Death missed its appointment and this immortality has made Vance Monroe bitter. Lives have come and gone, but he remains; held together by surgery and science.
Substitute organs fill the space of what should be a hollow and decomposed corpse. Modern medicine reverses the flooding failures of aging.
Vance stares at himself in the mirror, looking at a youthful stranger. A stranger whose pain is not reflected by the searing scars on his body, but by the engulfing emptiness in his eyes.
Pages turned on generations of souls vanquished in a life where Vance’s family and friends were relieved of their earthly duties long before he had to beg for Death’s deliverance to maintain his sanity.
All this, a secret known only to him and to Death.
He resides in London, where he has learned to practice his loneliness — his heart as cold as cobblestone, but his hope for eternal rest ablaze as a hearth.
The evidence of his unnatural presence is seen through the unwelcoming behavior of the life around him: birds perch afar, gazing, silencing their cheerful chirps whenever he draws near; dogs, cats, horses, and other creatures avoid Vance as if he left a plagued trail behind him with every step he takes in his erroneous existence.
Suicide never an option and each accident, disease and disaster, Vance has healed and survived — increasingly begrudged as time goes by with each day progressing from mediocre to mundane, from undesired to unbearable.
The halls of his house harbor the memories of his wife’s harmonious hymns; a lingering fog, obscuring his senses.
To fan the fog from his mind, he sits at the piano where he and his wife sat long ago as he played beautiful, cheerful chords and his wife sang lyrics of the like.
As he plays, the halls now seep with atrocious, agonizing sounds. The piano that once was an instrument of his passion is now the tool of torment he uses to remind himself of what once was, and of what pain is.
He plays the piano for a forgotten and abandoned audience in the city, in the last stop between Earth and Hell. A place filled with sinners and derelicts that fill their ears with Vance’s torturous tune, and their stomachs with deadening drink.
The music tonight will be especially soulful, permeating pain. No matter the fact that time is irrelevant to Vance, time cannot erase memories and can at times resurrect them.
Today is the date of his wife’s passing. Not of the passing of her body, but of the withering of her will. A day that led to the slow death of her soul, her mind and her heart.
News long ago turned her hymns of hope turned into diatribes of despair when they learned that she was with child, but there was a complication and she had to decide if she or the unborn should live.
Vance tried to persuade her that they could try anew, that the sacrifice was not necessary. His wife rejected that offer with a stern tone in her voice, choosing to save the child.
Pathetically pacing in the waiting room, Vance expects to hear polarizing news.
The doctor admits the outcome is not what was determined: the child is dead.
As Vance ran in to see his wife, the air grew from cold to frigid and when he entered the room he saw the eyes of a shattered soul. He saw the loss of all things that once made his wife alive, years before her body followed.
Since that day, Vance has understood anguish. Death had taken his child, and his wife soon after, and yet Death neglects him after it has taken everything else; giving Vance the punishment of purgatory.
Vance forgot how many years ago it happened, all he remembers is the day. The only event he celebrates yearly — his horrid holiday.
He kicks the clumped snow as he treads sluggishly home. As he rises up the stone steps of his home and enters the door, he can’t help but feel like eyes are upon him, possibly the judgmental eyes of a citizen of the city that looks down on the scorn-ridden hermit Vance has become.
Locking the door behind him, he walks straight to the piano to continue his mournful celebration. As the unsteady notes assault his ears and the paralyzed household comes alive with agony, he hears what seems to be a knock at the door.
Questions race through his mind: Who would call upon a man with no connection to the world around him? — A man so willfully deserted he hasn’t spoken in years?
The knocking begins to sound more like a scathing scratching of the wooden door — the sound of nihilistic nails rupturing the entrance.
Vance opens the door and in front of him, by his feet, is a dog. A curious canine so full of fur that even its eyes are obscured and whose tail wags more the longer he’s in front of Vance.
Bewildered, Vance closes the door immediately; unable to understand why after so many decades of neglect he finally sees an act of compassion by this world toward him.
He runs straight to the piano to continue where he left off, except this time there is a vibration in the tune as his hands shake incomprehensibly. He asks himself if this is the lost symptom of fear while he tries to force the music from his hands.
