The Redeemed (13 page)

“That you move when I say move. Do not hesitate. And do not try to save me. Deal?”

“What are you talking about?” Parkman started to stand.

Sarah raised a hand for him to sit. “There’s no danger right this minute, but it’s coming. Just move when I say so.”

“Sarah, we have a cop stationed outside the door.”

“Parkman, you’re not listening. Whoever is coming will get past the cop. Everyone knows him. That’s why he went after Vicky. She had seen his face. When he attacked me, he had a hat on. Just trust me. Move when I say so.”

Parkman sat back, crossed his legs and clasped his hands around his knee. “I’m ready when you are. I’ll ask how high when you say jump. Until then, I want to hear your take on religion.”

Sarah leaned back, rested her head on the pillow and sighed deep, closing her eyes.

“I have no issue with religion itself. In fact, I think religion is a good thing. It has helped so many people for centuries. It’s the same for me with the police. They’ve helped so many people for centuries and I love the fact that they’re there. I just hate when policing goes bad, as with religion. I have zero use for a Holy War. Killing someone because of their beliefs is ridiculous and insane, but that won’t stop anytime soon.” She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling. “Isn’t a belief simply an opinion that you’re not willing to reconsider? One person believes this, the other that. Ultimately they are only opinions, albeit strong ones.”

“But what about
your
beliefs? Your personal idea of God?”

“I have a unique perspective.”

“How so?”

“Vivian’s essence has been working through me since I was eighteen. That’s almost eight years now. I’ve developed a feeling of how most of it works. So my beliefs aren’t just beliefs anymore, they’re more fact based. I don’t have an opinion on the matter, just an understanding.”

“Wow.” Parkman sat back. “What could you possibly know? And with that knowledge, could you save us all? Start a new religion? Bring light to darkness?”

“Scared you might learn something you didn’t expect? Something that’ll shatter what you believe, your preconceived notion of God and religion? Make you reconsider your opinions on the matter?”

The hospital intercom in the hallway chimed. Parkman jumped at the sudden noise. A doctor was paged to attend an emergency somewhere in the hospital.

“It’s fine, Parkman. I’ll give you ample notice before anything happens.”

He nodded and uncrossed his legs.

“Before we come here to live our lives,” Sarah started, “we write out our own life-book with all the characters, our family and friends, and all the events of our lives all set in place. This extremely detailed book is the story of the life we’re about to live here on Earth. But here’s the neat part. You pick your parents and they pick you. You choose your friends and your kids, if you have any, and everything else you want to experience while down here. Even the heartache. You actually pick everything in such detail, that even this conversation was prewritten by you and me prior to hitting the womb all those years ago.”

“Wow, that’s wild. What’s it all for? Why do we do it?”

“Have you ever lost something that eventually came back? Like a pet that wandered away. For argument’s sake, your cat was lost for a week, then suddenly the cat comes back. How do you feel? Don’t you hug that cat, give them special food and treat them like royalty after missing them for a week and knowing it might never come back? Don’t you appreciate that cat so much more than if it hadn’t wandered away in the first place? Would you be smothering it in kisses, treating it like royalty, had the cat been there all week? That’s what Heaven is.”

“Tell me more.”

“On the other side, we live in Heaven all the time. Because it’s so amazing, we fail to realize how seriously amazing it is. It’s almost like we become ungrateful. Like living with the cat, day in, day out. So we come down here, live our life-book and go home. Our return home is like when the cat came back. We appreciate it so much more. We can’t believe how amazing it is after leaving this tough place.”

“Then why is Earth so hard? Why not make it a little easier?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Some of this you’re going to have to put together on your own, but I’ll tell you what I’ve learned through Vivian.” She adjusted herself. “The harder it is down here, the more you’ll appreciate going home. And since God—the Supreme Being, the Enlightened One, the Prime Mover, even Yahweh, whatever people want to call him—made everything, it’s all a part of him. We’re a part of him. An actual part of the divinity. So one of the things we strive to do is evolve our soul for Him by coming here. We try to better ourselves. Which is why we come down here in the first place. The real death is coming here. We’re
born again
when we go home.”

Parkman got up and started to pace. “Based on that, how does Satan fit into your beliefs? Where’s the devil in the details?”

“There isn’t one. There’s no Satan. He’s a fable, written by man. There’s no Hell, either. This is a fact, not a belief, nor an opinion. Earth is the closest thing to Hell. What we do to each other is hell enough. I once heard someone say, ‘Religion is for people afraid of going to Hell. Spirituality is for people who have been there.’”

Parkman stopped pacing. “That’s good. I like that. But some would argue that if there’s a God, there has to be a devil.”

“They can argue all they want. There’s no devil.” She used air quotes on the word
devil
. “God’s counter are humans and the horrific things we do to each other, not Lucifer. The Bible was written by man. I wouldn’t tell too many people this as I could be stoned for blasphemy, but this is what I’ve learned through Vivian. This is one of the reasons Vivian works through me. To ease some of the pain here on Earth.” She took a drink of her green juice. “You remember Russell, my cousin?”

Parkman nodded as he stopped by the window to look out.

“Russell was an automatic writer, too. There are others out there doing good. He saved my life that day on the roof of that hotel in downtown Toronto.”

“What’s baffling me then is why do it in the first place?”

