Tartarus: Kingdom Wars II (30 page)

The crowd roared their displeasure. Semyaza’s eyes flared. Belial’s jaw clenched. I didn’t even want to think what they’d do to me had ten thousand angels and the Divine Warrior not been at my side.

“Do not listen to the ravings of this insignificant worm!” Semyaza cautioned.

I looked at him. He knew. The others didn’t, but he did. He knew Lucifer’s hidden agenda.

“Lucifer is no fool!” I said. “Knowing he can’t win leaves him only one option—to kick the game board over. His only hope is to convince the Father that creation is flawed beyond redemption. All of it. Earth. The cosmos. The heavens. His argument is for annihilation. Blessed nothingness. No torment. No memories. No earth. No hell. No heaven.”

The crowed fell to stunned silence.

Semyaza fidgeted.

“I speak from experience,” I said. “The prospect of unending torment is…is”—my voice faltered at the recent memory—“is unimaginable. Annihilation would be welcomed as a blessed gift.”

Sheol was as quiet as a tomb.

“Every evil in the cosmos adds to Lucifer’s argument. I thought you should know what you’re working for. It’s not concessions. It’s not reinstatement. It’s annihilation. This is Lucifer’s agenda. Semyaza knows this to be true. Ask him.”

The rebel angels became embroiled with noise. Shouts of dissension called for support of Lucifer. Others called for Semyaza to address my accusation. Many argued among themselves.

Belial drew my attention. He had gone to Semyaza. The two of them stood toe to toe in heated discussion. Others fell in behind Belial, descending upon Semyaza, demanding answers.

I stood atop my pedestal a safe distance away. Battered. Bruised. Bleeding. But alive and demon-free in Sheol.

“Your task here is done,” the Divine Warrior said to me. “We will take our leave.”

With Semyaza surrounded by angry, shouting rebel angels, Sheol melted away.

O
nce again the Father had used Lucifer’s strategy against him. And to think I’d witnessed it firsthand. My parting memory of Sheol was of a rebel army in complete disarray storming Semyaza, demanding answers. Semyaza had arranged a spectacle and the Divine Warrior stole the show.

We were standing in my living room.
(The Divine Warrior was standing in my living room!)
How we got there from Sheol I didn’t know. All I knew was that the passage was painless, and for that I was grateful.

He stood before me, tall and strong. At once fearful, yet approachable and kind.

“You trusted your enemy,” the Son said.

“Yes,” I said without excuse, not daring to look Him in the eyes. I suppose it was foolish of me to think I’d escape the inevitable lesson and guilt for this colossal blunder.

“You believed your enemy when he promised to help you gain access to the courts of heaven.”

It sounded unbelievably naïve in hindsight.

“Yes,” I said.

“Even though your previous attempts to cross dimensions had proven painful and unsuccessful.”

“Yes.”

“And then you made yourself vulnerable by relinquishing the protective mark of the Father.”

“That was—yes.”

“All because you wanted to present a petition to the Father.”

“Yes.”

“On behalf of demons who have on more than one occasion possessed and tormented you.”

“When you put it like that, it sounds—”

“The Father has received your petition on behalf of the Nephilim, Grant Austin. We are pleased with you. You have acted unselfishly with steadfast courage and self-sacrifice in the highest tradition of heaven’s warriors. We will not forget it on the day of judgment. Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”

I dared to look up. Kind eyes embraced me.

Then He was gone.

But He left something behind.

A pair of footprints on my carpet.

I stood there for the longest time as the reality of what I’d experienced began to sink in. My shirt and pants and shoes were slashed and splattered with blood, but my wounds were healed. My silver sword was sharp and had a mirror polish. There was no seal on it. No seal indicating salvation. No seal of protection from the Father. My petition had come with a price.

The following Monday Jana reported on the six o’clock news that the conference in Geneva, Switzerland, had adjourned when Belial failed to make an appearance.

Taped footage showed a large conference room with long, curved rows of desks. The floor was chaos. Delegates were on their feet shouting at each other in different languages. Two men at the podium fought over the gavel.

A video clip played, identifying the speaker as a delegate from England. “Was he the Christ? Not likely. But I’ll tell you one thing. No matter where he’s from, nobody’s going to come to our world and tell us how to solve our problems. We made them. We’re going to have to solve them ourselves.”

As the broadcast continued, I reclined on the sofa and smiled. Jana had used my quotation.

An expert on angels. Don’t make me laugh.

Belial was history. At least for now. Who knew when and where Semyaza would pop up. But I decided not to worry about it. In spite of ourselves, the good guys had won this round. But then, sometimes God favors the foolish as long as their hearts are in the right place.

Sue Ling answered the door.

“Grant! You look terrible! You look like you’ve been to hell and back.”

“Sheol. It’s in the same neighborhood.”

My pants were rumpled. My eyes bloodshot. I had a two-day growth of beard. I was exhausted and smelled as if I’d been wearing the same shirt for a week. My unsightly condition wasn’t because of Sheol. The airline industry was to blame.

What should have been a four-hour flight turned into a thirty-six-hour marathon wait in three airport lobbies as two of my flights were canceled due to mechanical problems. Leave it to the airlines to make traveling through interdimensional membranes look appealing.

Sue folded her arms, leaned against the doorframe, and laughed at me. “You really preached to an assembly of rebel angels and demons?”

“Who told you? Jana?”

“Abdiel.”

That surprised me. I hadn’t seen the big angel since he delivered the message that lost me the mark of favor.

“You’ve seen Abdiel?”

