Chapter 38: Heaven Sent
It had been six months since she saw the first appearance of the portals. Each of them led to the same strange laboratory somewhere on Earth. It should have been impossible, but she couldn't deny what she saw right in front of her. Each and every time she tried to show someone, they would disappear.
She tried to tell the higher ups. Ironically, the faithful in heaven did not believe her.
Sera basically dismissed her words as overworked ramblings. "Are you still on that, Emily. I told you, a human portal to Heaven is impossible."
"The rift vanished before I could show you."
"And this happened several times with me never seeing it?"
"Yes…"
"Emily, if humans did in fact make a portal to heaven, don't you think we would have seen said mortal humans running around?
"I mean… I guess…"
"If no one else has seen the portal, and there are no living humans in heaven after all this time, then perhaps it never existed."
"But that's not-"
"I believe it would be best to take some leave from your duties again. Perhaps the responsibilities of your seraph training are getting to you."
From there, she was put on indefinite hiatus until Sera saw fit.
She was not overworked. Emily continued going to documents scattered around her room. She hadn't had proper sleep in days. Okay, maybe she was a little overworked, but that was because of the portal, not her duties.
When she tried to tell Adam, he didn't believe her at first.
"Total bullshit."
Then she recalled earlier in the year when Adam was making a public outrage that someone was stealing his food.
"Maybe the human portal was used to steal his food."
"That's... huh."
She was getting closer to convincing him till his subordinates showed up.
That was up until Lute and Vaggie walked over, having heard the earlier conversation.
Lute rolled her eyes. "Come on, Adam. Are you really gonna believe the raving of a young Seraph? Not even Sarah takes her claims seriously."
Vaggie shrugged. "Yeah... No offense Emily, but you don't exactly inspire confidence."
Suffice to say, it was another defeat. Emily returned to her chamber and resumed her work. No amount of polite dismissal would change her mind.
At one point, she turned to less-than-legitimate methods. The Archive of Passage was an archive of every human soul that entered heaven. Seraphs were meant to make official requests for information related to reports. Instead, Emily snuck in and went digging herself.
Emily had stopped requesting weeks ago.
She discovered that one recording angel, a nervous Principality named Phanuel, could be persuaded to look the other way for an hour at a time.
Emily spent her off-cycles in the Archive's sublevels. She pulled records of the recently deceased. Her plan was simple. If the portal had opened on Earth, the one responsible had to be a major scientist. While they could not contact the living directly from Heaven. The ascended souls were another matter.
She began with the obvious. Physicists. Cosmologists. Theologians.
#
Interview Log: Dr. Marcus Chen, Physicist
Arrived: February 14
"Did you or anyone you knew ever try to open portals to other dimensions?"
He laughed. "Those are purely theoretical. We can barely get a probe past Pluto. Piercing the veil of reality is the realm of science fiction."
"... You are literally in heaven."
"Allegedly… This could all be a figment of my imagination while in a coma."
Emily sighed. "Right…"
#
Interview Log: Dr. Sarah Williams, Theologian
Arrived: March 3
"While alive, did you know of any institutions that attempted to physically reach Heaven?"
He grew thoughtful. "Symbolically, of course. But literally? No. The Kingdom of Heaven is within. It is not a place you reach like a stairway through the clouds."
That was a more poetic way to describe heaven, but Emily wasn't going to harp on it.
#
Eventually, it was clear that no one in this demographic had tried to punch a hole to Heaven.
Emily sulked in her bed for nights. Months of work. Dozens of interviews. And what did she have? Nothing.
Maybe the others were right. Maybe she was crazy…
She recalled the orange-suited human. How would she find him? The breakthrough came by accident.
#
Interview Log: Gerald Morrison, Physicist
Arrived: April 2
"Did you or others think it was possible to reach heaven through technology?"
"Me? Nah. But I knew some crackpot scientists who thought they were onto something."
Emily's wings stilled. "Crackpots?"
