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The Bureau Of Afterlife Discipline {The Divine Hilarity Trilogy - Book One}
The Bureau Of Afterlife Discipline {The Divine Hilarity Trilogy - Book One}
The Bureau Of Afterlife Discipline {The Divine Hilarity Trilogy - Book One}
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The Bureau Of Afterlife Discipline {The Divine Hilarity Trilogy - Book One}

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What if you woke up one day and realized that the mundane and dreary details of your lacklustre life were actually the machinations of an immense and Hellish Bureaucracy? What if you realized... that you were already in Hell?

Armed only with a janky smartphone, Sal sets out to document what is at once anyone’s worst nightmare and the love of his afterlife. Though Sal is an inhabitant of the Circles of Hell, the woman he is infatuated with is in fact the Queen of Hell: Persephone. The chances of escaping are already slim to none, but can he do it with Pluto’s wife at his side?

The odds were already stacked against Sal and Persephone, for the Bureau of Afterlife Discipline rarely releases any of its detainees. But now that Pluto knows of his own wife’s inclinations, Sal’s fate just got even more grim.

A literary mashup of humor and paranormal horror, this mysterious romantic thriller is one tale you won’t be able to stop reading.

It’s auditing season at the Bureau of Afterlife Discipline. The Bureau has a seemingly endless network of marble hallways, a legion of minotaurs and manticores to patrol the eerie Labyrinth that links the Circles of Discipline, and a set of squabbling Administrators each vying for their own pound of denizen flesh from poor souls like Sal. Will the mysterious Auditor, Momus, help or hinder Sal’s cause as he attempts to navigate these shark-infested waters?

This first instalment in a trilogy of novels is the perfect combination of ancient afterlife mythology and contemporary societal bureaucracy. May the literati and the literary zeitgeist beware.

Join Sal in The Divine Hilarity Trilogy as he first tackles The Bureau of Afterlife Discipline. What paranormal fate awaits our temerarious hero after he risks it all for the woman he loves? As Sal will eventually realize, his decisions and fate are tied to those of all of Afterlife Society and even mortal humanity.

Abandon hope all ye who enter here, for the tale that follows is sure to enthral the heart of thee.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 15, 2015
ISBN9781311816177
The Bureau Of Afterlife Discipline {The Divine Hilarity Trilogy - Book One}
Author

Lennox Mumpsfield

I like autodidacticism, spaced repetition, language, writing.

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    The Bureau Of Afterlife Discipline {The Divine Hilarity Trilogy - Book One} - Lennox Mumpsfield

    Chapter One

    Untitled 1

    Hello, warld.

    I record this via an app called Kleverknotes on an artifact-looking and generic smartphone with a scratched, dimpled back panel, chipped, kittly-benders glass, miraculously functioning microphone that the klever software uses to convert my speech into an uncanny well written record. So far, I haven't been able to stump it with rare, factitious, or extravagant speech.

    Were it not for the software, I should long ago have dismissed and dubbed this scrag of technology a dismal companion in these unworthy, blighted environs. After all these times, less the software I would probably retain the item newfound in my wisdom won of ages of boredom, a wisdom which recognizes what a regrettably insufferable fool I was just nine or ten weeks prior. It seems so long ago …

    And that length and languor long-suffered by me have served up an appreciation of the exalted fact that this smartphone literally never has to be charged! Three battery bars, eternal. What a deal.

    My only complaint about the device, which I received free of charge as far as I can tell — and that isn’t very in any sort of sensical progress measurement system I recall — is that I receive in this locale and any adjacent absolutely no service whatsoever — not that I can remember any phone numbers anyway — and therefore there is no photographic, technologic, or textual evidence of the past, and much of the capability is entirely lost on me — save for Kleverknotes.

    It is a sad irony that I here find myself talking into a phone, with no one listening to my knowledge save for a cleverly devised computer program. To its credit, it renders a more apparent and perceptive deduction of my intentions, albeit decidedly linguistic ones, than any humans with which I interact.

    I have just now noticed a bug in that I am incapable of changing the default-generated names of the files in Kleverknotes while using the transcription function. What a hokey flaw to remind me coincidence-like of the stifling lack of inspiration around here.

