Patience is a virtue that Tom Cavernham learnt a lot about in the queue. It was over a year - he imagined, without a watch - before he caught even a glimpse of the gate. A month or two later at last Tom could see the fabulously famous man sitting up right behind a desk. Unless, like Santa Claus or Sadam Hussein, St Peter used a stand in.
Beside the desk there was a hole. It glowed. People kept disappearing down it.
The anticipation, the dread, the panic... Tom's heart would have beaten its way through his ribs if he still had a heart - or ribs, for that matter.
During the wait, of course, he had made a list of his principal sins - as he saw them. His adulteries, the fight in the pub when he was a teenager, shoplifting only once no twice, his erratically bad temper (surely swearing was tolerated nowadays)... They would know all this anyway. It would probably be best not even to attempt excuses.
St Peter smiled faintly at Tom and looked down to his list. "The cat?" he asked. "Why were you cruel to that cat?"
Tom shook with fear - and then remembered. Once he'd had a girlfriend who had been adopted by a mangey black cat. She kept complaining. One summer evening Tom had taken the cat in his car out into the countryside and dumped it in a place where it was unlikely to survive.
"No,not that cat" St Peter said, displaying an annoying talent for mind reading. "The other one."
Tom's mind went blank, then blanker. A sour taste, a red coloured blankness.
"It doesn't matter that much about the cat. But my boss hates forgetters. A short sharp shock in the flames for you, pal."
Short? A hundred years or so? An introductory afternoon? On earth Tom had been an optimist. What had happened to eternal damnation?
St Peter (or his body double) winked. "Oh, the Almighty is indeed Merciful. But He does have a Wicked Sense of Humour."
