The Book of Daniel (18 page)

“As soon as it became clear who I was, that I really was a vicar, that was it. The media had a field day, and of course everybody was quick to condemn me. Even those same faces that would gaze back at me rapturously as I preached love and forgiveness on Sunday were twisted with hate, or at best disapproving pity. I was thrown out of the Church and sent to prison; but by then, my health had already begun to deteriorate. Maybe it was all that alcohol taking its toll, but I guess the stress didn’t help, either. Whatever it was, there was nothing the doctors could do. Before I had served a year of my sentence, I had been diagnosed with cancer of the liver, and less than five months after that, I was dead.”

Thomas fell silent at the conclusion of his tale, obviously overcome by his memories, despite the fact that he must have relived them time and time again since arriving in Purgatory. The poor guy had tried to live his life by the rules, God’s rules, and the one time he had gone out on a limb, with the best of intentions and with apparent sanction from on high, it had led to his ruin. And the reward for all the faith he had shown? Condemned to Purgatory. I realised that Thomas and I were both sufferers at God’s hands. Perhaps he was even worse off than I; at least I had only been subjected to a few years of Christian hypocrisy, whereas this poor soul in front of me had devoted his entire life to a higher being who, in the end, had crushed him with all the carelessness with which you or I would step on an ant. I could easily imagine the sanctimonious condemnation that his ex-parishioners would have directed towards him, too. They probably all had faces just like Geraldine’s, full of indignant righteousness rather than forgiveness or understanding.

Common adversity was one of the cornerstones of friendship in the Army back on Earth, and I had no reason to suppose it would be any different in Purgatory. Certainly after his tale, I felt much more warmly towards Thomas than I had when he had first revealed his former occupation.

I was about to ask him what he thought of God in light of his experience when the air was suddenly filled with a titanic bellowing sound. Seeing my panic as I tried to locate the direction from which this new threat might be coming, Thomas pointed to the top of the city walls and the row of angels standing there, trumpets held aloft, and I relaxed slightly. As quickly as it had started, the piercing sound faded, and in perfect synchronisation, the angels lowered their instruments and disappeared over the top of the wall. A change in the tone of the noise coming from the other side of the gates enlightened me as to what was going on. Whereas before, the clashing of metal was punctuated by cries of despair, fear and pain, there was now a new vigour to the sound, a confidence that I recognised from my own army days; it was the sound of a beleaguered group of soldiers who knew that reinforcements had just arrived. The angels had joined the battle.

For a short time, the sounds of fighting could be heard through the city gates, but then they gradually began to fade. The noise receded to a muted murmur, but as I strained to hear it, suddenly—and with a colossal rumble that scared the shit out of me—the gates began to swing grudgingly inwards. Clouds of dust scurried to get out of their way, and as soon as there was enough space between the gates, a river of people surged through the opening and into the city. More and more of them spilled through the gap, and the murmur increased in volume until the general din of soldiers marching, screaming, running and shouting was so loud that I thought the city walls might suffer the same fate as those of Jericho and fall to pieces. The farther apart the gates drew, the greater the exodus from the battlefield became. There didn’t seem to be any end to the flood.

Many of the people I could see were badly injured, and I turned to Thomas, yelling into his ear to ask him what would happen to them. I didn’t miss the look in his eyes. He was clearly glad that the topic of conversation had moved away from the tale of his downfall.

“They’ll be fine, don’t worry,” he shouted back at me. “These new bodies of ours, they’re great. Short of actually being chewed up and swallowed by a demon, there’s nothing they can’t heal. Missing limbs, intestines hanging out of your body, no problem. I once saw a guy who almost had his head bitten off by a Gorgon. It was barely hanging on by a thread. An angel stepped in and pulled him right out of the demon’s mouth, dragged him back to town, and the next day, he was back out there again, fighting the good fight. I wonder what surgeons back on Earth would make of it all. I mean, if they knew about this place and the way it works, I think they’d all just pack it in and become painters or teachers or something instead.”

The same might be said of priests, I didn’t add.

