A Very Reaper Romance

Chapter Six – 335 Days Left

After Zoie went back to uni, the days began to blur together in their monotony. Jack was quickly finding out that the older residents of the town had a taste for keeping him on his toes – every so often the ledger would activate only to shut down again.

At first, Jack wasn’t entirely sure why it was misfiring and he even considered reaching out to Death, but after he caught Mr Pemberton laid on his house’s roof clearing out the gutters for winter and found a drunk Mrs Harper who had crashed her mobility scooter into the town fountain, Jack realised the Angel of Death was having visions of what could go wrong and essentially putting Jack on standby every time one of the elderly got up to something unhinged.

He’d learned which streets to avoid at peak dog-walking hours, as well as which pensioners were likely to attempt DIY well beyond their skill set. When he wasn’t out wandering in town, Jack mostly spent his evenings at home reading or watching TV. He was quickly finding out that being dead was pretty boring. After two weeks, he finally felt confident enough to go back to the pub, if only to break the monotony.

The memory of that first visit had clung to him for days – the way his friends’ voices had sounded close enough to touch, the casual cruelty of hearing his own name spoken in the past tense. Since then, time had done what it always did: softened the edges without fixing the shape.

Jack told himself he could handle it now.

He wasn’t going to linger. He wouldn’t sit where he used to sit. He wouldn’t watch the door out of habit, waiting for people who weren’t coming anymore. He just wanted a pint, a bit of background noise, and proof that the world hadn’t ended simply because his had taken a sharp left turn into the afterlife.

That was reasonable. Right?

Jack checked his reflection before leaving – less out of vanity, more out of routine – and grabbed his jacket. The ledger stayed quiet in his pocket, which he took as a good sign. No vibrations, no ominous warmth. Either everyone in town was behaving themselves, or the Angel of Death was momentarily distracted.

The walk to the pub felt easier this time. Familiar, even. Jack realised with some surprise that he was looking forward to it; not in the hopeful way he used to, but in a quietly manageable way. He pushed the door open and stepped inside.

It was busier than it had been the last time he visited, which made Jack slightly nervous at the thought of having to leave in a hurry. He knew the pub quiz was on and hoped he could blend into the background of people focused on their answers. He felt the now familiar pang of sadness – he was brilliant at the pub quiz, and he and his friends would often win thanks to his contributions. Jack looked around, subconsciously searching for his friends, but his attention was pulled to the dark corner just beyond the bar.

His friend Alfie was there cozying up to a girl – his hand tangled in the blonde hair on the back of her head as she leaned in to whisper in his ear. Alfie looked completely lost in the moment and hadn’t noticed he was being watched by the stranger the other side of the bar. Jack tried not to seem like a pervert, watching the couple as they kissed passionately, oblivious to the other patrons or the world in general it seemed.

“What can I get you, lad?” the barmaid asked, pulling Jack’s attention away.

“Oh, um, a Bladdered Badger please,” Jack replied, laying his jacket over the back of the barstool and handing over a £10 note.

When the barmaid handed back a pile of change, Jack stacked them up as he always did. Jack had just placed the final five pence piece atop the pile of silvers when he heard giggling from Alfie’s corner. He looked over and saw Alfie pulling the girl to standing, wrapping his arms around her waist as she draped hers around his neck while they continued kissing. Jack tried to watch inconspicuously, but his gasp was audible when he saw who it was Alfie was canoodling with – Jack’s ex-girlfriend, Sienna.

‘Didn’t take them long’ Jack thought. It had only been, what, four weeks? Sure, he and Sienna had split a couple of weeks before his death, but they had been together for eighteen months. A foul taste settled in his mouth, and not from the obviously unclean beer lines. No, it was from bitterness. He hated that one of his supposed best friends had hopped into bed with his ex-girlfriend before his body was even cold.

Alfie and Sienna bustled past him on their way out the door, knocking the back of his barstool, causing his beer to spill across the bar. Jack grunted with annoyance.

“Sorry mate,” Alfie laughed. “Rosie, grab this guy another beer, stick it on my tab,” he called to the barmaid who smiled and nodded in acknowledgement.

“Nah, you’re alright, mate.” Jack could hear the venom in his voice, but he was disgusted that someone he had trusted and the woman he had once loved were so quick to betray his memory.

Alfie lingered by the door, one arm looped around Sienna’s waist, his laughter fading as his eyes flicked back to Jack. He frowned.

“Do I know you?” Alfie asked.

Jack’s stomach dropped. For half a second, he thought about telling the truth. About saying ‘you carried my coffin’.

Instead, he shook his head. “Don’t think so.”

Alfie studied him a moment longer, like a word was on the tip of his tongue. Then he snorted and waved it off. “Yeah. Must be imagining it.”

