Acheron Falls

By D.E. Lewis

Of the many words Elizabeth Dane would have used to describe her life, 'posthumous' was probably farthest down the list. So it came as some surprise to her when a fateful car accident vaulted it right to the top, not to mention vaulting her right into Heaven.
Not one to be deterred by something as inconvenient as death, Ellie quickly sets about looking for a way back to her mortal coil. The path back appears in the unlikely form of William Granger, an angry 'Cast Aside' with his own axes to grind. Despite an instant wedge of mutual dislike between them, the two form a tenuous alliance, each agreeing to help the other get what they want.
Armed only with their inability to get along and a plan that involves breaking the one rule that Heaven actually has, what could possibly go wrong?

------

This story started some eighteen years ago with the movie Titanic. As anyone who has seen the movie will recall, in the final scene the main character Rose walks up the Grand Staircase of the Titanic to a smiling, waiting Jack, surrounded by applauding passengers and crew. Roll credits, cue lights, and everyone leaves the theater or ejects the DVD in tears. The implication being of course, that Rose has passed at the end of the movie and this is Heaven where she is finally re-united with her one true love.

That ending never sat well with me. The character of Rose was married. It was there for anyone paying attention – her granddaughter traveling with her, then the brief scene where she arrives via helicopter and the salvage team talks about her background: she was married to ‘a guy named Calvert’ who is now dead. Most people gloss right over it as it’s entirely tangential to the story.

She would have been married to Calvert for forty, maybe fifty years? As I watched the ending of Titanic, I couldn’t help but imagine this Calvert fellow sitting there in Heaven patiently waiting for his wife of fifty years to cross over so that they might be together again – only to have her finally get there and go straight to... Jack?

That seemed... well... just completely brutal and so it simmered on the back burner of my subconscious until this story eventually worked its way out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9780988883512

Book preview

1

The vast majority of human beings go about their daily business feeling, at any given moment, like they’re going to live forever. Or, at the very least, they go about said business secure in the knowledge that their death is somehow sufficiently far off so as not to warrant much in the way of concern about it.

Elizabeth Dane certainly wasn’t concerned about it, given that she was only twenty-two years old and fresh out of college. A four-year major in English at the University of Virginia had her on track for post-graduate law school at the same institution, and to that end she had taken up a summer job interning at her father’s law offices.

The commute was typical for the DC area. Their house was a 3,200 square foot, five bedroom country-style home that her parents had renovated off Hunters Mill Road. She pulled onto the Dulles Toll Road every morning with the vague feeling that the money spent on the toll was worth the time saved sitting in traffic, and while she didn’t feel like today was anything special, because in particular it wasn’t, it did happen to be the last day of her life.

*****

Elizabeth Dane was born to Arthur and Andrea Dane, an upper-middle-class couple from Northern Virginia. She’d spent her early years terrorizing the Sterling playgrounds; always inquisitive and bright-eyed, she wasn’t afraid to ask anyone about anything, a habit that sometimes delighted and sometimes mortified her mother. But Arthur saw it as an intelligent curiosity that would serve her well in life so he patiently explained everything he could whenever she directed her inquisitions toward him. By the time Elizabeth graduated from middle school, her parents had moved to the Hunters Mill house, whose proximate location in the Fairfax County Public Schools system placed her in James Madison High School.

As stints in public high schools went, hers landed on the low side of the Hell-on-Earth-o-meter. She seemed to be one of the lucky few who could fit in with just about any crowd and while she was not part of the popular elite, she also didn’t feel any need to be. She got along well with just about everyone and she had her group of friends who liked to do their thing and they didn’t need or want the approval of the rest of the school to do it.

By her senior year, Ellie, as she liked to be called, had developed into quite the captivating young woman whose shoulder-length brunette hair, strong jaw line, and hazel eyes prompted more than a few second glances when she walked down the hall. This, however, was offset by a rapier wit, which she often put to use when members of the opposite sex took it upon themselves to try to press their luck or anything else upon her. To a certain extent she enjoyed the repartee, if not the attention.

