Cat's Claw

by Amber Benson

  “Stop that,” I began, but stopped when I felt a cold, menacing shadow descend over me. Slowly I looked up, my eyes going wide as I saw exactly why the little puppy wanted to get away so badly.

  Standing no more than two feet from me was one of the nastiest-looking monsters I’d ever seen. It had four sets of eyes, two of which protruded from the side of its head, and a large, slavering mouth. It had to be double my size, with a prehensile tail that was even longer. As I watched, the creature’s tail shot forward, intent on plucking the puppy right out of my hands.

  “You can’t have him!” I screamed at the nasty beast as I jerked the puppy out of its reach.

  The monster squatted down so that it was eyes to eye with me, both of its humanoid-looking legs bending backward instead of the way they were supposed to. It opened its mouth, revealing two rows of squat, square teeth.

  “But that’s my dog,” the creature said in a very normal, if not childlike, voice.

  “Excuse me?” I whispered, feeling light-headed. Had the creature just started chatting with me? Was human-monster interaction an everyday occurrence down in Hell?

  “This is your dog?” I continued, looking down at the yellow dog squirming in my arms. “Are you sure about that?”

  The monster nodded and reached forward with both of its hairy arms.

  “C’mere, Bruiser,” the monster said and the puppy instantly started wagging its tail and squirming to get out of my arms again.

  “You’re not gonna eat him, are you?” I asked tentatively, and the monster started laughing, great honking sounds issuing from deep in its sinus cavity. I wanted to ask it what kind of creature it was, but I didn’t want it to take offense and eat me, so I stayed mum on the subject.

  Instead, I tried to figure out what it was by using deductive reasoning. It appeared to be a hodgepodge of a bunch of different animals all haphazardly thrown together. I noticed that while it seemed menacing, it actually had a velvet-covered black button nose, plush teddy bear ears, and brown marble eyes (all four sets) that were in direct “cuteness” disproportion to the rest of its hulking body.

  “Why would I eat my dog?” the monster asked when it had stopped laughing.

  “I don’t know,” I stammered, getting huffy. “Some people eat dogs. They say they taste like chicken.”

  This only made the creature start laughing again. Feeling stupid, I let Bruiser go and the little dog scampered into its master’s waiting arms. The monster’s tail shot out and instantly started stroking the dog behind the ears.

  “Thanks for helping me find him,” the monster said when the dog-master love fest was over.

  “No problem,” I replied, rising to my aching feet. Whenever I went to Hell, I always left bloodier than I’d come.

  “See you around . . . I guess,” I called over my shoulder as I started down the path again, cursing my stupidity and the fact that I now smelled like drying dog pee.

  “Hey!” the monster called, catching up to me in two seconds flat. “What’s your name?”

  I sighed. The last thing I wanted was a stalker straight out of Hell. No matter how cute its dog was.

  “Callie. Callie Reaper-Jones. What’s yours?”

  The monster stopped in its tracks and Bruiser gave another short yip from his perch in his master’s arms.

  “You’re her?” the monster said, gazing at me with unfounded admiration, its four sets of eyes blinking in rapid-fire succession.

  “I’m her who?” I said, feeling gross and smelly and miserable, and not wanting to continue the conversation with Mr. Monster for any longer than I already had.

  Why couldn’t Calgon just take me away and never bring me back? Huh?

  “You’re the girl that bested the Devil and won back Daniel’s life.”

  “Excuse me?” I said, needing the monster to repeat exactly what he’d just said about ten more times so I could take it all in. “Tell me what you just said, but slower and with more information.”

  The monster nodded.

  “I’m Chuck, by the way, and what I said was that you’re the lady—”

  “I prefer the term ‘girl,’” I interrupted, “but go on.”

  “What? Oh, okay,” Chuck continued, a little confused by my sarcasm. “Well, you’re the girl who beat the Devil—no one does that. You won Daniel’s life back so he could leave Hell and ascend to his rightful place—and no one does that, either.”

