“Think of this as Purgatory – I will try to keep to your simple way of categorizing things. There are many places just like this, realms or realities that exist alongside your own, within your own, and a near infinite number which exist in the different pathways of time. This you will see for yourselves, I am sure.
“These worlds exist to house those who had died. To allow them time for contemplation, and to give us time to judge them. Some worlds are filled with those who led a righteous life, one worthy of a happy eternity. Others are fire realms, nothing more than holding pens for the cattle that will be marched below to where out fallen brother leads his hedonistic life.
“Then there are many filled with lost souls; empty, lonely places void of all feeling; ghost worlds filled with those that were forgotten, left behind when it was their time to rise... or fall. These worlds all exist separate from each other. Those who dwell or wait in one know nothing about the others. Although memory of your own world remains, given time it fades. Those in the fire realms seem to remember the longest. They are the ones who grasp onto their human memories as if it could somehow help them find redemption. While those who are righteous are given a mere taste of what awaits them and realize that there was no point to their lives.
“They are merely a short test which will determine your place in eternity. Pass and you will be rewarded, fail and punishment is a certainty, do neither and you will be destined to carry on living your mediocre existence in a world fitting to the task; a place such as this, for instance.
“This community, if you would like to call it that, is long abandoned. The souls simply fell from existence. In these outer worlds the boundaries that keep them sustained are weakened, bending all the time. It is not unheard of for these dimensions to disappear along with everybody in them. This was where we needed to bring you, for it is here that the boundaries are weakest.
“There is a war coming, a fight that has been brewing beneath the surface of all worlds since before time, and it is here that the first tears will appear. Once they start they cannot be stopped, and given time the barriers will break and all worlds will collide. Your earth, your mortal life, the kingdom of God will come crashing down from the heavens while the fiery underbelly of Hell will rise up and Lucifer, our fallen brother, will try once more to take control. This will not happen; it must not. Do you understand me?” Raguel’s eyes seemed to focus on all of them individually, yet simultaneously. It held them captive and allowed them all to see that this angel was far from the stereotype.
The group stood in silence. The words they had just heard were heavy to digest, and their brains had been sluggish before Raguel started, and so it took a while for everything to sink in. When it finally did they all had to fight back the urge to laugh, especially Graham who, despite his age, or possibly as a result of his age, was the most skeptical and cynical of them all. Once the laughter was contained without even so much as a nose snort, they all returned their attentions to Raguel, but instead of continuing with his explanation, he simple stared at them. There was a flash of light and a loud rustle of feathers. The wind created as the angel took flight brought tears to their eyes. Raguel was gone before any of them could register anything, the wind and sound apparently coming after the fact. All five of them had been looking straight at him, or so they would swear in later conversations, but yet none of them saw him leave. Like the greatest magician in the world, he was there one second and vanished like the victim of a David Copperfield illusion the next.
“Forgive Raguel. He does not deal with mortals well. He is a warrior through and through. Maintaining the balance is his purpose, keeping a watchful eye on us is his responsibility. The troubles of our father’s favorite creation are of little and no concern to him,” the angel who had been introduced as Nemamiah said. His words were noticeably more cordial than Raguel’s had been.
“Can you answer our questions?” Becky said, her words forming not a question although it certainly would look like one if written down, but rather a stern statement. It was one that Nemamiah, if not all three of them, seemed to understand with relative ease.
Helen turned and looked at her. She didn’t know who she was, but she knew what she had been, she knew that she had gotten at least one of their group killed in the past, and she didn’t trust her. Becky met her eyes, and if Helen’s were soft and naïve to the ways of the world, Becky’s were hard and cold. Those of someone who has lived through the worst and come out the other side, uncertain which side of the line they had returned on. They find themselves forever perched upon a fence as they wrestle with themselves, with what they have done and what they wish they could have done differently, yet at the same time they take on the world with the subtle, brute force of a Caterpillar running full speed on the building site. Helen held the stare that was returned to her for what felt like an age. She felt her heart race, her mouth begin to dry and her palms to moisten. When it became too much, Helen averted her gaze, dropped her head to study her feet. She could feel Becky’s eyes burning into the top of her bowed head. After making sure that her feet were all in good order, Helen raised her eyes more. Becky had returned her attention to the angels, who they all realized stood like fish out of water. Their appearance seemed more and more bizarre with each passing second.
