Chapter 2

"Am I dead?" asked Tony.

"Not yet," said Durkan. "It's not looking good for ya though."

Tony sank down onto his chair, put his head in his hands and thumped his head on the desk. Amused, Durkan settled himself leaning against a filing cabinet.

"Sorry to be so blunt," he said.

"It's fine," said Tony, sitting up. "I'm fine... I'm ready to go."

"Ready to die?"

"As ready as I'll ever be I guess."

"That's nice for you, most people never get closure or acceptance."

"Shit! That's true. Am I ready?"

"How would I know? I've only just met you."

Tony looked up at the old man made of smoke.

"Are you not Death?" he asked.

Durkan doubled over with wheezing laughter, overtaken by body-shaking coughs, he spluttered and laughed some more.

"Oh man, you are hilarious!" he said once he had recovered. "Of course I'm not Death."

"Then what are you doing here?"

"I was just hanging out, minding my own business. What are you doing here?"

"I was having one last cigarette before I die," said Tony, glancing to the floor where the now extinguished fag was snapped in half.

"The smoke must have got to me more than I thought, you're clearly a hallucination," said Tony.

"That's news to me," said Durkan, looking at the own hands. "So you reckon I only exist in your head?"

"No, I don't think you exist at all."

"That's bullshit, I know I exist. How could I know that if I wasn't real?"

"I'm not going to have the I-think-therefore-I-am conversation with you", snapped Tony. "You're not real and you're not really here. End of."

"That's just rude," said Durkan. "You can't go around telling people they don't exist, they will have all sorts of identity crises. If everyone is sitting around having a maudlin existential crisis it would be chaos."

Tony turned his desk chair to face away from Durkan.

"I am not going to spend my last moments alive talking to myself."

"Fine then... I hope you die horribly in a fire," laughed Durkan.

He guffawed and coughed.

"D'ya get it? Because you are about to really die in a fire?"

Tony turned back to scowl at him.

"You're a dick," he said.

"I've been called worse."

Durkan drummed his fingers on the top of the filing cabinet while he watched Tony. His translucent nails made no sound on the metal.

"So you're just gonna sit here and wait to die?" he finally asked to break to silence.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I'm trapped. Obviously. I'm not doing it for the good of my health."

"Clearly not, that would be very counter-productive," said Durkan with a smirk. "You're not even going to try and get out?" he continued.

"I've tried everything already. The doors are locked and all the windows on this floor have closed shutters. There is one way in or out but that is downstairs and the fire is blocking it. The only thing I can do is hope the fire brigade get here in time to rescue me."

"They may be a while, the blaze is pretty intense. Downstairs is totally engulfed and its not looking great on this floor either, I sneaked a peek earlier. It smells like petrol too which is not encouraging," said Durkan.
He ran his fingers through the grey smoke of his hair, displacing the shape for a moment before it reformed.

Tony buried his head in his hands again.

"Besides, it's not the flame that kill ya, it's choking to death on all the smoke," Durkan continued.

"Thanks for that, you're a real ray of fucking sunshine," said Tony.