Pandora Gets Frightened

by Carolyn Hennesy

  “Well,” Pandy sighed, “he didn’t. Not to me, anyway. All right, those are the gates to Hades. And they’re wide open, just as Sisyphus said. Now how do we get across?”

  “Where’s Charon?” Alcie said, scanning the river. “He’s not here, he’s not on the river, and his boat’s gone.”

  “Maybe he escaped?” asked Homer.

  “Don’t think so,” Pandy said. “We didn’t meet anyone else on the path. The dead just get ‘sent’ here, but humans and any spirit who leaves—like Eurydice—have to take the path. I think.”

  “Most times, you bet,” said Alcie, remembering how, when she’d left the underworld before, Hades had actually materialized her into a tree in Baghdad.

  “And speaking of the dead, where are they?” Iole asked.

  “Huh?” Alcie started.

  “This shore, according to every legend I’ve ever studied, is always crowded with the dead, waiting to be ferried across. There are stories that say some spirits, those who weren’t buried properly with coins on their eyes to pay Charon, or those with not enough of a payment, are forced to wander this beach for eternity. But I see no one.”

  “Iole’s right, Pandy,” Alcie said. “I don’t see dead people.”

  “That’s because they’re all out there,” Pandy answered.

  Alcie, Iole, and Homer followed her gaze.

  Even in the pale light of the sconces, they could now see that the Styx was full of various shades and transparent forms; some swimming, some floating—all trying for the far shore. Pandy saw a few shades actually drag themselves out of the water, but as they watched, it became clear that the current was too much for most, and hundreds of spirits were being towed underwater and downriver—wherever it went.

  All of a sudden, Alcie’s arm shot out.

  “There!” she cried. “Charon!”

  Alcie was pointing toward an impossibly thin man stomping about at the water’s edge on the opposite beach. His boat was nowhere to be seen, but he still had ahold of the long pole he used to steer, push, and pull the ferry across the river. At the moment, he was trying to drive the dead who’d managed to get across the Styx back into the river if they didn’t have the proper payment.

  “Oh, yeah, you deranged old hydra,” Alcie said acidly. “I’d know you anywhere. That’s how he treated me until I bopped him one.”

  As Homer and the girls watched, one spirit, on the verge of dragging itself out of the water while being poked with the pole, grabbed the other end and forcefully pulled a very surprised Charon back into the Styx. The spirit, after standing on the shore, conked Charon on the head with his very pole—then tossed it into the river, where it got caught in the shallows.

  “Score one for the dead guy!” Alcie said with a whoop.

  “We still have a problem,” Pandy said.

  “How do we get across?” said Iole, finishing Pandy’s thought.

  “Same as them,” Homer said. “Come on.”

  As he headed toward the water’s edge, Alcie caught him.

  “Hang on, handsome.”

  “Homer, this is the Styx and we don’t know what could …,” Iole began.

  “I get it, Iole. Okay? I do,” he said, cutting her off. “But while you all have been watching the ferryman, I have been assessing the options. That’s what I trained—for a few moons, anyway—in gladiator school to do when faced with a no-win situation. Here, there’s only one way. There’s no boat and no bridge. The water’s not hurting the spirits, and we have no choice.”

  Pandy looked at Alcie and Iole. After a moment, she shrugged.

  “When Homer’s right, he’s right.”

  “Just try to keep your head above water,” he cautioned. “Y’know, just in case. And don’t drink any of it.”

  “As if!” said Alcie.

  Pandy went to step into the river first, but Homer gently pulled her back.

  “I’m leading this,” he said forcefully. “Iole, you’re behind me, then Pandy and Alcie will bring up the rear. She’s just a little stronger than you, Pandy, and we need our anchors on each end. Everyone, hold hands.”

  Homer stepped into the mighty Styx and everyone immediately looked at his face to see if there was a change—any pain—anything.

  “It’s fine,” he announced. “A little warm actually. Stay against me if you can; I’ll try to block the current … and the bodies.”

  “Dido, come!” Pandy called as Dido began to bark, running to the water’s edge and then backing off.

  “Oh, he’s not liking this one bit,” Pandy said. “Come on, boy. Follow us.”

