
She put the weights down at last and stood in the center of the room, breathing hard, and she faced the
fears that ate at her.
More than once, she’d looked at herself as a torturer—as the person who did terrible things to nice little
old ladies and to sweet old men, to people who were helpless and hopeless. She was only half joking
when, talking with friends, she referred to her job as the job from Hell. One thing kept her in
nursing—the fact that sometimes the terrible things she did to her patients made them better. Sometimes
she was able to make things right.
But Dayne believed in Hell—in a real, literal Hell where the souls of the damned went to be tormented
for eternity. She believed in Heaven, too, but thoughts of Heaven hadn’t given her much solace in the four
years since her husband Torry died.
She’d loved him. He drank, he ran around on her, he got into trouble, he was a failure as a husband and
as a human being—but for the whole three years they were married, she’d loved him.
He died the way he’d lived—driving fast, stone drunk, with a woman who was not his wife in the car
with him. He’d smashed into a telephone pole going at better than a hundred miles an hour, and he and
his most recent girlfriend had flashed out of existence before they’d had a chance to know what
happened to them.
And right now, Dayne thought, down in Hell, someone was torturing Torry.
She stood in the center of that room, thinking of the pain she inflicted—and the fact that she inflicted it as
gently and quickly as she could, and of the fact that it ended—that no matter how badly she hurt the
people she cared for, their pain ended. Dr. Batskold couldn’t make them live forever, even though he
tried. Sooner or later they would die and escape.
Torry couldn’t escape. And when the universe blew out of existence and all of Time came to an end,
someone would still be torturing Torry.
He’d been twenty-four when he died—young and beautiful and foolish. His fundamentalist parents had
jammed religion down his throat until he’d thrown it up; he’d come to despise churches and religion and
everything he connected with them, and his life had been one big attempt to spit in God’s eye. Dayne had
loved him anyway—not wisely, but with her whole heart.
In spite of everything, she still loved him—and for four years, she’d gotten up every morning and gone to
bed every night, thinking of Torry in Hell.
This day, this hellish day that had come hard on the heels of a week of hellish days, had brought thoughts
of Torry to the front of her mind, and heated up her anger until she couldn’t hold it in anymore.
She looked up toward Heaven, and with her eyes wide open, she said, “Okay, God. I’ve had it. I’ve
thought about this until I can’t stand to think about it anymore, and now we’re going to have to do
something about it. You said that whatever we asked of you, if we had faith, you would give to us.” She
took a deep breath, and her hands clenched into fists.
“Hell is all wrong. You claim that we have free choice—the choice to love you or not, to follow you or
not. But there isn’t any choice to it. If a thief held a gun to my head and told me to give him my car keys
or he’d kill me, I’d give him my keys . . . but nobody would say I did so of my own free will. And if he
stuck the same gun to my head and told me to love him or else, I might pretend to love him . . . at least
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