    Circling back around to my painful boredom — which is something I do an awful lot of these days — in a sporadic and wistful mental flight from time to time, I imagine that an army of underpaid natives are eagerly sneaking and skulking about my abode, yet totally out of sight, all in the name of secretly recharging my smartphone at the behest of the device’s makers. If so, what a great service I am taking advantage of strictly for boredom alleviation purposes, and perhaps they are also responsible, at probably hardly munificent or e’en sufficient wages, for the accurate amanuensic services proffered in the form of an artificially artificially intelligent transcription service. If not, I fear the raw power of boredom and other terrors of this forsaken place have wrought a certifiable paranoiac of me.

    I am supine on my bare roof now, my locks of hair luffed slightly by the unkind, directionless wind and nary a star or heavenly figure to illuminate my doleful countenance — doleful in comparison to yesternight, when eagerly I jubilated in solitude. Or so I thought.

    Earlier in that day after the completion of the daily darg, I was approached by Mephistopheles, a tall, baby-faced man habitually clad fully in faded, handyman couture leather and the acting work supervisor — and since work is all we do, he is pretty much a dictator — in this damnèd district.

    He visited me at my abode with, oddly, an old radio. I fingered the dial nervously after he gave it to me. He awkwardly withheld some explication of the unwonted gift, the lingering secret putting pressure to and bulging his livid irises and simultaneously whitening his finger-length straw hair by the second.

    Music, wond’rous and wand’ring music, I said to him with restrained glee, pondering my heretofore pitiful lack of wherewithality in regards to music and general entertainment acquisition. May I inquire as to the occasion for this generous gift, sir?

    Mephistopheles shifted his weight in ill-concealed contemplation from one foot to the other and raised his arms, bringing his hands together behind his head. The sleeves of his jacket slid back a bit in acquiescence to the general gravitational pull, revealing in part a wizened and dissipated old tattoo bearing the name Mephistopheles beneath a pallid yet tight veneer of reluctantly youthful skin; it was that name he was known by amongst us tongue-tied and fearful denizens, though none of us would be caught dead uttering that appellation directly.

    It’s true it isn’t like I’m foisting a pair of manacles or lump of hot coals upon you, but it’s not largesse, as I can plainly see you suspect, Mephistopheles said. It’s a new, experimental program, it includes everyone, that means everyone in the Canton is getting one, so you shouldn’t worry your little mind about it.

    I wonder often, I began daringly, if you have looked into my memory problem at all. You might remember me telling you that I can’t seem to remember anything before about two months ago now.

    Mephistopheles' nostrils flared in breathy, silent irritation.

    I'm not even interested at all in pursuing treatment, I added quickly. It’s the curiosity from not knowing the cause, or anything else for that matter, that’s gnawing at me.

    Mephistopheles held his tongue still, so I continued, knowing full well that I was probably just digging my own grave. As a matter of fact, you might find it useful to know that I overheard some of the other workers also experienced some degree of a similar kind of memory loss. It was probably just guff of course, all the talk happened not while working but on the way back from work —

    You don’t need a very good memory to do this job, do you? Mephistopheles stated abruptly. It’s just brick laying and brick making. I wouldn’t worry about it. Just listen to the radio, and it might help. Music is like magic, and the only kind we’ll likely get around here.

    I was forced to be the first to take leave of our awkward encounter. I could feel his eyes burning the rear of my scalp as I retreated into my brick dwelling, perhaps a little too hurriedly.

    Skipping the unfenestrated, blind, and barren first floor, on which slumbered my old companion, Tatterdemalion (a pillowless and holy blanket, among other things) I scrambled up the bricolage masonic ladder built into the wall to reach the roof. As I carefully avoided the rough points of the brick with every part of my body, I realized and regretted for the first time that my old smartphone did not possess even a simple radio.

    I set the radio down beside me and immediately lowered the volume dial all the way before turning it on. I played both the volume and tuning dials with opposite hands ever so gingerly so as to simultaneously pick up a signal and avoid drawing unwanted attention.

    Soon, the depths of my ears hummed to an instrumental tune. The strange, yet canorous vibrations immediately tugged in unison at the corners of my mouth, drawing them agape and compressing my cheeks in an impassioned fit of raw, immemorially nostalgic joy.

