Beyond (Afterlife book 1) (2 page)

I looked at him skeptically. “How do you
know all this?”

He smiled. He had a nice smile.

“
I have been dead for a
long time.”

“
How long is
that?”

“
Almost a hundred years.
That is in earthly years. Times goes faster here in the Spiritual
Realm so that is more like three hundred years.”

A hundred years? I was stunned. That was an
incredible long time. Around six times as long as I had been
alive.

“
I know it sounds like a lot,
but I am really just very new here compared to others who have been
here for thousands of years.”

“
So why are you going to
the Academy if you already know everything?” I asked
him.

He shook his head, still smiling a little
arrogantly. I didn’t like that much, but I really liked him. I was
very attracted to him in a weird way. Like we knew each other from
somewhere or were spiritually connected. I don’t know what it was;
I just immediately felt comfortable in his presence.

“
I am not a student at the
Academy; I am the cook. I prepare food for the
students.”

He didn’t strike me as a cook. As a matter
of fact he looked like he had never been in a kitchen or done
manual labor of any kind. He was much too aristocratic in his
appearance.

“
You’ve been dead for nearly a
hundred years?” I asked, kind of blown off.

He nodded. “Yes.”

I tried to smile and nod. This was very
weird and hard for me to take in. I still thought about the
opportunity that I might be dreaming. That was the only solution I
could come up with right now.

Mick came closer and put his hand on my
shoulder. He squeezed it and I actually felt it.

“
Don’t worry, Meghan, you will
learn fast enough,” he said. “Everyone has a hard time the first
few days, but just be yourself, and you will be fine.”

Be myself? I thought. How was I supposed to
do that when I didn’t remember who I was or used to be or …
whatever.

If I was anything, I certainly wasn’t
myself right now.

Chapter
2

The boat slowed and finally stopped at a
small harbor with no other boats in sight. I followed the others
and pushed my way out. Now I stood on a dark platform. Strangely, I
felt neither warm nor cold. I couldn’t feel the wind even though I
could tell it was blowing in the treetops. And when I lifted my
hand to feel it, it was as though the wind blew through it while
the tips of my fingers seemed to dissolve, like the wind had
removed them. But as I lowered my hand, it looked the same as
before.

“
New students this way,” a voice
called in the distance. I followed the line of people toward a
lamp. A small man with a big beard held it suspended on a stick
between his hands as he called.

“
I need all new students
to follow me.”

We followed the tiny guy down what seemed
to be a steep, narrow path. While we were walking as humans
normally do, the tiny guy seemed to be floating a few inches above
the ground.

The people around me looked as scared and
confused as I felt on the inside, not knowing where we were, where
we were going, or even where we came from. I felt a strange
emptiness inside, but I guess not knowing your past or even who you
really are will do that to you.

The
darkness on both sides of us gave me
the impression we were going through a forest with big trees. No
one spoke a word. The chubby twins walked right in front of me. The
boy sniffed a few times and then the girl did the exact same thing
a second later.

“
I’ll get you all nice and
settled in at the Academy in just a few minutes,” the man with the
lamp said. “It is just around the corner.”

The path turned and we stopped in awe of
the sight before us.

“
Ooohhhh,” a young girl
next to me said.

“
Cool,” said a boy looking to be
a few years older than me.

The path ended at a big marshland with
beautiful flowers and high grass. Perched on a high cliff we saw a
giant castle with more than a hundred high towers reaching to the
sky. It appeared to be made of white marble. White clouds and
beautiful rainbows surrounded the castle. I was quite stunned by
the beauty.

“
Come on,” the small man said as
he found another narrow path through the waist-high grass. I stared
at the castle in front of us and couldn’t help feeling a little
excited. Was this the Academy? Was I going to live there? I didn’t
know much about where I came from or what my old school was like,
but I knew it didn’t look like this.

Everyone was silent during the walk
through the marshland. I stared up at the great castle in front of
me. And so did everyone else. Maybe they were all as surprised and
overwhelmed as I was. Maybe it was just that we didn’t have
anything to talk about since we didn’t remember much.

When we reached the foot of the high
cliff, we saw stairs carved into the wall, all the way up to the
castle. It seemed like an endless walk but I never felt tired. As
we climbed, we heard noise coming from above, like laughing and
chattering from a big crowd of people. I looked up and saw people
floating over our heads, reaching the castle from the air. They
talked and laughed as though they had known each other for years.
We all stopped and stared at the crowd. I recognized a few of them
from the boat. Mick was one of them. He waved at me.

“
Soon you will be floating
in the air like them,” the tiny man said. “One of the advantages of
being a spirit is that you don’t need stairs.”

As we climbed the last stone steps, we
crowded in front of a huge oak door. The bearded man raised the
stick he used to carry the lamp and knocked at the castle
door.

“
Normally we just go right
through,” he said and smiled, “but since you haven’t quite learned
how to go through doors yet, we do it the old-fashioned
way.”

The door swung open at once as if someone
had been waiting behind it.

A bright light shone in front of us, as
bright as the sun. It came from a fair and incredibly beautiful
woman with long blond braids and crystal-blue eyes. Her height was
much taller than a normal earthly woman. She wore a long white
dress and floated like many other people we had seen. She looked at
us with affection in her eyes. I remember feeling so exceedingly
loved at that moment.

“
New ones, my lady,” the
tiny man said.

