Chapter Five-
Meg awoke to a sensation not of pain, but of cold linoleum.
The moments of the chase and the inevitable attack on the hill were still fresh in her mind, as she felt her mother kneeling beside her, trying to sit her upright.
"Meg?" Lois called to her softly. "Meg? Are you all right, sweetheart?"
With her consciousness ascending back to normal, Meg could just recognize the nasal tones of Lois through the mental haze. What was she doing at the university?
"Mom? What…happened? Where am I? Back at graduation?" she muttered. "Tell the crowd I didn't…mean anything…with flipping them off…and the dirty cat's cradle."
Lois was at odds with what to say about that. Principal Sheppard, standing nearby, certainly didn't know what to make of his student's behavior either.
"Honey," Lois said to Meg while getting her to her feet and walking her over to one of the two chairs in front of the principal's desk. "You fainted when you opened the door, Sweetie. You've been out for a few minutes."
"Fainted?" Meg asked groggily.
"Yes, dear. I told Principal Sheppard that it was just low blood sugar and that you'll be fine."
Meg looked up at Sheppard, a little ashamed for what she thought she might have done. "Sorry, Principal Sheppard. I…hope I didn't drool too much on your floor."
Sheppard settled in his leather high back chair and laced his pudgy fingers together, attempting to look both imperious and conciliatory at the same time.
"That's quite alright, Miss Griffin," he said as he pulled out some papers from a drawer in the desk. "No harm done to the wax job. Now, I have the paperwork for you and your mother to sign. Afterwards, you can hold the hands of cry-babies while they suck from your emotional teat."
"All right, Principal Sheppard," said Lois, apparently not to noticing the snide remark as she leaned forward, perused the paperwork and then signed her name at its bottom.
Meg followed suit, and as she listened to the two adults drone on about the legalities of Meg's new "job", she just leaned back against her chair, trying to get her head around what an incredible dream everything was before she woke.
A few minutes later, it was time to leave, and Meg hoisted her book bag from the floor with one hand, a rolled up sheet still held in the other. She was just now aware of it.
She unfurled it slowly, wondering what it was. The words, "St. Montage's University, West Beach, California. This certifies that Megan Griffin has completed…" were emblazoned on its surface.
'The diploma?' she thought incredulously. 'It was real?'
Lois, who was already in the hallway outside the office, glanced back to see Meg rolling up a parchment-like piece of paper.
"Come on, Meg. Let's go," she told her, and then asked, "What's that in your hand?"
Meg looked up from the roll to Lois as though coming out of the dream again. Then she opened her bag and slid the roll inside.
"Er, classwork," she lied, as she zipped up the bag and joined her mother outside.
At home, Meg relaxed on her bed, her mind absorbing in more detail the entirety of her day, in particular, the several years' study she thought she did but now wasn't so sure.
Except that she understood the law, and not in any way that a layman might understand it. She knew it as fluently as if it were her native tongue. Every process, every term, every law it seemed was accessible in her mind. Apart from actual courtroom experience, she was potently armed.
She glanced over to the book bag lying on the floor nearby, thinking about the roll of parchment inside it. The proof, as best she could admit to it, that she was enrolled in a strange university after her…death?
Yet here she was, alive and relatively well. 'What did Death do to me?' she thought.
Meg got up, went to her radio/CD player and put in a disk. She made it back to bed and reclined just as the music started. She stretched the weariness from her body and blew out a tired breath. There was a lot to think about before the next move was made and it was made clear to her that there wasn't much time.
She closed her eyes and let the music carry her off, her head bobbing to the rhythm slowly.
Then there was a soft knock on the door.
'Probably that fat-assed Chris, playing around like the arrested development case that he is', she thought in frustration. With a deep breath, she called out tiredly, "Yeah?"
The door opened and Death entered as easy as he pleased. Meg saw him, sighed and settled more in her bed.
"What now, Death? I just got back from school and I'm beat."
"So am I," he said, taking a seat on her chair near her computer desk. "You try snatching somebody from one dimension to the next at the last minute. Especially when that somebody pisses off an entire university. Man, I thought lynching was the worse they were gonna do to ya."
Meg sat up instantly. "University? I was there! I really was there. How did I get there?"
Death cocked his head in an upward angle, as though he were rolling his non-existent eyes. "Uh, duh! I took you there. Remember?"
Meg thought for a moment. Her mental clock felt badly off. She could recall events that happened today and yet could also recall events of things she apparently did years ago and in places that weren't initially familiar. She felt like an alien abductee that was getting missing segments of her life back in a rush.
