Aeon Thirteen

by Aeon Authors

  She brought Eddie closer, gave him a gentle shove. Spent and sagging, he approached the fence. The males pressed in a crush around the gate as KC’s grandmother muscled it open on its rusted hinges. Eddie went through. His grandmother looked at the doctor, shook her head in shame and started through herself.

  “Not you,” the doctor said. “It wasn’t your fault.” He pulled her back to safety.

  It took the animals only seconds to strip away what little flesh Eddie had left on his arms and legs. They swarmed, scraping at him with scissored claws at the ends of their forelegs. The luminous parasites swarmed too, pools of variegated light moving with a single mind, secreting an acid that dissolved skin and muscle but left the bones and the new body sac suspended in the middle. Eddie screamed once, a sound like an entire field of screech beans going off at the same time.

  And then it was done. Eddie was no longer Eddie. The thing he’d become, Eddie-prime in the doctor’s lexicon, flexed his new appendages, rolled his bony new head, and started off with the others, already on their way to wherever it was the primes went. All but one.

  “That’s your father,” KC’s grandmother said. KC wriggled her fingers in a tentative wave but the big prime ignored her. Her grandmother took Yorwick from her and handed him to the doctor, who handed him over the fence. The prime took the skull and sniffed at it, then went off with the rest.

  KC watched them go until the light they shed had faded to a dim glow on the horizon. When she turned around, the doctor and her grandmother were gone, walking arm in arm through the knee-high weep grass back to the house. Eddie’s grandmother followed at a short distance. Egg-girl stayed behind, looking every bit the promiscuous zombie-hag she was but trying to look all sorry about it just the same.

  “I didn’t know he was yours,” she said with her head down and her eyes looking up all misty and plaintive into KC’s. “It just happened.”

  “It’s nothing,” KC lied. She thought it was probably one of those good lies she’d read about. Eggie held the egg out and KC stroked the smooth, cool shell.

  “The doctor’ll find me another mate,” she said. A better one, she almost said, but bit down on her lip before the words plunged out into time and couldn’t be taken back.. She looked up and saw Little Moon, Too flickering across the sky. She shrugged for good luck. Next year the drama club was doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Joaquin LeMarc, from district ten, was a shoein for the part of Lysander. KC went back to the house to start practicing for the auditions.

  Swimming Back From Hell by Moonlight

  Marissa K. Lingen

  “I am a firm believer in stepping off the path. Sometimes it’s the only way to make it back in one piece, or in as many pieces as required.”

  WHAT WILL YOU LOSE IF YOU LOOK BACK?

  I didn’t want to ask myself. Asking was almost a way of looking. When the gods promise you that your love will be behind you, if only you don’t look back, you know that you can’t look.

  But the road out of hell is long, so I had plenty of time to think. What will you lose? It had not seemed like such a long road on the way down, and I thought I knew what I had to lose, and I thought it was nothing, not any more.

  Nobody said we were the perfect couple, because we didn’t have the kind of friends who are given to that kind of idiotic pronouncement. But Jon and I were happy, truly and deeply happy. We’d each dated a few people before, nothing that worked out, nothing serious. Neither of us came from great heartbreak. We were just waiting, passing time. We met when my best friend married his best friend. It wasn’t love at first sight. I don’t believe in love at first sight. But it was something special.

  All of our photos together look glossy and professional. My dark hair spills over his fair hands. We stand tall together in rays of sunlight. We are untouchable in those photos.

  We were going to have gorgeous children together, and grow old and preferably cantankerous. We were going to drink gallons of herbal tea with clover honey and see dozens of old movies together. We knew how it would be.

  Three months before the wedding, Jon went to bed in his brother’s spare room and never woke up.

  They said it was a heart defect, undetectable. Later they admitted that this is what they say when a healthy twenty-eight-year-old man dies in his sleep and they can’t figure out why. It was as sudden as a snakebite, and as random, and as final.

