Keep YOUR people weak, you mean. Listen to yourself, General, you’re thinking with the enemy.
He got the barrel of the gun nestled under his chin, prayed to the good lord above that he had killed the man he’d been sent to kill, and pulled the trigger.
Then he climbed up out of the crawl space and into the kitchen. Wylie, whom Al had been sent to kill, was unhurt. They were all unhurt.
And Al was elated.
The next second, he understood that the person still lying down there in that crawl space with a splayed head was him. And, all at once, he realized what he had done. “Uh, hey! Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry. Sorry!”
He remembered the Mountain, going down into the rock with that woman, Captain Mazle. He realized that she had been seraph. Samson was one of them, too. They were heavily disguised and they used drugs to enable them to live in our air, and they had stolen his will.
Needles, sharp scissors, clipped flesh wobbling in silver trays—brain being removed, brain being installed.
They had stolen his memory. They had subverted his honor.
This soldier owes his duty to his country, NOT TO THEM!
He’d been working for the enemy.
As he watched, EMS technicians came running in. He watched them jump down into the crawl space.
“I can tell you what you need to know,” he said.
The cop hurried out behind the EMS doctors. Wylie and his family came together, holding each other. Martin and Trevor left, and began to move off down the hill.
Al ran outside. “Wait! Listen to me! I made a mistake, but I can help you!” He went up to them. He shouted into Martin’s face, “Listen to me! I can help you!”
Nothing. He grabbed Martin—and his hands went through him. Martin shuddered and said, “I feel like a goose just walked over my grave.”
“Dad, we have a problem here, because when we go back, we’re gonna hit really fast water. Remember, in our world, the Saunders is in flood.”
Al could hear every word. “Can you hear me?” he bellowed.
“Yeah, that’s right, we can’t cross, not with the flooding on the other side.”
“What about the Hummer?”
“Yeah!”
No! NO! You fools, it’ll float right down the river!
They started back up the hill. “It’s full of dead seraph.”
“Take ’em with us, save Wylie and Matt a lotta trouble.”
“Plus, the back’s caked with venom. They must’ve brought that busted up outrider with them in it.”
Al had followed them. He was right with them, just inches away.
LISTEN TO ME! LISTEN NOW!
They set about pushing reptile bodies into the back of the Humvee.
Al inventoried his situation. You still exist, you can think, you can see and hear, you can move effortlessly wherever you want to go. But how in hell do you communicate? A quick review of his knowledge of ghosts and such, and the answer was immediately clear: you don’t.
He was a damn ghost, was what he was.
But no, this ghost was no cute little Casper and—he hoped—no raging banshee. He had a much larger vision of his life than before. His conscience was very, very powerful now. He saw deep into the arrogance that had made him who he was, the entire falsity of it, and how profound feelings of worthlessness were the foundation of the ego that had led him across all his life, all the way to this final predicament.
He knew now who he was, he knew the mistakes he had made, and he knew just exactly how to help the people of his world turn everything around. They could completely defeat Abaddon—these people, this man and this boy, if only they knew what he did. He had to tell them—but he couldn’t make them hear him or see him.
Martin and Trevor opened the doors of the Hummer and shoved two gray, lifeless seraph bodies into the back, then, as an afterthought, Trevor pocketed one of their hand weapons. Al knew those weapons, electrical-centrifugal handguns that could propel thousands of light-weight plastic rounds at five thousand clicks an hour. The only sound they made was the crackle of the rounds breaking the sound barrier, but they could slice a man in half a mile away. Or a dozen men…or a thousand.
“How do these work?” Martin asked.
“Let’s test ’em.”
Holy shit, be careful!
“It doesn’t look very lethal,” Trevor commented.
Martin held one of the black disks away from his body, pointing its three short barrels in the direction of some trees. He pressed the two triggers, top and bottom. There was a brief snarl, and three of the trees literally flew apart, a foot-wide chunk of their trunks turned instantly to sawdust.
