Chapter 1

The blackness owned me.

For an eternity, I drifted in a silent, lightless void. The only sound was silence.

With only my memories for company, I began to reconstruct my life – both lives.

As Carl, my earliest memories surrounded me as little more than impressions, so I embraced the impressions and concentrated on them, seeking truth. There were flashes of still pictures that slipped away almost instantly.

My mother.

Leaning over to lift me up, so she could tend to a skinned knee. Her face a study in concentration, as she wiped away the blood and my tears.

My mother ... again.

I was older, but still of indeterminate age. Her face flashed into my mind. She was dressed for an outing, waiting at the front door for my father to pick her up and take her out. There was a tendril of memory, floating at the back of my mind, of a babysitter and my unhappiness at having this particular sitter stay with me.

The still picture of my mother was engraved into my memory, because, instead of my father come to pick her up, there were two police officers and a clergyman. There words were far too soft for my little ears, and the baby sitter scooped me up and ran from the room, lest I hear and understand.

Later...

Was it years, later? Decades, maybe.

There is no time when you're dead. Only now, forever...

Another flash of memory.

My mother, weeping at the kitchen sink, was holding a sheaf of medical papers in her hand. She stared at the papers as if they were a palpable enemy that she could rend, tear, or kill. Her tears were hard and angry – but soft, and almost helpless. Hindsight cleared up so much, and I now know the anguish she felt as the sterile, white forms pronounced her death sentence.

For millennia I lingered in the valley of death. There were no shadows in that valley, only blackness, silence, and emptiness. My mind went away again. I drifted on the smokescreen of memory, and visited myself on places and people I'd not thought about for ... well, for the rest of my life.

The first sounds I heard that were not from my manufactured memories, were the sounds made by cloth sliding over cloth. The sounds may have been present for a very long time, or just a second, but I separated the sounds from those of mind, and spirit, hoarding them, because it was so novel.

In the presence of sound, I rushed to feel – but there was nothing to feel. The dead have no feelings, no senses to feel with, and no nerves to transmit sensation if there'd been any.

My mind and I went away, again, for a very long time. The darkness grew blacker and the silence louder, blocking out what I thought was sound.

I thought ... because the dead can only think. There's nothing else...

There came a time when light intruded into my black cocoon. The mere change in the texture of blackness gave me hope, tinged with fear.

What if...

What if it was time for judgment? In the soundless vacuum, I pondered the meaning of "if" for a very long time.