  I had just finished the illustrations to a big project, a glossy high-concept retelling of the story of Demeter and Persephone. One of the biggest names in children’s books had done the text. It might have been the best project I’d ever done. I had nothing to do but think of Jon until the author finished the next text in the series. I knew it would be the story of Midas, so I could have made some informed guesses, started some concept sketches. I could have called and asked her. I didn’t want to.

  My next door neighbor Kelly said her family had a place on the Oregon coast, and I could stay there if I wanted. I wasn’t sure why she offered—we hadn’t been close, I didn’t think—but I said yes without thinking much about it. My parents thought they might go with me. I told them I wanted to be alone.

  I think my mother thought I might do something drastic, but in the end they didn’t have much choice but to let me go and pray for the best.

  I’d never been to Oregon before. The tiny rental car managed the hills with nary a quiver, but I took a wrong turn and had to feel my way along the coastal highway, the names of unfamiliar towns flashing past me. Mists surrounded the car, and the temperature dropped fifteen degrees after I had gone over the last set of hills to the sea. I stopped in one of the seaside towns to pay too much for groceries.

  When I found my way back to the right road, I passed suburban developments of beach homes, rows upon rows of identical, cheerfully nautical crackerboxes. I began to fear the worst, but Kelly’s family property was away from the neighborhoods and their prying neighbors. It stood on a cliff, alone except for the trees. I pulled the car into the carport and unloaded my things undisturbed by friendliness.

  I had friends in Chicago. I didn’t need friends to follow me and ask their friendly questions and make their friendly faces. Why are you here? Because my life is over. What have you lost? My love.

  Myself, it seemed.

  I brought books to read, movies to watch, recipes to try. I made myself tea every morning in a pudgy little red teapot, and then I sat and drank the tea and stared at the table. Sometimes I remembered to eat something, but never from the new recipes. Sometimes I turned my chair around so I was staring out the window at the ocean. It didn’t seem to matter. Ocean, table, wall, teapot. Whatever. I stared at things until they made no sense—which didn’t take long—and then kept staring.

  The back corner of my brain that made sure I occasionally got food and sleep recognized that this was not healthy behavior. I laced up my hiking boots, grabbed a nubbly sweater, and headed out the door for a hike. I put the sweater on immediately. Even hiking, I didn’t warm up.

  I stayed away from the edge of the cliff, wandering through the trees parallel to it. I had gone down the hill and up and down again when I saw the chipped grey mouth of a cave.

  In the right kinds of story, I wouldn’t have known where the cave led. I wouldn’t have gone down into it knowing. But if you ever come upon a cave that is the mouth of hell, you may trust me that you will know. I squared my shoulders and walked down to hell with my eyes open.

  It was not the hell I expected.

  The three-headed dog didn’t even raise one of his heads, and the ferryman lolled with his feet in the river, smoking a cigarette. I had not expected hell to be Greek, but more than that I had not expected it to be so tired.

  “Living woman, what do you want?” asked the ferryman.

  “I have come for my love,” I said.

  He looked me over carefully. He swung his feet out of the river and stepped into his boat.

  “Aren’t you going to—”

  “Tragic lo
vers, what can you do? They get in the boat, or they don’t.” He watched me.

  “You just wait?”

  He smiled carefully. “What else do I have to do?”

  When I got to the boat, he offered his arm. I took it; I wasn’t used to getting in little boats without tipping them, and a swim in the Styx was not my goal. Charon coughed politely.

  “Yes?”

  “There is the matter of the fee….”

  I dug in my jeans for my wallet and managed to produce a dime and a Canadian quarter someone had passed off in my change at the grocery store. He frowned at me. “Is this the best—”

  “We use paper money for the big stuff now,” I said.

  “I know, but—”

  “One coin for each eye. I know the rules.”

  Charon shook his head and pushed the boat off. He uttered long-suffering sighs all the way across the river. Cerberus raised one of his heads and howled, just once; the other two heads snarled at the first, and it subsided. I clutched the edge of the boat and tried not to look out into the water.