Out of the corner of her eye, Becky glanced over at Helen but said nothing. She had changed, and while buried deep down inside her was a small voice that spoke from the corners of dark streets in the early hours of the morning, a taunting, goading voice that told her to fight, to grab that beautiful blonde by the hair and throw her face first into the first wall or tree she saw but she silenced it before even realizing that the thought had truly occurred. After all, that person was the fake. Who she was trying to become was the same person she had been before that dark figure in her mind had taken control. She forgave them their thoughts and perception of her; she didn’t even like whom it was they believed her to be, and she promised herself that she would give everyone the chance to see who she really was.
God, it all feels like so long ago, she thought, already finding it harder to remember her old life, both the highs and lows.
“Raguel, he’s an archangel, isn’t he?” Marcus said with a reassuring confidence.
He wasn’t a big religious fan, and certainly didn’t claim to be able to regurgitate his favorite psalms or quotations when the right situation arose, but he knew enough to make his statement one based in knowledge rather than pure speculation.
“Yes, he was sent out of Heaven to oversee your...collection.” The word came after a slight pause and sounded wrong, but what better word was there for what happened to them other than those offered by a thesaurus? “But now is not the time for that discussion; we have business at hand and it is time for you to hear it to the end.” This time is was Nakir who spoke. Now that Raguel had gone, the group had expected the others to become more relaxed, but they remained in their rigid positions, standing to attention the whole time. When one spoke they did so by stepping forward, raising their eyes from the floor and looking at the group as a whole, rather than from one to the other in turn. Now that he finally spoke and had their attention, they all noticed – apart from Sammy, of course – that Nakir’s eyes were jet black. In fact, they thought there was a good chance he had no eyes at all, and all that they saw was a heavenly void, filled with flawless rounds of onyx or possibly, given his angelic persuasions, black sapphires or even diamonds. For they did seem to sparkle with a little bit of what Marcus liked to call the ‘Ali gleam’.
Nemamiah stepped forward once again. He shifted himself as if uncomfortable; his body seemed bloated and stiff, overstuffed, a balloon blown up to the point of bursting, the lettering on it claiming whichever celebration was right for the occasion stretched not to the point of complete nonsensicality but distorted enough for it to be noticeable only by those who looked close enough. When he spoke, they all felt compelled to listen.
Helen stood beside Marcus, her grip on him released, satisfied with the close proximity between the two and the comforting way his shadow seemed to fall over hers. Graham stood behind them; he stood alone, while off to his left stood Becky. Her arm was wrapped around Sammy’s waist; her hand, which had settled on his abdomen, was covered by his own. Their fingers were not interlocked but did more than overlap one another.
Nobody noticed that, the more Nemamiah talked, the more Sammy’s eyes bled.
“Take a look around you. This place was once a bustling halfway house for those that have passed. For those whose deaths had been noble, their lives less so, their true place in eternity not yet fully known. It wasn’t a happy place, nor was it one filled with sorrow. A piece of the grey lands, we call it. Many years ago, too many for you to be able to comprehend – for time, time moves at a faster rate in the between worlds, and faster still in the greater worlds, but then when you live in paradise time has no meaning for you anymore,” Nemamiah added as a side note.
His eyes left the group and seemed to gaze listlessly for just a moment or two, his train of thought not broken, but detoured before being brought back on track.
“Mirantaea is lost, this shell a mere husk of landscape and empty buildings is all that remains now. The barriers here are thinner than any other worlds that I know of, and our presence here is unwise, but it is what is needed for you to understand what has happened here, and what will happen to your world. So we must allow it to begin. You must watch as a world falls out of existence, for it is the only way.”
Doing as they were instructed they all looked around at the world they were in. What they saw was powerful enough to reduce them to tears. The buildings that they thought looked like they belonged in a wild west movie, possibly a Henry Fonda classic, were much older than that: they were little more than mud huts held together by spit and crossed fingers.
The wood used for the support beams were rotted through – scorched and dry. The ground which they had mistaken for sand was dust, a grey dust which had once been earth; it was cracked and open like the sores on a junkie’s arm at the end of his needle fuelled life.
