Ignostiel went over the jobs for which I was qualified for. Most were personal assistant positions, like the clerk I’d met outside. Each angel could have one mortal as an assistant, and since there were about a billion angels and roughly one human in a hundred-thousand was offered a job, there were always openings. Now me, I didn’t fancy the idea of running around after someone all the time, or being used just to fetch things, and Iggy kind of got that about me quickly.

  An angel could only employ one mortal at a time, but archangels were a whole different story. They could gather as many as they wanted. Archangels are as far above angels as angels are above us, with the type of power that could create solar systems and destroy them in the same snap of their fingers. There were eight in total, but one was a little busy ruling hell, and I didn’t want to find out if I could join his payroll. However, the seven others all offered plenty of mortal jobs. After a brief explanation of the various positions available, Iggy set me up with Raphael, who to my disappointment, was not a Ninja Turtle.

  Raphael ran a prison, which needed plenty of guards. Iggy didn’t have many details about the job other than the minimal risk, and perks like good food and entertainment. I don’t know why I felt drawn to that position, but I suspected it was primarily for the irony of it. I accepted the job, and Iggy closed her file.

  I can’t explain the mechanics of how I got from the office to the prison*. There was a sudden absence of noise, and the light coming from the window reached a near blinding level. I closed my eyes, and looked away to protect them. When I slowly cracked them open again, I was in a grey-stone walled room with spartan furniture and little else. I staggered for a moment when I appeared, and grabbed hold of the bed's metal railing to steady myself. The wooden door to the room stood open, and I could not hear any movement or sound in the hall outside, or anywhere at all. I looked down at the bed and saw on it a dark militaristic jacket, along with a white shirt and a pair of black trousers. They looked to be my size. Under the bed, I saw a pair of shoes bright with recent polish. I suppose I was expected to put this uniform on. I didn’t. Instead, I sat on the edge of the bed in the clothes I’d been wearing the moment I’d died (jeans, a grey cardigan, and a t-shirt with a faded Batman logo embossed on it) and began to wait.

  *We know Daniel. If you had been able to then you would have been offered a far better job.

  I thought I imagined it at first, but as I sat there I noticed the air around me felt unusual. I didn’t even know then if there was any air at all (I asked later, there was). It felt more alive, tinging, like a static build up you get from socks on a carpet, only ten times that. The hair on the back of my neck and arms began to stand up. The more I paid attention to it the stronger it became. I pushed it to the back of my mind and did my best to ignore it.

  After ten minutes, I got up to use the bathroom. Turns out, the dead still pee. While there, for the first time since I left my home that morning, I caught a look at myself in the mirror above the sink. I’d half expected to look different, but nothing had changed in those few hours. I’d expected to have blood in my hair after getting hit by a car, but it was just its normal shade of light brown. I could also see that I needed a shave. My jawline was my only good feature and I didn’t like the stubble that became an all too common resident. I couldn’t see a razor anywhere… so I sat down on the bed.

  Twenty minutes later I’d begun to eye the uniform next to me, wondering if it was like a checkpoint in a video game, where the player had to equip an item to move forward. I’d just got my Batman shirt over my head when a knock came from the other side of the open door. I spun towards it, and realised I was unable to see, the shirt still wrapped across my face. Confronted with the choice of taking the shirt all the way off or putting it back on, I put it back on, and turned to see who had such great timing.

  A little girl stood in my doorway. A hair's breadth over four feet tall, she didn’t look like she could be above ten years old. She had light brown, near olive skin, likely from somewhere in the Middle East, and she wore her black hair in bunches. Her face… well, her face didn’t match. Her light brown eyes sharpened and focused as they studied me. They were the eyes of a woman who was used to issuing commands, and those commands being obeyed. She wore a uniform exactly the same as the one on my bed, albeit made to fit her.

