by Lev Grossman
“I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s Abigail.”
She was a girl sloth. Quentin hadn’t realized. A hard wooden chair had been brought down to the hold, presumably in case someone was enjoying their conversation with the sloth so much that he or she just had to sit down to enjoy it even more.
“And you’ve been very busy,” she added charitably.
A long silence ensued. Once in a while the sloth masticated something, Quentin wasn’t sure what, with its blunt yellow teeth. It must be somebody’s job to come down here and feed it. Her.
“Do you mind if I ask,” Quentin said finally, “why you came on this voyage? I’ve always wondered.”
“I don’t mind at all,” Abigail the Sloth said calmly. “I came because nobody else wanted to, and we thought we should send someone. The Council of Animals decided that I would mind it the least. I sleep a great deal, and I don’t move around very much. I enjoy my solitude. In a way I am hardly in this world at all, so it doesn’t very much matter where I am in it.”
“Oh. We thought the talking animals wanted a representative on the ship. We thought you’d be insulted if we didn’t take one of you along.”
“We thought you’d be insulted if we didn’t send someone. It is humorous how rife with misunderstanding the world is, is it not?”
It sure was.
The sloth didn’t find the long silences awkward. Maybe animals didn’t experience awkwardness the way humans did.
“When a sloth dies, it remains hanging in its tree,” the sloth said, apropos of nothing. “Often well into the process of decomposition.”
Quentin nodded sagely.
“I did not know that.”
It wasn’t an easy ball to throw back.
“This is by way of telling you something about the way sloths live. It is different from the way humans live, and even from the way other animals live. We spend our lives in between worlds, you might say. We suspend ourselves between the earth and the sky, touching neither. Our minds hover between the sleeping world and the waking. In a sense we live on the borderline between life and death.”
“That is very different from how humans live.”
“It must seem strange to you, but it is where we feel most comfortable.”
The sloth seemed like somebody you could be frank with.
“Why are you telling me this?” he said. “I mean, I’m sure you have a reason, but I’m not making the connection. Is this about the key? Do you have an idea about how to find it?”
He didn’t know how much the sloth knew about what was going on above deck. Maybe she didn’t even know they were on a quest.
“It is not about the key,” Abigail said in her liquid, unhurried voice. “It is about Benedict Fenwick.”
“Benedict? What about him?”
“Would you like to speak with him?”
“Well, sure. Of course. But he’s dead. He died two weeks ago.”
It was still as unthinkable, almost unsayable, as it had been that first night.
“There are paths that are closed to most beings that are open to a sloth.”
Quentin supposed it went without saying that patience was a big deal when having a conversation with a sloth.
“I don’t understand. You’re going to hold a séance, and we can talk to Benedict’s ghost?”
“Benedict is in the underworld. He is not a ghost. He is a shade.” The sloth returned her head to its inverted position, a maneuver she accomplished without once dropping Quentin’s gaze.
“The underworld.” Jesus Christ. He hadn’t even realized Fillory had an underworld. “He’s in hell?”
“He is in the underworld, where dead souls go.”
“Is he all right there? Or I mean, I know he’s dead, but is he at peace? Or whatever?”
“That I cannot tell you. My understanding of human moods is imprecise. A sloth knows only peace, nothing else.”
It must be nice to be a sloth. Quentin was unsettled by the idea of Benedict in the underworld. It bothered him that Benedict could be dead but still—not alive, but what? Conscious? Awake? It was like he was buried alive. It sounded awful.
“But he’s not being tortured, right? By red guys with horns and pitchforks?” It never did to assume anything was impossible in Fillory.
“No. He is not being tormented.”
“But he’s not in heaven either.”
“I do not know what ‘heaven’ is. Fillory has only an underworld.”
“So how can I talk to him? Can you—I don’t know, put in a call? Patch me through?”
“No, Quentin. I am not a medium. I am a psychopomp. I do not speak to the dead, but I can show you the path to the underworld.”
Quentin was not sure he wanted to be shown that. He studied the sloth’s upside-down face. It was unreadable.
“Physically? I could physically go there?”
“Yes.”
Deep breath.
“Okay. I would really love to help Benedict, but I don’t want to leave the world of the living.”
“I will not force you. Indeed, I could not.”
It was spooky down in the hold, which was lightless except for the flame of Quentin’s candle, which stayed perfectly upright as the ship pitched forward and back. The hanging sloth did too—she swayed slightly, like a pendulum. Quentin’s eyes kept wandering off into the darkness. It was otherworldly down here. The ship’s curved sides were like the ribs of some huge animal that had swallowed them. Where was the underworld? Was it underground? Underwater?
The sloth chose this moment to engage in some self-grooming, which she did with her customary slowness and thoroughness, first with her tongue and then with a thick, woody claw, which she slowly and laboriously unhooked from around the beam.
“In a way”—she said, as she licked and clawed—“we sloths are like . . . small worlds . . . unto ourselves.”
Nobody could wait out a pause like a sloth. Or survive on less conversational encouragement. He wondered if to a sloth the human world appeared to move past at blinding, flickering speed—if humans looked twitchy and sped-up to her, the same way the sloth looked slowed-down to Quentin.
