Uncanny Tales

by Robert Sheckley

  Then, very faintly from the direction of the palace, I heard a jingling sound. Persephone heard it too. She said, “That’s the little bells on Demeter’s harness. It’s the harness she put on the bullocks that draw her cart. She is coming for me, as we agreed.”

  “Yes,” I said. For I had been forced to agree to Persephone’s returning to the upper world. The weird old ladies who make up what you could call the Supreme Court of Hell had handed down a restraining order on me. Cease and desist. Give the wench up. I had briefly contemplated revolt. But then wised up. I didn’t stand a chance against the living. Not even if all the dead fought for me, which was far from sure. Trouble is, the dead don’t fight worth shit. Dying seems to take something out of a man. It would be slaughter. There’s nothing the living like better than killing the dead. They consider us evil. A case of projection if I ever saw one. But impossible to fight against.

  And anyhow, I was in the wrong; snatching her off the face of the earth like I’d done was against the rule. I was in the wrong. And being in the wrong weakened my case.

  The way it was originally set up, when Zeus, Poseidon and I divided all creation between us after we succeeded in killing old Cronus, our rules were very simple and clear. Each to be supreme lord of his own realm, and no poaching on the terrain of any of the others. These rules were not always followed in full. But potentially, if anyone had a complaint, this was the rule they referred back to. I knew that but I took her anyhow. I took her because I wanted her. But my desire had no standing in the law. And even though Persephone was the most important thing in my life, such as it was, because I think you understand now that the life even of a king of hell is not to be compared to that of the most miserable living human being, or so the philosophers say, I was bound by the rule of law concerning cosmic property and all that relates to it, unfair and arbitrary though that rule might be. But you simply must have the rule. Your life is nothing without rules, and not even death is anything much without its rules.

  “The seed,” I said. “What about the seed?”

  She opened both her hands. They were empty. “Oh,” she said. “I must have dropped it.” And yet there was a lightness in her voice. Nothing very playful ever happens in hell so I didn’t really know how to react to it.

  “Don’t tease me,” I said. “Do you have the seed? Or did you drop it? Or did you conceal it and plan to take it later?”

  She bent forward and kissed me on the forehead. “Of course I’m going to tease you. Teasing, my love, is exactly what you need. You’re all too gloomy and serious here.”

  “You’ve changed all that,” I told her. “You’ve brought a lightness and a pleasure to hell that I never thought possible. Won’t you leave me now with some hope that you’ll return?”

  “Oh, you’ll always have that hope,” she said, “no matter what I do or say. It’s certainty that you really want, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose it is,” I said. “Can’t I have that? The certainty of your return for six months of every year?”

  She shook her head but she was smiling. “Certainty is a very salient quality of your realm. Everybody knows exactly where they stand, which is nowhere. There seems to be nothing quite as certain as death. I think that’s what Achilles really objects to about being here. That’s what you dead people have grown very accustomed to. ‘Maybe death is bad,’ you say to yourself, ‘but at least it’s reliable, at least I can count on it’.”

  “Sure we say that,” I said.

  “That’s because you’re dead,” Persephone pointed out. “But I’m not, I’m alive. I’m not bound by your rules. I’m a creature of the realm of life. Where I come from, we have no certainty. Everything changes from better to worse, from worse to better. There’s always hope and there’s always despair.”

  The sound of the bullock’s bells grew louder. And then the wagon itself came into sight, decked in flowers, drawn by six garlanded heifers. Demeter herself was standing in the front looking stern and classical, her usual look. She had a little whip in her hand made of grapevine. Her hair was blowing free and she brandished her whip in the air in salutation when she saw Persephone.

  Demeter is one of those people who are important but you don’t want to deal with them. They’re so significant that you don’t want to shortchange them, but they don’t play any part in your story so how much characterization do you need? Does a personification of Autumn need a mole on her chin? Must we give her a dumpy figure, and flinty, unrelenting eyes? Yes, the eyes, maybe. But not the rest. She comes in riding standing up in a bullock cart. You know what kind of woman would do that. Need we say more?