By the time college rolled around, her group of friends had become somewhat fractured as they each went off to different schools, but Ellie was happy to be accepted into early admission at the University of Virginia. She had already decided that she wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps and become a lawyer, and of the two primary majors leading to that particular career path, English or Philosophy, she found English to be the much more practical one. Something about the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God left a bad taste in her mouth. Add to that the fact that she could crank out English papers on just about any subject without breaking a sweat and English became the de facto winner. So when she finally graduated cum laude, Dean’s List, et.al., four years later, she blew past her LSATs and was summarily accepted into the university’s law school program. Wanting to get a jump start on that as well, she immediately canvassed Arthur for an internship at his law offices for the summer which he was only too happy to oblige.

*****

And so the course of her life had led her to this particular morning; waking to the intentionally annoying ringtone she’d chosen for her iPhone alarm, while feeling absolutely no desire whatsoever to do that for which the alarm was intended. It was still pitch-black out and she sluggishly remembered that she had set the alarm two hours earlier than usual in order to beat the standard DC-area rush-hour traffic since she had a significant amount of research to do on one of the partners’ cases. The month of June had unleashed a minor tempest, the weather having turned fairly inclement sometime during the night, and rain was pummeling down around the house in buckets.

The bad weather outside made the warm comforter that much more inviting. Combined with their Irish Setter, Clancy, snuggled up at her feet, it felt like an almost insurmountable weight to get out from under. Despite this she knew that ultimately she had to go to work and so three snooze buttons later she finally motivated herself to crawl out of bed and go about her morning routine.

Her father was in Boston prepping for a case, thus depriving her of her carpool partner for the week. Her mother worked for Honeywell but was traveling with her father, enjoying the more metropolitan aspects of Beantown, and her older sister, Michelle, was living away from home, attending grad school at Johns Hopkins. She had the house to herself, and she took a moment to enjoy the solitude of the rain smacking away at the roof.

She had showered and lain out an outfit the evening before, so her only requirements were hair and makeup, which she performed with the wispy thoughtlessness born of multitudinous repetition, after which she wandered downstairs to the kitchen where she prepped and finished a warm bowl of oatmeal. She scratched Clancy the dog as he came down to look for any potential table scraps and she bid him goodbye.

She hopped into her car, a white Volkswagen Jetta, cranked the engine, and backed out of the garage. Five minutes later she was on the Dulles Toll Road heading east, starting the jaunt down to Rosslyn where the offices of Wheeler Burton Dane were located. It was a thirty-minute commute, but it gave her the chance to listen to the satellite radio she’d gotten for Christmas the year before. Ordinarily, she liked to listen to their comedy channel but they were doing a British revival this morning and despite years of her dad trying to impress their sense of humor on her, she didn’t get it, so Pop Hits Countdown became the channel du jour.

The rain was cascading down in torrential sheets as the windshield wipers on her Jetta struggled frantically to keep up with the deluge. She eventually slowed to around fifty, given the poor visibility.

Farther down the freeway, Frank Golisano had pulled over to what he believed was the side of the road and turned off his running lights. In the heavy rain, he couldn’t see that his car was still partially on the freeway.

By the time Elizabeth saw his car halfway in her lane, it was too late. Her car hit his, corner on corner, spinning her vehicle around twice out into the freeway where it came to rest in a disheveled, steaming heap. Three seconds after that, it was hit driver’s-side-on by an Escalade. Ellie never felt it.

2

Ellie awoke with a start, sitting bolt upright in her bed. Mildly disoriented, it only took her a moment to realize that it wasn’t actually her own bed, nor was it any bed she recognized.

She was in a white room filled with ambient light, the uniformity of which almost brought on vertigo. Despite the lack of windows or otherwise obvious lighting, the room seemed to be lit anyway, which did nothing to help her confusion.

She tried to remember how she had gotten to this place, but could not.

She tried to remember the last thing she could remember and caught a vague whiff of a recollection of lying in her own bed with the dog. The disconnect between lying in her bed at home and lying in this one caused a small amount of panic to well up and her heart immediately began pounding faster. She threw the covers off and saw that she was dressed in a white gown. Flipping her legs over the edge of the bed, she stood up and immediately felt dizzy, causing her to sit heavily back down.

