“It’s not the oil; it’s your lifeline.” He put a finger up and plucked at the air as if playing an invisible guitar.
Cressida shuddered as the feeling shivered down her spine. “Stop that!”
“That, College, will help me know where you are.”
“Okay, but you can’t play me like a harp.”
“Yes, I can. Hierophant privileges.” He ignored her look and bustled around the room.
“If this will help me get back, why didn’t it help June?”
“I don’t know! All of this is theory. Do you want to go or not?”
“I don’t have a choice.” She cinched her pack and laid it on the ground. “Now what? We find your underground gate?”
His laughing look gave way to a more serious one. “Yep, and there we will perform the Mysteries.”
Cressida took a deep breath. Despite what she’d felt from the wheat, and the way Nero could touch her lifeline, she still doubted what he said. Once they started the Mysteries, she knew everything would become clearer, that if she watched him, she might spot a rational explanation for everything that was happening.
At the moment, it was the best she could hope for, apart from finding June in whatever cave Nero had left her in. “Let’s do it.”
Chapter Two
Cressida had been expecting one of the many tourist attracting caves in the Austin Hill Country, but Nero led her to an innocuous divot in the bottom of a hill that could only be called a cave if she squinted. They’d had to park on the side of the road and ease under a barbed wire fence, and the entire time Cressida had been looking for evidence of June—a dropped tissue, a booted footprint—but in between the gravel and the scrubby plants and cacti, she saw nothing.
Standing in the unimpressive cave, Cressida’s confidence plummeted. What the hell was she doing here? Had she just driven herself to her own murder scene, just like June? Any minute now Nero would tell her that in order to complete the ritual, she’d have to dig a grave-like hole.
He set his bag down and rubbed his hands together. “You might want to take your backpack off. You’re going to be a little stumbly.”
And it would save him the trouble of wrestling it off her corpse. She dropped it to the ground and watched him so closely it made him chuckle.
“If you want to back out,” he said, “now’s the time.”
June hadn’t backed out. Wouldn’t. And there didn’t seem to be any sign of recent graves. “Where do we start?”
He opened the box and showed her a bottle of greenish brown sludge. “Here.”
“That’s…”
“Kykeon, the stuff that gets you high, yeah. Barley and pennyroyal mostly.”
“Is that really necessary?”
“You want to get into the Underworld? No one goes sober.”
And that was it. Nero was going to feed her sludge, rob her, and sell her to the creepy sweater triplets, just like he’d probably sold her aunt. But why bother with something so elaborate? To claim he didn’t force her to do anything? And though June always wanted to buy into the myths, she wasn’t stupid, far from it. She would have done her research on Nero before flying him over.
“Just get set up, and let me wrap my head around this,” she said.
He shrugged and set to work assembling a makeshift altar. Cressida peeked into his bag. There were more to the Mysteries than drugs. Ancient Greeks reenacted the kidnapping of Persephone, the agony of Demeter at losing her daughter. They told dirty jokes to make Demeter smile; they worshiped sacred objects. Nero wouldn’t have bothered to bring anything else if he was just going to drug her and kill her.
The box that held the sacred wheat was in there, as well as a basket and what looked like ceremonial robes. Nero donned them quickly, enough green fabric to nearly swallow him, as well as a heavy gold necklace and a crown. She couldn’t hold in a laugh.
He gave her a dirty look. “Sacred ceremony, yeah?”
“Sorry.” But she could barely hold it in.
“Want to start with the ritual cleansing?” He held up a bottle of water.
She eyed it and then him, hoping her expression conveyed that if he dumped that over her head, she would punch him.
He sighed. “She didn’t want you to see the video, but I see you’re not going to move forward without it.”
“The what?”
“I filmed her induction. Quite hard to do while performing it, you know, but it was my first time and everything…” He sighed. “She didn’t want you to see it. She knew she’d act a fool during the ceremony, but everyone does. Your aunt, though—”
“This whole time you had a video that would back you up, and you didn’t say anything?”
