The Trilogy of the Void: The Complete Boxed Set

by Peter Meredith

  "Why don't you ask God when you cross over? Babies are born all the time and one of them could be you, and there is no one who deserves another chance more."

  Talitha shook her head and sighed. "I don't think there's any going back. And besides, I wouldn't be me without you." She came back to the beach, but didn't approach too close to the river as if she couldn't decide between the opposing forces of earth and water. For a while, she was silent and sad, and an awkwardness came between them, but then she perked up and Will could tell that she was trying to put on a happy face. "Speaking of babies, what kind of father will you be, do you think?"

  The image of William Jern came to him and brought with it an equal mixture of sorrow and delight. "Like dad, I hope."

  "If you are, then your baby will be very lucky." She gave him an odd shy smile. "You know, I sort of wish that I could go back as her, your little girl."

  His mind strayed to an image of Lisa, lying in her long sleep and he ached deep inside. He was so afraid for her, but he didn't let it show on his face. "Why don't you? If we can wake Lisa up, I'm sure she'll be happy to have you."

  "I can't, your baby's soul has been chosen already."

  "It has? Oh, well there you go," he said again. The two smiled at each other and their previous happiness was tinged with melancholy. "I guess..."

  A sudden thunderous shout seemed to shake the air.

  WILL!

  His name had been called out so loudly, with so much force that he jumped, startled and quite a bit frightened. "What was that?"

  Talitha frowned. "What? What was what?"

  "I just heard..."

  HEY, WILL!

  With eyes that had grown huge, he scanned the dull sky and the hills and all about them. "I just heard my name being called. It was so loud that you had to have heard..." he left off with the realization that he knew the voice. "It's mom, I can hear her voice. She's calling me."

  Talitha smiled with thin tight lips and pain in her eyes. "I suppose that means you better go back. She probably needs you."

  "But you need me too..."

  "No, I'm dead, or practically so. It's people with life or... a chance at life who need you, Will." Before he could say anything else, she gave him a kiss on the cheek and then a little shove. "Go on...but you can visit me again, if you want to."

  WAKE UP!

  His head rang with the words, causing him to stagger. "I will, I'll come back."

  Talitha smiled and then she began to fade very much how the Cheshire Cat had done, leaving her sad smile for last. All the lands of the river faded as well and in a moment, he came to, lying in the back seat of the Jimmy, slumped over the dying body of his sister. Confusion and exhaustion made him slow and dull witted, so that it was a few seconds before he realized someone was shaking him.

  "Will! Hey, Will. Wake up."

  "I'm awake," Will said sitting up and blinking like a wide-eyed toddler disturbed from a nap. "I'm up, what's wrong?"

  Gayle was still in the process of pulling over while at same time she leaned around from the driver's seat and shook him. "Listen."

  There was nothing to hear. "What?" He was a little perturbed to have been woken from his dream of his sister. Or had it been real? One of his visions. Just then, he couldn't tell and he wasn't really in the mood to make the mental effort to try to figure it out. "I don't hear noth..."

  Behind him, a small voice stopped his words. "Will?" It sounded like a child lost in the dark, one who was afraid to draw attention to herself and called out only in a tiny whisper, "Will?"

  Frantically, Will tore off his seat belt and while his heart withheld its life giving beat and his lungs stayed in mid swell, he turned to look back. Lisa was lying in a ball with the dead body of his father curled protectively around her. Astonishingly she was awake. Her beautiful green eyes sparkled in the dim light looking more like emeralds than any emerald ever had.

  "Will, is that you?" She peered up at him, her eyes struggling to make out his features behind all of the bruising.

  Tears wanted to jump from his eyes and in vain, he tried to hold them back, but there was no stopping them, joy of that magnitude couldn't be contained. "Yes, I'm right here. I'm right here." By way of explanation for his face he added lamely, "I sort of got in a fight."

  Her eyebrows came up slightly. There were a light gold in color and thin but perfectly formed in an elegant arch. "Oh." She didn't look capable of much more, overwhelming confusion appearing to be her chief emotion. Despite that fact being indisputable, in his excitement Will was unable to repress the multitude of questions that filled his mind.

  "Are you all right?" he asked, as he looked her up and down, for some reason expecting to see the cause of her slumber. "What happened to you? Did it hurt? Do you think the baby is ok?" She was able to blink twice between each question and then nod vaguely to the last one. "Oh, that's great," he continued, enthusiasm had him bent over the back seat and he stroked the golden curls from her face. "How did you wake up?"

  This brought her to her first moment of concentration and her mouth came open as she thought. "Your little sister did it. She was able to do something to...to Amy Harris, I think it was."

  "Talitha? What did she do? Was she in the Void or in..."

  "No not Talitha. It was Katie. And..." More confusion had her blinking slowly as her mind tried to focus after her long ordeal, "And she had a message or wanted me to tell you something. We had a connection for a little while."

