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.
It seemed very sad, the little room. Somebody’s little hutch. But…where was it, exactly?
Experimentally, he pushed his hand in the doorway. There was a faint pop, nothing more. Immediately, though, his hand felt warm. It felt damp. Slowly, he moved it back and forth, and observed what was without question one of the most bizarre things he had ever seen. His hand moved more slowly than his wrist, meaning that, when his moving arm reached the center of the doorway, his hand was a good two feet behind it. There was no pain and there was no sense of detachment, but the hand simply did not appear to keep up with the arm.
He snatched his hand back.
Was he, perhaps, looking into a room in Abaddon?
If so, then this might be a major opportunity. There were controls in Abaddon that kept the fourteen huge lenses that were the main gateways open into the other human world. Tonight, the seraph would pour through