"Wait. Yeah, I remember! You took me to the mansion where Jennifer and the others died. Then you…" She paused at the potency of the act to come. "You killed me? And then we wound up somewhere cloudy and then you said that we were in a university. Saint…Montague's or something? Am I right?"
Death shrugged his shoulders slightly and nodded. "More or less, yeah."
"Well, how did I get back?" Meg asked. "I thought I was gonna get killed by some mob, but I was already dead, wasn't I? How did you bring me back to life?"
Again, Death shrugged nonchalantly. "Elementary, my dear flesh bag. I didn't kill you."
In her best Arnold Drummond, Meg asked, "Whachu talkin' 'bout, Death?"
"I didn't kill you," he explained. "I can't bring people back to life. I'm Death, not a Happy Ending in a massage parlor. I brought you back in time so you could see what happened Jennifer and the others, so you'd understand what's going on. Then, and this is the neat trick, I sent you to…" Death gestured dramatically and said in an equally mock-dramatic tone. "Another dimension."
Meg was thunderstruck at the impossibility of it all. "A what?"
" Yep," Death continued smugly. "A parallel universe where the space/time continuum is controlled by movies from the 1980's. Booya!"
"But why?"
"C'mon. You were pitchin' a fit about not being able to do anything, so I took you to the one place I knew you could get a decent education in what you needed in no time flat. You certainly weren't gonna get it in this country."
Meg considered that, and then a question hit her. "Well, then, why did you make me think I was dead or something?"
"So you'd be less inclined to back out of going to the school. It's not like I coulda force you or anything. You'd have to want to go."
"Oh," was Meg's last word on the subject. But then she thought about all the work she actually did do there at the university, time-compressed via cinematic convention or not. The knowledge was permanent as were the memories, and it was all Death's amazing idea.
"Wow, thanks, Death, " she said with grateful understanding. "I guess I did need a boot up my ass to motivate me."
Death gave Meg a reassuring point of his bony hand shaped like a gun. "Hey, happy to be of help. What was that, anyway, like a size 15 wide?"
"Ha, ha," Meg deadpanned.
"Anyway. What happened after you came back? Did your mom say anything?" he asked.
Meg sighed. "Mom was too busy getting my face off the floor to say much. I looked like Dad after an all-nighter. Anyway, thanks to her and Principal Sheppard, I have an appointment tomorrow afternoon at the offices where the magazine is published. Sort of a get-to-know-you deal."
"That's wonderful, Meg. Really," Death said in mock-congratulation. "I'm so happy this is all going your way…however, you have an interview that you have to get to tonight."
"What?" Meg protested, not believing she wasn't going to get any sleep, and on top of that, have to figure out how to sneak out so the folks wouldn't know what was going on.
Death brought up his hands in empathy. "Sorry, kid. You're a lawyer, now. You'll have to go to Limbo. That's where your friend and the other kids are staying until the end of the trial. You'll have to interview 'em before the trial."
"C'mon, Death. I can't stay up all night. I told you I have that appointment tomorrow. I'm not going there with bags under my eyes so big, I need a concierge. Can't I reschedule or something?"
"No," he said with a certain note of finality. Meg hung her head down in worry. How could she juggle two different lives now, one for the sake of a friend, and the other for herself?
Death looked at her in pity for a minute more before getting up from his seat and, in his most theatrical, acquiescing to her.
"Alright, alright," he called out in faux-reluctance, though he knew he would have to help her anyway. "I'll help ya out, jeez. Never let it be said that Death wasn't a good friend when the chips are down."
Meg perked up and asked, "You can do something? Reschedule?"
"Nah," Death said as he walked over to where Meg sat up in bed. "Something even cooler."
Night on Spooner Street was as quiet and uneventful as it could be at around two in the morning, and the Griffin household was still in its repose, especially in the bedroom of the daughter.
Meg slept deeply under her covers, wearing a tasteful white blouse, slacks and pumps.
A loose sheet of paper fell off of her desk and fluttered quietly to the floor, and in the still air of the darkness of the bedroom, something stirred invisibly.
Like the dying light of an old movie projector in reverse, a pinprick of a glow was slowly coming into focus in the middle of the room.
The glow took on coherence and shape, the semblance of a human body solidifying in appearance, if not physicality.
The manifestation complete, the ghostly twin of Meg Griffin looked around her room and then to the sleeping body in bed.
'I did it', she thought in surprise as she looked at her hands and looked down at her body, successfully formed and dressed in the very same clothes the physical form was wearing.
However, she did see something that she didn't expect to. A softly glowing cord of silvery light extended from her back and ran across the floor and up into the covers of her sleeping body.
