The Big Reap

THEN

The last thing I remembered was dying.

Autumn, 1944. A bitter cold October day. A bustling Manhattan street. Me invisible among the throng, one of the many homeless and bedraggled whose presence is willfully undetected by those more fortunate than they, as if the condition were contagious and acknowledgment the mode of transmission. I’d spent my last few weeks among the living camped outside my beloved Elizabeth’s new abode, desperate for even a glimpse of her — for she refused to see me, too, though her reasons were far better than those of the passers-by. I’d spent my nights inside a bottle, hoping whatever rotgut I could lay my hands on would soothe my soul and dull the aching chill that leeched upward through the park benches and concrete stoops upon which I lay my head.

But there was nothing I could do to soothe my soul. Because that soul was no longer mine to soothe. I’d bargained it away to a demon named Dumas in a desperate attempt to save my dying wife. It worked, for what it’s worth. But I was unprepared for what it wound up costing.

She’d been sick — tuberculosis. Latent for years, and then it wasn’t. Liz tried to put on a brave face, but it was no use. I could see her wasting away before me, her pallor growing gray. She tried to hide her red-flecked handkerchiefs from me so I wouldn’t worry. I worried plenty. Back then, full-blown tuberculosis was a death sentence, and when you’re as dirt-poor as we were, that death was bound to be anything but pretty. I tried to fix that, to make some scratch so we could afford to take her to a decent doctor, but work was hard to come by for a gimp like me. See, a few years back, in San Francisco, me and my union at the foundry walked the picket line for safer work conditions and better wages. At least until our boss sent in some strike-breakers who took their job too literally and busted up my knee but good. That picket line’s the last I ever walked without a limp.

Elizabeth was getting sicker by the day, and I was out of options, so I reached out to a local Staten Island hustler by the name of Johnnie Morhaim, who hooked me up with a gig as an errand-boy for union-guy-slash-mobster Walter Dumas. Dumas assured me he could help us, that he could get Elizabeth well. All I had to do was say the word.

Problem was, Dumas, aside from running rallies and rackets from Riverdale to Rockaway Beach, also happened to be a demon — not that I realized it at the time — and my half of our handshake deal was my immortal soul.

Dumas got Elizabeth into an experimental drug trial — some newfangled antibiotic called streptomycin — and I wound up Dumas’ errand boy. Which is to say, I had my fingers in a lot of rotten pies — political payoffs, drug smuggling, a brass-knuckled lesson here and there. All justifiable in my mind, because I was helping get Elizabeth well. All anathema to Elizabeth, who slipped away from me with every act of corruption I committed.

I realized that too late. Mistook Dumas for the problem, blamed him for Elizabeth’s cold distance — when really, it was me. I’d chosen this path. I’d allowed myself to be corrupted. But I didn’t see that then. All I kept coming back to was: end Dumas, and all my problems go away.

I had no idea how wrong I was.

I ain’t the most educated guy you’ll ever meet. Never been much for reading fancy literature; dimestore potboilers are more my speed which is to say, I never had the finest grasp on the concept of irony. Until Dumas gave me a master-class, that is. See, I shot Dumas dead, or so I thought — only it didn’t take, since he’s not of this mortal coil. But when I did it, I was certain I was taking a human life. I’d crossed a line you can’t uncross, and the blood I spilled — though fruitless, since the son of a bitch was no worse off for it — served to seal my devil’s bargain, condemning me to eternal damnation.

If that ain’t irony, I don’t know what is.

Of course, that evil bastard let me think him dead long enough to confess to my Elizabeth that I had killed him. After that, she couldn’t so much as look at me. Couldn’t stomach what I’d done, what I’d become. She threw me out, and who could blame her? I was no longer the man she married. As far as we both knew, I was a murderer.

Eventually, she got well, moved on. Shacked up with some doctor from her drug trial. I told myself it was more for comfort and security than love, as if it mattered, as if it eased the pain a whit. Whatever it was that drove her into his arms, hell let me kick around long enough to watch it happen from afar before finally cashing in its chit on that cold October city street.

