nurse’s round and long before the day staff came. She told him plainly, as she had told a great many people a great many things across a counter in Leeds: here are the options, here is what each one means, take your time.

“There’s the Threshold,” she said. “I’ve stood at it nine thousand times. I can’t tell you what’s past it, because I’ve never been, but I can tell you what comes through. Warmth. A smell people know — bread, mostly, or cut grass, or somebody’s coat. Nobody I’ve walked there has ever turned round. Not once.”

“And the other?”

“The between. Where I work. You’d be dead, Jonah. Nobody living would see you except the odd dying soul with the sight, and cats. But you’d hear music. You could finish your fugue. You could stand at the back of the hall at the spring concert and hear Timothy Morrison come in wrong in front of his mum. And when you’d had enough, you could go on. The Threshold doesn’t close for a remainder. It waits.”

“And you?”

“I’d be there. That’s the part I’m allowed to say.”

He caught that. “What aren’t you allowed to say?”

“Plenty. It’s a large Department.” She made herself smile. “A man called Pask will come. He’s from Records. He wears a cardigan, and he’ll ask you one question and write down the answer. I won’t be in the room. I won’t know until it’s done.”

“Tess.” His hand moved on the blanket towards her sleeve and stopped, by his own doing, a careful inch short. “What did it cost you?”

“Nothing you need to carry,” she said, and went out to wait in the garden.

Pask came at six and left at twenty past. He passed her on the path with his cardigan buttoned to the neck and his face telling her nothing, which was why Records had him. Tess went back in and stood at the foot of the bed. Gemma had come in before dawn and was asleep in the chair by the window with her coat over her knees. Outside, under the lamps, frost had whitened the lawn.

Jonah Cole died at thirteen minutes to seven. It was a small, plain loosening, like a knot let go.

The Threshold opened in the corner of the room, by the sink. It was warm and square, and it smelled, of all things, of rosin and floor polish: a school hall before a concert. Jonah’s soul sat up out of his body the way people get out of a bath, slowly, surprised at how light they are. He looked at the light for a long time. Tess kept her hands in her pockets and did not move, and did not breathe, which was easy, and did not hope, which was not.

Then he stood, walked past his sister without waking her, past the light without looking back at it, and took Tess’s hand.

It was warm, and it held on. She took the hands of the dead every night, and every one of them let go at the Threshold. She had forgotten that a hand could be a whole conversation: his thumb moving once across her knuckles, a question and its answer at the same time.

“Pask told me,” he said. “After. He said it’s the Department’s custom to tell a remainder what he’s cost. You signed before you knew.”

“That was the point.”

“If I’d gone through that door, you’d have had nothing.”

“I’d have had the job.” It came out much too high, and he heard that too.

They went out into the garden, because Gemma would wake soon and should have the room to herself. They left no prints in the frost. Below them Halifax was putting its lights on, and the first buses were nosing up out of the station.

“Can I kiss you?” he said. “I’ve wanted to ask for nine days. It seemed a poor idea when it would have killed me.”

She laughed, which she had not done in front of anyone since Leeds. “Yes. Ask me again tomorrow, too. I want it on the record.”

He kissed her carefully at first, as if she might still be a rule, and then not carefully at all. His hands came up into her hair. Hers found the back of his neck, the warm skin there, the place where his pulse would have been, and kept it. Neither of their breaths showed in the cold. She noticed that, and then for some time she noticed nothing but him: the scrape of a jaw nobody had shaved for two days, the taste of salt, the low sound he made against her mouth that might have been her name and might have been the first note of the subject, going out to see who would answer it.

When she looked up, from habit, towards the end of the garden path, there was a gate and the frost and the town. That was all. She found she could look at it.

She took out her list. “I’ve a nine o’clock in Todmorden.”

“Can I come?”

“There’s no rule against it,” Tess said. “I checked.”

They went down the hill together with the buses, unseen by everyone on them. Jonah carried nothing at all. Tess carried the schedule, and this once she meant to be early for it. He hummed the answer to his fugue the whole way there, in a key it had no business in, on purpose.