“I promised that I wouldn’t, that I’d only use it as a reference for myself, but I thought you were starting to believe me.”
She held up a hand. “Just show me. I promise I won’t mention it to my aunt.”
He took out his phone. “I wanted to study it. See where I could improve my technique. First, swear a vow of secrecy.”
She nodded. “I swear.”
When June came to life on his phone screen, Cressida’s heart thudded, and she felt a few wayward tears gather. She watched June and Nero enter the cave, watched the robes come out. June drank the kykeon and babbled about how myth was so unjust to women, about all the wrongs that should be righted, all the tales that should be rewritten.
For the most part, Cressida agreed, but they were just stories, reflective of the time they were written in, but June didn’t seem to see them that way. She acted as if there was something she could do about it. “The least I can do,” she slurred, “is hear the truth from their own lips.”
At one point, she tried to cut herself, and Nero had wrestled a knife away from her as Cressida watched, wincing. Another time she tried to take her clothes off, but Nero had stopped her with, “That’s enough of that, sweetheart. We don’t want to greet Hades in our underpants, do we?”
When the Mysteries had concluded, June nearly passed out, but Nero helped her put on a backpack that was the twin of Cressida’s then led her toward the back of the cave. The video did this shuddery shimmer, and she was gone.
There were ways to alter video. Everyone knew that, but Cressida didn’t have the time or the means to look for them. She didn’t even know where she’d start with such a thing.
Now she was just wasting time. If what she’d seen so far didn’t prove that June had really taken a trip to the Underworld, nothing would. A true skeptic never stopped looking for the zipper, but June was a believer, so to find her, Cressida knew she was going to have to act like a believer, too.
And if nothing happened, well, then she’d know, and then Nero would regret ever being born.
“How do I find her?” Cressida asked.
He had the decency to look apologetic as he shrugged. “Ask around.”
“Fantastic. Can’t wait.”
He lifted the water bottle high and whispered something before he dumped it over her head.
She resisted the urge to glare, and when he handed her the kykeon, she took a big drink. Her logical mind screamed at her, but the part of her that had listened wide-eyed to her aunt’s stories around a campfire sent a silent prayer that she would see her aunt soon.
For a moment, she felt nothing, and she was about to ask when it would kick in, but Nero leaned far to the side, farther than anyone had a right to lean before he oozed slowly up the wall.
“Stop that,” she tried to say, but her tongue wouldn’t obey her.
“Right, now we re-create the kidnapping of Persephone,” he said. “I’ll play Demeter, and you’re Persephone, so make sure you cry a lot because you’ve been kidnapped by Hades, and being separated from your mother and the other gods is severely bumming you out.”
She wanted to say she felt a little silly, that she might need more prompting, but what came out was, “Okey dokey.” She fell to her knees and lamented her fate while he cried for her, but to
her surprise, Nero wasn’t himself anymore but the goddess of the harvest and the land, wailing because she missed her daughter, and Cressida felt Persephone’s anguish, Demeter’s pain.
Someone was playing a drum? Nero shoved the wheat into her hands. She tottered along beside him slurring, “Fuck, yeah! Demeter is the shit, doing all the growing things and all the crops and stuff, and did Hades think of any of that? Noooo. He was just thinking with his dick! And he could have said, ‘Hey, Persephone, you wanna go out sometime?’ But he probably knew she would be all like, ‘No, you’re a fucking cockbag,’ and that’s why he kidnapped her! And now her mother is so sad because they were so close. Hey, that’s my arm, give it back!”
Nero led her arm toward the engraved box, and it towed her along. Cressida laid the wheat down so Demeter would know that Cressida was on her side, that Cressida wept for her because her daughter was missing like June was missing.
Cressida threw herself down before the makeshift altar and wept, thinking on June and Persephone and how they’d both been carried off, but Persephone got to come back sometimes. June might never get to. “I’ll rescue you!” she said, and she didn’t know whether she was talking to Persephone or June.
