by Skyler Andra
Chapter 11
Autumn
“Do you sense anything?” Hades asked quietly.
“I sense we’re in a house in the middle of nowhere that neither of us own.” I squinted down the pitch-black hallway.
Switching on the flashlight app on my phone, I shined a clear, strong white light over the entrance. Somewhat to my surprise, it appeared normal. The entrance contained a standing coat hanger, a shoe rack, and a table with a mirror and a little bowl for keys. I hadn’t been expecting demon circles or the remnants of supernatural rituals scattered everywhere, but I also hadn’t anticipated a neat, normal little farmhouse, either. The couch, a mottled velvet job from the seventies, had doilies over the headrests. So grandma-ish. A shallow bowl on the coffee table held a spray of old dried flowers. Overall, a little stiff, but I got the idea that the place was well cared for.
“This place doesn’t feel deserted,” I noted with some surprise.
“It wasn’t until relatively recently that is was,” Hades said, and that sent a chill up my spine as well. That meant that until recently, the inhabitant had been alive.
“So, who are we looking for?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re the God of Death, how do you not know? You knew Alan Parsons’ name.”
“God of the Underworld,” he corrected. “Not the God of Death. That role is played by Thanatos.”
“Oh.” I really had to brush up on my Greek mythology.
“I only get a name and a description when I happen upon them,” he elaborated, his voice fraying just a little. “All I know, all I feel, is that there is a void. That someone is missing.”
He’d been so calm this whole time that I hadn’t stopped to think about what kind of stress he might be under. I stopped myself from leaning over to take his hand. We needed all arms for ghost-fighting. And besides, holding hands during a breaking and entering was probably pretty weird.
We made our way to the kitchen, and as I swung my beam of light over a clean counter, an ugly little cookie jar, and a neat stack of medication, it struck me how normal all of the contents in the house were. Someone normal once lived here and ate their cookies and took their meds. We were the ones out of place.
I glanced at Hades, who outwardly looked very cool and calm. But beneath his exterior, I sensed his unease, his fear that if he didn’t fix this, he’d fade away in his realm without any last chance of hope. Everything about souls not showing up in the Underworld like they were supposed to was increasingly abnormal.
On impulse, I opened the fridge door, flooding the kitchen with a washed out light. Slightly behind me, Hades made a disgruntled sound.
“I can’t see anything,” he complained, and I shrugged apologetically.
Glancing in the fridge, I noticed the contents were well enough stocked and organized by food groups. Fruit, vegetables, some leftovers, condiments, and a six pack of diet soda.
What was I been expecting? A head? Some kind of horror? Silly.
Closing the fridge door, I turned to Hades, but just as the light went off I caught something standing behind him. A slight figure just over his left shoulder. Frozen in place, I noted how they were as solid as my own right hand. As I glanced upward, I realized it had a face, and all I saw were teeth, teeth, teeth…
I wished I could say something smart or useful or even shout a warning. Instead, I let out a garbled, “OhGodthere’ssomethingbehindyouohmyGod,” and almost tore the fridge door off its hinges.
Light filled the room again, and we both saw it this time: a small stick-like shape throwing a door to one side and lunging through it. Hades was just one pace behind it, descending the stairs after it. Slower than both of them, I rushed straight to the open doorway but froze. Rather than leading into another room, wooden slat stairs led straight down into a black space, disappearing into the dark. A basement.
“Oh, come on. This is just classic.” I groaned at how much this resembled a horror movie.
At least I knew what I’d be yelling if I were watching myself from a television. I’d be saying, “Get the heck out of there! Go wait on the lawn! Go wait for the sun to come up!” And I might have done just that, but then I heard Hades’ voice coming up out from the darkness.