There was an occasional orange glow that brewed beneath the surface. It ran beneath the surface of the entire town like blood, and the more they looked the more they could see the crisscrossing pattern of orange fire veins than ran beneath it all. Far beyond the borders of the town, which was now no longer than a quarter of a mile from start to finish, buried somewhere out in the middle of the desert like barren land that surrounded them, a golden fireball heart beat and struggled to bring life to the world. With each pulse it further inched its way to the surface, where it would cease. The ground pulsed beneath their feet, and a groaning sound like a mosquito that wakes you in the middle of the night began to hum in their ears.
“You wouldn’t believe it...” Becky began to whisper to Sammy, who she could feel stiffen beside her. He could hear the silence that had befallen the group, and felt the awe of what the rest could see.
“...If you told me. No need, I can’t see it, but I know what’s there. I think they want me to see it. I can see them, too, standing over there.” He nodded to the left, right at the point where the angels stood. Becky cast a quick glance towards them. They stood still and stared at her – no, not at her, at Sammy. She turned away as a shudder tickled her flesh. She could have sworn that one of them – she couldn’t remember all of their strange names – smiled at her.
“What do you mean?” Becky asked, confused.
“I can see them, the real them. I don’t know what you see, but I don’t think it’s anything like this,” Sammy said with a quiver in his voice, an undertone of delight; for good reason. What he saw was as close to perfection as any conscious mortal mind could ever hope to experience or be able to describe.
“They look normal, just like regular people, only a little bit, um, stuffed, I guess,” Becky answered. She didn’t need to look at them any more to know they were all focused on the two of them. “What do you see?” she whispered.
“I see them. They are brilliant. They’re light, you know, but not just shapes; I can see everything about them; the one with the black eyes, and the other two. The one on the left is injured; he holds his arm as if it’s in a sling. He’s nice; I can see it in his face. The others are different, vague. I see them, but not as clearly as him.” Sammy’s voice sounded frayed, raw and gruff. He held back the tears, even when Becky squeezed his hand tighter and pulled him in close to her. The arm around his waist rose up to his shoulder, and he whispered, “I always believed, through everything, I believed, but I see them, I see Angels of the Lord standing right before me, and I don’t trust them.”
“It’s okay to doubt, Sammy. I didn’t believe in anything before I died – nothing like this, any case, but by all accounts God made us, and God made them first. Maybe He isn’t perfect; we all have flaws, after all,” Becky whispered, although she was sure that they heard every word.
This idea seemed to perk Sammy up. He stopped shaking, that ever so slight tremor that he quite possibly hadn’t even noticed himself, and he began to walk; he allowed Becky to lead him to the others. They had spread out – only a few paces each – exploring the strange new world that they had just been told was about to end. “Can you help me?” he asked Becky gingerly. The concept of having to rely completely on others was still hard for him to come to terms with, but with Becky it came easy.
“Of course, whenever you need it,” Becky whispered in his ear, enjoying the fluttering sensation that flitted in the pit of her stomach, like nerves before an exam. Although in Becky’s case the most recent memory that had caused her to be nervous was the night of her first ever trick.
“What’s that?” Helen asked, pointing at a cluster of orange veins, which they now saw ran beneath everything.
Before any of the angels could offer their explanations, Graham popped up with a simple one.
“It’s Hell, my dear. Or so they want us to think.” The last sentence was spoken with the tone of a true conspiracy theorist.
“Oh, it’s more than Hell, old man.” Sariel stepped forward to speak. His voice was hoarse, like that of a man with a sixty a day habit. “The Hell you think of, even in your wildest variations thereof, cannot be compared to the kingdom Lucifer has established. Your world would be swallowed whole, absorbed without even upsetting the balance down there, which, given how fragile it is, should be regarded as nothing more than embarrassing.”
Graham said nothing. There was no need for him to speak; the three angels already knew what he would say. He could feel them rooting around in his head, plucking at his thoughts the instant they formed, sometimes before he had even heard them.
Keep your doubts, old man. It doesn’t matter. I’ll send you back down there myself the moment you stop being of any use, a voice said – well, it didn’t speak, but rather came from inside Graham’s head. He didn’t know who it was; possibly a combination of all three of them. Either way, Graham knew a threat when he heard one, and decided it was best to play simple.
... Although...
...He didn’t think it. He was careful not to do that.