"Yeah, you know. The fringe types. The ones who don't publish in major journals. There's a whole spectrum of them, ranging from guys building machines in their garages based on theories they cooked up themselves to eccentric billionaires. Most of it's nonsense, obviously, but..." He shrugged. "Some of them might've been onto something." He gestured to heaven around them. "Broken clocks, right?"
Emily stared at him for a long moment. She thanked him and ended the interview. Emily had been looking in the wrong place entirely.
She abandoned mainstream academia and turned to the fringe conspiracy theorists.
She found souls who believed in alien abductions. Ancient astronauts. Hollow Earth theories. People who believed they time traveled while in an airline. That last one was strange. They seemed to really believe it.
She interviewed a woman who spent forty years trying to contact the dead through modified radio equipment. She interviewed a man who built a 'dimensional' chamber in his basement out of copper wire and quartz crystals.
They might have been crazy, but they were nice enough to reasonably have made it to heaven.
Most leads were irrelevant. Some were absurd. A few were genuinely unsettling.
But as she sifted through the noise, she found her lead. Paranormal researchers. Specifically, researchers who studied ghosts.
The term appeared again and again in the records of the recently deceased. Almost always accompanied by complaints. "Those ghost hunters." "The weirdos who believe in ghosts." They converged on a single name.
Fentons.
It came up first in the testimony of a retired professor who died of pneumonia. When Emily asked about paranormal researchers, the soul groaned audibly.
"Oh, you mean the Fentons. I've heard of them. Been trying to prove the existence of ghosts for years. People in adjacent fields think they're nuts."
Emily's heart began to race. At first it was all mentions in passing, never meeting the family in person. Soon, she pulled more records and received more mentions of the Fentons.
A former associate from a university recalled them as "brilliant but completely crazy." The name surfaced across multiple accounts, always accompanied by ridicule.
They were very vocal about their goal of building a portal to… the ghost dimension.
She was starting to see how they were overlooked during her initial investigation. Almost no one took them seriously. They were never published in any major papers or articles regarding their findings.
In their attempt to find the non-existent ghost dimension, they found heaven. Further digging revealed that the family consisted of Jack, his wife Maddie, and their children.
Both Jack and Maddie were devoted to their cause. A match made in heaven, one could say. Some men she talked to stated that Maddie's hotness matched her crazy. In any case, she now had a destination: Amity Park, Illinois.
She gathered the records and erased her search history from the Archive's memory.
For the first time in months, Emily had a breakthrough.
Seraphs like Emily were not supposed to descend to Earth unless given a mission by the Almighty. They could not even be seen by mortals unless He allowed it. Only the Cherubs could interact with mortals normally to protect the lives of the living.
The procedures governing Seraphs entering the mortal plane were very strict. And yet here she was throwing that all to the wayside.
Later she would tell herself she had no choice. The bureaucracy would have taken months to approve an investigation she couldn't properly justify.
If she wasted any more time, her chance would be lost and her months of obsessive research would have been for nothing.
Celestial fluid pooled in her palm. The substance was a light blue, born of her own essence. She twisted her wrist and the liquid stretched to tear a hole in the air. A gateway formed within the flow. She stepped into the stream that now bridged Heaven and Earth.
The portal dropped her off in the sky above a town. If she was correct, this should be Amity Park. As she looked in the distance, sure enough, there was a large sign.
Amity Park
A safe place to live.
She would have to see if that were true. Emily descended through the clouds and began her search. Emily walked the streets of Amity Park for an hour without anyone being the wiser thanks to Him. She passed a school with a sign that read Casper High School. She thought it was weird that they would name the school that. Casper sounded like a fictional ghost's name. She passed a fast food restaurant called the Nasty Burger. She wondered who would eat at a place literally called Nasty. The mortal naming conventions made no sense.
She grew frustrated. She had expected to find some trace of the Fentons by now. Some mention of their work. Nothing. The townspeople went about their day without anything abnormal afoot.
Emily landed at a random building and took a breath, needing to collect herself. She had been so certain she was in the right place. Where were they?