  The air was suddenly gone from Will's lungs and no longer could he feel his body. He was completely numb from the neck down. His mouth went dry as well and he was only just able to spit out, "Is Katie, ok?" Lisa shook her head and Will couldn't tell whether it meant that Katie wasn't ok or that Lisa was still bewildered. "Can you at least tell me what she said?" he tried.

  "Katie wants to know if you can give her a ride home."

  Epilogue

  "You're having a contraction." Will said in a tired voice.

  "Oh really? I didn't know," Lisa's face was very white and was lined with a grimace of pain. Her mass of blonde curls sat tied up in a great blob atop her head and she wore a garishly flowered gown, which was in need of changing, the flowers looking ready to wilt right off of it.

  She breathed in and out quickly, but nothing like how they had been taught in their lamaz classes. Many hours ago, Will had given up trying to remind her of the proper technique, it only caused her to glare at him. The contraction was brief and when it was over, Lisa picked up the magazine that sat in her lap. The cover, a glossy picture of some young starlet shown out at the world, smiling because her life was perfect. Lisa gave it a dull look and dropped it again.

  "Would you like some ice?" Will asked as the dutiful and doting husband.

  "No thank you," she sighed, bored. "Remember back when we were excited to have this baby?"

  Will couldn't think that far back. "No."

  "Me too. Uhg! Who ever heard of labor lasting so stinking long? Twenty-eight hours...maybe she's stuck, got turned around or something."

  "She's probably..." Will became temporarily immobilized by tremendous yawn, "...she's probably going for the world record."

  Lisa gave him a half smile, the most effort she could make and looked around the room with eyes that were vibrant in color. They were bloodshot from lack of sleep and the green stood out, and as always, they were her best feature. "How long is the record?"

  "Nineteen months, it was set by a Tibetan monk, who ate nothing but moss the whole time."

  "I thought monks were all men."

  Will nodded. "Yeah, they're weird in China." An exhausted silence followed this; their conversations were getting shorter as the hours progressed. After a time, he found himself watching the line of paper spilling from one of the machines. There was little else to do and after thirty seconds or so, the running blue line on the paper edged upwards. Next to him, Lisa gasped.

  "You're having another contraction, dear," he said in a pleasant hel
pful conversational tone.

  "Thank God you're here to tell me these things," Lisa replied in between gritted teeth.

  Feeling useless, Will could only watch as his wife panted and then grimaced and then panted some more. Gradually she began to calm. "Was that a big one? Did she come out a little?" he asked and then tried to peek beneath the sweat-dampened sheet, but Lisa held it down.

  "Stop being a naughty boy," she glared, yet wasn't at all angry. "Oh, my, I'm so tired. At this rate, I'm going to be too tired to push when it's time. The baby is going to have to crawl out."

  "This is taking so long, she's probably going to be able to walk out." He gave her a smile and felt grit in his eyes. "Speaking of walking, do you mind if I..." He nodded at the door.

  "Sure, go check on your sister, but if she has her baby first, I'm disowning the lot of you."

  He left her with a kiss, and stepped out into the hallway, where soft pastels ruled. They were at the very end of the Labor and Delivery ward and the area had been purposely left secluded. Father Vogel, who was supposed to be surreptitiously regulating who had access to the rooms, was instead sleeping uncomfortably in a very stiff chair. Will couldn't blame him a bit.

  Stepping as lightly as his big frame would permit, Will eased by the priest and slipped into his sister's room. "Hey, how're the contractions coming along?" he asked Katie. In spite of her fatigue, the blonde sat pertly on the side of the bed, she gave her brother a shrug.

  "They're picking up steam, it'll be soon," Katie yawned and stretched. As she turned her neck at different angles to work out the kinks, a wide scar, low down on the left side became visible, Will turned away and looked at a picture of some unknown baby dressed as a bug. His little sister was self-conscious of her scars and didn't care for people staring and he was the worst when it came to that.

  The scars always brought back images of her lying in a great pool of blood shoving her fingers into the wound to keep from bleeding out. With the death of Amy, all of her spells had come unraveled and he had seen his sister, she had needed far more than just a ride home and had been within an ace of needing a ride to the morgue instead.

  Thankfully, the demon-possessed witch had attacked her with the fancy ceremonial dagger instead of a normal knife. On her third strike, she had sent the curved blade into Katie's neck with such force that it passed all the way through and snapped in half against the cement beneath. After that, the blonde had received only nasty defensive wounds on her right arm and had succeeded in placing a number of bullets through the demon's heart and lungs, as well as the coup de gras that went out the top of her head creating a horrid fountain of blood and brains.

  Will blinked away the image. "Where's mom?"

  "Just getting more coffee, only she's doing it at record speed. She's so funny. She acts like she's the first grandmother on earth and doesn't want to miss anything." Katie smiled her bi-polar smile and Will saw it; she had turned too late. Normally, she only presented her right side to people, especially when smiling. That side had a dimple. The other side, her left, had a long wicked scar that became especially pronounced and sinister when she smiled.

  As always, Will pretended not to notice. "I don't blame her, she's had a rough time of it. So, how's the baby?"

