6 A Mall to Die For

Lily

Lily sat in one of the perfect loungers in the library, toying idly with Max’s ear as he dozed in her lap. Steam curled up from the nearly empty mug of tea on the side table as rain tapped lightly on the windows, the restive atmosphere doing nothing to soothe the persistent sensation that she was missing something. It had been little more than a week since she’d arrived in her Paradise, and she’d spent most of it in her library, reading books from authors who had kept writing after their deaths.

She had taken some time to explore a bit of the Paradise beyond her gate. While she wasn’t the only one to have the spectacular fantasy land as her Paradise, each home was kept magically private for each resident. They might see each other’s chimneys and gates, but they were physically unable to intrude on each other’s gardens, unless the person was open to visitors. The picturesque little village and its collection of shops, pubs, and restaurants was mostly a neutral area, with a few pockets of more urban-style Paradise living. The streets often bustled with a wide assortment of people, and Lily had enjoyed chatting with everyone she’d met, but the connections had felt fairly surface level.

She’d texted Siedah, whose contact information had simply appeared in her phone one day, and asked if she wanted to get together. Siedah had responded enthusiastically, congratulating her on her Paradise, but explained that they had a lot of unexpected trainees that she was helping with, and asked for a rain check.

Beyond her driving need to do something, curiosity about the rest of the Afterlife had become a constant thought. Siedah had mentioned other realms, like the Underworld and the Summerland, and then there was the standing invitation for wine with the demon Moura, if she hadn’t been kidding.

Committing the grave sin of disturbing a cat at rest, Lily gently rearranged Max as she slipped away, leaving him to stretch on the lounger while she downed the last of her tea, excitement trickling through her veins. The dirty mug disappeared from her hand as she headed for the hall, thanks to the house’s magic, and she patted the door frame in acknowledgment.

Shucking off her baggy T-shirt and boxer shorts, she squinted into the closet before deciding not to strive for greatness, pulling out leggings and a charcoal-gray V-neck shirt. She paused in the entryway to pull on some comfortable boots and a lightweight zip-up hoodie, then grabbed the Paradise version of her favorite black leather jacket, which didn’t have patches of wear and a hole in the pocket.

She pulled up her hood and stepped outside, the smell of rain curling around her senses as she surveyed the gray skies and damp garden, eyes snagging on a massive new addition. A near perfect replica of her front door was set into the fence beside her front gate. She glanced behind her to confirm. The only difference was that the door in the fence was inlaid with silver instead of wrought iron.

Paradise Gate.

She blinked. The information came to her from everywhere and nowhere, a flood of information and something she’d always known.

Oh. It was like the door to her apartment versus the door to her apartment building .

She closed the door of the house with a click and grinned, boots squeaking on the wet stone pathway. The silver doorknob on the new door twisted smoothly, and Lily stepped through into a massive field that, with different lighting, could easily have passed as the set of a horror movie.

Sourceless golden hour sunlight radiated from a sky that shifted in patchy shades of pastels, but the most striking feature of the new landscape was the doors—hundreds and thousands of them, scattered over the flat ground and stretching endlessly into the distance.

A dozen paces to her left stood a traditionally shaped door, painted a bright, cheerful red. A similar distance ahead of her stood a door covered in neon spatters of paint. White doors, blue doors, multicolored doors, medieval doors, oddly shaped doors, frames with blankets or beads hanging over them, all freestanding on the lush, verdant grass, with no other buildings in sight. Wide paths of hard-packed soil cut through the grass, weaving to and between each door, joining together and branching apart apparently at random.

Lily turned. Her closed door stood alone, and she peered around the outer edge, only to see the reverse side of the door. She reached for the knob and cracked it open, the scent and sound of rain slipping out. She closed it again.

“Well, that’s trippy,” she muttered, slowly letting the magnitude of what she saw sink in.

Each door led to a person’s Paradise. Not just a Paradise realm , but someone’s unique, perfect Paradise. Siedah had been right to use the analogy of an apartment building, though Lily felt that she might have oversimplified it. The overall realm of Paradise wasn’t the metaphorical apartment building, it was a neighborhood of apartment buildings and, more likely than not, completely isolated “houses,” for those whose Paradise involved solitude.

Footsteps made her turn, only to see a slim-built man in full hippie garb sauntering down a path nearby.

He slid his round yellow lensed glasses down his nose. “First time out?”

Lily shrugged and offered a grin, pushing her hood back. “Caught me.”

“Well, let’s get shaking, I’ll show you out. It’s simple, you just walk, and then you get there.”

Lily fell into step beside him, not in the least bit enlightened but willing to roll with it. “Sounds about right,” she murmured.

The endless field of doors should have felt creepy. While it didn’t feel particularly comfortable, and certainly didn’t invite lingering, it didn’t make her spine prickle with the sense of wrongwrongwrong that she’d sometimes gotten in certain places or rooms in the mortal world.

