Father Alexander stared down at his body, quite certain he was dead.

He was surprised how tranquil he looked: eyes closed, hands resting gently on the arms of the recliner, book on his lap, legs elevated on the footrest. A slight smile on his face as if he were daydreaming about his childhood on the farm, just sitting on the edge of the pond, hoping to pull in one more sunfish. 

Dying this way had not been what he expected. At seventy-nine, with more aches, pains, and medications in his body than he ever imagined possible, he thought it would be something dramatic—a massive stroke, an explosive heart attack, a bursting aneurysm. But to be sitting in an overstuffed chair, thoroughly enjoying all his favorite passages from Summa Theologica (those Latin phrases effortlessly translating themselves), taking a moment to contemplate that quiet pleasure with eyes closed and then to open them and see himself deceased… 

Unexpected to say the least.

Still, he thought, it does prove I was right, and he allowed himself to revel in a moment of pride. Ego exceeds existence. He had always been secretly proud of that turn of phrase as the opening of his first book.

Hold on, the disciplined voice of the skeptic theologian-scientist in him answered. This could just be a hallucinatory effect, with the neurons of your brain starving and fighting for the last scraps of oxygen in your motionless blood, throwing out final, chaotic impulses. In six minutes, you’ll be not only merely dead, but really, most sincerely dead.

A definite possibility, Father Alexander had to admit. He glanced over at the mantel clock. 5:15. In that case there was nothing to do but wait those 360 seconds for the answer he had been seeking his entire adult life. 5:21. He’d know then. But what to do while I wait? 

Inventory the experience, the skeptic demanded. Stick with the scientific method. Catalog the apparent effects. 

He raised his hands in front of him. Pale. He looked down. SAS trainers on his feet, faded khaki slacks, ancient blue sweatshirt with its flaked-gold Notre Dame emblem. He was a complete match for the body in the chair. 

Father Alexander reached down, put his right hand on the forehead of his corpse. 

No sensation. Alive, he thought, the nerves in your fingertips would have a tactile response. Some warmth from the dying skin of your corporal body. The flat plane of pressure on the tips of your fingers. 

But there was nothing. 

He lifted his hand, held it close to his face. The pseudo flesh had an oily sheen, almost glistening in the diffused light of the floor lamp beside the occupied La-Z-Boy. Definitely losing its solidity. He turned to face the large antique mirror he had hung over the mantel of the equally ancient fireplace of the apartment’s living room.

No reflection, of course. That made sense. After all, his material self, that collections of cells made up of chemical compounds made up of atoms made up of protons, neutrons, electrons made up of quarks and gluons, all that was there in the recliner. Still, he could see his second self if he just looked down, raised his arms, lifted his leg.

Residual persistence of the physical image. He couldn’t remember who had suggested it in whatever academic paper. This could just be the last gasping effort of your fading hindbrain to preserve the sense of self, his skeptic sneered. 5:21 on the clock face.

You’ve got 180 seconds to go yet.

And then… Father Alexander sensed the sounds before they happened.

Four gentle raps upon his front door. 

He turned to walk down the short hallway, not surprised that he couldn’t feel his feet moving. Still, his eyes seemed to be working as he bent his head forward, looking through the door’s peep hole.

The sheen of a bald crown of a head. The unintentional tonsure ring of salt and pepper hair that always needed a decent trim instantly recognizable.

Brother Daniel. 

It’s Thursday, Father Alexander remembered. Our bi-weekly dinner together this evening. He wants to go down to Patrick’s. Again.

He watched as his friend shifted from one foot to another, waiting for a few moments, then knocking again, another four raps on the door. Then his right hand slipped in the wrinkled khaki pocket, pulled out his Jitterbug flip phone and slowly punched in a number.

Father Alexander heard his cordless phone ring in the living room—two, three, four times. Through the peep hole, he watched his friend take his phone away from his ear, punch in another number. He heard the muffled ringtone of his cell in the other room. He watched his friend wait through the unanswered rings and then mutter his way through a voice message.

He could easily imagine the raspy, trembling voice buried in the digital bowels of a Consumer Cellular server.

Where the hell are you? It’s almost 5:30. I’m going ahead to Patrick’s. Meet you there. 

He watched his friend stick the phone back in his pocket and start down the hallway.

I wonder if he’ll miss me, he thought. I wonder if I’ll miss him, if I’m still me in a few minutes.

The thought brought him back to whatever reality he was in. He drifted back into the living room, glanced at the old mantel clock once more.

