For A Few Souls More (Heaven's Gate Book 3) Read Online Free PDF

about make out another. It would seem he had been in a courtyard all this time, one big enough to hold Wyoming.
    Cloisters lined the walls. At the junction to his right, a stairway led upwards.
    It was as good a direction as any and Arno climbed the stairs to the next floor.
    He found himself in a corridor lined with doors on one side and windows on the other.
    “Hello?” he called. “Anyone here?”
    His voice echoed along the corridor but there was no reply.
    He walked to the first door and opened it. Inside was a completely empty room. A large white box, no furniture, no decoration.
    Arno stepped back out and moved along the corridor to the next. It was the same. As was the next.
    Sharp enough to sense a theme when presented with it, he returned to the stairs and decided to climb higher. If nothing else he would be able to get a good view of the courtyard from a few more floors up.
    As he walked up the stairs the only sound was his own footsteps. As they echoed around the white walls his thoughts turned back to philosophical matters. Was it possible that this was Hell rather than Heaven? For all its sterile beauty he couldn’t imagine passing a pleasant eternity in it.
    After he’d ascended a few more floors, he stepped out into an identical corridor to the one below. He walked to the first room and put his hand on the door handle. It buzzed beneath his skin with a prickling sensation that he would have immediately thought of as a faint electrical charge had he been born a few decades later. For all such a sensation might have seemed an omen of revelations, the door opened once more onto a blank room. He tried one more, with the same result, before moving to look out over the expansive courtyard, a genuine sense of panic building inside him.
    Surely this excessive place, a building that bordered on the infinite, couldn’t be empty? If so then he must be in Hell, destined to endure the passing decades opening door after door onto nothing.
    He looked down on the trees and the garden, tracing the path of the stream. Even this felt like a pretence of perfection, a fragile, child’s idea of paradise that glittered only on the surface.
    Arno James began to consider what he’d done wrong in life to end up in this candy-coated shell of a world. Had he not tried to be a good man? Had he not dedicated much of his life to helping others? Indeed, that had been his wife’s persistent complaint, that he lavished more time on strangers than he did on her. Maybe that had been his mistake. Was this fabricated Heaven the Hell where all bad husbands found themselves? Was it a kind of mockery? A joke? The bitter punchline at the end of a life lived with an eye on sanctity?
    His mood was sinking lower and lower, when a sudden glimpse of movement in the trees below tugged him out of self-pity. It was a woman, dressed in light, summer clothes. Her head was down, watching where she placed her feet.
    “Hey!” he called, as the figure vanished beneath the cover of the trees. “Hey, wait!”
    He ran for the stairs, trying not to calculate how long it would take him to reach the ground level and move back into the garden. Surely, if she hadn’t heard him—and she had made no sign of having done so—she would be long gone before he was even back in the open air.
    In his panic, he lost his footing on the stairs and the world around him spun in confusion as he tumbled, a brief, disorientating moment of up becoming down and left becoming right. There was just time for a spark of fear, anticipating the damage he might be about to do to himself, his body colliding with the hard steps, before he suddenly came to rest, flat on his back. He was unhurt—how can you hurt something that’s already dead? he wondered—and, against all reason, back in the courtyard, having somehow bypassed the several floors he’d climbed.
    His sense of urgency returned. He could wonder about the geographic rules of this place later, the most important thing was