chapter 2
I came to, if you could call it that, with my face literally buried in the sand. My head was pounding and my heart was racing. Wasn't I supposed to be dead? I clearly recalled the white light, the fading away of my senses, and an overwhelming sense of freedom.
I picked my head up and looked around through the sand that was stuck to my eyelashes. I was lying on a beach, wearing a pair of board shorts. I was alone. If this was Heaven, it was going to be a lonely eternity.
Who was she, I wondered, forgetting my predicament for a moment. The girl had killed me, but I was still thinking about her. Did that make me crazy? I pushed myself to my feet and began brushing off the more tenacious grains of sand, then took a deep breath and tried to think. Okay, so I had just died in an explosion, I was standing on a beach completely alone, and for some reason I wasn't afraid. In fact, other than the headache, I felt pretty darn good.
"Landon Hamilton." The voice was old, deep, and smooth as jazz. It scared the crap out of me. I spun around.
The man had appeared out of nowhere. He was a good six inches shorter than me, middle-aged, gaunt but muscular, and bald. He had a short white goatee and pale blue eyes. He was wearing a tailored black suit.
"Are you God?" I asked.
He gave me a 'you're an idiot' smile. "Thankfully, no. You can call me Mr. Ross. I'm the Collector."
Oh. "I am dead right?" I asked.
He nodded.
"A beach?"
"Look around son," he said. "Earth, water, air, fire; the feel of sand between your toes, cooling off in the water from the heat of the sun. The fresh salt sea air… Where else does humanity so perfectly merge with the most basic natural elements?"
It made sense, in a nothing-is-really-making-sense sense. "Okay. So, I'm pretty sure this isn't Hell, unless you're tricking me into thinking this isn't Hell, and then it turns out it actually is. If this is Heaven, I don't know… don't take this personally but, it’s kind of a bummer."
Mr. Ross sighed. "You may not be much, but if you’re all we’ve got I guess we’ll have to make a go of it. Now, please try to stop making a fool of yourself. Let's go."
He started walking. I followed behind.
"Wait a second. Where are we going?" He didn't answer. "Mr. Ross!" Nothing.
What did he expect? Two minutes earlier I had seen a beautiful woman turn into some kind of monster right before she blew me to smithereens. I was dead, but I was standing on a beach with one of the Blues Brothers. It had left me a little disoriented, confused, and giddy. I was finding it hard to calm down, so I was getting a little stupid.
We were walking, but I couldn't see where we were going. Ahead of us was a large sand dune, over it the clear blue horizon. There still wasn't another soul around, and Mr. Ross wouldn't say anything. He led. I followed. Until, for no apparent reason, he stopped.
"It'll be okay son," he said. "It happens to everyone. Just let it."
"What happens?" I asked.
Then it did. The reality. The crushing weight of what had actually occurred, the cold realization that I was no longer part of the land of the living. That my mother was going to be hearing from the police sometime soon that her son was a casualty of some kind of terrorist attack, disgruntled employee, or major nut-job. That I was never going to get married, have children, graduate college, or travel to Europe. Heaven or Hell, I was out of the game.
That's the simple description. The pain that ensued was a hundred times worse. Regret, guilt, anger, envy, I think I went through every single human emotion in the space of a couple of minutes. I curled up on the beach and cried my eyes out, the maelstrom of feeling overwhelming my senses and leaving me there for ten minutes, an hour, a month? There was no way to measure it except through pain. It felt like it lasted another lifetime. Mr. Ross just stood there while it happened, waiting for it to pass, as I was sure he had done plenty of times before.
When it did, the resulting reality was cathartic. At least I still had something. Something I could build upon, strive for, be challenged with. I may have lost my vessel, but the soul was still sentient. I got back to my feet, wiped my eyes with my hand, and looked at Mr. Ross.
"I'm ready," I said. He didn't say anything, but he looked pleased, as if I had passed some kind of test.
When we reached the top of the sand dune, we were greeted by nothing but white, empty space. Who knew that nothing could be so amazing? I gawked.
"I've seen this at least a million times," Mr. Ross said. I believed it. "I'm still amazed by it every time."