“Okay, so it is Hell, I’m not going to disagree either way. I mean, I know what I saw and went through down there,” Becky said. Now it was her turn to hold onto Sammy for support. “What you’re trying to say is the end of the world is coming; Armageddon and all that shit. Only you say it has always been like this and now the walls have gotten a little thin, like an aneurysm waiting to happen, and you have no idea how big it’s gonna be?” She let the words flow, aware that it didn’t exactly make sense, but they were stuck inside her and she needed to get them said. They just happened to come out in a flood.
The angels looked from one to another, as if conferring. Once again it was Nemamiah who spoke. “You think of it in such simple terms. The world you think of as being the center of your universe will not be destroyed, nor will the people in it – not all of them, at least. They will simply be overrun. When the barriers to your world begin to break, beings will emerge. First it will be the lower level sentient beings...like those you encountered. They will overrun your world and fill it with terror, getting ready for the cracks to open wider and allow the Kingdom of the Damned to take control. To answer your question, if that is even what it was, then no, this isn’t new. Cracks appear all the time and beings escape, as do souls – those brave enough to fight through their way through the torture racks and pain thresholds. We do our best to keep it to a minimum, although there are always a few who manage to evade us. It is just that this time...this time something big is brewing, and...” Nemamiah looked across at the other two as he spoke. Once again they seemed to smile at him, a wry smile that none of them noticed, not even Nemamiah, who had returned his stare to the group.
”You don’t know what it is, do you?” Graham piped up, seeming to take quite some degree of pleasure in the statement.
“Lucifer was thrown from Heaven after a great war within our family. He questioned our Father’s decisions. We tried to reason with him, we tried to help him find his faith, but his anger made him powerful, more powerful than many of us realized. So there was a war, civil war. The angels fought amongst themselves, our purity was ruined, and our Utopia was ripped apart like the Garden of Eden had been after the touch of mankind. With our brother Michael leading our army, we banished Lucifer and his followers from Heaven. As punishment, his soul was tainted, meaning he couldn’t find a vessel on earth, and so he fell deeper into the very bowels of the universe itself,” Nemamiah said with the soothing tones of a storyteller. All five of them stood captivated by his words.
‘You mean the like the core of the earth?” Helen asked clumsily.
“No, female, that is not what we mean. We mean the bottom of the universe, the basement of all existence. It is here that he came to rest, and even that was too good for him, the traitor,” Sariel began, but he was cut short
“Sariel, bite your tongue or offer penance,” Nemamiah bellowed. The power of the voice was enough to make the group of mortals jump, and had it been directed at them they were all certain that it would have been too much and turned them into liquefied jelly puddles. Thankfully, however, it was directed at Sariel, who shrank visibly and took several steps backwards. Even Nakir seemed to shrink away. Then, as if nothing had happened, Nemamiah continued talking.
“Lucifer fell. By your own way of calculating the passage of time, he fell for millennia before landing on a desolate piece of rock at the bottom of the universe, the edge of all existence. So fierce was the wrath that God unfurled on him after his defeat. It was there, on a small rock fighting for its survival in the truest possible sense, that Lucifer began to create his realm. Four of his followers survived the descent and impact. Their bodies were broken and disfigured, twisted into hideous beings with a thirst for revenge that consumed them completely.
“Lucifer saw his chance and so fueled their rage with crazy promises and desires. Lucifer spoke to them so as to keep himself whole. His anger was channeled through them, and as time passed they grew stronger. They remained there, balanced on the brink of everything, when more rocks began to pass them by; used up, dead chunks of everything, crushed down into rocks and floating debris islands by the pressures that the end of all existence exerts. There were gathered together and fused to each other, and thus his empire began to grow. The denser it became the more it began to rise. Not ascending, no, the path home was closed to him, but they pulled away from the edge. It was here as they rose, that Lucifer found the portals, and so too he found their weaknesses.” Nemamiah stopped, pausing to let everything sink in. To give them time for a question and answer session. None of them knew what to say; his voice held them captive, while his anger kept them tamed.
Marcus wanted to speak but found himself frozen, his lungs filled with air, but when it came out it brought no sound. It was like he had been hypnotized, yet all of them were aware of what occurred around them. After a while Nemamiah resumed his tale and they all stood; their minds filled by the words, yet hungry for more, as if they had been offered fruit plucked from the tree of knowledge itself.
