TIME OF DEATH
TIME OF DEATH
by Trey Stone
I met him in the back of an ambulance at 3 a.m., with four stab wounds in my chest and a punctured lung. He had a hooked nose, three days’ worth of stubble, and looked utterly normal. His black hair smelled of lye and elderberries.
“You’re Death.”
No wicked grin, no evil laugh. “How did you know?”
I was uncertain. He wore no black cowl, no scythe strapped across his back, but something about the way he worked to save my life told me he was pulling at empty sails. It was an act, and I was going to die.
“How long do I have?” Through the back windows, I saw the streets I knew so well. I had worn out four different sets of wheels in my twelve short years of driving, and I recognized the shadow of the Mahon bridge. The nearest hospital was fifteen minutes away.
“Now that is a good question.” He leaned in close, elbows resting on his knees. “Not long enough—in the grand scheme of things. But humor me for a moment, and I’ll make sure you last long enough for your wife—who’s currently twenty minutes away—to make it to the hospital.” His gaze followed mine out into the night.
He knew about Eleanor. Painful shivers shot down the length of my spine. “What?”
“You have strangely not asked the one question everyone asks.” He prodded me with a bony finger, letting it sink into the flesh of my chest and watching it bounce back, slow and pale. “‘What is it all for?’ It’s the only thing people ever moan about. I’m sick of it. There are so many more interesting questions.” He frowned, and for a brief moment, through those black pinprick eyes, I could see through him. There was an old, weathered darkness there, a ragged being that looked tired of the world.
I wheezed. “What?”
“What is my greatest invention?” He settled one cold hand on my chest, the other playing with medical instruments to my side. My waves of pain subsided, held back by something. The siren blared overhead.
“I have to guess?”
He gave an almost indiscernible nod.
“Blades,” I answered almost immediately, looking down at my chest. Red, dirty blood blotched my shirt. “Knives and swords and lances. The first things we killed each other with.”
“Wrong.” He mouthed the word, swinging his head gently back and forth. “What a silly answer. You’ve hammered sharp things to a point since the dawn of time and haven’t stopped sticking each other with them since. I’ve never created a weapon—that was all you.” He sat up straight and arched his back, cracking his neck from side to side. “I had my hopes up for you.”
Agony flooded back into my chest.
“No, wait.” I bit back against the pain. There was still time if I could make it last. And if I did, I might be able to see Eleanor before it was too late. “Let me try again.”
His eyes narrowed, and a great pressure lifted from my body. “Clock’s ticking. Give me your second guess.”
The ambulance cut a corner and swerved.
My mind was heavy and hazed. Human inventions were off the table, which narrowed my options considerably, but hardly enough. People died every day for hundreds of reasons, but surely Death had a hand in every single one of them. What did he take the most pride in? What single thing reaped the richer harvest? A pained grimace akin to a smile struck my face when it came to me.
“Disease. Plagues. Infections, bacteria, and viruses. Blood clots, strokes, and heart conditions. You invented illness.”
The look in his eyes was either one of consideration, as if he were deliberating whether he would let me off the hook; or one of remembrance, as if he for a moment had forgotten such things even existed and now was entertaining the idea that I was right.
Then the pain came rushing back, and he leaned in close and whispered harshly, “Wrong.” A groan escaped him as he sat back. “A good guess, though. Many fascinating conditions that bring your kind to me. Ischemic heart disease, Ebola, anthrax, cancer, smallpox…” He sighed, and a look passed over his face as if he were reminiscing of better times. The ambulance stopped hard, and life trickled out of me like an overflowing cup of water. He grabbed the end of my bed and pushed me toward the back. “Alas, I am the creator of very few of those.” He kicked the door open with his heel. “Sure, I’ve had my hand in a few, here and there, when I’ve found the opportunity to influence a particularly susceptible mind.” A grin caught his face and bared his teeth. They were pointed now. “But most of that happens on its own. Nature has a delightful way of being exquisitely terrible in its evolution.” He wheeled me inside the hospital. “But no, you’re not quite grasping what I mean by invention. I am no microbiologist or weaponsmith. One more guess—your time’s nearly up.”
Thoughts raced through my head like a broken reel of film, flipping and burning.
What? What is Death most proud of? Cigarettes? Alcohol? Traffic accidents? Jealousy, madness, famine? There are thousands of things!
The pain from bleeding out made it difficult to think.
“Age,” I whispered as he wheeled me behind a white curtain.
“Oh, you’re close.” He grinned, wider than what should have been physically possible if it had been a human soul inhabiting that meager frame. “But I’m sorry, wrong again. And now your time is up.” He held a finger up in the air, ears pricked.
“Adam? Are you here?” a voice cried. It was the sweet, but broken voice of an angel—my wife.
“Right on time,” Death said. “Goodbye, Adam.”
“Wait.” A hoarse whisper was all I managed. “What is it? What’s your greatest invention.” I had to do something to buy more time—appeal to his sense of pride just a little longer. She was right there.
Death leered at me in a way that suggested he considered me nothing but vermin, contemplating whether I was worth the bother. Then he curled down over my bed, his dark shape blanketing me.
“Time,” he whispered with a breath that reeked of rot. “For all the ways I’ve found to collect you, all the ways you have discovered to wring the life from each other, nothing gives me more pleasure than seeing you count down the days toward the end. I don’t have to do a thing anymore. All you can think of is death. You barely even glimpse at your lives anymore, too busy watching the pendulum swing.”
A cold darkness set in my chest.
“And you keep all your tallies yourself. You’ve saturated your lives with calendars, clocks, and time-keeping devices, looking at them nervously and wondering if it will all be worth it, not realizing that while the sand slips away, you forget to bathe in it. Before time, there was just a beginning and an end, and all you had to do in between was exist. Now you desperately cling to every moment, measuring them, weighing their worth. Is it too short or too long? Meaningful or boring? It doesn’t matter. Anniversaries, birthdays, holidays—all notches in the stick of life, counting down to your inevitable demise. Some of you think time is a circle, forever repeating, and some of you think it’s an endless journey from end to end.” He paused, and I could hear the mechanical ticking of the hospital surrounding me. “You’re all wrong. Time is nothing. Just the churning of decay.”
He stood up slowly, regaining his composure at the end of my bed. His black hair was slick against his forehead.
“How much time do I have?”
“Not enough,” he whispered.
“Adam, where are you?” My wife’s voice was a warm summer breeze beyond the white curtains surrounding us.
Death checked his watch and grinned. “Time of death.”
Fiction © Copyright Trey Stone
Base Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
Trey Stone is the author of three novels and a cartload of short stories, and has a made a habit out of writing dark, thrilling stories that don’t pull any punches. He lives in Norway with his wife and enjoys heavy metal, mountain hiking, video games, decent Scotch, and great books. When he’s not writing he’s can be found working at his day job as an archaeologist or daydreaming about his next tattoo.
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