  All at once, Dido’s gaze became focused intently on the river—at least that’s what Pandy thought; she couldn’t really see his irises in the dim light. It was as if he was calculating something very tricky.

  “What’s he …?” Alcie began.

  Then, without warning, Dido ran headlong toward the river. But instead of landing in the water, each paw landed on top of a spirit body floating by. Dido raced across the Styx as if he were following a path of stepping stones, making certain to lift his paw off before the spirit went underwater. Within moments, he was on the opposite shore, barking triumphantly.

  “Youths and maidens,” Pandy said when she could talk again after being stunned into silence, “I give you—my dog!”

  “What a performance!” Alcie crowed. “He could do two shows a night with Wang Chun Lo.”

  “Okay,” Homer said. “He can do it, we can do it.”

  They waded out into the flowing water—it was warm, very warm—and found they could stand. At its deepest point, Pandy could just touch the river bottom with her big toe. Halfway across, Iole thought she had a firm footing on a rock, but her foot slipped on the slimy surface, and her head went under.

  “Iole!” Pandy cried as she and Homer lifted Iole’s head out of the water. “Did you swallow any of it?”

  Iole blinked and shook her head.

  “I’m fine!” She smiled. “Moving on!”

  Pandy smiled back—but in that moment, she noticed that the firelight from the sconces stopped glinting off of Iole’s hair. Iole’s long black hair was now fully soaked—and dull; as if someone had coated it with cold sheep’s fat. They were nearly on the opposite shore when she felt Alcie go under—then pop back up.

  “Here!” Alcie said. “I’m right here.”

  Finally, Homer stepped up and onto the riverbank and hauled Iole next to him. Pandy found her own footing, then crawled the rest of the way onto the soft dirt as Homer lifted Alcie up and out of the Styx with one arm. After only a moment, Pandy got to her feet. She looked at the forbidding black gates, tall and seemingly covered in a dark pitch—and open.

  “Okay,” she said, turning back to her friends. “No time to lose. It looks like …”

  Then her voice faltered.

  Alcie’s eyes were huge and Homer’s mouth was agape. They were staring at her with the same look, she was certain, of shock and disbelief that was on her own face as she looked at them.

  Alcie’s skin from face to toe was the color and shine of copper. Her reddish hair now actually was copper, the curls and waves made of a thin copper wire. Homer’s hair was still blond, but his skin had taken on a blackish-blue sheen—as if he was covered in iron. Pandy looked at her own hands, arms, and legs; they were a deep, rich bronze that glinted in the firelight. It was only after they realized that each of them was shining like metal did they look at …

  Iole.

  She wasn’t standing slack-jawed, as they were. She wasn’t examining every inch of her skin as they’d begun to do; she didn’t even register surprise. She looked from one to the next, her eyes rather vacant and her skin dull. Iole definitely wasn’t shining. In fact, she looked like she’d been covered in gray chalk.

  “What in the underworld happened to us?” Alcie said, looking at the fine copper hairs coming out of her forearm.

  Without thinking, Pandy looked at Iole, who she knew would have some sort of answer. B
ut Iole just gazed back at Pandy as if the question hadn’t even been asked. To her amazement, Pandy didn’t panic; she just began to deduce.

  “It’s the Styx,” she said. “It has to be. We went in, we were fine. We came out and … this.”

  “Like Achilles,” said Homer.

  “Exactly!” said Alcie.

  “But not exactly,” Pandy countered. “His mother, Thetis, just held him by the ankle and dipped him in for, like, a second. That’s what made him invulnerable everywhere but his heel. But we were in there for … what?”

  “A lot longer,” said Iole.

  “Arrows would bounce off Achilles like his skin were made of metal,” said Homer.

  “‘Like’ it were metal,” Pandy said. “Only our skin is metal! Great Zeus, I’m bronze!”

  “But I can still pinch my flesh,” Alcie said, grabbing the skin between her thumb and forefinger.

  “Then it must mean we only have some sort of metal coating,” Pandy answered.

  “Is it going to make us sick? Will it ever come off?” Alcie asked. “Are we going to stiffen up like boards? Are we gonna die?”

