Chapter 1

Some things become possible if we want them bad enough.

- T.S. Eliot

Isaac

Kate perched on the iron railing of the organ loft, feet swinging in the air. Isaac sat at the bench, but the magnificent instrument slumbered. He didn’t dare disturb the vast quietude again. They spoke in hushed voices; the dark grandeur of the cathedral pressed in close around them. The stained-glass windows far overhead glinted faintly as mysterious lights moved beyond. In the silence, Isaac thought he could almost hear something from up there, like distant voices, perhaps even laughter.

“You s-s-still haven’t p-played anything!” said Kate in a low voice, almost a whisper. She was grinning, more at the white butterfly fluttering about than at him, and she flipped her long mass of dark hair over her shoulder. Her pale sandaled feet flashed rhythmically out from under her achingly bright dress as she bounced slightly back and forth on the rail, content.

“I’m trying to take it all in, okay? I died, give me a break. Look, it even says on my jacket.” He turned so she could see the words “Dead Man Walking” on the back of his blue jacket.

Kate folded her arms and raised her chin defiantly. “I d-di-died t-too, you know.”

Isaac turned back to the organ console. He ran his fingers over the smooth ivory keys. He examined the polished stops. This organ had more stops than he’d ever seen, and he had no idea what half of them were. For all he knew, one of them was Ceiling Collapses. Yeah, probably right there in between Roll For Initiative and Release The Kittens. Above Summon Online Friend, and below Find Out You’re Not Really Dead (Maybe). He put a hand to his throat. “Do you remember it?” he asked. “Dying?”

She shook her head. “I f-fe-f-I fell. She g-got me out b-be-before…” She couldn’t finish. She stopped kicking her legs and looked suddenly like she might cry. Isaac wanted to comfort her, but he did not know what to say. Or he did, but all the things he had to say were stupid. He really didn’t want to be stupid in front of Kate. ‘Oh, hey Kate, I see you have a speech impediment. Fancy that!’ No. Bad Isaac.

“I remember,” he said. He thought about describing what it felt like to have his throat torn open by a bullet from Abraham Black’s gun, but then considered that this could possibly be Tactless and Unhelpful. And besides, the memory gave him chills, made him wipe sweaty palms on his jeans.

A pure white butterfly the size of a CD had been flittering around Kate ever since she came up to the organ alcove. Up till this point, Isaac had ignored it in favor of more pressing matters like not making a doofus of himself, but now seemed like a good time to change the subject.

“So,” he said, “what’s with the butterfly?”

Kate smiled and held out her hand. The butterfly fluttered onto her index finger and flexed its milk-white wings. “This is m-my angel!” she proclaimed. She raised the butterfly aloft like a falconer releasing her bird, though in this case the butterfly decided to stay right where it was. Isaac could not believe in that moment how much she looked like a heroine from the front cover of some pulp fantasy novel, albeit a nerdy heroine with round glasses and a colorful painted lab coat.

“Um,” he said after a weird pause. “Cool. Where’d mine go?” He looked around but did not see Charlie. “Mine’s a bird, anyway. Lots of birds. His name is Charlie.”

“Hmm,” said Kate, absentmindedly playing with the snowflake scarf around her neck. “I d-di-d-I haven’t thought about na-naming him!” She frowned. “Or h-or-her?” She brought the butterfly close and squinted critically. “It’s s-s-some kind of s-swallowt-tail,” she told him. “I th-think it’s f-female.”

Isaac scrunched his eyebrows at the butterfly. “How about Navi?” he suggested.

“N-n-navi?”

“Yes.”

She thought about it. Then she saw something in his expression and narrowed her eyes at him. “Is that a d-d-dumb joke name, Isaac?”

“Hey! Listen, would I do that? Would I just suggest a name for your Very Important Angel just because it reminds me of something from a video game?”

“I th-think N-navi is a g-goo-a good name,” she said. “Regardless of w-whatever s-st-stupid thing it’s from.”

