He tried to understand. Vaporous curtains seemed to draw back one by one and a kind of clarity flowed over his mind like cool ocean up a white beach. A first faint tingling thrill moved in his blood, and became pleasure that mounted through ecstasy and then became something else for which he had no name.
He had called it—nowhere. This wasn't anything like that. This was really somewhere. Soft lights bathed him like water. Shadows seemed to shift and sway and there was silver in the light, dusted with golden motes.
He thought desperately. "Where is this? What has happened?"
"This is Death," the voice that had no face or form answered. "That is what you term it, in the lower stage reality from which you have come. There are other ways of going through the barrier, but death is the sure and the ordinary one. Many come through, in many ways—"
Stevens tried to understand, and he knew that he could not. He tried to see his present form, his present meaning. There was nothing tangible. He drifted. He was light and sound perhaps, movement perhaps. He was part of something greater and far more complex than his undeveloped powers of perception could absorb.
Stevens thought. "You mean—I'm—Dead. I mean—that I'm not living now?"
The thought answered him. It wasn't a sequence of words, phrases, forming meaning. The entire answer was a part of him, immediately. "You call it death. Actually you are more alive, you have come through the barrier into what you call the fourth dimension. It is really but a broader awareness of a higher reality—"
It didn't mean much to Stevens. The unknown, the intangible—it sent a chill through his consciousness. Pain hit him. He winced. Light roiled, irritation eddied like muddy streaks in a clear stream. A bluish haze spread like staining ink through the clouds of brilliance. Dark cracks spread like lines through colored glass.
Stevens felt an icy wind. He seemed to swirl inchoate through a forest of wildly irritated leaves and branches.