The Book of Daniel (35 page)

The moment stretched out impossibly. I knew that, with an effort, I could haul myself towards the Temple, and perhaps make it as far as the sanctuary of the steps. But even as the thought occurred to me, another of the Fallen screamed overhead, its passage negating my ideas completely. Instead of bouncing off of the Temple’s shield as before, it instead continued along its trajectory uninterrupted, slicing through an archway attached to the side of the Temple and sending it tumbling to the ground in a shower of bricks. With fresh horror, I realised that Abraham’s infernal words did more than simply protect him from the demons: they also stripped away the Temple’s defences, just as they had those of the angels. As long as he continued his chant, the Temple was no more safe than the rest of the city, and everyone sheltering inside it was in danger. If Abraham wasn’t stopped, there would be a massacre.

Of course, I had no concrete evidence that the chanting was the cause of the Temple’s vulnerability, but I suddenly found that having faith in the unseen and the unproven was a whole lot easier than I had previously supposed. In an instant, everything fell into place. It was no longer as simple as Harper, Abraham and me. I finally understood that when Jo had called on me to be a protector, she
had
meant for the whole of Purgatory, not just Harper. And Jack’s assertion, that all the hardship we had been put through in our lives was simply a preparatory process, a period of training designed to make us ready for our ultimate purpose, that made a heck of a lot more sense now that I was faced with what I knew I was being called to do. It all boiled down to a simple exchange: my life in return for that of everybody else still stuck in Purgatory. And incredibly, it was an exchange I felt ready to make.

The parallels between my situation and the sacrifice made by a certain carpenter’s son a couple of thousand years earlier did not escape me, and a wry, bloody smile came to my lips.

WWJD.

The final plan came into my mind—born of desperation, yet undeniably the same plan that would have come from millennia of careful planning—arriving in a cloud of mixed emotions that swept through my mind in a dizzying rush:

Fear of death and what lay beyond.

Regret that I would never see Jo again.

Pride that I knew she would approve of my action.

Hope that God would be merciful.

And brittle amusement at what Jack—and the other friends I had known, both in Purgatory and back on Earth—would make of it all. Dan the recalcitrant Messiah. I had spent all my life struggling against God; and yet here I was, at the end of my days, surrendering myself to His will, in spectacular style.

I turned towards Abraham and threw myself at him.

We collapsed in a heap, the agent of God pummelling at the agent of Satan, and Abraham’s apocalyptic grin and protective green glow both evaporated in a flash. The demons instantly sensed that the dynamics of the battlefield had changed, and descended upon us. For the last few seconds of my life, I knew what the Pharaoh must have felt like when the Red Sea came crashing down on him and his army. Abraham had just enough time to start screaming before a pair of jaws clamped decisively over his head, biting it clean off. His hands twitched as the life ran out of him, and the medallion fell into the dust, where it was quickly ground underfoot by the hungry masses. This time I was not sad to see the back of it.

I looked up at the demons, too tired to try to escape, knowing that this was the end. I felt a tugging on my left arm, and looked over to see a Bloodhound chewing on my hand. I made a half-hearted effort to free myself from its mouth, but all that succeeded in doing was to finish the demon’s work for it, and my hand tore off. I thought about trying to get up to chase after it, but even as I did so, I saw that both of my legs were missing, too. I caught sight of one of them, clutched to the chest of some kind of lizard as if it were the greatest treasure in the world, but the swarm shifted and blocked my view before I could be sure. It didn’t seem to matter anyway. I considered calling out for help, but quite apart from the fact that I knew I was beyond help, I was also afraid that if I opened my mouth, all that would come out would be a stream of insane laughter. Whoever said death is no laughing matter had obviously never tried it. Or at least not tried it enough times.

The last thing I remember was looking back towards the Temple. The demons had streamed past me by then, throwing themselves up the steps like salmon swimming upstream, but the instant any of them sailed over the threshold, they evaporated in a flash of light. With the cessation of Abraham’s chanting, the Temple was safe once again. Some of the demons realised this and tried to scramble back from the deadly, invisible barrier, but it was as useless for them to fight the inevitable tide as it had been for any of us. The greedy weight of Hell’s army pushing forwards drove them to their doom.