"What is it?" I asked.
"Think of the beach as a staging area. I'm the Collector. I pick you up here. From staging, you can go to any number of places depending on how you've been assigned. Most people get moved on to a secondary staging area where they're met with by an acquaintance if we have one available. We try to find somebody who's already learned the ropes to help them with the transition. If they don't know anybody, or maybe nobody ever liked them, they get moved on to orientation, which is divvied up by religious belief. A few get reassigned up or down, usually because of a 'clerical error'." He actually did the air quotes. "You're a special case. You get to meet the Boss."
Special case? Up or down? Boss? Too many questions, but I never got to ask them. He put his hand on my back and shoved me into the nothingness.
When we came out on the other side, we were standing on a busy city street that reminded me of New York. It was an instantaneous thing, a smooth transition. Right foot forward to land on the sidewalk, left foot still planted in the sand. Thankfully my clothes matched the environment, a pair of jeans, black t-shirt, and a leather blazer. I bet I looked cool.
"New York?" I asked.
"You tell me," Mr. Ross replied. "You made it."
"What do you mean?"
"I'll let the Boss explain it to you." He motioned me towards the building we were standing in front of. I looked up at the huge mass of glass and steel stretching as far up into the sky as my neck would crane. A hundred stories, at least. As we slipped through the revolving glass door, I noticed a small sign etched in the glass in a really fancy script.
Alighieri Corp.
The inside of the building was incredible. A huge reception area with a ceiling that easily reached two hundred feet, a solid wall of glass to the left and right, and a massive tapestry hanging behind a semi-circular reception desk where a young brunette was typing something into a computer. On either side of the desk were two pairs of elevators. Mr. Ross swerved left and hit the ‘up’ button. I took a closer look at the tapestry while we waited.
It looked familiar. A man in the foreground wearing a red robe and a funny hat, holding open a book. To the left a bunch of naked people dancing their way downward towards a fiery pit and the Devil. To the right a walled city, and in the background a spiraling mountain that led upwards to a ribboned sky.
I turned to Ross. "Is that?" I didn't get to finish. The elevator doors opened and he pushed me inside.
"The Boss," he mumbled, telling me to keep quiet and save the questions. The elevator doors binged closed and we started rising, slowly at first but I could feel us building speed. I tried to organize my questions into some kind of logical order, but logic was failing me and besides, the ride was too short. I felt my stomach lurch as we decelerated way too quickly. Could dead people vomit?
The elevator doors opened and I stepped out, feeling the softness of thick carpeting beneath my leather boots. That was nothing compared to the view. The entire floor was surrounded by what seemed like a solid pane of completely invisible glass, and I could see out for miles. The angle was no good to look down on the city itself, but I could see now that tall mountains, with snow-covered slopes and plenty of jagged peaks, ringed us. At the foot of the mountains was a thick forest, and before that the tail end of the city, just as dense as I imagined the area around this building to be. There were no roads leading out of the city, at least not that I could see.
About fifty feet forward, directly in front of the elevator was an ornate mahogany desk. Sitting behind the desk in an equally ornate chair was a tall, thin man with short white hair. He was turned so I could only catch his profile, but I could tell even from here that he was wearing a finely tailored suit, and a heavy gold Rolex dangled from his bony wrist. Mr. Ross led me over to him.
The man spun the chair to face us as we approached. His lips spread in a tight smile and he leaned himself onto the desk to drag himself to his feet. He was shorter than I had thought, standing a full head below me. He stuck out his hand.
"Buongiorno, Signore," he said. I took his hand in my own, making an effort to be firm, but not break anything. He felt like he would crack under the slightest pressure. "My name is Dante."
He had a soft Italian accent, but it was different than I was familiar with. By that I mean, not like in the Godfather. "Landon Hamilton," I said. I was sure he already knew that, but I didn't know what else to say.
"Of course," he said with a laugh. He dropped my hand and waved me to a chair that hadn't been there a second before. "Please, take a seat." He looked at Mr. Ross. "Thank you Mr. Ross. You can go. I believe you have another pickup."
Mr. Ross looked at his watch. "Yes," he said. He didn't leave by elevator. Instead, he just vanished.
