For A Few Souls More (Heaven's Gate Book 3) (6 page)

“Just a short while,” he said, “just until I get the hang of it.”

She nodded. “Alright, but only as long as you promise not to start hurling accusations around. If there’s one thing I was glad to consign to the flames it was that.”

“Agreed.”

2.

F
OR A WHILE
, Veronica continued to show him the secret of the dreaming rooms. After an hour so she even seemed to relish it, the earlier threats fading away as she began to enjoy the fun of making the rooms do as she wished, seeing the magic through new eyes.

Soon, Arno was able to work a little of their magic himself, though to begin with they were rough, fragile illusions.

“This is where I grew up,” he explained to Veronica as he led her through a small field of corn. In the distance there was a cabin; a man, Arno’s father, sweated his way through a pile of firewood. Every few seconds, the air was filled with a grunt and the heavy slap of axe on timber.

“Charming,” she said, plucking at an ear of corn. It crumbled in her hand. “Though you need to think in more detail, I can see through your dreaming.”

Arno nodded, looking towards his father whose face was a blur of pink skin. “He died when I was quite young,” he told her. “I can’t quite recall his face.”

“Then give him one you can remember,” she suggested. “This is your world, you can do what you like with it.”

Arno closed his eyes and tried to pull features together.

Once, a few years ago, and much to his wife’s exasperation, he had taken to sketching. He was never very good at it, always struggling to get the perspective of the world to sit right on the flat dimension of the paper, but he had enjoyed the process of hashing out the lines. There was something magical about filling a blank area with the black of charcoal, pulling shapes out of nowhere and pinning them down on the page. This was no different, except this time the muscles he needed to train were not in his hands; it was no longer about translating what he saw through the tip of a pencil, rather it was about recalling with clarity. He imagined a moustache, and focused on each hair, imagined it dark at the root and fading to light grey at the tip. He looked through that imaginary bush to the skin beneath, pricked with follicles like holes for thread. He thought of the skin of the lips, shiny and creased. He imagined the eyes, light grey, filled with filaments and swirls.

“Much better,” said Veronica, looking at the man who was his newly-imagined father. “You’ll be a master at this in no time.”

At her prompting, he even showed her the moment of his death, or at least how he imagined it. It was difficult to be precise under the circumstances. They sat on a sack of corn, hiding in the shadows and watching the memory of Arno as he finished unloading his cart of supplies, wiping the sweat of heavy lifting from his brow with the handkerchief his wife had embroidered in happier times. The cloth was scarlet, his initials stitched in white. The treacherous Zeke loomed behind him, spade in hand as his wife looked on from behind the crack of the half-open door.

Arno wondered if Zeke was still hot from his exertions in the marriage bed, corrupting its sheets with an intruder’s sweat and seed. He supposed it likely. Perhaps it was the intensity of the lovemaking that had brought the strength of conviction to his shoulders and biceps as he hefted the spade and swung it. There was a faint whisper of displaced air, and then a musical clang, the ringing of a dinner gong or a cheap church bell.

Arno flinched at the sight of it. The face of his imagined shadow contorted in an ugly, unflattering collection of features, puffy and folded. He looked, Arno decided, like a man in the grip of a sneeze so violent it had blown off the back of his head.

“What a way to go,” said Veronica. “Quick and percussive. There’s a lot to be said for a surprise killing.”

“I would have rather avoided it,” Arno admitted.

Zeke the Murderer, spade still in hand, looked around. “Who’s there?” he called, his voice thick with panic.

“Oh,” said Arno, “he heard us.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Veronica, stepping out into the light. “What’s he going to do? Even if he were more than a memory, you can only kill a person once.”

She gave a scream and jumped on Zeke, tugging at his thinning hair. He dropped the bloodied spade, raising his hands to defend himself. They spun around, Zeke’s boots connecting with the still-twitching body of the man he had just brained, sending them tumbling into the dirt and straw that lined the floor.

From the doorway, Arno’s wife entered, coming to the aid of her lover.

Arno, knowing an act of catharsis when presented with one, picked up the discarded spade and brought out its music by swinging it straight at her face. It’s good for the soul, this slapstick of memory, he thought as the clang of metal against teeth rang loud and clear.

“Better?” Veronica asked, bouncing up and down on the now wailing Zeke, a whirl of arms and legs, pummelling at a man who had never quite regained the sense to defend himself after the initial attack.

Arno looked down at his wife, her face now a comical grotesque of flattened nose and bloodied lips. “I’m not sure,” he said, “can it ever be right to take pleasure in hurting someone else?”

“Ah...” Veronica sighed, taking a rest from beating Zeke’s head against the ground, “I can see how you ended up here. What a pure soul you are.”

“I loved her after all,” Arno admitted, “even if that love wasn’t always returned.”

“She encouraged her lover to empty your skull of its contents, Arno, she wasn’t worthy of love.”

“We’re all worthy of love, some of us just aren’t terribly good at receiving it.”

“What a sweet little man you are.” She stood up, wiped her bloodied hands on her dress and took him by the arm. “And an utter wet blanket.”

He sighed. “She certainly thought so,” he admitted. “Say what you like about Zeke, he was never boring.”

“He is now,” she laughed, “though I’ll admit he entertained for a while. Come on, let’s go out and find some sun to push away all this gloom.”

They returned to the garden, having had their fill of dreaming for a while.

For some time, they just sat in silence, Arno pleased that Veronica now appeared happy to be in his company. He didn’t know how many hours they had been in The Junction, the passage of time was slippery here in the afterlife, but the reticence she had shown earlier had completely evaporated.

