care to answer.
Mr Ishmael nodded and raised a glass of his own.
‘To the success of your mission. Your first case,’ he said, and he toasted me.
I sampled further scotch and found some joy in this sampling.
‘You did very well,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘Employing the curious talents of your brother was an inspired idea.’
And I nodded. In agreement. That it would have been if I had indeed thought of it. But I was prepared to take the credit, if it was being offered.
‘Inspired,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘I knew I wasn’t wrong about you. And I will be faithful to my promise. You recovered the stolen goods and I will now share with you the Big Secret.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘And I hope that details of the Big Secret will include exactly what happened to me yesterday, because I appear to have at least twenty-four hours missing out of my life.’
Mr Ishmael nodded. ‘Would you care for a cigar?’ he asked.
And I said, ‘A cigar?’
‘To puff upon. You might need it, to stiffen your nerves. Folk generally have a cup of strong sweet tea to administer at moments like this, but I do not. But I do have cigars. You can take one, or leave it, as you please.’
‘I’ll take one,’ I said, for I had never before smoked a cigar. And what better place to begin the smoking of one than the inside of a stretch limousine?
Mr Ishmael went through all the preparations then stuck the cigar into my mouth, asked me to suck hard and administered the flame of a match to it.
And I didn’t cough. I puffed.
‘Nice,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘And now to business that I regret is far from nice. But where to start? Where indeed to start?’
‘At the beginning?’ I suggested, still not coughing at all.
‘No,’ said Mr Ishmael, going through further preparatory operations prior to lighting a cigar of his own. ‘This story is best told and explained beginning with the end. What would you say that the very end of everything would be, young Tyler?’
‘A big explosion, probably,’ I said. ‘The entire universe blowing up. Something like that.’
Mr Ishmael shook his head. ‘Care to have another go?’ he asked.
‘Not an explosion?’ I said. ‘Nothing, then. I suppose the end of everything would be nothing.’
‘Very close,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘Death would be the beginning.’
‘I thought you said that it was the end.’
‘The end of life. All life. The creation of the Necrosphere.’
And I asked what this was.
‘The world of the dead. A spherical universe of the dead.’
‘I think I would like you to explain,’ I said.
‘The name of your band,’ said Mr Ishmael, ‘The Sumerian Kynges – you had heard the tales of Captain Lynch regarding the creation of the Homunculus, yes?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but how did you know that?’
‘It is my business to know. And I know all about Captain Lynch.’
‘I think he’s carrying on with my mum,’ I said. ‘And if my dad finds out, he will probably beat Captain Lynch to an ungodly pulp.’
‘I consider this altogether probable. But Captain Lynch told you of the theory that the soul does not enter a person until the third month of gestation, yes?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Carry on.’
‘Well, something similar occurs at the point of death, but in reverse – the soul of the deceased remains within the body for a period of three months.’
‘Oh no,’ I said, and I coughed (just a little) upon my cigar. ‘You are not saying that you remain aware after death? That you know what’s happening to you while you rot away in the grave?’
Mr Ishmael shook his head. ‘You are not aware,’ he said. ‘You sleep, as it were. Your soul sleeps, but it remains within the body; then after three months the soul awakens, in paradise, or otherwise.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘But why? Why the three-month wait? Is that like the Catholic belief of Purgatory?’
‘The misconception of Purgatory. The truth is that the body is vulnerable for three months after death as the foetus is vulnerable in the first three months after conception. If the soul left the body at the moment of death, it would leave a nice fresh, although dead, vehicle that a magician of sufficient power could instill something into, to reanimate that corpse.’
‘As a zombie?’
‘We use the term “reoccupied”. A living person is referred to as an original “resident”, because their soul is the original resident, while the dead who have been afflicted with “the Taint” are “reoccupied”.’
These terms rang bells somewhere. As if I had heard them before.
‘A conspiracy exists,’ said Mr Ishmael, ‘to reoccupy the entire planet, to turn this into a planet peopled by the dead – a Necrosphere, do you see?’
‘I see, I suppose. But why? What would anyone have to gain from this?’
‘Not anyone. A powerful magician could create, at most, a single Homunculus in a single century. Whatever this is plans to annihilate the entire population of Earth, drive the resident souls from the bodies of the newly dead and reoccupy them with spirits, if you will, that will reanimate these dead bodies.’
‘It does sound very gruesome,’ I said. ‘But it also sounds rather pointless, or of a limited point, at least. Dead bodies aren’t going to last very long, are they? They will fall to pieces in no time. This Necrosphere of yours is going to smell pretty rank, I’m thinking.’
‘Puppets,’ said Mr Ishmael. ‘They will survive long enough to serve the needs of their puppet-master.’
‘And who he? A man, is this, or the Devil?’
‘That I do not know. I have only a piece or two of the jigsaw. With your help I will find further pieces, put them all together, complete the picture. And then.’
‘And then?’ I asked.
‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’
‘I think you’ll probably be crossing that bridge on your own,’ said I, ‘because I have had more than enough of this madness.’
‘Really?’ And Mr Ishmael sank some scotch. ‘So you won’t want to know what happened to you yesterday, then.’
‘I would like to know that, as it happens.’
‘Then so be it. After the furniture van had been loaded up at the cemetery, myself and my associates left the violated zone, for such had the cemetery become. Some time later you returned. You were then attacked by reoccupied beings. A task force from the Ministry of Serendipity, tipped off anonymously, by myself, arrived to sanitise the area.
‘The Government has known about this menace for as long as it has existed. They have a special department that deals with such matters – the Ministry of Serendipity. Their crack troops airlifted you out. You would then have been debriefed, reprogrammed and had your memory selectively erased, and then been returned to your family.’
And then I coughed on my cigar. And I said, ‘What, what, what?’ ‘I must say,’ said Mr Ishmael, ‘that the Ministry does not think as I do. I am, how shall I put this, independent. The Ministry has a more corporate mentality. Rather than trying to understand and deal with the cause, they blast in and simply eradicate the effect. They are very efficient at that.’
‘Not that efficient,’ I said. ‘Two of the blighters survived. They arrived on my doorstep. They were going to get me. I fled through the window and bumped into your limo.’
‘Those were not reoccupied beings,’ said Mr Ishmael.
‘Oh?’ said I. ‘They weren’t?’
‘No,’ said he, and he drew further smoke. ‘That was just a pair of cross-dressing Jehovah’s Witnesses. I believe they refer to themselves as, “Jehovah’s Wet-Nurses”.’
‘Most amusing,’ said I. ‘But I am far from happy about any of this. Things don’t add up. There are too many
