material falling from the sky, stones, bricks, bits of furniture, and red-hot scraps of what he supposed must be a meteor that had struck close by. To the west, violet light swam in blackness. The supernova was setting. In the east, there was blood on the horizon. But the northern sky was different. The northern sky was glowing, then going dark again, then glowing more brightly.
“David, it’s damaged!”
Caroline’s eyes were fierce with panic, which surprised David. In these past few moments, he had stopped struggling. Too much was wrong, and his heart was telling him that they must fail.
“It’s clear,” Caroline cried. “Oh, my God, look at it!”
As the crowd drew closer, people coming tentatively up through the grounds, families, pets, children, the portal not only became clear again, the rip made by the bullet simply faded into the image itself.
But then something else happened, that made David’s mind go blank with amazement, as the portal also began to get larger, as if curtains were spreading or clouds parting.
Caroline no longer held it, but only stood beside it. The portal had taken on an existence of its own, spreading wider and wider until it was ten feet wide, then fifty feet, then filling the whole grounds.
Tears streamed down her face, which was transfixed with joy.
David grabbed her shoulders and looked into her blazing, triumphant eyes.
As the portal grew, it looked like a gate into heaven, leading away from the roaring, dust-choked catastrophe that surrounded them.
Like ghosts, people came out of the dust clouds, moving tentatively toward the crystal predawn that spread before them.
But they did not enter it. Instead they began throwing themselves to their knees, pleading.
“They don’t understand,” Caroline said. “David, help them.”
He tried to raise his voice, but the dust that choked his throat made that impossible. Finally, he took a man by the shoulders and guided him toward the portal, but he shrank back.
“Don’t be afraid,” David said. He did not think any of them would be here if they bore the mark. By now most of those—the ones who were not hiding in bunkers—must surely have come to their ends. But what if he pushed this man and he burned, then what?
Before he could decide how to proceed, the light from the north came soaring above the horizon, an immense, flaming mass, the largest thing that any creature for the last half a billion years had seen in the sky of earth.
David called to the class, “Help them,” he shouted. “We have to help them!”
As a glare brighter by far than the sun flooded down from the object now speeding overhead, David tried to speak in the man’s ear, but he pulled away and ran. David knew that he must look mad, covered as he was by dust.
Still, there was no choice now, no time to waste, so he ran to a cowering family, the children so panicked that they were beyond control, the mother screaming, the father trying to shield them from the thing passing overhead. He picked up a girl of perhaps ten.
“Come on,” he said, “come with me.”
“What’s that thing?” the father shouted.
What did he mean, the thing in the sky or the portal? No time to find out. David grabbed him by the collar. “Come on, follow me!”
As he went toward the portal with the screaming girl trying to pull away from him, he felt once again heat from above, but also saw that the light was getting less bright. The gigantic meteor was not going to strike here, it was going farther south. But he couldn’t think about that now. He had reached the portal where Caroline stood with her arms outspread, calling to the crowd, telling them they could go through, in a voice that was lost in the roar of voices and the wind that had followed the meteor, and was now shaking the few trees left standing, and drawing dust up like a massive cloud of roiling smoke from the ruins of the mansion.
And now, as suddenly as it had come, the great light was gone, disappearing beneath the southern horizon, which glowed briefly with white light, and then was once again dark.
Mike said, “It hit in the ocean.”
“I know it.” And they both also knew exactly what, therefore, would be coming. The elevation here was six hundred feet, which would not be nearly enough.
“What’s in there?” the father asked him.
“A new world,” David said, and did the only thing left for him to do, which was that he thrust the screaming, writhing little girl through the portal.
“Jesus God,” the father cried, and the mother and younger brother both screamed in terror as they saw the girl inside the portal. She turned and put her hands to her head as if she was going to pull her hair out, and her face twisted into a scream that they could see but not hear. She came to the portal and threw herself against it, pressing herself and clawing at it, her face grotesque. From this side, she looked as if she was pressing herself against glass, and David understood for the first time that there was no return, and he remembered what had happened to Katrina’s arm when she had tried to pull it out.
“Do not stop, do NOT try to come back,” he shouted to the people crowding toward the glory of it, a sparkling dawn, enormous across the whole expanse of the lawn, concealing behind it the ruins of the house.
He took the father by the hand and said to him, “You need to help your daughter,” and the father took his wife’s arm and she held her son, and the three of them stepped through. A big old springer spaniel with gray dewlaps barked twice after they had gone, and jumped through behind them.
So far, none of these people showed the slightest sign of the mark, but God help any that did, should they try to go through.
Dawn was gold and clear in the east of the portal, and the family, now hand in hand, walked a short distance. The father bent down to feel the grass beneath their feet, then turned and spread his arms wide.
Along the southern horizon in this world, though, there had appeared a shimmering line, and David thought he knew what it was, and Mike certainly knew. “We just got a few minutes,” he said.
Inside the portal, David saw other people appearing, coming from other directions, and realized for the first time that this place was indeed not the only one where the portal was present. Just as they had been promised that it would in the class, it had appeared all over the world.
“Your father was right,” he told Caroline. “It’s holographic.”
David thought, at this point, that he understood the mechanics of judgment. Over the many lifetimes that come and go during a great earthly cycle, we are born and born again, making choices as we go along, each time locked in physical bodies that remember little of the soul’s past and its aims, where we enact lives that either add to the weight of the soul or reduce it. Evil makes it heavy, good makes it light, and the vast number of people die, each life, a little lighter than before.
Then, as the cycle’s end approaches, the chance to be reborn anew ceases. The changes become permanent and most people are harvested to higher life. Some, who have ruined themselves, sink away, and a few remain to take the wisdom of the last cycle forward into the next.
“We got maybe ten minutes, man!” Mike said.
So David believed he understood these sacred mechanics, which was lovely, but this was no time to stand watching the spectacle and indulging his inner professor.
He raised his voice. “Get moving, everybody! Everybody! NOW! NOW!”
People stirred but were still unwilling.
“They’re scared,” Caroline said. “They still don’t understand.”
“There’s no time left!” He knew that this scene was being repeated all over the world, and many would fall by the wayside, and also that this was intended, that it fit the gigantic plan of life, and for just an instant he sensed the presence of the mind that had conceived the universe… and felt as if he was in the presence of a child.
Caroline stepped to the center of the portal. “We can go through,” she shouted. “Look, we can all do this!” But then she was absorbed in the milling, panicky crowd.
“Caroline!” He waded after her.
Ahead, he saw her hair, then he saw a tall, ghostly figure come to her, and she was lifted by her hair, her face distended with pain, her eyes bulging.
Against her throat, Mack held a jagged blade that had been broken off an electric hedge clipper.
