The First Phone Call From Heaven: A Novel

by Mitch Albom

  It was dark, and his eyes took a moment to adjust. There were large machines, small red lights, power supplies, snakelike cords. Equipment was rack-mounted, but he couldn’t tell what it was. There was a large metal desk and an empty chair. The noise he’d heard was a flat-panel TV.

  It was showing cartoons.

  “Horace!” Sully yelled.

  His voice wafted up to the barn rafters. He slowly circled behind the machinery, his eyes darting left and right.

  “Horace Belfin!”

  Nothing. He approached the desk, which was neatly arranged with stacked papers and yellow highlighters in a coffee cup. Sully pressed a lamp button, and the surface was illuminated. He pulled open one of the drawers. Office supplies. Another drawer. Computer cables. Another drawer.

  Sully blinked.

  Inside was something he’d seen before. Maria’s files. Her color-coded tabs. Up front, he saw familiar names.

  Barua. Rafferty. Sellers. Yellin. . .

  He froze.

  The last file read, Harding, Giselle.

  “Mr. Harding!”

  Sully spun around.

  “Mr. Harding!”

  The voice came from outside. Sully’s hands shook so badly, he couldn’t close the drawer.

  “Mr. Harding! Please come out!”

  He followed the sound to the barn entrance, inhaled, then peered out from behind the door.

  “Mr. Harding!”

  Horace was standing by the house, in a black suit, waving.

  “Over here!” he yelled.

  When Katherine gave birth to her first child, Diane was in the delivery room, as Katherine had been with Diane when her first daughter was born. The sisters held hands as the contractions increased.

  “Just a little longer,” Diane said soothingly. “You can do it.”

  Sweat poured down Katherine’s face. Diane had driven her to the hospital two hours earlier—Dennis was at work—weaving through cars at breakneck speed.

  “I can’t believe . . . we didn’t get . . . pulled over,” Katherine said between breaths.

  “I wish we had,” Diane said. “I always wanted to tell a cop, ‘It’s not my fault, this lady’s gonna have a baby!’”

  Katherine nearly laughed, then felt the sharpest pain yet.

  “My God, Diane, how did you stand it?”

  “Easy.” Diane smiled. “I had you, remember?”

  Katherine thought about that moment as she held her pink phone and gazed at the crowd. The show was in the midst of a commercial break, the lights had been lowered, and she suddenly wished she could slip away and go back home, be by herself, waiting for Diane’s voice, instead of this—all these people, all these cameras, those phones ringing, that crank, Elwood Jupes! And now the countless eyes staring up at her, waiting, waiting.

  She glanced around the stage. A makeup artist was working on the host’s face. Production assistants pushed space heaters closer to the guests. Jack Sellers stood a few feet away, staring at his feet.

  Katherine studied him. She had met him once or twice, back in the days when folks in Coldwater were known by their first names and their jobs—“Jack, the police chief,” “Katherine, the real estate agent”—before the town was divided by whose phones were ringing and whose weren’t.

  “Excuse me,” she said.

  Jack looked up.

  “What do you think he meant? Your son?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “When he said, ‘The end is not the end.’ What do you think he meant?”

  “Heaven, I guess. At least that’s what I hope.”

  He looked off.

  “I didn’t plan to tell anybody.”

  She followed his gaze to the crowd.

  “It’s too late now,” she whispered.

  And with that, her phone rang.

  Sully entered the farmhouse carefully, touching the porch’s doorframe before passing through it. Horace had waved him inside—“Over here!”—then disappeared. If this was some kind of trap, Sully thought, he was ill prepared. As he inched forward, he looked for something he might pick up to defend himself.

  The hallways were narrow, the floors old and scuffed, the walls painted in dull hues; every room seemed small, as if from a time when people were smaller, too. Sully passed the kitchen with flower-patterned wallpaper and light oak cabinets, a pot of coffee sitting on the counter. He heard voices coming from below and spotted, at the end of the hallway, a railing that led to a basement. Part of him wanted to run. Part of him had to go down there. He slid out of his heavy coat, letting it fall silently on the floor. At least now he could maneuver.

  He reached the railing.

  He thought about Giselle.

  Stay with me, baby.

  He began to descend.

  Nine years after he invented the telephone, Alexander Bell was experimenting with sound reproduction. He recorded his voice by speaking through a diaphragm that moved a stylus and cut grooves into a wax disc. He recited a series of numbers. At the end, to authenticate it, he said, “In witness hereof, hear my voice . . . Alexander . . . Graham . . . Bell.”

  For over a century that disc sat untouched in a box in a museum collection—until finally technology involving computers, light, and a 3D camera allowed the sound to be extracted from the wax. Researchers heard the dead man’s voice for the first time; they noted the way he pronounced his name, with the faint trace of a Scottish accent—“Alex-ahhn-der Gray-ham Bell.”

  Today people create voice imprints countless times each day—most commonly by leaving telephone voice mails. Bell’s precious invention, through which human conversation once traveled over a short wire, can now transmit to satellites and transform our words into digital data—data that can be preserved, replicated, or, if so desired, manipulated.

