Heaven and Hell (48 page)

Johann nodded. “Very well, then. Let us keep talking to a minimum during this exercise. David, I know that you become easily excited; however, I must ask you to refrain from making any unnecessary comments until we have concluded our work here. Do you understand?”

“Yes, professor,” confirmed David, bowing his head slightly.

“Then, we shall begin,” said Johann, opening the book.

The shelves of books dissolved around them, replaced with the images of Serena’s past. Johann paced through Serena’s early life rather quickly. He paused only briefly to observe the many crises that transpired between Serena and her mother. These were contributing elements of his research, but not the primary topic. He could always come back to them if conditions dictated.

Chris watched without comment as the years sped by. He could see his two companions standing in the midst of the flowing images, one to his left, and the other to his right. They looked somehow less real than the vision itself. He tried not to show his emotions as he witnessed Serena’s death once more. He glanced toward David in time to see him cringe at the moment of the crash.

Johann seemed particularly interested by the circumstances of Serena’s trial, yet he said nothing to Chris or David. He moved on to Serena’s experience with the angel Aaron, and her fellow lost soul, Benny, then on to her audience with the prince of darkness himself and her journey through Hell.

Chris turned to David as they watched Serena walk amid the black altars, amid the myriad of helpless men and women being horribly desecrated by the ravenous birds of prey. David’s expression was one of wide-eyed terror, yet he couldn’t seem to turn away from it. Chris was very much afraid that he was beginning to lose it.

“It’s horrible,” whispered David, trying to stifle his emotions. “This can’t be real, it’s a nightmare.”

Chris leaned toward David, placing his hand on the youth’s shoulder. “Do you want out? We can stop and then go on without you.”

“No,” he replied. “I’m cool. I’ll be OK.”

Chris wasn’t certain that David could cope with what was to come. He was from an age of televised violence, yet he had turned out to be more sensitive to this sort of thing than Chris had figured. He’d keep a close eye on him.

Johann too turned occasionally toward the youth, though he said nothing. Johann did his best to view the horrors before him with a dispassionate eye. His fears about David’s involvement had been confirmed. He really should have left the youth behind; he was not emotionally up to the rigors of this expedition.

Eventually Serena plummeted from the cliff and into the heaving fiery sea. From there, Johann mercifully initiated a fast forward. What must have been months passed in far less than a minute. Then Serena was climbing up the cliff, the waves of the fiery sea crashing ever farther below. Johann stepped forward, watched her every move carefully. He followed her progress to the ledge and then, as the terrible sulfurous storm bore down upon her, into the cave.

“Way to go, Serena,” David whispered, totally caught up in the drama.

They were in unknown territory now. Chris watched cautiously as Serena curled up in the darkness to watch the storm beyond the cave. He could barely discern her or her surroundings, yet there seemed to be no immediate dangers. She was safe, for the moment. He dreaded to think of her becoming some sort of primitive cave dweller, yet it was infinitely preferable to the alternative.

Johann paged forward, accelerating the march of time. There was a flash of light and Serena was pulled to her feet by a large demon with feathery wings. The suddenness of the attack startled all of them. Here it was; the end of Serena’s short-lived peace. Johann had been right; one could not long evade the devil within his own domain. Yet none of the observers could have predicted the outcome of the brief altercation between this fallen angel and the brave Serena. Though cast across the cavern room like a toy and in great pain, Serena courageously defied her assailant, questioning his motives, and somewhere along the line, hit a cord. The tension within the cave eased, and soon she was actually negotiating with the titan.

“Abaddon!” David said. He could keep his silence no longer, and looked to his mentor, realizing that he had just broken one of the ground rules. “Do you realize who this guy is?”

“Quiet, please!” scolded Johann, drawing closer to the two negotiating parties in the vision.

David still seemed agitated; nonetheless, he held his peace.

All that Chris could do was to pray, pray that his beloved Serena might be able to work her charm on this being; that seemed so much a walking contradiction. How might one negotiate with a demon? He figured that he was getting his first lesson.

