Serpent's Storm

by Amber Benson

  Our train chose that very moment to materialize at the end of the track. It quivered to a stop, a set of doors lining up exactly with where we were standing.

  “God, I sound like a Hallmark card,” I said as the doors opened in front of us.

  “Yes, you do,” Jarvis said, taking my hand again and leading me onto the standing-room-only train.

  i felt like we were on the damn train forever, but maybe it was just my imagination. Either way, the train was so crowded—and I kept getting jostled farther and farther away from Jarvis by the people standing around me—that it became impossible to talk. Needless to say, I had a lot of downtime to think about what I’d just done.

  I didn’t know why I felt like such a heel. It wasn’t like Daniel and I were married. We were just dating each other nonexclusively—but I could only say that because we’d never “officially” talked about it one way or the other.

  Oh, crap, I thought, that makes it sound even worse. I am such a finger-banging cheater. Bad, bad, bad!

  The next time I saw Daniel, I just had to man up and do the right thing. I had to tell him what I’d done and then we’d see how it went from there. Maybe he wouldn’t hate my guts too much. Maybe he’d understand that I hadn’t meant to hook up with an almost total stranger in the middle of a crowded subway platform, that it’d just happened . . . by accident.

  Fat chance of that, I thought miserably.

  “We’re getting off here.”

  Jarvis had worked his way back over to me, but I was so lost in my own thoughts that it took me a minute to remember it was Jarvis standing there, not some strange, gangling kid I didn’t know.

  We waited for the doors to open, then followed the crowd out onto the platform. It was the 14th Street Station, a station I frequented, but I didn’t think I’d ever been on this particular track before. Like a newborn lamb, I followed Jarvis and the crowd toward the exit stairs, but instead of climbing up the first step, Jarvis circumvented it, leaving the flow of foot traffic behind us.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, but when Jarvis put his finger to his lips for silence, I shut up.

  He pointed to the mouth of the subway tunnel and then pointed to us. It didn’t take two guesses to figure out where we were going. He checked to make sure we weren’t being observed then he stepped into the subway tunnel, his gangly body disappearing into the inky darkness. I followed suit a moment later, plunging into the unknown with only my trust in Jarvis to guide me.

  For some reason, my night vision didn’t work in here, and after only a few steps into the tunnel, I was engulfed in a blackness so absolute and impenetrable—and improbably comforting—that it was like being refolded into the universal womb. All the tension in my body melted away, and even though I couldn’t see two inches in front of me, I had no fear of walking into or tripping over anything unseen. I felt weightless as I danced through the darkness, unfettered from all the human worries that had plagued me during the past twenty-four hours, all the guilt and doubt dissolving like sugar into boiling water.

  I could’ve stayed in that lovely state of stasis forever, but just as soon as my body—and mind—had arrived at the apex of relaxation, the dark became less inscrutable, a murkier shade of gray rather than pitch black. It was like I’d been walking among the blind and then someone had turned on the light at the end of the not-so-proverbial tunnel and I could see again.

  Jarvis waited at the edge, his back to the light, beckoning me forward. Shedding the last remnants of the darkness like a shroud, I left the tunnel behind me and came to stand beside my friend, my eyes feasting on the beautiful, brown-tiled subway station that magically opened up before us.

  The station was bathed in an ethereal golden light that bounced off the wheat brown tiles and filled the whole space with a burnished glow. A row of gold-leafed ticket windows lined the far wall, stretching as far as the eye could see. Above the central ticket windows hung a gigantic electronic destination board with so many sets of arrivals and departures—some for places I’d never even heard of before—that it boggled the eye. Every few seconds the board refigured itself, platform numbers lighting up beside new arrivals and impending departures.

  To our left, two arched walkways bore signs above them indicating that one tunnel led to the departure platforms while the other led to arrivals. This made me wonder, since we obviously hadn’t come by way of either arched tunnel, how we had gotten here. I crooked my head so I could look behind me. To my surprise, there was no darkened tunnel behind us, only a large black door with a plaque above it that read EMERGENCY EXIT in large block letters.

