dark and smelt like wet cigarettes. A light rain was falling through the dirty air. Occasionally, in the distance, they heard the howling of wild dogs as they caught one of the profligate whom they chased through the thorny undergrowth. Apart from that, the grove was completely silent because, after all, what do suicides have to say anymore? Apart from the creaking of their ropes, there was no sound but the clattering of dead branches. Every tree was the soul of a suicide and their useless, empty husks hung limply from their own branches. Mary led the way, crashing ahead through the briars, her eyes fixed on the corpses dangling from each tree.
“We could just ask someone,” Satan said, struggling to keep up.
“I have to find her,” Mary called back.
“Who’s her? I thought we were looking for Bishop Tutu,” Satan said, but Mary had already disappeared through a wall of thorns. Satan sighed and followed. If it wasn’t so important that he keep her alive he would have let her go, but right now she and this Bishop Tutu were his only two advantages over Heaven.
Bishop Tutu...
Wait a minute.
A dim memory of walking through a hospital lobby rose through his mind, like a bubble rising through a bucket of syrup. A long-out-of-date magazine cover...TIME Magazine...a smiling black man and the headline, “Archbishop Tutu Leads South Africa Into the Light.”
He felt stupid. He felt like an idiot. He had been played.
Satan blundered after her through the thorns.
“Mary!” he yelled. “Mary.”
He hated yelling, but she was taking advantage. He had to catch up with her and let her know that he was nobody’s fool.
He suddenly fell over her, kneeling beneath a suicide tree that grew dangerously close to the edge of a cliff that plunged down further than the eye could see. The chasm dropped straight down past the Seventh Circle and almost all the way to the Eighth. A filthy wind was blowing up from the lower Bolgias and it was making the tree branches clack together. Mary was praying to one of the trees, and that threw Satan for a minute.
“Do Catholics pray to trees?” he said to himself. “I thought that was druids?”
He walked closer and Mary stood quickly, backing away from him in alarm.
“Bishop Tutu is still alive, I think,” Satan said. “Anyways, I know he’s not here.”
Mary shook her head.
“You lied,” he said.
“Get away from me,” she said. And then she placed a hand on the sodden foot of a suicide’s corpse and looked up at its face, talking under her breath, passionately and fervently.
Satan got closer and looked at the body. Water-logged, fly-infested, devoid of life but still...the family resemblance was clear.
“Your sister?” he asked.
“Don’t talk to me,” Mary said.
“She’s just about your age, so I thought she was your sister,” Satan said. “We have to go.”
Mary kept talking to the body.
“If you’re trying to communicate, her soul is in the tree. The body’s just a decoration.”
Not even a thank you.
“Come on,” Satan said. “We need to get going.”
Mary jerked her shoulder away from his touch and she pressed her folded hands to her forehead and prayed for the fate of her immortal soul.
“Mom,” she prayed. “I want you to hear me. Saint Jude told me that I needed to forgive the one who had done me the most harm, and so I came here, I came to Hell, because I want you to know that I forgive you. I was so scared when you left me. I thought your suicide was like a sickness and that I could catch it if I thought about you, or if I went to your funeral, or if I touched your things and so I scrubbed you out of my mind. But I forgive you. I forgive you with all my soul and with all my heart.”
She had a beatific expression on her face as she walked to the edge of the cliff. None of it made any sense to Satan and because he didn’t understand what was going on he didn’t move quickly enough. Not when she reached the edge of the cliff. Not when she turned her face up towards Heaven. Not even when she said, “I’m ready to be received into your arms, O Lord.” And not when she stepped off the cliff and into thin air. Her entire attitude was directed upwards, as if she expected to ascend, but she didn’t. Gravity grabbed her and yanked her down, hard and fast, and she disappeared into