  "Kicking like crazy, she definitely wants out. Here, you want to feel?" Katie hopped down from the bed with the easy grace of youth. Will advanced, but was slow to touch, he gave Katie a sheepish look. She forgot herself again and smiled without hesitation or turning. "Just touch the outside of the sheet. That's what I do. All that other stuff, I don't even look at."

  "That's probably best," Will touched the small swell of his sister's belly and as if the baby was waiting for just that, it jumped and kicked.

  "See, just don't think about it and it's like a normal mom and baby," Katie said, going through a series of stretches. To Will, she looked to have grown another inch and stood tall and athletically slim.

  The baby kicked again and he turned from his little sister and stared down at what was left of the body beneath the sheet—what once had been Talitha Jern. There wasn't much left to her now, the venom driven necrosis of the hell blade had taken her extremities and much of her skin. She no longer had a face and her organs were pared down to a minimum, and even these wouldn't last another day, but her womb was an untouchable vault. It was there that she was giving herself her second chance, her do over.

  Bishop Keenan had wanted to call the virgin birth a miracle. When Will mentioned this to Talitha she had bored him silly with a long-winded lecture on the wonders inherent to binary fission, mitosis, and cellular division in general. Will hadn't bother to follow along. All he knew was that instead of one baby, he would be having two and he couldn't be happier. And besides, he didn't need a bishop to pronounce the upcoming birth miraculous.

  Talitha had never considered herself blessed, yet to him, she was a straight up miracle. No one had ever gone through what she had and no one ever could, at least not with so much courage. Had it been him, Will would never have made the choice to come back for a second shot at life, not after all she had gone through. He would've dashed across that river at the first opportunity.

  But not her. Two months before, just after she had told him of her decision to come back, he had asked her if she was certain that it was a good idea. They were standing by the river and she turned her heavy gaze upon him and she knew what he meant.

  "Yes, it's imperative that I go back. Otherwise for me heaven at best would be just a refuge from the possibility of danger, and at worst, it would become a prison. Don't you see? I would be prisoner of heaven and the walls of that prison would be made up of all my fears. That's not what heaven is about. I can see that now."

  She had a way with logic, but in his heart, he still worried for her. "There's so much that could go wrong...even in a normal life. You could get married too young or end up with the wrong man or no man at all. You could get in a car accident and be paralyzed—your driving is atrocious, and we both know it. You follow so closely that you could..."

  She stayed his increasingly strident worries. "You sound like a dad. In point of fact you sound like someone who could be my dad. I'll need one, you know. I've decided to start completely over and I'll have no memory of any of this. I'll be a baby like any other."

  "And you want me to be your father?"

  "I know you love me. I know that you'll lay down your life for mine. I know you'll stay up worrying when I'm out late and I know you'll ground me when I do. And I know you'll be the first to tell me when I'm messing up." They grinned at each other over the truth of that. "And I know that I love you and respect you and I always thought that you'd be great dad to your baby. You could be a great dad to me too."

  "Will I get to spank you?" he asked thinking to make a joke. "Wait...that's too weird. How bout we have Lisa be in charge of spankings? Deal?"

  "Deal."

  The End

  *

  Author's Note

  Thank you for reading The Trilogy of the Void. My goal when writing these books was not only to thrill and entertain my readers, but also to explore the possible nature of hell and purgatory(heaven being somewhat self-explanatory, I saw no need to go down that road). I tried to portray the two alternatives to heaven from the point of having a fully good and just God, one who does not create evil but allows it to exist only as an unfortunate side effect of free will.

  If you enjoyed this series may I suggest A Perfect America and The Sacrificial Daughter. Both of these are not only compelling stories, they are also vehicles for delving into philosophical paradigms that most of us take for granted.

  Finally, on a self-serving note, the review is the most practical and inexpensive form of advertisement an independent author has available in order to get his work known. If you could put a kind review on Amazon and your Facebook page, I would greatly appreciate it.

  Peter Meredith

  Fictional works by Peter Meredith:

  A Perfect A
merica

  The Sacrificial Daughter

  The Apocalypse Crusade War of the Undead Day One

  The Horror of the Shade Trilogy of the Void 1

  An Illusion of Hell Trilogy of the Void 2

  Hell Blade Trilogy of the Void 3

  The Punished

  Sprite

  The Feylands: A Hidden Lands Novel

  The Sun King: A Hidden Lands Novel

  The Sun Queen: A Hidden Lands Novel

  The Apocalypse: The Undead World Novel 1

  The Apocalypse Survivors: The Undead World Novel 2

  The Apocalypse Outcasts: The Undead World Novel 3

  The Apocalypse Fugitives: The Undead World Novel 4

  The Apocalypse Renegades: The Undead World Novel 5

  Pen(Novella)

  A Sliver of Perfection (Novella)

  The Haunting At Red Feathers(Short Story)

  The Haunting On Colonel's Row(Short Story)

  The Drawer(Short Story)

  The Eyes in the Storm(Short Story)