Jessica should have known what she was getting herself into when she managed to summon the physical embodiment of death in the staff section of the Palooska Beach Park & Funatorium's Haunted Hellhole. The newspaper clipping she'd found on the reverse side of a story about her grandmother's famous cake told her exactly what kind of place she needed to be in to call death and ask them one thing.
The article said it had to be a place of joyous fear where the salt of tears meets the salt of the world which sounded like utter nonsense for a good while until another accident occurred on the helter skelter. Seems whoever greased the slide did their job too well and a child went flying from thirty feet up and down into the sea. Gone for good.
It wasn't hard for her to get a job there - they were desperate for young people whose minimum wage was a great deal less than someone trained in basic health and safety. After a ten minute tour of the Funatorium she was given a grubby shirt with the park's logo and told to wait for her ride mentor in the usual generic haunted house ride that every beach park seemed to have with minimal alternations.
After two hours Jessica assumed her mentor wasn't coming and began to plan how she would set up the summoning to ask the embodiment of death where everyone went when they died. She wasn't hoping for heaven or hell but the idea that there was some kind of eventual peace made the thought of dying a little less worrisome for her.
After her fifth "shift" (which consisted of hiding in the staff room and not seeing anybody other than the guy her age who let people on and off the ride with as little enthusiasm as was humanly possible) she started to set up the summoning. Her coworkers never bothered with the staff room there, it had nothing in it other than two chairs and a NO SMOKING sign.
According the the article she had to set up at least one chair and then use blood (hers was pig's blood from the local butcher) to write down the hierarchy of humans which was detailed at the end of the page. From there she only had to wait until a line had been scratched over each hierarchy except the one that she inhabited. That's when the embodiment of death would appear sitting in the chair waiting to answer her question.
She never expected it to work, never thought she'd see the grime and dust on the floor swirl until it formed a humanoid skeleton whose teeth were all wrong for a human, who had five eye sockets and a cloud of filth floating about them like a scarf caught in a sharp fluttering breeze.
After several tense minutes of stiff silence (death could wait forever, time meant nothing to the unaging) she stuttered out her question, finally asking if there was anything after death, anything like a heaven or hell. She didn't think that death would open its jaws with a loud crack and laugh like bellows full of cotton and gravel.
Death told her that there was an afterlife much like the one she was living. An eternity of waiting in uncomfortable places while everyone either looks through you or looks at you like you aren't supposed to be there. The dead crowd around staircases and pretend they are still alive, they squeeze onto packed trains and suck the breath out of the entire compartment in the vaguest hopes that they'll gain company.
Death mocked her for thinking that an afterlife could somehow be greater than her present life. What had she ever done to deserve eternal peace over another person whose life had given them no choice but to become crueller than anyone else in their pitiful lives? Death's final parting words were to tell her to burn the article and forget about living a "good" life.
She'd be no different from the countless legions of the dead who were swarming her even then.
The article said it had to be a place of joyous fear where the salt of tears meets the salt of the world which sounded like utter nonsense for a good while until another accident occurred on the helter skelter. Seems whoever greased the slide did their job too well and a child went flying from thirty feet up and down into the sea. Gone for good.
It wasn't hard for her to get a job there - they were desperate for young people whose minimum wage was a great deal less than someone trained in basic health and safety. After a ten minute tour of the Funatorium she was given a grubby shirt with the park's logo and told to wait for her ride mentor in the usual generic haunted house ride that every beach park seemed to have with minimal alternations.
After two hours Jessica assumed her mentor wasn't coming and began to plan how she would set up the summoning to ask the embodiment of death where everyone went when they died. She wasn't hoping for heaven or hell but the idea that there was some kind of eventual peace made the thought of dying a little less worrisome for her.
After her fifth "shift" (which consisted of hiding in the staff room and not seeing anybody other than the guy her age who let people on and off the ride with as little enthusiasm as was humanly possible) she started to set up the summoning. Her coworkers never bothered with the staff room there, it had nothing in it other than two chairs and a NO SMOKING sign.
According the the article she had to set up at least one chair and then use blood (hers was pig's blood from the local butcher) to write down the hierarchy of humans which was detailed at the end of the page. From there she only had to wait until a line had been scratched over each hierarchy except the one that she inhabited. That's when the embodiment of death would appear sitting in the chair waiting to answer her question.
She never expected it to work, never thought she'd see the grime and dust on the floor swirl until it formed a humanoid skeleton whose teeth were all wrong for a human, who had five eye sockets and a cloud of filth floating about them like a scarf caught in a sharp fluttering breeze.
After several tense minutes of stiff silence (death could wait forever, time meant nothing to the unaging) she stuttered out her question, finally asking if there was anything after death, anything like a heaven or hell. She didn't think that death would open its jaws with a loud crack and laugh like bellows full of cotton and gravel.
Death told her that there was an afterlife much like the one she was living. An eternity of waiting in uncomfortable places while everyone either looks through you or looks at you like you aren't supposed to be there. The dead crowd around staircases and pretend they are still alive, they squeeze onto packed trains and suck the breath out of the entire compartment in the vaguest hopes that they'll gain company.
Death mocked her for thinking that an afterlife could somehow be greater than her present life. What had she ever done to deserve eternal peace over another person whose life had given them no choice but to become crueller than anyone else in their pitiful lives? Death's final parting words were to tell her to burn the article and forget about living a "good" life.
She'd be no different from the countless legions of the dead who were swarming her even then.
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