  Persephone rose, then she bent over and kissed me once, lightly, on the lips. Before I could put my arms around her, she had drawn away. She stepped up lightly into Demeter’s cart. And soon they were gone.

  Hades stood there with a stupid look on his face. She was gone. And he had no one to talk to. It looked like he was going to have to monologue.

  Suddenly she was back with her cart and her disapproving mother and her garlanded bullocks. The whole shot. The eternal recurrence! Hades’ heart leaped.

  “I forgot to remind you about Achilles and Helen,” she said. “You’ll have to cancel our dinner with them.”

  “You did remind me,” I said.

  “I did?” Persephone said.

  “You did,” I said. “Previously. But I’m glad you came back. There was something I was going to ask you.”

  “I thought you’d never get around to asking me anything,” Persephone said. “I know you love me, but you’re entirely too silent and gloomy about it. At least you could talk about it a little. Yes, I’ll be pleased to answer. What do you want to ask?”

  “What I want to ask,” I said, “is that I heard that you know what is happening to Tantulus these days, and I wanted you to tell me.”

  “I’ll be happy to,” Persephone said. “I’ll be as quick as possible, Mother,” she called out to the old woman in the shawl driving the bullocks, her mother, Demeter. Her mother nodded resignedly. It was enough she was getting her daughter back. No sense offending her by interrupting her story.

  TANTULUS

  Persephone said, I’ve always found Uncle Tantulus an interesting figure. You know his general circumstances, I assume. Waist deep in mud in a swamp. Huge rock suspended above him on a thin copper wire. The rock never drops, of course, but the suspense is nevertheless intense, because it was written in by Zeus himself that no one should take anything for granted concerning the boulder, it could drop at any time, there was no story device forestalling it, even though we always pick it up at a moment when the boulder is just hanging there solid as a rock. There is no way around such a situation except by arbitrary rule: You will feel anxiety for Tantulus on account of the boulder over his head.

  Do that or we’ll strike the Greek Myth set.

  Tantulus is standing there in a muddy little pool on the banks of the Styx up to his chin in water. But each time he bends over to take a drink, the water recedes from him, leaving his face caked with black mud and him with the nickname given him by the Corybantes, Old Dirtymouth. No water for Tantulus. That’s the first rule.

  Next, from branches of the willow tree near which he is chained, from drooping branches hang great snack foods, whole pastramis, liverwursts, salamis of every size, sort and description, cheeses like the world has never seen, composed salads, beautifully cooked vegetables suspended in cobwebs, themselves edible.

  But of course, you guessed it, when Tantulus tries to eat anything, the thing is pulled out of his hands and is always just out of his reach. So he’s standing there up to the chin in water he can’t drink surrounded by foods he can’t eat and this is Zeus’s idea of a really cruel punishment.

  But in hell you get used to anything and if Tantulus couldn’t drink the water, at least he could feel it, the feel of water lapping around his legs. They hadn’t taken that away. Couldn’t. What would be left if he couldn’t feel the water he stood in?
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  The water was really feeling good this morning. Sometimes that happens even in hell. They try to gross you out, but sometimes they slip up. This was Tantulus at his best, trying to make the best of his lot. Inviting friends over for a banquet even if he couldn’t eat it himself.

  His guests came from far and wide. From all parts of hell. Soon they were all assembled. And then Tantulus addressed them.

  “My friends,” he said, “you will forgive me if I don’t get out of the water just now. It’s my whim to entertain you while standing chin-deep in this rather delicious flow.”

  The fact was, Tantulus had been in hell so long that he had been granted certain privileges. Like the right of bathing in any river of hell of his choosing. This morning it was the Lethe. Of all the rivers of hell, this was his favorite. The gods had dug mud pits on the banks of all the rivers of hell, and planted willow trees there to carry the food, and Tantulus could stand in any mud-pit he wanted just as long as he gave the people who arrange this sort of thing a little advance notice so they could set everything up.