Nero whispered in her ear in Greek.
“Speak up,” she tried to say, but all that came out was a whistle. Then she realized the whistling inside her was actually around her, and goddamn she was powerful; she could make a whole cave whistle! Something tugged on her back. Nero had helped her put on her backpack, but it hovered a few feet overhead.
The air felt swirly, as if she was falling. “This is it!” she cried. There actually was an entrance to the Underworld in a shitty little non-cave in Austin, and the thought made her laugh and laugh until the swirly air seemed to focus on one point, and she was stumbling toward it and falling again.
Someone pulled her lifeline taut, and she gasped, her limbs flying out like a marionette’s. She turned to yell at Nero, but her feet crunched into something.
The cave had gone dark as pitch except for a faint light coming from far away, down a tunnel that hadn’t been there before. When had it gotten dark? Her head was clearing, the drug fading like water sliding off her skin. She fumbled for her flashlight, but when she flicked it on, she had to stifle a yelp. Mounds of skeletons lay strewn across a huge cavern, piles of yellow-white bone heaped like macabre dunes.
The entrance to the Underworld, the spot where Cerberus waited to strip the flesh from any mortal trying to sneak into the land of the dead.
*
Medusa slipped deeper into the mud bath and tried to remember what it was like to get drunk. The alcohol of the dead relied too heavily on the taster, powered by memory and imagination. Labels instructed those who imbibed to recall spending an evening with friends and family or to summon the memory of relaxing moments in groves and meadows, as if everyone had spent their lives in a beer commercial.
But it was hard to remember a blackout drunk. That was part of the charm. Memory and inhibition pissed away in dribs and drabs until a person couldn’t remember where her feet were and then couldn’t recall what they were for, either. Medusa hadn’t been a heavy drinker in life, but she still wanted the option from time to time.
After more than three millennia had passed in the mortal realm, a living person had visited the Underworld. It was an impossible amount of time to think about, let alone live, but time worked differently for the dead. Days were hard to separate—and weeks, months, years—but Medusa recognized that it had been a long time, too long.
New spirits trickled down occasionally, those who worshipped the old gods, but they were fewer and fewer, and a living person? Virtually forgotten. She’d felt the ripple in the air when the living woman had shown up; all those with more awareness had felt it, too, and she knew everyone would be scrambling to put long dormant plans into motion. A living person was too great an opportunity to ignore.
Medusa sank into the soothing mud until it covered her chin. She shifted, letting scales cover her body, her wings stretching to either side, and her hair lifting and transforming into writhing snakes before she settled into her human form again, letting her human hair drift on the mud’s surface. She’d seen the living mortal. Her face was etched upon Medusa’s memory as she stared at the Underworld in wide-eyed wonder, but Medusa hadn’t been fast enough. Someone had swooped in and gathered her up first, and Medusa hadn’t even seen who it was.
Her body tightened, fists clenching until she forced herself to relax again, to let the mud do its work. She had to think of a plan, a way to find the mortal before it was too late, and Perseus was reincarnated again.
A jolt like lightning passed through her, and for a second, she thought it was anger at the man who’d killed her and her sisters, but this was the same feeling that had made her hesitate before. Another living person had entered the Underworld.
“So soon?” she asked. But it didn’t matter if it was a new one or if the other had left and now returned. She leapt from the tub and wrapped a robe around her muddy body. She dashed into the living room of her high-rise apartment and looked out over the jumble of the city, trying to see past the mishmash of concrete and glass buildings, some temples and traditional houses stuck amidst the press by diehards who refused to move with the times. Over it all hung the thick shade fog and the crisscrossing elevator cables that let the denizens move from one place to another.
“Stheno, Euryale!”
They glided into the room, almost specters now, nearly the same as the floating shades that made up the fog, all the people no longer remembered by anyone walking the Earth.
