by Laura Bickle
Anya put the coin on her tongue, whispered, “Charon.”
And the world went black.
THE WORLD WENT BLACK.
And then it turned inside out and opened up.
Anya felt weightless, the warm drifting sensation of dozing in warm bathwater. She opened her eyes to find herself floating above the bathtub, nose to nose with her own face.
Startled, she kicked backward. Like a clumsy swimmer in a pool, she backed up and managed to get her feet on the floor. But the pressure felt different; heavier. She looked down. Sparky sat beside her on the floor, tail wagging. He gleamed with pure amber light, much more strongly than he did in the physical plane. The mottles and speckles on his body churned white and orange, playing over his skin like the shadow of fire.
Anya looked down.
She wasn’t herself. Her hands were covered with articulated copper scales, moving up and over her body in a suit of segmented armor. She wore a breastplate polished to a blinding gleam. True to Ciro’s word, a translucent silver cord extended from her navel to the limp body in the bathtub. She reached up and felt a helmet covering her head, molded to the back of her skull.
“Welcome to your astral self.”
Anya turned. Charon stood on the floor, hands in his pockets. He looked much the same as he had as a ghost—a rocker in the wrong era—but he was surrounded with a gray aura that dissipated at the edges like smoke. His eyes burned cold blue in the haze.
Anya turned her copper hands up to the light. “I saw myself like this once before. Only once.” The copper armor had erupted from her salamander torque to protect her from the fiery breath of the king of salamanders, Sir-rush. That had been the breath that killed her lover, Drake.
“The astral shows people as they really are. Like the philosopher said, ‘As within, so without.’” Charon nodded. “But I’ve gotta say, that’s very impressive.”
Anya leaned over the edge of the bathtub. Panic laced through her. The eggs were gone.
“The eggs!” she cried.
“You’re wearing them,” Charon answered. He pointed to a belt of beads around her waist. When Anya looked closer, she could see that the belt was made of the tiny eggs, strung together like a girdle. When she touched them, she could feel the heat of them, hot as coals.
“I don’t know what you are, but you’re awfully shiny.” Renee sat on the bar stool and gave her an appraising look. In this world, Renee was wreathed in a sultry pink light, accompanied by the smell of lilies.
“You can see me?” Anya asked.
“Sure, doll.” She cast a wary look at Charon. “I see him, too.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not taking you anywhere.”
Renee’s pencil-thin eyebrows dropped, and her lashes fluttered. “Good. Somebody has to stay behind to watch the old man.”
She gestured toward Ciro. It was then that Anya understood that it wasn’t just her that was different in this sidereal world. It was the world itself and everything in it.
The other humans in the room seemed rooted in place, as if time ran slower for them, and oblivious to her presence. They were blurry around the edges, and Anya could see light surrounding them. Ciro was surrounded by a white shimmer that flickered like a lightbulb almost ready to go out. When she came close to him, she could nearly hear it buzzing.
Katie stood arguing with the others, blooming a serene turquoise flame. Jules was gesturing and saying something beside her, surrounded by a shining gold light that Anya found oddly comforting. Max hummed beside him, crackling in an orange-gold energetic flare.
Brian stood at the perimeter, arms crossed. Anya reached out to touch him. Where the others were bathed in bright, vibrant color, his aura was murky. Bits of green and black fizzled in a swirling, confused mass. When she touched his skin, her hand passed through him, as if she were a ghost.
Charon put his hand on Anya’s shoulder, and she jumped. His grip was solid.
“Why can’t I touch him?” she asked. “And how come you can touch me?” She wasn’t sure she liked the reversed roles.
“You’re essentially a ghost on this plane, subject to the same laws as ghosts. You can’t affect the physical world. But things on the astral plane can interact with you.”
“What am I seeing?” Anya whispered, squinting at Brian’s fuzzy aura.
“Afterimages. The astral world is a sidereal plane—it exists parallel to the physical world. It intersects with the physical plane where energy moves, whether it’s the energy of thought, memory, or life.”