Dante eased himself back down into the chair. "Now, where were we? Ah yes, you are surely wondering what is going on? Would that be a good estimation?"
"Dead on," I said. He stifled a grin.
"I'm sure you've already surmised that you have left behind the state of existence often referred to as 'being alive'. You did so in quite a violent manner in fact, being blown to bits by a certain 'hottie'." He stifled another grin. At least he was amused. "Believe me when I say you should be glad for the fact that it was quick. Better to come to a sudden end than to suffer."
That might actually be true, but I was twenty-three years old. "Better to live another, I don't know, fifty, sixty years," I said.
"So you think," he replied. His jovial expression faded somewhat. "Things are not as simple as they may seem from that side of the coin, Landon. Not simple at all."
"I really have no idea what you're talking about," I said
"No, you wouldn't. Are you familiar with the Catholic Church?" he asked.
Familiar? My mother dragged me to Church every Sunday morning for most of my childhood. I had spent my adulthood teetering between a healthy fear of God and a complete lack of belief in anything special. Considering that second part had already been proven wrong, maybe I should reconsider the first.
"I spent a year as an alter boy," I replied.
Dante stood up again and began pacing the room. After a few trips back and forth behind the desk, he spoke again.
"It's a lie," he said.
"What?" I wasn’t sure I had heard him right.
He took a deep breath and sighed. "It's a lie, Landon. Not a total fabrication of course, there is a God, and as you may have determined Heaven and Hell are real. So is the place in between."
That was one question answered. "So I'm in Purgatory?" I asked.
"You're in Purgatory," he confirmed. "But it's not what you think. None of it is."
I had a feeling he was going to say that. Who knew it took eternal sleep to be woken up? "Do you care to explain?"
Dante resumed his pacing. "It is difficult to explain, Signore. We are speaking of thousands of years of history. I will start with the simplest description." He paused, trying to think of how to say what he wanted to say so I would understand.
"In all things there is balance," he said. "It is the single most important law of the Universe. If something expands, it must contract, if it goes up, it must come down. Even God must adhere to this law, because it transcends even Him. This is the reason for Purgatory. It is necessary for the balance of goodness, and evilness. When God created mankind, and named it good, he tried to push this balance to his own ends. Such things are not to be."
I knew some of the stories in the Bible. "The serpent."
"Yes," he shouted, smiling and clapping his hands together. "Not a serpent of course. That is just a story in a book, a representation of the truth, a simplification much as I am attempting now. Mankind could never have been inherently good, or inherently evil, because the Laws of Balance would not allow it. To use an analogy you may understand, the more he pushed these boundaries, the more feedback he received. He created the seraphs, the angels, to try to steer us back on the path of righteousness, and they began to fall."
"The Devil?" I guessed.
"As he is known in some circles,” Dante said. “He was an angel once, but he was corrupted by temptation. He sewed dissent amongst the ranks of the angels, making false promises and filling their ears with believable lies. He gained immeasurable power before God realized his one and only mistake, the only one he could ever make. God restored the balance by giving Hell to the Devil. He then created Purgatory to put some distance between the two, in order to minimize the damage that could be caused by shifting tides. So it was for many thousands of years."
"But…" I knew there had to be one. There always was, wasn't there?
Dante sighed again. He walked over to the window and gazed out at the mountains. "The Devil and his minions thrive on chaos. He gains nothing from balance, and lusts only for power. He twists mankind to his will when he can, and forever hopes to tip the scales in his favor.
For many years this was as expected, and thus the balance was held steady. Two thousand years ago, a problem arose. God decided to get back in the game. He was unhappy with the status quo, unhappy to have been denied in anything. The war began anew with the birth of His son."
I rose to my feet and went to stand at the window with Dante. His eyes darted over to look at me, and a surprised expression spread across his face, and then vanished.
"Jesus was crucified,” I said. “Wouldn't that have rebalanced the equation?"
"Crucified yes, but also martyred. His death created the underpinnings of the Catholic Church, the most powerful of God's armies. I was once a staunch ally of the Church. I fell in love with an angel, and was granted a rare opportunity to visit all three realms. Heaven is a wondrous and beautiful place, incredible to behold, and Hell is just as opposite."