It was early evening. The sidewalk was packed. Liz was carrying a bag of groceries as she walked briskly down the street toward the apartment she and Chet — for in my mind, that’s what I’d dubbed the toothsome oaf — shared. I’d been living on the streets some time by then — drunk, sickly, and feverish — and though I spent my every waking moment trying to catch a glimpse of her, I must have drifted off a while, because I hadn’t seen her leave.

We hadn’t spoken since the night of my confession. There was nothing left for me to say — Elizabeth had made that excruciatingly clear. But on that day — the day of my death — her face was downcast, her brow furrowed in worry, and in that moment I wondered if she was thinking of me.

As she passed, I called to her.

When she heard my voice, Liz spun around, her grocery bag falling forgotten to the sidewalk. I watched her peer into the crowd, searching for my face, but with my ratty hair and my twisted scraggle of a beard, she didn’t see me looking back at her.

But I saw. I saw too much. I saw the weight she carried in her cheeks, rounding out her face and glowing pink in the chill autumn air. I saw the round swell of her belly, protruding from beneath her woolen jacket. And in that moment, I understood. Why she had pushed me away. Why she’d been forced to let me go.

She’d been protecting her child. Protecting our child.

Protecting it from the killer I’d become.

It was then, as I stood staring at the woman that I loved and the unborn child I’d never know, that hell’s minion struck.

Hunched inside his woolen overcoat beneath a low-slung pageboy cap, he looked just like any other man on that busy city street, with two exceptions. One: where the others’ eyes slid right off of me, his locked on and never deviated. And two: where most folks’ hands were glove-clad or thrust deep into their pockets to protect against the cold, his were bare and exposed.

When he reached me, I found out why.

At first, I thought nothing of him running headlong into me. My focus was on Elizabeth, and he seemed nothing more than a rude New York pedestrian, not watching where he was going. Then he plunged his hand into my chest, a mad cackle escaping his lips.

His fingers clawed at my soul. The pain was excruciating, and I shrieked in sudden agony, though the many passers-by seemed not to notice. Then they and the world around me disappeared, replaced by a swirling gray-black — he and I at the center, locked in a morbid, blasphemous embrace.

And as he gouged my soul free from my chest, my body collapsing lifeless to the sidewalk, I could swear I heard Elizabeth call out, one heartbreaking syllable, her voice tremulous and full of hope: “Sam?”

But she was too late.

I was gone.

Dead.

And for a time, there was nothing.

Blissful. Horrible. Absolute.

Then I woke to the sound of rolling thunder.

Its bass-drum boom shook the walls and ceiling of the dingy tenement apartment in which I found myself, loosing patters of plaster-droppings from the patches of bare wooden laths that dotted the cracked and broken ceiling above like exposed ribs. Its vibrations rattled upward through the cool porcelain beneath me. A bathtub, I realized, freestanding in the corner of the room beside the tiny kitchen, with a curling lip of smooth white all around and a dirt-roughened basin the color of tea. Empty of water, thankfully, since I huddled in it fully clothed, knees to chest, olive drab from head to toe.

My stomach seized. I doubled over, acid scratching at my throat as I spewed yellow-green toward the hair-caked tub drain. For five minutes I sat there puking before my nausea subsided. Then I climbed sweat-slick and trembling from the tub, on limbs sleep-numbed and clumsy. My legs wouldn’t support my weight. I assumed — mistakenly as it turns out — that they were merely asleep due to the position in which I found myself when I awoke. I slumped to the floor, leaning heavily against the lip of the tub as I waited for my circulation to return. But the smell of vomit was overpowering, and my stomach once more threatened mutiny. I twisted the bulbous cold-water X to rinse away the sick; the knob squeaked, but nothing happened. So instead, I pushed away from the tub in an awkward, leg-dragging crawl and looked around, trying to suss out where the hell I was, and how I’d wound up here.