All the while we had been speaking, the queue leading into the Forge had been steadily moving forward, and by now we were almost inside. I looked back at the queue, elongated beyond sight by those leaving the battlefield and joining its end, their blood and sweat spattering onto the dusty ground, their weapons lost or warped out of shape, their armour dented and mangled. I tried not to stare at the Purgatorians and their injuries, but focussed my attention instead on talking further with Thomas. I was careful not to press him about his past, but instead shared a little with him about the horrible circumstances that immediately preceded my own arrival in Purgatory. He was suitably sympathetic, and not in the hollow, polite way that I expected of a priest.

“That’s hard. You have my sincerest condolences, Dan. I was lucky enough—if that’s the right way to put it—that when I died, I didn’t have any earthly ties, so from that point of view, my time in Purgatory has been much easier. Nobody mourned my passing apart from a few journalists, and even they didn’t care that much. By then, I was old news. Most people didn’t even remember who I was.” Thomas shrugged. “But in the grand scheme of things, none of what you do back on Earth really counts for much. Even all the work I did before Tiverly, before things went wrong: almost meaningless. Obviously I’ve had a variety of different feelings about that—angry, humbled, sad—but I’m pretty sure that I’ve come to terms with it now. I’ve had plenty of time to mull it over and try to figure it out… but I must not have all the answers yet, otherwise I wouldn’t still be here, eh?” His smile as he said this was fleeting. “Figuring things like that out is all part of the fun of Purgatory, Dan. But once you get it right, bingo, up you go, Heaven, eternal life, the whole package.”

“And how are you supposed to know when you’ve got it right?”

“Oh, you’ll know all right, it’s fairly spectacular. Transition, they call it. The instant you’ve worked out the answers, you get engulfed in a big ball of blue light, and then whoosh, you shoot up into Heaven, just like that, with no warning and no chance for you to say goodbye to anyone or share your insight. Not that that would necessarily help; everyone’s got their own unique set of problems to wrestle with here, their own questions, their own answers. But at the end of the day, it’s all about getting right with God. I guess you should know by now that that’s no big secret.”

“And that it’s easier said than done.”

“Never a truer word spoken.”

With these words, we finally entered the smoky, grimy building that housed the Forge. Like the Temple of Rebirth, the interior of the building was high and vaulted, but there the similarities ended. Whereas the Temple was an oasis of calm, the Forge was everything you would expect from its name: loud, dirty and chokingly hot. The cause of the heat was immediately obvious; it was impossible to miss the enormous, glowing red well that sat in the middle of the hall. The light that it threw out contrasted with the soft blue glow emanating from the hundreds of swords that lined the walls, and the way the air shimmered in the heat almost made it seem as if the two different types of light were at war with one another. The walls themselves appeared to have been hewn from bare rock rather than constructed, and from the looks of them, no-one had ever bothered to finish the job properly; but based on the number of swords I could see, it was clear where the priorities lay. Closer inspection of the workers responsible for all this weaponry was difficult through the sooty air, but the strange light reflecting off of their heads made it obvious that the place was staffed by more of the mechanical angels, not humans. Metal forging metal. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

The moment I took my first breath of Forge air, the reason for the lack of human workers became obvious. New body or not, no-one could last for long with that liquid heat scorching them from the inside out. The fire back at the UPF warehouse on Earth seemed as frail as a guttering candle by comparison.

“If you’re thinking it’s as hot as Hell in here, you’re not far from the truth,” said Thomas, sweat beading on his forehead. “That’s precisely what you’ll find all the way down at the bottom of that big hole in the floor.”

“Isn’t that a bit risky, having an opening to Hell like that right inside the city? What’s to stop the demons climbing up out of it? Or let me guess: they can’t, and it’s just another of these ‘mysteries of the Lord’,” I said, imitating his mystical finger gesture from earlier.

