Death, the Devil, and the Goldfish (18 page)

This repetitive scenario drove Death crazy until he took to drinking the small bottles of free wine that Nexus airlines provided for all international flights. The flight attendant was completely oblivious to the amount of wine she gave out, as she could not remember Death, or ever seeing him before, or ever giving him any wine or peanuts.

After a two-hour delay and seven small bottles of wine, Death started to warm up to the flight attendant and had taken to calling her Peanut Lady whenever he had the chance. Instead of refusing the peanuts, he accepted them and then would gleefully fling them backward over his head.

An elderly man named Stanton Waring, who was partially blind in his right eye, partially deaf in his left ear, and had no sense of smell, was in constant confusion, as every ten minutes a packet of peanuts would hit him in the head. He had come to the conclusion that one of the flight attendants was angry at him, but being the old war horse that he was, and seeing no reason for the constant throwing of peanuts, he had taken the relentless assault as an act of war. He watched the flight attendants closely as they walked by, eyeing them up and down for any kind of malice, sizing up the precise moment when he would exact his revenge.

Gerald, on the other hand, had a fabulous time. Not only had he ceased to be a penguin and become a human, not only had he been assaulted and tied to a bed, but he'd also managed to make a friend, and discovered the joy of small bottles of wine that Death happily shared with him. Gerald had pelted Death with questions since their escape from the hospital, and Death had done his best to answer them even though he didn't really understand the whole penguin business himself.

"So what is this we're sitting in?" asked Gerald.

"S'plane, big metal thing with wings, allows humans to fly all over the place," answered Death.

Gerald pointed to a woman wearing a large pink hat and asked, "Who's that?"

"S'woman."

"And that?"

"That's a child."

"And that thing up there?"

"That's a bag."

"Hmm, a bag. This is all very interesting. All this stuff is floating around in my head but it doesn't all connect."

"Yes, well, let's take it slow. I mean, you were a penguin this morning and now look at you. More wine?"

Several minutes later and under the influence of the cheap booze, Gerald found himself glued to the window staring at the men who were trying to load crate loads of lemons into the cargo hold.

An older, taller man who looked to be the superior of the bunch waved his arms and shouted at the other men. The situation was such that there just wasn't enough room for all the lemons in the cargo hold unless they wanted to offload some of the passengers' luggage. The workers took the superior’s comment as being literal and offloaded half of the luggage. This made the superior furious, hence all the arm waving and shouting.

Gerald, of course, didn't know this but found the whole event rather entertaining as he thought the man looked like he was trying to fly by flapping his arms and getting himself nowhere.

The flight attendant approached and offered a sickly sweet smile through a pair of dark red lips and heavy eyeliner.

"I'm sorry for the delay, gentlemen, we will be ready to leave in a matter of minutes. Could I get you some peanuts? Or some wine, perhaps?"

Gerald was too busy looking out the window but Death happily took the offer on both counts.

"I'd absholutely love shum peanuts my lovely peanut lady," said Death. "And my friend here, he wash a penguin ya know, he'll take two," proclaimed Death and held up four fingers to enforce the point.

The flight attendant cheerily handed over three packs of peanuts and refilled the wine.

Death flung all three back over his head in rapid succession.

Gerald giggled to himself as the situation outside drew to a close with the rest of the lemons successfully being crammed in with the luggage, and the workers moved off the runway while throwing lemons at each other.

The
fasten seat belts
sign flicked on and a voice boomed over the PA system.

"Passengers of flight 34x-19457EKL, this is your captain speaking."

"Wassat?" asked Gerald.

"That, my lil pegwin, ish the bloke whosh flying the plan."

The captain continued. "We'll be taking off in a matter of moments and apologize for the extensive delay. The flight attendants will now explain the safety procedures. I hope you enjoy the flight and please feel free to try our excellent Lemon Meringue Pie." There was a loud
bing
and the plane began to move.

Jeremiah the goldfish was completely astonished to find that someone had placed him in a glass bowl, filled it with water, and dropped a castle into it. This exact same surprise had occurred one-million-thirty-three-thousand-two-hundred-thirty-three times in his life. And this would not be the last time, either.

Jeremiah's premonitions and constant prophetic abilities appeared to be getting more severe as the day progressed, although he didn't actually know this because he couldn't remember. Words, letters, and numbers continued to fly into his head on a seemingly regular basis. He continued to try and record what he saw by moving his little coloured rocks around, but what he created made no sense to him at all and made him frustrated. However, moments later, he completely forgot what he was frustrated about and instead decided to swim in and out of the castle that he'd just found in his bowl.

Jeremiah was quite happy doing this, right up until he heard a muffled sound outside the bowl. Jeremiah swam up to the edge to see what made the sound but he couldn't really make out any distinct shapes. A tall sort of blur looked to be moving around, but Jeremiah failed to see any details. Then he forgot all about the sound and the blur and instead began to wonder why he was staring out of his fish bowl. He shrugged, as well as a fish can shrug, and turned around, only to have a creepy feeling run right up his spine. It would appear that someone had placed a castle in his bowl.

Nigel lived in a respectable, uptown, London apartment that overlooked a quaint greengrocer, a video rental store owned by two generally happy East Indian fellows known as the Raja brothers, and a small pottery shop that no one ever entered. The apartment building itself had been built well over a hundred years ago, but due to fire damage had been renovated several times.