As she sat there trying to push past the dizziness, she could feel the sheets on her hands and legs and it occurred to her that they felt almost preternaturally crisp and clean, as if they’d been washed and starched only moments ago.

She took the time to try to really focus on the memory of lying in her own bed with the dog, and caught another whiff of a memory of driving down the toll road in pouring rain. She tried to zero-in on that memory, but it was elusive. The more she tried to remember it, the more elusive it became until she got to the point where she was not even sure that it was a real memory at all.

Eventually giving up in frustration, she turned instead to take stock of herself and the room. She appeared to be fine. She could discern no apparent injuries, visible or otherwise, to her person. Everything moved the way it should and nothing hurt, so she directed her attention outward. The room was about fifteen feet by fifteen feet. There was only her bed sticking straight out from the wall and an equally white door on the wall parallel to the left of the bed. The bed itself was a classic, a white-painted iron bed frame that seemed more apropos for the nineteen fifties than anything from her era. She tried to see where the ambient light was coming from but could detect no obvious sources. The whole thing was completely surreal and her mind ran through possible scenarios ranging from elaborate practical joke to government abduction to new age mental ward in as many seconds. She debated whether to try the door or not.

The dizziness seemed to have passed so she made a decision, stood up, and walked hesitantly toward the door. When she got to it, she paused only a moment before reaching out for the door handle, but before she could touch it, the door swung open and she yanked her arm back, startled. A man in a white doctor’s coat walked in and she backed up a step toward the bed. He was smiling, though, and didn’t seem threatening in any way even as he stepped in and closed the door behind him. She just didn’t know who he was, where she was, or what the hell was going on.

Okay, who are you? Where am I? What the hell is going on? were naturally the first words out of her mouth. She looked him up and down. He was about six feet tall, lean, angular, and quite attractive in a daytime soap opera kind of way.

Who I am is not overly important. You may call me Seraph. That will do for now. As for where you are and what’s going on .… He paused to inhale. You might want to take a seat.

Something about his earnestness prompted her to go along with his suggestion; she sat back down on the bed.

First of all—do you remember your name?

Of course. Elizabeth Dane.

Excellent. Do you remember what happened?

I don’t remember how I got here, if that’s what you’re asking.

It is.

She sat still for a moment and concentrated again. I just get images.… Flashes, really. I remember sleeping in my bed and I remember driving down the freeway in the rain.

Very good. Do you—

Seraph, she interrupted, what’s going on? Are you a doctor? Is this a hospital?

He shook his head. This is not a hospital and I’m not a doctor. I haven’t even played one on TV. He seemed to add that as an afterthought.

Okay. Then what is it? Where am I? What’s going on? The insistence in her voice rose with each question.

Seraph sighed. This is a staging area. We find it eases people’s transition.

Transition into what?

He paused for a moment, then, Why, Heaven, of course.

Her heart skipped a beat. You’re joking, right?

Since I pride myself on an impeccable sense of humor, I will simply say no.

Heav—? she started. As in ‘Heaven’, Heaven? As in, I’m—

No longer among the living, Seraph stated.

You mean I’m dead.

Seraph hesitated again. Yes. He waited a few more seconds and when she didn’t say anything further, he offered, Would you like me to leave? Do you need some time to process this on your own?

That got her attention. Hell, no! The last thing I want is to be left alone right now. Especially in this place!

Seraph raised an eyebrow. We definitely need to work on your conversational word choices.

She looked up sharply. Why? Will it get me in trouble?

No. Not particularly. It’s just a little inappropriate. Kind of like going to Burger King and ordering Chicken McNuggets, he said with a wry smile. They tend not to appreciate it, even though they know what you mean.

She sat contemplating for a few more seconds, then, Where was the bright light?

Pardon? Seraph asked.

You know, the bright light? The dead relatives beckoning? That whole deal. Where was the light?

This room is not bright enough for you? he asked with a raised eyebrow.

Ellie skewered him with a look from the arsenal usually reserved for skirmishes with her sister.

He quickly continued. It’s different for everyone. Some people see light, some see other people, some feel warmth, and some experience some combination of all of the above. Still others feel nothing at all. It really all depends on the circumstances of your passing.

