Checkmate, Death Read online

  Checkmate, Death.

  Cobyboy

  Contents

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  1

  When you happen to be Death incarnate, you get used to not being wanted. No one wants to see your bony face, hear your rasping voice, or fall under the shadow of your towering, cloaked form. No one wants to see the blade of your scythe, light glinting from its perfectly honed edge. Not that I actually have a scythe, it's just that everyone expects me to have one.

  No one wants you around, period. The only lucky thing is that no humans can see you unless you want them to, unless they already straddle the line between life and death, waiting to be nudged in either direction by your erudite hand.

  Celestials, on the other hand, can always see you. And they really don't want to.

  So, it's pretty rare to be invited to a party. I never turn such an invitation down. As much as I hate mingling with my colleagues, my life is lonely enough. I always go to these parties. And they always end up the same way.

  Tonight was no exception. One moment I was climbing the steps toward the Celestial Palace, and the next I was bleary-eyed drunk and chatting up some lesser angel with big blue eyes. The angel was gorgeous but androgynous. I had no idea if it was male or female or something in between. But I did like the fact that they were keeping their mouth shut and letting me do the talking.

  "You see him?" I asked, pointing with one heavy hand out into a nearby crowd. The angel looked, but the crowd was too tightly packed to tell which individual I was talking about.

  "The big one," I explained.

  "God?" the angel asked, looking back at me with that dumb expression of reverent terror that pretty much everyone gets when the big man is mentioned.

  "Yep," I said. "That guy, there. He's the only one here who I haven't beaten in a game of chess. You know why? He's never accepted my challenges." I blew out my lips, spraying wine-stained saliva onto the patient face of my conversation partner. "I could beat Him, though..."

  The angel wiped its face with the sleeve of its glowing white robe. "You could beat God? The being who created the universe, who knows and sees all?"

  "I know what you're thinking," I said, trying to set my glass down but missing the edge of the table; it slipped to the floor and splashed wine over my foot. Before I knew it a cherub was there to mop up the mess with a towel so fluffy and thick it resembled a cloud.

  "Listen," I went on, sticking a long, pale finger into the angel's face. "I could beat God, because He created me to be the best strategist ever... And that's what I am."

  Before the angel had a chance to act impressed, a strong hand closed around my upper arm and pulled me around. The High Angel Zanus was there, scowling at me.

  "You're drunk, is what you are," Zanus said. "That barrel of wine you sucked down was meant to be used as a toast for the whole party. I think it's time you went back to your dark little hole."

  "My friend Zanus!" I said, glancing back at the lesser angel. "Get it? My friend's anus! Hah. Is that the little hole you want me to find, Zanus?"

  If Zanus had not been an angel, I think he would have pummeled me so hard I might have to play against myself in a game of chess to save my own life.

  The party was just starting to get fun. Unfortunately, I had now caught the attention of God Himself. I suddenly found myself compelled toward the exit, escorted by Zanus and another high angel I didn't recognize.

  "Death has such a stupid sense of humor," I heard someone mutter.

  "I thought he would have been a good deal more... bleak," said someone else.

  Grand compliments, I thought. I don't get invited to many parties, as I've already said, so I like to make them count. If I can become the talk of the night, even after getting kicked out, I consider it a success. Another victory in the mind game called Life Everlasting. Zanus was throwing me out of the gathering bodily, but some small part of me would linger behind. He could not get rid of it, no matter how hard he tried.

  ***

  I guess the only reason I do get invited to the odd party is because of my position. Once appointed, Death cannot be replaced until he chooses to retire. After retirement, he will be judged by the Celestial Court and sent to whatever domain he deserves to be sent to. I already knew for a fact that, after my own retirement, I wasn't going to be sent to anywhere very cushy. So it has always been my plan to hold the job as long as possible. I thought I was doing a pretty good job of that, considering the fact I am the first and only Death that has ever filled the position.

  Zanus and his cohorts knew this about me, too. My stubbornness. My decision to hold the position from now until Kingdom Come.

  Except, for us, there is no Kingdome Come. No afterlife. We are already there.

  I know what you're thinking. Or what you would be thinking, if you were clever enough. If we're in the afterlife that means we're dead, right? Not for us. We're Celestials. Yes, even me. Hard to believe.

  Celestials are not alive, and they aren't dead. They are universal constants, like light and gravity. Forces of nature. We're always there. You can deflect us, or escape us temporarily, but we won't ever disappear.

  One thing that sets me apart from other Celestials is that I can be removed from the position. And as Death, I can move freely between the different planes of reality and exert my will and the rights of my job wherever they apply. But once I no longer hold the position, I must be judged the same way those mortal souls have been for millions of years. It's only fair. I have already been alive for an eternity. But if I ever decided to retire, I would spent another eternity stuck in whatever place the Court sent me to.