    I swirled ‘round and leaned over the viscid, cultured puddle of stagnant, acidulous liquid — I daren’t let it hear me refer to it as water — which I had been nursing in a depression atop my roof since I could remember. The otherworldly image therein contained bore the only rendition of my freckled and gaunt visage available to mine eyes. For the first time, that sole format of visual metacognition did beteem the spare and straying waifs of light a moment to coalesce into a kind of spit and image mimicking my momentary exhilaration and euphoria.

    I collapsed onto my back and ceased with the central control of eyes, which now scanned the skies aimlessly and halfheartedly, all in order to focus every constituent of my being on cultivating my kudzu cognitions into a resourceful relish.

    The tune was never ending, constant blending, an undulating pattern of waves, tastefully predictable, delectably surprising — a seriatim conducted surely by none other than seraphim.

    At every crest, I ignored a brief and burning reminder of the mysterious tattoo of random figures seared into my own forearm, the first time in memory I was inspired to such ignorance. I even dreamed up accompaniment lyrics, the mere concept of which just moments previous I had thought too devious for music so melodiously impervious. Alack! I am too abashèd to record them here.

    In the eurythmic thrust of my physical gests and anatomical expressions, I started at what I thought were fitting fits of laughs and decadent vocal gyrations worked seamlessly into the emanating song.

    I soon realized it was a foreign infiltration unpleasantly devised, if not apart from the radio, at least from the song. Flushed with quickening paranoia, my consternated forefinger silenced the radio with a sideswipe. The voices continued. My ears perked in a seasoned form of ancient self-defense, and soon was deduced the source of the cachinnations.

    Several mud brick buildings away, there crouched on the roof a gang of my coworkers with Mephistopheles hooting and cackling at the forefront. As their intentions were not sufficiently bedimmed by the thick cloak of night, my eyes immediately apprehended the naked bodying forth of their collective and premeditated refusal to allow me to save face and confess my embarrassment. Their violently erupting laughter echoed louder and louder into the nothingness.

    I knocked the radio over into the thick of the puddle in my mad dash back, down, into my dwelling. Underneath my blanket I hugged the dirt and cast an embittered and terrified eye beneath my only door, which must have long before me rotted a full foot short of the earth it had once graced.

    In my silent, recreant rage I cursed the muse of music as a foreign whore with tremulous oscillations between amazing, addictive, anodyne and annoying, duplicitous obnubilation that bore the power to flummox anyone in excess.

    My eyes and ears told a different story, restlessly tracking the feet of jeery passersby and hecklers scampering wildly past my front door.

    After a night of no sleep — which to be fair isn’t that unusual in these parts — I had already three-quarters expected my co-workers to torment me the entire day with insipid and coordinated mockery.

    And what a grand display it was this morning! I had thankfully my lack of sleep to unoriginally blame for my trembling extremities, within which every nerve was brought nigh its breaking point. Though my field of vision deftly avoided every cruelly, yet silently dancing and gyrating co-worker for most of the day, my ears somehow painted a clear enough picture in my mind. Periodically, Mephistopheles launched his loud laughter unchallenged into the atmosphere from the bellows of his gut.

    For this reason, I have returned home today with rivulets of tears racing from my eyes unto my eyeteeth, begging for a way out from these trying and unfavorable circumstances.

    As a symbol of my endeavor of change, I took the radio for a walk after returning home and disposed of it by a distant and stony wayside. I daresay with my Kleverknotepad cryptically clad and a resolution to put that succubus radio permanently out of mind, I have a chance at reworking my distrait demeanor.

    Good night.

    Chapter Two

    Both hinging points of all four mandibles were completely dislodged and had given way in a battle of tension between themselves and their presumably original craniums, resulting in mandibular fractures and nasty gouges carved into the temporal bones of the skulls. Pillars of wood stained blood red erupted from the bregma intersection atop each skull, the pillars bowing slightly and calculatedly in their support of the similarly stained wooden panels of the desk.