I couldn’t quite make out what he was saying or even his tone, but because of the thud that followed, and the fact his voice cut off for a moment, I jumped down the stairs two at a time. I shakily held my phone up for light, finding a light switch halfway down. Flipping it on, the brightness was followed by immediate cursing, which preceded a crash. Yelping, I stumbled over the last step, which was two inches taller than the previous ones. Thankfully my adrenaline was going hard enough that I didn’t do more than wince before staggering to my feet.
Upon glancing around, I saw that I was in a semi-finished basement, the walls lined with glass jars that held things that I wasn’t sure I wanted to look at. At the center stood Hades, hands raised as if he were ready to start throwing fists. Tension laced his body. He glanced at me, and then at a slightly ajar door at the opposite end of the cellar.
“Are you all right?” Hades asked.
“I was going to ask you the same thing,” I panted.
He looked rumpled, glancing at some smashed jars—their contents shattered everywhere on the concrete floor. I was lucky I hadn’t fallen closer to that mess. I would have been picking glass shards out of my skin for ages.
“Are… are those pickles?” I asked.
“Root cellar, shh.” Hades held up a hand.
The door at the end of the cellar pulled slightly, creaking, as if someone on the other side tried to tug it close. It appeared big and heavy, and I guessed the rust on the hinges and the uneven floor had prevented anything from happening.
“Come out here at once!” Hades snapped, making a real first impression. “You are dead. You cannot simply stay here.”
I flinched at the sternness in his voice. Dead or alive, I wouldn’t want anyone talking to me like that.
The sound that came from inside the room made all the hairs on my body curl with fright. Like the hiss of a cat combined with the growl of a dog, it told me that the person making the noise hated everything we were putting it through.
Hades circled the spilled pickles on the floor, stalking toward the door.
“I am not telling you again,” he growled. “Come out.”
Whoa. No wonder the souls didn’t want to go to the Underworld.
He grabbed the handle with one hand and reached inside the room with the other. From my vantage, I saw his arm flex as though he’d gotten a hold of whoever hid from us. Before he could pull, he cried out a half-muffled scream. When he stumbled back, straight through the pickle puddle, his sleeve was in tatters.
“What the hell?” I shouted.
He stared in shock at the door. “I don’t know. She does not even look human anymore.”
“I wouldn’t be very friendly if the roles were reversed and you came in uninvited,” I rebuked.
Hades looked down at me. “You sound like you have an idea.”
“I might.” I examined his arm. The ripped fabric exposed a small amount of blood running slowly out of the shallow scratches from his elbow to his wrist. They weren’t bad, but they also weren’t pleasant at all.
He shook his arm. “No. If she could do this to me… no. I was wrong to bring you here. Go wait in the car, and I’ll–”
But I wasn’t listening. I was already moving to the storage shelves where jars were lined up as neat as soldiers. I’d been afraid of eyeballs and body parts when really, they stored asparagus spears, tomatoes, baby carrots, and corn. The neatly printed labels recorded canning dates and ingredients, and in the bottom left corner, a cute little old woman held a banner that read “From the kitchen of Mae!”
“What are you doing?” Hades questioned, hovering behind me.
“Seems pretty obvious to me,” I said, selecting one of the jars. “Ms. Mae?”
Silence f
ell over the basement. Even though whatever was here acted like it wanted us dead, it its sense of the urgency seemed to have died away.
I’d take that as a good sign. “Ms. Mae, I’m sorry, but we broke some pickle jars out here.”
“She broke the jars,” Hades muttered. “Threw them at me. And yesterday a man punched me. Does no one respect the Lord of the Dead?”
I glared at Hades, remembering the neat and tidy house upstairs. Judging by the spidery script on the jar in my hands, I’d bet a month’s salary at Pearls’ that Ms. Mae was house-proud. She’d hate the idea of vinegar and sugar soaking into the cement cracks.
“I am so sorry,” I continued, talking to Ms. Mae in my most contrite voice. “Do you have a mop and a bucket somewhere? We’re going to clean this mess right up.”
