The Dirty Streets of Heaven

by Tad Williams

  Still, it is a risk to write this at all. What I am about to relate will be unbelievable to many, if not most who hear of it. However, I can assure whoever is reading this that there is nothing wrong with my mind and that I have had proofs that have more than satisfied me of everything I set out here.

  Here is what I now know, which I have seen proven beyond the possibility of debate. There is life after death. The soul does exist without the body. And although most of the narrow, interfering rules of the world’s organized religions are just as wrong as I always thought they were, when it comes to the basic facts I must admit that they were right and my fellow doubters and I were wrong. There is a Heaven and there is a Hell.

  I attended a conference of the Atheist Alliance International in Los Angeles where I gave one of my infrequent but heartfelt lectures on the mischief caused in the world in general and America in particular by the adherents of organized religion, whether Christian, Jew, Islamist, or any number of other flavors of Theism. Afterward I was approached by a small dark-skinned man with gray hair whom I took at first to be African American. After hearing him speak I decided he might actually be African or Afro-Caribbean, since he had what sounded to my ears like a slight British accent. He told me he had enjoyed what I had to say and wished to speak to me about it. Amused and intrigued by his air of importance, I said yes.

  Over coffee my new acquaintance began to ask questions, not so much about what I had said to the conference as to my actual beliefs. Did I think that God was impossible or just unlikely? Why did humans keep returning to the belief in something beyond themselves, century after century?

  I could not quite understand what he was getting at, although when he finally produced a business card that read “Reverend Doctor Moses Habari” I was pretty sure I understood. I suggested that he was one of those ministers who trolls for converts in seemingly unlikely places, and that although I was not as hostile to spirituality as some of the people here, I was certainly not in attendance because I needed reinforcement of shaky beliefs (or rather non-beliefs). He laughed and said I was only partially wrong, but that what he was looking for was not men and women of weak principles who could be bent by fear into belief but instead those who could hold onto their skepticism and integrity even in the face of frightening revelations.

  The word “revelation,” of course, filled me with distrust, as it is one of the many code-phrases for Christian end of the world fantasies, but I did not mind the doctor’s quiet, friendly company, and so we talked amiably about many things other than religion, and at his request I agreed that we would stay in touch.

  For a year or so that was the precise limit of our relationship, an occasional letter. He wrote to tell me he was involved with something very important, which he wanted to show me one day, and I told him of how I kept myself busy with work. Molly had died a couple of years earlier and in all honesty I was a bit at loose ends, but I never emphasized this to Dr. Habari. Still, he must have decided that I would be ideal for his project, because although our friendship continued as a casual sort of thing, with a letter passing between us every month or month and a half, he also began to send me articles that I thought were purely political in nature, about the Third Way movement in Europe and other parts of the world, a fairly well-known attempt to find a middle ground between left-wing and right-wing political agendas.

  Well, one thing I had to say about the late Edward Walker was that he certainly appeared to be lucid. He was awfully wordy, though, so I skipped lightly over the next couple of pages about Habari’s interests in politics and social organization, so that I could get to what I thought of—rather ironically, as it turned out—as the good stuff.

  But the day came when Dr. Habari no longer referred to his grand project in vague, sweeping generalities about “religious freedom” and “finding a new way forward,” and began to talk about it as a very real thing that was now underway, and which he thought would be, as he put it, “ideal for someone like you, my dear Edward.” I had been friends with Habari long enough that I no longer thought he was flacking for converts to his low-key brand of Christianity, and so I agreed to talk to him about it in more depth. “Even better, my dear Edward,” he said, “I shall give you a demonstration.” I had no idea what that meant. I anticipated a trip to a local outreach center or some other charitable endeavor. Even the religious folk who despair of converting me still sometimes hope to get some money out of me. A well-to-do widower makes a likely candidate for charities of all stripes.

