by Tad Williams
So there was my first question-three suicides? Wasn’t that an abnormally large ratio out of seven otherwise random deaths? Had they all really chosen to take their own lives? One of the suicides had been very ill, which made it less likely that foul play was involved, but it certainly didn’t rule it out.
But if Eligor or some other strategist in Hell had come up with a way to snatch the souls of the departed right under our angelic noses, why would they need to make it look like anything? Dead folks were shuffling off the mortal coil every hour, and both sides had thousands of operatives just to process those transitions to the afterlife. Why bother to hurry a few folk out of their mortal bodies just to snatch their souls? Unless some kind of special death was necessary before the soul in question could be hijacked. Was that where someone like the elusive Habari came in? To “help” the chosen out of their bodies, whether they wanted to go or not? But the Reverend Doctor seemed to have spent a lot of time hanging around with Edward L. Walker for someone whose job was simply to commit a murder. Even if it was necessary to give the mark something before he or she died-some kind of soul-collector or equally science-fictional device-it seemed like it would have been easier to have a professional pickpocket plant the thing on them before they were killed instead of sending someone like Moses Habari to pal around with the intended victim for weeks ahead of time.
No, clearly I still didn’t have enough information to make sense out of the disappearing dead, or even to begin to. I sure couldn’t guess what the method was, and I didn’t have a clue as to the motive, either. Why steal souls and try to hide it? Not that the Opposition wouldn’t have loved to be able to do it, but when there’s only two players in the game, and one of them always cheats anyway, why would they bother to keep their advantage a secret? There were only two players in the game, weren’t there…?
I shuffled through the information Fatback had sent me on the deaths, all the forensics and reports from first responders, but still nothing jumped out at me except the waste of all these significant lives, many of them over before they should have been, no matter what the reason.
Then something did jump out at me. In fact, it damn near knocked me down and screamed “Boo!” in my face. Significant lives. The methods of leaving those lives may have seemed random and the lives themselves may not have had any connections with each other, but one thing did link them-they were all significant people.
As this struck me, I felt a prickle run up my spine. Scientists, educators, entrepreneurs, and even a minister. I scanned the list again, and now that I was looking for it, it screamed out at me: they weren’t all as rich as Edward Walker by any means, but they were all accomplished people who had made their way in the world and done so very successfully. Proud people, and with good reason to be. Bright, determined, and probably articulate.
Proud people.
Struck by a sudden hunch I dialed a number I hadn’t called in a while-the Walker house. I was in luck: Garcia Windhover answered the phone.
“Yo. G-Man talking at you.”
“Bobby Dollar here. I need you to do me a favor.”
“Sweet! I’m all over it, boss.”
Boss? Did he think he was my deputy now? Or worse, my assistant? “Uh, okay. Well, if Posie’s there with you I need you to get her out of the house for about two hours. Can you do that? You see, I’m worried. I think she might be in danger at her place.” I explained to you how sometimes even angels like me have to stretch the truth, didn’t I? “Give me a couple of hours, and I’ll let you know when it’s safe to go back.” I explained it would be best if he could get her out of the neighborhood entirely for the afternoon.
He promised he’d give it a shot. “I’ll tell her it’s like a bomb threat or something.”
It wasn’t a very good excuse, but obviously she wasn’t the most discerning young lady, either. I decided not to micromanage. “Thanks…G-Man. I’ll be in touch in a couple of hours.”
Was I feeling guilty? Good question, but I wasn’t putting him and Posie in danger-the contrary, if anything. I was heading for the Walker house, and the farther they stayed away from me the better their chances of a long, happy life, since I was a bit of a disaster magnet at the moment.
I left Orban’s loaner Benz around the corner from the Walker place and let myself into the yard through the side gate. The house was empty, which meant G-Man had done his job. I hadn’t bothered to ask him to leave the house unlocked for me because of the terrifying possibility that if he knew I was going to be there he might sneak back to try to help me. Anyway, anybody who was in the Harps can pick a lock with his eyes closed and his hands tied. I wasn’t trying to make things interesting, so I was inside in a minute or so. The house hadn’t changed much, except that more dust had gathered on the books and objets d’art since my last visit. I got the feeling that Posie was squatting in the place more than inhabiting it. Perhaps it was going to be sold, which made it even more important that I find what I was looking for today.
There was one problem, though: I didn’t actually know what I was looking for. As I’d reviewed Fatback’s material on the local victims, I had become more and more certain that someone like Edward Lynes Walker, a successful, well-known man, wouldn’t just kill himself without even trying to explain it, unless he was very, very depressed, if for no other purpose than the apology many suicides left. But Walker had no history of depression, and judging from the coverage of his death, it seemed that everybody who knew him had been astonished that he had taken his own life. It’s damn hard to prove a negative, of course, and the absence of a note certainly didn’t indicate murder. But if I did find a suicide note that others had missed, or anything that would shed some light on his frame of mind in his last days, I might be able at least to eliminate foul play and narrow my focus to what had happened after he died.
