Excerpt: A Harvest of Bad Company

As Mort moved forward, I began to have second thoughts. “Hold on.” I held up a hand to stop him. “I... I don’t know. Will something bad happen to her?”

“Something bad has already happened to her.” Mort replied dryly. “Just about as bad as you can get.”

“No, I mean... will she go to... you know?”

“Will she go to Hell?” Mort asked, and I nodded, brows raised in question. “I don’t control where she ends up. That’s in the review board’s hands.”

“So... if I give her to you, it won’t change what will happen to her after she’s...” I looked for the right word, but couldn’t find it. “...gone?”

“They’re all gonna be burning down the same highway.” Mort leaned against the drawers. “All we’re doing is choosing the on-ramp.”

I frowned. Mort was being particularly evasive. I matched his metaphor with one of my own. “Well quite. But what I want to know is, will this particular on-ramp prove to be as-advertised, paving the way safely to Dorset, or will the poor old bird find herself stuck behind a tanker on the M6, pushing on for Manchester?”

Mort paused a moment, getting his bearings. I admit that it was rather more elaborate than it needed to be. “I haven’t been in the area long, but I think I get the metaphor. I assure you, her and all following referrals will go exactly where they would have all along. They’ve decided their final destination based on how they’ve lived their lives. No one can change that now, certainly not me.”

I looked at the wall of cold steel drawers and thought about my own shortening life span. There was nothing else for it, that would have to be good enough for me. “Alright. It’s a deal.”

Mort nodded and dug in his pocket for a pen, moving forward. I frowned.

“Wait, hold on. Aren’t we going to seal the deal? Shake my hand and infuse me with some life-giving energy or something like that?”

Mort frowned back. “Do I look like a cartoon to you? It’s a deal. I won’t take your soul. That’s it.”

“Oh.” I said, feeling slightly anti-climatic. “Alright. Go ahead then.”

Mort, again, moved towards the dead body, slightly tentatively this time in case he was stopped again. I stood back and let him continue, so he clicked his pen and got down to business.

“Hello, love. You’re dead, I’m afraid.” Mort said to the body. I thought he was just being crass, pretending to talk to the poor dead cancer patient, but when I looked at him to tell him to be a little more sensitive, he almost looked like he was listening. Not to me, to her.

“Can’t tell you that, I’m afraid.” He seemed to be replying to some inaudible question. “You’ll just have to find out when you get there.”

“Did she just..?” I asked in awe, looking at the cold, lifeless body of Olive Somone-or-Other.

“She wants to know if she’s been naughty or nice.” Mort said, fishing in his inside-jacket-pocket and pulling out a stapled set of forms with a piece of carbon paper in the middle.

“Alright, little paperwork to do here, love.” Mort raised his voice and enunciated clearly, just as you do when speaking to the hard-of-hearing elderly. “I said ‘there’s just a little paperwork!’ ‘Paperwork’, love! Forms! I need your name.” He paused, then wrote something down on his form. I craned my neck to see. He’d written next to ‘Name’ in block capitals; OLIVE NICHOLS.

Nichols! That was her surname.

“Good Lord!” I exclaimed. “You really are talking to her, aren’t you?”

“Yep.” He moved on to the next box. “Date of birth?” Pause. “Cripes. Well done lasting this long.”

He filled in the rest of the form, then I watched as he tore off the back slip and held it up in the air, where it vanished. I’ve never seen anything so uncanny happen right in front of me. “Take that, go towards the light, and give it to the lady at the front desk. She’s a lovely woman called Maude. She’ll make sure you know where you’re going.”

I found myself following Olive’s invisible trail out of the morgue, out of the world and into the light. I hadn’t seen anything, but I think I had felt it.

“That’s it?” I asked Mort as he tucked the forms back into his inside-coat pocket.

“That’s it.” He nodded. “Surprisingly easy thing, death. You don’t realize it ‘til you’re in the business.”