“What is this thing?”
The U.S. military has the same thing. Bigger, vehicle mounted.
“It’s a seraph weapon,” Trevor said, producing a dark blue box with seraph hieroglyphics on it. “Here’s some ammo.”
“Wylie and Nick would love this.”
“You like them. Their macho and their guns and all.”
“They’re winners, Dad. This whole universe—it works better than ours, it’s more dynamic.”
“It’s been at war with itself for a hundred years.”
“And we live in a world of kingdoms and empires where nobody’s really free.”
“We’re free.”
“We are and the French are and the English are, at least at home. But look at the rest of it, Dad, it’s a vast system of slavery—orderly, easy to live in, but—”
The Hummer roared to life. Al watched, no longer trying to stop them. He knew that he couldn’t. The dead did not communicate with the living. Just didn’t.
So when you finally understand and you can tell them everything they need to know, this happens.
They closed the doors and drove the Hummer down toward the bank of the Saunders—here, flowing gently. There were places where you could jump across it, even, but certainly not into another universe.
They needed to know about the seraph headquarters, deep underground and just a few miles from here, had to be told what he had remembered about being in there.
If they could enter it, they could free millions of trapped souls, they could wreck the power systems, maybe even stop the lenses from functioning. They could cause core damage to Abaddon’s plans, maybe kill Mazle and Samson, even.
He raced down to the Hummer, shot into it right through one of the windows. “Hear me! HEAR ME!”
“There’s the gateway,” Martin told Trevor.
“Is it big enough for this thing?”
“They got it through.”
Maybe this was good, maybe the gateway was too small, maybe the Hummer wouldn’t fit and they wouldn’t kill themselves, the damn fools.
“Do we just aim at it or what? I’m not sure I know how to go about this.”
“I’m not sure, either, Dad.”
Don’t try, please.
“We have to try.”
Please.
As Martin backed the Hummer up, Al did everything he could think of, attempting to project his thoughts into Martin’s mind, actually going inside his body where his organs were sloshing and his blood was surging. He went directly into the brain, but even that didn’t help. He could perceive the gray matter like a pulsating, sparking fog all around him, but he couldn’t do anything to affect thought from in here, either.
The Hummer went roaring toward the gateway. Al saw the diamond-shaped crystalline object much more clearly than he’d been able to in life, and saw it expand smoothly, almost obediently, to accommodate the Hummer. So it was going to go through, they were going to be in it, and they were going to be drowned.
He saw black water, roiling, churning, and in it what looked like people, swimming hard. Then the Hummer hit with a huge splash, and the gateway closed and was gone.
He was moving fast, and sailed right across the stream and into the woods beyond. But he was still in this universe.
He rushed back across the river, looked for the gateway, coul
d not find it. But he didn’t belong here, this wasn’t right.
He rushed up and down the river bank, trying to find a flicker of the gateway.
Even when he’d seen the president die and known—known—that Samson had somehow done it, he had not acted. Instead, he’d gone to Cheyenne Mountain to take a new job, because he’d wanted the promotion.
What had he been thinking? How could he have so blinded himself?
In this state, he was finding that he was becoming naked to himself, seeing past the self-deception that had defined his life.
He was seeing how loveless, how empty it had been. A useless, silly journey, his wife dead early and no further attempt to find love, and love all that mattered.
In this state, he was revealed to himself, and he saw clearly that his willful blindness had led to a great catastrophe, and there was no way for him to justify himself.
He found himself back a very long time ago, sitting on the side porch at home on a night in July, with music drifting across the evening air. He saw a girl he had known then, a girl called Nellie, who had been full of love for him.
Had he let himself accept her, had he chosen the humble life that being with her offered, he would be soaring now, flying above all these cares instead of sinking into this pit of regret.
