For A Few Souls More (Heaven's Gate Book 3) Read Free Page A

Heaven?” Atherton didn’t bother to keep the cynicism from his voice.
    “I know, it’s a hard concept to grasp, isn’t it? Again the ethereal, the spiritual, given flesh. Heaven is not a place we would ever have granted geography. Even those of us who believed unequivocally in its presence would think of it as abstract, a place of the mind, not somewhere solid. Hell too. These were domains of the soul, that insubstantial, intangible essence. What use did the soul have of walkways? Bricks and mortar?”
    He was looking towards Wormwood, Atherton knew, even though it was not visible here in the crater.
    “I would always have suspected,” the monk continued, “that, however we visualised the afterlife, God or the Devil, we would be doing so in a reductive fashion. The reality would be even more abstract than our human minds could picture. Actually, the opposite is the case. It’s as solid as we are. Perhaps, given that, it’s not so absurd to believe God may be dead after all. Maybe he was as ruined, as tethered by the flesh as we all are.”
    “I remain to be convinced.”
    Father Martin smiled. “And to think, earlier I complained that the intangibility of theology was lost to us. Perhaps we have just as many mysteries as we always did. Except now the answers may be found by explorers not philosophers, archeologists not clerics.”
    “If our government has its way, that soil will never be dug. They will want the doorway closed. Heaven and Hell, if they exist as physical continents, must be vaster than any other on the map. That they should exist, here... That cannot be allowed.”
    “I wonder if that would have been the case had Wormwood appeared in England?” Father Martin asked.
    Atherton was not going to be drawn into a political argument, however much he knew that the monk had put his finger on the truth. “You said yourself, that place should not exist.”
    “Indeed not. Whatever my beliefs I am no idiot. To have Heaven and Hell on our doorsteps, to be able to walk directly into either...”
    “Or to have whatever inhabits them walk into our world.”
    “Exactly. It would have been better were that not to have happened. I cannot believe it is what God wants, or, perhaps wanted . What chance does any human soul have if it can simply stroll into paradise? The chaos you saw down there, the monstrosities and the aberrations, they will only be the beginning, of that I’m quite sure. Soon, mankind will match it for its excesses. Can you imagine what our world will be like once people realise there are no limitations? That there is no need to await heavenly reward? That Hell can simply be walked away from? Do you think the human race is strong enough to retain its morality, its sense of propriety, in the face of that?”
    Atherton held the morality of the world in low esteem and always had. “No.”
    “And so, if the doorway can be closed it must, for all our sakes.”
    “God’s work?” Atherton smiled.
    Father Martin, for all he knew he was being mocked, nodded. “I believe so. And even if that is the only belief I am left with, I will hold onto it.”
     
     
    5.
     
    A FTER A THERTON ANNOUNCED his intention to remain in the camp, at least for now, Father Martin instructed a couple of men to gather the man some supplies. A bed roll, a canopy, a little food and water. These people didn’t have much but they did their best to share.
    That night, as the camp slept under the stars, the air filled with the faint sound of smouldering fires and snoring, Atherton lay awake and imagined what might lie ahead.
    Father Martin had been right, of course, his government’s concern was not a spiritual one. The idea that America now possessed both Heaven and Hell on its soil, vast, powerful landscapes with undreamed of populations; such a thing was terrifying to every other country in the world. Certainly he would not be the only agent of a foreign power currently charged to investigate. He imagined swarms of them