  “This way,” Jarvis said, taking my arm and leading me into the thick of the crowd.

  The station was swarming with a plethora of interesting creatures—many that I’d never seen before—intermingling with humans and humanoid-like beings that probably didn’t have a molecule of humanness in their entire body. Some were buying train tickets, others huddled in small groups talking worriedly among themselves. I saw three Bugbears, one with a large gash in his tail, waiting at one of the ticket booths, and I wondered how many family members they’d left behind when they’d made their escape. There were also fauns and satyrs, a tiny red dragon, some mermen—I could tell by their gills—all waiting for tickets or pointing determinedly at the destination board.

  As I marveled at the startling variety of life around me, at the utter uniqueness of each of God’s bizarre creations, I was forced to wonder why he/she had lifted Man to such a lofty place among this pantheon. And I realized, as I stared at the veritable Tower of Babel surrounding me, that I couldn’t think of one good answer to my question.

  “Is it always this busy?” I whispered.

  Jarvis shook his head, but it was a tall, bearded man in a top hat, horns, and black tails walking in the same direction as us who responded to my question.

  “No, this stampede is because of what’s happening in Purgatory. Death has been beheaded and the Devil and one of Death’s Daughters, along with the Devil’s loyal minions, have overrun Death, Inc. This mad rush is on their way to help fight them.”

  I thought of my father, who’d done nothing wrong but had been destroyed nonetheless, and my mother and baby sister who were alive (maybe) only at the Devil’s behest—and I felt ill.

  “What about Hell?” I asked, thinking of Runt and Cerberus now. “What’s happening down there?”

  “We don’t know,” the man said, shaking his head. “There’s been no word since yesterday.”

  “Thank you,” I said, grateful for any information I could get.

  The man tipped his hat to us before veering off in another direction, losing himself in the crowd.

  “Where are we going?” I asked as Jarvis led us to an unoccupied ticket booth.

  “Two tickets to Heaven,” he intoned into the booth’s window.

  “Uhm, there’s no one there,” I said, but Jarvis raised a finger for me to be quiet.

  Suddenly, two tiny pink tickets magically appeared on the counter in front of us.

  “Thank you,” Jarvis said politely. As he pocketed them, I peered into the booth to see if there was anyone hiding inside, but no matter how I squinted, I couldn’t see anyone or anything.

  “Who’s in there?” I asked, curious. “It looks empty.”

  “It’s not,” Jarvis replied, turning away from the window—and since he seemed to know where we were going, I let him lead us back into the crowd. “You remember when your friend Daniel was a shade, his body trapped in Hell so he would be forced to do the Devil’s bidding?”

  I nodded.

  “That was what was inside of that ticket booth: a damned soul who has chosen to let its body rot in Hell rather than do what the Devil demands.”

  “Oh,” I said as comprehension flooded my brain. “Gotcha.”

  We picked our way through the throng, our footsteps and those of the people around us melding together into a cacophony of echoing sound as we moved toward the arched tunnel marke
d DEPARTURES. Other people/creatures around us were carrying train tickets in a rainbow of hues, but I saw no one else with pink ones like ours.

  “How come everyone is here?” I asked, picking up my pace to keep up with Jarvis’s longer strides. “Why aren’t they just using the wormholes?”

  “Because it’s through Purgatory that all wormhole activity is monitored—”

  “So?” I asked, interrupting him.

  “If you’d let me finish, Miss Calliope,” he said, rolling his droopy eyes heavenward in a signature Jarvis move. “What I was going to say, before you rudely interrupted me, is that all wormhole activity is monitored and regulated through Purgatory. If the Devil has taken over the building, then he’s disabled the system so no one can get in or out of Purgatory.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yes,” Jarvis agreed with me. “Shit is definitely apropos.”

