You know when they say that at the end of your life, the universe  will open up its secrets and answer every question you ever had? You  ever heard that one? Well, it's a load of bollocks. The universe doesn't  owe you a thing, certainly not answers. When you die you're still the  tiny speck you were beforehand.

Neither do you get your life played back before your eyes in an  instant. It takes some time before the rushes get edited together, in  whatever way time exists in this place.

When I was five I saw my teacher sawn in half by a magician who did a show at my primary school. He probably used one of those crappy  jigsaws, but at that age I screamed the room down like I'd witnessed a  murder. When my teacher showed me he was OK, I was fascinated. At that  young age, I had found the other side of fear.

I never fit in at school. I did well academically, but socially I was  a disaster. I tried, I really did. I joined in on the pop fandoms, the  fads, the edgy jokes picking on whoever, but the kids could smell a fake  and I fooled nobody. When I was bullied I fought back first with my  tongue, then, when that escalated the situation, my fists. It got me  into so much trouble I had to learn the power of walking away, but by  then no-one was coming at me head on anyway, they knew better. It would  be lovely to say that that was the end of my bully troubles, but the  bullies just found ways to snipe at me from a safe distance.

In year nine, a boy called Richard Conners started telling everyone  who'd listen that he'd got in my knickers behind the bike sheds. No-one  really believed him except the bullshit lads who bragged about having a  supermodel mum and a Bugatti, but a lot of kids kept the rumour going  just as a way to get at me. It came to a head in English when we had to  give a definition of fantasy fiction. I stood up and gave mine out loud:

"Fantasy fiction is Richard Conners thinking I'd ever go near him  with a long stick and a hazmat suit, and not just because the only dick  he's got is the one on his forehead."

I got two weeks detention for that and one more when I refused to  apologise. I smiled through all of it, but before long everyone was  calling me Lexie the Lezzie behind my back. They made sure I knew about  it, too.

Chris was one of the only people to stay by me for any length of  time. I don't think he fancied me, at least I hope not because I never  looked at him that way, but he was the best friend I could have asked  for at that time or any other.

Our high school was the shits. They made all the girls wear knee  length pleated skirts with their uniforms and refused to let us wear  trousers – the policy would change after I left following a car crash  local news interview where the Headteacher tried to defend it and came  off sounding like a massive pervert. So after school I would seek out  Chris and got him to swap with me. I'd go home in his school trousers,  he'd wear my skirt. He wore it better than me anyway and knew that  anyone who picked on him for it would have me to answer to.

And then I met Maise. I first saw her at an inter-school maths event  where she was representing one of the OFSTED-rated schools it was always  assumed would win. My school, on the single occasion they gained a  "satisfactory" OFSTED rating, celebrated as if they'd brought back a  Nobel Prize.

Maise and I hit it off in the canteen at lunchtime. It turned out she  lived in a posh area on the far side of Lampew Meadows, an area of  wasteland that would eventually be sold off bit by bit to developers,  forcing the Decent People / Lower Class Scum borders to be revised  annually by the aspirational and prejudiced.

We (Maise, Chris and I) started meeting after school at various  locations in Lampew meadow and then went to each others' houses. Mostly  Chris's, because he lived in neutral ground between my sinkhole estate  and Maise's garden-fronted, double garaged Community. My parents loved  that I had friends and always made them welcome when we did go to mine.  Maise's parents didn't mind Chris but barely tolerated me. They owned a  chain of minimarkets and probably had their photos on posters in the  Daily Mail boardroom as exemplar demographic.

Maise and I shared our first kiss on a building site at Lampew  Meadows. There was a new block of flats going up and they'd just dug the  foundations. Chris had said something dumb, we teased him by running  off and leaving him and ended up hiding in one of the deep chambers near  the lift shaft. It was lined with rebar, waiting to be filled with  concrete.

We could hear Chris's voice echoing down the chamber as he looked for  us. We huddled close together, Maise put her finger to my lips, we  gazed into each others' eyes and came together for eternity.

When we all left school, Maise started working for her parents, Chris  went on a tech course at the city college and I signed up with a temp  agency. We talked about renting together and eventually did. Maise's  parents raised objections, but she eventually sold them on the need for  her to find her own feet in order to carry on the family business. They  were not happy about our relationship – they could just about handle  Maise being gay, but not with council estate trash like myself. Maise  put her foot down, raised her own deposit and moved in with me anyway.  They never gave us their blessings, but at least dropped their  objections.

