Paradise Lost Boxed Set

by R. E. Vance

  After what seems to be an eternity, I eventually gain enough composure to stand. The radio clicks. HQ wants to know what’s happening. I throw it to the ground and then stomp on it. Let them think we’re all dead. Everyone else is—what’s one more dead soldier going to change?

  That’s when I go AWOL, hiding in my PopPop’s old cabin. It takes a year, but eventually an uneasy peace is brokered between humans and Others.

  That’s when I return to Paradise Lot in order to fulfill Bella’s dream.

  Memories

  The road to the cabin was winding, and to get onto the property you needed to climb a steep hill. The old Road Runner struggled, and I had to push the accelerator all the way down to get her old wheels over the crescent.

  This would be the same hill Grinner would have to climb when he came, assuming he didn’t fly. Since I’d never seen his feet leave the ground—at least, not by his own will—I guessed flying wasn’t among his modes of transport. That and because he was the Avatar of Gravity, I figured he was a feet-on-the-ground kind of guy. I supposed he could make his way through the thick treeline or cross the lake, but I doubted that, too. The forest was too dirty for his clean pleated trousers and the lake required hiring a boat or walking on water. Gravity could do a lot, but that trick required a different kind of magic. But the biggest proof I had that he’d use the main path was that he wasn’t afraid of me. This soon-to-be god saw my defiance as an annoyance that had to be dealt with, not a problem with the potential to undo him. Everything I knew about Grinner told me he’d be coming through the front door. As I climbed over the hill’s zenith, I made a mental note to put some sensors in the brush. I’d know when he passed this point, at least.

  The cabin was still there, standing alone on the hill’s plain. It was a lone structure, one story high and made completely of pinewood. There were two bedrooms—one on each side of the cabin—no electricity, a kitchenette with a gas stove and running water that was installed about thirty years ago, when PopPop fitted a pump from the lake. As for a bathroom—well, that was what the trees were for.

  I parked by the old woodshed and walked up the steps, opening the unlocked door. What was the point of locking it? Someone could spend all day kicking down the door without a soul to stop them. Inside I noted that, either by luck or because the cabin was so far off the beaten path, no one had found it since I last visited it all those years back. I walked onto its old, uneven floor. A green two-seat sofa sat in front of the fireplace. The floor creaked as I pulled back the sofa and threw aside the tatty orange rug that it rested on. Beneath it was a false floor I had built. It opened with a pop, dust flying up into the air, and I stuck my arm down the hole, feeling for the old gray-green canvas sack.

  It was right where I’d left it. With a strained pull, I lifted out my old military bag from its hiding place. It was heavy, about as long as a ski bag and eight times the width. I pulled back its heavy-duty zipper, opening its mouth as wide as it would go. And there it all was. All my old military stuff that I had stashed in the cabin when I naively believed I would never need it again. Weapons specifically designed to kill Others. They felt familiar in my hands, muscle memory taking over as I held them. Old friends.

  Old addictions.

  I checked my rifle and went through my bag of tricks. Once more into the fray … into the last good fight I’ll ever know, I thought as I inventoried the content.

  The way Grinner burned through time, he believed it was infinite, so the plan was simple: rain holy Hell on him and wear him out. Of course, my plan also required me not getting flattened in the meantime. No plan was perfect and, besides, it was a good day to die.

  I grabbed my bag and started distributing its contents in the cottage and surrounding lands. When the fight started, the more options I had, the better off I’d be. Then I sheathed my hunting sword and pulled out my trusted rifle, preparing myself for the next part of my plan. I had to get more information, and there was only one person I knew who could tell me what I wanted to know.

  I needed to take a nap.

  Dream a Little Dream of Me

  The darkness came for me the way it always did, its tendrils reaching out like some gruesome, undefined monster. I wanted to run, to run like I had every night for the last six years, but tonight I let the darkness envelop me.

  It hit me like a rush of air from a fan suddenly turned on and then I was in it, completely consumed by its nothingness. For a moment I was alone, until she came for me like she did every night—a light in the endless Void, an angel floating down from nowhere, her presence chasing away both darkness and fear.

  “Hi, Jean,” she said, her tone soft and careful. “I suspect you have a few questions for me.”

  “Yeah,” I said, looking up at her blinding light, “a couple. But I think I’ve figured out a lot of it already.”

  “Fine. But first, where would you like to be?”

  “Excuse me?”

  She rolled her eyes, tempering the gesture with a playful smile. “Oh come, Jean. We’re about to have a fight.” She stood arms akimbo as she gave me her mocking It’s time to get serious look. It was the look she always gave me when trying to lighten the mood before we were about to have a hard conversation. “Jean, we might as well do it somewhere beautiful. Where would you like to go?”

  I looked at her blankly, still not sure what she meant.

  She swallowed hard, as if pushing back her frustration, and in a controlled even tone she said, “Do you remember where we met? Just outside that diner you used to work?” In the darkness, a glass-and-steel door appeared with a neon yellow sign above it that read: Jack’s Diner.

  “Jim’s Diner,” I corrected, “not Jack’s.”