The man’s name was Jason, and they chatted aimlessly as they wove around doors. His Paradise was a shared one, as it turned out, a commune.

“One that won’t ever end up getting weird,” he told her cheerfully.

She laughed. “Were you ever in a commune in Arizona? My uncle was, back in the day, and he would’ve gone to Woodstock, but apparently the commune he was on had really good food, so he stayed there and missed out.”

“Right on.” Jason nodded sagely. “I’d been eating old cans of cat food, so I didn’t have any holdups about going to Woodstock, which was a fucking experience . We were gonna have an Afterlife Woodstock, but I guess there’s an issue with the pocket realm we wanted to use— Oh, here we are.”

A monumental, white stone arch towered three stories high, set into a patch of sky that dipped down to touch the earth. Beyond it, a gargantuan hallway, at least as wide as a football field, stretched away into a gradual curve. From what she could see through the limited view of the arch, it vaguely reminded her of a single level mall, given all the bustle and activity, but built on an impossible scale. Slightly roughened walls of striated stone reached up hundreds of feet towards an indistinct ceiling of hazy golden light. It had an old look to it, vaguely medieval in the way her favorite fantasy stories were, except it felt modern too. The timelessness of it made sense—it was the Universal Hallway, the community hub of all activity and connection point of all realms in the Afterlife.

Lily moved to the edge of the arch to get a better view. Instead of department stores, a few grand doorways and arches were set into each wall that she could see, offering glimpses of the realms within. Shops were built into large depressions in the stone walls, clearly a part of the Hall, and not a gateway to another place.

Thousands of figures moved along the Hall, stepping into shops, entering and exiting the arches, and—Lily’s mouth dropped open before she could catch herself—a few even flew high above the crowds. One such figure swooped down to dip below the peak of the arch she and Jason were approaching, wings moving like a hummingbird’s. The person waved as they buzzed overhead, their pale-blue skin shimmering with iridescence, then they zipped up and away, moving purposefully towards something in the distance.

“The Fae are trippy,” Jason said casually. “Personally, I find them a little creepy, but hey, different strokes for different folks, right? Non-souls don’t usually come into Paradise unless they like, know someone here, so if they creep you out too, don’t worry, they won’t be in here much. See you around, Red!” He bumped her arm with his elbow before sauntering towards a group of people waiting in the Hall nearby.

Lily ventured into the Hall herself, trying not to stare at some of the more unusual people. The Paradise arch was situated on a slight convex curve of the hallway, so while it looked straight down the main line of the Hall, when she exited it, she saw that it continued to the right, narrowing a bit. The Paradise arch was noticeably larger than other arches Lily could see, though they were all dwarfed by the scale of the Hallway. Perhaps the neutrality of Paradise was a more common choice than faith-specific Afterlives.

The Hall seemed wider and busier straight ahead, so, with a bracing breath, she headed out. A woman in a flowing chiton talked animatedly with a Middle Eastern man in pristine white robes, while a child sitting at her feet played with a carved toy that looked a bit like a dog. Lily’s eyes lingered on the child for a moment. Logically, she knew that young souls would be in the Afterlife, but something about the child seemed slightly other . She’d have to ask Siedah about that when they met up.

A man with arms covered in colorful tattoos stepped out of a Celtic-style arch, nodding as the ethereally beautiful woman next to him read aloud from a heavy leather-bound book, her delicate dragonfly wings shimmering with each step. Another woman, who could have stepped off the set of a show based on the Middle Ages, strode up to them, waving another book in disgust.

“It was so many reincarnations ago she barely remembers, but I’ve checked her old notes six times, and there is nothing to indicate that the phases of the moon would affect that particular…”

“…the damndest thing, everyone who was there said it was like an earthquake, but more like an earth-shiver? Someone probably set off one of those magic fireworks again…” a powerfully built man said into his phone, a small dog tucked in his other arm.

Lily stuck to the main Hall, though she peered down the narrower offshoots at each intersection she passed. Two of them had been short and ended with a cul-de-sac of realms. One had narrowed significantly and seemed devoid of anyone or anything, meandering around a corner that she didn’t want to go past. There were only a couple of major intersections along the length of the main Hall, making it feel a bit more like a small city center instead of an incomprehensible maze. It reminded her of maps she’d seen of old European cities, with a main street as the central vein and then a bit of a chaotic layout branching out from it—growing organically as they went, rather than neatly.

The arches to different Afterlives or realms were impossible to miss; each one thrummed with power and was carved or decorated in a unique style. The name of each realm floated in glowing letters above each entrance, some familiar, some she’d never heard of: Valhalla, the Summerland, Garden of the Gods, Rarohenga. After some exploring, she even found the arch for the Underworld, which was busier than she’d expected.

Farther down the Hall, Lily rounded a corner and stepped closer to the wall to get out of the way of a group of muscular women.

“You Amazons aren’t fucking around with arm day. I almost cried lifting my coffee this morning,” one woman said.

