Hellsborough Exposed — death-and-afterlife

I found Van several jugs into one of his melancholic moods, talking to the fireplace more than to me: when the day comes you need care, he says, the responsible thing is to remove yourself from the burden of it before you become one, rather than expect your fellow apes to keep consuming resources on your behalf. He calls anyone who thinks otherwise selfish, living out their little Dunlockslyn lives by scriptures he reckons have long since gone milting — an old man's philosophy of dying I still haven't decided whether to find brave or terrifying.

Hellsborough has no ambulance service, no fire brigade, and nothing an off-worlder would recognise as a health service. There are GPs of a sort, hireable, mostly witchdoctors, and there is rockcrust if you can get hold of any. Denizens are children of the murk and mend themselves; jellyheads and netherlanders are human, and do not. So when the rockcrust runs out and the remedies fail, what is left is to walk into the murk and take your chances, sink or swim, which the old and the infirm do often enough that nobody thinks to remark on it. That is why the average age here is so encouragingly young.

Cath was patching canvas near the fire on the fourth murkrise when I asked the question I'd been working toward all day.

Tom: How many people have been here longer than Roper.

Cath: One. Maybe two. They're not around now.

Tom: What happens to them.

Cath: You stop seeing them at the fire. Then you stop seeing them in the morning. Then they're gone and nobody quite says they've gone. Roper says it's what the ground does with the ones who've been in it long enough.

Pip's working hypothesis — written down, so it counts — is that consciousness is a quantum state and the soul its emergent property, which means that barghests and murk wraiths are only theoretically possible if consciousness survives death, and consciousness only survives if the quantum mechanics hold. Multiple copies of a person would produce multiple souls, linked by entanglement in the way that nothing inconvenient in Hellsborough ever fails to be linked to something else. Sophie Hinchcliffe was reconstructed from DNA with no access to her prior memories: whether what returned was Sophie, or merely a very accurate guess, remains an open question.

Death in Hellsborough is administered by the Wisewood Reaper, who operates from the forest boundary with a clipboard, a case file, and the professional patience of someone whose queue has not been short in living memory. He does not ask whether you are ready. He asks which column you belong to and whether a sub-form applies — and I have now appeared in his records under 'entity of disputed status,' which I suspect makes me more paperwork than most.

Fishermen who work the Damflask after murk-fall have a name for the shadows that settle at the reservoir's centre: the Shivering Grounds. Roger Robinson drowned there with six hands aboard his lugger, and has since been known to haul himself uninvited into passing boats — soaking, unhurried, the hook still in his cheek, asking after his wife. Whether this constitutes death in Hellsborough, or merely a change of circumstance, is a question none of Wisewood's elders have yet settled.