A Deafening Silence In Heaven - Thomas E. Sniegoski Page 0,66

Lord in all His magnificence as He was about to reunify all that had once been and raise humanity to its next level.

A new Heaven to define them all.

Michael had never experienced such bliss as he had at that moment, touched by the power of He who had made it all. And a single thought had run through his mind.

Maybe I was wrong.

Michael twitched violently as if stabbed, crying out with the sudden savagery of his memory.

It always made him scream, no matter how many times he relived it.

One moment God was alive—one with everything as He brought together that which had been sundered—and the next . . .

There came a sound like something harkening back to the creation of it all, when the Almighty wished something from nothing . . . but this time it had nothing to do with the beginning . . . with life.

It was about the end of it all . . . death.

The sight of his Lord God falling dead on the steps of the Golden City brought steaming tears to Michael’s eye.

The memory was as overwhelming as it always was.

He remembered crying out as he’d turned to the gathered multitude, remembered the horror-filled expressions of those who had come to participate in an event of celestial magnitude, but instead bore witness to an atrocity of cosmic proportions.

He saw them all, their faces frozen in the darkness of his memory.

Had any of them been responsible?

It was a question he believed would never be answered, for he’d thought those whose faces haunted his memories to be as dead as the God who’d created them.

Or were they?

Michael looked down upon the angel Remiel.

“Time to wake up, Remiel,” the archangel said, willing what little divine fire he could muster into his hand as he grasped the angel’s throat.

And the air was filled with the hiss and stink of burning flesh.

• • •

He remembered the feeling. There was nothing quite like it.

It aroused every sense; he could smell it in the air, feel it beneath his feet and through everything he touched, hear it with sounds like the planet’s largest symphony tuning its instruments, and see it—

One only had to look into the sky to see it.

Remy saw through the eyes of someone else’s memory, but that someone just happened to be another version of himself.

The realization caused an increasing wave of discomfort, a horrible burning sensation that threatened to draw him from the wonderful memory of how it had been when Heaven had made its presence known to the world.

He remembered how he’d left his home on Beacon Hill, going out into the streets as nearly everybody else on the Hill had done. They were all just standing there, looking up into the sky above them. It was still blue, with gorgeous, puffy white clouds that looked as though they’d been torn from bales of cotton, but there was something else.

Something else behind the sky.

Remy had known what it was, and he’d suspected that many others who gazed upon it knew as well. Perhaps they knew it by a different name: the Hereafter, Utopia, Providence, Elysium, Canaan, Zion . . .

But all were the same place.

The place in which the Creator dwelled.

Heaven.

Remy recalled people crying as they looked upon it, some dropping to their knees and praying. Others just laughed, and smiled, and hugged one another, sensing that this was a special time.

And it was. It was a time that Remy had believed he would never see.

“What is it, Remy?” asked a familiar voice from behind him.

He’d felt Marlowe’s cold snout nuzzling his hand, as he’d turned to look upon the visage of . . .

Madeline, his wife. Alive.

The memory became suddenly . . . wrong, reminding him that this wasn’t his memory, but the memory of another . . . him.

Although he had to admit she’d never looked more beautiful as she’d stood there upon the steps of their home, the ravages of old age and cancer not evident in any way whatsoever.

The sight of her was better than . . . better than Heaven in the sky above.

And he knew suddenly that it was because of him.

Because of something he had done.

He had broken the rules to keep her with him.

“Isn’t it wonderful!” she’d exclaimed, gazing up at the Kingdom of Glory, tears in her beautiful brown eyes, clear of cataracts and the dullness of sickness.

And he’d had to say, “Yes,” as he looked upon his living wife. It was the most wonderful thing he