you, and if you stay quiet he’ll go back to what he was doing.”
I didn’t want to stay quiet. I wanted to get out of that building, out of that nightmare, away from everything that I was seeing, but Habari’s hold on me was astonishingly firm.
“You are looking at a prosecutor of souls,” my guide told me. “Many would call him a demon. The woman at the end of the bed is what would be called an angel. She is there to defend the man who has just died. That’s him, looking down at the body he has left behind. The dead man’s name is Morton Kim, and he is a good man, a kind man. I think his afterlife will be a happy one.”
The thing with the bug eyes was not looking at us any more, not even as Habari spoke in an ordinary, conversational tone. “Why don’t they hear you?” I asked. “Who are you?”
Habari only shook his head. His right hand, the one that had blazed like the sun just a few moments ago, looked almost ordinary as he held it up now, although it still seemed to glow slightly. “They don’t hear me because at the moment I am a servant of someone more powerful than either of them.”
“You mean, like God?”
He smiled. “We’re all servants of the Highest-even Fishspine there, Hell’s prosecutor. But my sponsor is at least more powerful than either this angel or this demon. Now let’s leave them to their business.”
He led me out of the room and down the corridors again until we found the glowing hole through which we had entered. When we stepped through it, all was as it had been. A few seconds later an orderly rounded the corner, moving like every human I had ever seen before this hour. He glanced at us briefly and without interest, then continued on his way.
Habari didn’t explain anything about what had happened as he drove me back. He didn’t lecture or solicit or proselytize. He didn’t need to. What I had seen was so far beyond anything I’d ever experienced that I was shaking like a man with a fever. He took me home, poured me a glass of wine, then made himself a cup of tea and sat with me until I was feeling a little less overcome. He left me with promises to return the next day and discuss our “adventure” as he called it.
Whoever you are, reading this, you probably already have several ideas to explain what happened to me- hypnosis, drugs, perhaps just ordinary mental illness. I had all these thoughts myself, so after a nearly sleepless night, I was quite angry by the time Habari returned. He seemed to have expected this reaction and took me on another journey, this time to an apartment building in the Ravenswood district.
“It’s sad-there’s been an electrocution,” he said. “Faulty hair dryer.”
The scene was much the same but without the doctors and nurses. The paramedics were strapping the body of a middle-aged woman to a gurney, but when we went through the shining opening her soul was out of the body, watching the ambulance workers and the heartbroken grandchild who had found her, weeping as if her heart was broken. Within moments an advocate angel and a demon prosecutor both appeared, the former a young man with luminous features, the latter another young man without a head, but with a face in the middle of his naked torso. The deceased woman looked at him with fear, but the handsome young man stepped up and spoke to her, calming her.
“Smearhawk,” said Habari, nodding at the headless demon. “As a prosecutor he’s a tough opponent, but I think he’ll be unlucky here.”
And then the judge appeared.
We once bought a toy for one of the children’s birthdays, a device that attached to the hose like a sprinkler and sent showers of water up and down and around as it spun like a merry-go-round. The kids loved it and played with it that whole summer. At just the right angle the sun’s rays would make a wonderful shining rainbow that hung where the water sprayed, staying in one place even though the water itself was rising and falling and spurting out in all directions as the sprinkler device revolved.
The heavenly judge was like one of those, a frozen shower of light, but awesome and frightening, too.
“We should go,” Habari whispered to me. “The Powers aren’t like the lower angels. He might detect us if we remain too long.”
Over the next several days Dr. Habari took me on several more of these astounding journeys outside of the life we know, until even I had to admit that if I was being tricked I could not imagine how he was doing it. Once I conceded this he told me that perhaps now I was ready to hear the truth-the real truth. But he wanted more from me than simply to recruit another believer.
“What is the point, Edward,” he asked me on the day he finally explained it all, “of surrendering yourself to the very same arbitrary rules and bullying use of power you fought against on Earth? You stood up for what you believed even when it was difficult-what your mind and heart told you must be true.”
“But it wasn’t true,” I said. “That’s just the point. I was wrong.”
“Ah, but only as to the nature of the battlefield. The conflict is just as fierce as you perceived.”
I was confused and told him so. What conflict did he mean?
What he meant, he explained to me over the course of a long afternoon and evening, was that there were dissident elements in Heaven itself-it still seems so strange to say that, so old-fashioned! — that felt the fate of man was too arbitrary, that sentences which could never be appealed made no sense for eternal entities like souls, that Heaven itself had become hidebound and dictatorial. Instead of a timeless home for weary souls it had become a place where rules strangled freedom and dogma had overcome the birthright of all humans, which was the right to question, a gift that their Creator had blessed them with. The elements of which Habari spoke, felt that it was time for a change. They were the ones behind Habari’s Magian Society-a very different kind of charity organization than I had suspected!
As he detailed his complaints with the ordering of Heaven I began to look at him with more than a little fear.
“Oh, my lord!” I said. “Are you…a servant of the Devil?” Now that I believed in Heaven I had to believe in Hell, too. Had the leer of the great Enemy of Mankind been hidden behind Habari’s kindly, philosophical mask this whole time?
He laughed. He laughed very hard. “No, no, no!” he finally managed to say. “Not me. The plight of the citizens of Hell is far worse than anything we face in Heaven. No, although there are doubtless more than a few souls trapped there who deserve better, there are far more who have done things so terrible that any ordinary Creator would have destroyed them instantly. God’s mercy, and His plans, are still a mystery beyond any of our complete understanding.” He shook his head. “No, my master and my colleagues and I represent something different. Do you remember some of the articles I sent you? About political philosophy?”
“Certainly,” I said. “About the, what was it called? The Third Way?” But then, as the old expression goes, the penny finally dropped. “Is that what you represent? Some breakaway sect?”
“We do not wish to break away from Heaven so much as we hope to coexist,” he told me. “That is where one of our names comes from-the Magians. The Wise Men brought three gifts, you see, representing three different ways. Because that is what we wish to become, Edward. A middle path. A third way.”
He went on to tell me that he and his colleagues had found (or created-it was not clear) a place beyond the mortal Earth for the souls of the dead, a place that did not belong to either Heaven or Hell, and that they were founding a sort of free state for those who had done good things in life but would not be happy delivered into a rigid, rule-bound afterlife where happiness was imposed. Habari’s rebels wanted free-thinkers, people who would benefit from this alternative third way.
“People like you, Edward,” he told me, patting my hand. “You are a perfect candidate. You will be the first, but you will not be the only one-not for long.”
I asked him if he wasn’t frightened about what God would think of them-of us. For the first time in my life I had to seriously consider the jealous God of the Old Testament, and it terrified me.
“I’ve never seen the Highest,” he said. “And there are others far, far higher in Heaven’s hiearchy than me who say they’ve never seen the Highest either, or received any indication that He, in fact, is ruling Heaven. We’re not resisting God, Edward-we’re resisting heavenly inertia.”
“But what if those are the same thing? Aren’t you afraid?”
“I’ve prayed on this,” Habari told me. “We all have. And one answer keeps coming, although I suspect it is only the answer of my own logic. We’ve made our intentions plain enough, at least to the Highest we all worship in our secret hearts. He has done nothing to stop us. Does that not suggest that He might not care-or might even approve of what we do?
I sat for a moment staring at Walker’s typewritten letter. I felt, as Edward Lynes Walker himself must have
