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around him, a jumble of sights and sensations—a nightmare from which he couldn’t awaken. Where was he? His mind was like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle with thousands of pieces caught in a turbulent whirlwind. Eventually the scattered pieces of that jigsaw puzzle, the events of his life, and a horrendous afterlife, began to fit together in a somewhat logical order.
    He found himself in a crowded hospital emergency room, his loving wife sitting by his side. He hadn’t really wanted to come here. It had seemed more like a bad case of indigestion than anything else. He’d wanted to continue playing hoops with his sixteen-year-old son Pete. He was down 7-9, but he was catching up. That was until the pain and shortness of breath hit him. He’d had to sit down. It had been his wife, Lois, who insisted that they go to the emergency room, just in case. If only he had realized the seriousness of his condition.
    It came upon him abruptly. He felt the awful crushing pain in his chest. This time it couldn’t be confused with a case of indigestion; it was the pain of a second heart attack. His collapse to the floor set off a flurry of activity in the emergency room. Yet for him, the pain lasted only a fraction of a minute. The next thing he knew he was rising to his feet. The pain was gone. Confused, he looked around. A doctor, nurse, and orderly were kneeling over a man lying on the floor—he couldn’t see who the man was. He nearly freaked out as a second orderly rushed straight toward him and passed right through him. Then he realized that the man on the floor was him.
    “Wake up, I’ve got to wake up!” he cried. Yet it did no good. This wasn’t a nightmare, it was reality. He turned to his wife, tried to get her to see him, but it was futile. She was looking on in horror at the man on the floor. No one could see the spirits of the dead.
    Perhaps they would revive him, and he would slip back into his body. Perhaps he would become just one of the thousands of people who had a near-death, out-of-body experience. But as the minutes passed and they shocked his heart again and again to no avail, it became clear that he would become a different type of statistic.
    “I’m afraid I’m going to have to call it,” said the exhausted doctor. “He’s gone. I’m sorry.”
    “No, you’ve got to keep trying!” screamed Carson. But no one could hear him.
    Then he saw the swirling violet vortex forming near the corner of the emergency room. It was more real than everything else around him that now looked dull and faded, as if viewed through a smudged lens. The swirling phantasm was not some sort of projection; it had tremendous depth. It was a corridor that led right into the wall behind it. Not to the outside of the hospital, but into some other place, some place dark and vast. And there was something else, something that went beyond the fear-inspiring visual impression of it all. There was a sensation that found its origins in the depths of his primal soul. If there was a physical manifestation of evil, he was looking at it.
    He backed away, yet it was pulling him toward it. It was like some other form of gravity, and it was growing more powerful by the minute. He tried to run, but he felt so weak—this new force was swiftly overcoming the fading gravity of the world.
    “Help me! For God’s sake, someone help me!” he screamed.
    No one responded. How could anyone in the emergency room help him? This horrible apparition was not part of their world. It was now part of his.
    He reached for something to grab onto, to anchor himself. He reached for a support column that ran from the floor to the ceiling, but his hands passed through nothing but empty air. He slipped backward, toward the dark violet portal that now took up all of the space from the floor to the ceiling and more. His body was growing lighter and lighter, making it even more difficult to fight the powerful attraction pulling him into the dark undulating tunnel. Then his