A howl penetrates the household, joining Vance in a saddening symphony.
Unable to understand why he’s afraid of such an expressive gesture by a kind creature, his wretched, weary tune turns into a repertoire of enraged rhythm as he beats down relentlessly on the keys; the piercing howl following the lead of the stampede.
He continues his explosive display and is stunned to witness a dampening of the pianos keys. He puts his hands on his face and feels streaks of tears.
He runs to the mirror to see whether or not there was evidence of his humanity left.
Vance was not greeted by the youthful stranger he’d grown accustomed to, but by a sad, sobbing old man. He sees a feeble body with a frail and skeletal complexion slowly filling with the pains of aging. The longer he stares at the mirror, the more he seems to age. His hearing becoming hum and vision dim, he walks to open the door for the animal that helped him transform.
The dog darts within and jumps on top of the piano — Vance follows.
The dog’s tail wags rhythmically as a metronome and waits patiently for Vance to sit and play. His hands finally finding the keys and playing, but not songs of heartache and sorrow, but songs of love and adoration he and his wife shared together so many years ago.
The dog wails, joining this orchestra of emotion and Vance’s aged eyes pour pain on the piano, dousing it with decades of angst.
Vance becomes weaker as his senses slip away, but he continues to play, and the dog to howl. He feels warmth from within as he begins to fade, and a smile emerges from his face.
The world around Vance darkens.
The howling stops.
Vance’s hands lift from the piano as his eyes look around to find the cause of this deafening darkness.
The dog stares blankly in his direction, unmoved. Vance reaches out his bony hand to pet the creature but becomes motionless when he sees a shadowed silhouette at the end of the blackened hallway.
His blurred eyes cannot determine exactly what is present, but this obtuse, opaque shape grows as it seemingly moves toward Vance. He feels scalding steam on his skin as it approaches slowly and his vision focuses more on this silhouette as his peripherals darken.
The dark shadow stands in front of Vance.
The shadow lifts what seems to be an arm and vindictively points at Vance, making his resurrected heart sink.
The shadow looks away.
It now points at the animal as it moves its arm slowly toward it, steam still emitting.
Like a sparked fuse waiting to ignite a catastrophe, the hand reaches the trembling, terrified animal.
The shadow lifts the veil of fur that covered the dog’s eyes and reveals an abyss of darkness that robbed the animal of affection and revealed its disposition to the damned.
Vance can hear echoed wailing as the creature hypnotizes him. A chill moves gently along his spine and he feels as if a thousand souls claw at him.
The dog releases a shrieking cry and the shadow moves a breath away from Vance. From its darkness emerges an aged, weathered book; a heavy text with writing in Latin on the cover that Vance cannot comprehend.
Vance reaches out and puts his hand on the side of the book to open it; the dog’s tail begins to wag again. He opens the book and from the text, from each character, begins pouring out blood like a river flowing outward into an estuary.
The blood keeps pouring from the book as it forms a pool on the floor that begins to churn and swirl.
This maelstrom of blood latches on and begins to devour the shadow. Vance hears the dog let out a compassionate whimper.
The hot steam that engulfed the shadow is becoming a refreshing breeze as the dog releases one final, thunderous howl.
There is light in the room again and all that remains is Vance, the dog and the book.
The dog is pacified, wagging its tail and panting excitedly. Vance instinctively smiles at the decrepit creature.
As he holds the book, a new shadow moves from within it and up his arm, spreading throughout his body, consuming Vance. He looks down onto book and sees a small amount of remaining text, converging and transforming from Latin into something recognizable:
“Unto you, foretold obligation.
Free this soul from innate damnation.
Affliction carried one thousand years.
Tested harbinger for the hallowed frontier.
Now your burden, one day released.
Bring to others eternal peace.
Last trace of humanity: your final breath.
Embrace darkness as you become Death.”
As the pages of the book slam down, a blinding gust of dust overcomes the room. Vance vanished and only the dog remaining as it shakes off the dust from its fur.
The dog yawns as it exits the house; snout in the wind, sniffing the world over, unseen — looking for the next anguished soul worthy of the ordained burden for the following millennia.
Originally written in 2014.