The room was gloomy, cold, unlit. Empty, but for me. An unmade bed. A rickety dining room table and four chairs, one upturned. A face-down bookshelf beside a yellowed basin sink. Crumbling, nicotine-stained walls barren of art, of photos, of cheer. Age-dulled wooden floors more gray than brown, and coarse beneath my stocking feet. Scarcely three hundred square feet of space — small even by New York standards — and every inch of it depressing. The size suggested I was still on the island of Manhattan — tenements in the other boroughs had a hair more breathing room; that’s why me and Liz wound up on Staten Island. The run-down condition suggested I was someplace dodgy; Alphabet City or the Village. But I’d expect the latter to be funkier than this, what with all the artist-types about, and the former should be awash with city sounds. All I heard was continuous thunder, though no lightning flashes accompanied it, and, from somewhere distant — through the wall, perhaps — a radio nattering on in angry, animated German. Of course, as near as I could tell, all German sounded angry. The latest of Hitler’s polemics, no doubt. Couldn’t wait for our boys to finally take that asshole out.

The sky outside the apartment’s gap-toothed window frames was overcast. Morning, afternoon, or evening, I couldn’t tell. Another rumble — this one closer — and I was dusted with fine powder from above. It pricked like pepper at my sinuses, daring me to sneeze. A jagged triangle of glass that had clung stubbornly for God knows how long to the right angle of its frame when the rest of the pane shattered finally surrendered, tinkling to the floor with a champagne-toast clink. Or, at least, what I imagined a champagne toast to sound like. Me and Elizabeth, we never had the dough to pay for bubbly, let alone the fancy stemware in which to put it. Our idea of splurging was a wicker-basketed Chianti and a thin-crust pie in one of the Italian joints that lined the streets of Rosebank, Staten Island, a short hike from our apartment.

Of course, it wasn’t our apartment anymore. And she was no longer my Elizabeth. But maybe, just maybe, I could change that. Make things right. Maybe that’s why I was here.

Maybe God had given me a second chance.

“Oh, good,” came a voice from behind me, bourbon layered over honey. “You’re up.”

I wheeled toward the voice, or tried. My equilibrium was out of whack; I wound up dizzy, disoriented, and staring, cheek pressed to rough wood floor, at a sideways woman in a slip dress of black trimmed in red that seemed designed to highlight her bare legs, feet, and shoulders. She was standing between me and the tub, not three feet from where I lay, in a spot I was certain had been empty, having recently vacated it myself. My passing had disturbed the plaster fines that dusted the wooden floor like powdered sugar on a cake, mirror-image handprints on either side of the wide swath left by my dragging legs. And my every movement elicited a squeal of protest from the creaky floorboards. But the dust around this woman remained undisturbed, and I hadn’t heard so much as a mouse-squeak from them to mark her passage before she spoke.

Foolish as it sounded, it was as if she appeared from thin air.

I propped myself up on one arm and sat agape as, upright, her full beauty became evident. She was, it shames me to say so soon after selling my soul to save the love of my life, the most stunning woman I’d ever seen. And apparently, I wasn’t the only one to find her so — even the radio in the other room had fallen silent upon her arrival. Her eyes glinted emerald and onyx, somehow suggesting throaty laughs and whispered secrets and traded glances from across a crowded room that led wordlessly to clothes discarded and limbs tangled in passion. Her cheeks and shoulders were dusted with freckles, and the sultry scent of sun-warmed skin clung to her, as if she’d wandered through a summer orchard on her way to these bleak environs. Her hair tumbled lustrous red across her shoulders in undulating waves and curls, the last of which on either side curved to frame her perfect breasts, which seemed to ever-so-slightly strain the mere molecules of silk that attempted to contain them. And her lips, painted the color of fresh blood, were so sensuous — so transfixing — I couldn’t help but wonder what foolhardy acts men had perpetrated with the hopes of kissing them, of tasting her breath, of simply seeing them smile.

They weren’t smiling now.

Her gaze traveled from my prostrate form to the vomit-specked tub and her face crinkled with distaste. Then she strode past me so close the silken hem of her dress dragged cool across my cheek — clean-shaven, I was surprised to discover, as last I recalled I wore the ratty, unkempt beard of an indigent — and righted the upturned kitchen chair. She dropped into it with an easy grace and crossed her legs. Her toenails, I saw, were painted blood red to match her lips. No footprints marked her trip across the room.