  Instead Habari came to my house one day in April, two years ago. I remember it because it was a lovely spring day, and the apricot tree by the front walk was covered in green shoots. Habari drove us across town in his battered old car, cautioning me that what I was going to see would be surprising, but that no matter what I saw and how it made me feel he was relying on my discretion afterward.

  “Why?” I asked, amused. “Are we going to be breaking the law?”

  “Only the laws of physics,” he told me. “And they’re not being broken, really. You’re going to see what’s behind them.”

  I was beginning to wonder about my soft-spoken friend—was he taking me to see some weeping Madonna miracle statue? Or something more modern, like a self-proclaimed UFO abductee? But Habari wouldn’t tell me. Eventually we arrived at Stanford Hospital, parked, then made our way in and past the emergency desk. The reverend had one hand tucked in his coat pocket and a look of concentration on his face.

  “Now, say nothing and do not move,” he told me as we reached a momentarily empty corridor of the hospital, then waved his free hand in the air in front of us. Nothing happened, which did not surprise me, but the intent way Habari stared at the air, as if something really had happened, made me nervous. Then he withdrew his other hand from his pocket.

  At first I thought he was holding some incredibly bright arc light, or even a magnesium flare, but this light did not spark and fountain like a flare, it simply shone with blinding brilliance so that I had to turn away.

  “No,” he said. “Be brave, Edward. And see!”

  I felt his hand on my shoulder. The light he had held was suddenly gone, but another, lesser light hung in the air before us like a loop of blazing wire. He led me through it—I confess I cried out a little, thinking I would be burned—but there was no heat, and when we stepped through to the other side nothing had changed except perhaps a slight alteration in the quality of the light and an unusual echo to the sounds we made.

  Habari asked me not to speak, to save my questions, then he led me down the corridor into a part of the hospital where we began to see other people again—nurses, patients, family members waiting—but every single one of them was completely motionless, as if they had been sealed in amber like prehistoric insects. I could not touch them directly—something like magnetic resistance kept me away—but I could get close enough to see that they were not imprisoned by anything, but rather that time had simply stopped. For them, all of them, but not for us. I was very frightened.

  “Oh my God,” I said to Habari. “What are you?”

  He smiled. “Your friend, Edward. I promise you that.”

  He led me past the motionless staff members and toward the wards. There too, everything had stopped as if a switch had been thrown, the patients and visitors alike all still as statues. As we walked among them I could hardly breathe. Just outside one of the rooms a little Hispanic boy had been running up the corridor, but now hovered in mid air with only the tip of one foot touching the ground.

  Then we stepped through into that room, and I was suddenly even more frightened, because people were moving there. Not everyone—a nurse and several family members stood beside the patient’s bed, and they were just as motionless as anyone in the corridors outside, but others nearby were moving and talking among themselves. Even more disturbing was that the person on the bed, a man not much older than myself, although very thin and with many dark, ugly bruises on his skin, also stood beside the bed—looking down
on his own body with a look of obvious astonishment!

  I let out a gasp of despair and confusion. I was quite overwhelmed.

  Then one of the moving figures turned and looked toward us. Not directly, as though we were as plain to see as everyone else, but as if he had heard something, or perhaps seen movement in the corner of his eye. But that eye and its twin were hideous, faceted like those of an insect, and the monster’s face though more or less human was covered in scales like a lizard’s, bright, coppery red and brown scales.

  I confess I tried to run. Habari gripped my arm and would not let me go. “Do not fear,” he said. “He can’t see you, and if you stay quiet he’ll go back to what he was doing.”

  I didn’t want to stay quiet. I wanted to get out of that building, out of that nightmare, away from everything that I was seeing, but Habari’s hold on me was astonishingly firm.

  “You are looking at a prosecutor of souls,” my guide told me. “Many would call him a demon. The woman at the end of the bed is what would be called an angel. She is there to defend the man who has just died. That’s him, looking down at the body he has left behind. The dead man’s name is Morton Kim, and he is a good man, a kind man. I think his afterlife will be a happy one.”