He nodded. “Okay. It’s from th—”

“D-don’t t-tell me!” She fiercely shoved her glasses back up her nose. Isaac took his own off and inspected them. Before he died, the thick lenses had been a bit scratched. Now they looked brand new, set in their blue plastic rims.

Was his whole body new? Would he still have scars? Wait, had he had any scars to begin with? There was the one on his shoulder from the bike wreck that one time…

“W-w-what are you thinking about?” asked Kate.

“My glasses look new. Did we get like new bodies too or something?” New bodies—Isaac remembered that from 2 Corinthians. But weren’t the new ones supposed to be, like, perfect?

Kate nodded and touched her face as though feeling for something. “S-s-something like that.”

“I guess that makes sense,” said Isaac. “My old body’s no good anymore.” He cleared his throat and continued in an exaggerated Boston accent. “A, uh, Critical Failure in the circulatory system. Bit of a misplacement in the hemoglobin department, okay?”

Kate giggled and joined in with a gruff voice in the same accent, “S-s-somebody’s g-gettin fired over this, B-billy.”

“Well it ain’t gonna be me, you hear?”

“Hey let’s b-b-low this p-po-popsi-this p-pop-let’sgetrightonouttahere, whaddaya say?”

“Aye, sounds about right,” said Isaac, his accent slipping.

Kate laughed. “You t-turned into a p- a pirate at the end!”

Isaac spread his hands in a well-there-you-have-it gesture. “And that’s how it was,” he concluded. “We decided to vacate our old bodies…” (he briefly considered and discarded a lame joke about insurance), “and come here. The afterlife.”

“It’s the M-museum.”

“Same thing.”

“Uh, Isaac?” she asked.

“Yeah?”

She bit her lip and looked nervous. Isaac turned back to the keyboard. He almost put his feet up on the pedals before remembering what a light touch they had. How was this thing even turned on, anyway? He didn’t feel the slightest hum or vibration when he touched the paneling. There were no lights, no detectable wiring.

“W-when you w-woke up here,” said Kate in a hesitant voice, “w-w-what…I mean, if it’s okay t-to ask…”

“Yeah yeah it’s fine. You can ask me, like, whatever.” Smooth, Isaac.

“Okay. When you w-wo-woke up here…w-what did you think? D-did you really think you w-were, um, in heaven?”

“Woah.” He paused. “I mean, I figured out pretty quick it wasn’t Heaven. Because, uh, no God. I mean, like, not that I could see, right? But I was all like, ‘hey, what do I know about what Heaven’s like,’ you know? So I thought for a while maybe I was like in Heaven’s waiting room or something.”

“H-heaven’s w-w-waiting room,” she repeated softly behind him.

Isaac was thinking about what to say next when a white-sleeved arm reached over his shoulder and thunked a cluster of keys on the bottom of the third manual down. Nothing happened; the stops were all in. He noticed smeared equations scrawled in pen on the sleeve.

“P-play s-something, Isaac!” she shouted in his ear.

“Aah! I can’t play organ!”

“Then j-ju-just use one k-keyboard!”

“Okay! Fine! Just stop shouting!”

She shouted louder. “It’s f-fine! There’s no one here b-b-but the D-dark Man and he d-do-do-hedoesn’tcare!”

Her last few syllables echoed in the vast space. Isaac didn’t understand what she’d just said or how she knew that, but he didn’t dwell on it. Kate just knew things; that was her whole deal.

Play what? He didn’t want to play just anything , not here. Even though he was pretty much convinced by now that this place had nothing to do with Heaven, he still thought it wouldn’t be appropriate to start bringing in Row Your Boat or something.

The thing he’d been playing for Jacob. Yeah, that would work. Wait, was Jacob okay?

He readied his hands, then remembered he had to apply some stops. He examined them and stalled.

“W-what’s the h-holdup?” asked Kate over his shoulder.

“Uh, it’s the stops,” he said. He reached out hesitantly for a few that he recognized. “I don’t know what most of them are,” he explained.

