Jason opened his eyes slowly and looked up to find himself seated in front of an old fashioned solid oak desk. Behind the desk sat a black silk boxer's dressing gown with the hood up, or at least, that's what he thought until he saw the scythe leaning against the back of the chair. Strangely, he too was wearing a robe, but his was hospital white. His mind cleared quite quickly after that.
"Good morning."
The voice, deep and funereal, seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.
"Er! Good morning." Jason replied, looking around nervously and wondering just who he was replying to. The room he was in seemed to be a large oak panelled and shelf lined study, the shelves filled with row upon row of black bound and gold lettered ledgers.
The figure behind the desk looked up and folded its arms on the blotter before it, skeletal hands protruding gloomily from the sleeves. For some reason the fact that the black hood of the robe seemed empty didn't alarm Jason at all, he simply regarded the dark space inside the hood as if it were a face and waited for something to happen.
"I am Death." The sepulchral voice explained. "And I expect you're wondering why you are here?"
"Death?" Jason raised his eyebrows quizzically.
"Yes, Death. You know, the Grim Reaper. I'm sure you've heard of me?"
"Heard of you, yes. I just wasn't expecting to meet you, not yet at least."
It was slowly dawning on Jason that he was in fact dead.
"Nor would you have, if you hadn't decided to screw your neighbour's daughter just as he was expected home from work."
"Oh, so that's what happened!"
He had a vague recollection of the sound of a door being thrown open behind the bed just as his balls were tightening in readiness to empty themselves into the eager pussy of the flaxen haired and eighteen year old Natalie. There had been nothing he could do about it, his own urge to ram his cock deeper into that warm wet sheath was far stronger than his desire to look over his shoulder at her outraged father, even if the long slim legs locked around his waist and the tensile steel fingers digging furrows into his shoulders would have let him.
"In fact." Death was continuing. "You shouldn't be here yet at all. You weren't scheduled for a good few years, but even the best of us can't foresee everything. The bullet was supposed to miss you and take out Natalie instead, but you both came at that very moment and your bucking and fucking radically improved her father's aim, with the result that you are here now instead of her."
"So she's alive?" Jason was strangely relieved.
"Oh yes! The bullet was pretty well spent when it hit her. She'll have a scar over her left ear, but apart from that she's fine now."
"Fine now?"
"Yes. You both spent a fortnight in intensive care, but while she got better, I'm afraid you didn't. Nine days I spent sitting beside your beds wondering which of you I would be escorting away. That's nine days out of a very busy schedule, I'll have you know."
"Oh! Sorry. So what happens now?"
Jason felt tentatively all around the back of his skull, but everything seemed intact. But then, he supposed, it wouldn't have been very good for him to be trailing bits of brain and bone behind him.
"Well I'm afraid the records at the Pearly Gates aren't as up to date as one might wish, so you'll have to stay here for a while."
"And where, exactly, is here?"
"Here? Didn't you realise? This is Purgatory, it's where everyone stays if either they aren't ready to move on or their destination isn't yet ready to accept them."
"And I guess I fall into the second category?"
"I'm afraid so."
"A bit of a cock up in both senses then!"
"Yes, I suppose so, but look on the bright side; at least you haven't gone downstairs -- not yet anyway."
"That's true." Jason acknowledged, thinking back briefly to a short but happy twenty-seven year life spent mostly drinking and fornicating and hearing the 'not yet' part of Death's words.
"And I'm going to offer you a job that -- if it's done well -- might help improve your chances of not going there when your proper time comes."
The cathedral like voice was beginning to grate on Jason's nerves, but the message sounded hopeful.
"A job?"
The cowl nodded.
"I'm going to assign you to the Unfinished Business (Sexual) Department. Natalie was singing your praises as a lover while she was in her coma." Death paused. "Well, actually she was mumbling your praises, and her parents were not very amused, especially when she described how good your tongue is. Her mother was quite perturbed, judging by the way she wriggled in her seat. Anyway, that's why you're being offered this job."
"But what job? What would I have to do?"
"Yes, of course. You're new here, aren't you? So you wouldn't know."
"Know what?"
"What I'm going to tell you."
That was a conversation that could have gone around in circles for eternity, but even Death couldn't spare that much time and so he went on to give an explanation.
