Of course, this is fiction: Evelyn exists only in your head.
The Book of the Emissaries
Retold from the manuscripts of the Underworld.
Two.
The Cabinet of Thoughts
Murder, Evelyn learned quickly, was not quite as glamourous as one might otherwise have assumed. The exciting murders were all committed by the most senior Emissaries: the ones she imagined sat in chambers, chanting and polishing their guns.
Such creatures were little more than a rumour among the newest recruits – there was a perpetual whisper that the Emissaries of Sudden Violent Death wore red cloaks and the faces of little girl ghosts.
Evelyn had certainly never seen one of them.
Although, she supposed, seeing anything when you were already dead was likely to pose something of a challenge.
Evelyn, the newest of Emissaries, had a simpler and entirely more uninteresting task.
She was sent to collect ideas.
Unbound from the ordinary limitations of physics, Evelyn wandered freely through the minds of living souls. The simple ideas were ones she snatched from the brain like butterflies: they were not missed, and their absence posed no threat.
The complex ideas: the ones they kept in jars, were the ones for which she was required to kill.
“Dig,” she was told, and she learned that obedience can be simple.
Evelyn first kept the quarried thoughts in a green plastic lunchbox, all tangled up. Later, she would transfer them into clean pickle jars, topped off with formaldehyde. It is a challenge to quantify the size of a cabinet in the absence of time and space, but it would be far to say that the collection of thoughts, memories and ideas dug up by the Emissaries was rather large.
After a week, she discovered the purpose of the ideas for which she had so diligently mined. A leaflet found its way to her imaginary post-life front door.
Welcome to LiveFlix [The Cabinet of Thoughts]: the Afterlife Entertainment Catalogue.
For Romance: press one.
For War: press two.
For Children Falling Over: press three.
For Erotica: press four…
She wondered what was wrong with a good book.
Retold from the manuscripts of the Underworld.
Two.
The Cabinet of Thoughts
Murder, Evelyn learned quickly, was not quite as glamourous as one might otherwise have assumed. The exciting murders were all committed by the most senior Emissaries: the ones she imagined sat in chambers, chanting and polishing their guns.
Such creatures were little more than a rumour among the newest recruits – there was a perpetual whisper that the Emissaries of Sudden Violent Death wore red cloaks and the faces of little girl ghosts.
Evelyn had certainly never seen one of them.
Although, she supposed, seeing anything when you were already dead was likely to pose something of a challenge.
Evelyn, the newest of Emissaries, had a simpler and entirely more uninteresting task.
She was sent to collect ideas.
Unbound from the ordinary limitations of physics, Evelyn wandered freely through the minds of living souls. The simple ideas were ones she snatched from the brain like butterflies: they were not missed, and their absence posed no threat.
The complex ideas: the ones they kept in jars, were the ones for which she was required to kill.
“Dig,” she was told, and she learned that obedience can be simple.
Evelyn first kept the quarried thoughts in a green plastic lunchbox, all tangled up. Later, she would transfer them into clean pickle jars, topped off with formaldehyde. It is a challenge to quantify the size of a cabinet in the absence of time and space, but it would be far to say that the collection of thoughts, memories and ideas dug up by the Emissaries was rather large.
After a week, she discovered the purpose of the ideas for which she had so diligently mined. A leaflet found its way to her imaginary post-life front door.
Welcome to LiveFlix [The Cabinet of Thoughts]: the Afterlife Entertainment Catalogue.
For Romance: press one.
For War: press two.
For Children Falling Over: press three.
For Erotica: press four…
She wondered what was wrong with a good book.