Now I was really confused. "So why not stay in Heaven?"
"There is a war going on, Signore. It may seem that there are only two sides, but there is a third, and it has very few soldiers. If the Devil gets his due, the world of man will fall into chaos and ruin. It will be ruled by violence, death, and famine. All of humanity will be hunted to extinction by the creatures of the Underworld."
"So we root for good right?" I asked.
He shook his head. "It is certainly tempting to do so, but if the world is overwhelmed with good then God will have leave to do as he wishes. You have heard of the Rapture?” I nodded. “He will take only his most faithful servants up to Heaven, and he will destroy everything else in order to make right his miscalculation. Do not think badly of Him for it, Landon, it is not for any ill will to us, but because that is His nature. He does not understand that there is something greater than Him, and as such He will lay challenge to this universal law. He cannot see that He is destined only to fail in this. In any case, this is why there must be a third side, and this is why we fight for it. If either good or evil wins, the world as you know it will cease to be."
It was a scary thought, and a hard one to accept. My mother had spent my entire life teaching me to be good, to obey the word of God, to hold the moral high ground. Okay, I hadn't exactly mastered it, but I tried to be a decent person overall. My incarceration was for identity theft and fraud. I had tried to cheat the system, not hurt anybody. Yet, now I was being told that by doing good I was threatening all of humanity?
"How can it be wrong to do good in the world?" I asked.
"It isn't wrong, for the balance must be maintained. For every old lady you help with their groceries, there is someone being teased for their appearance. For every prayer you send to God, there is a curse being uttered. Such things are of utmost importance, and thus the infinite circle continues."
It made sense in a way I did not completely understand, but was able to accept. The more I thought about how the world did its business - war, humanitarianism, greed, philanthropy, stealing and charity, the more I came to understand the pattern. I moved to stand directly in front of Dante, so I could look him in the eye. I squeezed in between him and the view.
"Okay, so everything is in balance, and God and Beelzebub are duking it out to see who can take home the whole pie. So then, here you are trying to get in the middle of it and prevent a clear winner?"
He seemed uncomfortable having me so close. He backed up a few steps. "Yes. Exactly."
Something was out of whack with the story. “But if the Universe forces all things into balance, then shouldn’t it be able to take care of their attempts to tip the scales on its own?”
Dante smiled wearily. “The Universe works on its own time, not ours. A victory by either side will throw the balance, and the Universe will put it back in place. When? How? That is not for us to know, and it will matter to us little, for we will all be gone.”
It was time for the million-dollar question. "How many people know about this?"
He knew the question was coming. He didn't want to answer it. He knew I wasn't going to like the answer.
He did another one of those big sighs before he replied. "Other than the angels and demons?” he asked. I nodded. “Counting you and I... four."
Mr. Ross had said I was special. What made me so special that I got to know this anyway? "Why so few?"
"Please, Landon, let us sit again." He waved me back over to the chair and returned to the desk. I was hesitant to follow him, but I needed answers. It was like an itch that started at my feet, ran up my legs, and disappeared deep into my soul. Once I had plopped down into the chair, he picked up a remote control and faced it towards the window in front of me. It became a gigantic screen. Depicted on it was Dante, looking much the same as he did today. The video relayed the scene to me exactly as he described it.
"For me, it was an accident. I was never supposed to stay in this place. The caretaker at the time had tired of the fighting, and wanted to get out. He could never leave Purgatory of course, but he could escape his memories of all that had occurred. As I traveled through this realm, he reached out and touched my arm, and by doing so passed all of his knowledge on to me. Once I knew the truth, I could not abandon the mortal world to the end I knew would otherwise come."
The scene in the video changed. It showed Mr. Ross lying naked on a beach. The same beach I had arrived on.
"Mr. Ross is the next," he said. "He told me he was a tax collector for King Henry the Second. In those days new souls had to find their own way off the beach, but he came straight to my front door so to speak. He knew who I was, I don't really know how. He started asking me questions about Heaven, and about Hell. Nobody else had ever asked me these questions. Everyone else lands on the beach, suffers their Regrets, and moves on to spend their eternity much the same as they lived their lives. I was so grateful for someone to share this burden with, I told him everything I knew. Ever the Collector, he felt there was more information out there, something more that I didn't know."