He looked at his watch. It claimed to be twenty past eight but the second hand was frozen and he knew that it showed the time of his death, that final second when time still mattered. What business did hours and minutes have here in Heaven? You couldn’t break an eternity down on a clock. Or could you? The horizon showed signs of darkening, so even the everafter knew the passage of day and night.

“It does get dark here then?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” she said. “What would paradise be without a cool evening or a midnight full of stars? God knows the beauty of a sunset or a dawn and is happy to share them.”

One thought led to another as the sky continued to darken.

“Where do we sleep?” he asked.

“Wherever we like,” she said. “You can imagine whatever you like in The Junction, dream up a bed or a warm hearth.”

“Is that what you do?”

“No,” she admitted, taking hold of his hand. “I like to sleep beneath the stars.”

They appeared above them, as if summoned, and perhaps they were; after all, if Arno had learned anything about Heaven he had learned it was a place that shifted with the desires of its inhabitants.

She pulled him down next to her and guided his awkward fingers as to the way of her dress. As he stripped her of it, he was pleased to note it no longer bore her bloodied handprints from earlier. If their crimes were so transient that their evidence vanished so quickly, they couldn’t be mortal sins. The thought led him to consider other acts that might once have shamed him and he busied himself with them as the forest glowed around them, the trees filled with starlight.

Two lovers in a garden in Paradise. Naked. Unburdened.

To Hell with serpents.

3.

F
OR THE FIRST
few days, Arno managed to mark the passage of time but eventually he stopped bothering. It hardly mattered.

He and Veronica split their time between the garden and The Junction, sleeping together under the open sky.

For the first couple of nights, Arno found sleep hard. He didn’t feel tiredness so profoundly now, he supposed you had to be alive to really grow tired. But, as Veronica explained, sleep was a pleasure in and of itself. How blissful was it to open one’s eyes as the warmth of the sun heated your cheeks, gazing out onto a fresh day? Why give up on any pleasures now they were your life? Soon, he caught the trick of it, the earth a better mattress than any other his back had known.

It didn’t take him long to realise that Veronica had been as happy to meet him as he her. For all her bravado and insistence that she had been happy on her own, she never left his side now and he recognised a soul retrieved from loneliness.

It was a strange Heaven, he decided, that contained so few of the blessed. Of all the questions that had been on his mind during that first day in the afterlife, that was the only one that clung. Where was everyone?

“It’s a big place,” Veronica said, “bigger than we could ever really conceive of. Is it so strange that we don’t bump into others?”

And perhaps that was the truth of it. If the acreage of Heaven was as vast as God could imagine, a place unbound from the geography of rock and ocean, then how could it ever be filled? Still, in the quiet moments, when he and Veronica weren’t exploring landscapes in The Junction, or exploring each other in the garden, the question rolled around in Arno’s head. It was the one thing that didn’t let him rest.

Then finally, that one question robbing him of his peace, he found a serpent he could ask for an answer. He found Alonzo.

“Good afternoon!” the man called, walking through the trees towards them. “A lovely day as always?”

He was dressed well, his fine blond hair capturing the sunlight and glistening almost as much as the grass or the water of the stream.

“This,” said Veronica to Arno, “is Alonzo.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Arno said, wondering on the etiquette with angels, did you shake one’s hand? Bow?

Alonzo gave him a hug, solving the problem with admirable enthusiasm.

“My dear Arno,” he said, “how lovely to finally meet you. I can’t apologise enough for ignoring you on your arrival. I’ve been hatefully slack on my duties of late. I find myself unreasonably consumed with other projects and allowed the business of meeting and greeting to pass me by.”

“That’s alright,” said Arno. “Veronica has been taking good care of me.”

“Wonderful! That’s what I like to hear. So good when souls meet, a paradise shared is a paradise doubled.”

“I’m surprised we haven’t come across anyone else,” said Arno, circling around the question that plagued him.

“Not that we need anyone else,” added Veronica, perhaps knowing, on some deep level, that the answer to Arno’s question would break the pleasure they had found.

“Not that surprising, sadly,” said Arno. “You find Heaven in hard times, my friend. So few come here. It’s a sad reflection on the state of the human heart that most consider themselves worthy only of Hell. All would be welcome here if only they had the convictions to make the journey as you two did. That’s the ultimate truth, my dear Arno, we get the eternity we wish, and so few wish for—or feel deserving of—this...” He opened his arms crucifixion wide, gesturing around them.

Arno tried to get his head around this. “You’re saying that everyone’s in Hell?”

“Well,” Arno replied, pointing at the two of them, “not everyone, obviously. There are other souls here like you. But it’s a majority, yes.”

“But they would be welcome here?”

“Indeed. Our Father has always believed in second chances, though it’s a concept that has fallen out of favour in the mortal coil.”

“Then why don’t you tell them?”

“It’s not my place,” Alonzo admitted. “I could make the journey to the Dominion of Circles, certainly. It’s simple enough. But there are laws, even here. I can’t simply walk into Hell and hand out tickets. I’m afraid that would be a breach of protocol too far.” He took Arno’s arm. “I’m pleased to see the situation chimes with you though, my friend. It is a sorry state of affairs is it not? You can rest assured that I am, in my own way, attempting to turn the tide.”

“Oh?”

“Indeed. I won’t bore you with the details but I am hard at work on a solution.” He stepped back and, clapping his hands with enthusiasm, opened his arms as if to embrace them. “On the subject of which, you’re clearly in no need of my intrusion. I shall return to my endeavours and leave you to yours.”

He turned and walked back into the trees, leaving Arno to think about what he had said.

4.