"We have a young lady with us at the moment who is kind of overstaying her welcome. The problem is that she was saving herself, in the sexual sense, for the right man to come along, but unfortunately I came along instead, summoned by a seven ton truck that wanted to occupy the same bit of road as she did, and at the same time. Now she finds it difficult to accept that she's dead and, not to put too fine a point on it, stubbornly refuses to move on until she's had at least one good fucking. She is not prepared to miss out on the experience, she tells me, and I can't change her mind."
The cowl regarded Jason gravely.
"Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to seduce and satisfy this young woman, and to give her that one good fucking that she's waiting for. This offer will self destruct in five seconds, would you be interested?"
"Well, yes, of course I would."
Jason had visions of a beautiful young virgin desperate for him to deflower her.
"You won't have long to do it in, you see I can't be doing with dissatisfied customers stuck around the place for all eternity."
"That's ok. I can cope with that, I'm a pretty quick worker. But what if she doesn't fancy me?"
"Oh, but she will. I can make sure she does. You will appear to her as her dream lover, the very man she was waiting for, so you won't have to worry about that. So, do you want to give it a go? Make her happy enough and you might earn yourself a place upstairs."
"Yeah, ok, why not?"
"Good man. Wait a minute, I've just got to give someone an extra few years -- he's been good to his mother you see -- and then I'll take you along to the department."
Death reached out his bony fingers and turned over a large black hourglass that stood on a shelf behind him.
"Good deeds bring rewards, isn't that what they say?" He asked Jason rhetorically, by way of explanation.
"Right, let's go." With a little clacking and rattling of skeletal parts, Death raised himself from the chair and set off on bare foot bones for the door.
Out of the door they were in a long, seemingly endless corridor that stretched off in both directions, the same dark oak panelling lining its walls. Death turned smartly left and set of at a quick march pace that Jason struggled to match.
"Slow down a bit." He pleaded, quickly running out of breath.
Death looked down at him and the empty cowl nodded in understanding.
"Sorry. I get used to travelling light." He told Jason, slowing down and at the same time peeling back a sleeve to reveal the dry bones of his arms. "I forget you've got all that flesh to cart around."
The corridor had seemed without either beginning or end, but within a hundred yards they came across a junction, the panelled walls carrying direction signs in black Gothic lettering shadowed in red.
'Unfinished Business' the main notice proclaimed, with sectional signs fastened below it. Apparently, to the right were 'Revenge' and 'Forgiveness', while the sign to the left announced 'Sexual' and 'Financial'. 'Everything Else', a third sign told them, lay straight ahead.
Death swung left and Jason followed.
"What do the other sections deal with?" He asked.
"Well, Financial is mostly things like Wills and such like, or people who've salted money away and forgotten to tell anyone where it is."
The corridor seemed to amplify the echo in Death's voice.
"Revenge is what it says, and so is Forgiveness. In both cases it's most often the way people arrived here that triggers off their need for these sections. We get a lot of clients who need a psychic to take a message to those who helped them leave the mortal world, stating that they either do or don't forgive them. You wouldn't believe some of the requests we get, especially from the Revenge Section. It makes a Reaper's bones rattle, it surely does." Death's robe shook slightly at the thought, and a demonstration of rattling bones could be heard. "They're by far the largest sections, and the most clear cut. Almost all Forgiveness clients go upstairs and almost all Revenge seekers are on their way down, though it's not set in stone of course."
Death swung open his arms in an all encompassing gesture as he marched along.
"And obviously, 'Everything Else' is everything else."
Another junction loomed up ahead. This time it was simply Financial to the left and Sexual to the right. They swung sharp right, Jason needing no prompting this time.
Before then now lay another long corridor, but this one had doors set into both sides at regular six foot intervals. Death led the way to the first door on the right and turned the handle.
"This is your apartment." He told Jason, pushing the door open.
It was indeed his apartment, the one he had left behind seemingly only a short time ago to climb into bed with the delectable Natalie. But somehow the dimensions of the inside did not quite match those of the outside. Behind the door his lounge stretched much further than the six feet to the next door. A bemused Jason shook his head and entered.
The apartment was just as he had left it, except that the doors to the kitchen and bathroom were simply not where they should be. The bedroom was there, and off that the shower, but of a kitchen or a toilet there was no sign.