“Ooh, oooh!” Isaac felt her bouncing up and down behind him in excitement.

“What?”

“Sh-sh-show me the o-ones you d-do-d-youdon’tknow!”

“Okay…” He pointed out a few different rows of columns labeled with abbreviations he couldn’t recall seeing before: Ard., Clr., D.M., ##, Vox Daimon, Tpt.^2.

“Isn’t that one j-just c-cla-clarinet?”

“Uh…probably, yeah.”

“W-w-what d-do these numbers mean?”

“They’re the length of the pipe.”

“In what?”

“What?”

“In w-w-what unit?”

“Feet, I think.”

“That’s s-so weird! Who u-u-uses feet?”

“Uh, like, everyone?”

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

“Ahurr-d-d-durr! L-look at m-me, I’m Isaac and I m-ma-make d-d-dumb jokes! Also I’m an American and use the s-st-stu-the impe-p-perial s-s-system! Well g-guess what? Navi d-d-doesn’t use f-fee-f-fee-shedoesn’tusefeetIsaac!”

She proceeded to crack up with her goofy cackle of a laugh. But she brought up a good question. Why were feet the appropriate system of measurement for something as scientific as pitch frequency? Like, why did that work?

Better question: why did the numbers get so big? The organs at the Methodist church in Pike had stops that went up to 16. So, sixteen feet? But here they kept going: 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024…he didn’t see one larger than that.

“W-what?” asked Kate, once more creeping over his shoulder.

“These numbers…”

“Aren’t they the s-si- the size of the p-pipes?”

“Yeah but look how big they get!”

“Whoa!”

“So let’s see…” he said. “Middle C is 256 Hertz, and it’s like, what, 2 feet long?”

Kate nodded over his shoulder; her hair bobbed up and down. “I s-see! S-so the one-twenty-eight pipe would be only four cycles per s-second! Woah!”

“Yeah. Wait…” He tried to do the math quickly in his head, but Kaitlyn Carter was way ahead of him.

“And the f-f-five-hundred-twelve would be just one! I b-bet that doesn’t even r-re-register as sound!”

She reached over, pulled out the Great 512 stop, and struck a random note on the low end of the bottommost manual out of the five. Nothing happened.

“Wrong manual,” said Isaac. “Up here.” He hit middle C on the correct level.

Indeed, it came not as sound. It came as a pulse of force ripping through the air from somewhere in the darkness beyond, roughly once per second.

He held the key down long enough to experience three pulses. He let it go. He turned in his seat to gaze at Kate and wondered if his own eyes were as wide as hers, his own grin as broad.

They sat down together on the bench and subjected the organ to a variety of creative experimentations. Most of the stops made normal organ noises, albeit maybe at a far lower frequency than normal. The pipes also went up to frequencies too high for them to hear. Celeste, fagotto, tuba, vox humana, assorted mixes, etc, etc.

Then there were the strange ones, indistinguishable from the rest except by virtue of being unfamiliar to Isaac. One of them caused bright ribbons of color to slither down from the darkness above, twining in complex patterns before fading when the key lifted. Another appeared to modify these colors into different shapes, thicknesses, and levels of excitability.

One row of stops changed the arrangement and number of stained-glass windows on the ceiling above; another altered the intensity and movement of the strange lights above the glass. At maximum windows and backlighting, the two of them could just make out the extent of the cathedral. It looked as though a few NFL football stadiums could fit comfortably inside.

Some stops produced no effect beyond a vague sense of movement, as though the entire cathedral had shifted. One stop, when pulled, made two more manuals extend to their left and right, nearly encircling them. The one next to it made part of the floor drop away, revealing a second pedal board, presumably for people with four to six feet.

Isaac realized when the thrill of discovery began to wane that he had been sitting right beside Kate and laughing with her for…what, a half hour? An hour? More? He had no idea. They were touching, reaching over each other in their enthusiasm to try new things.