I looked up at Harper—safe on the steps, slowly making her way up them towards the Temple—and I knew peace. Even the sudden eruption of the ground beneath me raised only a vague sense of alarm, and as I found myself propelled upwards towards the sky, trapped between the jaws of a Subterranean, I looked down detachedly, straight into Harper’s eyes.

She stopped and smiled up at me.

The demon bit down, and everything ceased.

Chapter 22

F
irst the hospital in Afghanistan; then the Temple of Rebirth; now this. Coming round and finding myself in an unfamiliar place seemed to be becoming something of a habit for me, although this time there was no darkness before my awakening. One moment, I was lunch for the Subterranean, the next I was sitting on a wooden bench, looking out over a lush green valley. Rather than the demon’s teeth, I was now surrounded by fields full of vividly coloured flowers, lolling in the bright sunshine that doused everything. I could immediately sense that death had no place here. Instead, the enormous trees that dotted the landscape seemed to celebrate life, their branches sagging under the weight of all kinds of fruit. In the distance, snow-capped mountains thrust up into an azure sky, calm and majestic and quite unlike the volcanoes I had got used to seeing in their place. Nearby, at the foot of a towering white cliff, was a lake, the soothing rumble of the waterfall that fed it seamlessly replacing the wild roaring of the mob that had engulfed me an instant earlier. At the bottom of the waterfall, enough moisture was thrown into the air to create a rainbow.

It was all, quite simply, beautiful.

I can’t remember how long I just sat there, staring. But gradually, the initial wave of confusion and wonder subsided and allowed my other senses a chance to catch up. I noticed that all my limbs were back, free from pain, and that instead of a heavy suit of mechanical armour, they were now clad in a light, white garment of some kind. I took a few deep breaths. It was wonderful to taste air that wasn’t tainted with the foul undertone of charcoal and sulphur. But there was something else here, too, a scent from another time that at first I couldn’t place… but suddenly it hit me in a rush of memories. Jo’s favourite perfume.

At exactly the same moment I identified the fragrance, I heard a soft rustling sound next to me on the bench.

“Hello, gorgeous.”

My heart leapt and my head spun, and there she was, looking as radiant as ever; more so, if that were possible. There was a look of bright joy on her face, but also a hint of wry amusement that no doubt stemmed from sitting there and observing my disorientation. She bit her bottom lip delicately, scarcely containing the enthusiasm that was apparent in the warmth of her eyes. She was dressed in the same kind of robe as I was, and its extreme whiteness contrasted breathtakingly with the red cascade of hair that spilled over her shoulders. The gleam of her smile made the nearby rainbow seem lacklustre by comparison.

The apparent impossibility of what I could see before my eyes sparked an instinctive pessimism in my mind. I was too used to things going wrong for me. How could this be real? Before I was ready to let down my guard, I had to be sure that this wasn’t just some evil trick. There was still a chance that despite the evidence of my senses, I was in fact in Hell. Perhaps all that I could see around me was fake, designed to inspire me with a hope that would then be snatched away again. Certainly, I couldn’t imagine a worse torture than to lose Jo again after being so close to her at last.

Jo had always been able to read me like a book, and the giggle that broke into my introspection was more reassuring than any words would have been.

“Jo? Is that really you?”

“Last time I checked. Here, let me prove it.”

She leant across and pressed her lips against mine.

Time passed.

A lot of time.

I was convinced.

Eventually our mouths parted, and she snuggled down under my arm. I grinned foolishly. Sitting like that with her was just like when we used to watch TV together, back when we were both still alive.

“I like the way your smile fits your new face,” she said. I’d forgotten about the scar that she was used to seeing there. “I’ve been waiting to tell you that for ages. Not that you’ve been doing a great deal of smiling, of course.”

“That’s going to change. Look at me, I can’t stop.”

She kissed me again, a brief peck this time. “No need to try too hard. Now that you’ve finally made it here, you’ll find yourself smiling a whole lot more. That’s what this place does to you.”

