Chapter One: Waiting Rooms.

Sipping from teacups in a backdrop of white. It could be worse. He'd been dead for six days, as far as he could tell. Six. Now, that was quite a nice number, really. Two times three, you know. Even numbers were good. There was something very rounded about them, something that he could trust. Yes.

Cutler Beckett had wondered what death would be like—he knew that everyone faced it, eventually, although he himself had been hoping to avoid it for a good few decades yet. But you couldn't have everything. And there was something about death that reminded him—in a way—of his office at the E.I.T.C... there was paperwork, for a start. Oh, what unearthly amounts of paperwork! For once, though, he was not in charge of going over every ledger and looking back at accounts so that he could check that all receipts had been duly signed and that no legal action could be taken if... if... it was at this moment that his trail of thought (which had already been leading to a rather dismal end: death can do that to you) was interrupted by the appearance of that strange gentleman who had first talked to him when he had died.

"I'm awfully sorry for all of the waiting, Mister Beckett, C," he said, sounding a little flustered, flipping through a lot of paper that was stuck onto a little piece of wood. A clipboard. He was always referred to as "Mister Beckett, C" here, though he didn't mind an awful lot, he supposed. Apart from one minor detail.

"Lord Beckett, C... well, Lord Beckett will do," he said, straightening his frock coat with as much decency as he could possess within a moment that a man who looked like a bird watcher crossed with a serial killer was in charge of him. To be honest, he had never acted the subordinate to anyone, and he did not wish to begin any time soon. But that was just how it worked.

"Yes, well," the man said, quite bluntly ignoring him, as he always did. "You did choose a bit of a bad time to die-."

"Choose?"

"-as we're having a big re-organization, here," the man finally seemed to find the correct page amongst his block of paper and his eyes flickered over it, Beckett's indignant expression utterly lost on him. The silly bespectacled man seemed to notice nothing in front of his long nose, apart from his little pieces of paper, of course. Beckett looked around the place that he had been dwelling for an estimated six days—although there really was no way to tell, because nothing changed, here. Nothing moved because nothing was. It was an endless stretch of white: Beckett had gone for a long schlep through the place and had come across no borders and no edges and no walls. It simply went on, infinitely, or at least indefinitely. Except, the way things were organized around here, it probably just went on until further notice.

It was an empty and unloved place, though it could make tea appear from nowhere.

"What, exactly, is 'here'?" Beckett asked in his usual self-important manner. "Death? You're re-organizing death?" Admittedly, the organization had been rather awful. Upon arrival, he had had to sit around in a waiting room for an unearthly amount of time (unearthly was right, though, he supposed: wherever this was, it wasn't earth). There had been blue chairs made of hideously scratchy felt. There had been a glass coffee table. There had been a plastic potted plant, which had come across to Beckett as a desperate attempt to bring an almost manically cheerful tone to the room. Despite it being a room full of people who had just died. And behind a massive desk, there had been a woman with bleached-blonde hair, nattering obnoxiously onto a phone, staring at the screen of her computer like a blind woman.

"What is this?" Beckett had demanded from the woman sitting next to him. He was soaked to the bone, and his left arm and the entire left portion of his back was furiously burnt, although he was somehow immune to the pain. The woman besides him had a knitting needle rammed into her chest, which he decided not to ask about.

"It's like waiting to see a dentist, but with no magazines to read..." she had said, looking around herself. He hadn't understood much of that, but he understood the next part: "Sounds like hell to me."

It had indeed been just a little bit hellish, especially as they'd all had to take a number and wait. He had been number eighteen. In no way did he believe that he was the eighteenth person in the world to die, so this lead him to believe that there were more of these waiting rooms, perhaps people were filtered into them separately. He saw nobody that he recognized, though the people in there certainly were an odd mishmash. There was the knitting-needle woman, as well as a man dressed in a tuxedo with several holes in his body, some sort of ancient warrior wearing a large tea towel with spears sticking out of him. He supposed that the theme for this room was something along the lines of "non-natural causes". Then he'd gotten up to the desk and had to have his name put on a lot of lists and have a few filing cabinets be searched through and his appointment time (?!) re-checked. And then he'd had to sign something. "What happens if I don't sign it? Do I not count as dead?" he'd asked, dryly. Her resulting blank look had scared him into signing (a look devoid of any sentient intelligence at all, he was certain).

And then he'd been dumped into the white space, while the bespectacled man ("Call-me-Hugh," he had said in a perfectly perfunctory manner) told him that, regretfully, the system was going through a bit of a crunch at the moment (sir) and that he would have to wait for a short while, sincere apologies, goodbye. And so his six-day stay in the endless whiteness had started. Still, now it was over: where would he be heading? What was going to happen next?

