Immortal Remains: A Tim Reaper Novel Read online

  Immortal Remains

  A Tim Reaper Novel

  Sean Cummings

  Back Alley Books

  Immortal Remains – A Tim Reaper Novel

  Copyright © 2016 Sean Cummings

  Sean Cummings asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  ISBN 978-0-9783817-6-9

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or in any means – by electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without prior written permission.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the author’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Also by Sean Cummings

  Acknowledgements

  1. Chapter 1

  2. Chapter 2

  3. Chapter 3

  4. Chapter 4

  5. Chapter 5

  6. Chapter 6

  7. Chapter 7

  8. Chapter 8

  9. Chapter 9

  10. Chapter 10

  11. Chapter 11

  12. Chapter 12

  13. Chapter 13

  14. Chapter 14

  15. Chapter 15

  16. Chapter 16

  17. Chapter 17

  18. Chapter 18

  19. Chapter 19

  20. Chapter 20

  21. Chapter 21

  22. Chapter 22

  23. Chapter 23

  24. Chapter 24

  25. Chapter 25

  26. Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from THE GIRL ON VICTORIA ROAD

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  SNEAK PEAK AT "FREAKS ANON" by MATT DARST

  CHAPTER 1

  Also by Sean Cummings

  Poltergeeks

  Student Bodies

  Marshall Conrad – A Superhero Tale

  Funeral Pallor – A Valerie Stevens Novel

  Shade Fright – A Valerie Stevens Novel

  The North – A Post Apocalyptic Thriller

  For Children:

  To Catch a Cat Thief

  Visit Sean online at:

  sean-cummings.ca

  Twitter: @saskatoonauthor

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  AUTHOR’S NOTE:

  PSST! Want a free copy of one of my books? Post an honest review on your Facebook page (yes, even if you thought my book was terrible) go to my Facebook Author Page and pop the link on the wall! I’ll send you a Kindle or EPUB copy of one of my books! -or- CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEWSLETTER & GET A FREE COPY OF ONE OF MY BOOKS!

  For Jodi who waited and waited and waited …

  Acknowledgements

  Back in 2010, my second ever traditionally published novel hit bookstores courtesy of the UK publisher, Snowbooks. It’s called FUNERAL PALLOR, the second in my Valerie Stevens urban fantasy series. It’s basically a book about blowing the crap out of zombies and laying the beat-down on some necromancers. There are head bangers with a zombie plow, a fully sentient zombie named Caroline who is Val’s sidekick. And I introduced a new character – TIM REAPER. The guy who can’t be killed.

  A funny thing happened. The feedback I got from readers was unanimous: when is there going to be a Tim Reaper book? Those were the salad days for urban fantasy. Round about 2012, traditional publishing hit “peak urban fantasy” – I just didn’t know it at the time. I had started writing TIM REAPER in 2011 and got it off to my then agent in London. We spent the next twelve months revising the hell out of it and, unfortunately, we missed the bus. By the time we were ready to submit, UF was over unless you were an established brand or you were writing something like my books POLTERGEEKS and STUDENT BODIES – urban fantasy aimed at young adults.

  My agent and I parted company in 2014 because she’s primarily a children’s and YA agent and I wanted to write adult stuff. She’s fabulous. I would be with her today if I only wrote children’s books and YA. She couldn’t sell the project and recommended I try finding another agent.

  So … I spent the rest of 2014 back in the query pits and the project I queried? IMMORTAL REMAINS – A TIM REAPER NOVEL. (I also self-published my YA ZOMPOC thriller THE NORTH. It sold very well for about a year and a half. Then the sales dropped and it’s now available as a reprint with Severed Press and selling quite well again, thank you very much.)

  I did get a number of full requests from agents but they all passed stating that UF was “a tough sell these days”. In January 2015 I finally found a new agent – Lane Heymont from The Seymour Agency. He got the book out there and we got a lot of full requests but after a year of submitting, this spring he said that he’d exhausted every contact and that UF was such a downer in traditional publishing that he actually submitted the book as “contemporary fantasy” hoping we might get lucky. He did a great job for me on the project and I have no complaints.

  But now I had this completed novel which is, in my opinion, the best thing I have ever written and no publishers were jumping at it. (I came very close with a Canadian publisher who offered the best rejection I have ever received as a professional author). In short … urban fantasy is dead in the traditional publishing world.

  What did I do next? Well, I researched. I started looking into urban fantasy and dark fantasy on Amazon, checking out the rankings. What did I learn? That urban and dark fantasy and are selling quite well for a large number of authors who self-published it. Books with excellent cover art and great stories exist on Amazon and they aren’t under anyone’s banner but that of the author.