“Who–” I said, but then I stopped. The word felt foreign and awkward on my tongue — my lips contorting as if unsure how to wrap themselves around it — and sounded so, as well. I wondered then if I’d suffered a stroke. Perhaps the stress and scavenged food and rotgut booze had finally caught up with me, and my memory of dying was nothing more than a hallucination brought on by a blood clot lodging itself somewhere in my brain and starving it of oxygen.

Hell, maybe the clot had been building for a while, and was responsible for ginning up the whole Dumas-is-a-demon-to-whom-I-sold-my-soul madness I’d been clinging two these past few months. I had to admit, it seemed the likelier option. And if it were true, maybe it was modern medicine and not God who’d granted me my second chance. Either way, I swore then and there, to myself and to Elizabeth, I wouldn’t squander it.

If I only knew then how hard a promise that would be to keep.

“Don’t worry,” said the woman, noting my puzzled reaction to my own halting utterance, “speech is tricky at first, particularly in a foreign vessel such as yours, it requires close marriage of thought and fine motor skills, and his are calibrated to another tongue, but I’ve no doubt you’ll get the hang of it.”

I swallowed hard and tried again to speak, this time with exaggerated care. “W-who are you?” It came out with a few more syllables than I intended, and my voice sounded unfamiliar to my own ears, but I think it got the point across. Herr Grumpypants on the radio in the other room seemed to disagree. His nattering started up again, far louder now, with a barked Nein, nein, nein! It was an ice pick to the temples. I could barely hear myself think.

“Who I am is not as important at this moment as what I am. Just as who you are is no longer as important as what you are. My name is Lilith. I’m to be your handler. And you, Collector, are to be my little undead pet.”

“M-my h-h-handler?”

“That’s right,” she said.

“I d-d-don’t understand.”

She heaved an exaggerated sigh, as if she were a schoolmarm and I a particularly obstinate student. “You wouldn’t, would you? Your kind never seem to. It’s been forever since my last babysitting assignment — I would have thought you lot would be savvier by now. Too much for me to hope for, I suppose. So allow me to explain to you how your afterlife’s to work. It’s quite simple, really. Your job, for all eternity, is to collect the souls of the damned. My job is to communicate to you your assignments, and to ensure you do not step out of line. Do as I say, and you and I shall get along just fine. Disobey me, and I’ll be forced to take action to ensure you won’t again. Are we clear?”

None of this was making sense. I said as much. Lilith rolled her eyes like I was the crazy one.

“Look,” I said, my words coming easier now, requiring less concentration, though the din of the radio made it hard for me to hear them as I spoke. “I don’t know who you are, or what you’re playing at. But you’re going to have to play at it by yourself. I need to go find my Elizabeth.”

“Elizabeth?” she asked, the faintest hint of a smile dancing across her perfect lips. “Ah, yes, your star-crossed wife. I assure you, she’s quite well. After all, those were the terms of your bargain as I understand them. But I’m afraid seeing her is out of the question.”

“Like hell it is.”

“Finally, Collector, you’re catching on.”

“Why do you keep calling me that? My name is Sam.”

“Was,” she replied.

“I don’t follow.”

“Your name in life was Sam. In death, I may call you anything I wish. And I prefer Collector. It suggests an air of professionalism, don’t you think?”

“I think this whole conversation suggests an air of flat-out crazy,” I replied, “and I’ve had about all of it I can take. Now you’re either going to help me up or not, but either way, I’m getting out of here — even if it means I have to crawl. I’ve got a wife to apologize to.”

“No, you don’t,” she said, not unkindly. “You have a widow. One you’re forbidden from seeing — unless, of course, you wish to nullify your deal and send the poor girl into an unfortunate state of relapse.” At that, I blanched, and swallowed hard. Lilith took note, nodding once to indicate her satisfaction that her message had been received, and then continued. “And I suspect by now your legs will work just fine. It always takes a while for a Collector’s vessel to acquiesce to its commands. Of course, unless this vessel’s a world-class swimmer, those legs won’t get you where you wish to go, working or no.”

“You’re telling me this ain’t Manhattan? So where, then? Brooklyn? Queens?”