He wasn’t just sinking into despair, either, he was becoming involved with the actual ground. He was sinking into the earth itself. Above him, he could sense realms past imagining, where things like the walls between universes had no meaning and time itself was only a memory.
He was falling, but he wanted to rise.
He had to rise, it was heaven, he was seeing heaven and he had to rise!
Then he thought of the souls Samson had trapped. They belonged there, they were part of heaven, but they had literally been stolen from God to be bought and sold, their memories and emotions stripped from them like ripe fruit and consumed into the darkness of demon hearts.
It was the greatest of all evils, to kidnap the good into hell, but that’s what they were doing—or rather, trying.
He would fight. He would do battle with Samson.
But he was already lower, sinking into the grass, and below him he could see black halls and hear desolate cries.
He strove, he struggled, he fought. Above him, love and forgiveness shimmered, above him freedom beckoned. He tasted the greatest agony there is, that of being unable to rise to heaven.
But then, he thought, perhaps he could save himself. There was something he could do, perhaps. One thing. Wouldn’t work, probably. But he could try.
TWENTY-ONE
DECEMBER 21, DAWN THE DEPTHS
AS SOON AS MARTIN AND Trevor had left, Wylie had found himself able to write again. He and Brooke read over what he had just completed.
“Did they drown?” she asked.
“God forbid. The key thing here is that Al North knows something that can help them but his soul is here, still on this side, so if he thinks about it clearly enough, I’m going to pick up on it, I think.”
She sat reading the screen, scrolling, then reading more. “Is he…what’s happening to him? What’s he sinking into?”
“My best guess is the core of the planet. Maybe the way you live makes your soul weigh more or less. If you weigh too much—have too little love and too much greed, essentially—you sink. And then I guess you just stay there, trapped. Cooking, given that the core is hot.”
“But the universe has an end. What then?”
“I think the evil are forgotten.”
“But we need him. We need him now!”
Outside, dawn was breaking. The last phoebes were calling, the last tanagers chirping. Winter, such as it was, would drive them south any day now. They were very late to leave this year. But there was not much winter now, so they would return by February.
She came closer to him. He closed the laptop.
“Nick?” she called softly.
No answer.
“Kelsey?”
Silence.
But then she moved away. “I can feel him. He’s not going down. He’s here.”
“The world is full of watchers. We’re all on stage all the time.”
“I want privacy.”
These past days had isolated them from each other. But he had learned something from what he was seeing of Al North’s miserable afterlife. Love is the great treasure, it is what we come here to feel, and every bit of it that can be taken must be taken, because it isn’t like the other acts of life. Most everything is forgotten in death. The names, the facts, the achievements, the failures, all are left behind. But love is not left behind. Jacob’s Ladder has another name in heaven. It is Love.
She folded her arms, their signal that it wasn’t the right moment. “I feel too exposed,” she said.
“We are but players,” he said.
“I can’t do it onstage! Anyway, I’m—oh, my mind is blown. Martin and Trevor, my dear God, what’s happening to them now?”
He took her in his arms. She lay against him, and it was good for a time, in the quiet.
Soon, though, he felt something other than the beat of her heart. He raised his head. “What is that?”
“Trembling. I think, uh…the fridge?”
But it got stronger. Things began to rattle.
“Dad!”
“All right, everybody stay calm,” he shouted.
In her room, Kelsey began crying.
“Hold on, Honey!”
He wasn’t going anywhere, the house was now shaking and shuddering so hard that he couldn’t take a step. There was a tremendous crash from downstairs. He thought that the chandelier in the dining room must have collapsed, or the gun cabinet gone over in the family room. “Try to get out,” he shouted. Behind him, Brooke vomited. He grabbed her and forced one foot in front of the other, dragging her toward the bedroom door and the stairs.
Nick appeared—incredibly, with Kelsey in his arms. The sight of them galvanized Brooke, who took her little girl, and they went lurching down the back stairs. The family room was in chaos. It had indeed been the guns.
