The White Oak

by Kim White

  “Are you . . . ”

  “A ghost.” Lucas says. “Me and Grandma died in the sinkhole.” He snaps his slingshot and launches a stone into the water. It doesn’t make a splash, because the water is too thick. Instead it slides in and slowly sinks.

  I sit next to him, dangling my bare feet over the edge of the dock. I can feel the heat rising off the stagnant water.

  “Where is Grandmother?” I ask.

  “She crossed over already,” Lucas answers. “I stayed behind to wait for you.”

  I sigh with relief, happy that Lucas is here and my mean-spirited grandmother is not.

  He sends another stone into the water. I feel my heart swell with love for him. I want to smooth his messy hair and comfort him, but he is in no mood for that, and my hands can’t touch him anyway. I pick up one of his rocks and feel surprised that it’s solid and heavy. I hear the ferryman cracking his fearful whip and remember his iron grip on my neck.

  “Why is it that some things in this world are solid and some aren’t?” I ask, reaching out and placing my hand on top of his. It passes right through. “How can the ferryman crush me, but you can’t even hug me?” Lucas cringes, and I wish I’d used a different example.

  “I’ve been watching the people down here,” he says. “Some are more solid than others. I think it has something to do with their power in the underworld.” He takes a stone off the pile and tosses it into the river. “At least I have enough power to throw rocks at monsters,” he says, shrugging.

  I smile at him. “Thank goodness for that, or I’d be . . . ”

  “You’d be what?” he says, studying me closely. “Cora, you seem solid all the way through.”

  “Lucas, I’m—” I start to tell him but stop, not sure how he will react. Then I decide I have to tell him. If Lucas can’t accept me, nobody can. “I’m still alive,” I explain. “That’s why the ferryman doesn’t want me on board.”

  “How is that possible?” he says. “You were buried in that sinkhole just like me!”

  “The ground opened up underneath me and I fell all the way through to the caves. I can’t explain it. I don’t know how I survived. I mean, I have so far, but Minotaur says I could die here and be stuck. He’s helping me find a way out.”

  “Who is Minotaur?” Lucas asks. I notice for the first time how concerned he is—like a father who finds out his child has been talking to a stranger. Before I can answer, Minotaur appears. Or more precisely, part of Minotaur appears. To stay hidden with us behind the ropes and barrels, he can’t show more than a head, shoulders, and part of an upper body.

  “I am Minotaur, Cora’s friend and guide,” he says. I wince when he calls me a friend, but Lucas doesn’t notice because Minotaur has appeared in a persona he recognizes. The persona hovers above the dock dressed in military fatigues, a giant gun slung across his back and a smaller gun holstered under his arm. He’d be as big as the ferryman if his full body were showing. The soldier snaps to attention and salutes, saying, “Lieutenant Garrison, Sir!”

  Lucas’s mouth hangs open for a moment. Second Lieutenant Garrison is the hero Lucas invented for the computer game he was building before he died. “Why did you tell him about my game?” Lucas says angrily.

  “I didn’t,” I say. “He just knows. If you do something on a computer or any kind of machine, he knows.” Lucas seems concerned about this, but I don’t know why. What does it matter if Minotaur knows what Lucas did when he was alive?

  “What do you want and why are you talking to us?” Lucas addresses Minotaur combatively.

  “My mission is to aid and protect you,” Lieutenant Garrison says in his matter-of-fact soldier’s voice. Lucas stares at him, and neither of them says anything for a long time.

  Lucas finally breaks the silence. “Bullshit,” he says. “What do you know about my projects?”

  “Everything,” Minotaur replies. “I know what you have written, and I know what you are capable of writing.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Lucas counters. “Show me.”

  Minotaur’s persona fades and is replaced by lines of code that hover in midair. Slowly they rearrange themselves, forming a series of three-dimensional images. They are Lucas’s cave photographs, rendered in 3-D for his game. The images begin to change incrementally, until the landscape looks like the underworld, like the river and the plains of Asphodel, and the pier we are sitting on.

  Lucas is fascinated. “How are you doing this?” he asks.