  Chuck stopped there, pleased with his knowledge-sharing ability. I gave him an encouraging smile, but inside all I wanted to do was pull my hair out. Apparently, the monster had no experience in elucidating the facts of a situation because I was exactly where I’d started with no more information than I’d just had.

  Argh!

  “When you said that Daniel could ascend to his rightful place—” I started to say, but was interrupted by a loud screeching sound from somewhere deeper in the forest.

  Chuck froze, listening. Then, with a hangdog expression on his face, he said: “That’s my mom calling. I gotta go.”

  “Wait,” I said. “I just need to ask you a few more questions . . .”

  Chuck didn’t appear to be listening to me anymore, intent now on getting home before his mother got any angrier, I supposed.

  “It was nice meeting you, Callie Reaper-Jones,” Chuck said, grinning like the little kid he was. “Just wait ’til I tell my friends I met you!”

  And with that, Chuck and Bruiser stepped into the woods and were gone.

  “Damn it!” I said, plopping down in the dirt and putting my head in my hands to stop my chin from throbbing. I’d been so intent on pumping Chuck for information that I’d forgotten how much my mouth hurt.

  This sucks, I thought to myself as I continued to sit in the middle of the path totally not caring whose way I might be blocking. Luckily, no more unheralded guests appeared and I sat in the silence of the forest for a long, long time.

  This was turning out to be some day, I thought miserably to myself . . . and it had only just begun.

  seven

  I winded my way through the Valley of Death, traveled past the River Styx, and came to the North Gate without any more run-ins. While I walked, I did keep my eyes peeled for stray dogs and errant monster children roaming the woods. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if Chuck had decided to get together a bunch of his little monster friends and chase me down, so he could show off “the lady who beat the Devil, etc., etc.,” but I had no intention of being anyone’s “show and tell” subject, thankyouverymuch.

  The North Gate looked very much the same as it did on my last visit to Hell—and this time there was even a delegation of three souls waiting to be let in! I had never seen a soul being admitted into the interior of Hell up close and personal-like before, so instead of just stumbling into the middle of the whole process and causing a scene, I hung back by the trees, watching and waiting for them to make their way through the entrance.

  I had totally forgotten that the North Gate dealt primarily with pagans, Satanists, and atheists, so it took me a minute to realize that these were three young would-be Satanists I was spying on.

  I stepped a little closer and saw that the two males were twins, both dressed in matching black T-shirts, black jeans, and black work boots. The female, who upon closer inspection couldn’t have been more than twenty, was wearing a black stretchy dress, black leggings, and a bizarrely shiny black plastic cape. All three of them had white pancake makeup slathered over their faces and necks—the girl had added heavy black eyeliner to her eyes, so that she sort of resembled an albino raccoon—and their matching hair color was a shade of Manic Panic called Ebony. Although it had been a very long time since I’d played “Let’s shock the parents with a scary new hair color,” so Manic Panic might’ve been calling it something else by now.

  As I watched the three little Satanists huff and puff, but not blow anything down, I tried to remember Jarvis’s exact words on how the whole Heaven/Hell thing worked.

 
In my experience, the Afterlife can get a tad confusing, so you just have to remember one very important thing: Even when you think you have a handle on the way the whole setup runs, it can turn around and surprise the crap out of you anytime it wants.

  Okay, let the Jarvis-style lecture begin:

  I know everyone thinks Death is just some old, skeletal guy in a robe, skulking around with a scythe in his hand, looking for his next victim, but in actuality, Death is run a lot more like a multinational conglomerate than one might ever imagine. Every person has his or her place in the process—and without their participation, the whole thing would just fall apart into a million pieces.

  I mean, even my dad, Mr. High and Mighty President and CEO of Death, Inc., was really just a cog in a much bigger piece of machinery. He has to answer to a higher office, just like everyone else, because, yes, even in Death there are checks and balances to keep one entity or another from trying to stage a coup in the Afterlife.

