Charles Frederick
GRIM FANDANGO
An Epic Tale of Crime and Corruption in the Land of the Dead
3rd Edition, April 2011
PROLOGUE
Enter Dying
Everything began when I died. Life, well, I fouled that up but good. Death gave me a second chance I had never expected, so that’s where I’m beginning, carnal: Judgment Day.
Death was something I saw coming. The surprise came after. When the reaper handling my case brought me in, he told me that I had to stay in the Land of the Dead for a while yet. Since I hadn’t expected there to even be a Land of the Dead, I needed an explanation. But I didn’t get one. Not really. Not one that made much sense at first. The reaper told me that I had a debt to work off, a moral debt, and I asked him what the hell he meant by that. “Mr. Calavera…” the reaper began.
“Call me Manny,” I said.
The reaper didn’t smile, not even counting the perpetual skeletal grin; and yet I sensed, somehow, that he would have been smiling if he could have done. “Manny,” he said. “With a record like yours, you won’t be allowed to continue on to the Ninth Underworld. Not yet. Not until you make your life balance out.”
I noticed he hadn’t really answered the question. “Suppose I walk or hitch a lift?” I asked. “Forget the train or bus or whatever.” I figured there had to be an out. There was always an out. Knowing that had made me the man I am to… oh. Right.
“Manny, please listen to me,” the reaper said, leaning forward and putting an earnest hand on my shoulder. “Do not try to leave town. Not ever.” He took his hand away to drop it, clenched, into his lap. “That would be the proverbial fate worse than death.” A tone of sad regret had crept into his voice.
I fumbled with my fifth cigarette since I was brought in, trying to cover up the shaking of my fleshless hands. The other man’s gesture and change of voice had gotten to me. “You’re not shitting me, are you? There really are worse things than being stuck in a world of the walking dead?”
“Yes, Manny,” he assured me. “Much worse.”
I took a deep drag on the cigarette. Then another. Maybe, I thought, just maybe looking for the out wasn’t such a hot idea. I mean, when you consider just where that had gotten me so far. “So, about this debt,” I finally managed to ask, “how do I pay it off?”
“You will work for the Department of Death. As a reaper.”
“¡Híjole!”
I don’t have any trouble admitting that they scared the hell out of me: the reaper who handled my case, the trainers, everybody involved in the whole situation. I was shit-my-pants terrified. Once the reaper was finished with me I was taken to the DOD training facility and locked down. They put me in this tiny, windowless room (maybe even doorless, too, once it had been shut) and left me for… I don’t know how long. It seemed like days but it was probably less than an hour. Then a trainer came in and outlined what my fate was going to be in the most brutal terms possible—for the state of mind I was in, anyway. Maybe she was just being factual. I don’t know. She told me stories about souls that remained in the Land of the Dead for centuries, even millennia. And about those who never left. I was already feeling restless, ready to move on, and the plain thought of staying was torture all by itself, never mind the horror stories. By the time the practical part of the training began, I was most definitely ready to be a good boy.
After the initial orientation/scare-the-new-guy part ended they issued me a scythe, a hooded black robe and abject humiliation. A reaper is supposed to be imposing. Sometimes a soul has to be overawed, almost spiritually bullied, before it will follow you out of the Land of the Living; but with these stumpy legs of mine I don’t make much of an impression, so the DOD gave me these things to wear that added almost a foot to my height. It took about half an hour of falling on my coccyx before I could even cross the room. I wouldn’t have minded so much except it was part of my official training and I did those thirty minutes of pratfalls in front of more than a dozen other trainees. But I put up with it, making out like they were laughing with me rather than at me. Having decided it was finally time to play by the rules, I found I could accept being humiliated. And after the training was finished they assigned me an office in the Bureau of Acquisitions and a driver.
“Why do I need a driver?” I had asked the trainer.
“If the company let you guys drive,” he said, “you’d all be AWOL in ten minutes.”
“Got me there,” one of the other trainees cracked.
My driver turned out to be a large demon with fuzzy blue skin that was about five sizes too big for him. He looked like nothing so much as a six-foot-tall Shar-Pei. For some reason his name was Endive. And didn’t the demon part take some getting used to.
“There are two basic kinds of demons,” our trainer told us. “Those who help souls and those who want to rip you apart.”
“And how do you tell the difference?” another guy asked. “Before the chiropractic begins, I mean.”
The trainer went hmpf and said, “You won’t have to worry about that for a long time. All of the demons here in El Marrow are the friendly sort. But if any of you step even one inch beyond the city limits you will, I guarantee, quickly learn what the words ‘eternal torment’ really and truly mean.”
Endive was definitely the friendly sort of demon. Quiet, very respectful, and thoroughly unhelpful.
“Hey, carnal, let’s go for a ride,” I might say to him on any given day.
“Sorry, sir,” Endive would reply, “but the car’s having it’s tires rotated.”
And he would keep on like that. If I didn’t want the car for official purposes it was getting a lube job, the timing belt was being adjusted or the horn was being tuned. Any and every lame excuse was brought out as a reason not to go for a joy ride. Eventually, I caught on. “You’re just making excuses, aren’t you?” I accused him one day after he fed me another slice of bullshit.
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. The company won’t let me drive you anywhere except to and from the Land of the Living. If I break the rules I could lose my job.” He said that like it was the worst thing in the world.
“Why didn’t you just say so at the beginning?”
“I don’t like to disobey, sir.”
“But you can lie, apparently.”
“Yes, sir, but please don’t tell anyone.”
I hid my phantom smile by taking a puff on my cigarette. “Still, you can drive whenever you feel like it if I’m not in the car, right?” I’d seen Endive tearing around the streets of El Marrow and he knew it.
“Oh, yes, sir. I have to drive.”
“Have to?”
“I’m an elemental, sir, a spirit of the land. It’s what I was made for.”
“So let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re saying you were created just to drive cars? You have a purpose in being and you know what it is?”
“Oh, yes, sir!” Endive answered enthusiastically.
That piece of news didn’t exactly make my day. By the time this conversation took place I was past fear and into bitter. Finding out that demons knew what their purpose in life was… this was not something I wanted to know. ‘If only I could have known that kind of thing when I was alive,’ I kept thinking, ‘I wouldn’t be in this mess now.’ But, eventually, I got over it and I settled into the job of picking up souls in the Land of the Living and trying to sell them the best travel packages they qualified for.