Anya looked up. The bar itself was rendered in shades of gray. But it wasn’t the same as she remembered. Paintings hung over tables that didn’t exist before. The windows weren’t blackened out and boarded shut, they were stained glass. Even the door handles seemed to be from a different era.
“This is the building’s memory of itself. When humans talk about residual hauntings, they talk about the energy impressions a place has made over time, through people tracking through it and focusing their thought energies on it. Sometimes deep impressions make it right through to other planes. Sort of like when you press very hard with a pen on a piece of carbon paper, and the image is transferred to the layer below.”
Anya glanced at the ghost of the flapper. “Renee, is this what you see?”
The flapper nodded, her feather earrings floating away from her shoulders. She touched a stool upholstered in rich leather. “This is how I remember it. Sometimes I think I’m the only one who does.”
Anya turned back to Charon. “We have to find Hope. I released most of the spirits she’d trapped in reliquaries, but she has Pandora’s Jar. And all the ghosts from the museum.”
Charon frowned. “Those are old ghosts. Powerful ones. She’ll be ready to put up a fight.”
“How can we find her?”
“There’s one place in the city where all ghosts pass through. We should be able to catch her trail there, at Michigan Central Station.”
Anya’s brow wrinkled underneath her helmet. “That’s been closed for decades.”
“It’s been closed to humans. Not to the rest of us.” Charon gestured to the door. “C’mon. I’ll show you.”
Hesitantly, Anya followed him through the door of the Devil’s Bathtub. When she stepped out onto the street, she stopped short and gasped. Sparky ran into the back of her armored legs and grumbled at the affront.
She’d expected to see what she always had: a cracked downtown street, traffic, telephone poles, maybe a bit of litter or a parked car decorated with tickets. But the road was nearly empty, unfolding like a black ribbon, winding around buildings from various eras: the 1920s, 1930s, and beyond. Snatches of music from the jazz era played through open windows, and a Model T tooled down the street. A tree had taken root in the sidewalk, shining absinthe green, and Anya could see its roots digging below the pavement in perfect symmetry to the branches reaching overhead to the dusky sky.
Two doors down, a brick warehouse collapsed without a sound, dissolving into dust that blew downwind like a sandstorm. Anya covered her nose as the sand blew past, smelling like shattered clay and with bits that glittered like glass.
“What’s happening?” she gasped. The red dust rolled past her ankles and down the streets.
“That’s what happens to things that are forgotten here.” Charon shrugged, as if seeing a three-story building dissolve was a usual event. “Memory is the key thing. Energy makes things live. Thoughts are energy. If no one—ghost or human—thinks about something, then it disappears.”
The dust blew past, leaving a blank and empty lot, filled with a black void that seethed and churned. It was the most complete destruction of anything Anya had ever seen. Instinctively, she recoiled from it. But it felt familiar. Her fingers touched her breastbone, where that terrible dark fire burned. It smelled like oblivion.
“We’ve gotta get going. I’ll explain the laws on the way.” Charon walked a motorcycle from the shadow of the Devil’s Bathtub. Anya wa
sn’t a fan of motorcycles. Firefighters and paramedics called them “donorcycles.” Charon’s ride was an old, beat-up bike that reminded Anya of something she would have seen in a World War II documentary.
“That’s your… transportation here?”
Charon must have sensed her squeamishness. A smile played around the corners of his mouth, the first she’d seen on him. It wasn’t an unpleasant expression.
“What did you expect? I ditched the boat a couple thousand years ago.”
Anya couldn’t tell if he was joking or serious. She climbed on the bike behind him. Sparky scrambled up to her shoulder, and she awkwardly put her arms around Charon’s waist. He radiated cold through his coat, a chill that seeped through her metal armor and made her shudder. His coat smelled like incense.
Charon stomped on the accelerator. The bike responded with a sound like a choked lawn mower and took off. Anya’s stomach lurched and her chest tightened. She heard Sparky’s claws scraping on her armor as he shifted around her neck. From the corner of her tearing eye, she saw him leaning his head into the wind. His tongue and gill-fronds unfurled, and he seemed to taste the air lashing around them.