  Far from being a one-man operation, Death was really a bureaucracy, with enough red tape and paperwork to make you ill. In fact, I think my dad spent more time trying to appease his Executives and the Board of Death than he did anything else.

  And I knew from experience how hard to please those people could be . . . but I digress. Back to:

  “Death 101, or How Does That Persnickety Afterlife Work?”

  Okay, when a soul dies, it doesn’t just magically move on to the next dimension. A soul is actually pretty helpless right after it’s passed, so it has to be collected by a group of people called harvesters. The harvesters usually work in teams of two, using something that I think resembles a butterfly net to scoop up the floundering soul, thus beginning its progression into the Afterlife.

  Once a soul has left the earthly plane and moved into the supernatural realm, it becomes solid again. At this point, the harvesters have finished their job. Another person called a transporter takes over from there, explaining to the soul the basic principles of the Afterlife and what the process will be like as it transitions from one dimension to the next. The transporter shepherds the soul on its journey to Purgatory, where it is then judged, sentenced, and sent to either Heaven or Hell (based on how naughty or nice it was on Earth).

  After the soul has done its allotted time in the Afterlife, it will then be returned to the Soul Pool for recycling—and then the process of Rebirth and Death begins all over again.

  When I was a kid, my dad made us watch this documentary on television called The Power of Myth. It was really just this mythologist named Joseph Campbell talking to the camera and telling stories.

  Basically, he was pitching the idea that all myths are variations on the same themes—if you break them down to their essence—that, whether humanity wanted to believe it or not, different cultures and religions were way more alike than they were different.

  Afterward, my dad sat down with the three of us, Thalia, Clio, and myself, and explained that Mr. Campbell, who he promised was just a normal human being with no supernatural ties whatsoever, had hit on a very essential truth: that mankind was all the same on the inside, no matter how different they seemed on the outside.

  It was only years later, when I was a freshman at Sarah Lawrence, that I found Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces sitting proudly on a shelf at a used bookstore and remembered so vividly the night that I had first learned that Death was an equal opportunity employer.

  Joseph Campbell had the right idea. All you had to do was hang out in the Afterlife for a little while and you’d see that no matter what mask you happened to be wearing, it was always just that . . . a mask. Underneath it, we were all the same.

  “I wanna go home!!” the Goth girl shrieked, making my ears ring and reminding me that while we might be the same on the inside, some of us were definitely more annoying on the outside.

  “I so did not, like, ask to die,” the girl said, her cadence like that of a Valley Girl on speed, “so, like, send me back right this instant!”

  I realized that the girl was obviously the leader of the group because, along with being the most vocal of the three, she was also the most aggressive. As I watched openmouthed, she marched right up to Cerberus, who was waiting patiently by the towering stone gates, and demanded once again that he send her back to Earth.

  While the girl screeched, the two boys she had come with appeared to be about to pee on themselves in terror. I’m sure that during all the Black Magic summoning parties they’d had they’d never really expected to be calling up any beasties from the depths of Hell. Now, faced with something straight out of the Clash of the Titans movie, they didn’t have a clue what to do with themselves.

  I couldn’t really blame them for their fear. Cerberus was a pretty terrifying fellow. With three monstrous dog heads and a humongous, muscled body, he resembled an overgrown black Lab that was ready to rumble at a moment’s notice. Believe me when I say that he was definitely a force to be reckoned with.

  I had spent enough time with Cerberus to know that two of the giant dog’s heads were dumber than a bag of rocks but relatively normal looking, while the main head, old “Snarly head,” as I liked to call him, was supersmart but totally vicious. Its one yellow-colored eye shone like a beacon from the middle of its head, and every time it spoke, it revealed two rows of jagged, limb-biting-off-ly sharp teeth.

  As the Goth girl continued with her abrasive invective, I waited for Cerberus to bite her head off or something equally as gory, but instead, he just let the girl go on yammering.

  The girl didn’t seem at all threatened by the massive three-headed dog—rather the opposite, actually. She just kept running her mouth off while Snarly head stared at her. Of course, I suppose when two of the dog’s heads were engaged in licking their balls, there was less to be frightened of.

