The Wall was not far distant, a hundred yards or half a mile, he could not tell. But not far. All the woods around him blazed with its preternatural glow. He walked toward it, impelled by the horror behind him, by the burden in his arms, and by the alien machinery now wrapped around his heart. He could not help himself.
Up close, only a few steps away, closer than he’d ever heard of anyone coming to it, the Wall refused to resolve itself into solid substance. Little flickering motes of intense reddish-pink light swirled and crawled over each other, and the humming sound, though no louder than before, passed right through him; his entire body buzzed and vibrated like the sounding board of a guitar. The Wall loomed so high now that when he craned his head, it seemed to fill the universe, and he had the vertiginous sensation of falling into it. The thing in his chest seemed to leap up with joy.
I won’t, he thought wildly. I refuse! But he kept walking. The Wall filled his sight entirely, that terrible, unearthly dazzle. Briefly, he tried to lie to himself, to pretend that he was just going to bring the Preacher to the Wall he had spent his entire life journeying toward without ever reaching, and place his body there before it, like an offering to an angry God, so that He might be moved to pity and forgive His sinning children, especially that one in particular who was named Hanson. But being so close to the Wall seemed to lend the key strength; the buzzing rose up and overwhelmed Hanson’s thoughts in a great wave.
A hole opened in the Wall like a mouth, directly before him. It was big enough for a man to walk into. No, he thought. No!
He walked in.
The Wall closed behind him. He was in a moving bubble that kept pace with him. The walls provided enough light for him to see by and enough air to breathe. But it was warm, much warmer than the air outside had been. Sweat beaded up on his forehead, ran in rivulets from his armpits. It was ungodly hot in here! He kept walking, but more slowly now. His arms ached dreadfully, and his knees were starting to buckle. He cursed his weakness, hefted the Preacher’s body, and forced himself forward.
He kept walking straight ahead, until he was sure he should have passed through by now. How thick was the Wall anyway? How thick could it possibly be? The swarming buzz of microscopic bees made it hard for him to think.
On an impulse, he turned and walked at right angles to his previous path. The bubble tracked him perfectly. So it wasn’t guiding him! He returned, as best he could, to his previous path. But he was definitely lost now, somewhere within the reaches of the Wall, and it was growing hotter. His skull buzzed and stuttered, and his breath came in long, shuddering gasps. It was as hot as the inside of an oven. He was surprised that his hair hadn’t caught fire.
The Preacher’s body grew heavier and heavier. His step faltered, grew slower and slower, as though he were wading through mud. Finally, he stopped, and, groaning, sank to his knees in despair. The buzzing grew louder. He reached out a hand, and where his palm brushed against the glowing substance of the Wall, it suddenly stung like a thousand wasps. He whipped his hand back, and saw that it was all bloody, skin and flesh sliced away where he had brushed it against the Wall. Ignoring the pain, he extended the arm again, gingerly, index finger extended.
As he’d suspected, the second time he didn’t have to reach so far. The bubble was closing about him. There must be something he could do to stop its progress, but with the heat and noise increasing unbearably, he could not think what it was. He could not think. He could only sink down over the Preacher’s corpse, grateful that his ordeal was almost over, as the bubble dwindled around him and its molten substance wrapped itself about his skin in sudden and searing pain.
Hanson screamed.
4
HE AWOKE IN DAYLIGHT, lying on his back in a meadow, shaded by an elm tree bearing vivid orange fruit. A gentle breeze touched him. It carried the mingled scents of sandalwood and wintergreen.
A tall, inhumanly thin man in a charcoal gray tunic stood watching over Hanson. He had a kind face. On seeing Hanson awake, he smiled. “Welcome home,” he said.
Home? Hanson rolled over and levered himself up on an elbow, and then rose to his feet. He looked around and knew for a certainty that he had passed all the way through the Wall.
Heaven was not as he’d imagined it.
No, that was wrong. Hanson had never been able to imagine what Heaven might actually be like. Oh, when he was young, he’d been as free with a crudely ribald speculation as anyone, but as far as what it might be like to actually stand in the City of God—
Whatever it was, it wasn’t this.
He looked across a vast lawn freckled with occasional pairs of silver dots or circles—gently rolling land that stretched as far as the eye could see, and all well-manicured, trimmed, as if someone were mad enough to mow it all. Not that any man could. It would’ve taken a hundred mowers, in constant motion, tireless, insanely devoted to their task… He shook his head. There were—buildings?—here and there, isolated from each other, immaculate and pointless. A cone larger than any single structure Hanson had ever seen, delicately balanced on its point and canted to one side. A red glass sphere caught in arches of congealed lightning. What could only be a baby’s arm magnified a million times, sticking out of the earth, fingers gently moving in a way that was undeniably alive.
It did not look right. Hanson knew there was some other way that Heaven should look, though he lacked the ability to put it into words. More beautiful, somehow. More symmetrical, perhaps. It should be bizarre and wonderful and, yes, strange, certainly strange. But not like this. Never like this. He turned back to the thin man, who was still waiting patiently on him. “Are you… an angel?”
An urbane, undeniably sympathetic, and self-dismissive gesture. “I am a function. You have been in the lands of the Renunciates for so long a time that you can no longer recall your origins. Until you recover your memory, you may call upon my services as your interface and guide.”
“My memory,” Hanson said flatly. He could make sense of none of this.
“Your friend is anxious to see you.”
He cast his mind back, awkwardly groping for meaning. Anyone who could have been counted a friend of his, by however loose a reckoning, was either long dead or left behind in Orange; he had no friends anymore, not unless you counted the Preacher, and he—“My friend is dead.”
“Not any longer.”
The Preacher sat in the grass of a nearby hollow, running a finger around and around the inside of his mouth, admiring his perfect new teeth. He smiled broadly at Hanson. “Quite a set of choppers, eh?” Then, indicating the thin man, “Don’t pay any mind to Cicero. He’s not real.”
“He said he was a function.”
“It means the same thing. I told him to let you sleep, figured you could use it. Me, I’ve been up for hours. How do you feel?”
“Fine,” Hanson said uncomfortably. He slapped his hands together, and then, as he realized what he’d done, raised them up to his face in wonderment: the places on the palm and the tip of the one finger that the Wall had eaten away had been completely, magically healed. And, now that he thought about it, he really did, he felt just fine! A hundred small aches and aggravations were gone, from the sour tooth that had nagged dimly from the back corner of his mouth for as long as he could remember to the thorn scratches and sticker-rashes he’d incurred blundering into the mile-a-minute vines last night—gone, as if they had never been. He rotated his neck and it didn’t make the little crackling noises that he had grown accustomed to. Even the gut-pain of the Crab, by God, even that was gone! Something moved deep within him, a small and hurtful aching sensation so alien to his nature that it took him a second to identify it.