“So this is Heaven, then? Nice.”

“I’m sure God is pleased it meets with your approval.”

“I mean it, it’s great. I had no idea. But I’ll tell you this: as nice as all the trees and rainbows and fluffy bunny rabbits are, it wouldn’t mean a thing without you being here, Jo. I’ve missed you.”

She became serious. “I know, Dan. I’m sorry you had such a hard time getting here. I knew you’d make it in the end, but it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, watching you struggle, wanting so much to reach over and touch you or tell you that everything would be okay, but knowing that I mustn’t.”

“What are you talking about? You mean you were there in Purgatory with me the whole time?”

“Well of course! You didn’t think I’d forget about you once I got into Heaven, did you?”

“How come I never saw you? I looked everywhere.”

Jo sighed. “It’s hard to explain, Dan. I’m going to try, but you’re going to have to pay close attention. You might have all the time in the world ahead of you to get used to what I’m about to say, but that doesn’t make it any easier the first time through. Okay, here we go. Let’s start with the basics.

“The first thing to get into your head is that Purgatory as you know it—the place you’ve just left, full of brimstone and demons and all that—none of it was real.”

I made a half-strangled sound, but Jo held up a finger, and in my shock, that was all it took to keep me quiet. “At least, not real in the sense of being a physical place where you’re punished for the sins of your earthly life. That’s the wrong way of looking at it, because as you know, Jesus’s death already took care of all that. Instead, you’ve got to think of Purgatory more like a state of mind, a construct that your consciousness is put into, somewhere for it to settle things, both with itself and with its station in the divine order. Because everyone who dies has their own set of issues to deal with, the exact sensory form that Purgatory takes is different for each of us. But its purpose is always the same: to provide a framework in which you can wrestle with your doubts and meditate on your relationship with God. Once you’ve come to terms with it all, then the scales are lifted from your eyes, and your soul is free to move on to its true place in the universe, which is here in Heaven.”

“So let me get this straight. You’re telling me that everything that happened to me back there was basically all just a dream, like in some bad movie?”

“Nothing as inconsequential as a dream, Dan. But if it helps you to think of it that way, then yes.”

Not all dreams are inconsequential, of course. Our conversation reminded me of the night that I’d found her in the forest, huddled under the tree, and of the strange dream I’d had beforehand. But now that I was sitting here with her in Heaven, finally at peace, the startling transformation I had undergone at the end of the dream suddenly made sense. That night, she had been the lost sheep in need of rescuing by the shepherd, but ever since we had both died—or maybe long before that—our roles had been reversed, and I had become the one who needed to be saved. And now, apparently, I had been. But from what, exactly? God’s judgement? My own mind? Or something in between the two? I sat there in stunned silence, trying to organise all the ideas that were running around my head into something that might make sense. “But if none of that was real, why did God put me through it all? That place was horrible. If He wanted us to iron out our differences, couldn’t He have just sat down on a bench with me, like this, and talked things through?”

“For some people’s version of Purgatory, that’s exactly what He does do. But do you really think that would have worked with you? Would you have been open to a reasoned debate like that with someone you had hated for so long?”

I didn’t know. “It would’ve been nice to have been given the option,” I grumbled.

“Maybe. But if that’s the way Purgatory had been for you, your chances of making it to Heaven wouldn’t have been as good. God wanted to give you the best shot at getting here, Dan, the same way He does for all of us. Your particular form of Purgatory was just the right mixture of experiences to help steer you in the right direction, however unpleasant it may have seemed when they were actually happening to you. Remember, now that you’ve made it, you’ve got an eternity ahead of you to look back on things. The time you spent passing through Purgatory will seem like the blink of an eye, and you’ll soon get over any anger you might feel.”

Curiously enough, I didn’t actually feel that angry. Maybe it was the shock of going from being eaten by a demon, to being kissed by my wife, to being told that I had been living in a figment of my—or God’s—imagination for however long it had been. Or maybe I really had gotten over my anger at God at last. Like Jo said, I had a lot of time ahead of me to think it through, which was probably just as well.