She went over to the bed and was about to lift the covers to see where the cord was attached on her physical self when she heard the sound of a putting motor announce itself outside her windows.
Meg went to the window overlooking the Swansons' house and peered out onto to the street. A car, a VW Bug, sat idling front of her house.
She fished under her bed and pulled out an old attaché Peter once owned. She opened it up and checked the contents she smuggled in it. Note pads, pens and pencils, and other relevant things all there. She closed it back and carried it with her to her mirror.
Despite her nervousness at her first real action as a lawyer, she looked admiringly at herself. She looked professional, important, confident and competent.
With a bracing sigh, she opened her bedroom door and quietly left her room, noticing that the silver cord silently passed through the door when she closed it behind her and trailed behind her when she walked downstairs.
As she closed and locked the front door, she took another look at the Volkswagen parked by the curb, in particular, the driver's side of it. There, looking as impatient as he could muster, sat Death.
"Jeez, girl," he muttered in low tones out of the driver's side window. "What were you doing? Putting on make-up? We gotta go."
"Okay, okay," Meg said as she went around to the front passenger side and got in. "You were right, this is pretty cool," she told him.
"Ah, it's just an old party trick. Just keep practicing and it'll get easier, I promise ya."
Meg then asked warily, "You sure I'm not dead, right?"
"Ugh, I told ya already," Death moaned in exasperation. "It's called astral projection, an Out-of Body-Experience. You're perfectly safe. This way you can do what you need to do out here, and your body stays home and sleeps."
"Okay," Meg said guardedly, then she asked, "What's with this string behind me? What does it do?"
"Oh, that?" Death said as he put his car into gear. "Well, that's your silver cord. It connects you to your body. Haven't ya ever read Shirley Maclane?" The look on her face told him that she hadn't. "Anyway, it keeps your body alive while you're floatin' around like this. But be careful, if it breaks, you're worm chow."
"Good to know," Meg gulped. Then, to change the subject, she asked, as the car pulled out into the quiet street, "Do you think we're going to get there in time?"
Death glanced at her casually. "Relax, will ya? We got plenty of time." He suddenly perked up and said to her, "Hey, check this out! "Roads? Where we're going, we won't need roads!" Ah, I always wanted to say that. Okay, hang on."
The VW floated off the street, its tires tucked into its undercarriage. Then it flew a few yards down the street, banked back towards Meg's house and then blasted into the starry night.
The trip was incredibly short to Meg. One moment it was night on Earth, the next, it was daytime on the plane of Limbo. What she didn't expect was what Limbo looked like now, not that she ever knew what it looked like previously.
Except for what she was taught as a Roman Catholic, Meg always thought that Limbo was the kind of place that souls were sent to if they weren't good enough for Heaven, or not bad enough for Hell. An eternal realm for the mediocre.
But this was totally different. It looked for all the world, like a gated community. Death drove up to a tall set of wrought iron gates, leaned out of his window and spoke to a checkpoint intercom that stood off to one side.
"Death and one, to see the mayor," he said to it.
The clanking of metal and the whir of a motor heralded Death's car as the gates parted and they drove into a vast, open seaside land of manicured lawns, red-bricked walkways and quaint homes. To Meg, it all looked like a cross between Cape Cod and an endless suburban tract.
"This is Limbo?" Meg asked and then spied a painted wooden sign on the lawn leading into the administrative courtyard that said," Limbo Minimum Security Village."
Death pulled into the parking lot. "Yeah. Upper management decided to redevelop it. Change its image and all that. Now the inmates get to live it up. You can't leave here, but who'd want to?"
They both got out of the car, yet Meg was becoming fascinated by both the incongruity of her expectations and the ambiance of the place, the down-home folksiness of it all. People were strolling into little shops and cafes, meeting and talking to friends along the picturesque promenade, or riding carriages to or from the beach.
Everything about the place made Meg feel as though she were actually at a seaside community on Earth, instead of one on another plane of existence. However, there was just one thing that Meg kept noticing that continuously took her out of her Norman Rockwell fantasy. Everybody around her wore security ankle bracelets.
Meg followed Death into the courtyard, which was walled on all sides by the various buildings of the administration complex and dominated by a large marble fountain in its center.
"Where are we going?" Meg asked.
"We're going to see The Mayor. Actually, he's just the warden here, but since there's been no trouble since the place went country club, he runs the place like its his own town. People seemed to like it so they call him, 'The Mayor'."
They walked through a main pair of double doors leading to a wide foyer and intersection. A central desk stood before them, manned by a female clerk.
"Do you have an appointment here?" she asked officiously.