The hands pointed to 5:26.

Just to be certain, Father Alexander gave himself another 30 minutes before he felt certain—certain of anything. Any part of this process.

Still here. Aware. Conscious. The essence of self. 

A surge of pride filled him, then humbling irony. To think, here at this very moment he knew the greatest truth a human being could learn, could attest that the self goes on beyond the last breath, last heartbeat, last chemical reaction in the brain. His first reaction to the knowledge was to want to shout, “I told you so, you pricks,” to every doubting Thomas who had dismissed his life’s work with a weary, bored sigh and a roll of the eyes.

I’m still here. And I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Father Alexander considered all the possibilities that had been part of his decades of study.

Would his heart be removed from his metaphysical form to be weighed against the feather of truth by winged Ma’at? Or would Hades with his three-headed dog appear to whisk his ghostly form to the shore of the River Styx and its haggard ferryman? Could a Valkyrie carry him off to Hel with its golden Heorot Hall towering over an icy fjord in the heavens? Or would it be as simple as his Catholic faith suggested, to see the face of God, face judgment and a passage to heaven, hell, or purgatory? 

He cataloged every eschatology he had touched upon while he waited for his answer, but after a full day he was beginning to think that the answer to that might be just one word.

Nothing.

-

Based on the first 24 hours, Father Alexander’s considered opinion on the essence of life after death was total and complete boredom. 

No transfiguration, angelic or demonic. His residual perception was unchanged, although there was a trace of a physical sensation, a shadow quiver, which was the last whisper of sensory impression. Still, his hands passed through every object in the room, including his own limp corpse in the overstuffed chair. He could move from room to room, but when it occurred to him that his non-corporeal self ought to be able to simply drift through the walls or front door, and into the hallway and the outside world, he was a little taken back by the impenetrable resistance he met when he tried. 

He wasn’t surprised that his animus didn’t sleep, but to be conscious 24 hours a day with no physicality was tedious to say the least. He watched the room grow dark as the evening descended, listened to the din of traffic on the street below, and the sound of his neighbor’s binge-watching Game of Thrones till after two in the morning. 

Dear Lord, he thought. Could this be purgatory? Or even Hell? The punishment for transgressions, an eternity of ennui. No wonder some ghosts could be so hostile, trapped in dilapidated mansions and crumbling castles bored out of their non-corporeal minds!

Still, the academician in him counseled patience. This is just the beginning, your first step in the undiscovered country.

So, he waited for the gray dawn light to shift through the sheer linen curtains, trying to sift out some sensation, some impression beyond the mechanical click of the minute hand of the mantel clock and its deep metallic chime every hour.

Nothing. Nothing at all, except once, at about four in the morning.

A thud from the front door.

Adam from across the hall, stumbling in from cruising the neighborhood bars. Not the first time he had tripped, fallen against the metal door frame, turning himself around for a run at his own apartment entrance. 

Father Alexander wasn’t so sure, though, about the noises that followed.

A staccato of something heavy being dragged across the metal of his door, alternating beats between damp sliding and rippling thumps. He hurried to the peephole to get a glimpse of the source, but nothing was there. Instinctively he tried to turn the doorknob, step out into the hallway. 

His hand slid through the old brass knob.

-

The rest of the second day passed much like the previous night had, except for the street noise, including the banging of overloaded trash cans emptying into a city garbage truck and more spits and growls of traffic in the street. He wandered through the rooms of his apartment, desperate for something, anything, to occupy his post-demise mind. But the stacks of books with their well-thumbed pages, unreachable in his postmortem existence, offered no distraction, other than to make him wonder why he had never found a used bookstore willing to take them off his hands. So, he spent most of the day drifting from the front window to the front door peephole to the couch across from his stiffening cadaver.

However, sometime around early afternoon, Father Alexander began to sense the change.

At first it was just a tingling somewhere deep in his chest, as close to a physical sensation as he had felt since he had drifted off to sleep for the last time. He tried to localize it in his phantom body, but the feeling seemed to float, touching down on what would have been his ear, then his right ankle, then just below his buttock, then the tip of his left thumb. But each time it shifted, there was a residual prick of concreteness left behind, alien but corporeal. 

As he looked down at his arms and legs, he could tell that some change was happening. His form was more translucent now, like a smoked glass in the shape of his body, with traces of his clothing etched upon it.

The residual image is going, he supposed. The ego can only sustain it for so long. 

Once again he raised his hand in front of his face, staring at the luminous gray tint of its form. 