“Sister?” they asked, talking on top of one another, their closeness the only thing keeping them in form. Too many people had forgotten them, but it seemed some still remembered the old myths. Medusa often thanked the gods for liberal arts programs.
“Another mortal has come. Find her.” Medusa dashed away, grabbing some jeans from the floor and pulling them on, mud and all. Her sisters crowded around the window, tapping into the fog of floating shades, searching, listening.
Medusa turned, looking for a shirt, but there wasn’t one handy. She cinched the robe tighter and ran out of the apartment, sprinting toward her building’s elevator. There wasn’t time for anything else. Everyone would know, everyone who was remembered by someone who still lived would realize there was a mortal in their midst, and they’d be after him or her like a shot.
She hit the ground floor and ran into the street. She reached up, grabbed one of the floating shades, and tugged it along with her, using it as a conduit to speak with her sisters, their voices vibrating through the spiritual fog.
“Which way?”
They guided her through the streets, past the myriad elevators that traversed the city, traveling up or down or sideways, leading her toward Cerberus’s tunnel.
*
Cressida froze, waiting for the hot breath of Cerberus to wash over her back right before a set of huge jaws clamped over her head, shutting off air and light forever.
“Oh God,” she groaned, then clapped a hand over her mouth. Her bladder shrank, and she clamped her knees together to keep from giving in to the sudden urge to wet her pants.
Nero’s words swam into focus in her head. Cerberus was in the real world, looking for Nero, looking for her, but if he sensed that she’d crossed over, he’d be on his way quick. She ran for the light, skittering over skeletons and crunching bones under her sneakers. She wobbled, the sharp ends of femurs sticking into her legs but not penetrating her jeans. She tried to run in bounding hops until she tripped, and the sounds of clattering, skittering bones echoed off the walls.
A deep growl sounded far off behind her, as if the cave was warning her to be quiet, but her imagination supplied her with the three-headed dog she couldn’t see. Cressida tried to swear through clenched teeth and fumbled her way forward, finally breaking into a clearing where she ran for all she was worth, her backpack pounding up and down, and her hear
t hammering in her chest. The growling had reached the bones, and huge feet knocked them aside like kindling.
An opening loomed ahead; bluish light poured out of a hole too small for Cerberus in his three-headed dog form, or at least she hoped so. She ran faster but heard him gaining, his paws rasping against stone, and she pictured all three jaws opening wide, slick with drool, red tongues lolling.
She didn’t even see the drop. Suddenly weightless, she spun her arms, legs still running but with nothing to catch on. She struck a slope on her heel and skidded, fighting to keep her balance, knowing she was going to fall and unable to stop it. Bits of skin sloughed from her palms as she fell forward and lost the fight with momentum. She rolled for a few stomach wrenching turns before finally sliding to a halt.
Cressida put her arms over her head and breathed, wanting to be as small as possible when she was eaten. Maybe if he didn’t chew, she could claw her way out from the inside.
Nope, that was too much. She uncurled enough to vomit, and it wasn’t until she dry heaved over and over that she realized Cerberus hadn’t caught her.
The hole above her was packed with three snouts jockeying for position as they sniffed and snarled. He couldn’t fit. She barked a laugh, and the noses stopped as if listening. Cressida tried to keep another laugh in, but it wouldn’t be silenced, and soon it had friends, more and more until she was laughing hysterically, and the snouts began barking, one after another poking out the hole in impotent fury.
Cressida pushed to her feet, her elatedness at remaining uneaten making her call, “Good boy!” The wall of a cavern shuddered as if Cerberus banged against it, and Cressida turned away, starting to run, but she staggered to a stop.
She’d expected rivers, caverns, maybe the odd lake of lava, but an alley stretched in front of her, slick dark bricks covered in graffiti that glowed in a meager streetlight. Maybe the Mysteries had gone wrong and instead of sending her to the Underworld, Nero had transported her to the magical land of Cleveland.
Coils Page 3
