Conan Doyle was worried about her connecting with a world usually reserved for the dead. Though she appeared to have regained nearly all of her vigor, he did not care for the distant look in her eyes, a look that hinted that the despair of the Underworld had touched her deeply. He feared what would happen when it came time to leave.
"How’s she doing?" Danny asked, paddling with all his might.
The boy had removed what remained of his tattered t-shirt and his muscles strained as he rowed. The demon’s flesh was continuing to evolve, growing more leathery, thicker, darker. There were blotches of color on his back that reminded the sorcerer of the burned orange of fall leaves on Beacon Hill.
"She’s doing fine," he responded, marveling at the youth’s tenacity. To think that mere months ago he was living as a typical teenager, totally unaware of his true nature. He was proud of Daniel Ferrick. A normal youth his age would have been driven to the brink of insanity on more than one occasion with what the boy had witnessed in recent days. He was indeed a welcome addition to the Menagerie.
"And you?" Conan Doyle asked, his arms burning with exertion.
"I’m good," the boy said between puffs of air. "Getting a little tired, but I think I can hold out until we get to the other side. How are you doing?" The boy smiled, exposing sharp-looking teeth. There was a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. "Hanging in there, old-timer?"
He didn’t care for the boy’s lack of respect, but considering what they had been through, he decided to let it slide. "Don’t concern yourself, boy," he stressed, staring straight ahead, attempting to pierce the shifting gray vapor that hung over the river to the other side. They had to be getting closer. "Focus on staying alive."
Danny laughed and continued to paddle. The thick shroud of mist parted momentarily and something caught Conan Doyle’s attention. He set his makeshift oar down on the raft and climbed to his feet.
"What is it?" Danny asked. "Are we close?"
"Stop rowing," Conan Doyle ordered. His eyes had found the spot again, only to have his line of sight obscured by the drifting vapor. "There’s something in the water ahead."
Danny did as he was told, placing his oar down and getting to his feet. He peered over the side of the raft. "We’re still moving."
Conan Doyle saw that the boy was right. They were being drawn toward the area where he had seen movement uon the water. "Ceridwen," he called, looking over his shoulder.
She had removed her hand from the water and was clutching it to her chest, a look of shock on her face. "There are things in the river," she whispered. "Things that hate us quite ferociously. And they mean us harm."
"Holy shit. Take a look at that." Danny pointed out across the water.
A whirlpool had formed in the Styx, a swirling maelstrom that was inexorably drawing them closer.
"Charybdis," Ceridwen said, and Conan Doyle saw that her hand was immersed in the water again. "The whirlpool is alive. I don’t understand how, but it’s a living thing. It’s called Charybdis."
Danny couldn’t take his eyes from the spiraling vortex. "Why does it hate us? What the hell did we do this time? Oh man I hate this shit!"
Gull, Conan Doyle thought. Somehow, his old adversary was responsible.
"It believes we’ve come to do it harm . . . ," Ceridwen began, her eyes wide and her expression dreamlike as she extracted the information from the turgid water. "It has been told that we’ve come to separate it from its mate."
"Who told it that?" Danny asked. He had picked up his oar and was attempting to paddle the raft away from the whirlpool, but to no avail. "Was it Gull?" His voice was on the brink of hysteria. "It was that ugly fuck, wasn’t it?"
They drew toward the dark, sucking center of the maelstrom. The raft began to rock and Conan Doyle and Danny were driven to their knees. Water surged up over them, soaking their clothes.
"Is there any way you can ask the river currents to pull us from the whirlpool’s grasp?" Conan Doyle shouted at Ceridwen over the roaring water, trying to clear his vision to have the comfort of the sight of her.
She looked up at him with eyes barely focused. "I’m trying," she croaked, shaking her head in the negative. "But Charybdis is too strong."
It tore at him to see her so helpless but there was nothing he could do. If they were to survive, all of their power and guile would have to be brought into play. He reached within himself, drawing upon the magick that resided there. Conan Doyle expected excruciating pain, but found only the slightest discomfort. Just as the nature of this place was adjusting to Ceridwen, the laws of magick were growing accustomed to him. He didn’t like that at all, but at the moment he was more concerned with Charybdis.
