Surprise, Exorcise, Vanish Chapter 1

He was dead. That was his first rational thought.

He didn’t know where he was. Limbo, perhaps. It was a place of white, of empty nothing, not even gravity to determine up or down. He couldn’t move, but he thought the reason was because he didn’t have anything to move, nor anywhere to go. No frame of reference, no destination.

Alone, unfeeling, unchanging in a pale infinity. A tangle of thought with no mouth to scream from. A fitting afterlife for someone like him. It was about what he deserved, he mused.

A measure of time passed, or perhaps none at all. One moment he had been alone, the next he had company. There, standing before him was a figure.

It was difficult to determine who or even what it was, standing there and looking back at him. In one moment he beheld a blazing white star, in another, a pale stranger in a suit and top hat. He perceived a pair of hands resting on a gentlemanly cane seemingly carved from pale marble stone. The next, hands of hewn marble gripping a cane of sandalwood.

The face, if it could be called such, changed from second to second. Sometimes a grinning smile, sometimes eyes floating where they shouldn’t be, or no eyes at all. The edges of the figure’s form were indistinct, amorphous. When he tried to focus on any one part there was an illusion of solidity, but when he looked elsewhere and back-

“Hello there!” the figure cheerily spoke, interrupting his inspection. The voice was cheery yet calm, level, gentlemanly and a thousand other elegant adjectives almost all at once.

He would have replied with a greeting, but no sound came.

“Oh, sorry, let me fix that.” The figure raised its left hand and snapped its fingers.

For an unknown reason he felt he could speak. He thought about what to say very carefully. “You are not what I was expecting.”

He got the impression that there was a smile somewhere in that ever-changing visage. “Oh? What did you expect?”

An old wizened man, perhaps in the guise of a venerable old actor. Or an old man in general, perhaps? “To be honest, I don’t really know.”

They laughed. “A common reaction, to be sure.”

He would have nodded in agreement if he had the means to. He had a lot of questions, but he was a smart man. Smarter than most, perhaps. He had immediately recognized who and what he was speaking to after all. And being here before them answered most any other questions he could ponder, let alone ask.

The question came after a moment of thinking about it. “Do you take constructive criticism?”

Another laugh. “Perhaps. Only a handful of people have ever thought to ask that, let alone actually do so.”

He said nothing for a moment. “How many?”

The figure cocked their head, a smile played across its face. “No more than a handful, I believe. I find that that makes you quite the… exceptional individual.”

Exceptional. That word could be better used to describe the circumstances of it all, especially towards the end. He himself had never been more than a man serving his country. The circumstances he had found himself in had been exceptional, not the man.

Los Angeles, its fall. The end of the world, seemingly as he knew it. He thought about those final hours, that fight up and through a skyscraper in a desperate last ditch effort to save the better half of California. If not the whole world. He’d succeeded in his mission, he reasoned. That, if nothing else, made him happy.

“Well, I can tell you’re wondering about a great many things,” they continued. “Remembering them too I see. Perhaps you’re wondering about what comes now?”

He would have nodded if he could. Perhaps not about the last bit, as he already knew. Someone like him, after all the pain and suffering he’d been party to in his life, didn’t get an eternity of sunshine and rainbows. He’d hurt people, killed many. Others he didn’t pull the trigger on, but he’d called the shot regardless.

It had all been necessary, or so he’d told himself. To get dirty, so the world stayed clean.

The price of freedom.

“I know what you’ve done. I’ve seen it too. Not pleasant, not in the slightest. But you did them for reasons you believed acceptable, justifiable even. What is the saying, for God and country?”

“You don’t have to rub it in.” He already knew the verdict.

“Do you?” They asked.

A moment passed in silence as he realized what they meant. “You can read my mind?”

There was another smile on their face. “Here in this place, thoughts and speech are interchangeable.” They looked at him, something akin to a smile somewhere on their face. “Words, concepts, here travel at, shall we say, the speed of thought?”

“I see.” He decidedly didn’t but said nor thought nothing. Perhaps in time it would make sense.

A smile and nod. “You will. Well like I said earlier, you are quite exceptional. You stood out amongst your peers, rose to a lofty office in the land.” That smile grew. “Believe it or not, I find that I am in need of someone like you. Or rather, well, they need you.”