Nigel lived on the third, and best, floor. The ground floor was the lowest, and anyone walking by the ground floor apartments never fought the urge to look through the windows. Thankfully, the ground floor was occupied nearly entirely by exhibitionists and they loved the attention.

The first floor had been the residence of a very cunning and talented arsonist responsible for the fires in the building and several more around London until he was finally arrested and sent to a prison in the northern regions of England where he was re-named Snugglyboo by his large, yet well-mannered, cellmate.

It was rumoured that the second floor was haunted by a marauding band of sheep poachers who had holed up in one of the rooms back in the late eighteen hundreds in order to avoid the authorities. One of the sheep they had recently stolen from a nearby farm became violent and ferocious due to eating some bad fruit and ended up killing the poachers. The story related that their ghosts haunted the second floor looking for the one sheep that turned bad. And so not only was the third floor the highest, it was also considered the best, as there was no lack of privacy, no ghosts, and no prior history with Snugglyboo the arsonist.

Following Heinrich's orders, Nigel entered his apartment and checked his messages. He found three. The first was a telephone salesman offering fantastic rates on the latest and greatest edition of an encyclopedia that would no doubt transform even the dullest, dimwitted person into someone of magnificent intellect. Nigel deleted the message without giving it a second thought, or a first one for that matter.

The second was a message from his mother asking him to call and talk to his father who had, apparently out of boredom and old age, decided to start a
Save the Ducks Foundation
, after he read a report about how ducks were being used for nerve gas testing in Australia. His newfound passion for the feathered, quacking birds drove his wife up the wall, as there were regular shipments of nervous ducks coming in from Australia. Being that the Reinhardts lived in a one-story bungalow somewhere south of Essex, there just wasn't enough room for all the ducks and Nigel's mother was highly concerned about the state of her fake Persian rugs.

Nigel made a mental note to call his parents sometime in the near future and continued to the last message, which appeared to be a woman in some form of hysteria ranting about out-of-control cyborg elves at Majestic Technologies.

A thought at the back of Nigel's brain shifted slightly and peered around many other thoughts. The memory of Mrs. Jones mentioning that her cat Fuzzbucket, that had been possessed by the devil, had mentioned Majestic Technologies shifted nervously. It felt it was about to be disturbed.

Nigel had once read an article about the advancements in modern technology allowing robots to learn and solve problems. Japan was definitely a forerunner in the advancements, as they already had robots walking up walls, bringing the morning coffee, and completing simple household tasks. The leading American artificial intelligence research lab had the misfortune of being located in Texas. The most impressive thing the crack group of scientists at the Texas Institute for Technology, rather unfortunately abbreviated TIT., had accomplished was making a small robot dog belch the alphabet.

The Irish had managed to form a committee to undertake the research and development of artificial intelligence, they'd purchased the necessary equipment, built a laboratory, and then all gone down to the pub to celebrate and had been there ever since. All this Nigel knew to be true, as he'd read it in a popular and renowned magazine.

Cyborg elves sounded like something straight out of a bad science fiction movie. After all the goings-on of the day, this was the last thing that Nigel hoped for. Things had been entirely too weird, with people not dying anymore, getting fired, the disturbing flashback, not to mention the whole hanging upside down off a building incident. Although it went against every natural urge in his body, he decided that enough was quite enough, even more than enough, in some people's opinions. He would not respond to the crazed woman who had left him a message.

Probably just a prank, anyway
.

For a while, Nigel had been receiving phone calls from a left-wing communist religious cult that had become convinced that Nigel's goldfish represented the missing link to the saviour of the universe. Nigel had received a total of three-thousand-two-hundred-sixty-three phone calls from the insane cult members before finally deciding that they were in fact a bunch of complete nutters and changing his phone number. What Nigel really wanted was some food, as he hadn't eaten since breakfast and—

"Food!" said Nigel.

Two thoughts crisscrossed his mind and then collided somewhere in the middle. He'd forgotten to feed his pet fish. Nigel was immensely obsessed with his pet fish, Jeremiah, for reasons of which he himself was completely oblivious. He never really had any pets growing up and, as a consequence, was no great lover of animals, although he did feel a small twang of grief about the bird that had been crushed inadvertently by his falling desk earlier in the day. Nigel could never understand the human fascination with keeping animals in their house, the comfort that they allegedly provided, and the amount of waste that they excreted in a one-week period: it none of that balanced correctly in his mind. It all seemed rather bizarre to him, and so he had never really ever thought about getting a pet until one day, while visiting his Great-Aunt Margo in Birmingham, he came across a small pond located somewhere in an obscure piece of countryside where Nigel got himself completely lost. Every time Nigel tried to recount, even to himself, the events that brought about the consequence of him owning a pet goldfish, everything seemed to blur and he often blacked out. He remembered leaving London in a rented car, he remembered getting lost somewhere after Essex, he remembered the pond, and Jeremiah staring innocently up out of the green goo, and then he was back in his London apartment looking for something to put his new fish in. As far as he remembered, he never made it to a visit with his aged relative. What was even stranger was that he later discovered that he'd never had a Great-Aunt Margo in the first place. The whole trip seemed like some sort of deranged dream.