  Sounds boring, huh? I agree. Spending eternity in one of the layers of Hell would actually be better. Time goes by faster when you get to endure a new type of torture every five years. New experiences, constantly. In Heaven, I would just be lazing around, drunk, trying to get someone to subject themselves to the pain of being crushed by me in a game of strategy.

  No, sir. Not me. I like my job, for the most part. And I'm very good at it.

  Don't believe me? Think I'm just a bloated ego, a balloon filled with too much hot air? Well, just wait until you're about to die. Wait for me to show up, appeal to me, see if I accept your challenge. I probably won't. Too many people die every damn day for me to play each and every one of them. But if I do play you, guess who's guaranteed to win?

  If you still don't believe me, well, I guess I should give you the highlight reel of my career thus far.

  2

  I realize that I might have made my friend Zanus (haha) out to be a bit of a curmudgeon. An anti-fun Gestapo officer. But I assure you - and this will be a running theme throughout my tale - he had a good reason to dislike me.

  ***

  First, we'll have to go back in time a bit. Way back. Through the annals of time and pre-history, to an era where your hairiest, most ancient ancestors were just beginning to make tools and scratch artwork onto cave walls by the light of sooty fires.

  There was something to be said about that era. There were far less people, and therefore far less deaths. But the causes of death were always so interesting, none of these boring heart attacks and car accidents you get now. You haven't lived until you've reaped a boy who fell over a cliff after wrestling a saber-toothed tiger off his younger sister.

  History is funny, you know. Humans are funny in general. You put so much stock in your actions, your free will. You fret so much with things like hope and fear. You don't realize that your existence is jus
t a series of unfolding inevitabilities.

  Your discoveries are not your own. Take the game of chess, for instance. I was playing it with my colleagues while the original humans took their first steps out of Africa, while Homo Denisovan battled giant creatures on the land you call Australia. Those were fun times to be Death, like I mentioned above, but I was very happy when you people finally gained access to chess. Like all the technology and innovations you've come across, chess is what I like to call a celestial constant. It was not something you conjured up out of nothing. It was actually a stream that was always there, that you finally became smart enough to tap into.

  This all goes back to the true nature of time as a non-linear construct. Everything that ever existed still exists now. Everything that ever will exist actually exists already. Time is a book. Humans only know how to read forward, turning pages toward an eventual ending. But certain Celestials, God being one of them, can read backward as well. They can view time in its entirety, understanding the universe like no other consciousness can.

  You know that piece of toast you dropped, the one that landed facedown and splattered butter everywhere? Do you remember the other day when your precious phone slipped out of your pocket while you were getting in the car, and fell under your seat? God foresaw those tiny events from the very beginning of time itself. You can't surprise him, no matter how hard you try. He's always way ahead of you. By billions of years.

  But I digress. This was supposed to be about Zanus and why he dislikes me. I promise it has nothing to do with the way I exploit his unfortunate name. That was just the icing I added on later.

  You see, there was a time when it was possible for another Celestial to challenge Death. If the challenger won, he or she would take the job over and eject the current holder of the position. This was a brief clause, which God revoked before too long. It was just a way to make sure my mind was as sharp as he already knew it to be.

  I hadn't known before, but Zanus apparently coveted my job. He wanted it for himself. You see, high angels like Zanus are not allowed to leave Heaven unless God leaves Heaven. And seeing as God is like a man who has done all the heavy lifting of building a business and now runs it all from the comfort of his home, He rarely has cause to leave. Zanus was effectively trapped in Heaven.

  There is a misconception that angels are perfect. They are not. They are symmetrical, they reflect the basic nature of the universe. They have light sides, and dark sides. Zanus's dark side was that he had a bad streak of wanderlust, a thirst to see all of Creation for himself. He resented the fact that he had to stay at God's side for eternity. He didn't necessarily want to be the one to reap souls, to scrape them out of their mortal shells and send them off for judgment. But he did relish the thought of getting out and about, seeing new things and places.

  These desires of his had been bubbling and boiling for eons already. So, when God announced his decision to allow temporary challenges against me, Zanus launched himself most heartily into the campaign of taking my spot and booting me to some untimely eternal Hell.

  Was I worried? Not really. You've never met a better strategist than me, and I mean that most wholeheartedly. Did I think God could beat me? Despite what I told the androgynous angel at the party, yes. I was sure God could beat me. But anyone else? Even Satan himself? No.

  I made no attempt to forestall or avoid Zanus in any way. He did all the stalling himself. I caught wind of a rumor that he was challenging some of the better strategists among the Celestials to games of chess. Trying to refine his skills. By the time he actually approached me for the challenge, I heard he was winning every single game he took part in. His skills were impressive. He had proved that he had the brain of a chess player, capable of looking into the future, through infinite permutations.

  I was in the Celestial Café when he challenged me. As good a place as any for a game of chess. It is situated on a circular balcony, which looks down on the vault of Heaven and the Earth beneath its ethereal barrier. It is the preferred place to take one's breakfast.

