Coraline and the Last Confession

Some questions are not asked in search of God, but in search of justice.

     The cathedral stood at the end of the narrow street like an old, exhausted monarch, its stonework darkened by centuries of rain and the accumulated breath of generations who had entered through its heavy oak doors carrying grief, guilt, and the desperate hope that somebody, somewhere, might be listening.

Coraline had no particular reason to be there.

Or so she told herself.

She had never been a woman of faith. Faith required a certain surrender, and Coraline had spent her entire life building walls against surrender. She trusted what she could see, what she could touch, and, most importantly, what she could prove. The rest belonged to the weak, the frightened, or those who preferred the comfort of a beautiful lie.

Yet something about the cathedral drew her inside that afternoon.

Perhaps it was the silence.

Perhaps it was the knowledge that beneath those vaulted ceilings, people had been asking the same unanswerable questions for a thousand years, and still the world continued to produce monsters.

She stood beneath the great stone archway, looking up at the stained-glass windows. Coloured fragments of light fell across the flagstones, red and blue and gold, as though heaven had shattered and scattered its pieces upon the floor.

She wondered, briefly, whether the dead could see such things.

And if they could, would they care?

“Coraline?”

The voice came from behind her.

She turned to find the priest standing beside a wooden pew, his hands folded loosely before him. He was an elderly man with a deeply lined face and the quiet, observant eyes of someone who had spent a lifetime listening to confessions. There was something almost disconcerting about his stillness, as though he had long ago learned that the most revealing things people said were those they had not intended to say at all.

“I thought that was you,” he said. “Although I confess I am rather surprised to find you here.”

“Am I not permitted to admire the architecture?”

“Of course you are.” A faint smile touched his face. “Though I remember you once telling me that you had no belief in God, no patience for organised religion, and even less for the idea of an afterlife.”

“I still don't believe in God.”

“No?”

“No.”

He nodded, accepting the answer without offence.

“Then perhaps I should ask what brings you to His house.”

Coraline glanced towards the altar.

“Curiosity.”

“About God?”

“About what happens when we die.”

For the first time, the priest's expression changed. Not dramatically, but enough for Coraline to notice. His eyes seemed to settle more carefully upon her face.

“Ah,” he said. “That is a question which has occupied rather better minds than mine.”

“Then you should have a reasonable answer.”

“Perhaps. But I suspect you haven't come here for the conventional one.”

Coraline gave a small, humourless laugh.

“Tell me something, Father. Where do you think the tortured souls of the evil and twisted go when they leave this earth?”

He said nothing.

“I mean the real ones,” she continued. “The murderers. The rapists. The people who destroy other human beings and then carry on with their lives as though they have merely misplaced an umbrella. Men who ruin childhoods. Men who leave women afraid of their own shadows. People who take something innocent and spend the rest of their lives pretending they never touched it.”

Her voice had acquired a curious precision. Each word was placed carefully, like a blade laid upon a surgeon's table.

“Do you honestly believe they rise into heaven alongside the very people they destroyed? Do you imagine a murdered woman and her killer might one day stand together in the presence of God, perfectly reconciled, all grievances dissolved in a celestial light?”

The priest looked towards the crucifix above the altar.

“No,” he said quietly. “I do not believe that forgiveness can be made so cheap.”

Coraline studied him.

“Then where do they go?”

He drew a slow breath.

“You ask me for a destination, Coraline. A place. A geographical answer to a moral question. We human beings seem to need that, don't we? A heaven above us, a hell beneath us, a door through which the wicked must pass and a locked room in which justice is finally done.”

“And you don't believe in those places?”

“I believe that the language of heaven and hell has helped generations of people express something they could scarcely bear to contemplate. Whether they are places in the way we imagine them is another matter.”

He moved towards the nearest pew and rested one hand upon its worn wooden back.

“But I can tell you what I believe about the people you describe.”

Coraline waited.

“I believe that evil matters. That what we do to another human being matters. And I believe that no amount of respectable clothing, charitable donations, religious observance, or carefully maintained reputation can make a cruel act cease to have happened.”

A shaft of coloured light passed across his face.

“The Church speaks of judgement, of repentance, of mercy. But repentance is not simply feeling sorry because one has been discovered. Nor is it weeping because the consequences have become inconvenient. True repentance requires a person to look directly at what he has done, without excuse, without disguise, without shifting the blame onto the person who suffered.”

“And if he never does?”

“Then he may spend his entire life running from the truth.”

“That isn't punishment.”

“No,” the priest conceded. “Not necessarily. Not enough.”

For a moment, Coraline thought she detected anger in him. It was an unfamiliar expression on a priest's face, or perhaps merely an unfamiliar one on a man who had spent his life practising restraint.

“You see,” he continued, “I cannot honestly tell you that I know what happens to a particular soul after death. I cannot point to a place on a map and assure you that every murderer is sent there, while every innocent victim is carried somewhere safe. Anyone who claims to possess that kind of certainty should be questioned very carefully.”

“Convenient.”

“Perhaps. But I would rather admit the limits of my knowledge than offer you a comforting fiction.”

She looked at him more closely then.

“And what of the victims? What becomes of them? Are they expected to forgive? To understand? To spend eternity in the company of those who hurt them because the Almighty has decided that mercy must triumph over justice?”

“No.”