  “Ahhh, that’s right, Jim’s Diner.” The sign above the door morphed from Jack’s to Jim’s, keeping the same neon-yellow shine. “You were a busboy, weren’t you? My mom took me out to dinner as a treat for getting a perfect report card or winning a spelling bee or whatever it was. Even then, she hated the way you looked at me.” Bella flattened her dress, nervously pressing out wrinkles in the fabric. “We could go there. Or we could go to our first apartment. That hole-in-the-wall just off of—”

  “Where I proposed,” I interrupted. “I want to go there.”

  “We went there last night,” she protested, but I held resolute.

  “So what?” I said. “You asked me where I wanted to go and I want to go there.”

  “OK, fine. You were always such a creature of habit.”

  Then, from the darkness, mists bloomed from a thousand flower buds that I did not know were there. Maybe the unblossomed pods were hidden in the darkness, or maybe they had never been there and Bella somehow, magically, made them appear. Whatever it was, wisps of smoke billowed out as the Void filled around us with a translucent smoke. Then we were standing on a cloud, cool fog shifting in an effervescent dance beneath our feet. The haze had a pleasant smell that I couldn’t quite place. Something safe and pure, like when PopPop used to bake apple pie, or the strong leather smell of his car. Perhaps it was one of those. Perhaps both.

  Slowly the smell changed, bringing with it tinges of salt and water and … I smelled the ocean. More than that—I could hear the waves lapping against the shore just in front of me. More out of instinct than anything else, I took a step forward, forgetting that I was suspended in the darkness, floating in nothing. I was surprised when my feet caught on to earth. I shuffled them. It felt like I was standing on sand. I looked down, expecting to see cool white wisps still dancing around my feet, but instead I saw hardened vapor that congealed into a white, sandy beach.

  A light that had not been there before shined above me and I looked up, blinded by the sudden appearance of the sun. As my eyes adjusted, I looked around and saw that we were on the beach and Bella was no longer haloed by light. She was wearing her white sundress, the one with lilies. There were so many little details that were different from how I remembered them. The boats off the shore. The treeline
behind us. A tiny shell that dug into my knee when I bent down to propose to her. And why not? It had been fourteen years since we last stood on this beach. In real life, that is. In my dreams, we visited this place often. Still, it had been so long since either of us had been here, our memories of this place were bound to be a bit off. Trouble was, the beach we were standing on wasn’t the recollection of my imperfect memory, it was hers.

  All this time when she took me to places to have our nightly chats, I’d believed they were my memories that took us there. She was my dream, after all, so it made sense that we would go to places I remembered and loved. But we never went anywhere from my memories. We were always going to the places she knew, in the way she remembered them.

  As if sensing my realization, she said, “Before I learned how to do that, I thought we had failed. After all, I was meant to be in Heaven, but instead I was lost in a place that transcended emptiness.” She chuckled at the thought.

  “But you didn’t fail, did you?”

  She shook her head. “I remember what the Ambassador told me. Why did the angels rebel?”

  “Pride?”

  “Envy. They envied our free will. It was a power they wished to have for themselves. But what is free will? After all, didn’t the angels rebel? How could they have done that without free will? It got me thinking … and I realized that free will isn’t just the ability to do whatever we want, it is also the ability to shape the world around us. Mold it into what we want it to be. That’s a lot more literal in a place like this.”

  She lifted her hand and from it sprung forth the twist tie I had used to propose. I felt around my neck—my own twist tie was still coiled around the chain. She smiled, tossing it to me. In the palm of my hand, I looked closely at the tiny piece of plastic that my seventeen-year-old self had used in lieu of an engagement ring. At the time, I thought it proved me insurmountably romantic to propose with such a thing. Bella came over and showed me her own ring finger. She still wore her twist tie. Then she touched the thin band in my hand and it felt almost like her finger pressed on my palm. But as in all my dreams, we never actually touched. I guess that was just another rule of this place. She rolled the twist tie on the palm of my hand and turned it into a silver ring, which she put on her own finger alongside her own twist tie.

  “In this life and the next,” she said, looking at the two rings. Bella sighed and turned her attention to the sky above. “I think that is why they took all the human souls with them when they left. Because they knew that any human soul in Heaven or Hell would understand that and would bend the Void to their will.”

  “I … I don’t understand,” I said, shaking my head, drawing in closer to her.

  “When the gods created the world, they gave everyone immortality. Others were granted endless life and humans were imbued with souls. In other words, we were all given essentially the same thing—eternal life. But the two kinds of immortalities drew on different wells of power. When the gods left, they effectively turned off the lights for all the other planes. Others, despite all their abilities, did not possess the right kind of power to turn the lights back on. But a human soul, that is a different thing altogether.”

  I nodded, slowly understanding what Bella was saying. “Souls are the On switch to this place?”

  “Not just the On switch. They’re like a million nuclear power stations all running at full capacity. Watch!”

  She flicked her hand, and in an instant the beach turned into the apartment where we first lived, then PopPop’s cabin, the airplane on which we rode with the Ambassador, the hard concrete floor where we made love the night before she died. She was cycling through all the places that, once upon a time, meant something to us.