  As Sully stepped into the basement, he did not know he was staring at such technology. He simply saw Horace in a high-backed chair, amid a bank of TV screens showing the stage at Coldwater’s football field. He was surrounded by computer monitors, several keyboards, and multiple racks of electronic equipment. Cords, dozens of them, were bound together, running up the wall and out through an opening toward the barn.

  “Sit anywhere you like, Mr. Harding,” Horace said, not turning around.

  “What are you doing?” Sully whispered.

  “If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t be here.” Horace tapped several keys. “Here we go.”

  He pressed a final key, and on the screen, Katherine Yellin could be seen looking at her phone. It rang once. It rang twice. The TV cameras closed in as she flipped it open.

  “Hello . . . Diane?” she said.

  Her voice boomed over the basement speakers, making Sully snap back. He saw Horace reading from a list on a screen. He tapped several keys.

  “Hello, sister.”

  It was Diane Yellin’s voice.

  Sully heard it in the basement. Katherine heard it in her ear. The crowd heard it in the stands. And people worldwide heard it on their TV sets or computers—thanks to a signal being sent from Horace’s equipment, received through a cell phone, bounced through an amplified board, and cast out through a network audio feed.

  Alexander Bell’s dream of humans speaking from far away had come to a full and bizarre circle.

  A dead woman’s voice, re-created, was now having a conversation with the living.

  “Diane, it is you,” Katherine said.

  Horace typed something quickly.

  “I am here, Kath.”

  “There are people here listening.”

  More typing.

  “I know . . . I see . . .”

  “Diane, can you tell the world about heaven?”

  Horace snapped his hands up, like a pianist finishing with a flourish. “Thank you, Katherine Yellin,” he mumbled.

  He flicked a key, and a monitor filled with words. He spun around and looked straight at Sully.

  “It helps when you know a question is coming,” he said.

&nbs
p; What the world heard next was a fifty-four-second explanation of life after life—all in the voice of a deceased woman. It would be transcribed, memorized, printed, and repeated more times than anyone could possibly count.

  This is what it said:

  “In heaven, we can see you. . . . We can feel you. . . . We know your pain, your tears, but we feel no pain or tears ourselves. . . . There are no bodies here . . . there is no age. . . . The old who come . . . are no different than the children. . . . No one feels alone. . . . No one is greater or smaller. . . . We are all in the light . . . the light is grace . . . and we are part of . . . the one great thing.”

  The voice stopped. Katherine looked up.

  “What is the one great thing?” she whispered.

  In the basement Horace nodded slightly, the question expected. He tapped another key.

  “Love. . . . You are born in it . . . you return to it.”

  On the screen, Katherine was crying, holding the phone as if it were a trembling bird.

  “Diane?”

  “Sister . . .”

  “Do you miss me like I miss you?”

  Horace paused at his keyboard, then typed.

  “Every minute.”

  Katherine’s tears flowed. The others onstage could only watch in silent reverence. The host pointed to the clipboard, and Katherine lowered her head and began to read the questions.

  “Does God hear our prayers?”

  “Always.”

  “When will we get the answers?”

  “You already have them.”

  “Are you above us?”

  “We are right next to you.”

  Sully stepped closer to Horace in the chair. He could see, on the man’s thin, haggard face, tears rolling freely down his cheeks.

  “Then heaven is really waiting for us?” Katherine asked.

  Horace inhaled and typed one last thing.

  “No, sweet sister. . . . You are waiting for it.”

  What happened next in the basement was violent and sudden. Sully would only later remember the details—the cords he ripped from the electrical outlets, the monitors he swept from tabletops, the rack of equipment he plowed into with a football block, knocking it to the ground. He was blinded by fury, as if a film were over his eyes and a buzzing sound in his head that he had to make stop. He threw himself into anything he could, panting heavily, his muscles taut as cables. When the rack of equipment crashed, he spun and saw Horace watching him—not angry, not scolding, not even visibly surprised.

  “STOP IT! NO MORE!” Sully screamed.

  “It’s done,” Horace said, softly.

  “Who are you? Why are you doing this to people?”

  Horace seemed taken aback.

  “I’m not doing anything to anyone.”

  “You are! It’s terrible!”

  “Really?” He motioned toward the screens. “It doesn’t look terrible.”

  Although the sound had been lost during Sully’s rampage, the monitor images remained: people cheering, hugging, on their knees in prayer, crying on each others’ shoulders. Katherine was being embraced by the others. The host was beaming and moving between them all. Watching it in silence made it even more surreal.

  “This is insanity,” Sully whispered.

  “Why?”

  “It’s a huge lie.”

  “Heaven? Are you sure about that?”

  “You’re giving them false hope.”

  Horace crossed his hands on his lap.

  “What is false about hope?”

  Sully steadied himself on a table. His throat constricted, and he was gasping for breath. A pain behind his eyes was so severe it nearly blinded him.

  Horace turned a knob, and the screens went blank.

  “Now we’ll see,” he said.

  “You can’t get away with this.”

  “Please, Mr. Hardin—”

  “I’ll tell everyone.”

  Horace pursed his lips.