The thought broke him out of the curiosity which compelled him. He looked around. Charlie (falcon form) rested atop the railing where Kate had sat earlier. He had some kind of…hat? No, that was the butterfly. Navi lazily flexed her wings as Isaac watched.

“What is it?” asked Kate. She stopped playing, and for the first moment in some time, silence reasserted itself as the rightful denizen of this place.

Isaac began to respond with ‘uh, nothing,’ but then he caught sight of the apse and of a tall dark figure standing there, looking up at them from under a dark hat.

His words froze in his throat. Only a thin, embarrassing whine escaped his lips. In that moment, he knew that somehow Abraham Black had followed him here to finish him off, and he would kill Kate too.

He felt Kate leaning over to look. “Oh!” she said. “It’s him!”

Isaac tried to rise, to leap to his feet and attempt some kind of escape. But where to run? A motion from Charlie, apparently awaking from sleep, caught his eye. Of course! The angels! He jumped to his feet, an action made somewhat awkward by the extra manuals hemming him in. He un-heroically fumbled with the wayward spare manual, trying to figure out whether it folded up, folded down, or slid back in somehow.

Kate, meanwhile, waved at the dark figure and shouted, “Hey! H-hello!”

“Kate!” said Isaac, at last giving up and sliding awkwardly out of the arms of the organ console. “Kate, run! He—it’s Black!”

“Isaac, that’s r-ra-raci-r- he’s not b-black, Isaac! Chill out!”

“No, I–” he finally scrambled out and to his feet next to Kate. A glance revealed that the figure had vanished.

Dread gripped Isaac. He could hear that dry, hacking chuckle. The cold click of revolvers cocking. A run of thick blood down those freak-white teeth, down his chin. A phantom pain flashed through his throat where the bullet had torn through. He looked around desperately. Gone.

He turned to Kate and seized her by a shoulder. “Kate, we have to go.”

“Isaac, I think you n-need t-to calm down.”

He turned her to face him. “No! You need to–to–to calm up!”

She squinted her eyes at him and tilted her head sideways.

“Where’s your angel? We need to go!”

“Ch-chill, Isaac!”

“No!” He started trying to drag her.

Kate said, “Th-thank you” and reached over his left shoulder. She drew her arm back. It held an electric bass. With a roundabout one-arm swing, she sent the body of the guitar on a course for his head. Isaac fell backwards in time to avoid the bulk of the impact, but the edge of the bass still clipped his forehead.

He tumbled back against the organ bench, bruising his shoulder before falling to the ground. From the ground, he saw that at some point the tall dark figure had appeared roughly behind him. He saw also, even from his upside-down vantage, that it was not Abraham Black. Or at least some things were different, and Isaac felt oddly sure that Abraham Black didn’t change outfits. This man’s coat had hints of color, and he had a white butterfly resting on one shoulder. Abraham Black didn’t like butterflies.

The shadow of the stranger’s hat obscured the upper half of his face, leaving visible only a pale, sharp jaw with patchy stubble and a hawk-like nose. His thin lips met in a slight smile. He held something in one hand, and without preamble dropped it on Isaac’s face. Isaac flinched, but the impact was light. He identified the object as a hat. His hat. His woven horsehair hat from a Hutterite colony that Dwayne had given him years ago.

When he lifted the hat, the black-clad figure had vanished. Kate leaned over him, the bass guitar over one shoulder and a hand offered to help him to his feet. He accepted her hand and stood up.

“Ow,” he said, touching his forehead, although really it didn’t hurt much. The shoulder would hurt more, eventually.

“W-w-well you w-were f-fr-freaking out.”

“Who was that?” Isaac moved to the railing and looked out over the cathedral, but didn’t see the black-clad man.

“It’s the D-dark Man.”

“Dark Man.”

She nodded. “W-w-well, that’s what I call him.”

“Who…uh, why was he here?”

“T-to give me this, I th- I think.” She looked down at the green and black bass in her hands. “B-b-but he forgot a n-neck strap this time!”

