by Paul Neuhaus
“Alright. Keep your nose peeled.” It wasn’t as stinky in the sewers as I expected it to be, which was a small blessing. I tried to find a happy medium where I was watching where I was going, but I wasn’t seeing any rats or poopies bobbing in the water. Your mind is good at protecting you from things like that when you give it enough warning. There are drawbacks, though. I was tuned-out enough to walk into a big cloud of angry, buzzy flies. Super gross. Finally, we came to a four-way intersection. “You’re gonna have to help me now ‘cause I’m lost.”
“Actually, we’re right below the Convention Center lobby. Look up.”
I looked up and there was a sliver of artificial light above us. It was the hole the Kraken had dug. “Good, good,” I said, “What now?”
She gave me a series of directions which drove us deeper and deeper into the underground. “Left. Right. Straight ahead two intersections. Right. Down the incline. Watch your step, it’s slippery as hell. Left. Left. Left.” When we got near where we were going, we began seeing little glow-y patches. Fresh, non-dry Kraken blood. Hope’d steered us true. When we got exactly where we were going, something weird happened. We had to go through a hole in the concrete wall—and it wasn’t a fresh hole of Kraken manufacture, it’d been there for a while. On the other side was a hard-packed platform of dirt looking down on a catacomb of tunnels—tunnels I assure you were not made by the L.A. Department of Water and Power. Wooden railings lashed together by rope defined walkways. Catwalks hung suspended overhead. What I took to be a waterwheel turned in the distance. The place was lit by torches and an eerie silence hung over it. If you’ve ever seen Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, think of the mine occupied by the Thuggee cult. This place was a fair approximation. “Wow,” Hope said. “I did not see this coming.”
“I know, right?” I duck-walked over to the railing looking down on the big chamber beneath us. I heard two people speaking as soon as I went through the hole in the wall, and I didn’t want to draw their attention. I looked down and it was the Verne Troyer-scale Kraken and a woman. The woman had her back to us.
The woman was the one speaking. “It’s clear Poseidon supplied you with brawn but not much brains. You had one job: get in there and find somebody—anybody—who knew Pegasus’ location. And now, here you are, and not only don’t you know the horse’s whereabouts, you look like a Muppet. Also, you’ve got a knife sticking out of your head.” She reached over and yanked the knife out of the monster’s noggin. A little jet of luminous blood shot out and he squealed. “Did you at least see Elijah?” she went on. “I showed you a picture of him. Did you see him?”
The Kraken pouted. “I see him,” he said. “He had many friends. One—little girl—stab me in new head.”
The woman put her hand on her hip. “Yeah, well, you know what? If you’re open to be stabbed in your new head by a little girl, maybe you don’t deserve your new head. I know it’s hard, but I want you to think for a minute. Do you realize we’re no better off than we were before?”
“I realize,” the Kraken said.
“No, actually strike that. We’re worse off than we were before. Not only do we not know where they’re keeping Pegasus, they know they’re being stalked by a Kraken. That’s bound to make them a little cautious, am I right?”
“You right.”
“Remember when you came to me, lost and lonely? Not sure what to do or where to turn?”
“Yes.”
“What’d I tell you then?”
“You say, ‘listen’.”
The woman tapped her foot. “That’s not what I said. I said you needed to listen to every word I said and do exactly what I told you. Do you remember that?”
The Kraken lowered its head and looked like a sullen six-year-old. “I remember,” it said.
“I can’t help you if you don’t listen.”
Then another voice from the direction of the waterwheel surprised Hope and I. It said, “Leave him be. He said he’s sorry. Riding him like a little bitch doesn’t help.” We were even more surprised when we looked up and saw who the voice belonged to.
It belonged to Hermes. He limped toward the two speakers below us.
The woman folded her arms over her breasts and replied, “Nice of you to take a break from your busy schedule of whacking off.”
The Olympian’s brow furrowed. “You’re my daughter and I’m your elder. Can’t you at least give me an approximation of respect?”
