I laughed; I couldn’t help it.
“—and, curiously, remained when they found out it wasn’t mandatory.”
“Speaking of mandatory, I have an idea.” It wasn’t my best segue, but whatever. “Something I’ve been working on for a few weeks.”
They were all attentive, but Markus and the Ant looked tense. Their body language pretty much screamed, Oh, God, what idiocy is she springing on us now? Or I may have been projecting.
“I think Hell should be a maximum-security prison from which there is, eventually, parole.”
Nothing.
“So, after you’ve served your sentence, you can move on. To reincarnation or Heaven or whatever floats your boat.”
Silence.
“Is this thing on?” I made like I was tapping an imaginary microphone. “You guys are acting like I haven’t brought this up before.”
“The general consensus was that you had thought it through and dropped it,” the Ant said with a shrug.
“Well, I didn’t. Because we’ve all noticed people here who have been punished far longer or harder than their offense warranted. We’ve all seen children tortured because they thought accidentally drowning their puppy warranted an eternity in Hell. And—and I don’t agree.” Damn, who knew silence had weight? I could actually feel it pressing down on me. “And since this is my house, so to speak, it’s time to change that.” Maybe not my house. My horrible job, which, if I’m lucky, I’ll only be doing for thousands of years.
Father Markus straightened and opened his mouth. Given how much he’d been nagging me to take more of the reins (not to mention attend all of the meetings), I was looking forward to his input. He wouldn’t be totally on board, but he’d have to acknowledge I’d given this some real thought.
“You’ve lost your mind,” was the flat response. Tina’s eyes went narrow at that—she probably thought the same thing, but respected my office(s) too much to cough it up like that. “Completely. What mind you had is gone. It has taken flight.”
“Oh, probably, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what it means,” the priest continued. I noticed his hands had snapped into fists. “You’re messing with a system that’s been in place for millions of years. Millions. You don’t have to change a thing if you don’t want to. As you yourself pointed out a few weeks ago, the place runs itself, more or less.”
“So why am I here?”
“Exactly,” he snapped.
“Whoa!” Marc said, hands out like he was trying to stop traffic. “Uncalled for, dude.”
Tina was watching me and, observing that I hadn’t burst into tears or made an “off with his head” motion, simply sat back and folded her arms across her perfect perky boobs (hidden behind another navy blue designer suit, Chanel this time). Sinclair could take a lesson from her. (In restraint, not suits. Nobody wore a suit better than the king of the vampires, who got that body from farming.) Meanwhile, Cathie was studying Markus like he was a bug she’d never seen before, and the Ant kept taking notes.
“We’ve had this discussion before,” I said pleasantly. “If you’ve got a problem with the new regime—”
“It’s ‘ruh-jheem,’ not ‘ree-gime.’”
“—then you know where the Lego door is.”
“But why?” In addition to being horrified, the priest seemed honestly mystified. “Why make so many changes in less than a month? You’ve only just started here and you’re ripping up the foundation this dimension was built on: a place for the damned to be punished.”
“And it still is. Hell will always be Hell. But c’mon, Markus, back in the day people got the death penalty if they sang the wrong song.”
“In China,” was the instant comeback (damn, the man knew his history).
“Okay, well, in Tudor England it was treason to say the king would eventually die. It was punishable by death! Some of those people are still here, still being stuffed into a big wheel lined with spikes and rolled down a hill again and again, and why? Because they told the truth: a mortal man would eventually die; and they convinced themselves it was a sin worthy of eternal punishment. Which it isn’t! How is that okay?” (Thank you, Showtime and Jonathan Rhys Meyers!)
Father Markus was visibly trying to calm down. His hands kept spreading open like flowers, snapping back into fists, then opening again. But at least he was keeping his fists away from my face, which was crucial for meaningful debate. “You make some fair points. But I think you’re too young to make changes of this magnitude. And I think you’re rushing things.”