Conan Doyle raised a hand above his head and sketched at the air. A sphere of dark blue energy coalesced around his fingers and then a lance of magick thrust across the river, causing a wall of water to erupt beneath it as it passed. It was a powerful enchantment meant to disrupt magick, to short-circuit the supernatural. Again and again he summoned that spell, and cast it out across the river to strike at the heart of the swirling water. The river began to froth and steam and a strange sound, the cries of some ethereal beast in pain, rose up from the water to fill the air.
The raft rocked upon the choppy water as the vortex started to falter, and from the corner of his eye Conan Doyle saw Ceridwen pitch to one side, coming dangerously close to falling from the raft. He scrambled to her, pulling the sorceress closer to him.
"I have you," he told her as a wave of exhaustion passed over him.
"I think we beat it," he heard Danny say excitedly, and he looked to see that the boy was standing at the raft’s edge, peering into the slowly calming waters. The raft was again at the mercy of the river’s natural flow.
Ceridwen was shaking off her stupor, trying to talk, but her voice was so soft that he could not hear. He bent his ear down close, attempting to decipher her whispering words.
"Charybdis," she began. "Charybdis is no . . ."
"Charybdis is gone," he said, pulling her close in an attempt to comfort.
Her violet eyes flashed angrily as she pushed herself out of his arms, shaking her head from side to side.
"No," she said, her voice stronger. "Charybdis is not . . .alone."
He recalled her words from before; that they had come to separate Charybdis from its mate.
Its mate.
The water in front of them began to bubble and churn, and again their raft was tossed about.
"What now?" Danny shrieked, losing his balance and collapsing.
Something exploded up from the depths, its skin catching the strange light of the hellish place, glistening with all the colors of the rainbow. Conan Doyle was reminded of a rainbow trout, but this was no mere fish.
Scylla, the mate of Charybdis, surged up from the bubbling black waters of the Styx, her voice raised in a scream of rage over what they had wrought upon her consort.
Once she had been a beautiful sea nymph, loved by Zeus and Poseidon in turn, until twisted by the jealousy of Circe into something monstrous. If one looked closely enough, past the slick, greasy skin and thick appendages that grew like tumors from her body, one could see that this had once been a creature of beauty, but that had been so long ago that Conan Doyle doubted even Scylla remembered.
The river beast surged toward them in a spray of water. Scylla grabbed the front of the makeshift raft in large, webbed hands, tipping it forward. Holding Ceridwen tightly in his arms, Conan Doyle dug his fingers into the wood, halting his slide toward the enraged beast.
"Hold on!" he cried out to Danny, but the boy’s clawing hands could not find purchase and he began to slide toward the monster.
Her tentacles darted at him with incredible speed, almost as if they had a sentience all their own. Conan Doyle watched in horror as the tapered ends of those appendages split open to reveal snarling faces, needle-toothed jaws snapping in horror.
Is there no end to the nightmares of this place? Conan Doyle though
t as he plucked a spell from his memory. He thrust out his hand and began to utter the incantation.
The blast that streamed from his fingertips struck Scylla square in the chest and seared her flesh black. With an ear-piercing scream she dove beneath the water to recover. Danny struggled to climb back up onto the raft, and Conan Doyle was forced to leave Ceridwen’s side to assist him.
"Take my hand, boy," he cried, extending his arm.
"What the fuck is up with this place!" the boy yelled, hauling himself out of the water with Conan Doyle’s help, and back up onto the raft. "Does everything have to have multiple heads and a serious mad on for us?"
"It does appear that way, doesn’t it?" Conan Doyle sighed, taking a moment to catch his breath now that Danny was safe.
The waters of the Styx were becoming agitated again. He was about to tell the boy to hold on, when he heard Ceridwen’s cry of warning, and he turned just in time to see the elemental sorceress standing, her hands crackling with unrestrained power as she prepared to defend them.
