“Uhh, hi,” I said, voice a little raspy. Master of verbal gymnastics, that’s me. The angel, Ignostiel I assumed, smiled bright, perfect teeth, and gestured to the chair in front of her. I sat and put my hands in my lap. I then moved them to the arms of the chair. I then moved them back to my lap.

  “Hello Daniel,” she repeated, her voice as calm and tranquil as a lake on a summer morning. “Welcome to Purgatory.”

  “This isn’t heaven?” I asked. I mean, yeah, of course it wasn’t. If a stuffy office building was the heaven that religious folks spent their lives trying to get into, then most would demand an immediate redo.

  “No, Daniel, you haven’t followed the right path for Heaven. Or Hell, either.” She added, at my alarmed expression. She waited for a few of my frantic breaths, before continuing. “At least, not yet.”

  I had no idea what the angel was talking about, but she had a very soothing voice. It resonated in my head, seemingly without having to go through my ears first. I almost wouldn’t mind her telling me I was about to burn in the fires of damnation for all eternity, so long as she said it slowly... shit. I quickly explained to the dullest areas of my head that I should not, under any circumstances, be finding an angel attractive in any way, shape, or form.* I then realised I, too, hadn’t blinked in a while, rectified that, and then attempted a shrug as though to say, ‘I don’t understand, please say more things’. I was a mess. She seemed to get it. I guess she dealt with a lot of dead people who didn’t immediately pick up on the new state of being.

  *I can assume many shapes and forms that he would find very unattractive.

  “Fascinating,” she said slowly. Like she’d watched each thought dance across the surface of my mind. “Well if you’re unaware of what Purgatory is, I’ll explain in the manner mortals best understand.” Her words seemed condescending, but her tone was not. Hi, I’m an immortal being from the dawn of time that watched as your kind crawled from the ocean on your slimy bellies. But don’t worry, I’ll use small words. Oh wait... I hoped we crawled out. I had plenty of arguments with creationists about evolution being a fact. They’d scored at least one point over me so far today. Should I ask?

  “Your soul is sent to Purgatory upon your death, for Judgement,” Ignostiel explained, pushing the evolution arguments from my mind. “Depending on how much good or bad you enacted in your life, you are sent to either heaven or hell. Simple, yes?”

  I nodded. I was familiar with the concept. “I’ve seen it enough on T.V. Everything you do in life gets counted up at the end. Get enough good points and you go upstairs, too many bad points and you go downstairs.”

  Ignostiel paused for a moment before speaking. “Not quite, but close enough for this conversation. More factors than you can imagine are taken into account.” She sat tapping her lip, a far away expression coating her face. Her eyes seemed relaxed when she spoke again, far more, human? “Mortal entertainment about your own afterlives. I don’t get the opportunity to enjoy your staged pretending often. The last time I did… It was a piece by the writer Will Shakespeare. Do you know of him?”

  Ahh, good, common ground. “Not personally,” I hedged, in case she thought I might be from his neck of the woods. Well I don’t know how angels think, do I? “But yeah, I studied him in school. ‘Wherefore art thou Romeo’, and ‘shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’”

  Ignostiel nodded. “I always preferred; ‘in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil,’ much more my speed.”

  Gulp. I got the feeling I would learn about what Hamlet was referring to.

  Ignostiel stood and walked to one of the filing cabinets beside her desk. It looked like a typical three drawer deal, like you’d see in any office, except this one only had one drawer in its centre. Where the top and bottom drawers should have been, there was only the same grey metal as the rest of the cabinet. It slid open as the angel approached, and a file slowly rose out of the drawer. The only thing missing was the angelic chorus, an addition that I’m sure could’ve been arranged, but nothing about this place was really screaming showmanship. Maybe they had a budget.* She plucked the file out of the air, turning to face me as the drawer slid shut behind her.

  *I later explained to Daniel that what he saw was his mind filtering out the impossibilities to make it into something he could understand. He asked me to install a better graphics card into his brain. I tried, I really tried.

  “I should stress that free will does exist,” she stated as she sat back at her desk. “But, after a few millennia, it’s not hard to predict what you mortals are going to do. When one watches the loom of fate weave, you start to notice how and where the patterns form. So, not only can we predict the time the mortal will arrive here, we often know how their soul is going to be judged years before the fact.” She opened the file and turned it around to face me. It had a picture of me clipped to what looked to be a stack of forms. The picture was the most recent one from one of my social media accounts, and I didn’t (and don’t) know what to make of that.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  “The problem is, occasionally, someone like you comes along.” Iggy began to leaf through some of the pages. Yes, in my head, I was calling the powerful, immortal being beyond my comprehension, Iggy.* She looked up to meet my gaze. God, her eyes were dark as night, bottomless, as though existence ended at the iris. The quality reminiscent of humanity from before now completely dispersed. “Your death was a genuine accident. One that we didn’t see coming. One that wasn’t your fault, and one that stopped you from doing the good or bad things you were going to do with your life.”

