Heaven and Hell (2 page)

Another ten minutes and they would be home. They would slip into something more comfortable, and curl up together in front of the fireplace. After all, tomorrow was Saturday; they had the whole night to play.

Chris didn’t see the patch of ice on the curve of the darkened highway until it was too late. When they had passed this way three hours before, only a trickle of water was melting from a roadside snow bank. Now, it formed a deadly sheet of ice.

His eyes grew wide with fear as the small car slipped across the solid yellow line and into the opposing lane of traffic. He battled for control as the tires slid wildly back and forth. If they’d had the road to themselves, it would have been scary enough; but then they saw the headlights of an 18-wheeler that appeared out of nowhere and was bearing toward them. It was the dark essence of a nightmare, a possibility neither of them had ever envisioned. Now they stared at it head-on.

The car hit the guardrail first, then bounded into the path of the oncoming leviathan. The impact ripped through their world, as the sheet metal of their small import bent and twisted like cardboard.

“Oh Chris!” cried Serena, trying her best to brace herself. She was propelled toward the windshield because no seatbelt restrained her.

Chris slammed into the steering wheel and then against the driver’s side door. The car spun; then tumbled over and over again, crashing through the guardrail and into a power pole where it finally came to rest, wrapped about the stout pillar, a steaming mass of twisted metal. For a moment, there was nothing but silence.

With difficulty, Serena picked herself up from the cold, snowy ground. She was still shaking as she rose to her feet. She was disoriented, surprised not to be in pain. She remembered being tossed about in the tumbling car, or did she? The past few minutes were a blur. Perhaps she was in shock, injured beyond the point of pain. She looked at herself and discovered that she had sustained not a single bruise or cut. Even her dress had survived the impact without so much as a rip. Somehow she’d been thrown from the car and landed in the soft snow.

She glanced back at the car and saw that the passenger’s side door was crumpled, but very much closed. The window was closed too. She thought that the door must have flown open during the crash, just long enough for her to have been thrown free. She looked more closely—was that blood on the window? She couldn’t be sure from where she was standing, it was too dark. No, it couldn’t be. She looked at her arms and legs and felt her head once more to verify that she was fully intact. Not a scratch.

“Unbelievable!” she gasped. Had luck been with her or what? Then a wave of horror swept over her like a dark shroud. Maybe it is blood, but not hers. “Chris! Where are you? Oh God, are you all right?”

Serena was filled with dread. What if her love was still within that twisted wreck, perhaps horribly crushed? Suppose he was dead! How could she go on?

“I’m OK,” Chris said.

Serena turned to see Chris rise to unsteady legs on the other side of the car. He seemed dazed, but unharmed. His eyes met Serena’s.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, I am now,” she said.

Chris looked at the mangled car, took a step toward it, then stopped. “Serena, do you smell that? It’s gasoline—it might explode!”

That was a thought she hadn’t considered. It would be indeed ironic to miraculously survive the crash, only to be killed in an explosion. Serena ran as fast as she could through the snow, crossing the guardrail, and meeting Chris along the side of the road, about 50 feet from the car. They embraced.

“Thank you Lord Jesus,” Chris said, wrapping his arms about his shivering wife. “I thought for sure I’d lost you. That old car can be replaced—you can’t. Maybe our next car will have airbags.”

He looked back at the 18-wheeler which had finally managed to stop about a hundred yards down the road. The driver had jumped from his rig and was running toward them. Chris waved his arms in the air. “I bet we scared the begebers out of that poor guy.”

“And don’t forget me,” Serena said, managing a slight chuckle. “You’ll have an interesting story to tell in church this Sunday.” Serena turned toward the car that was twisted around the power pole and shook her head. “People just don’t walk away from these kinds of accidents, but we did.”

“Maybe a guardian angel saved us,” Chris said, taking her hand and walking toward the truck driver. “It’s very possible. With God, all things are possible.”

That response didn’t surprise Serena in the least. Chris often spoke of heavenly matters. Actually, she was surprised that he’d never become a preacher himself. He would have made a good one. Perhaps it was her lack of spirituality and religious conviction that had hindered him. She hoped not.

They stopped about 20 feet from the car. Amazingly, the right headlight was still shining, illuminating their surroundings. The glare of the lone headlamp prevented them from getting a really good look at the full extent of the damage. They’d been so concerned about each other, that they hadn’t given the condition of the car much thought. It was totaled, that much was certain. Chris hesitated for a moment, apparently considering if it was safe to draw any closer to the twisted hulk. There was no sign of a fire, and only a trace of steam rising from the shattered radiator. The only event in this car’s future was a journey to the scrap yard.

“We’re OK!” yelled Chris, waving again at the approaching truck driver. It seemed strange that he didn’t respond.

“Wait here,” Chris said, stepping from the glare of the headlight and toward the contorted hunk of metal and glass.

“Maybe we should all wait for the state police,” Serena said. “The car could still explode.

“It’s OK,” Chris said to his wife. “If it was going to explode it would have done so already.” He turned toward the car again. “This is strange; the driver’s side door is still closed. So is the window. How in the world was I thrown clear?”

“Oh Chris, I wish you’d wait,” repeated Serena, as her husband approached the driver’s side door. “I have a really bad feeling about this.”

Chris dismissed his wife’s warning, and looked in the car window. His expression spoke of his horror. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, yet the apparition remained.

“Serena, come here! This, this can’t be!”

Serena hesitated, then joined her husband by the car door. “Chris, no, oh God, it’s us! How can we be in there and out here at the same time?”

Now, the truck driver, too, stood at the driver’s side door. His flashlight revealed two contorted and blood-soaked figures, a young man and woman. He did not notice the uninjured doubles standing by his side.