The door creaked open a fraction, revealing something just past the threshold. Someone shorter than I was and far thinner, standing hunched over, eyes glowing.
Aw, man, I should have just waited outside.
Of course, I hadn’t because I was getting paid for this. I swallowed hard and took a step closer, aware that Hades was right behind me the whole time. Times like this, I was glad he had my back in case everything went wrong.
“What are you doing?” he hissed.
“Being nice,” I muttered back. “You should try it.”
He went to argue with me, but I cut him off with a wave of my hand.
“Once again,” I reiterated, “I’m so sorry, Ms. Mae. It won’t happen again.”
The door swung open wide this time, and I braced myself as Ms. Mae came out. The basement light gleamed off of her spectacles. Her mouth was pressed in a firm line.
“Oh, you careless children,” she chided. “Look at that mess and broken glass. Won’t be able to walk barefoot down here.”
“Just show me to the mop, and I’ll get it,” I promised her.
Her eyes dropped to what I had in my hands. She stepped closer, revealing strong hands with arrow and sharp-looking fingers despite her age. I stood my ground.
“Well! That’s my prize-winning asparagus.” She reached for it and I let her take it. I was curious to see if the dead could hold corporeal objects after they lost their form—I guess they could. “I took second at the State Fair with that one just a few years ago.”
“Ooh, neat,” I said. “I love asparagus. Do you do all your own canning?”
She nodded, her face beaming with pride. “Oh, yes. I have since I started living here. Every summer it was work-work-work to get the crops in, and every fall, work-work-work again to make sure that we could eat through the winter. So many good years in these jars.” She stroked the glass lovingly.
Before I knew it, she was leading me around the basement, pointing at her jars, showing us the tomatoes that she was working on perfecting for the ideal midwinter pasta sauce, the rosewater jam with strawberries suspended inside, the raspberry compote that was just wonderful in anything.
All that time Hades stared at us. If I caught his eyes, I would watch him stare at me in wonder, his jaw slack, his eyes lighter with what I interpreted as amazement at how I calmed Ms. Mae down and brought her out of her shell.
She paused close to the stairs. “I wonder who’s going to eat these now that I’m gone.”
Hades froze behind me.
I swallowed hard. “Um. You know you’re–”
“Oh, of course.” She smiled, glancing at the ceiling, probably recalling her dead body lying in her bed, her passing peaceful in her sleep. How I knew that, I didn’t know. I just did. “So undignified. I don’t relish being found like that.”
“So…” I risked a quick glance at Hades, who inspected Ms. Mae as if she were a weird bug he had found. That wasn’t helpful at all, so I hurried on. “So why hide from us?”
She swiped at her eyes a little, the gesture more absent than anything else. “Oh, I don’t know. Because there’s all this food down here and no one to eat it. That’s sad, isn’t it? And it’s such good food.”
Her eyes moistened a little. All the effort she’d gone to—planting the vegetables, harvesting them, sterilizing the jars, and preserving the food.
“My kids, you know,” she started, “They won’t eat it. They’ll just dispose of it. Too old-fashioned for them.”
I hesitated. “Um. We can take it if that would help you?”
She gave us both a hard look with a special glare reserved for Hades. Given how he had scolded her, I couldn’t say she was wrong to do so.
“And you’re not just saying that to get me to go where you want me to go?”
I took a breath. “I’m not going to lie. You can’t stay here.”
“Why?” she asked.
To my surprise, Hades spoke. His voice was as gentle as I had ever heard it. “Because this is over now. It is time to move on. The longer you stay here, the harder it will be for you to leave. I would not like anyone to suffer that kind of pain.”
For some reason, his words brought a lump to my throat, but Ms. Mae only looked more thoughtful.
“You’re likely not wrong,” she agreed reluctantly. “Party’s over. Time to go home, I guess. But you will take the jars and eat the food? It’s all good, I promise.”
“Yes,” I said, accepting the jar she handed me. “We have an enormous trunk. We can take it all.”