  *This is where it all started going wrong, and I wasn’t even aware of it.

  And for the first time since I’d died, it hit me. I was dead. Things had sort of progressed rapidly up until that point, even while queuing, and I hadn’t really thought about my end, past my desire not to be judged. I was dead. I had died. The aforementioned mortal coil had been completely shuffled off. I wouldn’t see anyone I cared about again, not until they died anyway. Not my mother, my few friends, my coworkers, not that I cared much about them. My girlfriend and I broke up a couple of weeks ago. We’d both decided we didn’t want anything long term and... well, we had no idea how little choice we would have in the matter. Oh hell, I was on the last few chapters of The Lord of the Rings. I’d been avoiding the movies until I’d finished the damn books. What happens when they get back to the Shire? It was not the most important of losses, but still.

  I think Iggy knew what was going on in my head, and sat back in her chair to watch me. It took a moment before I wondered why a literal angel was telling me I’d been screwed. From what I’d seen outside, not many get this chat. I gave myself a little shake. Plenty of time to brood later. Probably. Hopefully.

  “Sorry,” I said, thanking G…just thankful that I hadn’t shed any tears. “Please go on.”

  Ignostiel smiled and leaned forward again, elbows on the desk. “I don’t tell you this to bring you down, Daniel, to torture you or bring you pain, but to explain why you are here in this room. We don’t know offhand where your soul would go. You lived a morally grey life up until your death. What good you did was done for the wrong reasons, and the bad, well, that was done for what to you were the right reasons.” She paused to gauge my reaction before adding, “You don’t have enough... good points, or bad points for it to be obvious.”

  This was all a lot to take in very quickly, and I felt like a laptop with a bad dial up internet connection trying its best to buffer. “But,” I said slowly, trying to think of the right words, “I was a… you know a…”

  “A criminal?” She smiled. “Yes, Daniel, I know. But from what I can see here, you were no monster. Nor were you a saint, but a scarce few are truly either. No, Daniel, you walked the narrow grey line in life, and so I brought you here to delay your soul from being judged.”

  I sat up a little straighter. “Why?” An image of me returning to life with no memory of this sprang into my mind. In hindsight, maybe I’d watched Men in Black one too many times.

  She cocked her head. “Once your soul is judged, then that’s it, you ascend or fall, but you don’t stay here. There are no do-overs once the judgement has been rendered. The important thing about this is that your death was an accident. It was not predicted. What was predicted was, pending alterations in circumstances, you changing your ways and helping people with your life. So, Daniel Isaac Mason, son of Marion and an unknown father, I’m offering you a job.”

  I stared at her, waiting for her to elaborate. She didn’t. I was going to change my ways? How? When? I’d been all but trapped in that deal with King, and had been looking for a way out of it that wouldn’t hurt those I loved. I took another look at the plaque on her desk. ‘Mortal Resources Department’. Something clicked.

  “A job?” I spurted. “As what? And why? And… what?” My brain and mouth were working at the same speed but they were both going in opposite directions.

  “As to what the job is, well, we can come back to that. This job offer is made to very few people, Daniel. It’s a chance to help my kind with our various projects, and these deeds are counted in your favour when you decide it’s time for your soul to be weighed.”

  I was pretty sure my soul was not lighter than a feather. I thought about her offer for a moment. Help an angel for a while and guarantee a spot in heaven? I’d be a fool not to take that deal. I wasn’t one to shy from work, but what work could I do that an angel couldn’t? I looked back at the angel and tentatively asked, “okay, what sort of job?”

  Ignostiel, angel of the Lord and officer of the afterlife’s human resources department, smiled and leaned towards me. Flipping open the file again, she said, “well, it depends on your own skill set. You had no great talents, at least none that my brothers and sisters are looking for. Martial skill, espionage abilities, a genius level intellect. That sort of thing. No offence intended,” she added, almost as an afterthought

  I took no offence, with all the skill of a particularly drunk tightrope walker performing the day after being shot in the leg. I must’ve bristled at her remarks, because the angel smiled in a way that said, ‘correct me if I’m wrong.’

  She wasn’t.

  “Anyway, those aren’t jobs you’d want. Uriel has spies that are currently being tortured on a rack in hell, just so he has contacts who can tell him the demon’s current work rota. However, Lucifer is getting very skilled at spotting them.”*

  *Indeed. See: [REDACTED]

  I tried to imagine that, then decided that a demon torturer was the last thing I wanted to imagine. “Okay.” I met her ethereal eyes with my own. “What are you offering then?”

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