The Mirror at the Gates · Book 1

The Son

Prologue: The Last Ordinary Minute

It was a Tuesday, and Elias Thorne died with a roll of painter’s tape under his arm.

Later, if later was still a word that meant anything where he was going, the tape was what bothered him. Not the pain. Not the fear. The tape. The good blue roll, the kind that peeled clean off a fresh edge, because the cheap stuff tore the paint and left a ragged line on Mrs. Avery’s trim.

He was forty-six. He’d been up since five. Half a gas-station coffee had gone cold in the cupholder of the van, under the gold lettering that said Thorne Home Services, Family Owned Since ’91.

The second van’s transmission was slipping again, and it couldn’t die before October.

He’d promised Maddie he would make the recital. He had promised twice before and missed both. There was a way his daughter said it’s okay, Dad that was worse than screaming.

And under all that, in the place a man keeps what he won’t look at, he was tired in a way sleep didn’t touch.

He stepped down from the van. Cut grass. Somebody’s dryer sheets. On his hands, the orange cleaner his wife swore she could find him by in the dark.

Then his left arm went strange.

Not painful. Heavy, and far off, like it belonged to the man standing next to him. That’s not right, he thought, in the flat voice people save for the enormous things. He set the tape on the hood, carefully, because the grass was wet and it was the good roll.

The sky tilted.

The last ordinary thing Elias Thorne did on earth was reach for a van he still owed eleven thousand dollars on, and miss.

No tunnel. No light. No grandmother waiting in a doorway.

Just a sound like a held breath let go.

And then the mist, and a voice in it that knew his name.

Part One: The Crossroads

Chapter One: The Crossroads

The first thing he understood was that he was standing.

That struck him as suspicious. He had just fallen. He remembered the humiliating helplessness of it, his body declining to obey, and now he was upright with his weight in his knees, the way you stand when you’ve spent all day on other people’s floors.

He looked down. Stone. Old gray stone fitted so tightly there were no seams, running off in every direction into a fog so soft it looked like you could lie down in it.

“Okay,” he said, because his own voice was the only thing he had. “Okay. Okay.”

The mist glowed evenly, the way the inside of a cloud glows at noon, so nothing cast a shadow. His eyes hated that. A man’s eyes want shadows. Shadows tell you where things are.

And nothing hurt. That was what scared him first. The lower back that had been talking to him since he was thirty-five, the right knee that clicked on stairs, the knot between his shoulder blades he had carried so long he’d stopped calling it pain and started calling it himself. All of it gone. He had expected to feel relief. What he felt was closer to grief, because he had no idea how much of him was left once you took out everything that hurt.

“Hello?” he called.

The mist drank it.

He put a hand over the pocket of his work shirt, over ELIAS stitched in red script, and waited for his heartbeat.

There wasn’t one.

He stood very still with his palm on his quiet chest, and the truth came in slowly, the way the bad ones do. Not am I dead. Just oh. The way you remember you left the stove on.

His other hand went to his hip pocket on its own. The phone was there. He pulled it out and the screen lit, which seemed rude of it, and showed him the little red badge he had been ignoring for eleven months.

Voicemail. Dad. 2:38.

He had listened to the first ten seconds in the van. Nothing’s wrong, nobody’s sick. He had meant to call back that weekend.

The screen went dark and stayed dark, and when he pressed the button nothing happened at all.

“No,” he said, conversationally, to no one.

The mist ahead of him thinned. It didn’t blow away, because there was no wind. It drew back like a curtain, and showed him what the crossroads had been hiding.

Two gates.

They stood about two hundred feet apart, with a plaza of stone spread in front of them, and he understood without being told that he was meant to stand right where he was, in the middle, a coin on its edge.

The gate on the right was made of light. Not sun-bright. Bright the way a thing is when it is more real than you are, so that standing in front of it he felt like a pencil sketch of a man. Warmth came off it. Not heat. Warmth, the kind that comes off a kitchen with somebody in it. For half a second he smelled bread and dish soap, and under the hum of the place he heard a woman singing badly, off-key on purpose, and he knew the voice before he could stop himself from knowing it.

His mother had been dead thirty-five years. He had not let himself hear that voice in thirty of them.

He locked his knees so he wouldn’t walk toward it.

The gate on the left was made of dark, and that was the one that frightened him, because it didn’t look like anything he’d been warned about. No flames. No red man with a goatee. It was simply open, quietly and reasonably open, onto a dark that was patient and very deep. It felt like a place that had made room for him a long time ago and was in no hurry.