Uh-huh. And what were those circumstances, exactly? Because I can’t seem to remember anything.

You were in a car accident, he said simply. During a rainstorm, you ran into another driver’s vehicle, which started a chain reaction of events culminating in your arrival here.

With Seraph’s description the mental images of events came partially back. She remembered the startling appearance of the other car out of nowhere and the sickening crunch of metal-on-metal as her car impacted his. For the first time she entertained the idea that this might be on the level. Then her thoughts instantly went down another path. What about my family?

What about them?

Are they going to be okay? What’s happening with them?

They are going through the grieving process. In the long term they will be okay, as anyone in this situation eventually would be.

What the he—What does that mean? That doesn’t sound reassuring at all. Can I see them?

Seraph hesitated again. It’s not a good idea.

Why?

At this point both parties need to accept and move on. If you go down there and see them, it will be that much more difficult for you to let go. And they won’t even know you’re there. At the end of the day, it’s really quite an extravagant form of self-torture.

I need to see them.

They always do, Seraph muttered to himself. You’re sure? Seraph asked, looking back at her.

Yes.

Seraph sighed. "Okay. Hold—

—on," he finished, and suddenly they were looking down on a room in a hospital ward from the ceiling.

Where are we? she asked, and as she asked, she realized she was more thinking it than asking it out loud, at which point it occurred to her that she no longer had a body.

ICU. Fairfax Hospital.

Why are we here?

You asked to be taken to your family. This is where they are right now.

She looked down and saw a body lying in a bed, semi-propped up with tubes and ventilators coming out of it, each going to a different machine. The head was covered in bandages and only one eye and part of a cheekbone were visible. A heart monitor sat by the bed, beeping rhythmically and another monitor that she didn’t recognize sat next to it, showing a flatline. She somehow knew the body on the bed was hers. She felt connected to it in a way she couldn’t define and the last doubts concerning Seraph and her current status evaporated. Her family: mother, father, and sister, stood around the bed, eyes red with tears.

Are you satisfied? Seraph asked.

She could tell that his voice came from a place right next to her and when she shifted her attention in that direction, she could see a softly glowing yellow light.

Is that you, Seraph?

Yes.

Do I look the same?

To me, yes.

She shifted her attention back to the scene below. Mom! Dad! I’m here!

They continued to stare at her body in the ICU without looking up.

Michelle! I’m here! Hey, Big Sis!

They can’t hear you, Seraph supplied. They can’t see you. They have no way of knowing you’re here. There is literally no way on Earth for you to interact with them.

What happens if I try?

Go ahead, Seraph said with the loose boredom of someone who had seen this same scene play out millions of times.

Ellie floated lower into the room. She didn’t know how she did it. It was akin to getting up out of a chair and walking across a room. When you stop to think about it, you don’t really know how you do it, you just do it. She floated as close to her parents as she could and yelled as loud as she could. Nothing. No response. She floated in front of her sister, who stared through her, equally oblivious. She tried moving through her parents but it didn’t really happen, it felt more like she passed around them rather than through them. She turned her attention back to the ceiling where the pale, glowing yellow light that was Seraph shimmered.

Why don’t we have bodies? Why can’t we walk around?

What did you expect? Some kind of Hollywood movie where we walk around among the living and people pass right through us?

Well, now that you mention it, yes. Why don’t I have some kind of ghost body?

It doesn’t work that way. Your body, as you’ve already seen and felt, is lying there on the bed. Why would you expect to have a second one to walk around with?

Because up in Heaven, in the staging area, I had a body and I walked around with it.

That was Heaven. This is Earth. Two different realms with two different sets of rules and two different sets of infrastructure. Heaven’s infrastructure is not designed to handle corporeal bodies. Earth’s infrastructure is only indirectly equipped to handle ethereal ones.

Indirectly? she asked, floating back up toward the ceiling corner where Seraph still hovered.

The Earth has vessels which contain ethereal substances.

Vessels?

People, Seraph said simply. What is the purpose of a human body? It’s a physical vessel that is designed to transport an incorporeal element—what you call a soul—and convey it through the physical realm. If the vessel is destroyed, or too badly damaged, it can no longer contain those ethereal elements and they get whisked away back to The Source.