  “Alcie, calm down,” Pandy said. “If it didn’t hurt Achilles, I don’t think it’s gonna hurt us. Besides, there’s nothing we can do about it right now.”

  “Why isn’t anyone else affected?” Homer asked, looking at the spirit bodies floating in the Styx.

  Before anyone else could think of an answer, Iole shuffled her feet.

  “They’re dead. We’re not.”

  “But why do we all look different?” Alcie asked. “Why aren’t we all the same metal?”

  “It just picked what we were most like,” Iole said matter-of-factly.

  “What?” Alcie cried.

  “She’s right,” Homer said. “I’m iron—because of my strength.”

  Pandy had stopped paying attention to their predicament and was, instead, focusing on Iole—and why she was using such short, simple phrases. It was completely unlike her.

  And it was at this precise moment that Charon ran up on his skeletal legs, brandishing his pole—which he’d fished out of the water—and swinging wildly, trying to force the foursome back into the Styx. With one hand, Homer lifted the frail ferryman by the waist and threw him into the middle of the river.

  “Okay,” he said, after a pause. “But you know I could have done that even before I was covered in iron.”

  “The metal relates to our strongest trait. Alcie, you’re copper because … because …,” Pandy started.

  “What?” Alcie snapped. “Because I conduct heat well over an open flame? That would be you, Pandy!”

  “No,” Pandy said. “But you’re close. Because you’re fiery. And quick tempered.”

  “I AM not!” Alcie yelled. Then she closed her mouth. “Okay, you’re right. But what about my hair?”

  “Wet,” Iole said.

  “You slipped and went under,” Pandy said, with a sideways glance at Iole. “Your hair got wet.”

  “Oh. Yeah. So why are you bronze?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Because you’re a combination,” Homer answered. “You’re a rare mixture, Pandy: mortal and immortal.”

  Alcie and Pandy stared at him.

  “It’s my best guess.”

  Suddenly, Alcie shrieked.

  “Homie! Your face! Your cheek—it’s perfect!”

  Homer reached up, touched his cheek, and felt nothing but smoothness. His skin was cool and a little hard, but his iron-coated flesh was nicely healed.

  “Well, that’s a groovy bonus,” he said. “Guess I won’t be spilling food out of my face every time I chew.”

  Out of nowhere, Dido padded up and put his forepaws on Pandy’s waist.

  “Hey, ghost dog,” she said, kissing his face. “You didn’t get wet, did you? Huh, boy? No metal for you, right?”

  Then she saw the gold specks glinting off his paws.

  “Look,” Pandy said. “If he’d gone all the way into the water, I’d have a golden dog.”

  Then everyone turned to Iole; her skin gray, her hair dull.

  “Gods,” Alcie said softly.

  “She’s lead,” Pandy muttered, the terrible certainty dawning on her. “Iole is lead.”

  “But that makes absolutely no sense,” Alcie said, her voice rising again. “She’s the smartest! She’s the brightest! She should be gold! Her brain is the size of the Aegean Sea! It’s dense, like my mother’s lamb stew! It’s thick! It’s …”

  “Heavy,” Pandy said. “It’s thick and dense and heavy. And Iole went underwater too, remember. The power of the Styx came into contact with Iole’s brain—which is the most important part of her—and probably didn’t know what to do with it. It’s so dense, it thought her brain was lead.”

  “And now,” Alcie said with a gulp, “it is.”

  “No, it’s not,” Pandy countered. “She just has a dull lead coating. Her brain is fine. It’s just buried. We’ll fix it. I don’t know how, but we’ll fix all of this.”

  Iole looked from Pandy to Alcie to Homer. In the darkest corner of her brain, a tiny voice was screaming at all of them. Screaming that she knew exactly what they were saying; that she had every word she’d ever learned right on the tip of her tongue, but somehow she couldn’t get her tongue to work. To Iole, it was as if she were sitting alone in a chair in a small room with a single candle; every piece of knowledge she’d had was written on tiny pieces of parchment, scattered about her on the floor. And outside was the cold, black, terrifying emptiness of the entire universe.

  Chapter Five

  Good Dog

  “What are we gonna do?” Alcie asked Pandy quietly as they walked ahead of Homer and Iole toward the massive gates of the underworld. Dido, as if he could sense something wrong, was trotting alongside Iole.