Something’s there. What is that? He brought the strange appendage closer to what must pass now for his eyes, and squinted to try to make out the deeper interior of his palm. 

A fleck of color. A saffron dot, no larger than a speck of dust, there in the center of the thumb’s bulge. Now he noticed still others, different hues, and shades, scattered throughout the shape of his hand, the length of his arm, the edge of his shoulder.

Just as he started to check out the rest of his gray glass body shape, there came another knock at the door. Three quick raps, a pause, and the heavy clunk of the ancient deadbolt turning in the lock. The door swung open. The fleshy bulk of Mr. Lebowitz, the building manager, stood framed in the open space, master key in one hand and a can of Bud Light in the other. Brother Daniel’s head peeked out from behind the man’s right shoulder as Mr. L called out, “Father A, you here?” and the two men crept past Father Alexander’s shade, heading toward the living room.

The next few hours were the most interesting of his death. At least something was happening.

The police and the ambulance arrived at the same time, but both had little to do. The EMTs, recognizing a day-old corpse, didn’t bother to open their jump bags, but simply pulled out clip boards and began scribbling on forms. Two indifferent police officers stood in the open door into the hallway questioning his old friend who, distraught and distracted, kept asking if they would contact the chancery office right away, while Mr. L. fidgeted with his keys, no doubt worried about what the management company was going to say about a haunted rental in their building.

But eventually, a white plastic body bag was unfolded, and Father Alexander’s cadaver slipped into it, then lifted onto a battered metal stretcher and rolled out into the hallway by the EMTs. The two police officers gently shuffled Bro. Daniel and Mr. L out the door behind it. There was the sound of the dead bolt being turned by Mr. L’s key and then silence.

Father Alexander hovered about in his empty living room, lost.

Is this it? The thought intrigued him. An essence trapped in a two-bedroom apartment in a crumbling, century old building? A wraith…

But before he could complete the thought it happened again.

A heavy thud against the front door. The staccato rhythm of wet slithers and mallet thumps across its surface. Going on for far too long before fading into silence.

For the first time since he had slipped out of his old life and into this strange new existence, he found his wonder replaced by a nagging disquiet.

What is that? The question repeated in whatever passed for his mind now, and its echo seemed to linger with a tinge of old-fashioned fear.

What is that?

-

On the third day, he noticed trivial things at first. 

The mantle clock no longer clicking off the minutes. The insect hum of the old fluorescent ceiling light in the kitchen going quiet. The sound of rush hour traffic diminishing as if the growl of engines and smack of tires against pavement were being pushed through the mufflers along with the exhaust fumes. Then no sounds at all.

The outside light from the living room windows dimming in almost imperceptible stages, reaching twilight gray but not descending into nightfall. Then it became more apparent. The walls of the apartment, the ceiling, the floor, every chair, every table, every lamp, all the knickknacks scattered on shelves and in corners, all started a transformation. It was like some middling commercial artist, 3D photograph clipped to the top of his work easel, was trying desperately to turn it into a pencil sketch. Everything reduced to lines, thick and thin, gridded or herringbone, with translucent swirling smoke in the emptiness between them.

Everything but the front door. Father Alexander drifted to stand before it. The painted metal was still there, solid in its physicality, but its flat surface rippling as if viscous tentacles flicked just below the veneer.

In a reflex, he reached out to touch it with his right arm and hand.

A cluster of cilia, glittering with kaleidoscope hues, moved forward, gently spread their strands across the moving surface of the door. For the first time since his death, he could feel the sensation, dozens of individual taps of reality moving through strange flesh. He thought to raise his other arm, but his mind rejected the command as something alien and incomprehensible. Instead, the slender appendages quivered once more with a different pattern. He tried to tilt his head downward but found that his line of sight remained unchanged, with his brain rebelling against the command,.

For an instant he felt as if he were floating downward, shrinking in the process but somehow it felt natural, as if he were meant to be closer to the ground, his body somehow more comfortable.

Reincarnation! The revelation burst like blinding light in his thoughts. Buddhism, Hinduism. Karmic rebirth into new forms. I am transforming into the next stage. The next level of physical existence from which to grow and learn. My evolution towards the great meaning of existence, the answer to why we exist, what our final purpose is!

He could sense changes both within and without, but a kind of sight was still with him. 

And a kind of hearing as well.

The heavy thud against the front door. The staccato rhythm of wet slithers and mallet thumps across its surface. Going on for far too long before fading into silence.