  We crossed the threshold of the Departure’s archway, leaving the station behind us as we followed the crush of bodies down a wide brown-and-white mosaic-tiled walkway. The arched ceiling soared twenty feet above us, and long pewter pendant fixtures cast in an art deco chevron motif dangled from the ceiling at ten-foot intervals, bathing the chamber in pale yellow light. Spaced between the light fixtures were tall, arched doorways with corresponding platform numbers embedded in the overhead tile work. The doorways were shrouded in darkness so that whatever lay beyond them remained in shadow. To keep myself occupied as we walked, I started counting doorways, but stopped when I hit one hundred and fifty-seven—and the tunnel still had no end in sight. With each subsequent doorway we passed, we lost more and more of the crowd as they peeled away to find their platforms.

  Soon, only Jarvis and I remained, trudging forward like two refugees from a modern-day civil war. Jarvis, wearing his cheap business suit and thin addict’s body, looked the worse for wear. He had dark smudges under his puppy dog eyes, and the pomade in his hair had started to dissolve, leaving a tuft of dark hair sticking straight up in the back. I didn’t even want to think about how I looked. Suffice it to say, I could smell my own stench and it told me I was fit for a Dumpster and nowhere else.

  When we reached doorway number three hundred and seventy-five, I stopped in protest.

  “My feet hurt and you look like you’re gonna fall over,” I said to Jarvis. “Can we just take like a two-minute break . . . please?”

  “We only have one more to go,” Jarvis said, shaking his head and pointing at an arched doorway on our left.

  “Okay.” I sighed and picked up my feet.

  Jarvis got there first but waited for me.

  “Here’s your ticket,” he said, thrusting one of the pink things at me. I took the proffered ticket, and then together we entered the darkened doorway, stepping out from behind a column to find ourselves on a normal New York City subway platform with people milling about, reading the paper and playing with their cell phones as they waited for their train to arrive.

  I heaved a sigh of relief, glad we hadn’t ended up somewhere strange . . . and then I started looking around me. After that, I wasn’t so sure how I felt anymore—definitely not relieved.

  There was something odd about the people—humans only now—that surrounded us. An older man reading a book on one of the benches to our right was so transparent I could see the brick wall through his head. Down at the end of the platform, two skinny young women in yoga gear and thick hoodies casually held their yoga mats at their sides: one woman was slightly transparent, while the other was almost totally gone.

  A Hispanic nanny and her tiny Caucasian charge, both wrapped in medium-weight coats as they waited hand in hand by the turnstiles, weren’t very see-through at all.

  The station itself looked normal, with dirt on the concrete floor, smears of God knew what on the white-tiled walls, and a stack of grubby newspapers sitting on the floor by the turnstiles. Beyond the turnstiles, a heavy African-American woman in an MTA uniform sat inside the information booth, reading over some paperwork. She was almost totally solid, like the nanny and her charge.

  “What’s wrong with them?” I asked Jarvis as I took a seat beside him on one of the empty benches.

  “Nothing is wrong with them, Miss Calliope,” Jarvis said.

  “No,” I argued, shaking my head. “There is definitely something wrong with them. I can see right through that guy.”

  I pointed at the guy on the next bench over, reading his book. I could see the book’s title—Dostoevsky’s The Double—through the man’s transparent hands.

  Jarvis sighed.

  “Yes, I forgot, you’re seeing their deaths—”

  “What?” I growled back at him.

  “These are human beings, Miss Calliope. You are Death, well, at least, half-Death right now, so your powers are growing. I suspect what you are seeing right now is how long they each have left to live on this earth.”

  My stomach, which was already a burning mess, flipped over with an acidy gurgle, and I fought another burp that was crawling up my throat.

  I didn’t want to know how long these people had left on the earth, I didn’t want to see their impending deaths—this was an awful, awful thing!

  “This is the way of Death,” Jarvis said, continuing his explanation in the vacuum of my silence. “It’s not as bad as you think, though. Having done it before.”