  I had a choice to make. Let my completed project sit on a flash drive and collect dust until some day in the future when traditional publishing decides that urban fantasy is “in” again? Or should I throw caution to the wind and self-publish?

  Like Tim Reaper, I decided to go for it. Reaper is a great protagonist because he is an amoral death spirit who really just wants to become human. He hasn’t aged a day in a hundred years because he switches bodies when the one he is occupying breaks down. Try to imagine Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer as a grim reaper in human form. And Reaper has some allies: Carol Sparks – a Halifax homicide detective and Dane Woollcott, the owner/manager of a gay nightclub where Reaper likes to drink pints of ale. There are demons, angels and those working for both sides. Of course we can’t forget the premise: there’s a serial killer on the loose and his victims are angels. Only Reaper can stop him and if he doesn’t it’s end-of-days for the human race.

  This book has been a hard slog for five years. I want to thank Jenny Savill in London for all her work on the project and my agent, Lane Heymont who worked his tail off with new ideas and revision work. Thanks to my wife for putting up with me being the most grumpy author on the planet. Thanks to everyone in my writer’s group for listening to me lament the challenges of getting a good urban fantasy published these days. Thanks to Chris Holm for his front cover blurb. Read his Collector series, they’re brilliant books.

  So … kick up your heels. Dig in and I hope you enjoy Immortal Remains.

  “Death makes angels of us all and gives us wings where we had shoulders smooth as raven’s claws.”

  Jim Morrison, Rock Star

  �
�You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everybody dances with the Grim Reaper.”

  Robert Alton Harris, Serial Killer

  “Angels and demons are all assholes. The only difference between them is the colour of their attire.”

  Tim Reaper, Shit Disturber

  1

  1919

  It is a terrible thing to watch a child die. It is worse still when you carry the secret knowledge that a child’s death is your fault.

  I observed the scene around the little boy’s bedside. It should have been easy for me as I had witnessed the conclusion of a life lived countless times in the past. This particular scene should have been no different than what happened in millions of hospitals and homes around the globe at all hours, every day and night. The dying time; a unit measured by fever and failing organs and seemingly endless final moments, each attuned to a fate set out by powers greater than mine from the moment of birth.

  The grieving parents wore linen face masks as they hovered over the dying child whose face resembled some ghastly china doll. He might as well have been made of porcelain, because the flu hit hard and fast, smashing its way through his immune system, shattering any hope of a future into a million tiny shards. He was only nine years old and his body betrayed him. Disease kicked his hopes and dreams to the gutter. It stabbed his mother in the abdomen, in the very womb from which he emerged only nine short years ago, and she would never be the same. She would blame herself until the day one of my kind comes to claim her. The loss of her only child would poison her mind, her life and her marriage until such a point her husband leaves her for another less guilt-ridden woman because that is how this particular grieving family would play itself out.

  I caused this.

  These final seconds, like countless others occurring at the same moment only divided by human constructs like time and faith, is overseen by those who facilitate the natural order of things. Like me, we passively watch life’s end unfold until our shadow-like hands gently brush the collective faces of our intended and we whisper the words of timeless, ageless and limitless ending.

  “Come with me,” I whispered in the little boy’s ear as I brushed against his clammy cheek.

  He let out a sudden sharp gasp; a gulp of air from a drowning soul. A full life was his birthright and I took it from him. I snatched it away. He emitted a last desperate breath and then my intended slowly exhaled; that final breath leaving his lungs like the air being slowly released from a balloon. His heart stopped beating within a microsecond and that’s when tears began to flow.

  This was the start of my punishment. The little boy was to be the last soul I would ever claim. There must have been some kind of symbolism in it having been a child, though I didn’t have a freaking clue what meaning could ever be drawn from what I had just done.

  His lifeless eyes stared up at the ceiling, they looked through it actually. And it was in the very next moment I felt his soul emerge from the same body that once skated on the frozen edges of the lake with his pals. The child’s mother let out a haunted, painful wail as she drove her face into her dead child’s now motionless chest and sobbed.

  The flickering image of the boy stood before his mother and reached out to her; his near translucent hand passing through her flesh. The Angel of Death and Transformation appeared a second or so later – a rarity because he never showed up at death side, that’s always a reaper’s job. He fired a contemptuous glare my way and then his features softened as he knelt before the visage of the dead boy.

  “Take my hand, child,” Ezekiel said in a voice so filled with tenderness I couldn’t believe this was the same Holy being that unleashed hell on earth in Egypt nearly three thousand years ago.

  The boy reached out and the moment his hand touched Ezekiel’s, Holy light filled the room. A host of angels sang His praise and the light diminished until there was only a crying mother hugging her dead child’s body as the grief-stricken father looked on.