“There is a species of algae,” she said, “that grows only . . . in sloth fur. It accounts for our unique . . . greenish tint. The algae helps us blend in with the leaves. But it also serves . . . to nourish an entire ecological system. There is a species of moth that lives only . . . in the thick, algaerich fur . . . of the sloth. Once a moth arrives on its chosen sloth”—here she tussled with a particularly gristly knot of fur for a long minute before continuing—“its wings break off. It does not need them. It will never leave.”
Finally finished, she rehooked her claw over the beam and returned to her quiescent, upside-down state.
“They are called sloth moths.”
“Look,” Quentin said. “I want to be clear. I don’t have time to go to the underworld right now. At any other time grieving for Benedict would be the biggest thing in my life, but the universe is going through a crisis. We’re searching for a key, and there’s a lot riding on that. A lot. It could be the end of Fillory if we don’t find it. This will have to wait.”
“No time will pass while you are in the other realm. For the dead there is no change, and therefore no time.”
He couldn’t afford to get distracted. “Even if it takes no time. Anyway what good would it do? I can’t bring him back.”
“No.”
“So I hate to be blunt, but what’s the point?”
“You could offer Benedict comfort. Sometimes the living can give something to the dead. And perhaps he could offer you something too. My understanding of human emotions is . . .”
The sloth paused to ponder her choice of words.
“Imprecise?” Quentin said.
“Precisely. Imprecise. But I do not think Benedict was happy with his death.”
“It was a terrible death. He must feel very unhappy.”
�
��I think perhaps he wants to tell you that.”
Quentin hadn’t considered that.
“I think perhaps he could give you something too.”
The sloth regarded him with her gelatinous, glittering eyes, which seemed to pick up light from somewhere other than in the room. Then she closed them.
The ship grunted patiently as the waves beat against its hull, over and over again, monotonously. Quentin watched the sloth. By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn’t doing it. He pictured Benedict, trapped and languishing in a poorly drawn cartoon netherworld. Would he want someone to come visit him? He probably would.
Quentin felt responsible for him. It was part of being a king. And Benedict had died before he found out what the keys were for. He thought that he’d died for no reason. Imagine chewing on that for eternity.
One of the things Quentin remembered from reading about King Arthur was that the knights who had sins on their consciences never did very well on the quest for the Grail. The thing was to go to confession before you set out. You had to face yourself and deal with your shit, that’s how you got somewhere. At the time Quentin thought that that was obvious, and he never understood why Gawain and the rougher knights didn’t just suck it up, get shriven, and get on with it. Instead they blundered around getting into fights and succumbing to temptation and eventually ended up nowhere near the Grail.
But being in the middle of it, it wasn’t that obvious. Maybe Benedict’s death was—if not a sin on his conscience, exactly, then something unresolved. The sloth was right. It was weighing on his soul, slowing them all down. Maybe this was one of those times when being a hero didn’t involve looking particularly brave. It was just doing what you should.
Well, bottom line, no time is the perfect time to visit the dead in the underworld. And if the sloth was telling the truth, he could be back before anyone knew he was gone.
“So I can do this in no time at all?” he said. “I mean, literally no time will pass here?”
“Perhaps I exaggerated. No time will pass while you are in the underworld. But you will have to make certain preparations before you go.”
“And I can come back.”
“You can come back.”
“Okay. All right.” Unless he changed he was going to be visiting the underworld in his pajamas. “Let’s get started. What do I need to do?”
“I neglected to mention, the ritual must be performed on land.”
“Oh. Right.” Thank God, he could go back to bed after all. Hell could wait. “I thought we were going right here and now. Well, so I’ll just pop down next time we get—”
There was a distant clatter of boots overhead, and a bell rang.
“We just sighted land, didn’t we,” Quentin said.
The sloth gravely closed her eyes and then opened them again: indeed, yes, we just sighted land. Quentin was going to ask her how she did that but stopped himself, because asking would mean that he’d have to sit through the answer, and he’d had about enough slothly wisdom for the time being.
Not more than an hour later Quentin was standing on a flat gray beach in the middle of the night. He’d wanted to slip off to the underworld and back quietly, unbeknownst to the rest of the gang. Then maybe he would bring it up later, just drop it into conversation that by the way, he’d been to hell and back, no big thing, why do you ask? Benedict says hi. He hadn’t planned on doing this in front of an audience.
But an audience had assembled: Eliot, Josh, Poppy, and even Julia, who had roused herself from her stupor to observe. Bingle and one of the sailors stood nearby with a long oar resting between them on their shoulders, and from the oar dangled the sloth. They had carried it out to the beach like that, like a side of beef. It had seemed the easiest way.
Of them all only Poppy didn’t seem convinced he should go.
“I don’t know, Quentin,” she said. “I’m just trying to picture it. It’s not like visiting somebody in the hospital. Get well soon, here’s a bunch of balloons to tie to the bedpost. Imagine if you were dead. Would you want the living to visit you, when you knew you couldn’t go back with them? I’m not a thousand percent sure I would. It seems a little like rubbing it in. Maybe you should let him rest in peace.”
