by Diana Tyler
When they reached the bottom of the stairs, Ethan flipped a switch, flooding the narrow gallery with light. Chloe’s attention was immediately drawn to a humongous fossil in the center of the room. Stepping closer, she saw that it was a footprint, or, more accurately, a talon print.
“That’s half the size of me!” she exclaimed. “What in Hades is that?”
Ethan smiled, evidently amused by her enthusiasm—or her ignorance. “Remember the stories about the Gryphons?”
“You’re kidding me. This belongs to one of the things that pulled Apollo’s chariot and slaughtered Cyclopes? Do you have Cyclopes fossils, too?” Chloe’s heartbeat accelerated. She wasn’t afraid anymore; she was riveted.
“It’s speculation, of course. But it matches the written record we have. And no. No Cyclops remains yet. I’m not sure that’s something I’d want to see.”
Chloe kneeled in front of the fossil. She reached out to touch it, but stopped herself.
“You know what’s even more awesome?” Ethan pointed to another fossil at the opposite end of the room.
Chloe sprang up and approached the rock, stopping when she made it halfway and could clearly see what it was. “No way,” she said, goosebumps rising on her arms.
“One of the gryphon’s back feet,” Ethan said. “It has the exact same dimensions as the forward talon. And again, it fits the mythology perfectly.”
“Wait,” said Chloe, her logic short-circuiting her excitement as she stared at the gargantuan lion paw impressed in the stone. “How do you know it’s not a fake?”
“Well, first of all, my mom ran every test known to man, including thermoluminescence and radio-carbon dating. And second, the last time someone fabricated an artifact—I think it was an amber scroll—the court sentenced him to death. They made him drink hemlock.”
Chloe shivered, not only because of the grisly punishment, but because it stood to reason that if the gryphon had existed, then Scylla had, too.
“So your mom dug all these up?” Chloe asked. She didn’t want to consider a real-life Scylla a second longer.
“She and her team. They’d been laughed at for years because they hadn’t found anything more than pottery. When they found the fossils and the scroll, the Fantásmata pulled their funding and made them clear the site.”
“Why? Why would they shut them down as soon as they started making progress?” Chloe asked. But then she remembered Ethan’s remark about the Fantásmata not caring whether their decisions make sense. She couldn’t help but wonder what other fossils and relics were buried. “Have there been any…um…giant squid fossils found?”
Ethan raised his eyebrows in surprise. Then he laughed. “No, why do you ask?”
“I’d just like to know if Scylla, the mythological sea monster, ever really existed.”
“I guess we’ll never know,” Ethan said.
“I hope we’ll never know,” Chloe muttered under her breath.
“What did you say?”
“I said I’d like to see the scroll. You said there’s a written record.”
Ethan nodded. “Iris’s Scroll, we call it. It isn’t much, but it’s intriguing nonetheless. There’s more to it, my mom said, but the Fantásmata are still studying it on their own.”
“How do you know they didn’t just dump it all back in the Great Sea?” Chloe could feel herself resenting her planet’s secretive government a little more each minute.
“That wouldn’t make any sense.” Ethan shrugged. “But I wouldn’t put it past them.” He walked past a display of water pots and weapon remains—which, given the evidence of a gryphon that surrounded it, didn’t interest Chloe in the least—and stopped in front of the back wall.
Instead of waiting for the high-tech wall to scan his retina, Ethan tapped out a pattern on the surface. The wall stayed put this time, but Chloe’s eyes lifted up as Ethan’s did, and she saw a square of four ceiling tiles fold up. Out of the hole descended a cylindrical glass case with a few torn, discolored pages positioned in a circle around it on plastic display stands. Ethan was right; it wasn’t much.
Chloe squinted at the unfamiliar alphabet etched into the scroll fragments. “Can you read Próta?” she asked Ethan.
“I’m working on it. My mom has some of the only Próta textbooks still in print. Studying is another way I spend my time here when I’m not opening secret doorways.”
“Do you know enough to know what these say?”