  “They are all our memories,” I said.

  She nodded. “And not just memories. Watch!”

  With a wave of her hand, she brought forth a light show that made Fantasia seem like a child playing with flashlights. Meteors shot up as swirls of rainbow-colored imagery shone bright in the sky. The spectacular illuminations danced around us as she transformed the empty Void into her canvas, filled by her imagination. I giggled at the sight.

  “And it’s not just lights. I can make things, too. Imagine playing with these!”

  Optimus Prime, Voltron and an army of Smurfs manifested themselves before me. Each was life-size and looked so real I thought they were standing right there. And it wasn’t some 3-D animation like what we got in the movies. These beings had a realism to them that made those renditions seem like a child’s drawings. Whatever she was doing, she wasn’t drawing or sculpting these creatures. She was creating them. All that was left was to breathe life into their husks.

  “This is what the Others must do when they burn time. Except here—time is infinite,” my Bella said, and as the words left her lips, her creations faded away. I looked over at her, as she breathed heavily from the exertion of creating. “I’m still learning to hold the creations. Right now I can form them, but I can’t keep them. Perhaps in time I will be able to keep them around longer—or forever. But for now, the only things I seem able to manifest with any permanence are the constructs that I make from memories. The easiest ones to build are the memories that mattered most. The times I was most happy and in love—” she took me to PopPop’s cabin “—or happiest.” Suddenly we were in our first apartment, standing in front of the couch we used to cuddle on while watching TV.

  I rolled my eyes. “Seriously? I thought you hated that couch.”

  She laughed, her eyes brightening. “I know, I know! But I loved being near you. And it was our love that allowed me to be tethered enough to the mortal realm to find you. It was our love that allowed me to eventually find you in your dreams. And perhaps it will be our love that will find a way for us to be together again.”

  “So, am I here?” I asked. She had stopped the memories outside Jim’s Diner, and I bent down to touch the ground, expecting concrete from the road, but my hand went through the surface, touching nothing.

  “No,” she said.

  “Are you here?” I asked, trying to comprehend what this place was. She no longer wore her sundress—the one with lilies—but jeans and the V-neck sweater I had bought her for her birthday.

  “Yes, this place is as real as anywhere I’ve ever been. You are as real to me as ever before,” she said.

  My tears welled up within me. All these years believing she was not real, believing it was my guilt and pain that caused my nightly dream of her. So much wasted time. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?” I asked, knowing I should be angry. But I was so happy. Bella still existed.

  “Oh, Jean, I am so sorry for not telling you. I thought I was doing what was best for you. You were doing so well, you even seemed happy at times. I thought this was my role—to be your guardian angel, helping you through all the hardships you faced. Telling you would have only caused you more pain and it would have stopped you from doing all the good you have done. I didn’t want you to spend years looking for a way to me, when you could have spent that time doing good that matters.”

  “But this matters,” I said.

  She shot me her best You know what I mean look and said with a smile, “I did what I thought was right, just like you’ve done so many times in the past. And I am sorry that my decisions have caused you pain. Cause you pain, still. I love you, Jean, in this life and the next.”

  I did know what she meant. I really did. After all, it was our love that had got us through the really hard times, it was our love that had allowed us to find each other even when we were worlds apart and it was our love that Grinner had wished to capture in order to reopen Heaven. “In this life and the next,” I said, “I love you, too.”

  She smiled, closing her eyes, causing a single tear to escape and fall on my outstretched hand. I could have sworn I felt it. “Jean, we don’t have much time. He is coming, and whatever happens next, you cannot let him find me.”

  “But we could be together.”


  “In a world that would be in flames.”

  “And would that be so bad?”

  “Yes,” she said, her face drained of joy. “Yes, it would be.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, her voice flat. “What do we do every time we have a fight?”

  I shrugged. “We go for a walk. Cool off … But it’s not like there’s anywhere we can go here.”

  “Oh,” Bella said as her lips curled up, “but that’s where you are wrong.”

  ↔

  Bella snapped her fingers and the world transformed around us. We were in the cabin, then in her childhood bedroom. Next my house, followed by the downtown bakery where we used to go and get ice cream after school. Over the next couple of hours, we visited a past filled by us. I could not begin to understand the emotions that stirred within me. Joy, anger, hate, elation, contentment, chaos—they all swirled around as she took me on a tour of her personal Heaven. A heaven filled only with memories of us. The one emotion that tempered all that I felt, that kept them from boiling over and wasting the little time we had left, was love.

  Still, there was one memory we did not visit. One that held more pain in it than I have ever known before. I knew that if I were to win against Grinner, I needed to know as much as I could. I had to understand what happened the night she died. I wanted to visit that place as much as I wanted a threesome with Judith and the Devil, but I had to know everything if I was going to live through the night.

  “What happened that day?” I asked.

  “Do you really want to know?” Her intangible hand on my cheek.

  “I have to,” I said.

  Withdrawing her wraithlike hand from my face, Bella gave me her You asked for it look. With downcast eyes, she took us to the room where it all had happened. The room where Bella had been killed.