People seem to have the idea that when you die, your soul leaves your body and drifts away, departing somewhere into the ether, voyaging, as it were, onward to some heavenly realm. If you’ve behaved yourself during your time on this earthly sphere, you might end up somewhere sunny and beautiful and full of song and splendor where you’ll spend your days lying on a bed of clouds, listening to some celestial creature play on the harp as you reflect on all the good you did what a wonderful person you were. And if you, as so many do, found yourself tempted by the darker dealings of the mortal realm, you might end up in something of a more punishing place where you’re as like to be stuck with hot pokers as looked at.

But I am here to disabuse you of any such notion. For you see, what happens when you die, what really happens, is that your soul—your spirit, your inner being, your divine essence, whatever you want to call it—that part of you, the part that make you you, simply stays put. That’s right. Instead of floating away into some otherworldly realm, your inner self remains completely and inseparably attached to your outer self. That awkward, lumpy mass of bone and flesh and hair that you spend your entire life trying to maintain (only to watch it slowly grow uglier and podgier by the year, I might add), that place you’ve called home all your life, is, in the end, the only home you’ll ever know.

But that doesn’t mean that death is the end. Oh, no.

See, after you die and you figure out that you won’t be going anywhere, you might feel an initial sense of relief. There’s no judgement to face, no accountability to be had for all the morally questionable and perhaps slightly perverse things that you’ve done over the course of your life. There’s no man with a list telling you they’re all full up in the place you hoped you’d end up and no red-handed menace waiting to beat you with a stick when you end up in the other place.

But after that, that’s when the reality of things begins to set in and a true sense of dread starts to take over. Because it’s pretty soon after that initial acceptance of what your future’s going to look like that you realize just what that means: an eternity of lying there in the dark listening to the sound of other people carrying on with their lives while you slowly wither and rot. If you think watching paint dry or a kettle boil is boring, buckle up, because pretty soon, you’ll start hoping a worm will crawl by just so you can have someone to talk to—not that you can talk.

Now, if you’re lucky, you’ll end up like me and die with your eyes wide open somewhere nice and public. Sure, it might not sound such an appetizing prospect now, but at least that way you can have a bit of entertainment in the afterlife. When I think of those poor saps who end up chucked in pine box with nails driven into the lid buried six feet in the ground or those high and mighty types who have themselves split open and divided up into little jars or shoved in a sarcophagus somewhere—well, when its lights out and the only thing they’ve got to amuse themselves is the sensation of their own skin receding slowly over their bones, I imagine they start to regret those kinds of decisions pretty quick.

Of course, you don’t have to believe me. You can just as easy wait and find out for yourself. But I do recommend that before going that route you try to die—and I cannot emphasize this part enough—stay in as interesting a place as possible. Because it’ll do you little good to die somewhere appealing if you’re immediately going to be carted off and thrown into a hole in the ground.

Now, I’ve thought about this a fair deal, and I’ve a couple of suggestions. First of all, it might be good if you can have someone prop you up in a window somewhere, maybe on the second story of a building overlooking a busy street. Or I suppose you might donate yourself to some sort of scientific exhibit where all sorts of people can come and have a look at you—though I don’t recommend this to people who take exception to having others gawk and laugh at your most sensitive bits. But either way, try to have it fixed so that you’ll have a bit of a view when you go.

Please know that whatever you decide to believe—or not believe—I tell you this all with the utmost sincerity and the kind of certainty that only comes from experiencing a thing oneself.

Stolen story; please report.

That’s right: I, Charles Ignacious Hillmont, am dead.

Or I was. I died, in any case, and I think it’s safe to say that that makes me more of an expert on the matter than you. Unless, I suppose, you’ve also died, in which case, erm, greetings from the netherworld! Or some such thing. Either way, I do know a thing or two about death and dying.

Now, perhaps you’re wondering, How can you be telling me all this when you’re dead? Surely even if dead people retain a certain level of consciousness, they lose their ability to do things like write and talk and tell stories of questionable validity, and to that I say: you are very perceptive, and I’ll get to that later on.

But perhaps you’re also wondering: Why are you dead? What horrible thing could have possibly precipitated such a tragedy?  And to that I say: I’m glad you asked.

The whole business began late one night when I was walking home from the pub—that’s short for “public house” for all you upstanding types. Now, normally I would’ve stayed until the sun had at least begun come up over the horizon, seeing as how that’s a much safer time of day to be out and about, rather than to be caught roaming the streets of Rippshaw alone in the dark. But on this particular occasion, the rather scrupulous and, dare I say, unsympathetic innkeeper informed me that, seeing as I had ran rather short on coin, he would have to ask me to leave. My bill at this point was only six nights running, and in that time, I can’t have drunk more than, say, five and twenty flagons of ale, but the innkeeper would not relent.

The whole thing was a misunderstanding, an oversight which I would’ve been happy to amend as soon as the next night if he had only given me the chance. But the old beef-wit insisted that I either pay my bill in full then and there or leave. Can you believe the nerve of him?

Needless to say, I could not in good conscious give in to such harassment, and in the end, I discovered the hard way that the innkeeper meant what he said when he threatened to have me carried out of the place by my collar.

Oh, was I ever cross. I was so cross, I could have thrashed the man, were it not for the fact that I’d just been thrown by the heels from his pub and had five flagons of ale already that night, making it something of a difficult task to keep a straight line. And it was while I was in this understandable state of vexation and relative insobriety that I sought a bush where I might relieve myself of my…troubles. However, seeing as it was quite dark, and Rippshaw being one of the less savory parts of town, the first bush I happened upon turned out to be a derelict, some drunken sop of a man who fallen who’d fallen asleep on the street.

So, rather than make the same mistake twice, I decided to seek the river. I stood there, going about my business, and was just about to return to the pub where I reasoned I’d either give the innkeeper a piece of my mind or throw myself at his mercy, when a hand grabbed my shoulder. It gave me such a fright I nearly fell into the river right then and there.

“Charles Ignacious Hillmont?” a rather menacing sounding voice said.

“I prefer ‘Charlie,’” I said, adjusting the waist of my trousers. I tried to turn around to get a look at the fellow who would choose such an inopportune moment to address me, but a second hand had joined the first and held me in place.

“Charlie, is it?” the voice said with a rather crude sort of laugh.

“That’s what your mother calls me,” I said.

And that’s when I felt it: something cold and sharp driving into my back, plunging its way with little resistance deep into the soft wetness of my insides.

It’s a nasty business, being stabbed liked that. Hurts like the dickens.

The voice laughed again, and after a brief bout of crippling pain, everything went dark. I reawoke to find myself falling face-first into the river.

“Goodbye, Charlie,” I hear the voice say as I smacked into the surface with a splash.

I began to sink—fast. But I knocked against something on my way down, which managed to turn me the other way about, and I ended up landing on my back on the bottom of the most disgusting river in the country, and quite possibly the world.

Whoever it was must have put something in my pockets to make me sink like that, but no matter; I was already dead by the time I went in. I say that because there was no point at which I found myself gasping for air or struggling to reach the surface. There was no feeling that my lungs would implode or that the life was being squeezed from my body. No, I was already a goner by that point. I’m not sure I understood just how bleak things were for me then. My only thought was: Well, now how am I going to set that dogged innkeeper straight?

In retrospect, I might have left off the part about the fellow’s mother, but I’m not sure that would have made a difference. Call me crazy, but it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing you kill someone over unless you already had a mind to do so. Either way, facts were facts, and I was dead.

That is, until I wasn’t.