Bright's Passage: A Novel by Josh Ritter

and at a signal from the sergeant, the others spread to either side. The wood was stained almost to ebony by age, and the weighty brass rings that served as handles were polished yellow at their base from centuries of use.
    They waited on Sergeant Carlson for the signal to open the heavy doors, and, when he gave it, they grabbed the rings and pulled hard until a small crack afforded Bright a look inside. The sanctuary was narrow, the floor a diamond-checkerboard pattern of slate and marble. The walls had been painted an austere white but were stippled here and there with muted flecks of color as daylight shone through the few remaining stained-glass windows, as through the prism of an icicle. An altar hunkered squatly on a dais at the far end of the room, one corner chipped away, a candlestick fallen to the floor.
    Bright signaled that the room was empty, and at another sign from Carlson, he slipped inside. In the single, brief moment before the others crowded in around him, he let his eyes rise to the painted ceiling and, unprepared for what he saw there, foundhimself falling headlong into the crowded heaven that spiraled into infinity above him.
    It was the blue of the sky that caught him first: a rapturous, painfully pure spike of color that hooked his eyes like fish and reeled them upward into the heights. Gone in that instant was the viscous puddle of October light that had dribbled in behind him through the crack in the doorway. Beneath the gracious blue vault of the church it was a fresh and dazzling spring morning at the beginning of the world.
    His hand shot out, gripping the brass door handle hard, as if to keep himself from falling upward. He had believed the church to be empty, but, hanging there, Henry Bright realized he was in fact surrounded on all sides by a great gesticulating host of fellow beings. There were thousands of them in the sky around him—men, women, and children, in every conceivable pose and color. Some had the muscular builds of river-boat men and stood proudly astride their cake-white clouds. Others, a species of fat-faced-baby things, seemed to have leavened their way into the clouds themselves and popped their tousled heads at random from out of the billows, wearing expressions of frantic mirth and mischief. Many figures in the assemblage thrummed musical instruments, while others placidly displayed brutal and mysterious wounds. A finely featured woman held a pair of eyeballs on a platter, next to a nearly naked man who was calmly watching his own body being rendered into fat by flames.
    Above this crowd and higher still, a circle of bearded and wild men looked down from their perches with electric severity at Henry Bright, though he barely noticed them. His eyes now had come to rest on the figure of a young girl kneeling in prayer there in the highest heavens at the dome’s apogee.
    She was almost impossibly beautiful, her eyes filled with suchreserves of comfort that to Bright it seemed as if, had he come into the church only an instant earlier, she would have been happy to give him all the love and understanding he might have ever needed or desired. Sadly, though, this was not to be, for her face was even now caught in the act of turning toward the other figure who was interrupting her prayers.
    This other interloper was an angel, its hair like twists of fire, its wings bejeweled with eyes in all states of opening and closing, its white robes trailing just behind it in this, its moment of arrival. It was impossible to tell what the angel was saying to the girl, but so beautiful was she, so composed and fatalistic was the poetry of her face against the urgency of the angel’s, that Henry Bright fell in love with her in that moment and stood staring up at her as if stricken.
    “Bright!”
    “Bright?”
    Bathing in the radiant pool of the girl’s beauty, he was deaf to the men behind him and returned blinkingly to himself only to discover that he had been jostled forward by the others