"That attack will come from beneath us!" she cried out just as the raft was struck from below.
Then they were airborne, the raft propelled up and out of the water by the savagery of the attack. The raft was destroyed, reduced to wreckage floating upon the turbulent waters of the River Styx. Conan Doyle broke the surface, spitting the foul tasting water from his mouth. Its taste was like nothing he had ever experienced before, and it stirred memories of times and events best left forgotten. Times of sorrow. The water wanted him to surrender, to give himself over entirely to the flow and pull of the river.
But Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would never surrender.
Shrugging off the influence of the river he began to search for Ceridwen and Danny in the choppy waters. In the distance he saw something upon the undulating surface and relief surged through him as he realized it was Danny, clutching Ceridwen with one arm and with the other clinging to a section of their decimated raft.
Swimming against the current, he went to them.
"I think she might have hit her head on something," Danny shouted over the rush of the river.
Conan Doyle helped him with Ceridwen. The sorceress had a gash on her temple, and she moaned fitfully as she struggled to regain consciousness.
"We have to get to shore," the demon boy said, his eyes wild as he searched the waters for any sign of further attack. "I can’t freakin’ stand this anymore."
Conan Doyle could offer nothing to allay the boy’s fears. They were being carried by the current, not near enough the bank to swim, only the wreckage of the raft keeping them above water. Conan Doyle racked his brain for a way to the other side.
Then he saw Danny’s eyes go wide with fear.
"Something just touched my . . . " The demon boy gasped, but never finished as he was yanked beneath the surface of the water.
"Danny!" Conan Doyle cried, illuminating one of his hands and plunging it down into the river. But he could see nothing in the darkness.
The boy was gone.
The water began to churn again and he readied himself for the conflict. Ceridwen was barely conscious so he could not depend on her for assistance. As he clung to a piece of raft, keeping his love from sliding beneath the river’s cold embrace, Conan Doyle brought forth a spell of defense and held it at the ready.
The turbulent waters exploded and the monstrous Scylla reared up from beneath the Styx, shrieking like the damnable thing she was.
But there was something wrong. Scylla was not attacking. She was fending off an attack.
Bobbing upon the roiling waters, Conan Doyle looked on in astonishment as Daniel Ferrick clung to the body of the raging sea monster. The lunatic savagery of his demonic birthright had overcome him, and there was nothing human about him now. His yellow eyes gleamed as he tore away chunks of the monster’s flesh with his claws and needle-teeth in a bloody frenzy of violence.
The river churned as though attuned with Scylla’s pain. It took everything Conan Doyle had to keep himself and Ceridwen above the raging waters. Scylla dove repeatedly beneath the surface and exploded upward in an attempt to loosen the hold of her attacker, but to no avail. Danny held fast, rending her flesh with wanton abandon.
The last thing Conan Doyle saw before succumbing to the pull of the Styx was the monster Scylla beckoning to the heavens as the demon boy dug into her chest with his claws, hunting for her heart. Scylla screamed as if pleading to the gods that had cursed her for mercy.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The shipyard stank of fish. Squire wrinkled his nose as he ambled among the dry-docked fishing boats. Some of them were obviously being repaired or repainted and one or two seemed to be in the midst of a patchwork reconstruction using the remains of several others. The majority were rusting or rotting hulks that had been abandoned long ago, their paint flaked off so completely that they appeared ancient. From the awful odor, it seemed like one of those old wrecks — or perhaps one of the boats under repair — still had a hull filled with the catch of the day.
If the day was a week ago, he thought.
The smell was ferocious and he breathed through his mouth. It might have come from the boats themselves, from the sea seeping into the wood, or maybe it was just that stench that sometimes came off the sea at low tide. But something about it made Squire reasonably sure it was local. Either there was a trawler-net full of rotting fish nearby, or something had crawled up out of the ocean and died. Maybe a lot of somethings.