The Source?

The source of all ethereal substance. The place where all corporeal vessels obtain their incorporeal element from. Heaven.

Okay. Speaking of which—what’s going on with my particular vessel? I was expecting to come down here to a funeral or a wake, something to indicate that I was dead. Instead, I find my body lying in an ICU clearly still alive. As Ellie spoke, a nurse came in and quietly began checking charts, vitals, and monitors.

Your body is very much still alive. It’s your brain that is, for all intents and purposes, dead. You are in a coma. Hypoxic-ischemic brain injury, I believe is the medical term.

But people can—people have come out of comas. Sometimes even years later! Why would you take me away?

Because the alternative is much worse. Essentially, non-existence. You would be trapped here in your body, a veritable prison sentence, unavailable to any external stimuli until they pulled the plug. We did what we thought was best for you.

That’s not your decision to make!

For the first time, Seraph’s tone lost some of its lightness. Well, to be rather blunt, it really is. It is exactly our decision to make and we made it, he said, and then warmed up again. I know you can’t see it, but this is the best outcome for you.

All the talk of vessels gave Ellie an idea and she flew down to her body. She had a vision of jumping right back into it and taking up residence there once again but when she reached it she slid around it the same way she had her parents. She enveloped the whole thing, desperately trying to force her consciousness back into her body. Suddenly the flat-lining scanner, an EEG machine, gave a single blip.

It startled her family.

The nurse looked up briefly from what she was doing, then looked back down again at the chart and wrote some notes. That happens from time to time. I wouldn’t attach any significance to it, the nurse said without looking up. Just a random neuron firing. She’s still in the same non-responsive state. The nurse turned and walked out.

Ellie desperately tried to make the blip happen again. She pushed against her body, tried to go into it, through it, all around it. Nothing.

Are you going to be at this long? Seraph asked.

What was that blip? I heard it and saw it on the monitor when I tried to get back into my body.

As the nurse said, probably just a random neuron firing. Look, you can stay here as long as you want. There are no rules governing this sort of thing. When you’re ready to come back, call my name.

And he was gone, leaving Ellie's consciousness alone in the room with her body and family, both equally damaged in their own unique way.

*****

She spent a little over two months there. Floating around, hovering in front of people, friends, family, doctors, and nurses, all the while yelling, talking, softly cajoling. She tried entering her body more times than she could keep track of, to no effect. Her family and friends came religiously the first two weeks. Then her friends began tapering off. Eventually her sister had to return to grad school and finally after a month her parents had to return to their jobs. The first time she tried to follow them home, she quickly discovered that she couldn’t get more than thirty yards down the hall. After learning that, she figured out that she couldn’t get more than about fifty yards away from her body in any direction.

She called Seraph to ask about it. After he appeared, only to discover that she was not in fact ready to return, he sardonically explained that since her body was technically still alive, her soul was anchored to its physical location; a caveat that he had neglected to mention before. He apologized and disappeared as quickly as he’d shown up. The next thing she realized was that she couldn’t sleep in this state. It simply wasn’t an option. The best she could do was a form of self-guided meditation, that, while helpful, simply wasn’t the same as a proper, good night’s sleep.

About six weeks into it they moved her out of ICU and into another room. Her bed was wheeled down the hall which happened to run along the outer wall of the hospital and for a moment she was able to go outside and see the parking lot and the trees on the horizon, and feel the sun. She never thought the sight of a parking lot could make her feel so happy, and she was surprised that she could feel the sun at all given her current state, but the joy and high that the little sojourn brought to her was only matched by the emotional nadir of being pulled back indoors as her body was wheeled deeper inside the building. Her parents still came to visit routinely; it was just, the visits were becoming more and more routine, and less and less frequent. After another month, it got to the point where they only came twice a week. Her dad would pace the room while her mother sat and held her hand and talked to her about current events. As painful as it was to see her family unhappy and not be able to interact with them, she finally became, well, bored.

3

Seraph?

Instantly he was there, the warm yellow glow suffusing the room. Yes? Are you ready to come back now?

She hesitated a moment. Yes. I’m ready.