"Yeah," Death replied. "We're here to see The Mayor."
The clerk looked at Meg and said to her, "All visitors to the village must wear an ID button at all times." She gestured at a small cardboard box next to her. "Take one."
Meg complied and pulled out a large button that had a number eight in the center of it. She pinned it on and the two continued their trek.
Bustling office workers greeted and passed each other in the halls, and as they parted, they occasionally held their hand up, fingers touching thumb, shaping the hand like a crude telescope, and said, "See you 'round," by way of farewell.
Meg found the exchange strange, as though she had just wandered into the midst of another cult.
They went up the hall of the tastefully decorated building until they reached the end of it. A single door hung on the wall that dead-ended in front of them; the number two was stenciled on its window. Death knocked on the door and then they entered.
The office was surprisingly large, as large as a chamber, but it resembled nothing like the interior of any office. It looked more in common with a war room or a monitoring center.
The ceiling was domed; the walls were curved and adorned with what looked like sky charts and constellations, blinking intermittently. Security officers sat on strange, swaying, see-saw like constructs that supported monitors on their seated ends.
Just up ahead of Meg and Death, where it looked like someone in charge would sit, rested one of those egg chairs from the 1960's. Its back faced them from behind a beautifully carved desk. Behind the chair stood a large bay window overlooking the sea.
The chair silently turned from the window to face forward as the two approached.
"Ah, hello there! You must be the new Number 8," the portly, bearded man in the immaculate suit said as he noticed Meg's button pinned to her blouse. He stood up from his desk and extended a hand to shake. "You may call me Number 2. I'm the head administrator here at Limbo. We were expecting you."
He sat back down as soon as his guests sat down on the two similar chairs in front of the desk. "Now, Number 8...I can call you Number 8, can't I? I understand that you've come here to interview some of the inmates here prior to their trial, correct?"
"Yes, sir," Meg said, looking down at her ID button. "This will be my first case."
"Well, I wish you luck, Number 8, but I wouldn't put much hope in prisoners like these. They're the hardest bunch I ever had to deal with."
Meg looked a little confused. Surely he wasn't referring to the people she just saw when she got here. They seemed pleasant enough.
"You mean the inmates I saw on my way here? They seemed nice," she said.
The warden leaned forward conspiratorially and said in a low tone, "Don't let the quiet fool you for a second, my dear. They're always plotting, always scheming…to escape and to corrupt. They're like little fires. You have to stamp them out before they become big ones."
Meg just glanced over to Death in quiet concern. "I, uh, have all my paperwork, if you'd like to see," she said as she gave her folder from her attaché to the man in hopes of changing the subject. "I hope it's all here, I tried to give as much information as I could."
Number 2 looked through the folder, and then he glared up at Meg, his voice sounding more interrogatory and coldly polite. "So, you couldn't be bothered to give me all of your…information, Number 8?"
Meg felt a little uneasy. So much for a first impression. "Well, like I said, sir. I could only give you what I know. I hope you don't think I'm holding anything from you."
"We'll see, Number 8. By hook or by crook, we will."
"Ohhkay," Meg said pensively.
Number 2 calmly placed the folder on the desk and peered at Meg more intently, as if trying to read her secret motives from within.
"I wonder, have you ever served in the intelligence sector?" he interrogated her quietly. "Have you ever been a…secret agent, ma'am?"
Meg had no idea where these questions were coming from, as they had nothing whatsoever to do with the law or law enforcement. She was beginning to think that this guy was a certified wacko.
"Uh, no, sir. I haven't. Look does this have anything to do with my interview here?"
"Don't try to change the subject, Number 8," he challenged in a strong voice. "I can see now that I'll have to play chess with you very carefully. I do hope you'll prove to be a worthy opponent."
Meg felt like she was in a play that she didn't know the lines to. "Ohhkay," she said again, this time trying a better tactic in dealing with this nut. "If you could tell me where to find the inmate named Jennifer and her friends," she said slowly and carefully to placate him. "I'd be eternally grateful."
Number 2 laced his fingers together in deep thought, staring at her evenly. "Yes, I'm sure you would, Number 8. Well, I suppose it's for the best. You need to check the lay of the land before you begin to move your pieces, don't you? Very well."
Without preamble, he handed her a golden-filigreed plaque with a white screen in the center of it. "Speak the name of whom you seek and the map will show you the way," he told her.
Nervously, Meg got up quickly and nodded respectfully. "Thank you, sir. I'll be back in a bit."
The so-called Mayor smiled grimly at her as the guests departed, slowly shaking their heads. "Indeed, and…have a nice day."
The two had already left.