  “You. Follow me.” The girl commanded as she turned and began walking away from the room. She didn’t even stop to check if I followed her. I tried to catch up with her, forgot that I’d already kicked off my shoes, and almost tripped over them. Once they were back on my feet, I ran out the door and found myself in a stark corridor, cut from the same grey stone as the room behind. Me being about two feet taller than the child, I caught up fast, and fell into a (very slow) step beside her. We carried on walking down the corridor, passing several rooms identical to the one I’d just left.

  “You’re Daniel.”

  It wasn’t a question, it was more like she was letting me know that I was in fact Daniel, and that if I wasn’t, I should do my utmost to become Daniel very quickly. She continued staring straight ahead as we walked. We carried on past the bare walls, and doors to rooms like mine. I noticed the feeling of electricity lingering in the air becoming stronger with every step we took, as though each stride took us closer to a power generator. I even touched my hair to make sure it wasn’t standing up straight.

  “You’ll get used to that feeling,” the young girl said, stopping at the end of the corridor, otherwise describable as an empty, black stone wall. The corridor was a dead end. “For now, ignore it. It's just latent power, and if you need to have it explained to you another time, don’t ask me.”

  I looked down at the child. She was staring up at me, craning her neck to do so. She met my eyes confidently, not in the way of any child I had met in the living world. This was the afterlife. She must be dead. And if she died as a child...

  “You’re older than you look,” I said, cocking my head.

  “Oh good, you’re quick,” she said, voice so drenched in sarcasm that I almost laughed. The tone and timbre of the voice was that of a child, one whose primary goals should still be the pursuit of toys and the belief that grown ups are silly. It was stranger than a fish on a bike for her words to have an adult’s weight behind them.

  “My name is Maisie.”

  Without thinking, I threw on the smile I automatically wore whenever I spoke to a child. “Hey, Maisie!”

  Her face darkened. “Yes, I know, it is childish. But I like it, so screw you.” She straightened up to her full height. It didn’t make much difference though. “I died when I was nine, the same time as my family, and I’ve worked here since then. I am the longest serving guard, nearly six hundred years longer than the asshole in second place, and if I was as tall as Lance I’d be the most respected too.” I tried to get a word in edgewise, but she bulldozed onwards. “I’m going to show you around, explain your job, and have a nap. We don’t need sleep anymore, by the way, but it’s the only peace and quiet I get so I get as much as I can.”

  I’m sure she thought she was answering the frequently asked questions that all newcomers have, but each question answered spawned a multitude more. Six hundred years? Who is Lance? Why did a nine year old become a prison guard*? What exactly have I signed up for? The last one rang the loudest.

  See report: Maiyander of Gerizim

  I began to stammer out a response but she held up her hand to cut me off. The gesture was done with such authority that I stopped mid stutter. Maisie then turned, and strode directly through the dark stone wall.

  It took a moment for my eyes to process that. It was as though the wall was incorporeal, made of light, or something that didn’t impede her in the slightest. It didn’t slow her down or offer any resistance but the wall gently rippled outwards from the point she passed through, like she had been a rock tossed into a vertical pond. I continued staring at the point she vanished for a moment, took a breath, and Harry Pottered my way after her. That is to say, I ran at the solid looking wall and hoped I didn’t break my face.

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  I closed my eyes just before I hit, and when I opened them again, I was on the other side. I looked ahead of me to see Maisie. She’d stopped to watch my journey through the wall, and was now pinching the bridge of her nose while shaking her head. I turned to look behind me and found what I had expected, a patch of dark grey wall. When I looked back, Maisie had turned away from me and begun to walk along a path through a courtyard decorated with a handful of shrubs and a lot of loose gravel. I caught up to her around the midpoint of the circular yard. There was a single building to the north, south, east and west of us. Of course with no way to discern the actual compass points, I went off which way I was facing. The building to the south was the building we’d just come out of, there was no visible entrance and no sign to declare what it held within. The buildings on either side had obvious entrances, and were made of the same dull grey stone. One was labelled ‘Mess Hall’, while the other was labelled ‘Rec House’. The building to the North of us however was all I could pay attention to. I had never seen anything that even came close to it in reality, movies, or television. My rational brain was screaming at me that it should not physically be able to exist, and if I’d presented something like this in an architecture class, the teacher would’ve burned the paper I’d profaned upon then attempted to burn me too.