“I have no sympathy,” a tall, Grecian woman drawled back. “Just hearing the phrase ‘Valkyrie leg day’ makes my thighs go all weak.”

“Aww s?ta , you know what will fix that? Hitting leg day more often,” another woman teased as they passed by.

“Plus, if the weird stuff from the last report turns into an actual conflict, we’ll need all the muscle we can get…” the first woman said, their conversation fading into the general chatter.

Lily frowned after them, wondering what could possibly cause conflict in a place that seemed to be a bastion of chaotic harmony.

Shaking the thought away, she peered down a side hallway and stopped in her tracks, comprehension an icy wash over her senses, a sick ache twisting through her silent chest.

Heaven.

The archway of solid mother-of-pearl was striking in its simplicity, the soft golden light of the realm within casting a warm glow out into the Hall. It didn’t feel sinister—the opposite in fact—but she wished that it did.

Unable to tear her eyes away from the arch, she felt like a stain on the landscape of the Afterlife. An inky, smudgy dark, wrong blot . And small. So very small. Like she was five years old in her little church dress, learning about sin and Hell for the first time.

Hands gripping too tight, begging for mercy, for help, for forgiveness. So scared, so worried about how she might mess it all up.

A flash of shame from her preteen years, curious and confused and desperate to know, to understand.

Questioning God will get you sent to Hell, Lily, is that what you want?

Tired and sick and in pain, trying to seem calm and happy for others when all she wanted was comfort.

Please, Lily, it’s not too late to accept God again. I don’t expect him to cure your cancer, but please don’t sentence yourself to an eternity of suffering.

Fighting the childish urge to pull her hood up, Lily spun on her heel and headed back to the main Hall, fighting to keep her steps even and unhurried and her expression neutral, despite the nausea and fury roiling in her gut.

“Okay,” she muttered, stepping into a little alcove and leaning against the wall, “so we don’t go down that hall unless we can’t help it.” She ran a hand through her hair, swallowing the snarl of emotions down. It was just a stupid arch. Just a place. She’d earned her Paradise, though a part of her was waiting to realize that it was as ephemeral and temporary as she and her heartbeat had been.

Lily eased out of the alcove, determined to continue her exploration. She followed the slight curvature of the Hall and had stopped to admire a dress on a mannequin when yelling drew her attention.

A disheveled man burst out of an arch farther up the Hall, pursued by two towering figures with horns. Several people laughed or clapped when demons secured the man by the arms and began frog-marching him back in the direction they’d come from, and more than a few shook their heads before carrying on.

“Trainees,” an older woman said fondly as she sauntered past Lily, the aura of power around her making Lily’s skin itch. “They’re trying, bless them.”

Lily frowned and rolled her shoulders to shake the feeling, fairly certain that some manner of deity had just gone by. The man twisted and nearly escaped, but was quickly caught by the frazzled trainees, who gave up on marching him and instead held him off the floor, carrying him while he screamed obscenities that made Lily’s eyebrows lift.

“I WAS A PASTOR!” the man bellowed, kicking at the air. “GET THEE BEHIND ME, SATAN!”

“My name,” grunted one, a gangly looking demon with ochre skin, “is Lamech.”

The man wailed like a husky being forced into a bathtub.

Lily covered her mouth, trying desperately not to laugh. Her early days as a teenage cashier at a grocery store had been confusing while she’d learned how to deal with customers, some not too far removed from the hopeful escapee. People like that had been awful, but through controlled exposure to their awfulness, she’d become immune to the outlandish behavior. Like getting a flu shot.

Lily winced as the man spat a slur at one demon then turned to threaten the other with an exorcism, trying to bite at their hands on his arms before they carried him through the arch. It seemed the trainees were getting one hell of a dose.

The yelling echoed and faded, and activity in the Hall resumed as if nothing had happened, but Lily slipped through the flow of people to stand before the arch of polished obsidian etched with swirling designs. Inside, red-gold filaments of light on the ceiling and walls softened the darkness, illuminating a tunnel and stairs, as well as the closed doors of an elevator.

Wicked girls go to Hell.

Dressed like that, you’ll end up in Hell.

You’re going to Hell if you keep acting like that.

You’re going to Hell.

You’re going to Hell.

You’re going to Hell.

Those four words swelled into a chorus in her memory. The hundreds—the thousands—of times she’d been warned of and threatened with Hell. Warned, then as she’d grown up and purposefully left the faith, condemned.

She shook her head to clear it, like resetting a mental Etch A Sketch, and turned her attention back to the arch. The delicate artistry of the obsidian almost made her breath catch, swooping and curling in some places, glinting with sharp edges in others. Pleasantly warm air wafted out of the arch, too warm for her two jackets, but perfect for what she considered T-shirt weather.

Come have that glass of wine with us. We can swap stories.

She straightened, a smile playing at her mouth.

Some people thought she was going to Hell? Fine. She would prove them right, on her terms, and with a glass of wine in hand. Then she would go home to Paradise.