They spread their arms, and he tried not to think of why that cane wasn’t falling over. “Beyond your talents, motivations, your skillset, you’ve demonstrated true selflessness. From someone in your former line of work, that was rare indeed. That’s more than enough to clear the bar.”

“There are others,” he countered. “I merely did what was asked of me.”

“And you did those things well.”

And because of that, you want something from me.”

They nodded. “There is a… vacancy,” they said, stressing the last word. A moment of hesitance, of emotion that seemed ill sounding of them. “Amongst a group of people very dear to me. And for a long time, they have been looking for someone to… fill that vacancy, per se. You could say they’ve cast a wide net, but haven’t found anyone that, well…”

“Fits the bill?”

They snapped a finger, before pointing at him. “Precisely! Oh, they’re going to love you, I know that for absolute certainty.”

He wanted to laugh. He wisely didn’t. As absurd as it was, he’d died and gone straight to a job interview of all things. Funny, a part of him remembered he’d been offered a job. An advisor at some start-up, a corner office and a six figure salary. Just desserts after he’d been set to retire from a long and fruitful career at the Agency.

He’d turned it down, of course. He had been much more in favor of a quiet retirement in the Catskills with his Golden Retriever, and a tool shed where he could build chicken coops and rabbit hutches. Preferably near a lake that was full of trout. Maybe he would have written a book about his life experiences at some point.

He’d been just a week away. He remembered how the Virginia office had a party planned for him, and he’d been looking forward to it. And then the end of the world started. Ground zero, downtown LA. It might have been a cosmic joke that he died the day he was set to retire.

“Not from me,” his heavenly interviewer helpfully reassured. “I am fairly sure that that was a coincidence.”

Right. He didn’t know what to think about that. “So, this ‘vacancy,’” he asked. “What does it entail exactly?”

The stranger smiled. “Well, I’m glad you asked…”

--==--

Saint Peter yawned.

It had been a slow couple of days of course.

Relative to most other days, that was. It had been hectic a brief while ago, some conflict or some such down on Earth. Things for him and his fellow gatekeepers usually became hectic during those times, an influx of new angels to the fold. He often tried to make a point to keep with the times so to speak, if only to be more amicable with the new arrivals, to make better small talk.

The frequently negative nature of news down on Earth often saddened him and made it challenging though. If there was one thing to be sure of, it was that Humanity’s appetite for war and conflict had only grown over the centuries since he himself had lived.

That, and their desire to create ever more deadly and destructive means to wage it. Swords had long since given way to guns, and it was disquieting to wonder what humanity to create next to destroy their fellow man. He’d been depressed for a rather long while, after an Angel had explained to him the concept of atomic weapons.

It was all he could do to hope and pray that humanity shed its addiction to destruction.

The sensation that accompanied a new arrival jolted him out of his self-imposed ennui. There was a static charge in the air, an almost hum-buzz of anticipation that interrupted his internal musings.

Ah, his cue. Saint Peter fished his watch from a pocket in his robe, clicking open the lid to check the time. Not quite on time, a bit earlier than usual. Were they a bit earlier than he was expecting them? Was his watch running fast?

The electric tension broke, the static discharged, and another angel joined him at the Gates.

He had been expecting a young boy.

He had not been expecting a seraphim.

Their appearance as such was unmistakable. They all but towered over him, six elegant wings radiating away from their torso. The pale white robe, patterned through with silvery filigree. All of it together gave an imposing, larger than life presence that rang true of all angels that held the rank.

His face… Saint Peter was fairly sure it was a he. And if he hadn’t known better, he could have sworn the seraphim was Lady Sera’s younger sibling. A soft mocha skin tone, a pair of pale blue eyes like hers. His halo was rather distinct from hers though, a silver white ring with five equidistant eyes worked into the form.

The seraphim wore an expression of calm serenity that seemed to reassure Saint Peter, as if the seraphim’s mere presence reassured him on some fundamental level. He felt the exact same way in Lady Sera’s presence, the times he had met her.

The newcomer blinked as they landed softly on the gilded approach to the gates. So enamored had Saint Peter been that he hadn’t realized the seraphim had been floating at his arrival. The new arrival turned his head this way and that, before his crystal blue eyes settled on Saint Peter.

For a moment there was a drawn out silence, before he remembered that he had a script. “W- Welcome to Heaven!” he said, “Can I get your name, please?”