Daughter? The woman with her back to us was Hermes’ daughter. I had a sudden flash of memory and all the energy left my body. We were hip-deep in some serious weirdness.
Adrestia.
The woman’s name was Adrestia.
The demigoddess ignored the question. “What’re we gonna do? We need that horse if we’re going to take this any further. I can’t use the Kraken at the size he is now. It’d be pointless.”
Hermes sighed. “Don’t ask me to do what you’re thinking about asking me to do,” he said.
“Why? Because you love her more than you love me? Because you don’t wanna betray her trust. Well, you betrayed my trust eons ago, and you still owe me restitution. You still need to become the father you never were.”
Hermes’ face became hard. “I won’t do it. Don’t ask me.”
Adrestia shrugged her shoulders and her voice became especially snarky. “I’ll say it again... We’re exactly where we were when we started. Unless you step up. Either become the man you always should’ve been or leave here and never return.”
The whole time the god and his half-god progeny were talking, the Kraken looked back and forth between them, fascinated. Now that they were at a crucial point in the conversation, the little monster was set to burst with anticipation. Would Hermes capitulate to his daughter’s cryptic demands, or would he turn tail and leave? Hope and I wondered the same thing.
Hermes turned tail and left. Good for Hermes, I thought, even though I didn’t know exactly what was going on. But then he backpedaled. He stopped when he was about twenty feet away from Adrestia and the Kraken and, without turning, he said, “Jellybelly’s Happy-time Petting Zoo. They’re at Jellybelly’s Happy-time Petting Zoo.”
What? What had just happened? But then it hit me. The petting zoo. Keri had mentioned it. In front of Hermes and I—and Hermes had put the pieces together before I had. Elijah had leveraged the same memory—a memory from better times—when he needed a place to board Pegasus. And the other person Adrestia mentioned—the one who’s trust Hermes hadn’t wanted to violate—it was me. Talk about your Holy Shit moments. With my face very near the pithos, I said, “Jellybelly’s... Is that where Elijah told you to go?”
“I’m not supposed to say, remember?”
“Have you not been listening?” I said, almost raising my voice.
“Okay, okay. It is, it is.”
“Fuck,” I replied. “We gotta get outta here.”
I tried to duckwalk backwards toward the hole in the wall, but I dropped the flashlight and it went skittering down the incline to the lower floor of the catacombs. Adrestia and the Kraken looked up and the Kraken hissed. For some reason it said, “Die, Brony, die!” again and came charging up the slope toward Hope and I. In that moment, I saw that Hermes had seen us too, and he was wearing a shocked, guilty expression.
Hope and I said, “Oh shit!” at the same time and dispensed with stealth. I got to my feet and spun. Since the hole in the wall wasn’t at floor level, I dove through it, did a somersault through a brackish puddle, and came to my feet again, already in a run.
“Put some distance between us and it,” Hope said. “If you stop too soon, he’ll be on you and he’ll tear you to shreds.” I could hear the Kraken behind us and I knew she was right. I also knew what she was angling for. She wanted me to get a comfortable buffer between us and the monster, so I could turn and pull the stopper off the pithos. If I could manage to do that, our problems would be over. Most of them, anyway.
Understanding Hope’s plan and mak
ing it happen were two different things thanks to the loss of the flashlight. Since we couldn’t see, Hope had to call out her directions again like some kind of mythic GPS. It was tough following her orders because I had a disconnect between what she was saying and my sightlessness. Fortunately, my trust in Hope was complete.
We turned into a straightaway and I poured on the speed (despite the fact I had a knot in my right side and I felt like I was going to stroke out). I listened behind myself, but I couldn’t get a fix on where the Kraken was. The sound in the tunnel was dopplering in a funny way. “Is... he... far... enough back?” I wheezed.
“I think so,” Hope answered.