This time? Isaac watched as Kate jumped back up on the railing, leaned precariously for a moment as she caught her balance, then proceeded to tune the bass. It was really, really out of tune.

It didn’t occur to him until after he’d been watching for about half a minute that the bass was not plugged into anything, and that the sound seemed to be emanating from the same vague upward direction as the organ music.

He had questions. Who was this Dark Man, and why did he care about bringing Kate a bass? Or, for that matter, bringing Isaac his hat? Isaac hadn’t even been wearing this hat when he died.

“S-so…” said Kate while she tuned. “You w-woke up in this ch-church?”

“Yeah.”

“Hmm,” she said. “You’re n-no- you’re not C-catholic. V-ve-v-most peculiar.”

Isaac looked out at the big dark space of the cathedral, then up at the stained-glass windows overhead.

“I h-hope the others are okay,” she said. She paused from tuning to check her phone.

Isaac checked his own phone. Everything seemed to be in order. No service, of course, nor wifi or data coverage. That did not surprise him. He had a message, though, from a number that was all garbled nonsense. He checked the message and discovered that it, too, was garbled nonsense.

“I ha-haven’t b-been in a church,” said Kate, “i-in a looooong t-time.” Her voice sounded casual. Too casual, as she had carefully scripted this statement before speaking.

“Uh, I was at church just a couple days ago,” he said.

“Mm-hm. W-wh-what was it a-again?” she asked as she twisted a tuning knob and warped a pitch.

“Pikeston First Baptist Church,” he said, “although it is also the Only Baptist Church.”

“‘F-f-first B-baptist’ is p-probably the name of—“

“Yeah, yeah, it’s like the name of the denomination or whatever. Hey, have you ever seen these churches that are, like, incorrectly hyphenated? Like once I saw an Evangelical Free Church but with a hyphen between ‘Evangelical’ and ‘Free.’ So, it’s like, they’re free of evangelicals!” Isaac chuckled, amused as always by incorrect hyphenations.

“I g-get it, Isaac.” Kate stopped what she was doing, shoved her slipping glasses up the bridge of her nose in a businesslike way, looked Isaac dead in the eyes and said, “Isaac, do you believe in God?”

He nodded.

“S-s-say it.” She aimed the neck of the bass at him. He looked for a joke in her bright green eyes but didn’t see one.

He put a hand to his head and said, “Well like, it’s weird for me to think of it that way.” She narrowed her eyes in a way which told him this wasn’t good enough. He continued. “I guess it’s like me saying, ‘do you believe in your aunt Becky?’ Like if we’re talking about just his existence then—“

“Say it, Isaac.”

“I believe in God. And just to be clear, that’s like the triune God as described in the Nicene creed.”

“D-do you really b-believe in him?”

“Yup.”

“Reeeeeaaaaaaaaaallllly??”

“Hundred percent.”

She frowned down at the floor, nodded as though this was satisfactory, and made a few final adjustments to the bass.

Isaac came upon Significant Hardship when trying to put the same question to her. He thought he knew the answer, roughly, just as she must have known, but he wanted to hear it. He gathered up his courage and asked, “Do you?” His voice cracked as he said this. He cleared his throat, opened his mouth to try again, then decided against it.

“Phffft! Awwwkward!” said Kate, bursting into laughter. She gave the bass a final strum and stood. “W-w-we’ll see, Isaac!”

“Was that an answer to my question?”

“Yes!”

“But that’s not a legit answer! You can’t just say ‘we’ll see’ when you’re talking about God.”

“I c-can, and I d-did.”

Arguments scrambled through Isaac’s head, such as: ‘But, like, what if you die? It’s too late to say ‘we’ll see’ once you see Him.’ But…not now. Later, Isaac. Later.

“So…” he said, “What now?”

“W-w-we got p-places to be!” she said with a grin. “Y-you drive!”

“Aye-aye, cap’n!”

Wait. Drive?