The man, death, the actual man stood in my house once again. The house I'd told him to get out of just a few months ago. He seemed bigger than before, he'd brought his army, all his terrible weapons and mechanisms, sulphurous smoke, rotting stenches and eerie noises that sounded like the distant laughter of babies or animals in the throes of passion.
I stood silently. I already knew he was coming, I knew why he was here, and I knew that - like before - I was ready to do battle.
"So what makes you think I'm just going to lie down and accept this?" I said quietly, measuredly.
I always lacked a "Voice of God" which was why I always got my wife to shout at kids kicking a ball against the wall of our house, or let her vent wrath when my daughter had done something that warranted it. But I had a quiet voice that spoke of malice and intent and that was the voice I was using now.
"What makes you think anything has changed aside from what's going on inside me?" I said.
"I've seen the results, I know what's happening. I am here, perhaps a little early but the sands won't last forever!"
He held up that rotten egg timer once again, the sickly varnished piece of frippery with its green sand flowing, perhaps seeming to flow a little faster than before. "Souvenir of Alum Bay" it said, a childhood holiday destination. Back before people were banned from digging the coloured sands out of the ever-receding cliffs, we would fill buckets with the stuff, all the mineral deposits making sludgy rainbows in whatever we chose to store them in, and providing the lurid green sand for this object d'tat.
"So how do you want to do this? You have an army, you stink, you have stupid noises. I have..."
I paused for a moment. I knew what I had. Absolute stubborn belief that, though you couldn't cheat death, it couldn't take you until it was your time. Death would try to cheat you, perhaps there was some sort of bonus scheme for any extra minutes, hours, days, months or years it managed to claw back from would-be clients who just gave in but I was not about to give death that satisfaction.
At that moment Death saw what I had, it looked into my mind. It knew that I knew it wasn't a case of being dragged away against your will, it would only be able to take you if you went willingly and it also saw, it also knew that I never would.
"Are we just going to do this until the end of time?" Death whispered.
"The end of your time or mine?" I said, again in that measured voice, the sub-voice of alt-god.
"Whichever comes first" Death said. "...and you know which will."
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