"Re-organizing death... yes, that is a way of putting it," Call-me-Hugh said, shooting him a smile that was reminiscent of plastic being stretched over a boomerang, forced and false. "We have a system here. The system is important. You would know about the legend of Davy Jones and his Locker, yes?" Call-me-Hugh nodded at the end of the sentence, as is thinking that this would automatically mean that he agreed with him, "Well, now that it is being—shall we say properly maintained again—there has been a sudden influx of people from your- let's say your era spilling into the system. I think that it was the, the kick we needed to get things running smoothly again." Beckett found himself detesting this man merely from the way that he spoke, and empathised the wrong words.

"Yes, well, my heartiest congratulations," Beckett said, impatiently, "But what happens to me now? Where am I supposed to go? What happens next?" Beckett didn't like bombarding people with questions—he found that, often, they only answered the final one. He had known a few people in his time who fired questions like bullets, allowing no time for answers before blathering on again, lost in their own pig-headed haze. Call-me-Hugh gave a polite little cough, one that he did not need as there was nothing stuck in his throat, but was thrown in anyway.

Beckett wondered if he had trained hard to be this hateable.

"Step into my office—so to speak," Call-me-Hugh responded evenly, and then his surroundings melted away like wet paint dripping down a canvas, and Beckett found himself in the most jam-packed office that he had ever come across. There were about a dozen desks in neat rows across the middle of the room, some of them overflowing with mountainous amounts of paper, other ones looking a little more organized. Dishevelled men—each one spectacled, dressed in attire similar to Call-me-Hugh—sat at some desks, whilst others were empty. Plastic things (telephones, they were telephones) rang loudly, their grinding tones sounding bitter and misanthropic.

Along every wall, there were filing cabinets—the room stretched quite far down, the size of one of the larger decks on a ship—and the grey filing cabinets gleamed from every single place that he looked. Bespectacled men were leafing through some of them, and the banging and grinding of their drawers being quickly pulled open and pushed closed echoed around the room. There was conversation, too, all of it in the harried yet businesslike manner of a journalist behind their deadline. Beckett wondered if death had always been this shambolic. It seems that the blight of incompetence shall always afflict mankind, he thought, sniffily.

"I died at sea, and according to legend, that puts me in the Locker," Beckett said.

"Ye-es... it does..." Beckett did not like that drawn out vowel. It sounded like Call-me-Hugh was hiding something. Something that would go down like a lead balloon. "You may have noticed that the time continuum of this place after death is a little, shall we say, skewed, however: over here, time doesn't really matter, as such."

"Of course time matters," Beckett said, frowning. "We can't have everything happening at once, can we?"

"There is time here, but it is different to the time in the living world," Call-me-Hugh sounded rehearsed, even bored: Beckett imagined that he had had to give this speech many times before. "Time in death is not after time in life; it is next to it. Stretched alongside the living world, all of it the same."

"You mean everyone who ever has and ever will die arrives here at the same time?" Beckett asked; well, if that didn't sound jolly disorganized, just what did?

"Not quite," Call-me-Hugh gave a patronizing little smile. "It's a hard concept to grasp, but we systematize time into little... packages, and take a little from all around, if you know what I mean. We take small portions from each century, and then go back to each one." Beckett thought for a moment of little parcels filled with time. It sounded quite useful. "So that we have—let's say—an even spread, across an entire timeline, we take bits at one hundred years intervals."

"Please, do elaborate," Beckett said—Call-me-Hugh looked at him for a moment. It was impossible to tell whether he was being sarcastic or serious. He looked earnest enough, so he continued.

"We group people into little, ah, clusters, so that they can be sent off to their correct placements in groups. It's more efficient, you see, saves more energy." Beckett was just looking at him, now. He didn't really need to say anything. "Of course, it takes a lot of energy to get to the land after death," Call-me-Hugh said, his smile now looking more like a ladder in a pair of tights; it was stretched across his face in a slightly disfigured manner, there nonetheless, but looking more like a blemish than a sign of genuine friendliness. "You don't expect the land of the dead to be right next to the land of the living, do you? We have to keep them separate; very separate."

"Why?" Beckett asked. He felt a little ridiculous, asking the question favoured by so many four-year-olds, and wished that he had said something else that was a little bit wordier. But the answer he received was still satisfactory.

"So that they don't come back, of course."


NB: Why hello. Illogical Squeeks has re-landed. I don't think anyone will remember who I am, actually. I used to write quite a lot on here, but then real life ate me alive and besides, not many people were really reading my stuff at that point. Perhaps my plotlines just became too weird. Doesn't look like I learn from my mistakes, does it? Please, if you are interested, do stick around. And feel free to drop me a line. Response gauaranteed 99.9% of the time (though not necessarily a sane one).

Disclaimer: disclaimed!

NEXT TIME: James was beginning to realize how much he disliked the word batch. He, Davy Jones, Cutler Beckett and Jack Sparrow were hardly the same make of muffin. So to speak.