The door swung shut behind them.

Jack heaved a sigh of relief. Relief that was cut short when the ledger throbbed urgently in his pocket. Not a warning. Not a flicker. A demand.

Jack stiffened, every nerve lighting up as heat bled through the fabric of his jeans.

“Of course,” he muttered.

Rosie was already setting down the fresh pint. “Here you go, love—”

He sighed. “You’ve got impeccable timing,” he muttered, and set off at a jog. Jack slid back from the stool, leaving the coins exactly where they’d fallen. “Can’t,” he said to Rosie, already moving. “Sorry.” He didn’t look back.

By the time he reached the cold air outside, the pub noise muffled behind him, Jack’s hands were shaking, not from grief, not from anger, but from the sickening clarity that the ledger hadn’t interrupted him at random.

Someone, somewhere, was close to the end.

The thought sobered him instantly, the bitterness of Alfie and Sienna’s betrayal ebbing away and leaving something heavier behind. He felt a familiar pang of sadness for a stranger he hadn’t met yet, for someone’s final moment he was about to walk into, whether they felt ready or not.

At least this time he knew what he was doing.

Jack opened the ledger just enough to glance inside. The page had filled itself in with a crude little doodle – a lopsided castle, complete with turrets and flags, like something drawn by a bored child – and beneath it, a single number; 86.

Jack frowned.

“A castle,” he muttered. “Brilliant. That narrows it down. There’s no castles in Barrowstead”

He snapped the ledger shut and began moving, listening for sirens, hoping for an ambulance to chase down like last time. Nothing. He was going to have to hit the streets and hope for the best. Jack made it halfway down the street before he stopped.

“Eighty-six,” he muttered, turning the number over in his head. “Eighty-six what?”

House number, maybe? Flat? Age? He scanned the street as he walked, counting doors automatically – forty-two, forty-four, forty-six – before realising how stupid that was. Barrowstead barely had way more than eighty-six houses, but not on one road. He slowed, pulling the ledger back out as he walked.

The doodle hadn’t changed. Still the same ridiculous little castle, crooked towers and a flag that looked suspiciously like it had been drawn with annoyance rather than care.

“Castle… eighty-six.”

He stopped so abruptly that someone behind him tutted. Jack’s stomach dropped.

“Oh,” he said quietly. “Oh, you bastard.”

Castle wasn’t the place. It was the name.

He flipped the ledger shut and dragged a hand down his face, already scanning his memory – post, shop signs, people he’d passed, the way small towns had a habit of recycling the same surnames until they felt unavoidable.

Castle.

Castle Confectioners.

He turned on his heel and broke into a jog.

“Eighty-six,” he muttered, heart thudding now. “Mr Castle. Please be Mr Castle.”

The ledger pulsed once in his pocket, as if in answer. Jack ran faster.

​​Jack didn’t dare consider what would happen if he was late. Would the deceased wander off into the ether? Was that what ghosts were? His feet pounded the pavement as he headed for the vintage confectioners shop on the outskirts of the main hub of shops.

The thought nagged in the back of his mind as he ran. Mr Carruthers hadn’t covered that part. He’d talked about “helping them along,” but he’d never mentioned what happened if no one turned up. Jack pictured a soul pacing an empty street, waiting for someone who wasn’t coming, and his chest tightened. He ran faster, his lungs burning and the ledger in his pocket radiating a low, impatient vibration.

Mr Castle had run the shop for the past thirty years, taking over from his parents when they retired and bringing the shop into a more modern age – namely advertising online and offering card payments. The shop was thriving as much as it had when it first opened nearly a century ago under Mr Castle’s grandparents.

Jack had always loved that about the place, the way it managed to feel untouched by time while quietly changing to fit in. Rows of glass jars filled with sweets lined the walls, the colours within were bright enough to make your teeth ache just looking at them. It had been the sort of shop you assumed would always be there, somehow safe from closures and recessions and the slow decay of small towns. The idea that it might suddenly stop made his stomach twist.

‘Hold on’, Jack thought to himself.

Mr Castle wasn’t eighty-six.

The man was barely in his sixties.

His heart lurched and even though his pace didn’t slow, Jack worried he had just taken himself in completely the wrong direction. The number rolled around in his head like a loose screw.

Eighty-six. Age? Address? Part of a phone number?

He cursed himself for assuming the ledger would be straightforward. It had already proven it liked riddles, doodles and vague hints over anything remotely helpful.

He sped towards the final corner, grabbing hold of the wrought-iron fence that enclosed the corner house’s front garden for a pivot point as he swung around the corner and stopping as fast as he could as he barrelled into Mrs Bailey.

“s**t!” Jack exclaimed as he braced for impact.