Businessmen -- Fiction; Fantasy fiction; Future life -- Fiction; Short stories
The demon turned into the door of the building and led the way up to
its stage. It was an auditorium. By the time they had reached the
platform, the crowd of ghosts behind were crowding into the place. They
soon filled it from wall to wall.
"You must have been a pretty popular fellow," remarked the demon,
looking them over, "or the reverse. Notorious, you know."
Chisholm didn't know. He had a reputation, he knew, as a go-getter and
a good fellow, but it was a modest one--restricted to his customers,
his salesmen, and people he met casually. He hardly expected this
turn-out. Moreover, he couldn't recognize anybody in the hall. As he
looked them over he was struck with one singularity of the crowd. Many
of them bore a family resemblance to him, some rather close, others
fantastically distorted. The majority looked like three-dimensional,
animated caricatures of him. One especially obnoxious one kept trying
to climb up onto the stage. He was far fatter than Chisholm himself
had ever been or could ever have been even if he had skipped the gym
workouts.
The demon observed the look of profound distaste on Chisholm's face,
but only grinned a little and picked up a gavel. He rapped sharply on
the table.
"Come to order, please," he said. "The convention is assembled."
There was a momentary hush, and then pandemonium broke out. It was a
very disorderly crowd and an opinionated one, from the jeers that were
hurled up at the stage. It was hard to pick out what they were saying,
but the trend of it seemed to be that practically everyone there wanted
to preside or was full of hot ideas that demanded immediate and full
expression. The demon was unperturbed. He was an old hand. At intervals
he would bang with the gavel. At last he got a tiny bit of silence.
"Fellow heels," he commenced, unblushingly, then paused to see what
uproar would follow. There was none. His insult had quieted the tumult
like oil on ruffled waters. He cleared his throat and went on.
"We are gathered here to form the ghost of Jerome Chester Chisholm,
deceased, erstwhile sales manager of the Pinnacle Office & Household
Appliance Corp. We have all eternity, to be sure, but why waste it?
Coalesce, please, as rapidly as possible. For purposes of comparison,
your prototype is standing here beside me. Take it or leave it. That's
your affair."
There were howls of "Chuck him out," "chiseler," "heel," "stuffed
shirt," and many, many less elegant epithets. Then an ominous silence
descended. The demon quietly pointed to a spot on the stage and the
procession started. One by one the specters mounted the stage, marched
to the spot and stood on it. Succeeding ones came on, each melting
imperceptibly into the one that had been there before. Gradually the
resultant figure took on more definite shape and looked far more solid
than any single shade in the hall. For many of them were so tenuous as
to be hardly visible.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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