The Book of Daniel (27 page)

“When I told my parents this and they saw the look in my eyes, they knew I had made up my mind, and gave me all the support they could, both financial and emotional. With that behind me, it was almost impossible for me to fail. I treated my time at school and college like a military campaign, to the point that I hardly bothered with friends; and as for boys, huh—they were only after one thing, and I was far too busy for that. By the time I graduated from University, I was in a position where I could take my pick of the best veterinary hospitals from around the world. Even without my academic track record, my parents’ money would have been enough to open all the doors I needed.

“In the end, I settled on the Larchbeck Equine Hospital in California, but that was a decision based mainly on Dr Anthony Ballentine rather than anything else. I tried to kid myself that it was down to the kind of work they were doing there, but at the end of the day, it was him.” She spat the word. “Right from the moment I met him, I was immediately smitten. He was the perfect gentleman about it, but at the same time, it was clear that the feeling was mutual; even with my lack of experience, a woman just knows these things. And it all fit so perfectly, too. I had been blessed ever since birth with all the opportunities I could wish for, and now that I was about to embark on the next stage of my life, why shouldn’t God keep right on blessing me? Huh. Some blessing. Little did I know how fucked up it would all turn out.”

Harper’s story came to a halt as she lost herself in her memories. For a moment, I thought she wasn’t going to continue. “Within a month of me starting at the hospital, Anthony and I were an item, and for a while everything was great. But then I began to have my doubts. Once you got past his good looks and the fact that he was one of the most gifted surgeons I had ever witnessed, there didn’t seem to be a whole lot else there. I tried my best to dig deeper, but every time I thought I was getting somewhere, he would clam up or change the topic of conversation. Every date we went on felt like a game of chess, and he was a grandmaster at keeping himself to himself. At first, I thought it was simply because he was shy, and that just made me all the more crazy about him. I guess it wasn’t just the sick animals I wanted to heal, huh? But eventually, I grew tired of banging my head against a brick wall, and I finished with him.

“For the first few weeks after we broke up, everything seemed okay. Despite the size of the hospital, we would often bump into each other during the course of the day. At the time I didn’t think that was peculiar, but hindsight is a wonderful thing for rubbing your nose in it. Whenever we met, he was always perfectly civil towards me, but there was a coldness that hadn’t been there before, and he was always quick to find an excuse to be somewhere else. That hurt a little bit, but I could understand that he needed some time to readjust. I was sure that it wouldn’t take long before we could resume a good professional relationship again, so I was thrilled when he came up to me one afternoon and asked if I wanted to assist him with treating a racehorse that had been brought in. Of course, I accepted; like I said, he was a brilliant surgeon, and I didn’t want to miss the chance to see him at work.

“The operation was scheduled for six o’clock that Friday afternoon, and I turned up slightly earlier than that. The operating theatre that he’d booked was right at the end of one wing of the hospital, so I wasn’t too surprised that nobody else was around. I started to prepare everything, cleaning off the operating table, laying out the surgical instruments, that sort of thing. I knew it wasn’t my job, but I wanted to show Anthony that he’d made the right decision by asking me to help him.

“I remember that I had just finished restocking the swabs and gauze when, suddenly, something hit me across the back of the head, and down I went. When I came round, I had a cracking headache, but it was clear that that was the least of my problems. Not only did the clock on the wall say that it was well past midnight, but even more worrying was the fact that I was strapped to the operating table with a gag in my mouth. For the next half an hour or so, I tried to yell for help and struggle free, but it was no use; I was trussed up too well, and I knew in my heart that no-one was around to hear me. I was terrified, of course—I was under no illusions about who was behind my predicament—but I was angry too, the most angry I’d ever been in my life, and the more I thrashed about on that table, unable to do anything, the more the needle tipped over into the red.

“I eventually wore myself out and paused for a second, breathing heavily through my nose, trying to think of another way to escape. The moment I was still, his voice came from the corner of the room. ‘Finally! I thought you’d never calm down.’ If it had been possible, I would have leapt ten feet in the air. That bastard had been there all the time, watching me, and I redoubled my efforts to escape, begging, threatening, reasoning, everything, but of course none of it made any sense through the gag. And then suddenly there he was, towering over me and looking more evil than half the fucking demons you see here in the afterlife.