  It looked like the Shard in London, the Bean in Chicago, and Superman’s fortress of solitude had had a baby that was going through an emo phase. The structure was larger than all of the pyramids in Egypt crammed together, and a shape like a display water fountain the size of a large lake had frozen at the same moment it exploded. A jet black crystal monstrosity of a structure, with an almost overpowering white light shone through from the inside. This was undoubtedly the source of the strange energy I’d felt in the air since leaving my room. I tried staring into the light coming from the dark crystal, but found it similar to looking at the sun, and stopped, blinking rapidly.

  “Welcome to Pandora,” Maisie said, coming to a stop and finally cracking a smile at the expression on my face. “The home of nightmares and monsters.”

  I looked down at her, then back up at the ‘building’*. Then I picked my jaw up off the ground. This was the prison? This was what I was going to be guarding? A cold, dull feeling slid into my stomach, chilling my whole body as it occurred to me there was something I really should’ve asked by now, maybe even before I’d left Iggy’s office.

  *It’s more of a concept

  “Who exactly is imprisoned here?”

  The smile on Maisie’s face took on a more serious cast, though she was clearly still amused. She paused before answering, turning to face me squarely. “Bad guys, Daniel.”

  A few beats later I prompted, “Such as?”

  A shrug. “Demons and Dragons, Fears and Faeries… Godlings and Ghouls.” With that Maisie turned and started walking towards the fortress. I didn’t notice straight away since I was trying to work out what the hell that meant.

  “Did you mean Goblins?” I called after her. The diminutive guard carried on walking, gesturing behind for me to follow. I waited long enough to shout again. “Did you mean Goblins!?” Nothing. Na-da. Zilch.

  It didn’t take more than a brisk stride to catch up to her. When I was alongside I caught her eye. “Look, I get that I’m dead and in the afterlife and everything here is batshit. But monsters and fairy stories were… well they were just that. None of that stuff was around on Earth, just the tales… right?”

  Maisie stopped walking again, looked up at me and cocked her head. “You can accept that there are such things as angels, but not things that go bump in the night?”

  I didn’t really give my brain a moment to work the issue before I ploughed on incorrectly. “This is the afterlife, there are bound to be angels or angel-ish beings here. I mean if there were werewolves and vampires running around major cities, hell even the countryside, we’d have heard about it.

  She smiled. “Would you?”

  “Yeah, it would be all over the news.”

  “So if a demi-god went into a papered news bullpen, and announced to all the typists and town criers there that he was the son of Zeus. That he had walked the Earth for centuries, and could command magics they could not imagine. You think they’d run that story the following day?”

  “Well, no, not if he went about it like that.”

  “So, how should he go about it? What would you do if you were a supernatural being?”

  I thought about it for not nearly long enough. “I’d do some magic, nothing mind breaking, but enough that they’d believe me.”

  “And what could you do that they wouldn’t pass off as a trick or some illusion involving mirrors?” Maisie pressed forward as soon as she could, her expression not shifting in the slightest.

  “I, erm, I would do something a stage magician couldn’t. Teleport across the room or grow to twice my size or something.”

  Maisie’s smile grew positively poisonous. “A decent performer could’ve done that with mirrors even in my day.” I opened my mouth but she waved me down before carrying on. “But let's say you do it. Let's say you convince everyone in the room that they were in the presence of a deity, or mage, or whatever you want. Would they still run the story?”

  I thought about that one a bit longer. “Probably not”

  “Why?”

  “Because people would think they were insane. Or duped. Either way they’d never be taken seriously again.”

