Just Like Heaven Read Online Free PDF

from Roland, he shook his head. “Right, I don’t expect to see them, so I can’t see them.”
    “ What about that concept seems so unusual ?”
    “ I saw that truck coming right at Nina, and I couldn’t have stopped it just by hoping it would vanish.”
    “On e arth ? No. In heaven? Anything’s possible.”
    “So why are we still walking? Why can’t we just…be where we want to go?”
    Roland looked him in the eye with a hint of a smile. “ Ve ry well .” He clutched Nick’ s shoulder with one hand and snapped his fingers with the other.
    After a momentary discombobulated sensation, which made his stomach clench and his mind a little dizzy, Nick opened his eyes to find himself inside a great hall. He swayed to the side, off balance.
    Roland reached out and held him upright.
    “If this is heaven, why do I feel so lightheaded?”
    “If you believed, you would be perfectly fine.”
    “Okay, whatever.” About fort y stories above him, Nick stared at an enormous dome constructed with such precision that it left him in awe. C he cking out his surroundings, he noticed m arble floors that led to staircases in every direction .
    “What is this place?”
    “We call it the Hall of Wisdom.”
    He turned to Roland . “And how did you do that? What gives ? ” He grabbed Roland ’s shoulder and snapped his fingers. They remained in p lace. Disappointed, he snapped his fingers again. They didn’t budge.
    Roland chuckled . “You’re quite the comic, aren’t you? Perhaps you should have given that line of work some consideration instead of devot ing all of your energy to the art world . ”
    “Never,” said Nick, his jaw-hard set. “I was born to create sweeping landscapes, images of the holidays and the importance of family and…” He had n o idea why he’d gotten so upset or why he recited what sounded like a forced line of dialogue from a bad movie. After all, this building and everyone in it was just a figment of his imagination.
    And if Nick questioned his dreams of one day having his artwork in every twentieth home in the United States, like his unofficial mentor Thomas Kinkade, it meant that deep down, he failed to spend the necessary time and energy to make his dreams come true. Never mind that , when not taking on freelance graphic art assignments , he spent most of his time in his heat-controlled garage working on Kinkadesque images – but with m ore of an edge. Nick couldn’t get past the pain and loss he’d experienced, and he needed to be true to all that he’d witnessed, which contributed to his more realistic vision of humanity and the world they lived in.
    “I meant no disrespect,” Roland said with utmost sincerity. He offered his hand.
    Nick shook it . And a moment later , he found himself in a dark room with an IMAX type-screen straight ahead. The woozy feeling in his head returned with only half the potency of the last trip. Perhaps the more he teleported, the more his body became familiar with the sensation. Then again, he didn’t recall this dazed sensation in any other dream, so why would it affect him now? But if he was in heaven, he wouldn’t be able to feel any physical sensation, because in that instance, his physical form would have remained on earth. From now on, he would anticipate these trips and see if that reduced his lightheadedness.
    Nick pointed to the movie screen. “We’re catching a flick?”
    The screen flickered to life and an image of a bald baby, covered wi th blood and amniotic fluid, wailed as the doctor handed the child to a midwife who bundled it in a blue blanket and carried it away.
    “That’s one disgusting baby,” Nick said.
    Roland turned to him. “That baby is you.”
    Nick just shook his head. “Whatever, Colonel. I’m not really into watching home videos. ” He turned around and looked up toward where the projection u nit should be. But he couldn’t find a glass window through which the film unspooled . “Do you have a remote? I like to