The answer was immediate.

“No?” Coraline repeated.

“No one should be told that their suffering was insignificant because forgiveness is considered virtuous. Nor should a victim be required to reconcile with the person who harmed them. Forgiveness, if it ever comes, cannot be demanded as payment for somebody else's salvation.”

The cathedral seemed to grow quieter around them.

“And heaven?” Coraline asked. “If heaven exists, how could it possibly accommodate a soul that has deliberately inflicted such misery upon another?”

The priest lowered his eyes.

“Perhaps it cannot accommodate that soul as it is.”

She frowned.

“Explain.”

“Consider this. If a man has committed terrible acts and dies without remorse, without acknowledging his victims, without any desire to change, what would it mean to admit him into a perfect heaven? Would he suddenly become harmless? Would the people he hurt be expected to forget? Would the very nature of heaven be altered to accommodate his cruelty?”

Coraline said nothing.

“I cannot believe that paradise would require the innocent to suffer a second time in order to make the guilty comfortable.”

Something in her face shifted, though whether it was agreement or disappointment, the priest could not tell.

“Then there must be a hell.”

“Perhaps,” he said. “But I suspect you want me to tell you that the worst among us will be thrown into eternal fire, that every crime will receive its exact measure of suffering, and that the universe will eventually balance its books.”

“Would that be so unreasonable?”

“No. It would be profoundly human.”

He paused.

“But there is a danger in imagining hell as a place where we finally get to watch those who hurt us being hurt in return. We can become so hungry for punishment that we begin to resemble the very cruelty we despise.”

Coraline's eyes narrowed.

“Easy words from a man who has never had to live with what some people do.”

The priest accepted the rebuke without flinching.

“You may be right. I have not lived your life, Coraline. I will not pretend otherwise.”

He glanced towards the darkened side chapel, where a single candle trembled in the draught.

“But if you ask me where I believe such souls ultimately go, I will give you the closest thing I have to an answer.”

She waited.

“I believe that whatever awaits us after death, no human being should be able to escape the truth of what they have done. If there is a final judgement, then let it be a judgement that sees through every lie. Let it uncover the things hidden behind respectable faces, the suffering concealed beneath family names, the cruelties protected by silence.”

His voice grew softer.

“And if a soul must enter eternity carrying the full knowledge of the pain it has caused, then perhaps that knowledge would be a more terrible reckoning than any fire we could invent.”

Coraline stared at him.

“You think they carry their memories with them?”

“I think that if our souls survive death, they must surely survive it as more than the stories we told about ourselves. Perhaps we are finally stripped of the excuses that made us bearable to ourselves. Perhaps, at last, we see the people we were, and the people we might have been.”

“And if they feel nothing? If they are incapable of remorse?”

The priest was silent for a long moment.

“Then I do not know, my dear. And that is the part of your question which troubles me most.”

She had expected certainty. A pronouncement. A verse from scripture delivered with the confidence of a man who possessed the keys to the next world.

Instead, he had given her uncertainty.

And, strangely, she found it more difficult to dismiss.

“Surely,” she whispered, “there must be somewhere for them to go.”

“Perhaps there is.”

“Somewhere they cannot hurt anyone else.”

“Yes,” he said. “That, at least, is a hope I understand.”

She turned back towards the altar. The carved figure upon the cross hung with its head bowed, its face exhausted by centuries of human suffering.

“Then I hope your God has a very good memory.”

The priest followed her gaze.

“So do I, Coraline.”

“And a long one?”

“An eternity, perhaps.”

She almost smiled.

“Good. Because some people deserve a very long reckoning.”

“Possibly,” he said. “But remember something else. Justice is not merely the punishment of the guilty. It is also the restoration of dignity to those who were made to feel they had none.”

For the first time that afternoon, Coraline looked genuinely unsettled.

Perhaps because she had come looking for an answer about the dead and found herself thinking about the living.

Perhaps because she understood, in some hidden chamber of her own mind, that the worst crimes were not always the ones that ended a life. Some merely rearranged it. They left their victims breathing, walking, speaking, while something essential inside them retreated into silence.

And those were the souls nobody knew how to bury.

She walked towards the cathedral doors.

“Father?”

“Yes?”

“If I ever discover that heaven is real, I shall be very disappointed if the wrong people are allowed in.”

He gave her a sad, almost affectionate smile.

“And if I ever discover that heaven is real, Coraline, I shall pray that it is wiser than either of us.”

She stepped outside into the pale afternoon.

Behind her, the cathedral doors closed with a deep, resonant thud.

For a moment, she stood upon the steps, listening to the city move around her. A bicycle rattled over the cobbles. Somewhere, a child laughed. A woman called to someone across the street. Ordinary life continued, entirely indifferent to the questions that had been asked beneath the ancient roof.

Coraline did not believe in God.

She did not believe in heaven, hell, or the tidy division of souls into those deserving of reward and those deserving of punishment.

But as she walked away, she found herself holding on to one thought.

Perhaps the final destination of an evil soul was not a place at all.

Perhaps it was the moment when every hiding place disappeared, every lie collapsed, every carefully constructed identity fell away, and the truth stood naked before it.

No witnesses to intimidate.

No victims to silence.

No reputation to protect.

No door through which to escape.

Only the truth.

And if there was a God, Coraline hoped he would be there to see it.