A long pause, then repetition.

Thud, staccato, slither and thumps, silence.

Over and over again.

What is that? Father Alexander found his earlier elation fading with the question. The sound, if he could even call it that in his changing state, seemed ominous, just at the edge of fear. He strained to listen more closely and found that other noises had crept into the collage of sounds. A strange wind rustling through crystal chimes. The meowing cry of some indescribable creature, half the screech of an owl and half the cackle of a hyena.

They were growing louder, sharper, crisper in tone but Father Alexander’s attention was pulled away from them. His eyes, or what now passed for them, caught a change in the smoke swirls still remaining from his faded apartment. Like fog being burned off by warm morning sun, the gray mass seemed to dissipate, specters of shapes beginning to emerge, surrounded by warm, pastel-copper light. 

The door had morphed, its right angles replaced by gentle curves, its bulk no longer metal but organic, with pulsating veins bulging below its creased surface. As he watched, the black outlines of the walls transformed into silver stanchions rising a hundred feet into a burnished sky above, arching to meet in a kind of vault, the space between each span filled with a glittering mesh so thin that one could see through it.

The transformation continued. Father Alexander watched the new world around him coalesce. In the distance he could make out crimson hills covered in a forest of swaying reeds of jade and amber, dancing in a wind that he could not feel. Beyond these, cragged turquoise mountains rose against the copper sky tinted by the twin amber suns beginning to rise above the peaks. Two perfect crystalline hemispheres, with needle obelisks dotted the slopes of the horizon below.

The strange cry he had heard before, the screech/crackle, filled his auditory sense, flowed to him from above and behind. There across the sky, a glider of flesh hanging from a centipede spine and raptors claws spiraled in the air, shrieking as it floated towards the distant summits. 

He felt the presence of the others around him. His new senses gave them form, though his mind struggled with their shifting images, as if it could not decide what to make of the impulses it was receiving. Slowly they came into focus.

Alabaster ovoids of flesh, lithe but wingless, vaguely like swans, each with a dozen long, limber necks from which clusters of swaying, silken cilia rose. He could sense that he was somehow akin to these new creatures (“We,” not “they” he realized. “We.”).

Then came the voices.

Some fearful. Some filled with elation. Some confused. Some calm, accepting. But he could tell all were human in their thoughts, their reactions.

Father Alexander wanted to call out to them, reassure them, then realized that he was doing just that as his thoughts spread to their minds as theirs had to him.

We are born again! Don’t you understand? Resurrection. Reincarnation. The obliteration of Self. They were all true. Life after death. We go on. Transformed. We go on!

They hear me! Father Alexander realized. He could sense tranquility rippling back to him from the others in the congregation. Their realization. Their acceptance. It was like a prayer rising to greet this strange afterlife of which they were now a part.

Thud, staccato, slither and thumps, silence.

The sound! Now a vibration that travelled down a cluster of his cilia, grabbed his attention. Without conscious thought, he swayed his optical tentacles to take in the source.

There! What had once been the door of his apartment. Now it was a glowing rectangle hanging from the alabaster cables knotted about two stanchions, its surface writhing with veins that slithered from side to side. Through the mesh of the enclosure, he could make out a figure beside it, colorless in its flesh, long and slender in its torso, spraying out at its base into thick polyps. From its thin shaft, countless jointed limbs sprouted. As he watched, they reached forward to touch the transformed entrance.

Thud, staccato, slither and thumps, silence. The sounds reverberated again in the alien air.

A summons! Father Alexander was sure of it. A call to announce our arrival to our new existence. 

From the distant mountain side, the city of hemispheres and obelisks answered back, its response a hundred times deeper and more voluminous.

The Voice of Jehovah, Allah, Anubis, Yama. Come to judge. The thought popped into Father Alexander’s head, filled him with anticipation and excitement. Come to lead us to our next life, our new knowledge of true existence.

A shimmering cloud began to form above the city, flickering with tints of color for which he had no name. With sentient intent, it drifted down the mountainside toward the enclosure, taking on substance and form. By the time it came to rest above the high stanchions, they had drawn back their curved ends, opening the enclosure to the being that hovered in the sky. Then the entity began to descend.

O Lord, Father Alexander called out with his mind, we come to fulfill whatever purpose You have for us, now and forever. Only say thy words and we will follow your desire.

Even as the cloud above split into maws and teeth to the screams of those around him, a voice, soft and mocking, answered him his prayer.

Through all transformations yet to come? they asked.

Then they were upon him.