  You know, angels don't actually have wings. They're kept in a store room until they are needed, like pieces of armor. When an angel has to leave Heaven for whatever reason, he or she visits one such store room and puts on his or her wings. And when they return from whatever mission, they immediately take their wings off and put them away again.

  Seeing as how I spend far more time out of Heaven than in it - a perk of my job - I usually only see angels like Zanus when they came down to Earth to berate me about something. It was always a shock, even after all these millions of years, to see an angel sans wings. I barely recognized Zanus as he walked in, clothed in a simple t-shirt and some comfy looking pajama bottoms.

  He approached, smirking with confidence, and stood by my table. I knew what was coming, so I was already well finished with my breakfast and shoved my plate away.

  "Here?" I asked. "Now?"

  Zanus nodded, gesturing to his left. In that direction stood a chess table. The seats were unoccupied. The board was set and ready to go. I didn't tell Zanus, but I had been the one who set it, mere minutes before he arrived.

  I stood, scooting my seat back, and waved him on. "You can be white."

  "Makes sense," Zanus said, his smirk growing. "And I will take the advantage of going first."

  I nodded, spreading my hands in a gesture of generosity. Look at me, a true saint, giving my vastly inferior opponent such a fabulous advantage!

  Going first in chess does give an advantage, but a small one. On average, white wins slightly more often than black. About two or three games more, out of a hundred. But this advantage was far, far too small to save poor Zanus. Or his anus.

  We sat. But we didn't play right away. It turned out that Zanus was a superstitious player, which I feel like is a sure sign of his low self esteem and the anxiety which derives from it. First, he ordered tea. Only when the pot arrived, with a single ceramic cup, did he deign to ask if I might like some. I politely declined. A chess player should not imbibe fluids whilst playing, especially not a nervous one like Zanus. An aching bladder could be the downfall of even a great player, let alone a merely good one.

  Zanus also felt it necessary to lay a few ground rules for this specific game. First, he wished to make sure I was on the same page with him in regards to taking movements back. In most casual games of chess, it is considered perfectly acceptable to move a piece, change one's mind, and move it back, provided the player's hand does not leave the piece at any point. I have seen some people act like sticklers on this point, saying any move is final, that indecisiveness in moves is a failure in the visualization capabilities of the player and thus a valid sign of inferiority.

  Since I am such a good player - unbeatable, really - I've never had a problem with granting opponents small favors. I have even allowed some to break the rules in certain ways, in order that they might learn a bit more about the game and offer more of a challenge the next time we played. I wasn't prepared to bend the rules for Zanus's sake. It wasn't that I feared him, I just didn't like him that much. But I saw no reason not to let him shuffle his pieces around any which way he liked, as long as he didn't take his hand away. In my mind, I could have let him stare at the board and test out moves for a thousand years, and he would still come no closer to beating me.

  Here's something else you should know about chess; if you're playing against someone who's a lot worse at the game than you are, going second is actually much better for you. You will see why shortly.

  Once he was good and ready, finished sipping his tea with his pinky sticking out and smirking at me as if he had already won, once he was done with his superstitions, he didn't waste any time in making his first move. The most important move of them all, at least in this match.

  He had figured out his opening move in advance. He was ready to go. I have no idea about the reasoning behind it, what Zanus was thinking, whether he thought to trick me by pretending to be dumb or whether he was just plain dumb.
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  This was what he did; he moved one of his pawns two spaces forward, to square f4. This was the pawn who sat just ahead of the bishop on his right side. And his white king sat just to the left of that bishop. By moving the pawn that far ahead, he split the diagonal path to his king wide open.

  I made a show of my own first move. I sat back, staring at the board, puffing my cheeks in and out. As though I was doing some serious contemplating. This show obviously pleased Zanus; his smirk grew to an outright grin, and he very casually poured himself another steaming cup of tea.

  After a couple minutes of (false) deliberation, I moved one of my own pawns forward.

  This was the pawn directly in front of my own king, with the bishop and the queen to the back left and right of it, respectively.

  Zanus's grin shrank back down again. He saw that I was getting ready to mobilize my queen, the most powerful piece in the game. More minutes of deliberation followed. These were anything but false; my angelic friend was trying his best to find the exact right move. I don't think at this point he had any idea the mighty thrashing that was about to fall on him. He still thought he could win. To him, nothing had really changed. He was merely getting serious now, committing himself to the game.

  His next move, on the surface, seemed sensible enough. He took the pawn which had stood just to the right of the one he had moved previously and moved it up by two squares, so that it was once again in line with its brother. It was a wall against my queen. I wouldn't dare move her up now, because in his next move he should be able to take her with one of his pawns. Clever boy.

  And by "clever" I of course mean "stupid."

  To his credit, he realized he had done an oopsie almost immediately. But by then his hand had already left the pawn and was midway back to his teacup. His mouth fell open and his eyes flashed over the chessboard. He saw now that he ought to have at least moved the rightmost pawn forward instead. I could have taken it with my queen, and put him into check, but then he could have followed up by taking my queen with his rook.