Good. Are you satisfied with affairs in this realm?

You mean aside from my body lying brain dead here in a coma while my family intermittently comes in to talk to it, all the while I’m right here but can’t say a word to them? Sure.

Good! he said, either not getting her sarcasm or choosing to ignore it completely. Hold—on, he said and they transposed again, from the Fairfax Hospital room back to the white staging one. She had a body again, still dressed in a white gown, now lying on the bed. She simply lay there for a minute, luxuriating in the feeling of having a body again. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed it. She got up, stretched, and walked around the bed, examining the room once more.

She turned to face Seraph. You can’t tell me all of Heaven’s going to be like this, she said, indicating the austere white decor. Because if so, you can just take me back to my hospital room now. At least that has some vague amount of variety—

Seraph opened the door and all manner of color cascaded into the room from beyond. He held out his hand to her and she took it and they walked out onto a veranda.

The place was huge. Far larger than anything she had ever imagined, let alone seen. Bright sunlight shown down from above which made it difficult to discern any details when she looked up. And when she looked down she felt instant vertigo. Her first instinct was to pull back away from the railing but Seraph put a steadying arm on her shoulder and it seemed to help. They leaned onto the balustrade and gazed out and down and Ellie saw a giant marble hall that had to be hundreds of stories tall and a mile wide at least. It reminded her more than anything of the Grand Canyon: huge, majestic, and really kind of artificially mosaic in its inaccessibility.

Each level had a veranda that went all the way around the hall. Some levels had open atriums that spanned through multiple levels, while others were just row upon row of doors. At the east end of the hall (she was automatically thinking of it as east, but really her only frame of reference was that it was on her right-hand side after exiting the staging room) there was a giant waterfall that fell the entire height of the structure. At the far west end, a tree—itself equally giant—with branches that spanned the width of the hall, and the trunk was at least a quarter-mile thick.

And so many people! As many people in one place as she had ever seen. They were everywhere. Coming, going, talking, congregating, sitting around tables, enjoying fountains and groves among the atriums. She could barely make them out at this distance, but it looked like there were people standing on the branches of the tree, as well. And then she noticed that some were even hovering or floating between branches and verandas.

What is this place? she asked in wonder.

This is the Grand Hall. This is the center of it all. Any ‘business,’ such as it is, gets conducted here. Any and all souls can come to meet here. It is the central nexus of all things related to Heaven.

Ellie began walking down the hall toward the waterfall. As magnificent as the tree was, there was something about the cascade of falling water that compelled her to want to see it first.

Is this where God lives? she asked.

Seraph looked at her with a bemused expression. Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven… he paused a moment, then God is omnipresent here—just as God is omnipresent on Earth.

‘Omnipresent here.’ Meaning?

God is everywhere. All around us. God is that which is all things.

She chewed on the words for a minute, kicking them around in her brain. Then she turned to him. Do you mean to tell me there’s no God in Heaven, either?

Not at all. I just said God was all around us.

But that’s what they say on Earth to justify the fact that he doesn’t seem to be anywhere!

That’s what we say in Heaven to explain the fact that God really does seem to be everywhere.

No games. Can I go meet God right now?

You can meet God whenever you want.

Okay. How do I meet him?

What makes you think God is a him?

You just said ‘He’ was everywhere.

No, I didn’t.

Yes, you did.

No, I didn’t.

This is going nowhere, she said. I feel like I should be asking if you want to buy an argument.

Five minutes or the whole course? Seraph asked with a wicked smile on his face.

Great. Of all the angels, I get the Monty Python fan.

I never said I was an angel.

You’re not an angel, she said, her flat statement belying the question behind it.

I am a great many things, Monty Python fan included, but alas, an angel is not one of them.

What are you then?

I am … a servant. Suffice to say that.

Who do you serve?

At the moment? You.

Will you always?

He hesitated only a split second, then, I will always be available to you if you require it.

Something about the way he said it left her with some niggling doubt, but she chose to let it go and instead went back to the original question. Okay, good to know. But, and here she struggled to find the right words, if God is not around, then who’s in charge of it all?

"Well, there is a hierarchy to be sure and God is at the top of