It looked restful. After a life like his, the dark gate looked like somewhere he could finally sit down.

He had been raised in the loose way of a family that moved too often to keep a church. Vacation Bible school in three states. A felt board with a felt Jesus. His mother praying with her eyes shut tight, like she was leaning her whole weight against a door. He’d set most of it down around eleven, the year he found out what prayer was worth, but a childhood faith leaves its furniture behind, and the furniture was this: a gate, a keeper, a book with your name in it. He had expected to be met.

“This isn’t right,” he said. “There’s supposed to be a guy. The beard. The book. Saint Peter.” His voice was climbing. “Where’s the pearly gates guy?”

“There’s no guy.”

He spun around.

A young man sat on the stone behind him, knees up, forearms draped across them. Maybe twenty-five. Too much dark hair, too lean from being broke and busy, and a cheap suit with the shoulders too big, the kind a kid buys on credit for a job that hasn’t started yet because he believes the suit is a door.

Elias knew the suit. He had bought it at a strip-mall store on credit, the spring he quit Roy and worn it to every sales call for two years.

He knew the face better. It had both eyebrows whole, where Elias had a scar through the left one from a forklift in ’99, and it hadn’t learned yet to hold its mouth in the flat line that meant I am working out what this is going to cost me. But it was the face he had shaved that morning in the dark while his wife slept.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” Elias said.

The young man smiled. It was Elias’s smile, from before the smile had jobs to do.

“Hey, Eli,” he said. “Long time.”

Elias didn’t faint, because apparently he couldn’t anymore, but his legs put him down on the stone without asking.

“You’re me.”

“I’m a you.” The young man stood with the loose ease Elias’s body had lost somewhere in its thirties. “The first one. Call me Past. Everybody does.”

“There’s an everybody?”

“There’s a lot you don’t know yet.” Past crouched in front of him, the way you crouch to talk to a kid, and Elias felt a flash of hot irritation. Don’t you crouch at me, I’m older than you. Except he wasn’t. That was the whole problem.

“Short version,” Past said. “You always said you wanted it straight. Especially when you didn’t.” He waited for Elias to nod. “You’re dead. Light on your right, dark on your left. Any minute you’re going to ask when somebody shows up to tell you which one you go through.”

“When does…”

“Nobody’s coming. There’s no judge.”

“Then how do I…”

“You do.”

The mist held still.

“That’s the whole machine,” Past said. “No saint with a clipboard. No scale. You walk back through your own life with your own eyes, all of it, the stuff you bragged about and the stuff you buried so deep you forgot the shovel. And at the end you stand right here and say out loud where you belong. Then you go there. Because nobody ever knew Elias Thorne the way Elias Thorne did, at three in the morning.”

Elias laughed, and it came out cracked.

“This is the Scrooge thing,” he said. “The Christmas one. Past, Present, the one in the robe pointing at the grave.” He was on his feet now and talking fast, grabbing the idea like a thrown rope. “Which is fine, right? Because that ends good. He sees it all and then he wakes up. Christmas morning. He throws open the window, he sends the kid for the goose, he gives Cratchit a raise. He gets to go back and do it different. That’s why people love it. It’s never too…”

He stopped. Past was looking at him with a kindness he couldn’t stand.

“Eli,” Past said. “There’s no Christmas morning.”

The light gate glowed. The dark one waited.

“Scrooge got his ghosts while he was still alive. That was the gift, and most people sleep right through it.” Past stepped close, and Elias smelled the green-bottle aftershave he had worn at twenty-five because he thought it made him smell like a man who’d made it. “We’re not here to give you a second chance, brother. We’re way past that.”

“Then what are you here for?”

“To help you tell the truth. One time. About what you did with the only life you got.”

Elias looked down at the dead phone in his hand.

“I have to call somebody,” he said. “My dad left me a message. I never… There’s a message.”

Something moved across Past’s young face and was gone before Elias could name it.

“I know,” Past said. “We’ll get there. It’s near the end.”

“What does it say?”

Past held out his hand, Elias’s own hand before the calluses, and behind him the fog began to take on color. A small house with a chain-link fence. A moving truck. A woman’s voice calling a name that was almost his.

“Start at the start,” Past said. “You’re going to argue with me. That’s allowed.” A beat. “It’s just that I know all your arguments. I’m the one who made them up.”