I woke up in a sewage pit last Saturday.
It was the best start to the weekend I’ve had in a while. Or at least, it was better than my alternative, which would have been a morgue. One that was full of people I hate, and terrors harder to stomach than human shit and gray water.
And Unit 240.
Lord, this is going to make no sense.
Fuck.
Right. My name is Lettie Harper. I’m currently typing this in a friend’s house somewhere in the armpit of the Eastern Seaboard, wearing clothes I stole from a Walmart, and I smell like the soap they have in truck-stop bathrooms.
Since the Nixon administration—I didn’t count before then—I have died three-hundred and twenty-seven times.
I am twenty-three years old.
I’m truly sorry I can’t prove this right now. There’s a box buried in a soybean field in Gridley, Illinois, which contains every passport and driver’s license I owned from 1929 until 1965, all of which clearly show my face. But I can’t drive over there and dig it up. And it seems a bad idea to post my more…physical evidence.
But take my word, aye? For all it helps.
Because you don’t want this.
Not that living forever is bad.
But because of the things which you meet when you do.
***
My life first went to hell in 1935, in a cafeteria in Chicago. I was one year out of Brown’s Business College. Work was sparse. But I could use a computator (look it up), type a hundred words a minute, and I was never as bad off as the tenant farmers or the panhandlers. That day I spent my lunch break watching the game tables at the back of the shop.
It was the day I met her.
I want to say there was a strange discomfort in the air. That perhaps the dust from the South was particularly thick in my throat. That I woke up with an ache in my bones.
But that’s probably the fog of memory.
Anyway, I was going about my normal business. Bought a sandwich and a coffee, scarfed them down. Talked a bit. Watched a bit.
It shouldn’t have felt as unusual as it did when someone recognized me.
“Letitia?” A strange voice asked behind me.
I jumped.
Turning around, for a heart’s beat I saw something sharp and skeletal. Something which oozed. Which wore bones like a suit and spoke with a dead tongue.
And I could only stare limply.
In front of me stood a quite beautiful older woman, somewhere in her forties. I didn’t recognize her. She wore a beat-up green coat with floral embroidery on both lapels, and gold epaulets.
“Um.” I said.
She smiled at me. “I heard you give your name.” She nodded to the lunch bar. “Letitia, yes? Do you play chess? You’ve been watching the tables so…intently.”
Her voice was grating. In a way I cannot write.
But my brain kicked itself. “Uh.” I said. I laughed nervously. “Only horrendously.”
She nodded. I asked her if she came here often. And she said, no she hadn’t, but that, “I always run in places where the prizes are worth winning.”
I think perhaps my greatest fault, still living a mortal life then, was my unwillingness to accuse random people of being supernatural beings. Instead I stuck my hands in the pockets of my skirt, and tampered down a terrible feeling rising up in my chest, telling me to run.
I should mention I am sure now that this woman was something like Death.
I should mention I am sure that day that she was collecting souls.
“I’ve been challenging everyone all day.” She told me. “Dreadful work. So much a person can win in a chess game, if they’re willing to bet for it.” The woman tilted her head. “What do you play?”
“Backgammon.”
I didn’t mean to say that. It just sort of tumbled out of my mouth.
The woman grinned at me with smokers teeth.
“Well I can do that.”
She held a palm out, revealing a corner of the shop I hadn’t noticed before, pushed between a bookshelf and a radio cabinet. There was another table here, with two chairs. They were decked with velvet pillows.
It seemed enormously sophisticated.
I don’t remember agreeing to play. But I know there was a terror in my chest. This awful dread. And when I came back to myself, the woman was handing me a stack of white pieces.
It was scrimshaw bone.
“Come on.” She said. “Sit down. It’ll be the game of your life.”
I blinked.
I will admit now that I am not an intelligent woman. But I have had a lot of tries at this whole being alive thing, and if I have any one bit of advice that I carry with me, it is this: if anyone strange you meet seems to be telling jokes to themself, you run.
“I have to use the lavatory.” I said, far too loudly.
Many things happened at once.
I set the checkers in my pocket. I was preparing to flee madly. To run out the door from a situation which I could not quite make sense of but from which the scent of danger burned hot and unpleasantly.
Then the woman turned. She looked like a cat, realizing that a mouse was running off with both its dinner and its claws.
I made it three steps to the door.
She picked up the doubling die. Flipped it to an eight. Turned it sideways.
And her hand began to melt.
The skin came off in sloughing bits, revealing red flesh beneath, inlaid with dirt, plants, mud. A moldy smell filled the room. Like rotting fish.
Not one person in that café turned toward us as I began to shout.
When the woman hit me, we crashed into the floor with a monstrous thud. By now most of her skin had sloughed off. She reached her skinned thumb up, and held it right under my eye. Her face was fit for a demon, with burning eyes and rage, and intensity.
A fat, pink, worm emerged from her finger.
And squirmed toward my vision.
I wish I could say I fainted. That I woke up like this, unknowing of my own condition. But I didn’t. I remember every second as that worm tunneled its way through my eye. The sick pop of its burrow. The blistering headache.
The way its slick body began to chew through my skull.
I remember how I screamed until my voice gave out.
“You will not get the peace of death, you coward.” The woman whispered.
And this all began.
***
Right. I hear a car coming down the road. I’m going to go hide in the root cellar again.
She shows up sometimes, you know.
In the corners of my eye, watching. These days her eyes are black pits. Her jaw hangs in a slack parody of a grin.
I live in hell. And it terrifies me.