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Dr. Clayton Forrester lay on, he presumed, his deathbed. He felt like he was dying. He wanted to die, if only to escape that infernal off-key wavering hum infesting his dungeon-like basement quarters. If he didn’t die, he’d have to get up and do something about it, and the black block that looked, without his glasses, vaguely like a VCR tape. (Where the hell had visions of THAT obsolete technology come from to contaminate his final moments? Must be the morphine.) Plus, getting up was less appealing than death.
You will die alone and afraid knowing not a single human being ever loved you.
He’d thought about his fortune now and then over the years, but never so much as recently. Death would do that to a guy, he supposed. And Frank was right – he was a profoundly lonely man until the end of his days, just as he liked. Until today.
In the dark night of a man’s soul, he confronts the truths he seeks to hide from others and from himself. Clayton Forrester knew his truth that although he'd always preferred to live alone, he had no wish to die alone. He wanted a companion there to just sit and reminisce about the good times, about the experiments and the inventions and the test cases and Deep 13. He wanted Frank.
He missed Frank more than anyone or anything. He used to be ashamed of that fact but now, here at the very end, shame ceased to matter and all that was left was longing for something that could never be.
Clayton tried to turn his body to stare at the walls of his castle room, but it wouldn’t answer him any longer, and he could barely manage tilting his head. His home wasn’t exactly his castle. It was actually the run-down main building among the remnants of an old children’s Fairy Tale Forest, the kind he’d always wanted to visit as a kid when his mother drove them to visit his aunt and cousins between her marriages. He’d timidly beg to stop, she’d smack him down with some amount of verbal abuse thrown in for fun, and they’d roll on down the highway. After his invention of non-cuttable, puncture-proof plastic blister wrap, he’d had enough money to buy his own creepy mad scientist lair, and what better place for a creepy mad scientist lair than an abandoned amusement park? Any inventions that escaped to wander the overgrown grounds were chalked up to hallucinations or tall-tales by the teens whose partying on the grounds each weekend provided both believable cover for his real goings-on and a steady supply of subjects. Every now and then he’d pick off one of the stupider or more obnoxious ones to experiment upon. No one noticed, or, more likely, cared.
That he had fixed the “castle” basement up to look a lot like Deep 13 had wasn’t nostalgic, he reminded himself many times, merely a side effect of all mad scientist lairs having a number of elements in common. One of his assistants had, at some point, even installed a large circular vault door in his bedroom; he’d forgot the reason years ago but still, it added to the ambiance. He’d had a lot of assistants over the years since leaving Deep 13; some bad, some worse, none as profoundly stupid or as mindlessly loyal as Frank. Some even had the audacity to stay dead after he killed them! No, none of them were Frank and although time had dimmed the loss, it remained a canker in his shriveled heart, reminding him he’d never be able to totally wipe away his pesky feelings despite his years of effort and experiments.
Feeling more alone and afraid than ever before, Forrester drifted into a not-quite-sleep, not-quite-awake state while his body shut down bit by bit. There might have been the noise of a door opening and someone shuffling around. Maybe. Maybe not. He didn’t care. He just wanted this twilight half-life over.
“You. Are. Going. To. Die.” The voice broke through Clayton’s fog. He hadn’t heard that voice, except in his dreams, for years, years and years. Was this another dream? Or maybe a hallucination, like the time he imagined Della Reese was speaking to him from the great white beyond, babbling something about a national our day and someone named Vicky. But the voice was too familiar to ignore.
He made a great effort and cracked his eyes open. The face in front of him was shrouded in a dark hood, but he could barely see the outline of a silver spit curl. The voice, the hair...could it be?
“Frank? TV’s Frank? Is that you?”
The figure pushed back its hood.
“It is you! Frank! You’ve come back to me!”
“Dr. Forrester! It’s so good to see you again! How have you been?” Frank’s broad face creased into a genuine smile. He grabbed Clayton’s hand and pumped it over and over again.
“Frank, it’s good to see you too! What are you doing here? I thought you were dead!” If Clayton had feeling left in his extremities, his hand would be throbbing by now, since Frank was still shaking it.
“I am dead. But I picked up a gig as a Soultaker.”
“What’s a Soultaker? And Frank, you can let go of my hand now.”
Frank grimaced and finally dropped Forrester’s hand. “Well, I go and steal people’s souls when they die, then deliver them to the Angel of Death. You’re next on my list, but honestly, I had no idea that you were the Dr. Clayton Forrester. I thought you were just a Dr. Clayton Forrester. Silly me!”
Frank fished a plastic ring out of his pocket. It glowed a feeble green, like an abandoned glow stick the morning after a concert. “I’m supposed to store your soul in one of these rings.” He cocked his head to the side and looked bewildered at the thing. “I think this soul might be close to its expiration date. I’d better hurry up and get yours so I can get back to the office and turn them in.”
“How did you find me?”
“Oh, it was easy. I’ve been here before,” Frank answered. “Before we start, are you gonna want your Jello?”
“No, you can – wait! You’ve been here before? How could you be here before? I only bought this place a few years ago, long after you were d-” He cut himself off. After all these years, he still didn’t like saying the actual word in regards to Frank.
“Oh, I was here to steal a soul from this weird gorilla guy from the future and it turned out he was working for your mother. She fixed this place up real good, you know?”
Clayton’s mouth refused to work. Finally he squeaked out a single word. “Future?”
“There’s some sort of weird alternate time line thing going on with your mother. She found this place after traveling the universe chasing Mike and the ‘bots-”
“Wait, my mother? My mother’s still alive?” For the first time in this whole dying thing, Clayton felt sheer terror.
“Yes.” Frank caught a look at Clayton’s face. “I mean no, not here. In a different here. She got thawed out 500 years from now by the apes and then ended up living back here, in Castle Forrester, with Bobo and some fruity Hostess Snowball Brain Guy alien.”