Anya shuddered. At least she was wearing a helmet.
Through slitted eyes, she watched the landscape whip past. Black road unfurled under a dusk-reddened sky. Streetlights had begun to flicker on, but they were a hodgepodge of styles: gaslights, electric lights suspended from ornate posts, and lights suspended from sleek aluminum arms. Some civil engineer, somewhere, must have been dreaming of them enough to give them form and shape here.
The buildings shifted, like clouds across the sky. In some moments, she saw buildings as she remembered them in the physical world: factories, houses, landmarks. But they sometimes reverted to earlier eras. Some spaces were rendered in more clarity than others: Two ghosts playing checkers in a park were surrounded with exquisite detail, down to each blade of grass. Anya imagined that they’d played every weekend for decades. Waiting areas of doctors offices were lit, with each dog-eared magazine sketched in boring, painstaking detail. Classroom desks could be seen through windows with plastic chairs pulled up behind them. Walls and train cars decorated with graffiti were sharper than blank, new ones. Supermarkets and gas stations faded into a blurry, decaying haze—no one apparently gave much thought to these, and they were quite literally falling apart.
Charon turned off by the river, the bike rattling and growling along the street. The River Rouge sliced through the twilight like silver rapids, much faster and clearer and stronger than in the physical world.
Charon caught her looking, shouted back to her, “Water’s like that, strong here. It gave rise to that myth about evil not being able to cross running water.”
“Is that true here?”
“Not any place I’ve ever been. Well, not without magickal interference.”
Anya assumed that was a lot of places. She shouted over the wind as it tore at her voice: “What are you, anyway? Are you the Charon? The guy fishing for dead souls on the river Styx? Or is that an affectation?”
She felt his muscles tense under her arms. “How about you?” he countered. “Are you the Ishtar?”
“Of course not.”
“We all inherit pieces of things that make us what we are, whether we want them or not.”
Anya poked him in the ribs, which caused the bike to wobble dangerously. “Quit being so fucking cryptic.”
“You really are clueless, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. I am.”
“Do you know what an avatar is?”
“That’s the thing you create to represent yourself in a video game. Everyone makes themselves look like they’re a lot hotter than they really are and goes off into some fantasy world to slay ogres and get virtual sex.”
Charon laughed. Anya felt it rumbling under her fingers before the wind ripped it away. “If it were only that easy. Let me back up a sec. Do you know what an archetype is?”
“I’m not entirely stupid. I remember reading about Jung and his archetypes. They’re constructs of ideal people that exist in the collective unconscious. Warriors, magicians, tricksters… that kind of thing. There was a guy on PBS a lot of years ago who talked about them.” Anya was impressed with herself for retaining that much from Mythology 101.
“Joseph Campbell. Yeah, he’s a trip. Great guy. And he’s having a rocking good time in the Afterworld.” Charon shook his head, and the air clawed through his Flock of Seagulls hair. “Anyway… archetypes are these idealized mythological images. Remember what I said about thought giving life to form in this world?”
“Yeah.”
“Pieces of those archetypes sometimes express themselves on the physical plane. They want to be timeless and eternal… so they don’t want the physical world to forget about them. Otherwise, they stop existing here, too.”
“Gah.” The whole theory made her head hurt.
“The short version is, you’ve been touched by Ishtar. Or the timeless archetype of Ishtar, however you want to look at it. In ancient times, this would have made you a priestess or a god’s favored champion.”
“I’m her avatar in the physical world?” Anya struggled to keep up.
“You’re one of her avatars, probably one of hundreds over time. Maybe thousands.”
Anya’s mouth thinned. “I got possessed a few months back by a demon who had been a priestess of Ishtar.”
“You’ll attract synchronicities that connect you to that archetype. It’s totally unpredictable, but that’s the way it works.”
“And the salamanders?” she asked.
“The salamanders need a protector. You’re a formidable threat, from their perspective. You’re a Lantern, and you can see into their world. You’ve got the touch of Ishtar upon you. So, yeah, a perfectly rational fire elemental would want to latch on to you to mother its offspring.”