    A touch of rationality perversely sanctified and hallowed the decor in the form of a nameplate at the corner of the desk, with letters constructed of filed phalanges nailed to the stained backdrop:

    P l u t o, C h a n c e l l o r & R e c t o r M a g n i f i c u s

    The man sitting behind the desk was sifting through loose papers, muttering quickly under his breath whilst saccades were underway across the top of each document.

    Suddenly, there were three raps on the other side of the door. The Auditor here to see you, sir, a feminine voice called.

    Send him in, Pluto responded quickly as her footsteps began to retreat. He massaged the piles of papers on the desk into a sheaf short enough to fit en masse in his top center drawer.

    He stepped away from the desk and slid his suit jacket on, then buttoned it up to conceal all but his velvet ascot. He made his way clumsily around the side of the desk and over to the door of his office, pausing to inhale deeply and extrude his breast, making almost completely horizontal his menacing lapels, which terminated on either side in a kind of razor-sharp brocade.

    At that time he seemed to realize that something was missing, and quickly withdrew his hand from the knob. He reached carefully into his breast pocket and withdrew a minuscule pitchfork, which he pulled up just enough to rest on the pocket hem and protrude in plain view.

    With a merdivorous smirk, he swung open the door to reveal an identically wainscoted antechamber. The only inhabitant was an empty bench camouflaged in the same familiar hue as the wall behind it.

    In practiced insouciance, Pluto at once spun around and returned to his desk and sat down to clean his entirely cosmetic spectacles. He withdrew from the depths of his breast pocket a small silken square once cut neatly as if with pinking shears from a patterned kerchief. He was thankful the Auditor had not yet entered when the square caught briefly on a barb of the tiny pitchfork. He took a brief and guarded moment to inspect the integrity of both utensils, and then proceeded with the polishing.

    After six minutes at the very least of polishing, with no sign of the Auditor, Pluto set down his spectacles (probably to preserve what thin layer of glass still remained) and propped open his pocket daintily to store his silken kerchief square. Much to his dismay, the silk caught the edge of his brocade lapel and tore slightly.

    Pluto swore loudly and started cramming the silk into the pocket, slicing the paunch of his right middle finger on the miniature pitchfork in the process. He aborted the attempt immediately and flicked the bloodied silk hard onto the desktop.

    At that inconvenient moment of commencing to primitively suck on his inadvertently self-inflicted injury, the Auditor rounded the corner into the antechamber. Pluto stuffed his recently wounded digit between his thighs hastily.

    Welcome, Master Auditor, Pluto said, marshaling his rows of teeth into an impressive array as part of an effort to produce a faux-Duchenne smile. He extended his free hand awkwardly across the desk and said, I am —

    I know bloody well who you are, the Auditor interrupted, not even bothering to offer Pluto’s extended hand a glance. Instead, he fingered the crude nameplate. I’m just wondering where the Chancellor and Rector are at the moment. Also, given the only two chairs in this room, which of you three typically sits on the floor? After a pause, he chuckled and then continued. I’m kidding of course. It does say something like that though on the harrowing nameplate here. I would seriously like to know about the desk, if you don’t mind me asking, if this is the Philistine or Tophet model…

    Apparently the Auditor got bored or distracted waiting for an answer and began to cast his eyes back and forth in contemplation between Pluto's face and the nameplate. You know, there is something about the name ‘Pluto’ and an obsession with chalk white bones. I suppose there’s a joke in there somewhere about the reverse spelling of ‘god’ too, but I’ll be far too busy auditing from here on out to pursue such nonsense.

    Before Pluto could muster a sufficiently clever answer, the Auditor had lost interest and strode over to the recessed bookcase. In one debonair shrug, the auditor removed his suit jacket, cast it across the office and over the office door, ignoring the horned coat hooks on the wall, and proceeded to tie his shoulder-length black hair back into a ponytail. He was a man of both obvious corporeal tenuity and potential ferocity, with the latter probably often assumed to be the effect of the former.

    Fingering the shelves for a bit, the Auditor at last rested his hand on a giant crystal bottle and spoke, But before we get down to business strict, it would be a shame not to dispense a few pleasantries. Pour you a drink?

    Th — that’s not e — Pluto started to reply, but was cut off once again.