Forrester stared at Frank.
“Look, I know it sounds like some sort of bad Sci-Fi network show, but it happened. Here, now, your mother is still frozen at Larry’s Discount Fur Storage and Cryogenic Emporium.”
“How the hell do you know where she was frozen?!”
“Oh, we talked about it over a cup of General Foods International Coffee. It was delightful!” Frank smiled wistfully.
“What else did she tell you?”
“All about your childhood, your second childhood, how she killed you, how she took over Ape Society...oh, all sorts of things,” Frank chuckled.
“Frank?”
“Yes, Steve?”
“What do you mean how she killed me?”
“Uh…” Frank had the grace to look a little embarrassed. “I’m not sure I’m supposed to tell you about this stuff.”
“Frank, I’m dying. That’s why you’re here, right? So spill it.”
Frank adjusted the collar of his chauffeur’s uniform. “Well, you see, after a long and miserable life you die. But you got reborn, or you will get reborn, as a star-child, and Pearl vowed, well, she’s going to vow, or she will have been going to vow -”
“FRANK!” Clayton bellowed, not realizing his bellow had been hollowed to a whisper. “Forget the tenses and get on with the story!”
“Geeze, OK, Dr. Forrester! So Pearl said she made a vow to raise you as a fine and upstanding man the second time around. But she got distracted and you turned out just as evil again. She smothered you with a pillow and swore revenge upon Mike and the ‘bots for your death.”
“Mike? Mike Nelson? That big goofy dope didn’t die in space after I cut the Umbilicus?”
“Naw, they drifted to the end of the universe then came back to Earth 500 years later. Last I knew he was living in a crappy apartment in Milwaukee.”
“Well, never mind Nelson. What do you mean I get reborn as a star-child?”
“I mean you get reborn as a star-child. You get to live all over again. Until your mother kills you.”
Clayton sunk even further into the pillows. He never really thought about what his afterlife would be like, but he sure as hell knew he didn’t want to go through his childhood again. Not with Pearl Forrester as his mother. Not without her as his mother, either. A sudden wish, a flicker of hope, flared in his fading mind. Time was short, and even shorter for him. He screwed up the little courage he possessed and asked.
“Frank? I don’t want to be born again. Can I come with you and steal souls for awhile?”
Frank stared at Forrester.
“I’m serious, Frank, I don’t want to be a child again. I’d rather die. And since that’s exactly what I’m going to be doing very shortly, I might as well make it a productive, evil death and snatch souls out from under unsuspecting...souls,” Clayton finished, rather weakly.
Frank continued to stare at Forrester. Then, like the sun breaking through clouds, he broke into a beaming smile.
“You mean it?” Frank asked, incredulously. “You want to come along and steal souls with me?”
“I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do, er, I mean, anything else to do in the afterlife,” Clayton said.
“Uh, okay!” Frank answered happily, before his expression changed to one of suspicion. “There’s one thing, though.”
“What’s that?” Forrester asked.
“You’ve got to promise you won’t kill me anymore.”
“Frank, I can’t kill you anymore. You’re already dead.”
“Oh yeah,” Frank pondered, “that’s right. Well, it’s not exactly fair, all the times you killed me and I only get to kill you this one time. I just want to make sure.”
“Frank, I promise I won’t kill you again.” Strangely enough, he wanted to keep this promise.
“Great! Now I get that $500 new Soultaker recruitment bonus! Suck it Joe Estevez!” Frank crowed.
“Joe Estevez?”
“Yeah, he’s on my shift. Struts around like he’s someone important, always kissing up to the Angel of Death, thinks he’s so great because he got his job back due to the union after he was sacked. Pah!”
Clayton shrugged. He didn’t know who Joe Estevez was and he didn’t care. Right now he just wanted to get this dying business over and done with, as it was becoming increasingly difficult to breathe.
“Frank? Do you have to take my soul for me to come with you or do I just die or what?”
Frank frowned.
“I don’t know. They didn’t say anything about it in the orientation session. I guess you just die. But hold on to this.” He pressed a black rubber ring into Clayton’s gray, ice-cold hand.
“Alrighty then.” And with that, Dr. Clayton Deborah Forrester shuffled off this mortal coil.
A moment later the same Dr. Clayton Deborah Forrester sat up in bed, feeling better than he had in years. “Is that all there is to dying? Why, I should have done that a long time ago!” He looked down; the ring in his hand was glowing a bright fluorescent green, the same exact green of his old Deep 13 lab coat. Frank reached out his hand to help him up, and Clayton grabbed it with his other hand. It was surprisingly warm, and he reluctantly let go once he was standing.
“Hurry, Clay. If we get back to the office now, there might be some lunch left. It’s Taco Tuesday!” Frank urged.
“Is this it?” Forrester asked. “Is there anything else I have to do?”
“Nope. But when you meet our boss, don’t mention he looks exactly like Robert Z’Dar. He gets mighty steamed if you tell him he looks like Robert Z’Dar, I can tell you that.”
“Frank, are you sure we’re not going to hell?”
“Unless hell resembles an office park in Eden Prairie, we’re not going to hell. Yet.”
Clayton walked, side by side and as happy as he had ever been, to the door with Frank. He turned and looked at the still form lying on the bed. He noticed the god-awful humming noise had stopped. He noticed the black monolith at the foot of his bed was gone. And he noticed that the lights were still on.
“Frank, would you turn out the lights? I don’t want to run up the electricity bill while I’m dead.”
“Okay, Steve.” Frank looked around. “Where’s the switch?”
“Over on the wall, to your left.”
“That’s not a light switch.”
“It’s an old fashioned light switch. This is an old building.”
“How does it work?”
“Just push the button, Frank.”