Serena stepped back and into the glare of the lone headlight, as she witnessed her husband’s hand pass through the driver’s shoulder like some sort of phantasm. Then she noticed that her body cast no shadow on the snowy landscape. “No,” she whimpered.

Chris retreated to his wife’s side, speechless. It was Serena who spoke the unthinkable.

“Chris, we’re dead, we’re ghosts.” Her voice was quivering and uncertain. “But we can’t be, I mean, I can still feel and think. My body is warm, I’m breathing.” Serena reached for her wrist, searched frantically for her pulse. She was relieved when she found a fast but strong rhythm. “My heart is still beating, how can I be dead?”

Chris didn’t respond. Something else had caught his attention, something that hadn’t been there just an instant before—a warm breeze was blowing from somewhere, driving away the cold of the winter night.

Serena turned around to see a bright point of light floating in midair. It looked like a beautiful, white star, adrift some 30 feet away. It grew brighter, becoming an increasing disk of luminance, pushing back the darkness of the snowy night. No, not a disk, a portal with depth and substance, a softly glowing tunnel, and at its end, a light that now appeared as bright as the sun. No, brighter even than that.

The distraught truck driver took no notice of the wondrous spectacle, as he struggled to open the twisted driver’s side door of the car. Why should he? This luminous phenomenon was part of another world, another reality. It illuminated Chris and Serena in its radiance, yet its light seemed not to affect anything else around them.

Chris hugged his wife and gazed into the light. “It’s so bright. I know that it should hurt my eyes, but it doesn’t. And can you feel it, Serena? Can you feel the love coming from the light? Did you ever feel anything like it?”

Serena shielded her eyes from the light. It was so bright. She too sensed the love it emanated, yet she felt fear as well. She seemed frozen in time, unable to move. She’d read about this sort of apparition. It was the ever-present constant in all near-death experiences—the tunnel of light. It was real. But this was no near-death experience—this was real, a one way tunnel from this life to whatever existed beyond.

“Come on,” Chris said. “That’s where we’ve got to go.”

“I don’t know about this, Chris,” warned Serena. “You don’t know what’s at the end of that tunnel. It might not be what you think.”

Apparently Chris hadn’t heard her, or hadn’t wanted to, because he began walking toward the light, drawing her with him. She walked by his side, drawing strength from his touch. Without his help, she was certain that she would not have been able to move at all. She squeezed his hand. Yet his touch was becoming ever more tenuous. It wasn’t that his grip was weakening, it was her ability to feel his touch that was fading. It was almost as if he were, somehow, less real. He didn’t seem to notice as he walked boldly toward the portal.

They were at the very threshold of the tunnel, when her hand slipped from her husband’s grip. A moment later, he vanished into the soft glow, leaving her behind. She tried to follow him, but no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t move. Why hadn’t he returned for her? Didn’t he realize that she was no longer beside him?

“Chris!” she cried, yet her voice was barely above a whisper.

She stood there, paralyzed and weeping. She had been forbidden entrance. It was a force greater than her will that had decreed it, and it was not within her power to disobey.

The brilliant light at the end of the portal faded from sight, even as the warm breeze ceased. It was replaced once more by the cold darkness of the winter night. Then the apparition vanished completely. A chill swept through Serena, a chill that went beyond the coldness of the night. She’d been denied the right to enter the next life, if that was indeed what lay beyond.

She was gripped with fear. Minutes passed, minutes of near total paralysis, giving her ample time to ponder her fate. Was it her destiny to become a ghost, a lost and restless spirit doomed to wander Earth forever? She had read more than her share of books on the topic as a youth. Her inability to move? Some experts insisted that ghosts remained close to the place of their deaths for years. Perhaps, like her, they experienced some form of spiritual paralysis that kept them there.

Sure, there were lots of people who had claimed to have had visitations from the dead, and some of them were pretty scary, but there was no documented proof for their claims. She had come to dismiss such things as hoaxes, perhaps results of a natural phenomenon compounded by an overactive imagination. The current circumstances, though, were compelling her to reconsider her previous conclusions.

In the midst of her contemplations, her ghostly existence was interrupted as another unearthly portal materialized out of the emptiness, not far away. Yet this one was very different from the first. It was an undulating violet-colored corridor, pulsing with arcs of blue electricity. It seemed endless and foreboding, a dark passage leading into infinity.

No sense of love emanated from this dark abyss; indeed, it seemed the incarnation of despair. It was brooding, sinister, yet irresistible. This was her portal, the gateway to her destiny.

“No, please, I don’t want to go in there,” she murmured.

But what she wanted didn’t matter. She slowly stepped toward it as in a trance, and felt as light as a snowflake as she was swept off her feet and into the void of the portal. She felt its electric presence, like an army of ants crawling over every inch of her body—it was cold, far colder than the winter night.

She became nothing more than a weightless and inconsequential vapor as she tumbled down end over end into a bottomless pit. It was a helpless, sickening feeling.

Tenuous clouds of red and violet against a dark gray background swept past her. Was she really falling or just being swept along by some invisible current? She couldn’t tell. The experience was totally disorienting and absolutely terrifying.

She looked at her hand and discovered that it was nothing more than a translucent form. She gazed down to see that her body was also transparent—like one of those plastic models she pieced together when she was in junior high school. Being the model was not nearly so much fun.

She screamed, yet she couldn’t hear her voice over the roar of the ethereal winds that swept her along. She wondered if there was a destination. Perhaps she would be swept along through this ethereal realm throughout all eternity.

She thought of Chris. Where was he? Was he experiencing anything like this? She hoped not.

How long or how far she was carried, she couldn’t say. In this realm there were no constants, no frames of reference for either time or space. Even existence itself was tenuous, measured only by the extent of her fear.