“I can work it out.” Ethan shrugged.
“Good enough for me.”
Ethan joined her by the case and pointed to the stand on the far left. “This one talks about something called a ‘Guardian.’ His name is Acheron, and he’s a pretty mean dude. He had five Eusebians executed because they asked him to stop the Alphas from sacrificing in their temple.”
“What are Alphas and Eusebians?”
“My mom says that it seems like there were two classes—more like religious groups—back then, at least according to one scroll that got confiscated a long time ago. One class worshipped the gods and goddesses, like Poseidon, Apollo, and Athena, and the other worshipped one god, named Duna.”
“I wonder when all that changed. Do these say?” Chloe asked, touching the glass with her knuckle.
Ethan shook his head. “I have a feeling only the Fantásmata know.”
“What’s this one say?” Chloe gestured to the second stand in line.
“That one mentions a messenger named Carya. She’s sort of weird, and supernatural, I think. She only talks in rhymes. She heals a slave girl who’s been whipped by Acheron.”
“Who’s the girl?”
“Her name’s Iris. She’s the sister of one of the people Acheron had killed. I guess he made her one of his slaves after that. I’d like to know what happened to him. I hope Iris sicked her doma on him.”
“Her what?” asked Chloe.
Before Ethan could answer, a loud beep blared from two speakers above their heads, causing Chloe to jump.
“It’s okay. It’s just the intercom,” Ethan assured her.
“Ethan, it’s time to come back upstairs.” The voice belonged to Ethan’s mother. “We have to close up for the day.”
“I’m sorry,” Ethan said to Chloe. “You haven’t heard about Diokles yet. He’s the last person mentioned in these sections. Maybe you can come back since your time was cut short today.”
Chloe found it refreshing that Ethan referred to these ancient people in the present tense, as if they were living now and he’d just talked with them over coffee. Perhaps they were to him what Rhoda and Farley were to her: imaginary characters whose faraway stories offered solace and escape. It felt good to consider that she might not be the only one who felt the need to escape every now and then.
“I’d like to see you—it—again,” Chloe stammered. She told herself that Ethan hadn’t noticed her slip.
He smiled. “I’d like to see you, too.”
Chloe remained silent, letting his words settle in the air long enough for her to make a memory of them. She’d never been told that before, and the feeling was incomparable, especially because she knew, instinctively, that he meant it.
“We’d better go,” Ethan said, then he spun on his heel and rushed to the foot of the stairs like he couldn’t wait to be rid of her.
Men, Chloe thought. They were either liars who didn’t mean what they said, or they were cowards who meant what they said but didn’t have the guts to stand by it.
Ethan offered to walk Chloe out to her car, but she told him no thank you. He said he would see about getting her another one-day pass, or at least a half-day pass, but she wasn’t going to hold her breath.
She got into her car, happy to see that the rain had let up and there was still enough daylight to keep her drive down the mountain safe from her made-up, horror-movie scenarios. She put the car in reverse, looked in the rearview mirror, and then screamed as her heart leapt into her throat. Sitting in the backseat, looking back at her in the m
irror, was a girl.
“Who in Zeus’ name are you?” Chloe shouted as she turned to face the interloper. She pulled a bottle of pepper spray out of the console.
The girl smiled softly and folded her hands, clearly unalarmed by Chloe’s threat.
“Do you know what this is?” said Chloe. “It’s pepper spray. It burns really, really bad. Get out of my car or I’m going to blind you with it.” This made the girl giggle a bit and twirl the ends of her wavy, auburn hair. “You think that’s funny?” That made the girl giggle even louder, and Chloe began to wonder if she was a bit slow. “Are you deaf?” Chloe said, raising her voice and enunciating each word so much that her jaw popped.
The girl stopped laughing and shook her head, then she opened her mouth and said,
“I can only speak what I’ve been sent to say,
So listen well before I fly aw—”
“Why are you talking in rhymes?” Chloe interrupted. “Wait. Are you…are you…” She could feel her chin quivering as the answer to her own question was becoming all too clear.
