Edge of Eternity – Randy Alcorn. Chapter 10 excerpt

I heard the sound of someone pounding with a hammer, but it was a dull tearing sound, not the crisp, loud sound of nails driven into wood. Where was it coming from?

I heard jingling metal and looked around me and saw people pulling things from their pockets. I reached into my left pocket and pulled out…a handful of nails.

I saw now that each person had a hammer. I watched motionless as person after person positioned nails on the Woodman’s giant feet.

“No!” I shouted, “What has he done to you?”

What horrified me most was that people seemed so normal, even nice.

“Beautiful day, isn’t it?” a woman in a white nurse’s uniform asked me as she positioned a nail and hammered it five times until it was buried to its head in the Woodman’s foot.

“Where’s your hammer?” asked a business man in suit and tie. “Here’s an extra. Glad to share.”

I took the hammer. It hung limp in my right hand. After watching this for a few minutes, it seemed less horrible. Something moved in my chest and before I knew it, I was thinking about how big the Woodsman was, how distant he was, and how little he cared about mt, and how he hadn’t made my life go the way I wanted, and how he thought he was better than me and had dared to cast blame on me. I took the hammer and started pounding nails into his heel, first one and then another and another. I felt gleeful, almost giddy.

“Nick! How’s it going?”

I looked over at Victoria, pounding her own nails into his feet. I saw David and Quon and Malaiki and Salama doing the same.

I felt the skin of my stomach bulge and saw a pulsating lump move up into my chest and out to my ribs, racing within me, as if I were hollow. Now the fuzzy gerbil appeared on my chest, comforting me. I petted it, then immediately resumed pounding.

I hammered nails feverishly, harder and harder. No matter how many nails I took out of my pocket, it was still full.

……

“Take that!” I shouted. “No one can tell me how to run my life. How dare you treat me like this?”

……

I looked at the blood on my own hands. I gazed up at the giant, certain that in one moment, deliberate or unguarded, he could hurl us into the abyss. Something grabbed hold of my insides and made me stop and wonder.

“Why do you do what you do?” I cried up to him, holding out my hands, with nails and hammer, covered with blood.

He looked down into my eyes, and in the next instant he was looking straight into them – that quickly he had shrunk again to my size. “You are why I do what I do.”

My heart was pulled toward him, then I considered his words. Was he blaming me for this again? How dare he? I backed away from him. He stretched out his blood hand, and I retreated even farther.

……

Then a guttural voice, soaked in evil, cried out from the great flying dinosaur.

“Bleed, Elyon! Suffer and die, mighty fool!”

I turned away, crying out, partly for his agony, partly for my complicity in it. For though the beast frightened and repulsed me, through the pounding of the nails I had become his partner.

……

I watched the Woodsman – not knowing how I could see so far – through the dark clouds, lying there, lifeless on the tree.

I looked around me, seeing Malaiki, Salama, Victoria, Quon and David, not knowing how to read what I saw on their faces, knowing only that none of us dared move.

For the King was dead. And we had killed him.

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Edge of Eternity – Randy Alcorn. Chapter 22 excerpt

I looked at his left hand, which had held on to the thorny tree limb. It was covered with red mud. I reached down into my bulging pocket, full of nails. I spilled them at his feet. Maybe I’d find them in my pocket again, as I always seemed to, but here, now, I was determined to have nothing to do with them.

“There are two kinds of people,” he said. “Those who deny they carry the nails and those who admit it. My followers admit it and empty them often at my feet, just as you have done.”