Now the scene shifted to Mr. Ross torturing a tan, golden haired man. It was disturbing, and I couldn’t bear to watch it. "He knew how to get information. As a Collector, he could collect anything. He found out that we did not have to be bystanders in this war, that there were others that could accept the truth. That there were others who could possibly even prevent total annihilation." He paused and took a sip of water for a cup that had just appeared on the desk.
“Thirsty?” he asked. I shook my head, so he continued.
"We waited over a hundred years for the first to arrive,” he said. “Mr. Ross collected every single soul in order to be sure not to miss her. When she came, we knew her right away because she wasn't naked."
Not naked, of course. "What?"
Dante let himself grin this time. "Almost everyone who dies comes to the afterlife unclothed. I did, Mr. Ross did. She didn't. Neither did you." He paused dramatically, or maybe so I would make the connection. Special. Me. Right. "What it meant was that she was Aware. Not on a conscious level at first, but Aware just the same. She could exert her will upon Purgatory itself, and it bent in response. She didn't want to be nude, and so she wasn't."
I looked down at the clothes I was wearing. "Mr. Ross said I had made this," I told him, waving my hand at the room.
"That is somewhat true,” he said. “But not completely. Everyone who dies experiences Purgatory in a different way. It has no specific shape or form, but rather is consumed by each individual according to what they believe it will be. For me, this place is typical to 14th Century Italy. The others here are peasants, merchants, and farmers. In my mind you would normally be a knight, however your will has changed this place to something you are more familiar with. While you are here I am a CEO, sitting in the penthouse of a modern skyscraper. You have made this my reality. If you went outside the people around you would find themselves in this city you have created, and many would suffer some level of disorientation before they would be able to adjust to the change."
I looked out at the city again with new eyes. This was all a figment of my imagination? "How far does it reach?"
He shook his head. "There is really no way to know. It could be all of Purgatory has changed because you are here. Most of the inhabitants here will not remember the change once you have gone."
I wanted to test this. I wanted to have some proof that what I was hearing was true, to see what Dante saw. I wanted to be in his world. I tried to picture a medieval castle, a throne, and a large timber table. Nothing happened.
"You don't have control of it," Dante said, as if he had been reading my mind. "Not yet. Your mind created this because it was familiar. It will hold onto it tightly until you can convince it that it doesn't have to."
"I feel like Neo," I said.
"Hardly," Dante replied.
Something was nagging at me. Something he had said before I tried to turn this place into Camelot. "Once I've gone? Isn't Purgatory, you know… forever?"
"No," Dante said. "Purgatory is never forever, unless you choose it to be. It is where the souls who have not chosen a side or who have not earned a place in either Heaven or Hell are sent until such a time as they do. Time is not observed the same way here, so such endeavors can take many hundreds, if not thousands of Earth years. And yes, you will leave this place if you choose to accept who and what you are."
There it was again. "Who and what am I?"
"You are a diuscrucis, a crossbreed of angel and demon. Not directly of course, but somewhere in your lineage, buried deep within your roots. The blood of the creatures of dark and the creatures of light flows through your veins. Moreover, the balance of this mixture is precise, or you would not be here now. Almost all diuscrucis are inherently good or inherently evil, depending on which side is more dominant. But you... You are a perfect balance of every variable in the equation. The odds are so infinitesimally small, that it has happened twice in a millennia is beyond words."
I was expecting something grandiose, after all Dante had said there was only one other like me that he had ever met. This went beyond grandiose though. This went deep into impossible. You would think a guy would know if his grandma were Satan's handmaiden. If my day had gone any differently, I would never have believed it. I did though. There was something telling me that I should.
Dante had read my expression, and he watched me curiously as I worked through acceptance of my family tree. "You would know if I was lying Landon," he said. "That is one of the traits you inherited from your good side. It is what allows me to tell you all of this, and know that you will accept it and believe it."