But he wasn’t going to. What’s the worst that could happen? Benedict could send him away if he wanted. The others hugged themselves in robes and overcoats in the chilly air. The island wasn’t much more than an overgrown sandbar, flat and featureless. The tide was out, and the sea was not so much calm as limp. Every few minutes it worked up enough energy for a wave that rose up half a foot and then flopped onto the strand with a startling smack, as if to remind everyone that it was still there.
“I’m ready,” Quentin said. “Tell me what to do.”
The sloth had asked them to bring a ladder and a long, flat board from the ship. Now it instructed them to stand them up and lean the two together to form a triangle. The ladder and board didn’t want to stay like that, the triangle kept collapsing, so Josh and Eliot had to hold them up. As a former Physical Kid Quentin was used to making magic out of unpromising raw materials, but this was crude even by his standards. The crescent moon of Fillory looked down on them, flooding the scene with silver light. It rotated eerily swiftly, once every ten minutes or so, so that its horns were always pointing in a different direction.
“Now climb the ladder.”
Quentin did. Eliot grunted with the effort of keeping it upright. Quentin got to the top.
“Now slide down the slide.”
It was clear what the sloth meant. He was supposed to slide down the plank like a playground slide. Though this wasn’t a playground slide, and it was a bit of a circus act to get into position without any bars to hang on to. The slide wobbled and at one point almost collapsed, but Josh and Eliot managed to hold it together.
Quentin sat at the top of the triangle. He hadn’t imagined that his journey to the underworld would be quite this ridiculous. He’d rather hoped it would involve drawing unholy sigils in the sand in letters of fire ten feet high, and flinging open the portal to hell. You can’t win them all.
“Slide down the slide,” the sloth said again.
It was a raw pine board, so he had to scooch himself along for a few feet, but eventually he managed to slide the rest of the way to the bottom. He was ready at any moment for a splinter to stab him in the ass, but none did. His bare feet planted in the firm cold sand. He stopped.
“Now what?” he called.
“Be patient,” said the sloth.
Everyone waited. A wave flopped. A gust of wind ruffled the fabric of his pajamas.
“Should I—?”
“Try wiggling your toes a little.”
Quentin wiggled them deeper into the cold, damp beach. He was about to get up and call it a night when he felt his toes break through something into nothing, and the sand gave way, and he slid down through it.
The moment he passed beneath the sand the slide became a real slide, made of metal, with metal guardrails. A playground slide. He slid down it in total darkness, with nothing around him as far as he could tell. It wasn’t a perfect system—every time he got up a decent head of speed he would get stuck and have to scooch again, his butt squeaking loudly in the pitch-black.
A light appeared, far ahead and below him. He wasn’t moving very fast, so he had plenty of time to check it out on his way down. It was an ordinary unshaded electric light set in a brick wall. The brickwork was old and uneven and could have used some repointing. Below the light was a pair of metal double doors painted a gray-brown. They were absolutely ordinary, the kind that might have opened onto a school auditorium.
In front of it stood someone who looked too small to be standing in front of the entrance to hell. He might have been eight years old. He was a sharp-looking little boy, with short black hair and a narrow face. He wore a little-boy
-sized gray suit with a white shirt, but no tie. He looked like he’d gotten fidgety in church and come outside for a minute to blow off steam.
He didn’t even have a stool to sit on, so he just stood in place as well as an eight-year-old boy can. He tried and failed to whistle. He kicked at nothing in particular.
Quentin thought it prudent to slow down and stop about twenty feet from the bottom of the slide. The boy watched him.
“Hi,” the boy said. His voice sounded loud in the silence.
“Hi,” Quentin said.
He slid down the rest of the way and then stood up, as gracefully as he could.
“You’re not dead,” the boy said.
“I’m alive,” Quentin said. “But is this the entrance to the underworld?”
“You know how I could tell you were alive?” The boy pointed behind Quentin. “The slide. It works much better if you’re dead.”
“Oh. Yes, I got stuck a few times.”
Quentin’s skin prickled just standing there. He wondered if the boy was alive. He didn’t look dead.
“Dead people are lighter,” the boy said. “And when you die they give you a robe. It’s better for sliding than regular pants.”
The bulb made a bubble of light in the darkness. Quentin had a sense of towering emptiness all around them. There was no sky or ceiling. The brick wall seemed to go up forever—did go up forever, as far as he could see. He was in the subbasement of the world.
Quentin pointed behind him at the double doors. “Is it all right if I go inside?”
“You can only go inside if you’re dead. That’s the rule.”
“Oh.”
This was a setback. You’d think Abigail the Sloth would have briefed him on that wrinkle. He didn’t relish the thought of trying to climb back up that long slide, if that was how you got back to the upper world. He seemed to remembered from being a kid that it was possible, just about, but that slide must have been half a mile long. What if he fell off? Or what if somebody died and came sliding down it while he was going up?
But it would also be a relief. He could get back to business. Back to the search for the key.