  Maisies nodded solemnly with wide eyes, like a professor who’d finally seen something worth teaching in their worst student. “But let's say for a moment you started off bigger. Let's say you could convince the entire world in one go that you were a master of magic. That creation and destruction lived at the tips of your dainty hands.” I looked at my hands. I suppose to someone born so long ago they looked like they belonged to someone who’d never done a hard day’s work. She wasn’t far wrong. “The entirety of the human race now believes you’re a demigod. What happens?”

  A few different scenarios ran through my head. “People would fear me. Or want me to fix all their problems.”

  The child bobbed her head from side to side slightly. “Mostly. I think fear would be the strongest response. People fear what they can't understand. Chances are high they will want to study you. It's the age of science after all, and you can’t be explained. They’d take you in, lock you up….would you let them?”

  “No.” I said firmly, before the last trace of her words had left the air.

  Maisie’s smile faded slightly from her face, though she nodded. “You’d have to fight them to stop them, Daniel. You’d likely have to kill again and again to discourage further attempts. Don’t you think it might just be easier to stay hidden, keep your power a secret?”

  I opened my mouth, and after a moment of not saying anything, closed it. “Yeah okay, I see where you're going.” My mind carried on chugging along the track my train of logic had been taking. “And those that would be willing to kill over and over to make their power known…”

  “End up here, in Pandora.” Maisie finished for me. We both looked at the dark crystalline structure. A brief moment of silence passed. There was no wind in the courtyard, no sounds of animals, nothing to suggest we were outside. I looked up at the sky and just saw endless black. No stars, moon, nor the sun. The only light I could see, anywhere, came from the prison.

  The moment ended as I heard the quiet sound of footsteps, and I looked back down to see Maisie walking once more towards the structure. I caught up and walked beside her.

  As we reached a black crystal portcullis, I asked, “can you give me a specific name I might’ve heard of? Any prisoner. Just one.”

  Maisie looked back up at me, thought for a moment, before saying, as though ordering a coffee, “Satan."

  Despite already looking at her I managed a double take. “Satan, Satan? The fucking king of hell is in there?”

  Maisie rolled her eyes. “No, genius. Lucifer is the king of hell. Satan is one of his lieutenants. A high ranking demon.” She said this with the tone of someone fed up with explaining that two plus two does not equal eighty seven, no matter how they looked at it. “Lucy keeps a cell here for whichever one of his underlings has pissed him off most. He cycles them out every couple of years.”

  She’d just called Lucifer, the fallen archangel, king of hell and villain of a gajillion stories, Lucy. I smiled before I realised that I had just signed up to be one of Satan’s guards, and from Maisie’s tone, he was one of the lesser threats inside.

  “What exactly does this job entail, and how are we supposed to stop gods and demons from escaping?” Seemed like a perfectly sensible question to me. Didn’t stop her giving me a look that I recognised as ‘are you an idiot?’ I’d had that look from so many people in my life, it makes sense I’d get it in my death too, and Maisie could give the best of them lessons.

  “You don’t stop them. The least of them in there would shred your soul into pieces at half an opportunity. Those with an eternity sentence anyway, and that’s about ninety nine percent of them.”

  “But then how—”

  “Pandora stops them.” This in the tone of someone explaining that two plus two equals four, but that doesn’t matter right now because the house is on fire. I gestured at her to carry on. “If something imprisoned there threw all of its power against the wall of its cell, then Pandora would automatically take enough power to nullify it from the other prisoners. They’re all like batteries. Each powering each other’s prisons.”

  That explained the energy in the air, and the weird white light. It still didn’t answer what my job was supposed to be. I was lost in a daydream of me trying to keep Frankenstein’s Monster in a cell, when I heard a sound like glass scraping against glass. The portcullis raised slowly to let us in.

  “What if they all tried at the same time?” I asked as we waited. “They counted to ten and then all tried to break out at the same time.”

  “Doesn’t work.”

  I waited for her to elaborate. She didn’t. She just led me through the now clear archway into the crystallised fortress, to see where I would be working the rest of my afterlife.

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