more antique than its date only a couple of weeks back and a few days before Edward Walker’s death. I took a quick look around to make certain I was alone on the quiet side street, then started to read.
To Whom It May Concern,
This is not a will, but it is a last testament of sorts. The contents should have no bearing on any of my personal affairs but I doubt the legal profession would agree with me. That is why I haven’t trusted it to my attorneys. If any of my dear friends were still alive I would have given it to one of them. Sadly, that choice is no longer available to me.
Still, it is a risk to write this at all. What I am about to relate will be unbelievable to many, if not most who hear of it. However, I can assure whoever is reading this that there is nothing wrong with my mind and that I have had proofs that have more than satisfied me of everything I set out here.
Here is what I now know, which I have seen proven beyond the possibility of debate. There is life after death. The soul does exist without the body. And although most of the narrow, interfering rules of the world’s organized religions are just as wrong as I always thought they were, when it comes to the basic facts I must admit that they were right and my fellow doubters and I were wrong. There is a Heaven and there is a Hell.
I attended a conference of the Atheist Alliance International in Los Angeles where I gave one of my infrequent but heartfelt lectures on the mischief caused in the world in general and America in particular by the adherents of organized religion, whether Christian, Jew, Islamist, or any number of other flavors of Theism. Afterward I was approached by a small dark-skinned man with gray hair whom I took at first to be African American. After hearing him speak I decided he might actually be African or Afro-Caribbean, since he had what sounded to my ears like a slight British accent. He told me he had enjoyed what I had to say and wished to speak to me about it. Amused and intrigued by his air of importance, I said yes.
Over coffee my new acquaintance began to ask questions, not so much about what I had said to the conference as to my actual beliefs. Did I think that God was impossible or just unlikely? Why did humans keep returning to the belief in something beyond themselves, century after century?
I could not quite understand what he was getting at, although when he finally produced a business card that read “Reverend Doctor Moses Habari” I was pretty sure I understood. I suggested that he was one of those ministers who trolls for converts in seemingly unlikely places, and that although I was not as hostile to spirituality as some of the people here, I was certainly not in attendance because I needed reinforcement of shaky beliefs (or rather non-beliefs). He laughed and said I was only partially wrong, but that what he was looking for was not men and women of weak principles who could be bent by fear into belief but instead those who could hold onto their skepticism and integrity even in the face of frightening revelations.
The word “revelation,” of course, filled me with distrust, as it is one of the many code-phrases for Christian end of the world fantasies, but I did not mind the doctor’s quiet, friendly company, and so we talked amiably about many things other than religion, and at his request I agreed that we would stay in touch.
For a year or so that was the precise limit of our relationship, an occasional letter. He wrote to tell me he was involved with something very important, which he wanted to show me one day, and I told him of how I kept myself busy with work. Molly had died a couple of years earlier and in all honesty I was a bit at loose ends, but I never emphasized this to Dr. Habari. Still, he must have decided that I would be ideal for his project, because although our friendship continued as a casual sort of thing, with a letter passing between us every month or month and a half, he also began to send me articles that I thought were purely political in nature, about the Third Way movement in Europe and other parts of the world, a fairly well-known attempt to find a middle ground between left-wing and right-wing political agendas.
Well, one thing I had to say about the late Edward Walker was that he certainly appeared to be lucid. He was awfully wordy, though, so I skipped lightly over the next couple of pages about Habari’s interests in politics and social organization, so that I could get to what I thought of-rather ironically, as it turned out-as the good stuff.
But the day came when Dr. Habari no longer referred to his grand project in vague, sweeping generalities about “religious freedom” and “finding a new way forward,” and began to talk about it as a very real thing that was now underway, and which he thought would be, as he put it, “ideal for someone like you, my dear Edward.” I had been friends with Habari long enough that I no longer thought he was flacking for converts to his low-key brand of Christianity, and so I agreed to talk to him about it in more depth. “Even better, my dear Edward,” he said, “I shall give you a demonstration.” I had no idea what that meant. I anticipated a trip to a local outreach center or some other charitable endeavor. Even the religious folk who despair of converting me still sometimes hope to get some money out of me. A well-to-do widower makes a likely candidate for charities of all stripes.
Instead Habari came to my house one day in April, two years ago. I remember it because it was a lovely spring day, and the apricot tree by the front walk was covered in green shoots. Habari drove us across town in his battered old car, cautioning me that what I was going to see would be surprising, but that no matter what I saw and how it made me feel he was relying on my discretion afterward.
“Why?” I asked, amused. “Are we going to be breaking the law?”
“Only the laws of physics,” he told me. “And they’re not being broken, really. You’re going to see what’s behind them.”
I was beginning to wonder about my soft-spoken friend-was he taking me to see some weeping Madonna miracle statue? Or something more modern, like a self-proclaimed UFO abductee? But Habari wouldn’t tell me. Eventually we arrived at Stanford Hospital, parked, then made our way in and past the emergency desk. The reverend had one hand tucked in his coat pocket and a look of concentration on his face.
“Now, say nothing and do not move,” he told me as we reached a momentarily empty corridor of the hospital, then waved his free hand in the air in front of us. Nothing happened, which did not surprise me, but the intent way Habari stared at the air, as if something really had happened, made me nervous. Then he withdrew his other hand from his pocket.
At first I thought he was holding some incredibly bright arc light, or even a magnesium flare, but this light did not spark and fountain like a flare, it simply shone with blinding brilliance so that I had to turn away.
“No,” he said. “Be brave, Edward. And see!”
I felt his hand on my shoulder. The light he had held was suddenly gone, but another, lesser light hung in the air before us like a loop of blazing wire. He led me through it-I confess I cried out a little, thinking I would be burned-but there was no heat, and when we stepped through to the other side nothing had changed except perhaps a slight alteration in the quality of the light and an unusual echo to the sounds we made.
Habari asked me not to speak, to save my questions, then he led me down the corridor into a part of the hospital where we began to see other people again-nurses, patients, family members waiting-but every single one of them was completely motionless, as if they had been sealed in amber like prehistoric insects. I could not touch them directly-something like magnetic resistance kept me away-but I could get close enough to see that they were not imprisoned by anything, but rather that time had simply stopped. For them, all of them, but not for us. I was very frightened.
“Oh my God,” I said to Habari. “What are you?”
He smiled. “Your friend, Edward. I promise you that.”
He led me past the motionless staff members and toward the wards. There too, everything had stopped as if a switch had been thrown, the patients and visitors alike all still as statues. As we walked among them I could hardly breathe. Just outside one of the rooms a little Hispanic boy had been running up the corridor, but now hovered in mid air with only the tip of one foot touching the ground.
Then we stepped through into that room, and I was suddenly even more frightened, because people were moving there. Not everyone-a nurse and several family members stood beside the patient’s bed, and they were just as motionless as anyone in the corridors outside, but others nearby were moving and talking among themselves. Even more disturbing was that the person on the bed, a man not much older than myself, although very thin and with many dark, ugly bruises on his skin, also stood beside the bed-looking down on his own body with a look of obvious astonishment!
I let out a gasp of despair and confusion. I was quite overwhelmed.
Then one of the moving figures turned and looked toward us. Not directly, as though we were as plain to see as everyone else, but as if he had heard something, or perhaps seen movement in the corner of his eye. But that eye and its twin were hideous, faceted like those of an insect, and the monster’s face though more or less human was covered in scales like a lizard’s, bright, coppery red and brown scales.
I confess I tried to run. Habari gripped my arm and would not let me go. “Do not fear,” he said. “He can’t see