  “I don’t think you will.”

  “You’re not going to stop me.”

  Horace shrugged.

  “Don’t try anything—I’m warning you.”

  “Mr. Harding. You misunderstand. I hold no strength over you. I am not a well man.”

  Sully swallowed hard. At that moment, staring at Horace’s near-skeletal frame, his drawn expression, the eyes underlined by dark circles, he realized that, indeed, the man must be ill. Until now, Sully had associated his faint pallor and unhealthy look with the undertaking job.

  “So . . . what are you?” Sully asked, eyeing the electronics. “Military intelligence?”

  Horace smiled. “Can we use those words together?”

  “Phones? Intercepts? Hacking?”

  “Beyond that.”

  “International? Spy surveillance?”

  “Beyond.”

  “Is that how you pulled this off?”

  Horace raised an eyebrow. “This?” He motioned to the equipment. “This is not very difficult anymore.”

  “Tell me! Explain, damn it!”

  “Very well.”

  In the minutes that followed, Horace detailed a process that stunned Sully with how far technology had evolved. Phone messages left by the deceased. A certain provider that stored years’ worth of them on servers. Hacked acquisition. Voice recognition software. Editing programs. People leave dozens of messages a day, Horace noted. With so many to work with—thus, so much vocabulary—one could create almost any sentence. Sometimes they came out trailing off or disjointed, so keeping conversations short was key. But knowing about the people who were speaking, their histories, their family issues, their nicknames—all conveniently provided by the Davidson & Sons obituary interviews—made the task much easier.

  By the time Horace finished, Sully understood enough to see how a mass deception was possible. What he did not understand was the reason.

  “Why did you do it?”

  “To make the world believe.”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “If it believes, it behaves better.”

  “What’s in that for you?”

  “Penance.”

  Sully was taken aback.

  “Penance?”

  “Sometimes you sit in a cell and don’t deserve it, Mr. Harding.” He looked away. “Sometimes it’s the other way around.”

  Sully felt lost. “Why those people?”

  “It could have been others. These were enough.”

  “Why Coldwater?”

  “Isn’t that obvious?”

  He lifted his palms.

  “Because of you.”

  “Me? What do I have to do with this?”

  For the first time, Horace looked surprised.

  “You really don’t know?”

  Sully straightened. He clenched his fists defensively.

  “I am sorry,” Horace said. “I thought that was clear by now.” His eyes drifted. “How did you find my home?”

  Sully explained—Maria, the library, the real estate office.

  “Then you read the deed?”

  “Yeah,” Sully said.

  “Read it again.”

  Horace sighed deeply and placed his hands on the desk, rising like a dazed fighter lifting off the canvas. He seemed more frail than ever.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Sully said.

  “That is beyond your control.”

  “I’ll call the police.”

  “I don’t think you will.”

  Horace moved to the back wall. “Your wife, Mr. Harding. I’m sorry you never got to say good-bye. I know how you feel.”

  He tugged on the bottom of his black suit coat. His knuckles protruded from his thin, veined hands. “It was a lovely ceremony.”

  “Don’t talk about Giselle, damn you!” Sully screamed. “You don’t know anything about her!”

  “I will soon enough.”

  Horace pressed his palms together as if in prayer. “I’m going to rest now. Please forgive me.”


  He pressed a button on the wall, and the room fell into blackness.

  In ancient times, stories traveled from lips to lips. A messenger running over mountains. A man riding for days on horseback. Even the most wondrous event would need to be spoken of again and again—mouth to ears, mouth to ears—spreading so slowly you could almost hear the planet conversing.

  Today we watch the world together, seven billion people staring at the same campfire. What happened on the stage of the Coldwater football field was relayed to the most remote corners of civilization—not in weeks or months, but in hours. And for one night on earth, the idea of heaven was as close as it had ever been.

  PROOF! some headlines read. HEAVEN SPEAKS! read others. People gathered in the streets from Miami to Istanbul, cheering and hugging and singing and praying. Churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples were overflowing with followers wishing to repent. Cemeteries were packed with new visitors. Terminally ill patients breathed differently as they closed their eyes. There were doubters—there are always doubters—but for one night, more than any piece of news since news was first gathered, a single story was the start of nearly every conversation on the planet.

  Did you hear?

  What do you think?

  Can you believe it?

  Is it a miracle?

  Only one man, speeding an old Buick along a two-lane road, knew the truth and was making plans to reveal it. He gripped the wheel, fighting exhaustion. He realized he had not eaten anything since the night before. His legs were soaked from the thighs down, the result of trudging through snowdrifts, looking fruitlessly for Horace, who had somehow disappeared.

  It had taken Sully a while to escape the basement darkness. Horace had killed the power to the entire property. Sully banged and bumbled until he found the steps, and he searched the house and later the barn. He wandered through the nearby woods. There was no sign of the old man. As the afternoon light faded, desperation overtook him—a need to share what he had seen before something or somebody could stop him. He retreated from the property, clomping through the snow until he reached the fence, which he climbed again, sheer adrenaline carrying him over the top. His car was cold, and it took several attempts before the engine turned over.