  I created the cataclysm that unleashed death on a scale not seen since the Middle Ages. It had been grinding at me for the last dozen souls I’d claimed: why must anyone die when death itself tears apart those who are left behind? My role had always been clear — I understood the natural order of things and for millennia, I never questioned it. Yet doubts crept in like a winter chill seeping in through the cracks in a wall. There was something about claiming the souls of children that always haunted me. This one certainly wasn’t the first child I’d taken. Yet with each dying child I encountered, I noticed they more than anyone else fought hardest right up until their last breaths. And it bothered me to see the end of innocence when so many I’d claimed were as far from innocent as you can get. It angered me. It was unjust.

  And that’s so completely unlike me.

  No, seriously.

  I’ve waited passively while a madman walked into a shipping office in London with a shotgun and two revolvers, blasting away at anything that moved. He killed eight people and me? I just observed the proceedings, oblivious the horrifying carnage. And the worst part? I wasn’t there to claim any of the eight victims; he was for me. It was my job to claim the crazy person the moment he fired both barrels straight into his mouth. There were eight other death dealers milling about, each assigned to claim the souls of his victim – they too were as oblivious as me.

  That’s how it worked, by the way.

  We claim one of you at a time. No more and no less. It’s always been like that.

  The little boy who died of the flu was to be my last. After he disappeared, I too disappeared.

  But only for a short time.

  Look, the arbitrary nature of what I do is cosmic cement that binds all living things to their fate; it’s not ever to be fucked with. Yet there I was drifting through the organic constructs of the living, en-route to the drunken man.

  The war had ended more than nine months earlier and all over the world, the dying continued on biblical scale. I was alone for the very first time, yet I knew the lure of living energy would be too much to bear. I decided to sample people’s lives. To drink in their life force. To experience fleeting glimpses into those seemingly unimportant gifts to the living, which are too quickly forgotten: the feel of the wind blowing gently through your hair or the warmth of the midmorning sun against your skin. I decided to sample their lives like a judge at a wine-tasting competition. I’d feel the constant thump-thump-thump of a beating heart, and then onto the next for another small moment. I’d look upon all there was to see through their living eyes, then onto another and another still, hopping from one person to the next, each body a mere stepping stone until I spotted him – the drunken man.

  I knew his end was near because we all see everyone’s end – it’s what we do. A thought occurred to me: what if I use him? What might happen? Anything would be better than an eternity’s existence as an intangible cloud of energy stealing glimpses into people’s lives.

  He staggered hard up a steep incline, blind to the approach of the streetcar about to clip him as it rumbled toward the stop not more than a half a block away.

  I hopped into the body of a homeless man squatting in a gully and taking a shit. I heard a thud and watched the drunken man’s feet leave the ground after the streetcar struck him. Another of my kind appeared beside the body as it lay bleeding on a patch of grass. It greeted the now dead man’s luminous form and escorted him away. As soon as the two were gone, I made my move.

  I drove my essence straight into his central nervous system. He’d been dead for less than a minute and I wasted no time getting him to draw a breath. An electric jolt shot through his heart and it began to beat.

  I blinked three times and drew in a cleansing breath of air. The body spasmed for a few seconds, just long enough for me to acquaint myself with my new host’s functions. When the twitching stopped, I pushed myself up off the grass. My head spun like a turbine and I felt a splash of nausea roll about in the pit of my stomach. A cloud of choking dust swirled around my face as another s
treetcar zipped by. I turned around and looked at the spot where I’d just resurrected a dead man.

  I saw the pool of blood along with a crisp grayish-brown human shaped impression in the grass where my host had been only a few seconds ago.

  Every living thing within a few feet of where I stood was dead. I glanced down at my hands and saw blood mixed with tiny flecks of dirt and a pair of long grass stains that stretched from the heel of my hands up to my wrists.

  The drunken man was gone. I was alive for the very first time.

  And my lips curled up into a smile.

  His name was Amos Regan and he’d been in America for twenty-five years. He’d worked with his hands back in the old country but it was in the new land that he discovered the lure of the drink. Dirt cheap American whisky warmed his insides on those cold mornings working the docks, loading and unloading Great Lakes ships with names like Ojibwa and Algonquin. Liquor drove away his wife and family – she’d taken the kids and run off after he slapped her around one time too many.

  He poured his worth into yet more drink night after night, picking fights for spare change and pummeling the faces of those who gave him any lip in one of the many saloons he frequented near dockside. He made quick cash doing side jobs for any gang in need of an enforcer. He wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty so it was a surprise to me his life ended by accident instead of by design.