I did know he was telling me the truth. "If that side helps me to recognize lies, does the other make me better at telling them?"
It was part of the balance. That deviousness had led me to hacking, to stealing, and ultimately to my arrest. The thought bothered me.
"Wait a second,” I said. “You speak of balance, good, and evil as if we have no choice in the matter. Are you saying that every decision I make is predetermined in order to keep me right in the center?"
When I asked the question, Dante flinched as though he had been struck. His wide eyes narrowed and dimmed, and he took on a look of sadness. "Everyone has the freedom to choose their own path. Charis did."
"Charis?" She was the other one like me. I knew it by his reaction. "What happened to her?"
He paused before he answered. "She made a choice. She isn't with us anymore."
I could tell by the way he said it that it was all he wanted to say. There was no reason to push him. I had gotten what I wanted.
"Then I guess the burning question is, what exactly am I doing here?" I asked.
Dante's demeanor changed again, turning him back into the energetic and lighthearted man that had greeted me.
"You are in a unique position, but as I have said it is your choice. The battle between good and evil rages on; the angels want the perfection that God had envisioned, and the demons aim to mangle the world to satiate their desire for chaos and destruction. Mankind has been caught in the middle, and they have no one to fight on their side. No one to assure that the balance is maintained so that they may continue to have control of their own future."
"So you think that I can help humanity deal with this somehow?" I was doubtful. Maybe I could spot a lie and dress myself in cool clothes, but I had a feeling that wouldn't help much against Satan or Saint Michael.
"I know you can, Signore," he said. "You are stronger than you know. Shedding your mortal skin has opened your being up to all of the power that it is due a diuscrucis." He leaned up over the desk and looked me right in the eyes, a look that delved deep into me. "ALL of the power." He seemed very satisfied.
I would do this. I had to do this. The need was an unbreakable iron grip on my soul. It was what I had been born to do, had died to do. It was frightening, exciting, and impossible to resist. It wasn’t about the power that Dante believed I had. It was about nature. My nature. How many people ever get to find out where they stand, and connect with it so completely? According to Dante even God Himself was being driven by His basest nature. I had asked about choice, discovered I had none, and realized that it was okay, because I didn’t care.
"So what happens next?" I asked.
Dante smiled. "When someone who leans to good leaves Purgatory, they go to Heaven. Someone leaning evil goes to Hell. Someone who doesn't lean at all, they go…"
He didn't finish. He didn't have a chance to. The solid glass window I had been enjoying looking out of earlier exploded inward, showering us both in glass. I backed away and raised my arms to cover my head. Dante didn't move at all, he just turned his head to watch the interlopers make their entrance. The glass seemed to bounce off of him. It took me a moment to realize it hadn't hurt me either.
The interlopers looked like angels, but I knew on my new instinct that they weren’t. Maybe once upon a time before the greedy promises and lies had changed their hearts, but not now. They may have been brothers, both with long silver and white hair, ebony skin and sharp red eyes. They were wearing matching leather dusters with black leather vests over purple shirts and dark wash jeans. Each was holding what looked to me like a samurai sword. They glared at Dante with disgust, and looked at me as if I were nothing more than an ant to be stepped on.
"You have no rights here," Dante said to them. He shifted over to put himself between them and me. "If any harm comes to me you will be in breach of the Treaty."
The two dark angels stepped forward as one. "We have no intention of harming you Alighieri," the one on the left said. "We only want him."
I felt my heart jump into my throat. What was this frail old man going to do to keep those swords from taking my head? This was turning really bad, really fast.
Dante turned his back on them and leaned in close to me. "I don't know how they found about you already," he said. "Take this." He handed me a... cellphone? "Mr. Ross will get you out of here."
"Wait... what am I supposed to do?"
Dante whispered something and put his hand to my forehead. The entire room started spinning. One of the dark angels pushed Dante out of the way. The other raised his sword and smiled, taking pleasure in his killing strike. I closed my eyes so I didn't have to watch myself die for the second time in one day. I wondered how that was even possible, sure I was about to find out.
I felt a pair of arms wrap around me. I smelled something burning. The blow never came. I opened my eyes. I was standing on the torch of the Statue of Liberty.