  The thing with the bug eyes was not looking at us any more, not even as Habari spoke in an ordinary, conversational tone. “Why don’t they hear you?” I asked. “Who are you?”

  Habari only shook his head. His right hand, the one that had blazed like the sun just a few moments ago, looked almost ordinary as he held it up now, although it still seemed to glow slightly. “They don’t hear me because at the moment I am a servant of someone more powerful than either of them.”

  “You mean, like God?”

  He smiled. “We’re all servants of the Highest—even Fishspine there, Hell’s prosecutor. But my sponsor is at least more powerful than either this angel or this demon. Now let’s leave them to their business.”

  He led me out of the room and down the corridors again until we found the glowing hole through which we had entered. When we stepped through it, all was as it had been. A few seconds later an orderly rounded the corner, moving like every human I had ever seen before this hour. He glanced at us briefly and without interest, then continued on his way.

  Habari didn’t explain anything about what had happened as he drove me back. He didn’t lecture or solicit or proselytize. He didn’t need to. What I had seen was so far beyond anything I’d ever experienced that I was shaking like a man with a fever. He took me home, poured me a glass of wine, then made himself a cup of tea and sat with me until I was feeling a little less overcome. He left me with promises to return the next day and discuss our “adventure” as he called it.

  Whoever you are, reading this, you probably already have several ideas to explain what happened to me—hypnosis, drugs, perhaps just ordinary mental illness. I had all these thoughts myself, so after a nearly sleepless night, I was quite angry by the time Habari returned. He seemed to have expected this reaction and took me on another journey, this time to an apartment building in the Ravenswood district.

  “It’s sad—there’s been an electrocution,” he said. “Faulty hair dryer.”

  The scene was much the same but without the doctors and nurses. The paramedics were strapping the body of a middle-aged woman to a gurney, but when we went through the shining opening her soul was out of the body, watching the ambulance workers and the heartbroken grandchild who had found her, weeping as if her heart was broken. Within moments an advocate angel and a demon prosecutor both appeared, the former a young man with luminous features, the latter another young man without a head, but with a face in the middle of his naked torso. The deceased woman looked at him with fear, but the handsome young man stepped up and spoke to her, calming her.

  “Smearhawk,” said Habari, nodding at the headless demon. “As a prosecutor he’s a tough opponent, but I think he’ll be unlucky here.”

  And then the judge appeared.

  We once bought a toy for one of the children’s birthdays, a device that attached to the hose like a sprinkler and sent showers of water up and down and around as it spun like a merry-go-round. The kids loved it and played with it that whole summer. At just the right angle the sun’s rays would make a wonderful shining rainbow that hung where the water sprayed, staying in one place even though the water itself was rising and falling and spurting out in all directions as the sprinkler device revolved.

  The heavenly judge was like one of those, a frozen shower of light, but awesome and frightening, too.

  “We should go,” Habari whispered to me. “The Powers aren’t like the lower angels. He might detect us if we remain too long.”

  Over the next several days Dr. Habari took me on several more of these astounding journeys outside of the life we know, until even I had to admit that if I was being tricked I could not imagine how he was doing it. Once I conceded this he told me that perhaps now I was ready to hear the truth—the real truth. But he wanted more from me than simply to recruit another believer.

  “What is the point, Edward,” he asked me on the day he finally explained it all, “of surrendering yourself to the very same arbitrary rules and bullying use of power you fought against on Earth? You stood up for what you believed even when it was difficult—what your mind and heart told you must be true.”

  “But it wasn’t true,” I said. “That’s just the point. I was wrong.”

  “Ah, but only as to the nature of the battlefield. The conflict is just as fierce as you perceived.”

  I was confused and told him so. What conflict did he mean?

  What he meant, he explained to me over the course of a long afternoon and evening, was that there were dissident elements in Heaven itself—it still seems so strange to say that, so old-fashioned!—that felt the fate of man was too arbitrary, that sentences which could never be appealed made no sense for eternal entities like souls, that Heaven itself had become hidebound and dictatorial. Instead of a timeless home for weary souls it had become a place where rules strangled freedom and dogma had overcome the birthright of all humans, which was the right to question, a gift that their Creator had blessed them with. The elements of which Habari spoke, felt that it was time for a change. They were the ones behind Habari’s Magian Society—a very different kind of charity organization than I had suspected!