  “I have lost twelve passengers,” he said. “Over the last aeons. Twelve.”

  “I don’t want to be number thirteen,” I said.

  He nodded. “Remember that. Don’t sell your life more cheaply than a two-coin ride.”

  “I haven’t forgotten why I’m here.”

  “I don’t think you really understand where you are.” The boat crunched on the far shore, on shells or gravel, I hoped. I carefully didn’t look down to see as I stepped out of the boat.

  I had always thought that hell would feature panoramas, sweeping visions of torment and regret. The dim light allowed me visions of very little at all.

  “Go on, then,” said Charon, and gave me a gentle push.

  “Where do I go?”

  Charon snorted. “Just go. You’ll know when you get there.”

  The dim figures came clear one at a time as I walked through hell. There was Sisyphus, and his boulder was bigger than I had imagined; there was Tantalus, shivering and dripping and crouching down again and again. The others were nameless to me, the woman whose child cried just out of her reach, the man who ran after a train, nearly catching it only to have it slip from his grasp. All wanting, all needing, none of them getting anywhere.

  I smelled pomegranate juice.

  I followed my nose until I stumbled on a rock, looked up, and found myself in the presence of gods.

  Persephone was not as I had drawn her, nor had she ever been. I had drawn a corn princess, as pink and golden as an Iowa homecoming queen. But her hair was as black as my own, where it was not touched with silver. She would nurture olives and grapes, and maybe even the little juicy marionberries that grew in the valleys on the way to the shore.

  Hades was shorter than I’d expected, stocky and dark, with a mustache and thick eyebrows. I was distracted from looking at him when something skittered over my booted foot. I looked down. Mice lined the path, some grey and some brown. They seemed profoundly indifferent to the king of the underworld. They shared their space with him but went on their mousely way. They didn’t seem to notice whether they were dead or alive: they had mouse business that was nothing to do with either. I couldn’t afford that indifference.

  “Living mortal, why are you here?” asked Hades.

  “You know why,” I said. “You’ve taken my love, and I want him back.”

  “I’ve taken nothing and no one,” said Hades. Persephone’s eyebrows shot up, and he amended it hastily: “Not for thousands of years. I am not Death. I merely guard the dead. I’m sure you can see the difference.”

  “So you’re his accomplice,” I said. But antagonizing the Lord of Hell was not likely to get me Jon back. “It doesn’t matter. You have him, whether you took him or not.”

  Hades inclined his head in acknowledgement.

  I faltered, not sure where to go from there. “Could I—I mean—I want to see him.”

  Persephone said, “I doubt that very much.”

  I glared at her. “I didn’t say I’d enjoy it. I said I want to see him. And I do.”

  Hades nodded. “And so you shall. Follow me.”

  Stepping carefully around the mice, we made our way to a foggy little alcove not far from the thrones of Hades. I blinked into the fog expectantly. Hades waved his hand, and the mists parted to show me Jon.

  He looked cold, but he didn’t seem to notice it. He was reaching for something, and it always seemed to slip from his grasp. His face was a permanent mask of anguish.

  “What is he trying to get?” I asked. Persephone looked at me gravely, and then I understood. “Me,” I whispered. “He’s trying to hold me.” She nodded.

  The tears ran silently down my cheeks. After a long moment, I turned away.

  “What will you do, little one?” asked Hades. His voice was so tender, I almost thought he liked me. Maybe he did.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Orpheus played for us. He played his grief on his lyre, and all the dead wept in mingled joy and sorrow to hear it. I wept. My queen wept.” Persephone inclined her head and gave me something that tried to be a smile but was not. “What will you do?”

  I had nothing else left. “I will draw you a story.”

  I didn’t have the urge to draw. I hadn’t really gotten inspired since Jon died. I didn’t want to work. But what else was there? The king of hell could not be bribed like the ferryman, with lint-specked coins from my pocket. The stories didn’t work that way. I had to drag something out of myself, or Jon would have to stay down here in the cold. There was no point in protesting that it was unfair. No one had ever obliged the gods to be fair.