“You’ve got it. Keep this up, and you’ll be out of Purgatory before I will. As to why it’s here, well, there are two reasons. The first is that forging things in the fires of Hell gives them some kind of extra potency against the demons. I guess a whiff of the old homeland puts the fear of God, or at least the other fella, into them. Believe me, none of them wants to be sent home with their tail between their legs and nothing to show for it. Second reason is that it reminds us poor saps of the fate that awaits us if we fail to make it to Heaven. A lot of people come here just to look down into that hole. Not that you can see much from all the way up here of course, but your imagination sometimes needs a focal point to start from.”

I craned my neck, trying to look down into the pit, but we were still too far away. However, as Thomas said, my mind was only too eager to fill in the blanks. It was sobering to think that Hell was a real place, to actually be able to
see
it, and to teeter on the edge of being sent there forever. It was enough to make a man reconsider his stance towards the Almighty… but not quite in the way that I felt I was supposed to. According to Saint Peter, I was here to re-establish a relationship with God, to love Him and accept Him into my life. The only feeling that the baneful red crater in front of me evoked was a shuddering wave of fear. How exactly was I supposed to love someone who was dangling me by the scruff of my shiny new neck over a pit of fire, saying ‘Love me or else…’? No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t see how it was possible.

I was so lost in my thoughts that when we next stopped moving, it took me a moment to realise we had finally reached the front of the queue. A broad stone counter stood before us, but if it weren’t for the angel standing behind it, it could very easily have been mistaken for a pagan altar rather than a quartermaster’s desk. The angel pushed a sword across the counter to Thomas, who lifted it up and inspected the blade.

“Fine work, as always. Thanks a lot. Hopefully this’ll be the last replacement I’ll need, eh?”

“We all pray that we will not see you here again, Thomas.”

“I’m sure you mean that in a nice way,” said Thomas, grinning. “Look, this is my friend Dan. He’s new here, so I want you to give him something extra nice, maybe one of those special under-the-counter jobs you keep for the Quakers.”

“Thomas, you know that all things are created equal here. No one sword is better than any other. No reborn body is any fitter than its brethren. The only differences come from the will that wields these tools.”

“I know, I know, I was just having a little fun. Besides, it can’t hurt to ask, can it?”

The angel turned to face me. “You will need to report to Maimonides for your armour before you are truly ready for combat,” he said, indicating another angel manning a desk opposite his own, “but here is the first of the things you will need.”

The sword slid across the counter like a ray of light shining across ice, and I tentatively reached out to pick it up. When my hand was a few centimetres away from the hilt, the sword suddenly leapt into my grasp and my fingers closed around the handle of their own volition. I lifted the sword up, wondering at its construction, unconsciously noting its lightness and balance. The experimental swings I made with it felt somehow
right
. I looked at Thomas quizzically, only to find him sporting a huge grin.

“How does it feel to be a master swordsman all of a sudden?”

“Weird… but at the same time, not so weird.”

“Yeah, well. Imagine if you’d spent your entire life being a man of the cloth and then suddenly found yourself waving one of these things around like Conan the Barbarian! At least you’ve had the experience of being a soldier to help prepare you for all this.”

“Believe me, I’m not finding this any easier than you probably did. The Army was quite a different kettle of fish to what it is here… although I can’t say that I’m particularly keen about those in charge of either of them.”

“Given your apparent fondness for being subordinate to higher powers, Dan, I’m surprised you enjoyed being in the Army at all.”

“It’s not that I joined the Army because I needed someone to tell me what to do. I… I just needed to reach out and make contact with people again, to feel like part of the human race. It fit the bill perfectly, too, right up until the point when everyone in my unit was killed in an ambush. Those were guys I’d known for years, all the friends I had, and God just snuffed them all out, like that,” I said, snapping my fingers.

“I’m sorry, Dan. That must have been tough.” I nodded. “What happened after that?”

“I left. Not that I’m a quitter, you understand. I didn’t give up on life then, I didn’t give up when God chose to take my mother away before that, and I was fighting right until the bitter fucking end to try to save my wife. If I was a quitter,” I said, jabbing my thumb towards the door, “I’d be sat out there blubbing my eyes out with those other sorry bastards that just can’t cope with being stuck in this place.”