Spirit Wars Read Online Free PDF Page B

on your face, you maggoty meat,” Death hisses with
pure vehemence. “I hate your kind that stutter even inside your heads.” When he
says this, it’s with a distaste reserved only for squashed roaches still
crawling with their insides sticking out. Now concerned for my safety more than
ever, my brain registers how the glass elevator has split in the middle and its
only remaining piece is the wall on which I hang; very convenient for my
captor, though something also tells me nothing ever happens around the Grim
Reaper by accident.
    Indeed the only damage I can find is the portion of the ceiling
above me, a ventilation shaft that has expanded as if it had been burst open
with dynamite, and the immediate spot on the floor that has buckled and cracked under the weight of my imported mounting
board. Apart from these, the room is spick and span.
    There’s a customized desk made of luxurious ebony in the middle of
the room. On top of it, there’s a solid-brass name plate proclaiming in big,
bold letters: SEPHTIMUS REX, CHIEF ASTRAL DEPORTER. But counting these out, the
office is spartan and lacks even chairs for a visitor (not that I’d be needing
any) or Sephtimus Rex himself to sit on.
    As though reading my mind and not liking what he finds there,
Sephtimus Rex swivels on his heels to face me and take off his hood. I brace
myself for the worst. The most grotesque and sickening sight yet. I resign
myself to the impending revelation, the climax to all the evil man wasn’t meant
to see.

  Chapter V: Love
Macabre

     I’m not sure whether to feel relieved or
cheated when I find underneath the black hood, the mother of all anticlimaxes:
a Dia de los Muertos mask. Yet somehow I feel I know the reason behind this
diluted image. No shape could ever truly contain the deep and pervasive horror
that Death inspires; to see it in all its raw potential is to literally explode
my head.
    Then, i n one fluid, memorized motion, Sephtimus
whirls his cloak off and into the air and a spirit steps out of a wall of
monitors to take the role of a coat-stand. This spirit is fully skeletal;
tragical ly its head is missing so there’s nothing but its spine
protruding between the shoulder-blades, which is anyway perfect for this
occasion as a peg. Sephtimus tosses his guitar case in the same direction and
the decapitated skeleton also catches this out of habit, before stiffening
ramrod straight like a foot guard at Buckingham Palace.
    I discover the reaper is wearing a black leather trench coat with
crisscrossing metal-studded straps sewn on the shoulders and the chest,
suggestive of a straitjacket that ironically restrains the warden of hell. The
coat’s lining sweeps all the way down to the floor, which is probably for the best
because there’s no sign of feet whatsoever under it.
    When Sephtimus finally sits behind his desk – more like throws
himself down in total abandon – another apparition scurries on all fours to
catch him while three more jump from behind to support his back and arms; all
four of them melding into one grand throne made entirely of human bones.
Sephtimus then takes a pack of cigarettes out of a drawer and one of his melded
assistants dislocates its forearm to light his stick with one hinged finger.
Apparently, everything in this room is a living extension of the Chief Astral
Deporter and exists to serve on his every whim.
    “I swear, nicotine and caffeine are going to be the death of me,”
he says to himself, smoking with humanoid lips in the fraction of space between
the maxilla of his skull mask and his coat’s stand-up collar. But he sounds so
pleased with himself that I doubt if he means what he’s saying.
    All at once it comes to me with an almost physical shock; this
mind-boggling observation. Death has pursed his actual lips when he took a drag
on his cigarette but for any other purpose than this, his mouth doesn’t budge.
His lips are a frozen ornament when he speaks. Death has been communicating
with me