Carya.
Was she hallucinating as she had in the treehouse? She pinched herself up and down her arms. She tugged on her ears. She was tempted to spray herself in the face with the pepper spray just to ensure she wasn’t dreaming.
Then the girl spoke again.
“Do not harm yourself; you’re wide awake,
But you must know what steps to take.
If more of the past you wish to see,
Take and eat from the walnut tree.”
The girl held out both fists and opened them. In the center of each ivory palm sat a walnut still in its shell.
As Chloe stared at the walnuts, she noticed that her car had never smelled so good, not even when Damian had put a wintergreen-scented air freshener in it after Chloe spilled a milkshake in the backseat and waited five days to clean it up. Now it smelled like lemon and lavender, rosemary and thyme all mingled together.
Before Chloe could ask another question, the girl began to speak again, only this time her voice was louder as she pronounced every syllable with urgency.
“There’s just one warning you should heed:
Do not eat of the enchanted seed.
Take a lesson from Hades’ wife,
Who descended to hell, though she kept her life.”
“You’re a funny little thing, you know that?” Chloe turned back toward the steering wheel, where the car didn’t smell so fresh. “Now get out of here before I—”
Before she could finish her sentence, the image of the stranger vanished from the rearview mirror. The only sign she had ever been there were the two walnuts hovering in the air where her hands had held them up.
“This birthday just gets better and better the crazier I get,” Chloe muttered. Then she took the walnuts and stuffed them in her purse, wondering why in the world she wasn’t hurling them out the window instead.
CHAPTER SIX
ORPHEUS
The Underworld was divided into several sections, into which mortals’ souls drifted the moment after their final breath. There were the Fields of Asphodel for those who, in life, committed neither heinous acts of evil nor honorable deeds of greatness. Beyond them was the Plain of Judgment, where Hades took pleasure in devising modes of torment that fit its inhabitants’ crimes. And between these two realms lay what was perhaps the most miserable of all the lightless lairs hidden deep beneath Petros, the Vale of Mourning, reserved for spirits consumed by tragic love, even in death.
The Vale of Mourning was no Elysium—where the occupants enjoyed sparkling white shores and soothing hot springs with fruit trees blossoming all around them—but it possessed a beauty that most mortals never had the opportunity to see. Wrapped around the Vale was a dormant range of volcanic mountains that stretched for miles toward Petros’s crust. From them flowed four rivers that Achelous, one of Apollo’s dark rebels, created so his beloved Deianeira could bathe in them and be reminded of their short-lived love before Heracles subdued him and whisked her away. These supernatural rivers converged within a vast crystalline lake filled with exotic fish that swam together in colorful schools, the only creatures in hell awarded freedom.
While there was no sun in the Underworld, Apollo possessed the ability to fabricate light with a snap of his fingers. He suffused the Vale with summer sunshine and filled its trees with music, though there were no birds. There was just one musical instrument, which belonged to a man named Orpheus; he played it seldom and softly.
This land of woe and regret was made beautiful by cruel design; its beauty meant to taunt the brokenhearted with scenes of rapture and songs of enchantment they would never be able to share with the ones they loved. Many of them stayed curled up in the shadows of the cypress trees with their ears covered, trying in vain to ignore the false heaven around them. Others made the best of their fate and befriended each other, spending their time reminiscing about their romances and how they went awry.
Orpheus was unlike any of his peers, for he neither hid from the majestic, lonely world nor babbled about his dear Eurydice to downcast wraiths who didn’t care. Apollo had allowed Orpheus, one of his many sons, to keep his golden lyre, the one that could charm or sedate any living thing depending on the song he played.
To be sure, the Dark Lord was not showing mercy. The lyre was to be a thorn that drew blood whenever it was strummed, causing stabbing memories of Eurydice to play through the melody.