  “It’s your program,” Minotaur says. “The one you started before you died.”

  “That was just an idea I was playing with,” Lucas replies. “I hadn’t worked it out completely.”

  “We filled in a few blanks for you, to help it along, but you will finish it here in the underworld,” Minotaur says.

  “Who is we?” Lucas asks in annoyance. “And how can you know what I am going to do next?”

  Minotaur pauses for a moment and looks at me, not Lucas. “Ask your sister,” he says. I feel a twinge of pain in my tooth as the golden pen digs in. I take it as a sign that I should say nothing.

  “What’s he talking about?” Lucas asks.

  I shake my head, not sure how to tell him about Sybil and the books, and worried that I will betray the secret of the golden pen if I do.

  Charon cracks his whip and breaks the silence. “All aboard!” he bellows. The boarding is almost completed.

  “Go quickly,” Minotaur says, disappearing from view. Lucas and I make a run for the boat.

  Waiting for Cora

  She had no idea how much danger she was in, and at the time, I didn’t fully understand it either, although I thought I did.

  I searched for her on the Ship of the Dead and then waited for her by the ferry. Hiding on the dock, I watched thousands of ghosts pass by and witnessed at least a hundred ferry crossings. There were times when I was sure I’d missed her, and other times when I wondered if she had survived the sinkhole, leaving me to wait years for her arrival.

  There were only a few places to hide—behind coils of thick rope or piles of wooden crates. When the boatswain came for new rope or when he dumped his box of plunder into one of the crates, I had to climb quickly under the dock and cling to the posts to stay out of sight. When the ferry was making a crossing, I would explore the dock, reading the ship’s manifest or rummaging through the boatswain’s crates looking for weapons—that’s how I found the slingshot and the rocks.

  Once, the boat returned when I wasn’t paying attention. I was snooping around the ferryman’s platform when I felt the pier shake as the boat bumped up against it. I quickly crawled under the platform and stayed hidden beneath the ferryman’s feet throughout the boarding. Up close, I could feel how powerful he was. The platform shook when he moved, and I could feel the wind made by the crack of his whip. I worried about being discovered until I realized that it wasn’t hard to escape his notice. He only cared about getting the passengers on board and across the river. It was the boatswain who continued to worry me. I watched him cautiously through a gap in the wood slats.

  By the time I found Cora, I’d watched a thousand souls make the journey, and I had a good idea how to get her across safely. I tied up her hair to keep it out of the fans, and told her where to stand on the ferry. I protected her from the boatswain, and helped her get through the gate into the City, but the whole time, I was wondering about the things she wasn’t telling me. She was my twin, I knew her almost as well as she knew herself, and I could see she was keeping secrets.

  She was traveling with an artificial intelligence that called itself Minotaur. Cora seemed uncomfortable around it, and I should have paid more attention to that, but I was too curious about how it worked and what it knew about the underworld. And, to be honest, I was flattered that it was familiar with my programs and seemed to think they were important. I had a vain notion that if I could finish my work, I could somehow become as solid as the ferryman.

  When I look back on it now, I see
that Minotaur perceived this. It recognized how badly I wanted power in the underworld. To my credit, I wanted to use it to protect Cora and get her out alive, to find my family, especially my mother, if she was down here. But mostly I wanted a chance to complete what I’d started. And Minotaur was able to give me that chance. It had access to the underworld database. If I could get into it, even for a few minutes, I could change this place. How many shades have that opportunity? It would almost be like living again.

  And that’s what I craved. I hated being dead. I was sure I hated it more than any other shade. When the ground gave way and the avalanche of dirt and rocks crushed me, I fought back. Even after I was dead, I resisted. My ghost held on to my body and refused to separate. But the struggle drained me, and that might have been why I ended up fainter and weaker than the other shades. I spent myself battling death, or perhaps I left part of myself in the body after all—tore myself apart because of my stubborn will.

