Read Online Forever After (a dark and funny fantasy novel) by David Jester - Free Book Online

past Michael the sullen reaper released a drawn-out sigh, allowing the memories that had rapidly reformed at the sight of his old friend to fade into his breath and disperse.
     
    ****
     
                  The main street that snaked through the centre of Brittleside was a boarded up shadow of its former self, or so Michael had been told many times. It was how he had always known it to be: rundown, empty, grimy and dilapidated. He didn’t doubt that at one time the buildings had been open and the street had thrived with life and activity, but the only difference between now and thirty years ago were an extra board or two.
                  He checked his timer anxiously. He was late. He was rarely late, but when he was it didn’t usually matter, the dead had nowhere to go, and they couldn’t go anywhere when he wasn’t around to guide them. There was nothing stopping him from going home and leaving a spirit of the recently deceased to wander aimlessly around his own place of death, and it had been known to happen to far more experienced reapers than Michael, but the people at the top, whoever they were, wouldn’t be impressed. He needed to make as many good impressions as he could, otherwise he’d be the one stuck patrolling those streets, left to wonder aimlessly around the spot where he allowed his eternal soul to die the night he agreed to immortality.
                  He picked up his pace when he saw the entrance to the park. A night-time rain and a light morning shower had sprinkled the grass with tips of dew that spat at the bottom of his jeans as he walked, soaking them by the time he reached his destination.
                  He saw the body first. The man had been shot a dozen times, his wounds filled with drying blood which had painted the moist grass green underneath his thick figure.
                  He checked his timer again. On it were the vague details of every death he had to deal with in the coming days, every soul that was about to commit itself to the afterlife. The rest, the semantics of death, came through an intuition that coursed through Michael like a second soul. There were exceptions of course, only on rare occasions could he anticipate murder, where the free will of others was involved, and that rarity faded to an impossibility when the hand of immortals, or non-humans, played a part.
                  In thirty years he had been to less than fifty murders, and he had only foreseen two of them: a drug deal turned violent and a drunken domestic which had resulted in a beaten wife stabbing her abusive husband. For the others, the timer flashed him a warning moments before the event, giving him a matter of minutes to get to get to the scene and transport the soul. Although it didn’t matter if he was late. More than once he had taken his time to drag his weary self to the scene after being woken by the dreading chirp of the timer.
                  He glanced around. He expected to see the soul hovering over his body, but there was no one there. If he had wandered off he would return. Like a murderer to the scene of the crime, they always came back, but Michael couldn’t afford to wait around. He had been around enough murder scenes to know that people had a way of ignoring him; it wasn’t that he was invisible, they could see him and he was sure they had, but they seemed almost entranced by his presence. He could step back, blend in with a waiting crowd and chat amongst the people there, but if he was found standing over the body looking suspicious, he was ignored.
                  It made his job a lot easier, but he still didn’t like to hang around. There was much emotion around death and when it came to murder that emotion was usually unbridled fear and morbid curiosity, two of the human emotions that made Michael feel sickly uneasy.
                  He peered into the forest, lit from all