When she looked back up, she came face to face with a building that should have stood out to her from the very start.
It was a two-story red brick building. However, there was a giant UFO-like structure with all sorts of antennas and equipment attached to it.
What made visibly slump was the giant bright neon sign above the front door that said:
FENTON WORKS
Emily stared at the sign with disbelief. Maybe she was overworking herself if this slipped by her for the past hour.
She had spent months chasing this family. Interviewed dozens of souls. Broken into restricted records. Risked her standing among the Seraphim. She had prepared for a long and difficult search on Earth. Careful, painstaking work.
And the Fentons had put their name in a green neon sign above their front door.
Emily allowed herself a small laugh. She began her descent toward the building that had consumed her every waking thought for half a year.
Emily entered through an open window on the second floor.
The room was likely a teenage girl's with the walls painted a magenta color. Thankfully, the room was empty. She supposed the girl was not home. Posters lined the walls depicting bands Emily did not recognize. Bookshelves overflowed with psychology texts and self-help volumes. A desk sat against one wall. Organized with nearly obsessive precision. A framed photograph on the nightstand showed a red-haired teenage girl standing with her family: two adults in brightly colored jumpsuits and dark-haired younger boy.
The Fenton family. She immediately locked on to the man in the photo. Sure enough, it was the same man she saw many months ago. She narrowed her eyes on the image of the smiling man. "Ahah! I found you, Jack! You thought you could hide from me on Earth, but you thought wrong! Just you wait. I'll expose what you did! Now they'll have to believe me!" She then slipped into the hallway. 'Where is the lab?'
The room across the hall was unmistakably the boy's. Where the girl's room was more ordered, this one was relatively more messy but not a sty. The walls had poster related to NASA and Space. There was even a large print of the Andromeda Galaxy. She seemed to smile at a Junior Astronaut certificate from space camp. The bookshelf held science fiction paperbacks and astronomy guides.
And nestled among them, barely visible behind a stack of comic books, a leather-bound tome with no title on its spine.
Emily's gaze caught on it. Something about it prickled at the edges of her celestial senses. She took a step toward it. Curiosity taking over for one brief moment before she pulled back. 'Find the portal. Find the portal.'
The stairs upward led to a metallic structure attached to the top of the house, and she moved through its rooms quickly. As she expected, there was laboratory equipment, but it was nothing like the room with the portal. She paused in the center of the upper lab before thinking back to that time.
She remembered the orange-suited Jack, the machinery surrounding him, and the walls. Now that she thought about it, there weren't any windows in the room. If that were the case, then the true laboratory was not above but buried beneath the house itself.
She descended back down the stairs to the ground floor and rummaged for another set of stairs. Soon enough, she found another door in the kitchen leading down. "Yes!"
Going down, she found the lab she saw months ago. Sure, there were a few changes, but overall it was the same layout. It was vast and far larger than the house above could account for. The Fentons had excavated deep beneath their property. She ignored the workbenches and devices for her main goal.
At the far end of the lab, occupying the center of the space, stood what she assumed was the frame of the portal. An octagonal tunnel was built into the wall with an enormous metal ring. Its looked simultaneously cutting-edge and haphazard.
Four children stood near the device and looked at it with interest. The boy from the photograph wore a white jumpsuit and stood inside the deactivated portal. A goth girl stood at the control panel and a boy with a cap stood nearby with a handheld device. A girl in magenta stood close to the portal and watched the boy inside with clear concern.
Emily frowned. Children should not stand near such dangerous machinery. Her plan was to learn how to open the portal to heaven and keep it open long enough for her to show everybody. She wasn't sure what would happen afterward, but she would be vindicated for her efforts! Now, all she had to do was figure out a way to get these kids out of the lab.
Suddenly, the raven-haired boy inside the ring lost his balance and tripped, and she heard an audible click. The next thing she knew, the room was bathed in green light and the portal activated. Screams filled the room, and for a moment, she found a young soul staring back at her.