  Grandmother didn’t resist. “When it’s your time, it’s your time,” she said when I saw her on the ship’s deck. She was almost as thick and strong in death as she was in life. She pinched me and scolded me. “Look what you’ve done to yourself,” she said. “I thought you were the smart one. You think you can trick death? Nobody ever has—nobody ever will.”

  I was glad she wasn’t there when I found Cora on the dock, alive. Grandmother would have killed her just to make a point. But I wasn’t going to let her die no matter what it cost me.

  I would defy this place, get her out, and if I could, I would do some damage to the underworld. I wanted more than just to trick death—I wanted to defeat it and get all of us out. I see now how foolish that was, how dangerous, but if I hadn’t acted on that ambition, things would have turned out much differently. As my grandfather once told me, “The heart was made to desire what destiny intends for it.”

  Crossing the River Tartarus

  The ferry is a large and frightful vessel, black as the river itself and barely seaworthy, more like a raft than a boat. It sits low in the water and has no guardrails, seats, or cabins. Passengers push and jockey for a position in the center of the boat, where there’s less danger of tumbling off into the river. Lucas tells me that the two huge fans in the back propel the boat across the thick water. The fans are enclosed in metal cages furred with greasy black soot.

  “We have to stand near the fans,” Lucas says. He is pushing through the crowd and leading me toward the back. I pause when I see the boatswain drawing in the ropes and wrapping them around a post near the fans.

  “I don’t want to stand near the boatswain,” I whisper.

  “It’ll be okay,” Lucas says. The boatswain finishes pulling in the moorings at the back of the boat, then goes to the front. Lucas takes the band off his slingshot and uses it to tie up my hair. “When the fans start,” says Lucas, “grab on to this post and don’t let it go.”

  “On to that?” I say in disgust. The wet ropes ooze foul-smelling sludge from the river.

  “Yes,” he says firmly.

  “But it’s not safe,” I plead. “There are poisons in the river.” I look around for something else to hold on to. There is nothing.

  “Trust me, Cora,” Lucas says. “This is the only way.”

  I nod unhappily and put my hand on the ropes—they are warm and sticky, bristled with thick hairs and dripping with the river’s noxious tar. Their stench is so strong I have to hold my breath to keep from gagging. Lucas is affected by it too. The fumes seem to burn him slightly.

  The boatswain makes his way back to the fans, pausing behind me to pull down my hair. I swat his hand away and tie my hair back up. He cackles softly and says “I’ll get you” under his breath as he opens the control box next to the fans and switches them on. They moan as they come to life and draw the thick, putrid air between their enormous metal blades.

  Lucas and I hug the mooring post as the boat lurches forward and makes a sharp turn from the dock. A dozen passengers tumble across the deck and into the water. Their efforts to swim are useless. They are pulled down like beasts in a tar pit.

  Other passengers try to save the struggling souls, but the boat is moving too fast now, and all we can do is watch from a growing distance as Tartarus consumes them. A ripple of panic passes through the crowd, and I hear the boatswain laughing quietly at our misfortune.

  The ferryman stands at the bow, both hands on a massive chrome wheel—the only part of the boat not black and with tar. Despite the thick water, the boat moves swiftly, and the passengers huddle together for safety as we race across the viscous surface.

  The woman with the baby who stood ahead of me in the boarding line makes her way toward us to share our secure mooring. She is right next to us when the boat lurches and she stumbles, dropping her baby. The boatswain catches the child and the woman smiles at him. Grateful, but wary, she holds out her arms to take the child, but the boatswain cackles menacingly.

  “Please give him back,” she begs.

  The boatswain takes one of the baby’s tiny arms between his dirty fingers, and starts to place it into the fan cage where the sharp blades will slice it to bits.

  The mother screams and tries to grab the child, but the boatswain kicks her hard and she falls to the deck, crying and pleading. Everyone is horrified, but no one has the courage to oppose him. He laughs as he teases the mother. The more she trembles and cries, the happier he becomes. I make a move as if to grab the baby myself, but Lucas puts a hand on my shoulder and shakes his head. The boatswain is about to push the baby’s arm into the fan when he stops short, cries out in pain, and lets go of the child. Lucas catches it. The boatswain’s foot has been nailed to the deck with Lucas’s pocketknife. The mother takes her baby and backs away as the boatswain pulls the knife out of his foot and lunges vengefully at Lucas. But Lucas is quick. He grabs the boatswains’ arm and twists it, recovering the knife. Lucas studied martial arts when he was alive and down here, his skills seem to trump his lack of substance. Brandishing the knife, he shoves the boatswain back into the fans.