  I felt terrible. I hadn’t asked Jarvis anything about what he’d been through. Granted, things had been a little nutty since we’d hooked back up together, but still, I’d acted thoughtlessly.

  “What happened to you when you died?” I asked. “I mean, I’d like to know, if you’d like to tell me.”

  Jarvis shrugged.

  “It wasn’t so bad. The Ender of Death knew my weakness and there was nothing I could do to protect myself. Right before he murdered me, he intimated that he might’ve dispatched your father, as well, and that was the hardest blow.”

  Jarvis paused, his throat constricting.

  “Your father was my friend and he deserved better than that,” Jarvis continued, his brown eyes filling with tears.

  I nodded, my heart squeezing tighter with every word he uttered.

  “Luckily,” Jarvis continued, a lighter tone in his voice now, “I was dispatched by an incompetent.”

  “Huh?” I said, not understanding.

  “You do a terrible job as Death. You aren’t committed to the job—”

  “No, duh,” I shot back.

  “So, you leave a little spark of life in the souls you dispatch.”

  I sat up in my seat, pleased.

  “I do?”

  Jarvis nodded.

  “In my case, it was a positive thing. It gave me enough power to escape from the Harvesters and find my way back into another body.”

  “And why would it not be positive?” I asked nervously.

  “All souls must transmigrate,” Jarvis said. “You give them the power to fight against the system, and if they try hard enough, you give them the freedom to escape.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I can see how that might not be a good thing.”

  Neither one of us had anything else to add to the conversation, so we sat in silence, waiting for our train. Jarvis was right, though. If I was gonna be Death, I was gonna have to commit myself to the job, or else I was going to ruin everything my dad had worked so hard to achieve.

  Definitely food for thought.

  Looking for something to do while we waited, I checked out the ticket I was holding. It was one of those rectangular, mass-produced paper tickets like you see at school raffles or at cheap carnivals, only this one was in a blistering shade of hot pink instead of the requisite red or yellow. It had the word TICKET on one side and KEEP THIS COUPON on the other, with no reference to what the ticket was supposed to be used for anywhere on it.

  “Budget cuts?” I said, pointing at the ticket. “Or are they just cheapos?”

  Jarvis laughed, looking down at his own ticket.

  “Yes, I have always fou
nd these to be a tad bourgeois,” he said with a smile.

  We sat in silence, each of us lost in our own thoughts. I knew so little about Jarvis’s life that I couldn’t have told you what he was thinking about, but I was still trying to wrap my mind around my indiscretion with Frank and why I’d let it happen. Jeez, if Jarvis hadn’t been there to wrest me out of Frank’s control, who knew where I would’ve found myself?

  “I’m glad you came back,” I said to Jarvis unexpectedly. “I don’t think I could’ve done any of this without you.”

  “Well, that’s not entirely true, Miss Calliope,” Jarvis said, an evil grin spreading across his face. “You did manage to accomplish the ‘getting jiggy in the subway’ part all by yourself.”

  And before I had a chance to properly respond (i.e., smack Jarvis upside the head), our train arrived.

  twenty-three

  With a loud screech, the train pulled into the station, the doors opening to unload its burden of passengers onto the subway platform.

  Except no one got off this train.

  I looked in both directions, thinking maybe it was just the cars in front of and behind us, but from what I could tell, no one had disembarked.

  “This is ours,” Jarvis said, standing up. “The pink train.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. The train was silver like all the other subway cars I’d ever ridden on, and then I noticed the number on the side of the car:

  Three hundred and sixty-seven.

  In hot pink neon.

  I’d seen trains with red numbers—and white numbers, too—but never ones in neon pink.

  Interesting, I thought. Very interesting.

  We climbed through the doors and sat down on a two-seater bench. I was still waiting for other people to get on with us, but no one did.

  “I guess it’s just us, huh?” I said finally when the doors slammed shut and the whole train shuddered to life.

  “To them,” Jarvis said, pointing to the people still waiting in the station, “the sign says this train is out of service.”