We watched movies together all the time, especially horror. Chris got  us started with the 80s American classics, then we all started trying  to find the best and worst obscure gems we could, on DVD stalls at the  market or downloaded from filesharing servers. We frequently got more  than we bargained for via the latter due to inaccurate labelling and had  to be on the alert for lurking hardcore and real death videos, which we  would delete as soon as we spotted the warning signs. Some of the  softer porn was fun though, on the same level as the cheesy horror we  liked. The specialist fetish ones were downright cute, when we found one  of those we placed bets on what ultra-specific kink would turn out to  be the focus.

We became regulars at Beyond The Pale, the Goth night that ran in  town every fortnight. We loved planning outfits to go in, it was the  only place I ever felt comfortable in a dress, though Maise had the  power to override that discomfort any time she wanted to see me in  something. Sometimes we'd all dress to an agreed theme, discussed and  chosen on web forums during the week.

At some point we started making daft home videos together recreating  memorable death scenes from movies. It gave us another opportunity to  play dress up and it was fun coming up with silly ways to represent the  effects. In a typical one I would don a beard and fisherman's sweater to  become Quint from Jaws, lying on a cardboard box boat to be eaten by a  stuffed toy shark.

When we saw that opening scene from Quills, we recreated it using a  magician's head chopper we found on eBay. Chris sat on the stairs  reading out the lines as the Marquis de Sade while I, the executioner,  did rude things to Maise's Mademoiselle Gerard. That one got a little  out of hand.

But the death scene that really struck a chord was in the French film  Love Me If You Dare, in which Guillaume Canet and Marillon Cotilard are  buried in cement together in "the dare of all dares". Immediately the  scene began Maise and I sat bolt upright, staring at the screen.

"That's our first kiss!" we yelled in unison.

We told Chris all about that day on the building site in Lampew  Meadows, when we had hidden from him in the lift foundations and come  out as a couple.

"I remember," he said. "You bastards left me wandering around out  there on my own, I didn't know where you were. At least I wasn't in  Lexie's skirt that day."

In tribute, we made two versions of that scene, kissing in the shower  cubicle while Chris slowly pulled up a grey curtain up in front of us.  We did it once in the costumes from the film, then again in our old  school uniforms, just as we had worn them at the time.

We posted up a YouTube channel of some of the videos (not the  personal ones, like our first kiss or Quills). It was moderately  popular, but we closed the channel and went back to just doing it for  ourselves when one of those stupid "ha ha look at these losers" blogs  linked to us and we were flooded with trolling and abusive comments. It  was a reminder we didn't need that we still lived in a world full of  assholes.

Going around town, we were heckled regularly on the street for our  appearance and sexuality. Sometimes there were threats or spitting, of  course never from within range of retaliation. I could take their worst,  had ever it come to blows I would have gone down fighting. But I  couldn't bear it when Maise and Chris were targeted. Chris was so good  natured, he took everything in stride, but I feared for what he was  holding inside.

On the night they died, we were coming back from Beyond the Pale. I  was wearing the long black lace skirt, Maise her tailored tuxedo.

A gang of drunk lads came the other way as we looked for a taxi. Some of them we knew from school.

They were calling us dykes, rug munchers, goth fags, every name under  the sun. They surrounded us, spat, got in our faces, then one groped  Maise. When I went to hit him he pulled out a knife and started waving  it around, with his mates egging him on. I made a move and he swung  around wildly, randomly slicing Maise across the throat. Chris ran  forward, in panic the guy stabbed him in the stomach. Realising what had  happened, his mates turned and ran. He faced up to me terrified, making  desperate lunges as I looked between him and my two best friends  bleeding out on the floor.

"You coward!" I yelled at him. "Kill me too, do it! Fucking do it!"

He was panicking hard. He lunged at me half-heartedly a couple of times then turned on his heels and ran.

I scrambled for my phone and rang 999. But the ambulance came too late to save Maise and Chris, who died in my arms.

They caught the culprits, they weren't exactly hard to identify. The  guy with the knife plead guilty to manslaughter and got a paltry  sentence. His accomplices laughed when they left the court.

Maise's parents blamed me for everything. I was not welcome at her funeral. It is the worst thing they could have done to me.