  “Boatswain!” the ferryman yells.

  The boatswain scrambles back to his position before the ferryman can raise his whip. He gives us a look that promises revenge.

  “Keep your head down,” Lucas whispers. “The bugs are coming.”

  I look up and see black clouds closing in on us. The clouds are thick swarms of biting insects ranging in size from smaller than a fingernail to larger than my fist. I watch as they begin to attack the shades, feeding off them like monstrous mosquitoes. The passengers scream and swat, closing their mouths and eyes tight to keep the bugs out. They wave their arms and stomp their feet to shoo them away. This worsens their already precarious balance. A few of them fall overboard or knock over the passengers next to them.

  The boatswain quietly turns up the fans and the strong pull of the wind draws the insects away from Lucas and me. We keep our heads low, hoping the other passengers don’t notice how comfortable we are in the midst of the frenzy.

  When we pass through the swarm and reach the center of the river, I let out a deep breath and start to relax, but Lucas grips his knife and looks around warily. The boatswain wedges himself between the two fans, and even the ferryman seems on edge.

  “What’s going on?” I say.

  “Watch the water,” Lucas whispers.

  I stare out across the still, black water and see them—huge, thick tentacles are rising out of the ooze, waving about blindly, looking for food. There are hundreds of them and there is no way to go around them. A forest of eel-like arms fills the center of the river as far up and downstream as we can see.

  The ferryman steers the boat with one hand and holds his whip at the ready with the other. The passengers watch, terrified, as a tentacle emerges from behind us, reaches across the deck, and gropes blindly for a victim. Everyone scrambles out of the way as the ferryman uses his whip to slice the tentacle clean off. It falls, with a thud, on the deck, crushing two people. The ferryma
n pushes it back into the river. Moments later, another tentacle grabs a passenger and drags him below the surface. Dozens of tentacles surround the boat, grabbing souls from our raft like hors d’oeuvres off a tray. One of them reaches toward us, and Lucas stabs it with his knife. It recoils like a snail shrinking into its shell.

  “This is worse than usual,” the boatswain mumbles, so focused on his own survival that for once he doesn’t take pleasure in the other passengers’ suffering. The grim look on his face worries me. The ferryman’s whip is snapping at the predators. They retreat as soon as they feel the sting of the whip, but there are too many of them.

  “Increase speed!” the ferryman shouts. The boatswain turns up the fans and the boat lurches forward, causing a small crowd of passengers to roll into the river, where the monsters quickly drag them down.

  We sail out of danger, and I breathe again. My shoulders are stiff with tension, but I can’t let go of it.

  We’re approaching the City. Its size is incomprehensible. An iron planet, blackened with oil and polished smooth. Not a single door or window interrupts the slick, impenetrable surface.

  “How do we get inside?” I whisper to Lucas.

  “You’ll see,” he replies, keeping an eye on the boatswain.

  There is something terrifying, awesome, about the sphere. It rotates in the oily water, and at first appears to be rolling toward us, but it’s turning in place, creating a subtle wake that gently rocks our boat. Bilge pipes appear just above the surface of the water, flushing the City’s waste, then closing before they are submerged in the river. We seem to be on a collision course with the sphere, and the passengers are screaming in fright. The ferryman cracks his whip to silence them.

  “It’ll be okay,” Lucas whispers. “Just hold on.”

  As we get closer, I see an opening form in the surface of the sphere. A pier extends outward, with a screeching of metal, like a branch growing from a tree. The opening widens but stays in the same position, just above the water, even as the sphere continues to turn. I can see, as we get closer, that the opening is tearing and then healing over before it submerges in the water.