  As he detailed his complaints with the ordering of Heaven I began to look at him with more than a little fear.

  “Oh, my lord!” I said. “Are you…a servant of the Devil?” Now that I believed in Heaven I had to believe in Hell, too. Had the leer of the great Enemy of Mankind been hidden behind Habari’s kindly, philosophical mask this whole time?

  He laughed. He laughed very hard. “No, no, no!” he finally managed to say. “Not me. The plight of the citizens of Hell is far worse than anything we face in Heaven. No, although there are doubtless more than a few souls trapped there who deserve better, there are far more who have done things so terrible that any ordinary Creator would have destroyed them instantly. God’s mercy, and His plans, are still a mystery beyond any of our complete understanding.” He shook his head. “No, my master and my colleagues and I represent something different. Do you remember some of the articles I sent you? About political philosophy?”

  “Certainly,” I said. “About the, what was it called? The Third Way?” But then, as the old expression goes, the penny finally dropped. “Is that what you represent? Some breakaway sect?”

  “We do not wish to break away from Heaven so much as we hope to coexist,” he told me. “That is where one of our names comes from—the Magians. The Wise Men brought three gifts, you see, representing three different ways. Because that is what we wish to become, Edward. A middle path. A third way.”

  He went on to tell me that he and his colleagues had found (or created—it was not clear) a place beyond the mortal Earth for the souls of the dead, a place that did not belong to either Heaven or Hell, and that th
ey were founding a sort of free state for those who had done good things in life but would not be happy delivered into a rigid, rule-bound afterlife where happiness was imposed. Habari’s rebels wanted free-thinkers, people who would benefit from this alternative third way.

  “People like you, Edward,” he told me, patting my hand. “You are a perfect candidate. You will be the first, but you will not be the only one—not for long.”

  I asked him if he wasn’t frightened about what God would think of them—of us. For the first time in my life I had to seriously consider the jealous God of the Old Testament, and it terrified me.

  “I’ve never seen the Highest,” he said. “And there are others far, far higher in Heaven’s hiearchy than me who say they’ve never seen the Highest either, or received any indication that He, in fact, is ruling Heaven. We’re not resisting God, Edward—we’re resisting heavenly inertia.”

  “But what if those are the same thing? Aren’t you afraid?”

  “I’ve prayed on this,” Habari told me. “We all have. And one answer keeps coming, although I suspect it is only the answer of my own logic. We’ve made our intentions plain enough, at least to the Highest we all worship in our secret hearts. He has done nothing to stop us. Does that not suggest that He might not care—or might even approve of what we do?

  I sat for a moment staring at Walker’s typewritten letter. I felt, as Edward Lynes Walker himself must have felt—like a man who had been swimming near the shore and suddenly realized the current was pulling him far, far out to sea. Could this be real? Did Habari truly represent some dissident faction of Heaven or was he an agent of Eligor’s? Or could he even be Eligor himself? Clearly, whatever he was, the being who called himself Moses Habari had abilities I didn’t quite understand. If he had taken Walker, a living man, through a Zipper to Outside and then showed him a soul about to be judged, without either the prosecutor or the advocate knowing he was there, he was doing something so far beyond the rules I knew that it might as well have been magic. The higher angels and, presumably, the higher demons can do things we rank-and-file can’t, but they are also very powerfully limited by the Conventions when they manifest on Earth, even Outside. I could believe that Habari and his lot (if he wasn’t some kind of lone wolf) might be willing to break the Conventions, but how could they get away with it? The whole system was set up to make sure a Principality or a Hell-Duke couldn’t just go strolling around Mortalville breaking the rules. I couldn’t even imagine how anyone could get around it and still do what Habari had done.