“For a moment, he just stood there, leering down at me, practically licking his lips, and then he said, ‘You shouldn’t have ended it, Harper, not when we were doing so well together. But we have the whole night ahead of us to make up. By the time the morning comes, I’m sure I’ll have changed your mind.’”

Harper laughed bitterly. “I didn’t realise he meant it literally. He disappeared out of view for a moment, and then reappeared with a syringe in his hand, full of what I later found out was ketamine. That’s something vets use to tranquilise horses, but it’s also popular on the streets because of the hallucinations it causes in humans. He made a big show of holding it up to the light and carefully squeezing the air bubbles out, and then he injected it into my arm.

“It all gets a bit hazy after that, not that I want to try too hard to remember. He raped me, of course, several times, but mostly I was so out of my mind that I didn’t care. That went for all the beatings he dished out, too. I dread to think where he was going with all this, but whatever his plan was, unfortunately for him, he never got to finish it. You see, as he got more and more carried away, he got careless. The first mistake he made was with the drugs, and somehow, most of the second lot he tried to inject me with ended up on the floor rather than in my arm. My mind slowly started coming back to reality. It didn’t want to, of course—the drugs took the edge off things quite nicely—but without the ketamine, it didn’t have a whole lot of choice in the matter.

“His second mistake was what sealed the deal, though. Because he thought I was still away with the fairies, he decided that it was safe to untie my arm and start twisting it around. That fucking hurt, I tell you, but the pain was the last push my mind needed to get back fully in control of itself; and with the pain came the anger again, too: a fuck-off great big flood of it. As soon as he let go of my arm and turned his less-than-welcome attentions elsewhere, I began to reach around for something, anything, I could use as a weapon. It seemed like forever before my hand finally found the scalpel, but when I realised what it was, I didn’t waste any more time: I jammed that sucker into his side, as far as it would go. It was almost worth all these years in Purgatory, just to see the look on his face and feel the satisfaction of twisting that blade. Yeah, we’ll see who changes whose fucking mind, right? He tried to wrestle his way free of me, yelling, screaming, leaving smeary red handprints everywhere like a bloody King Midas, but instead of escaping, all he managed to do was slip off of the table and fall headfirst onto the floor. There was this beautiful, decisive crack, and the screaming suddenly stopped. For a moment, I almost believed there was a God again…”

Harper trailed off, lost in the reliving of that horrible night. The look of rapture on her face as she had described stabbing her torturer was so intense that the sympathy I felt was tempered by a little fear, too. Eventually I couldn’t stand the silence any longer. “What happened then?”

“As soon as I saw him lying there, I was sure he was dead. There was no way he could still have been alive with his neck at that angle and all that blood everywhere. At first, I was swept away with joy, but as the fear receded, then the rage came back. Not just at this bastard for what he had put me through, but at God, too, for dumping me in such a fucked-up situation. The next thing I knew, I was crouched down over Anthony’s body, ramming the scalpel into it again and again, trying to hack him to pieces, screaming at the top of my lungs. Things got a bit blurry again after that, but I’m told I was picked up by the police in the early hours of the morning, wandering around the hospital campus, covered in blood and still clutching the scalpel. Apparently it took three of them to get it away from me, and one of them almost lost two fingers in the process.

“The trial that followed was a joke. The police had one dead body and one deranged woman running around with a knife, and they had no trouble putting two and two together. It was basically my word against his, although of course he wasn’t saying much of anything anymore. But his reputation as a fine, upstanding member of society made it very hard for the jury to believe he could be responsible for all the things I said he had done, and the more scepticism I saw on their faces, the more hysterical I got. The prosecution loved that, of course, and it wasn’t long before the media joined in, too; my being a member of the Lamont family provided just the hint of scandal that they needed to really get stuck in. Even the best lawyers money could buy weren’t enough to go up against God and His apparent plan to ruin my life.