They watched the story unfold for hours, from the confrontation in Abaddon’s cavern, to the precipice overlooking the flaming sea, to the small cell in which the fallen angel had imprisoned Serena. Then they witnessed the making of a covenant between the two unlikely partners. By this time, Chris was on top of the world. Tears of joy flowed from his eyes; and he was not alone; the experience had touched his young compatriot as well.

“Way to go,” whispered Chris, words that brought a broad smile to David’s face.

She was safe! Serena had found a safe harbor in the most tumultuous of all storms. Chris watched in wonder as his wife tended the subterranean garden and explored Abaddon’s small domain. She had found some measure of peace at last.

Johann turned to Chris as the vision vanished, giving way to the Hall of Records once more. Johann’s expression was one of total disbelief. “That is where your wife has been these past forty-three days, in the realm of Abaddon. That is where she is now. I have scanned the width and breadth of Hell in my expeditions within this hall; but I never dreamed that there were such beings as Abaddon in satan’s realm.”

“He had to be somewhere,” David said.

Johann shook his head. “David, what do you mean?”

“Well don’t you see? He
has
to be the Abaddon, the one mentioned in the Book of Revelation. John talks about a dark angel, the destroyer, who brings great destruction into the beast’s camp in the last of the last days. This is the guy, the destroyer, the bringer of the first curse. It is his destiny to rain on the beast’s parade. He leaves the saints of God in peace, leaves nature untouched, but torments the followers of the beast.”

“I don’t like to admit it,” Johann said, “but I’m not that familiar with this element of John’s Revelation.”

David was eager to enlighten his companions. “Well, he is only mentioned in the Bible once by name, and then only in a couple of verses. He’s one of those obscure characters that most people just dismiss. Some say Abaddon is just another name for satan, but I never thought so. It doesn’t fit at all. When I read Revelation, I remember wondering who he might be.

“He’s kind of like the Lone Ranger of angels, you know? He’s a dark knight, a loose cannon. He leads a hoard of…well, something or others, that plague the followers of the beast. This hoard makes them long for death but doesn’t kill them. Look, you’ve seen his love for nature, how he saved the ecosystem that once existed in Hell. In the Book of Revelation it says that he does no harm to nature or the saints. He’s one of the good guys, sort of. Now we know who he is, don’t we? We’ve unlocked a small piece of the mystery. This is just so cool!”

“You’re making an assumption that he is that same Abaddon,” Johann said. “I for one am not that certain.”

“But, who else could he be? It all fits,” insisted David.

Chris nodded. “Yes, it makes sense to me. So, where do we go from here?”

“Who said that there was anywhere to go from here,” objected Johann. “By a miracle, you now know that your wife is safe, at least for a season; surely this is more than you had dared hope for.”

“We make contact,” announced David, his voice full of youthful confidence. He turned to Chris, who was more than willing to hear what he had to say. “We contact this angel who took your wife into outer darkness…this Aaron. He made a promise to Serena, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” replied Chris with the slightest of a hopeful smile materializing.

“Well, we confront him,” continued David. “We ask him about Serena. Now, no one here is supposed to remember the damned in Hell, right?”

Chris nodded. He could see where David was taking this, and he liked it.

“We’ll blow his mind,” said David, a brief but devious smile sweeping across his face. “Now, he has to be one of a select group of angels that make the trip back and forth between Heaven and outer darkness on a regular basis, and once in a while he is going to have a few free minutes.

“Why couldn’t you write your wife a letter? Aaron could deliver it. It wouldn’t take us too long to figure out where Abaddon’s island is. We could determine the exact location. All we have to do is to pass that information on to Aaron. It’s not like being able to be with her again, but at least it’s something.”

Chris turned to Johann. He was certain that he would object to this reckless plan. He was surprised to see Johann nodding.