“
I will take them from here,”
she said with a gentle, almost singing voice. She was alluring. I
felt so close to her. I wanted to be close to her.

She pulled the door wide open and we
entered a hall as big as a house with white marble floors and white
marble walls holding burning torches. Magnificent paintings covered
the ceilings like in an old cathedral and the stained glass windows
rose from floor to ceiling.

Never ha
ve I seen anything this
beautiful
, I
thought. But then I remembered that I actually didn’t know if I
had.

“
Come with me,” the woman
in white said with a smile. “I am Rahmiel.”

We followed Rahmiel across the white
marbled floor. As we passed chambers and other hallways I was
certain I heard voices coming from everywhere. Happy voices and
people laughing. And I couldn’t help but feel cheerful inside.
Something about this place made me happy.

Rahmiel
led us into an empty
chamber.

“
Welcome to the Academy of the
Spiritual Realm,” Rahmiel said. A man suddenly streamed through the
marble wall behind her and glided through the room with a great
smile. He had long white hair and a long white beard to match. He
was as big as Rahmiel and wore a white robe. He smiled at
Rahmiel.

“
This is Salathiel. He is
the
headmaster at the Academy. He will fill you in on what you
need to know.”

Salathiel cleared his throat and looked at
us with another big smile. He too had a strange bright light
surrounding him.

“
So these are the new ones.
Well, welcome all of you. I know it is a difficult time for you
right now and there is a lot you don’t understand. But I ask you
please to wait with your questions until later. You will get a lot
of them answered the coming days when you begin your education.
This is a whole new life that is beginning for you; we call it the
Afterlife, and we hope you will enjoy your stay here. It is our job
to train you and educate you so when you leave this Academy you
will know all there is to know about the Afterlife. It is much
different from being a human, as you will soon learn. First of all
we will be sorting you in different groups.”

Salathiel and Rahmiel began to sort us
into our classes. We were quite a mixed group, I now realized.
There were forty-five elderly people, twenty-two adults, a couple
of children around eight or nine, and fifteen kids aged twelve to
eighteen. Rahmiel put all us teens in the same group. I recognized
the twins with the broken glass in their faces. A young Indian boy
wearing a hospital gown, named Abhik, was bald and extremely
skinny. Another girl about my age seemed angry and hostile toward
everything. She looked around with mad green eyes, hissing at
people who came too close to her. Her name, I later learned, was
Portia.

“
Now that everybody has found a
group, it is time to get the gala started.” Salathiel looked
excitedly at the crowd.“Dinner is served in Hornam
Hall.”

Chapter 3

As w
e walked in a line, I felt like a kid
on her first day of school. We went through the marbled hallway
again and further into the castle.

“
Try not to get lost in here,”
Salathiel said while leading us in the right direction. “This
castle has two hundred wings and, as you can see, there are no
staircases leading to the wings. We don’t need them, since we can
fly. To help newcomers like you, we have put up some ladders you
can climb until you learn how to fly. But you have to beware of
these ladders. We have a hundred and ten of them, but we only have
a hundred and two towers. Yes, that means there are eight ladders
that will lead you nowhere. And they are mischievous. One day a
ladder will lead you somewhere but the next time you climb it, it
will lead you straight into a wall. There is no way of telling if a
ladder leads you somewhere or not. There is only trying. However,
if you do get lost just find one of the bells.” Salathiel pointed
at a bell hanging in the air next to the marble wall. “This is a
special kind of bell, not only because it moves around the castle,
but because once you grab it, it will know your motives for doing
so. And if you’re not ringing it because you are in trouble, it
will not call for help but will do something else.”

“
What will it do, then?” asked a
badly bruised adult man who I guessed died in some kind of
fight.

“
That I cannot tell you.
Just never do it. Only ring the bell if you need help, and help
will arrive.”

We entered Hornam Hall through a huge open
wooden doorway. It was magnificent: high ceilings with beautiful
paintings; marble floors and walls; hundreds of round wooden tables
where people were sitting with their gold plates and silver knives
and forks. At the end of the hall, an orchestra of violinists
filled the air with the most enchanting music.

When we entered, the music and chatting
stopped and all the faces turned toward us. Hundreds of eyes looked
at us as we walked inside the hall, as if they were all waiting for
us.

Salathiel pointed at the empty round table
right in the middle of the room, set with an astonishing bouquet of
flowers. Rahmiel came up behind us.

“
This is where we sit,” she
said. “For the first dinner at the Academy, you join us at the
table in the middle.”

Feeling awkward because of all the staring
eyes, I followed the others toward the table in the center of the
hall. There were exactly enough plates and chairs to fit us all,
including Salathiel and Rahmiel. When we stood behind our chairs,
Salathiel clapped his hands.

“
This is a day of celebration as
The Academy of the Spiritual Realm welcomes our newest members,” he
said out loud while motioning in our direction.

Then everybody in the room started
cheering and clapping. The uplifting sound made me feel good about
myself, although a little shy as well.

“
Let’s eat.” He signaled that we
could all sit down.

The food was amazing. A taste of Heaven,
as Salathiel called it while winking at me. And it seemed to appear
out of nowhere. The more I ate, the more emerged on the plate. Not
only was it my favorite dishes, it was also exactly what I wanted
in this exact moment, as if someone knew my innermost cravings. I
looked at the other plates on the table only to realize that no two
plates had the same food.

H
appily, I realized I was still able to
taste the food. That sense hadn’t disappeared when I
died.