I slid to a stop right in the same cloud of flies we’d passed through on the way in. I pivoted and saw immediately, the midget-sized monster wasn’t as far back as I needed him to be. I did the only thing I could think of. I drew the gladius from my back and threw it through the air end over end. It imbedded itself in the Kraken’s forehead right next to the hole from Keri’s steak knife. Unlike the steak knife, the gladius was three feet long and had significant force behind it. It perforated the sea monster’s tiny brain and he went down like a sack of shit. As I fumbled to get the pithos off of my back (and I do mean fumbled), I had to swat at angry flies. They didn’t like me crashing their party and they were particularly buzzy and bitey. By the time I got the jug out of its straps and poised in front of me, I wished I had a wingman on fly detail.
When I got the stopper off the crock, nothing happened.
Well, not nothing exactly. I could feel the suction, but the screaming-Evil-getting-sucked-in part didn’t happen. Somehow, the Kraken’s spiritual essence had eluded us.
Standing there in the stinky corridor, surrounded by flies, I screamed, “Fuck!”
Okay so, right now, you gotta be asking yourself, “Who the fuck is Adrestia?” Well, let me share with you the memory that came flashing back once I realized it was her.
Way, way, way back in the day, Hermes hooked up with a nymph named Rhene. When the Olympians were in charge, there was a lot of free love and grooviness. It was like the sixties before Manson. Anyway, Hermes hooked up with this nymph named Rhene. Usually, the wham bam, thank you ma’am would be the end of it, but Rhene got pregnant. Not only that, Rhene was crazier than a shit-house rat. We’re talking Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction crazy. She started stalking Hermes and generally harshing his mellow. Hermes was in a major league funk because of it. So much so Zeus got tired of seeing his mopey ass around the office and did his boy a solid. He turned Rhene into a slug. As sometimes happens in these stories, Rhene managed to give birth to a full-sized demigoddess even though she was a gray squishy thing no longer than a fingernail. After that, she oozed away (leaving a trail behind her) and died a slug’s death.
On the one hand, Hermes was relieved Rhene was out of the picture. On the other, he told Zeus to watch it with the transmutations since turning the nymph into a slug was, while helpful, also a shitty thing to do. In fact, Hermes felt guilty enough that he took his daughter in and raised her as best he could. He named the girl Adrestia which means “she who cannot be escaped” which is a) a weird name and b) portentous in a “look at me asking for trouble” kind of way. Anyway, like I said, Hermes took her in and tried to get on with his life. The only problem was Adrestia was as crazy as Rhene—if not more so. She was bratty, she was petulant, and she was always revenging herself on others for slights real and imagined.
In fact, stick a bookmark in that concept because it comes up again.
Hermes managed to bring the girl into her teen years without serious incident. Don’t get me wrong, she was considered a giant nuisance and the other Olympians spent years avoiding her. But it was what it was. Then Adrestia hit puberty and all bets were off. All the girl’s worst traits were amplified and even some of the more laid-back gods and goddesses plotted ways to bump her off inconspicuously.
Everything came to a head on Adrestia’s sixteenth birthday.
Do you guys remember that MTV show My Super Sweet 16? It was a “reality” program where ultra-rich sixteen-year-olds would get an extravagant party and they’d throw a tantrum because it wasn’t extravagant enough. It had its fifteen minutes as a cultural touchstone. I think they even riffed on it on South Park. Adrestia’s party was like that show. I know because I was there. They held it in the beautiful meadow at Olympus’ feet. There were tents and exotic animals and circus performers and foods from all over the known world. But none of it was good enough for Hermes’ daughter. She bitched about the juggling bear, she bitched about the spiced eels from the Orient, she bitched about the tree sloth who could say “hello” in six human languages. None of it was good enough.
Not even Pegasus was good enough.
In a rare moment of beneficence, Zeus gifted Adrestia with the most sacred animal in the world. The animal that’d helped bring down the Kraken at Argos. The animal that carried Zeus’ lightning bolts into battle. The animal Adrestia called “tacky” and “beneath me”.
When that happened, dark clouds rolled in and Zeus rose from his solid gold chair. I’ve never seen the allfather so pissed. He raised his hands, ready to give the teenager the slug treatment, but Hermes intervened. Though he knew his daughter was insufferable, he still carried guilt in his heart. Long story short, he got her sentence commuted to banishment for life. Adrestia was kicked out of her own Sweet 16 and told to live among mortal men for the rest of her days.
