Other Side of Heaven

Stan Mason

Description

An old man dies and his spirit goes to Heaven, but it turns out to be entirely different to anything he had ever imagined in his mortal life.He discovers that it is governed by very strict rules, many of which goes against the grain especially when he has to account for all the bad things he did when he was alive.. One of his tasks is to be sent back to Earth as an Accompanying Angel to report on a Seraph and later returns to unravel a situation that could affect the whole planet. He meets the Cosmic Joker who takes him to Hell with surprising results and, very clearly, spirit life is nothing like anything he had expected.

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 02 janvier 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783334872
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
THE OTHER SIDE OF HEAVEN

by
Stan Mason



Publisher Information
The Other Side of Heaven in 2013 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
The right of Stan Mason to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998
Copyright © 2013 Stan Mason
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.



1
There were times when I had stood in front of a class of thirty boys and girls, teaching English or Geography, feeling extremely proud at being able to transfer information for the benefit of their education, realising that my efforts would help them to go out into the wide world well-equipped in knowledge to sustain a proper future for themselves. There were other times when I felt despondent at the poor decisions I had made and my perseverance to practice bad habits, as well as the lack of love for other people close to me, exposing my selfishness and personal weakness which seemed to have escaped my conscience. The pundits say that one’s personality forms at the age of three and never changes during one’s lifetime. They are probably quite correct in that assumption. A miserable child will always be sad and sulky; a happy one will tend to enjoy the fruits of life. However, whether my personality was good or bad was irrelevant as it was all now in the past... long gone and long forgotten. My time on Earth had expired and I was forced to leave my body behind ensuring that my spirit escaped to be free.
The church was practically empty except for the small group of people, mostly elegantly dressed in black or dark clothing, who listened to the priest talk briefly about the better elements of my life from a sheet of paper which had been hurriedly scribbled and passed to him by one of my nephews. Then, when the brief ceremony was over, the mourners made their way outside into the cemetery to wend their way slowly past the multitude of engraved tombstones behind a long well-worn metal trolley that carried the ornate wooden coffin with my body inside until they reached the site of the open grave. They all stood quite still at the edge, watching the pall being lowered and then began to listen to the final prayers of the priest officiating over the ceremony... ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
I stood some distance away by the side of one of the large tombstones in spirit form watching the proceedings without despair or desolation. I was invisible to all those attending... no one could see me as I observed the coffin being lowered with a slight smile on my face. At last, I was immune from pain and disappointment and all my failures in life only to realise that, when the incantation ended and the mourners had shovelled a tiny element of earth upon the lowered coffin ... everything was gone! The body in which I had shared my life, my particular personal history, the many relationships developed with friends and loved ones, my earthly needs, my long-faded ambitions, my aspiring hopes, all the knowledge I had gathered, as well as the experience secured over the many years of my life, indeed, not only those but my whole future ... they were all gone... interred under the sod of six feet of rich earthy soil. My flesh would rot and be eaten by parasitic insects until only my bones were left to crumble into dust. My life was irrevocably and definitely over!
***
During the years I spent on Earth I had always been a conscientious person ready to face the truth in life of any incident whether or not I was fit enough to deal with it. For that reason, as soon as I reached the age of maturity I had the notion that the paranormal existed. It was hosted with such entities as ghosts and spectres, poltergeists or spirits... even aliens from another planet... entering our world to haunt people to distraction by one means or another. However, I was never willing to accept the words of the numerous pundits in the world willing to predict what happens to the spirit of a person who passed away, although there were some exceptions with regard to the many people who claimed that they had suffered near-death experiences in crises. The former clearly had no idea what they were talking about for there is no evidence to prove the logic or the existence of a hereafter, while the latter practically always told their story of how they saw a wonderful bright light shining ahead of them that seemed to lead to another world before they managed to recover.
Not surprisingly, over the years, the authors of fiction have provided thousands of tales about ghosts, spectres, poltergeists, and spirits that form the paranormal and, indeed, some people have even experienced such weird and haunting activities in various houses to prove that something unnatural exists in the world. However, no one has ever been able to place a hand on their heart to identify anything that might or might not take place in the hereafter... if indeed there happened to be one. Certainly, it is not possible to establish any dubious existence of Heaven or Hell, Such reasoning can only be considered idyllic and fictional in terms of reality.
Before he died, Houdini, the famous escapologist, arranged a code by which he intended to contact his relatives and friends after his death to ensure that it was his spirit in contention but no message was ever forthcoming. From that conclusion, it is possible to suppose that when a person died, the aura that surrounded the body soon fades away and the existence ends at that moment in time. It is far more likely, however, that each person lives their life on Earth for a number of years and then is gone for ever; life becomes extinct. Unlike the flowers that bloom in the soil and return to enrich our lives each year, human-beings cannot return in the same form. For them it is a matter of total extinction of their lives and their souls. As some pundits earnestly predicted in the past: ‘Our lives on Earth are on lease only for a brief period of time.’
***
Before the last essence of life left my body, I considered how amazing it was that a fleeting memory of something which occurred briefly in the distant past could signal an effect in the brain and burst into incandescence many years later. Without rhyme or reason, as I lay on my death-bed, a vision suddenly triggered in my mind at the time when I was a schoolboy in the East End of London. It depicted a man parading along the pavement outside Whitechapel underground station carrying a large placard on a pole which read: ‘The End Is Nigh’. I didn’t know exactly what it meant at the time except that it was probably the end of the world and, in my youth, I felt quite haunted by the fact for a while in the belief that my life might end long before it had actually begun. Naturally, passers-by tended to ignore the man, thinking him to be either misguided or a a lunatic, while others ridiculed him, shouting abuse until, in the effluxion of time, he failed to appear on the pavement and was never seen again. It may well have been that he was signalling to the world that it was his end that was nigh.
My life thereafter continued in the usual vein as with most other people but now, at the age of eighty-eight, it fell to me to recognise that it was time for my end to be nigh. I had lain in bed for some time as a lonely weak old man, with irregular breathing that became more shallow each day. Arthritis riddled my body causing me great pain down my right side while, in addition, a weakening lethargy or malaise spread throughout me denying me the right to follow through any normal action. I could not imagine how much weight I had lost over the past few months but I knew in my mind that it was quite considerable. The sigbt in my right eye had long gone, I was toothless, while my thin face has become extremely wrinkled turning into a yellowish colour like parchment. No longer was I the romantic gigolo desired by many members of the opposite sex in my youth. The pleasantness of all the good days were gone... having paled into insignificance... for I now lived completely alone having become a widower some five years earlier. Sadly, my needs to stay alive had become extremely basic. Even worse, no food had touched my lips for almost ten days. Indeed, for me, in my present state, there was no doubt that my end was nigh.
Sleep can be a blessed friend to a body racked with pain. Subsequently, that night, during my stay in the arms of Morpheus, the murmur in my ancient heart finally reached its peak. It was the beginning of the end for the organs in my body started to fail to function any more and the Reaper’s scythe swiftly cut the umbilical cord which symbolically attached me to Earthly life. There was no wonderful light at the end of a tunnel for me to follow because I had died during my sleep so that death arrived ignominiously during my slumber. Nonetheless, my aura or spirit remained hovering above my listless body for a brief period of time in the place where I had lived for the past forty years although, in truth, I felt absolutely nothing... no sense of feeling, no taste of death... none of any of the senses except for sight.
However there were some distinct advantages to be enjoyed by the fact of my demise. For example, I was no longer burdened by the mantle of my body which enabled me to float lightly wherever I wanted to drift. Secondly, I was released from the agonising and continuous pai