“In the end, I was found guilty of murder and sentenced to fifteen years in San Quentin, and that was the last straw for delicate little Harper. The prospect of all those years in such an environment, especially coming from the background I did, was too much to bear. So… I committed suicide. It wasn’t easy, but then, as I said, I’ve always been a determined girl. I don’t think I would have tried so hard if I’d known that all I was really doing was swapping an earthly prison for this one instead. Huh, and if the Catholics are right, the fact that I committed suicide is probably the reason why I’m stuck here anyway. Wouldn’t that be hilarious, if in fact killing Anthony in self-defence like I did was fair and just, and I would have gone straight to Heaven if only I hadn’t killed myself? Or am I here because I spent so much time raging at God in those last few weeks I was still alive? Who knows? That was one of the good things about having Thomas around. We could talk for hours about the whys and wherefores of being stuck in this shithole. No offence, Dan, but it’s not the same talking to you.”

“None taken. And maybe it’s good that it’s not the same. You said it yourself on the day we met: perhaps you’ll get a new perspective on things from talking to me instead of him. There’s a rock garden in Japan I read about once, where there are fifteen rocks placed in such a way that no matter where you stand, you can only ever see fourteen of them at once. But if you walked around...”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it. Very Zen, Dan.”

“And just because I’m not a priest, it doesn’t mean I can’t talk about God with you, either. I don’t know if your feelings towards Him have changed at all since you came to Purgatory, but I completely agree with what you’re saying. I can’t figure out what He’s playing at most of the time, and I used to hate Him for what He did to my life, too. Maybe I still do, I’m not sure; all kinds of crazy shit goes through my head these days. But you’d be surprised how much in common our stories have.”

“You were tied to an operating table, drugged and raped, too? Gee, small world.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“So what did you mean?”

So I told her.

Chapter 18

B
y the time I had finished regaling Harper with my own tale of divine disappointment, I was aware that something had changed in her. It took a while to recognise exactly what, simply because it had been so long since I had seen anything like it in Purgatory: she seemed happy. I couldn’t figure it out at the time, and the first thing she said after I’d finished didn’t help to make it any clearer.

“You’re sweet, Dan.”

“Huh?”

“The way you talk about your wife. You must love her very much.”

“Yeah, I do. I miss her like crazy.”

She sighed heavily. “It must be nice, knowing that you’ve got something to fight for, someone waiting for you on the other side, in Heaven. There’s nothing like that for me. Unless of course I end up in Hell instead, in which case I sure hope there’s a particular somebody already there ahead of me. If he’s not, then there’s no fucking justice in this universe.”

“What are you talking about? Thomas is up there now, remember?”

She brightened. “Yeah, that’s true. I’ve been here too long. I’m just so used to thinking about my situation the way I told it to you, I sometimes forget that things change.”

“And when we make it through to the other side, I’ll introduce you to Jo, too. I’m sure you’ll get on like a house on fire. So to speak,” I added, remembering the blaze at the warehouse.

She gave me a funny look. “I’m sure we will. But let’s concentrate on getting out of here first before we start planning any dinner parties. Come on.”

She stood up from the table we had sat down at together two lifetimes ago, and started making her way towards the door. After a couple of steps, the mournful sound of the trumpet signifying the end of curfew sounded, right on cue.

I got up and followed her.

The grindstone of earning redemption resumed its ponderous turning, but it felt more bearable after having traded stories with Harper. The perspective that her tale brought was both liberating and comforting, because for the first time since I had entered Purgatory, I had been able to step out of my own shoes and empathise with someone else’s predicament. Sure, I had felt a bond with Thomas, too, but his transition had occurred too soon after my arrival for it to cement properly, and although I had extended my hand in friendship towards Abraham, that had only been as an act of reconciliation, rather than a deeper connection. I realised how self-absorbed I had been up until then. Getting back together with Jo was important, of course, but Harper’s misfortunes made it somehow more real to me that I wasn’t the only one struggling, and that if I couldn’t get out of the rut I was stuck in, perhaps I could at least help someone else out of theirs in the meantime. On those still-rare occasions when I found myself praying, I started to include Harper in those prayers, too. I was filled with new hope that perhaps between us, we could figure out the answers. But the main thing was that being part of a team again—no matter how small—felt great. It was almost like the best days of being back in the Army.