    Say no more, friend, the Auditor said with a wink, prying open the bottle. We’re on personal time for the moment so none of the drinking will be mentioned in the audit. He waved an afferent hand twice toward his nose and inhaled stray vapors from the top of the open bottle to catch a whiff. I didn’t realize you people pour such girly cocktails around here, but I’m not one to complain off the job, if you know what I mean. With that, he took a swig.

    Before he could quaff half of a mouthful, the lot of it was sent as if from a fountain onto the desktop and Pluto's suit jacket.

    I was about to say, Pluto said, retrieving the silken rag and dabbing his face with it, that’s cologne.

    The Auditor dropped the bottle with a grimace and collapsed into the seat across from Pluto. That doesn’t mean you’re supposed to bathe in it. Good lord! There must be two liters there.

    A splash less than that now, I’ll say, Pluto replied quietly.

    And I do hope you don't take that dirty silk to your calvous pate, as that is most unsanitary. You know, it would be wrong of me not to inform you, I dread to imagine what else you’ll say, the Auditor admitted from beneath thick, scrunched eyebrows. To be honest, your sense of style is just a bit off. Take the dark red you’ve bedaubed the wood with everywhere. By the looks of it, you’ve stained the life completely out of it, and not to mention some poor creature somewhere probably.

    Pluto’s free hand was distractedly shaking on the desktop. At least — do — you — even — have an office, Pluto stated rather than asked with no small amount of effort.

    Of course, the Auditor confirmed immediately. I pretty much go wherever I want, though. Now, if you could sign this affidavit and acknowledgement affirming your cordial reception of and compliance with myself in these germinal stages of the evaluation process, I’ll be about my business.

    Pluto licked the inside of his lower lip slowly as he withdrew the pocketed pitchfork. He pressed painfully on the barbs, and a pen nib jutted out the bottom.

    As he leaned in to sign the documents in stilted, sinistral manner, the Auditor quipped, A clever way to ensure no one ever steals your pen. I, for one, would never steal from you, and it’d probably be hard to find as big a masochist as you to use it on this side o’ the Styx even. And by the way, signing in blood, if that’s what’s actually going down right now, is not at all required. Though not at all prohibited either, I suppose.

    Pluto looked up briefly from his furious scribbles. Blood around here would be a more economic and sustainable source than ink, now that you mention it. To whom do I owe the pleasure of signing these documents?

    The name’s Momus, and I’d shake your hand … The newly-named Auditor stood and reached for his jacket. But I just don’t want to.

    Before you go, Pluto said coolly, you should probably know I usually threaten those who challenge me, and those I challenge don’t usually threaten me.

    Well if that’s your socially awkward way of fishing for a challenge, Momus said, then I am happy to inform you that you have one. And a big one, too. After all, as an authorized representative of the Bureau of Afterlife Law Enforcement and the Chief Afterlife Administrator Himself, my audit of this entire Bureau’s performance is really just an indirect evaluation of yours.

    Don’t say I didn’t warn you after I’ve burned you later, Pluto said.

    Egads! Momus cried, flourishing his shock of hair backwards in a dramatic swish. Duple egads! Momus, you darned scallawag! Regard well what flamesome folk up with whom you have gone and gotten yourself mixed. If ever there was an appropriate venue for a firy demise, this arena of brimstone, bats, and bruxism may just be the one! Good day!

    Chapter Three

    Untitled 2

    It is not two hours since my last recording. Despite what has transpired between them, my heart beats yet as relaxedly as it did earlier.

    A detail which I missed earlier is that the very same radio abandoned distantly by me, through some strange means, once more came to rest surreptitiously in the corner of my dwelling. It must have achieved the feat, with or without surreptitious feet of its own, whilst I narrated in peace atop my roof.

    I came down to catch a few winks before the start of the workday, and upon noticing the unusual occurrence set upon embracing immediate and total ignorance of it, and I suppose in some hushed corner of my psyche desperated that the radio would not grow an extra antenna (and risk an enhancement of my meager shot at entertainment? Ha!) and attempt to throttle me in an act of peculiar somnicide.

    Right before the scheduled ouster of the cobwebs and bats in my own belfry by the chiroptocidal contract cleaners on retainer from the land of nod —

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