“Yes,” he said. “It just might be possible. Angels have a mandate to serve humankind, so long as it doesn’t interfere with their mandates from God. I can see nothing about this plan that might be viewed as an act of disobedience to God. Yes, I will support you in this thing.”

Quite abruptly the smile vanished from Chris’s face. “Yeah, but how do we locate one specific angel out of millions.”

“Oh, that’s not so hard,” assured David, “and we’re already in the right place.”

That one raised Chris’s eyebrows. “You mean to say that there are books here for the angels as well?”

“Of course there are,” assured David.

“There is a section here especially for them,” interjected Johann. “It contains information about every angel who was ever created. Not just the ones here in Heaven, but those who have fallen as well. There are nearly four hundred million volumes, one for each angel. Not so many, when you consider that there are nearly thirty billion volumes for humanity.”

“You mean
all
of them, even satan himself?” asked Chris.

“Even satan himself,” confirmed Johann.

“I suppose you could keep him under surveillance if you had a mind to,” said David.

“I don’t think you would want to do that,” said Johann, just a little annoyed at his young apprentice’s attitude. “He is vile beyond description, David. I don’t know that you could walk away from his book unaffected. You had trouble with what you saw today.”

David nodded.

“When can we begin?” asked Chris.

“Immediately,” assured Johann. “We can proceed to the angel’s section of the hall and locate Aaron’s book. We’ve seen him, we know who he is. That is sufficient information to locate his book. I already know where it is.”

“Same here,” replied Chris, who had suddenly found the information within his own mind as well.

The three walked to the lower level, below street level, where the angel’s section was located. Here, rather than being made of the clearest crystal, the walkways and shelves were composed of the finest white-cultured marble. The books were about the same size as those designed for their human counterparts.

“The ivory-colored books are the records of the angels still in Heaven,” explained Johann. “I think you can deduce the meaning of the black covers on about a third of the books.”

Chris nodded.

It was not long before they stood before one particular shelf. There they found an ivory- colored book with the name of Aaron on the cover. They also noted a blue and a brown band along its upper binding.

“The blue band indicates that Aaron is a messenger,” noted Johann. “The brown band tells us his rank. He is not a high-ranking angel; he is a member of the seventh tier.”

“Seventh tier?” asked Chris.

“Yes,” replied Johann. “There are seven tiers in the community of angels. The highest tier now has only two members; Gabriel and Michael, the archangels. The second tier has forty-eight, the third has 1,152, and so on.”

Johann scanned the pages of the book for about five minutes, concentrating on the last pages of the volume. Strangely, Chris sensed no visual sensation whatsoever. Perhaps it was Johann’s intention to keep the contents of this book to himself. He closed the volume and returned it to its shelf. “We should be able to meet with Aaron tomorrow. I’ve noted a pattern to his travels.”

“Don’t angels have a home?” asked Chris, who suddenly realized how very little he actually knew about these sons of God.

“Yes, they do,” replied Johann, “but their homes are not like ours. Most of them live a sort of communal existence. They’re not so much like you or I. In your era, people might say that they were ‘programmed.’ They were created with all of the knowledge and skills they would ever need. They were created with the desire to perform a specific task, whatever that might be. Their emotions and personalities are subtle, not as complex as ours. They have amazingly few real needs, only the desire to serve. Perhaps that is why lucifer found it so easy to enlist the assistance and establish the undying loyalty of those angels in his charge.”

“So, they’re like robots?”

“No, nothing so two dimensional,” Johann said. “They have emotions and a soul. They can reason for themselves, and as time has passed, they have become so much more than they were at their beginnings. But they would seem to have no pastimes, no hobbies. They live for their work, engines of creation, as God intended. This Aaron that we seek spends some of his time in the Hall of Angels, a magnificent marble structure about two miles on a side and over two hundred feet high, near the heart of Zion. His actual living space is very small, an unfurnished white cubical about seven or eight feet square. Angels sleep on their feet, resting upon their wings. They don’t require much space.”