  It had taken Tantulus quite a long time to talk Hades and the other gods into giving him free access to the rivers. “After all,” he had pointed out, “I’m not trying to mitigate my sentence. It has been indeed pointed out that I am indeed doomed to stand until eternity with water up to my chin, and that’s all very well, I accept that. But why shouldn’t I have different waters and different views?”

  At first nobody paid any attention to him. Then his case was finally heard by the Judges.

  Rhadamanthus, chief god of the judges of the dead, had at first refused to listen to Tantulus’ argument. “It’s not traditional,” he grumbled.

  “No,” Tantulus replied, “but there’s no rule against it. What isn’t forbidden is allowed.”

  Rhadamanthus, Minos and the other judge hadn’t been interested in getting into it, certainly not at first. It looked like a lot of trouble and they had plenty of work on their hands. There was a lot to do back in those days. People were always dying and coming through from Earth, arriving at the great crossroads where the judges of the dead sat, showing up in droves, hundreds, thousands, and then millions. There was scarcely time to judge the tenth part of them. Their stories were in many ways remarkably similar.

  Most of the souls waiting to be judged were clad in winding-sheets. Some still had their jaws bound with the graveyard bandages. A few had managed to bring money with them, and some of them had quite a lot of money, because although Charon demanded but a single obol, several of the more aristocratic families had stuffed several obols, or a shekel or two, or even an entire talent of silver into their mouths. It was better than looking cheap.

  It is well-known that Charon, the boatman of the dead, demanded payment for ferrying dead souls to Hades—one obol, cash on the barrelhead. Since there are no pockets in shrouds, the dead used to carry their money down to hell in their mouths.

  The reason for payment to Charon, and the whole subject of money in hell, forms an interesting and permissible side issue. There is no use for money in hell. You only need money for buying and selling, and earth’s the place for that, not hell. Nothing’s for sale in hell, and people down there get into a terrible mental condition due to atrophy of the buying gland. They say that no matter how long he lives in hell, a mortal never gets over the memory of the convenience stores of earth. There are none in hell, nor are there inconvenience stores, though it’s an interesting idea. So, nothing to buy, but form was important.

  Nevertheless, he refused to take people aboard except for money. The moneyless dead used to gather on the Styx’s near shore and complain. It is a terrible thing, having to listen to the dead whine. They would stand or lie in the mud of the riverbank and cry to Charon, asking to be taken across anyhow, for free, consider it a public service. Charon would just glare at them and say, “No free rides, not even in hell!”

  It became a scandal, the way the penniless dead were piling up on the earthside shore.

  Charon was a stickler for form. He charged for the sake of form, not for the money. He had no use for people’s obols. He had a great stack of them that he kept in his locker back in Styxville, in the boathouse where he brought his houseboat in for repairs from time to time and as occasion demanded. For there are dangers even to crossing the Styx and if you think dead is the last word dangerwise, that just shows you haven’t seen what can go wrong after you’re dead.

  The famous people among the dead had no trouble getting across, whether they had money or not. No one was going to stop a famous courtesan like Lais of Corinth, or Sappho, who was said to be able to discourse more cleverly than Socrates. By the time Rome became a power, the custom of putting an obol in the mouth of the dead had fallen into abeyance, not least for the lack of obols that a bankrupt and discredited Greece no longer sent forth into the world. But the old obol-in-the-mouth construct still remained. But it didn’t matter, no one was going to keep a Roman empress out of hell just because her tiny white teeth were not clenched over a copper coin.

  It had taken Tantulus a while to get used to visits from Roman Empresses who hadn’t even been gleams in their daddy’s eyes back in his day. They came to visit him because he was one of the sights, and they asked him questions all respectful-like because Tantulus was one of the old ones, one of the first settlers, one of the original population of hell, The First Damned, they called themselves, the world’s first criminals.