“But Sparky just didn’t pick me out of a crowd. My mother gave him to me.”
“Remember what I said about pieces of archetypes wandering into the physical plane? Somewhere, someone in your family picked up that salamander collar, and it found its way to you. You’ve been blessed by fire.”
Anya’s jaw hardened. She didn’t like the idea that these bits of myth expressed themselves with conscious volition, regardless of the willingness of the recipient of their graces.
“This stuff is a lot like seeing ghosts,” Charon explained. “They’re not part of everyone’s daily consciousness. But when you can see beyond the mundane physical world, you realize the fingers of myth are all around you, touching and underneath everything. And here, on the astral plane, myths and ghosts are a lot more solid and powerful than they would ever be on your corporeal plane.”
“Look, Charon. I was raised to be a good Catholic girl. This is just a bit too New Agey for me to digest.”
“Good Catholic girls don’t devour ghosts, raise fire elementals, or go gallivanting off with motorcyclers on the astral plane.” Charon snorted. “I don’t think Ishtar really cares about your upbringing. She liked you, and you became one of hers.”
Charon peeled off down one of the side streets, and Anya held on for dear life. He pulled the motorcycle off the street in front of Michigan Central Station and shut the engine off. The silence made Anya’s ears ring.
On the astral plane, the train station looked much as it did in real life: a shattered black husk. But here, throngs of people moved past the windows and along the warped steel tracks. Anya could make out hats shading faces, the swish of skirts, hear the chatter of voices and the creak of luggage.
“They’re ghosts.” Anya’s brow wrinkled, and she scrambled off the back of the bike.
“This place is what it’s always been: a way station for spirits among planes. Spirits come here before they move to the Afterworld, whatever that destination may be for them.”
Anya followed Charon up the steps. “So… this is the gate to heaven?”
“Or hell. And anywhere in between.
From here, you can travel to any plane of reality. And the spirits don’t have much choice where they go.”
They passed through the doors into the crowded lobby. Hundreds of ghosts milled. They were images of people from many eras: women in bonnets, men in zoot suits, a child dressed in footie pajamas clutching a stuffed toy. No one seemed to notice the disparities in eras, and Anya wondered how long it had taken some of them to travel here. Some stared at a clock high on the wall, waiting with train cases and briefcases. Others flashed through the darkness like minnows in a pond, racing for the train platform. Long lines snaked to the ticket counter, which was made whole and full of glass. Anya watched as a shadow pushed a scrap of paper through the window to a ghost. The ghost at the head of the line, a teenage girl, took the ticket. She looked at the stub and burst into tears.
Charon wove through the crowd like a native New Yorker in a subway station. Anya struggled to keep up with him, trotting in his wake. From his high perch, Sparky craned his head above the crowd. The bodies of ghosts pressed against her, cold as winter wind, chill fogging her copper armor. Sparky remained wound tight around Anya’s neck like a spring. She shivered, and her armor rattled around her.
Charon paused at the edge of the train platform, peered into the darkness with his hands stuffed into his pockets. “It’s coming soon.”
“What’s coming?” Anya’s mouth was dry. She could see light beginning to prickle the edge of the tunnel, hear a terrible sound moving toward them.
“The train. It’ll take you where you need to go.”
The roar trembled the platform, whipping up wind and a scorching heat that shimmered in the air. A blackness thick as the dark at the bottom of any basement stairs rushed down the tunnel, blotting out the weak lights strung there like a cloud moving over stars.
“It’s going to hell!” Anya shouted, feeling a visceral fear rise in her stomach. That sound could come from nowhere else.
“Not hell.” Charon’s voice was shredded by the black. “But a road to it.”
Before she could turn and make a break for it, the shadow washed over the platform, sucking all the spirits like tissues in a vacuum cleaner. Anya crouched down and clutched Sparky, remembering tornado drills from elementary school. But the ghost train pulled her in as if she weighed nothing.