But Orpheus cherished the instrument because it made him feel close to his departed wife, Eurydice, who was taken from him by a viper’s bite. She had touched it, played it, loved it, sung along with it, just as he did on days when the pain of missing her made him cry aloud for death to take him again and send him this time to the Plain of Judgment, where the physical anguish might mask the torture wrought by his own emotions.
On this day, just after the peach light of dawn had spread over the ash-colored mountains, Orpheus took his lyre and began to play the song he had composed the morning he first laid eyes on Eurydice. The words rolled off his lips like water burbling in a brook as he closed his eyes and recreated the moment within the dreamlike haze of his most darling memory.
“When I would grow weary of people and forget how to form a smile,
I would wander into the woods and follow the river a while.
I would lean against a tree, invite the songbirds to be my muse,
Then play as many melodies as the morn has different hues.
But the day the oak nymph crossed my path with hyacinth in her hair,
My fingers refused to touch the lyre; all I could do was stare.
She was the most exquisite creature, with ivory arms and cheeks,
One look at her and my heart went soaring past Zeus’ snow-capped peaks.
She was enchanted by the music, overcome with rapt desire,
By the quivering of the lyre’s strings, their notes of mirth and fire.
She had a voice like honey, and that day it soothed my soul,
It sweetened my heart with gladness and made my being whole.
Though a son of gods I was, I would have cursed them all to be,
A worthless worm in the wondrous presence of my sweet Eurydice.”
“Mercy, mercy, Orpheus. Have mercy on our pitying ears.”
Orpheus turned to see Clytemnestra, the murdered queen, pulling at her hair with one hand and her ragged robe in the other, imploring him to stop.
“Give me that loathsome instrument this second,” hissed the queen as she pointed to a plume of smoke rising out of the tallest mountain. “I will rejoice with every step as I hike up there to drop it into the Tartarus cauldron. I know the Titans will have no greater pleasure than to take their turns tearing it to pieces. No doubt the music curses them all as well.”
Orpheus dropped the plectrum onto the grass and leaned the lyre against the dewy slope he sat upon. “Fair queen, why do you seek to bless the Titans while begrudging me the only speck of bliss I
have to enjoy here in this cesspool of suffering? I took my own life to be with my Eurydice, but even death could not end my agony. Why must you plead like a beggar that I spare you from a moment’s worth of relief within an eternity of gloom?”
“Let him play,” called another voice from the branches of a frankincense tree.
“Mind your own business, Leucothoe!” shrieked Clytemnestra, as she charged toward the tree and stared into it like a bloodthirsty hound chasing after a squirrel.
After a few seconds of silence had passed and it seemed Clytemnestra would get her way, the princess’s olive arm darted down from the leaves and seized the queen by the shoulder.
“I do not take orders well from murderers,” said Leucothoe as she slid out of the tree and planted her feet on the rocky earth. “I side with those who, unlike you, are undeserving of their lot in Hades. Husband killers deserve the Plain of Judgment, where the condemned would pluck out their own eyeballs just to hear an hour’s worth of song from Orpheus’s lyre.”
“Do not speak of what you do not understand, you vile strumpet,” Clytemnestra barked as she righted the robe at her shoulder. “Oh, why didn’t Apollo leave you in the form of that hideous tree as your lover intended? Or better yet, why didn’t Helios, your weak-willed lover, leave you buried dead in the sand in the first place, rotting away where your father rightly put you when he learned of your fool-headed trysts? When will mortals learn that nothing good ever comes from dalliances with the gods?”
“I have this frankincense tree to console my spirit as I weep for Helios, my radiant, sun-born love.” Leucothoe stepped forward and stroked the crossbar of Orpheus’s lyre. “The famed poet has his instrument to fill his thoughts with his wife, the ravishing oak nymph. But what do you have to assuage the festering hole of your guilt-blackened heart?” Clytemnestra’s eyes narrowed with anger. “That’s right,” said the princess. “Nothing. And so you despise those of us with remnants of love still to cling to. You may hate me, great queen, but I pity you.”
And with that, bold Leucothoe climbed back up the tree, into her abode of salty tears and piney resin.