  I didn’t quite understand why Snarly head was letting the Goth girl drone on until I realized that Snarly head must be impressed by the headstrong girl’s lack of fear, not upset by it. Old Snarly was enjoying her diatribe because forthrightness was the one thing he responded to in people—which only made me wish I’d done my research before I used subterfuge to try to steal Runt.

  Maybe then I wouldn’t owe the guy a favor.

  “I have no interest in whether you wanted to die or not. You’re dead,” Snarly head said sagely.

  The girl, shocked, not by Snarly’s words but by its eloquent speaking voice, shut her mouth for the first time since I’d gotten there.

  One of the boys reached out and pulled on the girl’s sleeve.

  “Don’t make him mad, Chanduthra. He might eat us.”

  The girl only snorted at her friend’s stupidity.

  “You heard him, Raphael; we’re already dead. So who cares if he eats us? Like, duh.”

  I had to admit that the girl did have a point—even if her acid-laced tongue was extremely annoying.

  “But . . .” Raphael babbled.

  “Just, like, shut it, Ralphy.”

  The boy glowered at her.

  “Hey, don’t call me Ralphy. You know I hate that name.”

  The girl snickered. “But it’s your name, Ralph.”

  “ENOUGH!” Snarly head bellowed, its large yellow eye raking over them like a searchlight.

  “Sorry, sir,” Raphael né Ralph said meekly, his legs quaking underneath him like a little schoolboy’s. The girl, Chanduthra, wasn’t at all cowed by old Snarly head’s outburst.

  “Look, mister, it was, like, an accident, you know. No one kicked the candle over on purpose or anything,” she said matter-of-factly. Her pale blue eyes looked up imploringly at the three-headed dog.

  “If you, like, have to, you can keep Ralph and Richard,” she continued. “I won’t tell a soul.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Was the Goth girl really trying to sell out her friends for her own freedom? What a ballsy chick. I looked over to where Ralph and Richard stood cowering together, shock at Chanduthra’s offer clearly apparent on their
faces.

  “Are you trying to bribe me?” Snarly head said, watching the girl intently. The two dumb heads moved away from their balls, transferring their attention onto Chanduthra. Immediately, they started drooling.

  I wondered what that meant.

  “No,” Chanduthra said, “not bribe really, just, you know, like, making an observation.”

  “And how did you die?” Snarly head asked, moving its great bulk closer to the girl so that the two dumb heads could sniff her better. Chanduthra didn’t flinch; just let the dumb heads sniff her up and down without protest.

  When they were done with “smell and tell,” Chanduthra turned back to glare at the boys, just daring them to contradict whatever came out of her mouth next. She cleared her throat and yanked at the hem of her dress before wiping the sweat off her upper lip with her cape. For a heavy girl, there was very little perspiration going on.

  I, on the other hand, was sweating like a stuck pig.

  Just another reason why I hated Hell so much . . . the oppressive heat.

  “Well,” Snarly head said, starting to look bored now. “Go on.”

  I was very interested as to what old Snarly head’s next move would be. I had a feeling he didn’t get too many souls sassing him right outside the Gate to Hell—or maybe I was just naïve and this stuff was business as usual. I had no way of knowing what the protocol was for entering the interior of Hell, so I just stayed put, my curiosity more than piqued as I tried to guess what Snarly head would do with this ragtag bunch of Goth kids.

  “We were calling forth the demon Abalam, and Ralphy had a little accident with the candles—”

  “I did not,” Ralph cried out indignantly.

  “Shut up, Ralphy,” Chanduthra said, licking her lips. “Like I was saying, we had, like, just laid the pentagram and were chanting and stuff. Ralph knocked the candle over and, like, everything just started burning.”

  The other twin, Richard, opened his mouth to say something, but another look from Chanduthra silenced him. I couldn’t tell which creature the brothers were more scared of: Cerberus, the three-headed Guardian of Hell, or Chanduthra, the Goth Bitch.