Every so often, throughout the centuries, I’d get wind of her running afoul of both gods and men. As time wore on, her reputation as a Raw Nerve grew and grew. She became known as the unofficial goddess of the Hissy Fit.
Which reminds me of a footnote. While I was at the party, I hung out with this guy. He was a little older than Adrestia and he was handsome in a not particularly standout way. His name was Calesius, and he was the stable boy of the gods. We hit it off, but there was no sex if that’s what you’re thinking. It was just two people chilling at a shindig and making snarky comments about the other guests. Anyway, at one point, I looked over and saw Adrestia glaring at us. Not only was she glaring at us, she was jotting something down in the little book she always carried around with her. I remember thinking, Uh oh. That can’t be good, but nothing came of it—or at least I thought it didn’t.
All the way out to Jellybelly’s Happy-time Petting Zoo (which I found, again, with Hope in GPS mode), there was a fly in the Pontiac. A stowaway from the L.A. Department of Water and Power’s delightful underground accommodations. I’m sure you’ve experienced the phenomenon yourself. The pesky-fly-stuck-in-the-car thing. Buzzing around you. Banging itself against the windows. Anyway, annoying bugs notwithstanding, we got where we were going more or less in one piece. The others were already there. They’d gone in Petey’s Escalade. Keri and Elijah met me at the entrance.
The petting zoo hadn’t been a going concern since the early aughts. Not only were there no animals there, all the paint was faded and one or two of the paddocks had fallen apart. That aside, Keri was aglow. “Dora! You have to come see!”
“I’m coming, I’m coming.” I was limping a bit and sore from the chase through the sewers.
“You okay?” Elijah asked.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just had a bit of a workout.”
“Is that where the smell’s coming from?”
“Always the charmer.”
The three of us had been walking from the entrance toward the complex proper. I fell between the two of them. Keri sniffed the air next to me. “He’s right. You smell like a dead ox.”
“Did you guys miss the part where I was going into the sewers to hunt for the monster that almost killed you?”
“Did you get him?” Keri said.
I sighed, and my shoulders drooped. “No. He gave me the slip. Again. I did, however, find his boss. And her accomplice.”
“That sounds like something we oughta know about,” Elijah said, concerned.
“Absolutely you s
hould. But I wanna tell all of you at once. Plus, I want a look at this crazy horse of yours.”
We went under a decorative arch and came to Happy-time’s central area. There was only one corral left intact, so that was the one we headed for. It was just a fenced-in area, so I could see Pegasus even from a distance. I’d seen him before, so the thrill of a first-time view wasn’t there, but there was no denying he was a magnificent animal. He was black from head to toe, but not in a flat kinda way. His hide had an iridescence. Where it caught the light, you could see a million colors. Also, from a distance, I could see he was injured. One of his wings was taped back. “What happened to him?” I said.
“We dunno,” El said. “The people that found him told us he was like that already.”
“Where was he found?”
“Turkey. He went through a chain of middle men and shippers before he found his way here.”
Petey was leaning against the fence. “So many bribes. So. Many. Bribes,” he said in a shell-shocked tone (making it clear he’d been the one to pay those bribes).
Chad and Tiresias were also leaning up against the fence. Pegasus went to them in turns and gave them friendly nudges. Given their cosplay, he must’ve thought they were from a kindred species. I shook my head. “You guys couldn’t get out of your brony get-ups and into your street clothes?”
“These are our street clothes from now on,” Chad said. “It’s who we’re meant to be.”
“From here on in, I identify as a pastel pony named Marshmallow,” Tiresias added.
I shook my head and turned to Petey. “What about you? What’s your pony name?”
“Sugar-dollop,” he said without a trace of irony.
“You guys ain’t wired right.” As Pegasus went by me, I held out my hand and the horse did a weird thing. He got wild-eyed, snorted and went out of his way to avoid getting close to me.
