"But fear came, fear when you realized that even if you died you might not understand anything, that there might be nothing...."

"...yes. And now I fear something worse. That there is something, certainly, and it may be worse than nothing at all."

"You're right to think so. It doesn't take much of a thumbscrew or the nails or the fire to make men and women wish for oblivion. Not much at all. Imagine, to wish that you had never lived."

"I know the concept. I fear knowing the feeling again."

"You're wise to fear, but you've never been more ready for what I have to reveal."

Chapter Twenty One

The wind swept the rocky field, the great centrifugal force dissolving and releasing those souls who struggled to be free of it at last as they assumed distinct human shape and pounded on the Gates of Hell, or wandered along the impossibly high walls, amid the flicker of fires within, reaching out for and imploring each other.

All voices were lost in the sound of the wind. Souls in human shape fought and struggled, others roamed as if in search of something small and lost and then lifted their arms and let the whirlwind once again take hold of them.

The shape of a woman, thin and pale, reached out to gather a wandering, weeping flock of baby souls, some not old enough yet to walk on two legs. The spirits of children wandered, crying piteously.

We drew near the gates, near narrow broken arches rising as black and fine as onyx worked by medieval craftsmen. The air was filled with soft and bleating cries.

Everywhere spirit hands reached to take hold of us; whispers covered us like the gnats and flies of the battlefield. Ghosts tore at my hair and coat.

Help us, let us in, damn you, curse you, cursed, take me back, free me, I curse you forever, damn you, help me, help ... a rising roar of opprobrium.

I struggled to clear the way for my eyes. Tender faces drifted before me, mouths issuing hot and mournful gasps against my skin.

The gates weren't solid gates at all but gateways.

And beyond stood the Helpful Dead, seemingly more solid, only more vividly colored and distinct, but diaphanous still, beckoning to the lost souls, calling to them by name, howling over the fierce wind that they must find the way inside, that this was not Perdition.

Torches were held high; lamps burnt atop the walls. The sky was torn with streaks of lightning, and the great mystic shower of sparks that comes from cannons both modern and ancient. The smell of gunpowder and blood filled the air. Again and again the lights flared as if in some magical display to enchant a Chinese court of old, and then the blackness rolled back, thin and substanceless and cold all around us.

"Come inside," sang the Helpful Dead, the well-formed, well-proportioned ghosts—

ghosts as determined as Roger had been, in garbs of all times and all nations, men and women, children, old ones, no body opaque, yet none weak, all reaching past us into the valley beyond, trying to assist the struggling, the cursing, the foundering.