“Once Lucifer found the portals and learnt how to use them, it was merely a matter of time before he became strong enough to travel through them. Your world is not the only one, as I am sure you now understand.” Nemamiah swept his arm out before showing them once again the barren, oven baked land upon which they stood. “Yet it was man that he was truly seeking, it was man that he blamed most for his fall, and man who, sadly to say, was the easiest to corrupt. He filled your world with hate, murder and deception. Envy and lust became mainstays of your existence and the more you sinned, the more his power grew. Despite it all, he could never take you whole, unlike the spirits and beings that dwell in the outer worlds. He had to wait for your death before he could claim your spirits, a small parting gift from us to him when he fell.” The voice had changed now, or maybe they had become accustomed to it. Maybe all angel stories were told in such mesmerizing tones and you just had to build up a tolerance.
“If he could move around all this time, why hasn’t he broken out already?” Marcus said. He had many a great many questions stored up, but he feared at least half of them would not be answered – however, this question was one that he wanted to get out in the open. He treated it as a test to make sure they weren’t just playing a trick on them. It was a question that he hoped would give him enough information to be able to use it at a later date in a number of different capacities and help them on their way.
“Travelling the portal pathways is not easy; it drains you, and if you get lost along the way the energy of the paths will consume you,” Nakir said to them, but Marcus noticed – he could not speak for the others as he had forgotten that they were there, with the exception of Helen – that neither Nakir nor Sariel dared stepped forward now to speak, nor did they look so bold and brash. Apparently an angelic ticking off had a lasting effect.
“Then what is so different now?” Graham asked, his tone of voice still one of deep cynicism. He sounded quite annoyed, as if they had woken him from a good nap or pulled him away from a good football game to talk at him nonsensically.
“A great many things have changed. Lucifer’s domain has grown, and broken through the portals. He has fused masses together across the pathways, breaking them down and setting the balance of everything off center. Each new piece of land, every extra world he adds to it, causes the balance to topple further,” Sariel answered. His tone was much like that of Graham. One of deep annoyance, and Marcus couldn’t quite work out whether it was a good imitation or if they were genuinely annoyed at being made to talk to humans.
Another tremor shook the ground, this one lasting about thirty seconds, and even the angels seemed to look startled. In the distance, lost somewhere in the reaches of the wastelands, a pillar of orange fire spurted into the sky, glinting in the sun like a tower of jewels. The power of it was felt even in town: they could all hear the foundations of the skeletal buildings creak and groan. Fibers snapped even further as the wave of heat washed over them, pushing a cloud of dead, dusty earth before it like a shield, preserving its heat for as long as possible.
“The underworld is a powerful place, and Lucifer was the most powerful angel in paradise, but even he is not exempt from the effects of the portals. The large beings, like Lucifer and what remains of our other fallen brothers, are easy enough to find and contain, but his army grows at such a rate even we cannot keep track of them all the time. It has always been so – beings escape through the portals and come out in other worlds. Their sole purpose is to recruit, to gather new souls, new bodies for Lucifer to bend to meet his will. ”
“You mean on earth?” Sammy raised his voice. He looked blindly towards the angels.
“To coin a popular phrase, there are other worlds than this. Have you not understood that yet? There are beings, energy forces everywhere that can be taken. The lost souls of mankind are but a small piece of the population. You are merely Lucifer’s own personal fascination, to be honest, in the grand scheme of things, you are but cannon fodder for his soldiers.” As he spoke Nemamiah cast a nervous glance at the floor beneath their feet where thin snail-like traces of a warm orange glow could be seen shining through the crust. “We must be quick,” he added in a tone much more somber than anybody would have liked.
“Why us?” Marcus asked, another one of the questions he felt must be asked.
“The answer is simpler than you realize. You are God’s favorites. He had us, and then he created you, and commissioned us to ensure your safety. Lucifer will do anything to control mankind simply to anger our father.” It was Sariel who spoke, his gravelly voice resonating deeply in the air.
“I mean us,” Marcus said again, only this time he swept his arm out and drew an imaginary circle around the five of them. They had moved closer together again.
“In good time you will know,” Sariel said before he stepped back and turned the floor back to Nemamiah.