The Further Tales of Tempest Landry Read Free

prison.”
    “But you said that you—”
    “Don’t mattah what I said, Angel. I’m in here behind bars with desperate men through no fault of my own. Your people done did it to me again and still you don’t want me to deny the rule of heaven. You still want to send me to the pit.”
    I had no reply. He expected none.
    Then Tempest smiled again.
    “But I got me a plan.”
    “Oh? What’s that?”
    “I need your help, brother man.”
    “I am not here to help you, Tempest. My job is your downfall.”
    “Your
job
, if I remember right, is to get me to see that I’m a sinner not worthy of heaven, not to throw me down by trickery or by force.”
    Again, I did not answer.
    “So,” he said, knowing that my silence meant that I agreed with his words, “I need you to go and talk to Fredda.”
    “Fredda?”
    “Yeah, man. She know things about Ezzard but she won’t talk up in here ’cause she think that they got ears in the CVP trailer. Maybe they do. I need you to find out from her all you can about me. Maybe there’s somethin’ that could get me outta here.”
    “That is not my job.”
    “Maybe not but this here ain’t right, man. It ain’t right. Sooner or later I’ma commit some kinda sin ’cause that’s what it’s like in prison. You might not be bent comin’ in but you sure the hell will be before you get out…if you ever get out.”
    The door behind Tempest opened and a line of prisoners were led in. Behind me visitors began to arrive. I wondered what Tempest paid to get an early meeting with me.
    “What you say, man?” he asked.
    I looked at him and felt my spirit; an essence once completely without matter now anchored in flesh; flesh that I had come to love and even believe in. In many ways I was as mortal as Tempest but I could not abandon my faith.
    I stood up, stoically silent.
    “Angel,” he called but I did not answer him.
    “You know I got the power to shout down the walls of heaven,” he warned.
    I hung the receiver on its hook and walked out of that room and into the long hall that led toward the outside world where my wife and child and unborn child were waiting. With every step I knew dread because I was sure that before long Tempest would denounce heaven or else become an unrepentant sinner; either way my tenure on earth, and my earthly bliss, would be over.

Fredda Lane
    I have come a long way from heaven.
    Once I was known as Joshua, Accounting Angel of Sin. From the other side of eternity I watched and recorded every act of Man; good, bad, and indifferent. This may sound like something miraculous but, when you understand the nature of the Infinite, it is really quite ordinary. From where I stood there was no such thing as time passing. I could see everything—past and present—and was therefore able to go through a mortal’s life history of good and evil as he or she stood in line awaiting judgment from the Guardian of the Gates of Heaven.
    I loved my job while I had it. I believed in heaven and the perfect order of the moral universe. I knew that I was part of the greatest good allowing for the sins and acts of charity performed by mortals and the rewards and punishments those transgressions and kindnesses engendered.
    Then I was given a mortal body and sent to earth on a mission of damnation. Tempest Landry, the Errant Soul, had refused the verdict of heaven. Because of this exercise of free will, he threatened the balance of a system that has existed longer than the atoms in my now mortal body.
    The task seemed straightforward enough. All I had to do was convince Tempest of his sins, see him off to hell, and return to the bosom of heaven.
    But when I arrived in the temporal realm I realized that sin was not such a simple thing to gauge or judge; that mortality brings with it a frail divinity and grace that I never knew in eternity.
    —
    And so I found myself one Tuesday afternoon, sitting in a metal chair, in front of a sheet of bulletproof glass, awaiting the arrival of a