  Tantulus had seen a lot of changes going on over the years that he had been here. What the hell, he used to tell the new recruits who came to him for advice, it isn’t so bad a place. You can get used to anything. Even hell. Maybe even especially hell. Because when the worst has befallen you, there really is nothing else to fear.

  SISYPHUS

  The camera swung into action again, forefront of the shockwave of recognition, speeding down long dusty corridors with the reflected light gleaming off them, and, in its ingratiating manner, stopped to point out that Tantulus had some old friends down here. Take Sisyphus, for example, and we cut to a big bald old guy with a beard, condemned to carry a boulder up the side of a steep mountain, then, when he reached the top, roll it back to the bottom again.

  That was all right as far as it went. Trouble is, no one said how long he should keep on doing it. Sisyphus continued to roll his boulders down the mountainside long after his punishment ought to have been over, long past the time when he should have been released in his own recognizance.

  But no, they kept Sisyphus working. Sisyphus got a lot of wear but he didn’t wear out because human spirit is eternal and a good thing too, it needs all the longevity it can get. Sisyphus used to go through a lot of boulders. Letting boulders fall back down the mountain was part of his job, so he can’t be accused of wanton destruction. It’s just that no one had thought through the ecological consequences. Because when he was on the mountaintop he would release the stone and it would roll down the mountain, what could be simpler. But they kept on having to bring him fresh boulders, and they finally even had to change his mountain, because he simply wore it away with his boulder-rolling. Sisyphus’ boulders cut deeper and deeper paths into the mountainside, wearing a scalloped path and finally wearing it all away. So the people in charge of that sort of thing had to go all over trying to find suitable boulders for him to carry up. The boulder couldn’t be just any slab or rock; it had to be quite round; otherwise it wouldn’t roll all the back way down to the bottom, except that sometimes it broke into pieces before it got there. And that also took its toll.

  The camera swings into view again and considers for our delectation the mechanism of temptation. We dolly back to Tantulus in the nicest way we know how. We get serious for a moment. We know—what need to tell us again?—that the earthly vision consisted of fruits and roasted meats and other good things dangled from the branches of trees above Tantulus’ head—tantalizingly—which they jerked back out of his reach when he reached for them. So of course after a while he didn’t r
each for them any more. But no one thought about that.

  In any event, all that food had to be renewed almost daily, just the same as if he had made a meal of it. Because you can’t tempt a man with a moldy roast and a bunch of rotten grapes. So you could say that in order for there to be a punishment, Tantulus, though he never tasted a morsel, still went through a hell of a lot of food.

  And as times changed, and new certainties came and went, the style of his meals changed, also.

  In the beginning they tempted him with simple fare: oat cakes, radishes and onions, and an occasional bit of roasted lamb. When a new administration came in, some thinking was done about all this.

  “This classical hell of ours,” one of the chief administrators pointed out at a recent meeting, “is an important interstellar tourist attraction. Millions of people come here nightly in their dreams. Millions more are brought here in one way or another. Even alien peoples come to visit us. We are an important exhibition, I could almost say a diorama of man’s spirit. And it is necessary for us to put on a good show.”

  This became law and there was a great hustle and bustle in the halls of the administration of ancient halls and monuments. Everything had to be refurbished. In Tantulus’ case, the whole exhibit was to be spruced up and this meant new menus. Cooks were trained to prepare the newer more modern meals that the menus called for; volunteers were not in sufficient supply so some people who were not actually cooks by any stretch of the imagination were especially condemned to do this work. But after a while the job acquired some panache and the finest chefs in the world vied to cook for Tantulus.

  Tantulus found hanging from the branches of his tree items that he had never dreamed of before. In fact, special guides had to be assigned to explain to him what the offerings were; otherwise he wouldn’t know what he was missing and his punishment would lose both efficacy and symbolic value. So they told him, “This is smoked boar in aspic, and this is pears bel Helene, and this is a compote of rare fruits.” And so on and so on. And they waited anxiously to see how he responded to all this, and took notes, because Tantulus, after all, was the standard by which temptation was judged.