“I think you misunderstand the nature of our relationship,” Lilith replied. “I am to be your master, not your tour guide. And this is your first lesson as a Collector, not some meet-and-greet. Now how about you do as I’ve suggested and test those legs of yours?”

Two-thirds of everything this chick said made no goddamn sense, but she was right about my legs at least. I flexed each of them in turn, wincing reflexively in anticipation of the broken-glass crunch of bone on bone in my bum knee, only to be surprised when it extended smoothly and pain-free. “But how could I… what did you do to me?”

“Tell me, Collector, what’s the last thing you remember?”

“I was outside Elizabeth’s new apartment, waiting to catch a glimpse of her. She and I… we’d parted ways, but I hoped maybe I had a shot to change her mind. I saw her through the crowd, and called to her. Someone bumped into me, and the world went gray. At the time, I thought he reached into my chest and ripped out my goddamn soul. But that’s nuts, right? I mean, it was probably a stroke or something. A blood clot traveling from my heart to my brain, and making me think all kinds of crazy shit. Whatever it was, it hurt like hell. And then I woke up here. Next thing I know, I’m in that bathtub,” I say, nodding, “and now you’re here, talking some world-class crazy. You’re what — some kind of nurse? And all this nonsense is, like, one of them newfangled psychological treatments, meant to poke and prod me to see if my brain’s wired right?” After all I’d seen and done, it was a stretch — a fantasy — I knew. But I wanted desperately to believe it. It sounded better than I’d never see Elizabeth again.

“Would that it were, Collector. I’m afraid the truth’s somewhat harder to explain, and harder still to swallow. Perhaps it would be better if I showed you?”

Lilith extended a hand, delicate as a flower. I took it, and she lifted me off the floor as a parent would a child, damn near wrenching my shoulder from its socket in the process. She looked around a moment, and then — spotting what she was looking for — walked to the far end of the room and righted the toppled bookshelf. She kicked aside its former contents — a single dented pot, some bent utensils, a man’s shaving kit, the broken remains of several dinner plates — unearthing a small, face-down, paper-backed picture frame. A braided metal wire ran the width of it, frayed to splitting at the center. Above the sink was a square of darker plaster that matched the frame’s dimensions. At the center of it was a nail.

Lilith handed the frame to me. I turned it over, and found not a picture staring back at me, but a strange man’s visage, a starburst crack distorting his fresh-faced Aryan features.

I blinked in confusion. The stranger blinked as well. As one, our eyes widened in sudden realization. The constant patter of radio-German rose to a fever pitch, drowning out all rational thought.

The mirror fell from my hand, and shattered into a million pieces on the floor.

“How?” I asked her.

“Possession,” she replied. “Samuel Thornton’s corpse is, by now, no more than hair and bone — one of a thousand John Does interred last year in New York’s Potter’s Field. And it’s a good thing, too — we can’t very well have you slinking about for all eternity in a decaying sack of meat and bone, frightening the villagers. So, freed by death from the confines of your human body, you now require a living vessel. Well, that or newly dead, though I’d recommend against the latter. They are quieter, I understand, but after a time, they do begin to stink. And think of what would happen if you were to bump into any of their relatives? Believe me, it’s happened occasionally throughout the whole of human history, and it’s never been pretty. Half the time, your kind declares it a miracle, and the other half, they burn the poor undead bastard at the stake. Either way, it’s more attention than we care to attract.”

“Wait– Did you say that I was buried last year?”

“That’s right,” she said. “You died this October past. It’s now April 1945.”

“But only moments passed for me.”

“Consider yourself lucky, then. Your time was spent in the vast, formless Nothing of the In-Between, while your fate was being debated. If you remembered it, you’d wish you didn’t.”

“Debated?”

“Yes. It seems someone on high — or perhaps on low — has taken quite a shine to you. There was much discussion as to your ultimate fate. Perhaps that’s why you were assigned to me, rather than simply to a demon, as are most Collectors. I confess I was surprised. My last foray into supervising your kind was not the smoothest of endeavors. Truth be told, I’m not sure if our pairing is intended to punish you or me or both.”

“A demon,” I echoed, disbelieving. “Like Dumas?”

