Page 5 of Malice

“It’s neither of those man-made constructs. It’s the Afterlife, specifically my section. The place where select souls go after their journey in the Above ends.”

“Select souls?”

“Yes.” He smiles, walking past me but waving for me to follow him. “This is the Revival House. Your soul met the placement criteria to be here, but there are other houses.”

“Uh-huh.”

Farnsworth chuckles. “You have no idea what I’m talking about, but I’ll explain.”

He leads me down a hallway to a grand room. Everything is black, but it’s ornately decorated, with massive furniture. Steam rises from the floor and lingers in the rafters. It’s freezing cold in here, and there are more people milling about with carts and files and books. It looks like some kind of Gothic library, except the people are faceless and floating.

“Our research center,” Farnsworth says. “Here we identify worthy souls to join our mission.” He raises his hand and one of the floating people appears, handing him a bright gold folder with my name scrawled on the front. “See? You popped up this morning.”

“Why am I worthy?”

Farnsworth glances at me, but doesn’t answer as he gestures for me to follow him into a second room. In the center of the room is a large round wooden table. Only one person is sitting at it—a woman, by the looks of it—and she’s staring down at a file.

“Penelope.”

She snaps her head up as if startled. “Farnsworth. I’m almost done.”

“No rush, dear. This is Aster. He arrived this morning. Penelope came to us in the middle of the night.”

“Um, hi,” I say.

Penelope waves. “What happened to you?”

“Car accident.”

“Me too. Drunk driver.”

Farnsworth puts his hand on my shoulder. “One more room. You’ll have a chance to talk to Penelope later.”

I wave, but Penelope is already reading again. We stop in front of a closed silver door.

“This is where the souls go who take option three.”

I’m about to ask what options one and two are, but when Farnsworth opens the door, I’m hit with a blast of heat and stumble back.

Farnsworth grabs my wrist and guides me inside. The walls are made of stone and they burn with internal heat, radiating it like a sauna. People roam around, bumping into each other then twisting around with no reaction. As my eyes adjust, I notice the state of these bodies.

One man walks by with a chainsaw jutting from his chest, still running. Another limps past with a clearly broken neck and leg, a ladder twisted around their ankles. A woman hobbles by, pausing to look at us. She has a gaping red hole in the middle of her forehead. Then I see Abigail, skipping in circles and humming a song. She looks out of place in her pink ruffled dress and bouncing curls, but when she pauses, I gasp at the sight of her burned flesh. More than half her body is covered in raw skin that still sizzles.

“What is this place?”

“Our chainsaw friend died in a work accident. A careless coworker bumped into him, plunging the tool into his chest.”

“Oh god.”

“Then we have the homeowner whose ladder was knocked over by a dog while he was on it. The woman there, the convenience store she worked at was robbed at gunpoint.”

“And Abigail?”

Farnsworth looks sad even as he smiles at the child. “Her stepfather set their house on fire for the insurance money and left her inside.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Yes.” He turns to me. “In this room, the souls carry their cause of death with them. They have no purpose.”

---