29.8

 

There is no pavement beneath her feet, no sun under which to bask; no sound for her to speak. It is as if she has been removed from the world and placed in this… what? She’d call it a void, but she has seen the Void and this is not it. This is nothing. Nowhere. This is not the Void, but neither is it Heaven, or Hell, or, if Dante was right all along, Purgatory. This is no plane of existence that holds any meaning whatsoever.

Her name flickers. Her purpose wavers. Her connection to the ground dissolves. She adjusts her sight, embracing the ability the mantle offers her to see through the infinite layers of Creation, and what she sees fills her with horror,

Babies. Silent, immobile babies, Each placed head-to-toe with the next like bottles in a crate, except these weren’t inanimate. These were… once… living beings. She’d call them dead, but there were no souls here. She could not sense a single fragment. This is like the glimpse of the future shown though John Connor’s experience in the Terminator movies, except these are not skeletons, but babies, perpetually immobile and yet perpetually aware of their own existence.

Beyond the expanse of babies rise larger mounds. Toddlers, older children, adults of every colour and creed, all jammed together in an infinite plane, like a jigsaw of tens of billions of people. Roisin has not seen Hell, but can it possibly be worse than this?

She remembers going to church as a child, when her mother still believed in God (she’ll wish she’d never stopped when Roisin gives her the news she was right.) She wasn’t very old then, perhaps seven or eight -- it’s difficult to pin memories to a date when there’s no time-based reference in the memory – but they were attending a baptism. It doesn’t matter whose, most likely a child of one of her mother’s friends, but the priest gave a homily about baptism, and how John the Baptist was ordained by God to be the first to roll out the programme. In the course of the sermon, he read a passage from the Bible which quoted Jesus as saying: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God”. The mantle provides the reference as the Gospel of St. John.

Now she understands where she is. She is where all the unbaptised go; the unborn, the stillborn, the unwed mothers, the atheists, agnostics and the non-Christian; all of humanity that were not indoctrinated into the Christian church, billions upon billions of them, as far as Eternity reigned.

She is in Limbo.

She looks around, amid the growing panic of her fluttering heart. She wasn’t here a minute ago, and now she is, so there must be a way out; as Mr Floyd said: “There must have been a door left in the wall, the way I came in.”

Roisin reaches for the mantle — it knows everything, so surely it must know how to find the doorway. It doesn’t, but it does offer something other than truth and clarity: definition, for the mantle is not a weapon, although knowledge can lead to the creative use of tools as weapons, but she feels it pressing close to her, as is she were a child being swaddled, for the mantle of knowledge is a framework within the world’s architecture. It is a structure that can hold a meaning in place.

And the meaning of the Fifth is Justice.

Roisin forces herself upright, straightening her spine in this place that has neither up or down save for the infinite rows of the unbaptised like racks in a honeycomb. Since she has definition, she must be part of Creation’s architecture, and with that tiny piece of logic comes a chink in the endless, serried ranks of limbo, even as the world blurs around her. That chink widens to a crack, which widens to a rift, through which she can see city streets and partially erased sky. She reaches up – or across, or whatever direction it’s in – and squeezes through the gap until she is once more standing before Hasmed.

Her voice is thin, shaking, but it holds. “You can’t banish me to Limbo.” The mantle ignites, blazing out from her in a halo, not of light, but of definition. It burns a circle against the void  as it forms a boundary around her. A boundary that only acceptance can possibly cross, and Hasmed has steadfastly refused to accept her.