“He popped in to tell me about your preaching tour. Unbelievable. And you actually lived to tell about it.”

“Reinforcements came.”

“The Divine Warrior. Oh, Grant, what was He like?”

“Once you see Him, you no longer doubt that good will prevail.”

“At first I was angry when Abdiel popped in. But you should have seen him, Grant. He was positively giddy.”

“That’s hard to imagine.”

“He is so proud of you, Grant. And so is the professor. Abdiel told me that when the professor heard what you had done, he whooped so loud he startled some angels to flight like a flock of pigeons.”

There was no animosity in her voice when she mentioned the professor. Her sword looked good. Stronger than ever.

“Didn’t your mother tell you it’s not polite to stare at a woman’s sword?”

I don’t know why it surprised me that she knew exactly what I was doing. She’d always been one step ahead of me.

“Well?” she said. “How does it look?”

“Beautiful.”

When I decided to come to Chapel Hill, I told myself that if her sword had not improved, I’d walk away. I also told myself that I was going to be totally honest with her.

“I no longer have the mark,” I said.

Whether she knew it already or not, she acted as though she was hearing it for the first time. She became serious.

“You’re just like the professor,” she said. “You’d misplace your soul if it wasn’t attached to you. Have you considered hiring a housekeeper?”

I grinned. “Are you applying for the position?”

She laughed. “You would hire me even though I haven’t earned my doctorate?”

“Life’s risky. Sometimes you have to take a chance.”

She stepped down onto the porch. She put her arms around me.

“Like this?” she said, kissing me.

Some days you wrestle with the devil. Other days you lose yourself in the arms of a beautiful woman. You never know what the day will bring when you live in Tartarus.

T
wo years after my journey to Sheol I sat in the Loaves and Fishes Bookstore in Chapel Hill signing my new book,
The Divine Warrior.
It contained my transcribed notes from Abdiel, including his recollections of the early church martyrs, which I finally got him to agree to share with me. Including their stories in the book was my way of showing how the life of the Divine Warrior inspires others to live courageous and self-sacrificing lives.

I also included the complete text of the Alexandrian manuscript in the appendix. Once the two narratives were put side by side, it became abundantly clear which was the real Jesus and which was the sham.

Speaking of shams…. No one has heard from or seen Belial. I like to think I had something to do with his disappearance and the fizzling of the Neo Jesus movement. That world deception had to be put on hold for a time while Lucifer attended to some pressing internal business.

For the most part, no one seems to miss Neo Jesus. Occasionally his name comes up. But people speak of him much as they do any other passing fad, like the miniskirt of the sixties or the hula hoop of the fifties. And of course there was the conspiracy crowd who pieced together a theory that a faction of Tartarans kidnapped Neo Jesus and did away with him Jimmy Hoffa style. According to Sue, it was faddish among physicists to calculate the location of Tartarus and theorize ways to communicate with subatomic civilizations.

Traditional churches have made a comeback. They always do. Jana did a feature on it that was picked up by the networks. She interviewed three people who had accidentally killed someone. A woman who had backed over her son’s best friend who was skateboarding belly-side down. A man who was stretching open a barbed-wire fence for his hunting buddy as he’d done a hundred times before, only this time his rifle fell and went off, killing his buddy instantly. And a rest-home attendant who left the coffeepot on and started a fire that burned six residents to death. Without exception, they said their faith in God helped them through the difficult time.

As the hunter said, “When you hurt that bad, you need more than pulpit jokes and Sunday morning good times.”

Dr. Sue Ling sat next to me at the book signing, handing me an open book to be autographed for the next person in line.

A thin, leathery man with no-nonsense eyes picked up one of the books from the stack and examined it through wire glasses.

“Is this fiction or nonfiction?” he asked.

“It doesn’t get any more real than this,” I told him.

He looked over the book at me. “I guess I’ll give it a try.”

I signed the front of his book with words the professor once said to me:
Seek the truth, find reality.

Those who have read Jack Cavanaugh’s fiction before will recognize that the Kingdom Wars series is a significant departure from the historical fiction Jack is best known for. An award-winning, full-time author, Jack has published twenty-five books to date. His nine-volume American Family Portrait series spans the history of our nation from the arrival of the Puritans to the present. He has also written novels about South Africa, the English versions of the Bible, and German Christians who resisted Hitler. He has published with Victor/Chariot-Victor, Moody, Zondervan, Bethany House, Howard Books, and Fleming H. Revell. His books have been translated into six languages.

The Puritans
was a Gold Medallion finalist in 1995. It received the San Diego Book Award for Best Historical Novel in 1994, and the Best Book of the Year Award in 1995 by the San Diego Christian Writers’ Guild.

The Patriots
won the San Diego Christian Writers’ Guild Best Fiction award in 1996.

Glimpses of Truth
was a Christy Award finalist in International Fiction in 2000.

While Mortals Sleep
won the Christy Award for International Fiction in 2002; the Gold Medal in
ForeWord
magazine’s Book of the Year contest in 2001; and the Excellence in Media’s Silver Angel Award in 2002.

His Watchful Eye
was a Christy Award winner in International Fiction in 2003.

Beyond the Sacred Page
was a Christy Award finalist in Historical Fiction in 2004.

Jack has been writing full-time since 1993. A student of the novel for a quarter of a century, he takes his craft seriously, continuing to study and teach at Christian writers’ conferences. He is the former pastor of three Southern Baptist churches in San Diego County. He draws upon his theological background for the spiritual elements of his books. Jack has three grown children. He and his wife live in Southern California.