She smiled, looking years younger. “Well then, no time like the present, I suppose. How do we do this?” She glanced at us both.
“This way,” Hades instructed, leading her up the stairs.
I followed behind although I couldn’t quite see what happened. Maybe it was that he got darker, or that she got lighter, but there was a shimmer to the air in front of me—something strange and unearthly—and by the time we got to the top, there were tears in my eyes, and Ms. Mae was gone.
“What happened?” I croaked.
“It is fine now,” Hades assured, his face solemn. “She is gone on. Are you all right?”
I rubbed the tears out of my eyes with my knuckles, because what was the point of me crying? I’d known her for just a little while. She wasn’t a part of my family or anything like that.
“Yeah,” I said gruffly. “Just give me a second.”
Hades set his hand on my shoulder. A light touch, not without the heat that always sprung up between us, but more than that there was comfort and kindness there.
“It is still a loss,” he said. “She was here, and now she is gone.”
I sighed, smiled, and patted his hand where it sat on my shoulder for a moment before pushing it away. “And that’s it, that’s all she wrote, eh? No, you’re right. Time to get on with things.”
I felt Hades’ stare follow me as I went to the narrow closet off the kitchen. As I suspected, in there was a mop and a bucket as well, which I filled at the sink before giving it a few squirts of dish soap.
“What are you doing?” Why did he keep asking me that?
“I promised a dead woman we’d clean her cellar,” I said obviously. “Okay, I know how insane that sounds. But I promised her. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
Hades hesitated, and this time it was my turn to stare at him.
“Wait, you weren’t going to clean it up?” I asked.
“Technically, you promised her, not me…”
I scowled at him. “No. No. If I’m doing this with you, this is a ground rule. Whatever we promise the person in question, we have to do, all right? That’s… that’s just basic.”
After a few moments, he nodded. “I agree.”
I half-expected him to argue with me—to claim that the Lord of the Underworld was above mopping up pickles and brushing up glass.
“You made Ms. Mae’s transition much easier, so we shall clean the damn cellar together.” He said it with such resignation that I giggled. I sounded a little higher than I meant, maybe even a little shrill.
“Okay, I’m going to get to work. You should, um, look after your arm. And then come down and help me becau
se there’re a lot of jars to load into the car.”
“My car?” he groaned.
I pointed plainly toward his shredded sleeve. The blood had clotted, and while the cuts were shallow, it was still a mess.
A number of emotions spread across Hades’ face, too fast for me to see, but then he nodded. “Very well then.”
He was as good as his word. Once I was done mopping, he brushed the glass into a dustpan with a broom. Then we hauled up the jars of preserves and filled his trunk. By the time we finished, the light of dawn began to break, filling the air with a kind of rosy light that would soon turn to gold. I yawned, tired and verging on exhausted. What we’d done was so beautiful I wanted to sit down and cry.
Then I remembered Mae’s concern, and turned back toward the house.
“What now?” Hades asked with an exaggeratingly resigned, if not amused note.
“Will you come help me? She… she didn’t want to be found like that.”
“Oh!” A blush spread across his cheeks, telling me he’d never taken such care of one of his subjects before. “Yes. Of course.”
We made our way up the stairs to her bedroom where we found her body lying still under the rumpled covers. My heartbeat quickened, my mouth went as dry as cotton, and no matter what I told myself about having seen tons of dead bodies before at the funeral parlors… I knew this was going to be different. In the end, I froze at the door. Hades ended up smoothing the covers back over her. Afterwards, he escorted me downstairs, tactfully letting me tear up a little on the porch while he locked up.
“That was… um.” I pressed my fingertips to my lips.
“If this is too much for you, you can stop,” he reassured.
I peered at him curiously. He looked tired too, an if possible, less like an underworld god than a man who had been driving all night. His gaze trailed the fields around the house, and he exuded a kind of silent strength that you could count on no matter what was going on.
