Scales

[WP] You are a necromancer's apprentice. One of your most important jobs is holding down the revived bodies in their first moments alive again, while they scream and beg to go back.

*****

I use headphones to mute the screaming. Noise cancelling works best, but just turning your music up real loud works too. I’m not generally a fan of rock, but it’s more full-sounding than classical or middle of the road. With relentless bass and screaming vocals, droning harmonies, you can’t hear a thing. Not even your heartbeat.

Today, as we operate, Avenged Seven Fold sing about a little piece of heaven.

It’s a summer job — I took it because it’s something I believe in. Plus it pays okay, too. We work in a church during the nights, with the blessings of the priest. He understands that what we do is necessary.

The priest used to be a friend of my father’s. It’s how I got the job. Connections, you know? Although Dad’s been gone two years now.

Two years. Where does the time go?

When they come back — the dead — they’re in shock. You would be too, right? You’ve just been ripped away from something as comforting a mother’s breast to a baby.

Here’s the thing, though. We’ve learned a lot about the afterlife from necromancy. We’ve proved the existence of a Heaven (or something like it) and a Hell (or similar). Wonderful and terrible places.

How they work, we think, is that during your life you are paid a type of coin for each good deed you do, and you gain a different coin for each bad deed. Help an elderly person across the road safely, get one golden coin. Murder someone, gain a hundred black coins.

Does this make sense? It’s partly metaphorical, anyway — so say the people we bring back. They just say this is the nearest they can get to understanding their experience.

What they say is: when you die there’s a golden scale waiting in front of you. God’s judgement. Gold coins rain down from the sky into the scale’s left hand, black coins rain down into the right hand. Your deeds are weighed up. You enter Heaven or Hell.

​

The necromancer’s been working on a corpse as my music’s been blaring. I can see the man on the table is screaming. He’s chained but I have to push his head against the slab so that he can’t slam it down and die all over again.

He would die again, if he could. A taste of heaven is apparently addictive.

The man’s crying, screaming, and although I can’t hear what he says, I know it’s something along the lines of: Let me back. Let me die. Repeat on loop.

​

The existence of an afterlife solved all kinds of questions about existence and meaning. It seemed like a creator had gotten everything prepared for us. No more did we feel forgotten by our father.

Necromancers brought people back and learned a little more about what was beyond, then released them again. Who were they to interfere for very long? As I said, Heaven is addictive and it’s unfair to take it away from people.

But some of those the necromancers brought back…

The process hadn’t been as the necromancers expected. Or the priests. And that’s the truth of it.

There was this man, for example. He was very wealthy and well regarded in his life. We brought him back. He’d been in Heaven so we didn’t keep him for long. After he died for a second time, his family cremated his body — like my father was. Ashes to ashes. Soul escaped forever.

Six years later stories about this man started to emerge. Gradually, these stories came, as if his cremation had been the commencement of rain after a long drought, and worms hidden well below ground slowly made their way to the surface.

He’d been an abuser. To many people of many ages. I try not to think about these things, but he was a terrible person. Ruined more lives than you can imagine. And each ruined life is like the beat of butterfly wings, of chaos theory — it’d changes the lives of all who knew the first person, and then those secondary lives would change the lives of all the people they knew, etc. The directly ruined life is usually ruined worse than the others, true, but still it spreads out like an oil spill.

So, the question is this: How had a prolific abuser reached heaven?

To reach an answer we have to think of the scales again. We must understand that a thousand black coins are nothing compared to ten million gold.

If you are wealthy enough to offset — in coinage — the weight of your misdeeds, through charity or some other means, then any evil is open to you and still Heaven’s gates will swing wide when you’re ready.

This seemed like a mistake on God’s part to many of us. Although a few argued that the cost of offsetting a sin was fair; that it was the price of redemption.

But most of us believed God had made an oversight. That God didn’t account for the rise of such wealthy and heinous individuals.

​

The man has stopped struggling. He’s not eaten for days (he’s been far too dead to eat) and has little energy to resist us. We lift him, carry him to the cage in the church’s catacombs and throw him inside with the others.

They do not deserve Heaven and yet we cannot send them to Hell.

So we must make our own Hell for them, here in the cold, dark recesses of the church’s underground. We bind them so they cannot harm themselves.

I think of the man who was cremated — whose deeds we found out about too late. Then I look at the captives, the semi-living, who have had a taste of Heaven but nothing more.

No more will escape true judgement, if we can help it.

I look at the captives for a while, until a question enters my mind: how will God judge my deeds?

I turn off my music. I’ve never turned off the sound down here before, but something in me wants to hear these people. Needs to.

I remove my headphones and slip them into my jacket.

I’d expected screams.

I’d expected crying, at the very least.

But there’s only silence. A thick, penetrating silence. Not even our newest resurrection cries anymore.

It’s as if everyone here is lost within themselves. All of us.

It makes me think of my father.

I realise it’s not the screams I don’t want to hear after all, but the silence.

My father was complicated. Too complicated to stay with us. That’s what Mom says, anyway. And I think it’s true, in a way. Still, I can’t help wondering which coins weighed more on his scale.

The necromancer sees me shiver. He nods at the stairs and we make our way back up to the church. I replace my headphones and prepare for the next treatment.

*****

THE END.