Another moment of silence, as the seraphim looked him up and down. “My name?”

“Yes, your name,” Saint Peter began to explain, cracking open the guest book before him. “Well it’s a requirement, of course.” Privately, Saint Peter wondered if he should send an urgent private message to the dominions, or perhaps one of the thrones or even Lady Sera herself. The circumstances almost called for it, but not quite like the last time. At least it hadn’t been her again.

The seraphim looked at the book on the podium, up to Saint Peter, before staring off into space for a moment. The silence dragged on for another, and Saint Peter considered asking the seraphim again before he turned and answered.

“Ontos,” the seraphim spoke. As he did so, it felt as if the ground and all of Heaven reverberated with it, ever so slightly. The emphasis was blatant and heavy on the words, as if some harpstring of Creation had been thrummed with its first utterance.

But he had a name to go off of at least. Saint Peter sighed in relief at that, glad that things might have some degree of simplicity. “Okay. Umm, first or last?”

The now-named seraphim cocked his head. “That’s the name I chose, yes.”

For a moment, Saint Peter opted to humor the obvious seraphim, on the off chance he actually was an angel with a natural form that was confusingly similar to that of Heaven’s leadership, or, heaven forbid, some strange attempt at a Hellborn impostor. He also opted to ignore the choice of words on the newcomer’s part. Chosen, and not given.

He made a show of thumbing through the golden pages of the guest book, flipping to the O’s. “Let’s see here,” he hummed, “Is that an O-N-T-H or an O-N-T-O?” he asked, flipping to roughly the page where the name would most likely be. He wasn’t expecting as much as he flipped a few more.

There were plenty of names, but none that were the seraphim’s. “So, I can’t find you on the list,” Saint Peter explained. “I mean, it is sorted by last name alphabetically, so if you could spell it out for me clearly-”

Saint Peter was cut off when something completely unexpected happened, something that he had never before seen in all the long years of welcoming new angels at the Pearly Gates. Something that well and truly was completely off-script.

They both looked down at the now glowing page in the guest book, as the names of one column seemed to shift and move apart to make way for a new name to form, practically ex nihilo on the parchment. The page glowed for a moment more before fading, as if to say things were set in stone rather than on paper.

They both read the name. Ontos, nestled neatly between all the other names on the page, and in the same font as well.

“That’s a relief,” Ontos said. “Speaking of names, I didn’t get yours?”

Saint Peter had been too flabbergasted at what had just happened to give a ready answer. Ontos waited for him, his expression never changing from its calm serenity. “I- I’m Saint Peter,” he managed. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Ontos stretched out a hand, as if to offer to shake his. Saint Peter returned the gesture, his own hand enveloped by the seraphim’s own, who firmly shook it. It occurred to him that it was the first time he’d ever shaken the hand of a seraphim - it was customary to bow.

Behind Saint Peter, the Gates swung open, as soundlessly as ever. A small part of his mind realized he hadn’t willed them to do so; the gates had opened entirely of their own accord and without prompting. Ontos looked over, a single eyebrow raised at the sight.

“A pleasure to make your acquaintance,” Ontos said, withdrawing his hand. He gave a short bow, before strolling toward the gates which had opened seemingly on His fiat alone. Ontos stopped after a few steps though, turning to ask over his shoulder, “Of Bethsaida, or Galilee?”

Saint Peter opened his mouth in surprise. The newcomer was learned, to say the least. “The former,” he answered. “Better memories.”

“I see.” Ontos nodded and smiled, before turning back and walking through the gates. The golden gates swung closed behind him with the barest of a whisper.

Once more, Saint Peter was alone. The entire experience had left the Keeper of the Gates of Heaven bewildered beyond belief. He took a moment to center himself, to try and figure out just what in the Rings of Paradise just happened, before deciding he had nothing to even use as a frame as a reference.

A crackle of energy, and the poor orphan he had actually been expecting to arrive around that time finally did. Said boy popped into existence, a huddled ball of wings and tears, crying out in fear and grief. The usual script wasn’t meant for a case like this, so he moved to comfort and console the newcomer as he often did with the youngest Angels so cruelly stripped from the world below.

Later, after his work was done for a time, he would inform Lady Sera and the other seraphim of the strange arrival.

But for now? Now he was needed.