  “Orpheus convinced me with his lute and his voice, right here on the spot,” said Hades.

  “I’m not Orpheus, and I’m not going to be able to do anything worthwhile in five seconds with you hanging your head over my shoulder.”

  He regarded me in silence for a moment, then inclined his head. “There are desks enough in hell. One of them can be cleared for you.”

  “And not enchanted into an infinite loop,” I said.

  Hades smiled. “Of course not. I swear you will be able to complete your task unmolested.”

  He showed me to a grey cubicle in the middle of a grey cubicle farm. The office chair was padded in the wrong places and cold enough to make my bones ache. It took me awhile—I had no sense of how long—to tune out the grey presences flittering back and forth outside my cubicle, but I couldn’t help them. They weren’t part of the deal.

  But once I regained my focus, I realized I had no idea what to draw. Orpheus had wailed out his anguish. I took the stick of charcoal and the top sheet and tried to sketch mine. I wound up with a rough self-portrait, head bowed and shoulders slumped. It was all right, maybe even good. Not great. I took up the next piece of paper. Nothing.

  A mouse skittered over my foot. I jumped. It didn’t, so I reached down slowly and picked it up, smudging its fur with the carbon on my hands. I lifted it to the level of my eyes, half-expecting it to bite me or lose control of its bladder at any moment. It didn’t. Instead, it nestled into the curve of my hand, staring me down with little black eyes. It was cold. I couldn’t blame it. Its brothers and I were the only warm things in hell, except perhaps Persephone, and she did not look eager to cuddle up to mice.

  I let it sit in my lap while I did the second sketch. It watched my charcoal move. Not another self-portrait; that series would get old fast. The mouse’s jittery movement reminded me of the way squirrels would jump out of the way of Jon’s spaniel and chatter angrily at him from the higher branches of the backyard oak trees. So I drew the squirrel, high in the right corner of the page, and as I filled in, I could see Betsy, her spaniel head averted, not a spare moment left for the squirrel in her search for her lost master.

  From there, it was—not easy, I couldn’t say that. But the holes he had left, the gaps in our life together, were clear enough. I had been over them in my he
ad so many times in the days past that I could transfer them to the page with almost no intervention between anguish and paper. When I finished, I handed them to Hades, a messy and irregular stack. I was too wearied to hold my breath and worry while he leafed through them.

  “All right,” he said finally. “Yes, all right. You may have your love.”

  I sat down suddenly on the floor of hell. It felt like the clammy floors in my high school’s basement, where the pipes trickled out a leak. It felt real, and I did not. “I can have Jon back.”

  “Yes. But the rules—” Hades smiled sadly. “You know the rules, I’m afraid. You must walk out of hell with him behind you, and if you look back, you will lose him forever. You must not look back. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “And do you agree?”

  I took a deep breath. “I agree.”

  Hades and Persephone escorted me back over the river. Charon shook his head at me but said nothing, and I looked up the stone path. It looked all right. It looked like something I could do.

  Two hours later, or three, or ten, I knew why Orpheus had looked.

  The stone was cold under my feet, though with only a hint of the chill of hell. The dark was empty and a little breezy. I heard Jon’s feet behind me, the right stride, the right cadence, the right weight. Surely Hades couldn’t fake that? Certainly he wouldn’t?

  But I was not to look back, so I couldn’t be sure, and looking forward seemed less and less useful with each moment. The road turned in irregular, unpredictable switchbacks. The light at the end of the path was no nearer than it ever had been, and it had been hours, maybe days, since I’d eaten or slept. Since I’d looked at Jon’s face, even in death. But I couldn’t think of that.

  What love can survive without a few reassurances, little rituals, gestures that mean, “yes, I still love you”?

  What will I lose if I look back?

  Jon, I told myself. Jon. But another question was chasing the first one around my head: What will I lose if I do not?