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that insisted they were clever allegories. In Hell, he had known in his heart, devils cavorted, torturing sinners under Satan's watchful eye. In Heaven, vast choirs of angels sang and danced while departed souls played before a benevolent God.
    Now that he knew these things as a concrete certainty, everything had shifted. Calum no longer had any use for his faith, because it had been overridden by cold, hard fact. Despite Ambrose's existence confirming that the wonders of an afterlife were waiting for him, Calum was empty in those parts of himself he had reserved for his Lord. The discomfort was almost physical, like a heat. Calum ran a finger around the inside of his dog collar, and found that he was sweating. Not as bad as on the Underground then, when he first read the story. Then, he had fought back the urge to vomit, missing his intended stop and spending the rest of the circuit around Glasgow's heart in a clammy daze until he was back where he had started. Three streets from Kelvinhall station sat the Church of St Cottier where he preached, and he found himself drawn there through a perverse mixture of hope and shame. Enlightenment had not been waiting, and no priest could be his own confessor. A creature that had warred openly with God had come to this building seeking forgiveness on a massive scale. Why was it so hard for a strayed follower of Christ to do so?
    Calum wiped his brow. He really did feel warm. Strange intuitions pulled him from his reverie, and he took a cautious step back from the pulpit, scanning the shadowy corners of the nave. Something wasn't right. Even at the height of summer, the church interior maintained an obstinate chill that kept it from ever being comfortable. With the heating at full blast, the temperature stayed forever a few degrees colder than those within would prefer.  
    Yet it was undeniably warm now. Retreating from the pulpit, Calum felt the touch of cool air at his back, realising with something close to terror that the heat was spreading from the pulpit itself.  
    Smoke curled from its edges. Amazement bred a sluggish inertia in his muscles, preventing him from jumping back when his instincts were driving him to do so.  
    The pulpit exploded, blasting charred shrapnel in all directions. Calum felt hot, sharp slices of pain across his arms and face as he fell back. Runnels of blood dripped into his eyes, but he could not close them or look away. Roaring above him, from the spot where the pulpit had stood, a billowing column of flame writhed, lighting the inside of the church in Armageddon shades. Scorching heat squeezed Calum's breath from his chest, leaving him gasping as his dream rushed back to him.
    Scrabbling back to the cool stone of the wall, Calum raised a hand to shield his eyes, trying to take this new miracle in. The fire was the core of a crazed maelstrom. Air whipped around the flames in a tightly spinning storm, streaked with flickers of lightning, each of which split the air with its own peal of thunder. Calum was torn between shielding his eyes from the light and heat, and covering his ears against the cacophony.  
    As he tried to stand, a tiny, ridiculous splash of flesh rising to face a thing both wondrous and immense, his apprehension was fuelled by the knowledge that it had appeared moments after his failure to confess his sin to his Lord. Shadows flared and died in staccato patterns between the pews, and the light caught the figures in the stained glass windows in peculiar, disturbing ways, highlighting eyes that studied him with both pity and fury. Finding his feet, Calum acknowledged what he thought he had noticed when he first stared at the firestorm before him. At the centre, in the flames, was a molten, humanoid form.
    Whether angel or demon, he did not know. Whether, given his crime, one would be preferable to the other, he could not say.
    “ Kneel .” There was mad fury in the voice, an inferno roar with drumfire beating through it like radio