I had to move out of our house, I couldn't afford the rent on my own.  I ended up sharing with a bunch of strangers I had nothing in common  with, crammed into a shitty house let by a shark landlord. I still had  the head chopper we had used to recreate the Quills scene. It was one of  the things I had to remember them by, but I kept it dismantled under  the bed.

Six months later, on my way back from work, I was hit by a speeding  car that mounted the kerb. I never fully knew what happened – obviously I  wasn't around for the investigation or coroner's report – but for the  first time in my life I didn't fight. There was no moment of destiny, no  rush of consciousness, not anything. I just died pathetically in the  street, the random victim of a road accident caused by an idiot.

Then I realised there was another memory after that one. I was back  in my room, in that shitty shared house. The head chopper stood in the  corner of the room, fully assembled.

I believe this is where we came in.

Dying over and over in inventive ways. That sounds a lot like every  description of Hell I've ever been told. But I've also heard that Heaven  and Hell are just the same place from different perspectives.

When the darkness manifests, how we deal defines who we are. When the  darkness meets fear and hate, it metastasizes, mutates and annihilates.  But when it meets love it settles and embraces. It forces perspective,  it feeds and heightens passion.

——

"How long are we here for?" asked Chris.

"As long as you wish," replied Uncle Morbid. "Time stopped being  linear the moment you died, that moment... this moment... is now infinite."

"What if our bodies get cremated?" I asked.

"It doesn't matter. You'd still have that moment even if your body was obliterated on death."

"How are we all together here?" asked Maise.

"With that, there are two possibilities. One is that you each are in  your own personal afterlife in which the other two are just constructs  built from your memories. Option two, which I think is a lot nicer, is  that you found each other and combined on a quantum level. All the other  people you meet are real people living their own moments here with us."

We looked at the monitors to see the members of the Mortal Masquerade  scattered around the venue. I wondered what all of their stories were,  if indeed they had any and weren't just constructed bit players in our  dreams.

I thought about Susan in the office, my wonderfully oblivious boss.  She was as out of place here as I was in the mainstream workplace, so  rationalised and dealt with it in the only way she knew how. But if this  was her afterlife, what was she doing at Morior? If she wasn't a  construct she had to be harbouring a dark side I was yet to see.

I thought about Debs and the role she had played in our journey  together. How the passion of competition and the thrill of deathplay had  focused and intensified her creativity into something extreme. I  suspected she'd been someone who'd never been able to express these  traits during her lifetime, but wanted to. So now, here she was with us.

This was not the end, it was a new beginning. There were new  adventures to share, new deathplays to create, new feelings to  experience. And we would do it all together, forever.

Chris broke the silence.

"Hey, Spring's nearly here. It'll be time to get the jungle ready soon."

A few days later, Maise told me she had a surprise for me. She told me to close my eyes and led me into the bedroom.

"OK, open them," she said.

On the bed her old school uniform was neatly laid out, the same one  she had had me wear for the whole Head Girl thing. And next to it was my  school uniform, recreated exactly. There was the horrible grey jumper  knitted from plasticky acrylic and polyester white blouse that itched,  irritated and nullified all known deodorants. Next to a pair of rolled  up black tights was the pleated skirt that I hated so intently.

"Once I remembered, it was easy finding all the parts," said Maise.  "I got you a pair of trousers to wear with it too, if you prefer. But  this is how we were dressed the first time we met, and the first time we  kissed."

A thought struck me.

"Maise, did you ever have this dream about that kiss..."

"...where we're getting buried in cement the whole time, Jeux D'enfants style? You know I did. Over and over."

My thoughts turned to the industrial cement mixer set up in Hangar 2.  I knew how easy it would be to build a rebar cage just like the  foundation chamber we had kissed in. I knew Uncle Morbid would happily  set the whole thing up just for us.

I knew for certain that it had been set up already.

I held her in my arms.

"It's wonderful, Maise, and of course I'll do it with you. But right now, I'd rather we wear something different."

As we kissed, I slipped my hand up inside her top and gently undid  her bra. She returned the favour. We finished undressing each other and  fell back on the bed, pushing aside both uniforms.

Naked on that bed, with no avatars, roleplay, toys or narrative, just  two women deeply and eternally in love, we shared the biggest little  death of them all.

The End.