Now windows began shattering, their glass exploding into the house. Nick got the back door open, and they struggled out onto the deck, which was soaked because the pool had heaved most of its water out and the rest was splashing crazily. The woods presented a chilling spectacle, with all the limbs swaying, and a continuous thunder of cracking trunks and the sighing rumble of falling trees.
They got to the middle of the backyard, well away from the house, well away from the woods. The quake had been going now for at least two minutes, maybe three, but it felt like years, it felt like forever. There was another crash from inside the house, and the lights in Nick’s room flickered. Wylie put his arm across his son’s shoulders. His bunk bed had just collapsed.
Just one sound, then—choking, astonished sobs. Brooke. Staring at her house in horrified amazement.
The quake had ended.
“This is Kansas,” she said, her voice an awed whisper.
“Bearish had a heart attack,” Kelsey announced. Then, her voice careful, “I’m quite concerned about him.”
Wylie was looking back into the woods, where he was seeing flickering. “I think we have a fire going back in there,” he said.
“Call the fire department,” Brooke responded as she headed toward the house.
He watched his family go in, heard Brooke scream her rage when she saw the mess, heard Kelsey start to cry, then Nick’s calmer voice giving instructions.
The flickering was along the draw that drifted south down from the ridge they were on. For their view, they had paid a price, because if there was ever a fire in that draw, it would be here in minutes. Knowing this, he had prepared himself with a portable water tank, which he kept in the garage. He’d tested it and it worked well, but it was not huge, so the key was to reach the fire early.
The tank was behind his car, wedged against the wall. Worse, the garage door was jammed. Fine, he
was ready for that, too. He strode across the garage and got his axe, which was lying in a heap of other tools. When he’d bought this, he’d imagined that he would take out a few trees himself, thin his woods by the sweat of his brow.
Not.
He hefted it and smashed it into one of the doors. The mechanism shook, and Nick appeared. “What’re you doing?”
“I gotta get down to that fire.”
“Here—” He reached up and pulled a lever Wylie hadn’t even known was there. Then he lifted the door. The mechanism had been locked up because the power was out.
Nick began pulling the fire pump out.
“Look, you stay with the girls. I’ll go down.”
“Dad—”
“Nick, please. You have to. They need one of us.”
“What just happened, Dad? We don’t have earthquakes here.”
“I know it. Whatever it was, it’s got to do with that fire down there.”
Nick went in the house, reappeared immediately with the magnum. “Take this, Dad. I’ve got everything loaded up and we’re gonna be in the family room.”
Wylie took the magnum, stuffed it in his belt, and headed out to fight the fire. He loped down the rough little draw, the pumper bouncing along behind him on its two bicycle wheels. As he got closer, the glow became more distinct. Would fifty gallons of water be enough? And in any case, what was burning? The electrics came up the road on the other side of the ridge.
He pushed his way along a jumbled path, slowing down as he got closer to the glow. When he broke through into the clearing, he didn’t even bother to unhook the hose, let alone pump up the tank.
For a good half minute, he had to struggle to make sense of what he was seeing. It looked like a doorway into a little room. He walked closer, his feet crunching in the dry autumn grass.
It was a little room, he could see it clearly. But what the hell was it doing out here? It was like an opening into a tiny cottage, and he thought maybe he knew where the stories of the witch house in the forest came from.
It had come with the earthquake, this strange opening. Perhaps because of the quake. Or maybe its coming had caused the quake.
It was about six feet high and three wide. From inside, there glowed hard light that came from a single bulb hanging down from the room’s ceiling. He went closer yet. He was now standing directly before the room. Another step, and he would be inside. On the right, he saw a rough table with a bowl on it. The bowl was filled with hot soup, he could see it steaming. To his left was a narrow bed covered by a gray, damp looking sheet. On the opposite wall there was a window, which was blocked by a thin drape. Beyond it, he detected movement, but could see no detail through the frayed cloth.