My only lucky break was that most of Edward Walker’s working life seemed confined to the room he had probably called a “study,” but which a later generation would have called an office; a big, sunny upstairs bedroom oriented around a handsome antique writing desk, on which his computer, a fairly expensive Dell Precision, still sat. The walls were lined with bookcases except for a low table on one side of the door and two large metal filing cabinets on the other. I didn’t bother checking the computer, and not only because the police lab and probably his lawyer would have already examined it thoroughly. Although he was no doubt very technologically literate, Walker seemed to me like the old-school kind of guy who would always have a hard copy of anything important. In fact, if he was concerned enough about snoopy hackers he might not even have committed it to electronic memory. After all, Edward Lynes Walker had been born into the last analog generation.
There are two different ways to toss a room: the kind where you know what you’re looking for and the kind where you don’t. The first kind is easier because you can immediately eliminate a lot of things. For instance, if you’re looking for a picnic basket you don’t need to spend a lot of time searching in envelopes. I didn’t have that luxury, so I started pulling things out of cabinet drawers as quickly as I could and setting them on the floor. After about half an hour the carpet looked like the downtown San Judas skyline crafted from piles of paper and beige cardboard, and I sat down and began working my way through.
I pulled out every sheet of paper in all of those files, one sheet at a time, and examined each one, albeit briefly. For an otherwise lazy guy I’m pretty thorough, but at the end of the first two hours of hard grafting I hadn’t come across anything out of the ordinary, although after having looked at thousands of snippets of Walker’s life I was beginning to feel as if I was finally getting to know him. For one thing, just reading his business correspondence made it clear that he was no sucker. He might have had an overly keen belief in his own undefeatable good sense (which I have found is often true with engineering types) but I was equally certain he wouldn’t have bought any pitch without proof. The atheism first suggested by his books seemed to arise
not out of a dislike of religion per se, but from a feeling that anything that couldn’t be scientifically proved wasn’t worth wasting time on. Did that make him more of an agnostic than an atheist? Walker certainly hadn’t been religious, no matter how you sliced it. If by some chance his disappearance had been voluntary, why would someone who didn’t believe in an afterlife decide to play hide-and-go-seek with Heavenly authorities?
More than two hours had now gone by. Posie might convince her boyfriend to bring her home any time, but I wasn’t ready to give up. I hurried through all the books in the office, pulling each from its shelf and inspecting it for stray envelopes or pieces of paper tucked inside, without luck. It took a long time but I was being thorough. I got all the books back into place and the room tidied just as I heard a car pull into the driveway. I wasn’t panicked-I knew I could make Dozy Posie believe just about anything, and I couldn’t imagine G-Man putting up much of an intellectual struggle either, but I didn’t want to push my luck in case I had to get back into the house again, although I wasn’t sure it would be worth it. After all, I’d failed to find what I was looking for despite a pretty thorough search, so I was beginning to doubt the sudden certainty that had set me off, a hunch that had seemed very powerful just a few hours earlier.
I hurried down the stairs and stopped dead, staring. I had completely forgotten the books in the living room shelves, most of which were art books, business manifestos, and a few novels. But right in front of me were several rows of religious material-well, anti-religious, mostly-that now seemed to me like as good place to leave a suicide note as in his office. But I could hear keys rattling in the door, which meant I couldn’t stay. I’d have to come back another time.
Then I saw it, down near the bottom of the nearest bookshelf, between one of Dawkins’ books and Mark Twain’s Letters From the Earth-the black leather, gilded spine of a King James Bible. As they used to sing on Sesame Street, “One of these things is not like the others.” The front door was opening, so I just reached out and grabbed. Then the angel with the stolen bible under his coat (that would be me) sprinted through the kitchen to the back door and escaped into the yard, only seconds ahead of the bible owner’s granddaughter and her faux-gangster boyfriend.
twenty-seven
the atheist’s bible
I drove a little farther into Palo Alto, then stopped in a quiet residential street. As soon as I took out the heavy, leather-bound bible I could see that something had been pressed inside the pages, a rather fat envelope. I was lucky it hadn’t dropped out during my hasty exit. The writing on it said only “To be opened after my death,” in handwriting that looked like what I’d seen of a few samples of Walker’s.
Jackpot. And everybody missed it but me!
I used a tissue to open the envelope, in case I needed to leave it for the police to find, and handled it the same way. Inside were at least a dozen sheets typed on thin, old-fashioned paper, which made the document seem more antique than its date only a couple of weeks back and a few days before Edward Walker’s death. I took a quick look around to make certain I was alone on the quiet side street, then started to read.
To Whom It May Concern,
This is not a will, but it is a last testament of sorts. The contents should have no bearing on any of my personal affairs but I doubt the legal profession would agree with me. That is why I haven’t trusted it to my attorneys. If any of my dear friends were still alive I would have given it to one of them. Sadly, that choice is no longer available to me.
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 chariti
es 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.