“That’s right. Though understand, his human appearance was a projection, nothing more. He chose it to better pass among your kind. Most like him make no attempt to mask their true natures — and though they often walk unseen among the living, the dead such as yourself do not have the luxury of such blindness. The monsters at the edge of the map are, in fact, quite real. The sooner you come to grips with that, the better.”

“You’re not a demon, though,” I said. “You’re human, like me?”

“I fear my ontological status is somewhat more complicated than that, but I was once human, yes. Though it was so long ago, I remember little of my life.”

“How did you wind up here? Did you make a deal, like me?”

“Would that I were given such a choice. No, I was cast out of Paradise for sins that, until I committed them, were as yet undefined, by a Maker as petty and mercurial as a poorly socialized toddler.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Not nearly so sorry as you will be when you reach my age,” she replied.

Her age. Funny, she didn’t look a day over thirty. And that body hardly conjured images of shuffleboard and bingo. Stunning as she was, I found it hard not to ogle her.

She caught the meaning behind my lusty stare and raised an eyebrow. I blushed and looked away. “So,” I said, “this is what I’m going to look like from now on?”

She laughed then. Sweet Lord in heaven, did Lilith have a laugh. It curled toes, straightened other things, prickled my new flesh with goose pimples. I felt the color rising in my cheeks. “Don’t be ridiculous, Collector. You’ll be here long after this vessel’s dead and gone. His grandchildren, too, should he survive long enough to have them. No, you’re just borrowing his body for as long as it suits your purposes. By assignment’s end, you’ll learn to take another at will, and to tamp down the thoughts of the individual inside.”

Realization dawned. “This goddamn radio I’m hearing — it’s no radio at all.”

“No,” she said. “The city’s been without power for at least a week. There’s not a radio to be heard for miles. Those are your vessel’s thoughts.”

“You’re telling me I hijacked a Kraut?”

“Jawohl,” she said. “A rising member of the Hitler Youth, in fact.”

“His chatter’s pretty goddamn annoying.”

“I would expect so. I imagine he’s not pleased with your sudden occupation of his body. The irony is delicious.”

“And your body,” I said, “is it borrowed too?”

“No,” she said. “Like Dumas, I look this way because I choose to. I’ve no need to drape myself in meat. Unless, of course, I find that meat desirable enough, and even then, I prefer to be on top.”

I’d never heard a woman make so frank an innuendo. And I’d never seen a woman as beautiful as Lilith in my life — not even on the silver screen. The combination was enough to take my breath away. Lilith seemed to delight in that.

Thunder struck once more, shaking the building so hard, my teeth rattled.

“We should move,” she said, crossing the room to the empty window frame and peering skyward. “They’re getting closer.”

“Who?” I asked, following.

She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. As I approached the window, I saw outside a ravaged city — streets cratered, buildings crumbling, tattered Nazi banners fluttering red and white and black from every flagpole and cockeyed lamppost — and above it, the slate sky was dotted here and there with fighter planes. Each wore a single star on its tail, and another on its fuselage. I recognized them from the newsreels that ran back home as Soviet Hunchbacks. As I watched, the nearest of them opened its belly and loosed a payload of bombs that once more shook the earth beneath my feet. Smoke billowed from where they landed some blocks away, and once the sound of their impact died down, I heard a woman’s anguished cry.

“Welcome to Berlin,” Lilith said.

Berlin. The thought — not to mention Lilith’s sudden closeness as we stood, touching, by the window — was exhilarating. Sam Thornton, bounced from recruitment station after recruitment station thanks to a bum knee and a lunger wife, dropped behind enemy lines on a mission to collect damned souls. I felt like a soldier. Like a superhero.

Maybe this undead thing wouldn’t be so bad after all.

“So,” I said, smiling for the first time since I awoke from the sleep of death, “you said something about an assignment?”

“I did, at that,” Lilith replied, skipping gaily toward the door. “Now follow me.”

“Where are we going?”

“Fear not, Collector, I suspect you’ll find the task to your liking.”

“C’mon, spill it. What’s the job?”

Lilith beamed, all dimples and pearly whites.

“You and I are off to kill the Führer.”