The night was humid and even the breeze off the Mediterranean was hot. They were farther south now, Medusa’s trail having led them to the coast and then southward, passing through several small villages and at last to this place. Marina would be far too rich a word for it and dock was not nearly descriptive enough. There was a dock where local fisherman brought in their catch, but that didn’t account for the ships under repair or the ones that had been abandoned. It was like some nautical junkyard occupied by dedicated fishermen who wouldn’t give up on a boat until it was beyond repair . . . but from the look of things, whoever these fishermen were, they had paid little attention to the upkeep of their vessels until things went horribly wrong.
Squire licked his lips, wishing he had a thick, sugary glass of ouzo to relax him. What he liked best about the Greek liqueur was that it was sort of like getting drunk on melted candy.
The evening sky was a blue-black and the darkness seemed to nestle within the shipyard in graded hues, an evening shadow in one place and an utter, inky black in others. It was almost as though the place had something to hide and the night was its conspirator. Squire paid it no mind. Natural or otherwise, he was intimately familiar with the dark. The shadows were his conspirators.
He whistled an old Frank Sinatra song, "Summer Wind," and turned seaward, passing through an opening between two skeletal boats, one of which appeared to have once been put to military use. As he moved nearer the Mediterranean there were fewer wrecks and more ships under repair, propped up on scaffolding or hoisted off the ground with ropes and pulleys. A pulley clanked against the side of a boat and Squire paused, frowning, but he did not turn to see the source of the sound.
The wind was strong, but enough to sway the heavy apparatus?
He continued on until he emerged from among the ships. A wide, rutted path separated the shipyard from the docks — wide enough for a car or truck to pass through — and beyond that was the Mediterranean. Whitecaps churned atop the waves, whipped by the wind and the night. Squire had always thought the sea was a nocturnal animal, only truly coming to life after dark. Scientists talked about the pull of the moon, but he felt it was more than that.
The masts of fishing boats swayed on the horizon. Smaller boats were tied up at the docks, silent but scarred with the wounds of their history, of hard work and rough seas. The smell of dead fish receded as he crossed the span of rutted earth between shipyard and dock, and he breathed more deeply of the moist, heated air. It had started to blunt even his prodigious appetit
e and he was pleased to be away from the stink.
Squire thought smoking was a filthy habit. Except, of course, on the rare occasions when he felt like having a stogie. He reached into the inner pocket of his coat, fingers pushing past the steel razor he kept there, and withdrew a fat Cuban cigar. Fidel. Hell of a guy, he thought.
"Gonna have to commandeer one of these," he muttered aloud, scanning the sea again, evaluating the fishing boats. He didn’t want a trawler. The speed on one of those old, choking things would have driven him apeshit. There was one that looked like it might actually be a charter boat, kept up nicely, outfitted for the sort of thing where businessmen paid to go out and have someone bait their hooks, and reel the fish in, and all they had to do was hold a rod for a few hours in between. But it probably had a decent engine.
Sails were okay for a backup plan, but the hobgoblin didn’t trust them. And he wasn’t all that enthused about the physical exertion they required.
It didn’t hurt that the charter-looking boat probably had a galley full of food.
He used his sharp thumbnail to pop the end off of the cigar and clenched it in his teeth. A quick check of his pockets produced a lighter. It was always extraordinary what a hobgoblin might find in his pockets that hadn’t been there moments before. It was a bit of magick luck, and Squire thought it was about the best quality a guy could be born with, even better than a startling endowment. Or close, at least.
The lighter flared in his hand and he puffed on the cigar. The tip glowed in the dark as he slipped the lighter back into his pocket. Impatience was part of his personality, so it was difficult to relax, there at the edge of the sea. He smoked the cigar, his exhalations pluming in the air, and he sighed. Squire had his heart set on that boat.
With his incredible gift, Clay had been following Medusa’s trail south from Corinth.
"What the hell does it look like?" Squire had asked him.
"Chewing gum," Clay had replied. Then, after the hobgoblin had shot him a hard look, he had shrugged. "It does, in a way. Like bubble gum that someone has chewed and started to stretch out to an impossible length."
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