“What’s it all for? The age-old question.” Sarah finished her juice and set the cup down on the tray by her unfinished salad. “ It’s all to experience His knowledge. Imagine the best marine biologist in the world who knew everything there ever was to know about marine biology. The guy knew it like you would know your phone number. He was a walking encyclopedia. But he’d never been to the ocean, never seen plankton, or shrimp, or took in the salty air of the sea. That’s how I understand God. He is all-knowing and experiences his knowledge through us and our experiences. Through all our five senses, all of us, all at once. We are living, breathing versions of his knowledge.”

“Wow, a bit hard to grasp.” Parkman stared out the window. “Doesn’t he ever get disappointed?”

“Of course,” Sarah said. “But never angry. Imagine a God of love giving his children an ultimatum. He would say, ‘I’ll give you no tangible proof of my existence, but you have to believe in me, or you’ll burn in a lake of fire.’” Sarah laughed, then winced at the pain in her ribs. “Hilarious. All man-made fables. How would you feel if your child hurt someone, spent time in jail and at forty years of age knocked on your door? Would you hear his story? Would you at least let him in? So what does God think when his children—us—screw up and when it’s all over, come home, our heads down? Especially when his capacity to love is a million times greater than us humans.”

She looked at her cup, but the juice was gone. “That’s Judgment Day. When you judge yourself at the end. When you die your soul goes through a life review. I know this because Vivian had to go through it. During this life review, a white light asks, ‘What have you done with the life I’ve given you?’ or something like that. As your life flashes before your eyes, what hits you, in the presence of such peace and love, are all the bad things you did and all the times you hurt someone. What you feel is the pain and suffering you caused others. You’ll cry and judge yourself harshly. While this happens, you’re in the presence of an all-forgiving, all-loving, all-caring, entity who does this to help cleanse your soul of your earthly chattels and prepare you for entering your rightful place, your home.”

Parkman took his seat again. “I have so many more questions. Can we continue?”

“Sure, but be ready. Something’s coming soon. Or someone.”

“Define soon.”

“Any minute now.” Sarah tightened her grip on the fork beside her.

“Should I be standing or sitting?”

“Won’t matter.”

He tented his fingers in front of him. “The suspense is killing me.”

“Me too. You think I like this? I can feel it, like déjà vu. He’s coming.”

“There’s something. What’s your definition of déjà vu?”

“When we come here, our blueprint, the book we wrote for our life, is inside our subconscious. We take it everywhere we go like a guide, but we aren’t able to consciously read it. When we’re on our right path, a small drip, a glimpse of our life-book, falls into our conscious mind and we feel like we’ve been in that spot before, even if we haven’t. You can even tell the future at that moment. Like if someone will knock on the door or the phone will ring. That’s déjà vu. When you’re not on your life path, you don’t experience it. If you stray too far, you end up with migraines, but I don’t know too much about that as most people are bound to follow their path.”

“How does that work regarding free will? Why are there so many religions then? What about reincarnation? Is it possible?” He got out of his seat again. “Sarah, I’ve got a thousand questions.”

“Vivian isn’t here right now. At least I can’t feel her. Most of what I told you is what I know from feeling her essence and sharing my body with her spirit for so long. But I do know one thing. Whether people believe in God or not, it doesn’t matter because he believes in us. All of us go home. Even the murdering psychopaths we kill. All we’re doing is getting them off this plane so the rest of us can enjoy life as best we can without their kind mucking things up for us. They go through their life review and they purge a lot for all the shit they did down here.”

“What about ghosts? Are they real?”

“Absolutely. They’re earthbound spirits. People who have died under extreme conditions that are bound to this plane by intense anger or love. Entities that are earthbound don’t know they’re dead and—”

A knock on the door silenced her.

“Go,” Sarah said. Her hand came out and pointed at the window, the fork between her fingers. “Now. Out the window.”

Parkman ran the other way and entered the bathroom, leaving the door slightly ajar.

“Dammit,” she whispered under her breath. “Now you’re going to get shot. You should’ve listened, Parkman.”

The light in the bathroom was off, Parkman virtually unseen.

“Come in,” Sarah called.

The door opened and Father Adams stepped in.

“Ahh, Father Adams. How good of you to come. But you must have the wrong room. No last rites needed here.”

“Actually, I’ve come to talk with you about a small matter.”

He kicked the door shut and turned to face her.

Chapter 24

Hirst waited in Father Adams’ office as instructed. The man of God was late for their meeting, but Hirst didn’t mind. It gave him a chance to learn more about the priest.

At the door, he peeked out into the church. One woman sat in a pew by a statue of Jesus at the front, her eyes closed. Another woman sat near the back in the mostly empty pews, a Bible in hand.

He closed the office door, walked around Father Adams’ desk, and opened drawers, rifling through paperwork, reading what he could. After five minutes, he realized he wouldn’t get too far this way. He would need Adams’ cooperation or a warrant to dig deep and find out who had access to church vehicles and property.

At Sarah’s accident scene, they had secured the perimeter and searched each parking level one at a time. They found the vehicle that had been involved in Vicky Chard’s murder and Sarah’s fall from the fifth floor. Inside the white van, they had found a snake cage. But there was no perp.

There was something about Father Adams that bothered Hirst, a self-assuredness, a smugness. How he became the church-appointed man to work with the police on the priest murders was something else Hirst wanted to know.

And what happened to his ear?

Hirst’s cell phone rang.

“Hirst here. What’s up?” He walked around the desk and sat in one of the visitor chairs.

“Detective Hirst, it’s Robert Kellman. I’m one of the men assigned to talk to local businesses by the building where Vicky—”

“I know who you are. Why are you calling me?”

“I thought you’d want in on this right away.”

There was a moment of silence on the line.

“This better be good,” Hirst said. “Speak fast.”