  “About what?” said Pandy, focusing more on the ooze that covered the gates from top to bottom. At first, she thought it was pitch or mold or slime. Now, she was certain it was blood.

  “About our simpleton?” Alcie said.

  Pandy stopped dead in her tracks and whipped her head around to stare at Alcie. Alcie had a half smile on her face and Pandy knew instantly that Alcie was just as scared as she was about Iole’s condition, and she was putting on what she thought was a brave face, making a ridiculous joke. But in that second, Pandy didn’t care that Alcie was frightened and wasn’t about to tolerate any jokes at Iole’s expense. It didn’t matter, at that moment, that she knew there was no real malice in Alcie’s heart. She, herself, was beyond scared at Iole’s condition—at the condition of them all—and she snapped. She searched her own brain for the cruelest, most hurtful comeback she could think of. Then she put her hands on her hips, just the way she’d seen the mean girls back at the Athena Maiden Middle School do before they delivered a devastating barb.

  “I don’t know what to do about ‘our simpleton,’ Alcie,” she said, making sure that Alcie was the only one who could hear her. “You’re the one who likes him so much!”

  Alcie was so stunned that her right knee actually buckled; every ounce of humor, wit, and sass drained right out of her.

  “I wasn’t talking about …,” Alcie whispered. “I didn’t … I didn’t mean to be …”

  The next instant she burst into tears. Pandy was aghast at her own words and threw her arms around Alcie.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she cried, beginning to sob into Alcie’s hair, feeling the copper wires press into her cheek. “I know you didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean it either. Homer’s wonderful; you know I think that. But I don’t know what to do about Iole—or any of us.”

  Homer, not having heard any of this, but for reasons he couldn’t say, slowed Iole’s gait and let Pandy and Alcie have a moment.

  “I’m sorry,” Alcie sobbed. “I don’t know where that came from.”

  “It’s the same reason we laugh when something, anything is really awful,” Pandy said. “It’s like we need relief
.”

  “Wow,” Alcie said, finally stifling her cries. “What you said—that was really good. That was worthy of Helen and Hippia.”

  “Somehow,” Pandy said, remembering the two most horrible girls at school, before they’d been changed into legless black salamanders, “that doesn’t make me feel better.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you how I feel,” Alcie said, walking over to Iole and wrapping her in her arms. “I feel less like copper and more like glass. Very, very fragile. Iole … I love you.”

  “I love you too,” Iole said with a smile.

  Suddenly, they heard a mad, incessant barking in the distance beyond the gate. Then a second bark—another dog—joined in, and then a third. Three distinct and ferocious barks, all yelping at once and all getting closer.

  Looking down the road, which led off beyond the gates and into the underworld, Pandy could see only a fine mist concealing nearly everything.

  “Cerberus!” she cried.

  Dido took off at a run; Pandy knew her dog wouldn’t stand a chance against what lay ahead.

  “DIDO, COME BACK HERE NOW!” she screamed with all the force she could muster. Dido stopped and gave a quick glance back to his mistress.

  “HERE. NOW!”

  Dido ran back to Pandy. Thinking fast, she fished the magic rope out of her pouch.

  “Rope,” she commanded, “hold Dido here.”

  The rope moved so fast, no one actually saw it. The next instant, Dido was bound, twitching but immobilized—including his jaws—a good distance from the gate and the approaching terror. Instinctively, Pandy looked for a place to hide them all. But Iole stepped toward the gate.

  “I have something for this,” she said. “Don’t I?”

  Without warning, a black shape bounded out of the mist and tore straight for them. Homer shoved Iole aside just as three black snarling dog heads—attached to a single enormous body—flew out of the gates, heading directly for Iole’s throat. Homer raised his iron fist and swiped hard at the heads. He sent two off in one direction unfazed, but the third head managed to land a bite on Homer’s right thigh. Then, there was a sickening shriek and the entire beast sprang back as if it had been mortally wounded. Homer looked down and saw a deep bite mark in his leg, but there was no blood and no pain. There were, however, two huge canine teeth sticking out of the wound.