THREE DAYS AFTER HE WAS MURDERED, RICHARD PRATT BEGAN TO FEEL MUCH BETTER...
A seemingly random act of violence propels Professor Richard Pratt into The Hereafter. It is a strange, muted, netherworld of the dead-a world in which he is forced to bear...
It was useless for Justin to try and hide. In the contained world of the Hereafter, there was nowhere to run, and nowhere that God couldn't find him. He knew it was only a matter of time, and all he could do was cower and wait—and hope that terrifying voice would be too busy with the Cleansing to bother with his transgression.
But of God's eventual wrath, Justin was certain.
For Justin had lied—grievously, and intentionally. God's commandment that his angels never possess the same human being more than once was clear and absolute. He had known it from the beginning, and yet, he had been powerless in the thrall of his desire for Howard Gunderson. He had possessed the boy not just once, but four times now, and his intention was to keep possessing him until the boy was his, body and soul.
His obsession with Richard Pratt and his piggy boyfriend was also a transgression likely to draw God's wrath. Angels were not to kill for their own reasons—they were to kill solely for God's glory. And in both of his sins, he had put his own needs above the will of the Almighty.
God would surely see him as a great disappointment, and might even curse him to be left behind at the end of days. He would be damned, he knew. And although part of him felt he deserved it, another part of him wanted to turn his anger on God and shout his defiance, whatever the cost.
Every ghost had a place they went to for comfort. For some, it was a place they had favored when they were alive, or that evoked a nostalgia for their lives. But for many, it was the place where they had died. Justin's life had ended in a violent crash at the bottom of this ravine. It was still a no-man's-land, just as it had been the night he died. Interstate 80 hugged the high hillside at the mouth of Parley's Canyon, and the rocky gulch a hundred feet below was good for absolutely nothing except as a final resting place for discarded appliances, old tires, and the giant, angular, blocky red boulders that had been blasted from the roadway above.
When his car had launched into the gully that night, it had hurtled down and directly into a block of red stone the size of a camper. There had been little left of the car other than a twisted hulk that looked as if it had been crushed by a giant's fist.
The car itself was long gone now, towed out by the Highway Patrol. But it had hit the boulder with enough force to break the giant stone in two. A slice of the boulder bigger than a sofa had broken away from the right side of the rock and left a gap the size of a coffin.
Justin had found shelter from the rain here the afternoon he returned. He could still remember the panic that set in when the rain started—feeling like needles ripping through his newly reconstituted flesh—and he had barely made it under the shelter of the rock before the pain had broken him. He had cowered in this place in terror for a string of days that unwound in slow motion.
It had been a week before he had eventually found the courage to leave his shelter, and this gulch.
But he always returned, even after the car was long gone.
This is where Justin Kimball found his comfort. And where he hid, after all his plans had crumbled.
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