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Only at the arrival of a small but haunting noise did he stir, his eyelids lifting heavily. He had already been to four pockets of heaven, met four people, and while each had been mystifying upon arrival, he sensed that this was something altogether different.

White was all Eddie saw. All he heard was his own labored breathing, followed by an echo of that breathing. He inhaled and heard a louder inhale. He exhaled, and it exhaled, too.

White. There was only white now. No earth, no sky, no horizon between the two. Only a pure and silent white, as noiseless as the deepest snowfall at the quietest sunrise.

Eddie squeezed his eyes shut. Silence is worse when you know it won't be broken, and Eddie knew. His wife was gone. He wanted her desperately, one more minute, half a minute, five more seconds, but there was no way to reach or call or wave or even look at her picture. He felt as if he'd tumbled down steps and was crumpled at the bottom. His soul was vacant. He had no impulse. He hung limp and lifeless in the void, as if on a hook, as if all the fluids had been gored out of him. He might have hung there a day or a month. It might have been a century.

He clenched his teeth, as if that might make it stop, but it continued on, like an unheeded alarm, until Eddie yelled into the choking whiteness: "What is it? What do you want?"

In human accounting, his body was near its end.

The tremor of noise came again, louder now, and Eddie, in a lifelong defense instinct, clenched his fists, only to find his right hand squeezing a cane. His forearms were pocked with liver spots. His fingernails were small and yellowish. His bare legs carried the reddish rash -- shingles -- that had come during his final weeks on earth. He looked away from his hastening decay.

With that, the high-pitched noise moved to the background, layered atop a second noise, a loose, relentless rumble -- the sound of a running river -- and the whiteness shrank to a sun spot reflecting off shimmering waters. Ground appeared beneath Eddie's feet. His cane touched something solid. He was high up on an embankment, where a breeze blew across his face and a mist brought his skin to a moist glaze. He looked down and saw, in the river, the source of those haunting screeches, and he was flushed with the relief of a man who finds, while gripping the baseball bat, that there is no intruder in his house. The sound, this screaming, whistling, thrumming screak, was merely the cacophony of children's voices, thousands of them at play, splashing in the river and shrieking with innocent laughter.

Now came the sound again, a high-pitched rolling of irregular shrieks and lulls. In life, Eddie had heard this sound in his nightmares, and he shuddered with the memory: the village, the fire, Smitty and this noise, this squealing cackle that, in the end, emerged from his own throat when he tried to speak.

Was this what I'd been dreaming? he thought. All this time? Why?

And then Eddie's eyes were drawn to a white boulder. A slender young girl stood upon it, apart from the others, facing his direction.

He studied the small bodies, some jumping, some wading, some carrying buckets while others rolled in the high grass. He noticed a certain calmness to it all, no rough-housing, which you usually saw with kids. He noticed something else. There were no adults. Not even teenagers. These were all small children, with skin the color of dark wood, seemingly monitoring themselves.

Eddie lowered his cane to navigate the downward slope. He slipped, his bad knee buckling, his legs giving way. But before he hit the earth, he felt a sudden blast of wind at his back and he was whipped forward and straightened on his feet, and there he was, standing before the little girl as if he'd been there all the time.

She motioned with both her hands, waving him in. He hesitated. She smiled. She waved again and nodded, as if to say, Yes, you.