They could see his house from theirs, for theirs was next along, just a field away, and the house since his death seemed to have grown enormous. For now that he had died, his consciousness seemed to inhabit the place more fully. At night they could hear Matti whistling to his dog. From their upstairs bedroom they looked over towards his house and swore they saw a Scared Heart lamp burning. Congealed blood began to drip from the heart of Christ in his kitchen. His house grew more barbaric and profane than when he’d been alive.

Because now, added to their disdain, came pity that turned to revulsion at the Catholic appetite for suffering.

And because of what she had seen – this Catholic nightmare – and for fear the face of the dead man would haunt her, Catherine was allowed to sleep next to Sara, and from Sara’s window the girls now watched his house till the edge of the buildings gave off a blue haze. His sudden whistling could be heard through the trees. The poor man’s scandalous image of Christ burned through the night like a Christmas fairy. The hair stood on their heads. He was in Hell.

“Is he there forever?” Catherine, terrified, ran in and asked her father.

Jonathan Adams considered the word that gave rise to that concept of everlasting, meaning eternal, age-long. Was the absolute eternity of evil affirmed? Was there a difference between everlasting and eternal? He sought a psalm that might alleviate Matti Bonner’s suffering and calm his daughters’ fears.

“For his anger endureth but a moment: in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning,” their father read from the book of Psalms.

And then he considered the words for hell. Sheol: the world beyond the grave. Tartarus: an intermediate state prior to judgment. Hades: the unseen world. And Gehenna, the word the Lord had used: the common sewer of a Jewish city where the corpses of the worst criminals were flung and fires lit to purify the contaminated air.

That was where Matti Bonner was, the girls decided as they stood by their window looking out into the darkness. And it was everlasting. Matti Bonner was in the Valley of Hinnom; his unburied corpse had been cast forth amid the worms and fires of the polluted valley. The stench of the dead reached them, and their cries, and then the yelps of a barking dog.

In time Matti Bonner’s animals crossed the fields to the Adams’ house.