My mind strayed back to the box on my kitchen table. The box that left an oozy feeling in my throat every time I looked at it. I had meant to ask Liam to open it when he arrived earlier that day, but other priorities had taken precedent.
An evil thought crept up my spine. How did he know I hadn't opened it? Had he been watching me? Had he been inside my house?
“You didn't open your package.”
The repetition of his words made them all the more terrifying. I scrambled to assemble psychological characteristics that might help me know the safest way to react. Repetitive phrases and lack of conversational cognition could be ascribed to a spectrum of issues that was far too broad to be helpful. One rule of thumb was true of all of them. Keeping him calm would only be to my benefit.
“You're right,” I agreed. “I didn't open the package. I apologize, I wasn't trying to be intentionally neglectful. Why don't you tell me what was inside?”
“I can't tell you.” His dark head swiveled slowly from side to side. “Can only show you.”
Fear leapt in my heart as he took a step toward me. My words were shakier this time, not nearly as convincing to myself or to him. “I would rather you tell me first.”
“Can't.” That same rictus was back on his face. “Show.”
He was across the room before I could take my next breath. A scream froze in my throat as a large hand clapped across my eyes. A swirling pit of darkness bored a hole straight through my body, emptying me of vital matter. I was a husk.
I was a void.
And then I was nothing at all.
*****
I awoke on strange waters.
Curled on my side, hands bound behind me, ankles roped together. No gag, thankfully.
From the gentle rocking beneath me, I guessed I was on a boat, though a thick blindfold over my eyes obscured all sight.
Muffled voices. Arguing.
“I don't do round trips, you know. This is a one-way proposition.” A dry, whispery voice, with a hint of a foreign accent.
A one-way proposition? I tried to swallow, but found my mouth lined with sand, my throat as dry as parchment.
“You'll take her.” The deliveryman. This voice I recognized though I hadn't heard him pronounce more than a dozen words.
“And just look at her. A fleshy. I don't do fleshies. You know how they upset the meatless.”
The meatless. Somehow I doubted this had anything to do with vegetarianism.
“You will take her.” Not much for clever conversation, the Deliveryman. A metallic clinking preceded a handful of objects jingling to the floor next to me. Coins?
The whispery voice coughed. “I guess exceptions can be made.”
Silence. A splash.
The craft lurched forward.
I lay there motionless. None of the options I considered seemed viable. No good screaming when I couldn't even see if there was anyone around to hear me. Thrashing might only manage to dump me over the side of the boat. Not an especially effective plan, seeing as my wrists and ankles were bound. Talking might alert whomever was in the boat that I was awake.
Had Liam realized I was gone yet? Would anyone even know to come looking for me? And if they did, would anyone know where?
“It's all right, love. He's gone.”
I gasped, startled to find the speaker so close to my ear.
“Now, I can take your blindfold off, but you've got to promise me not to scream. Can you do that?”
I couldn’t promise anything, but my desire not to be blinded overruled my predilection for truth. I nodded, attempting to demonstrate my innate ability for silence. I can be trusted, or so I willed him to understand.
“All right, then. Here we are.”
Gentle tugging behind my head. A rush of cool air. I blinked to clear the gummy paste from my eyes. The whole world was a blur of bright color without my glasses.
“You'll be needing these, I expect.”
The cool frames slid onto my face, and the scene snapped into focus.
A leering skeleton face in a black cloak surrounded by a backdrop of flame.
Skeletal fingers clapped over the sides of the hood when the howl of horror erupted from my throat.
I scrambled away on all fours. Splinters bit into my palms, but didn’t stop me. I kept moving away from cloaked figure, even to the point of climbing up the thin vertical prow of the wooden ship.
“Jove's bollocks,” the skeleton grumbled. “I told you not to scream. Do you have any idea how painful that is when you don't have ears and a tympanic membrane to filter noise?” He screwed a finger into the dark hole where his ear should be. The sound of bone scraping bone made my fingernails sink farther into the wood.
“What. The hell. Are you?” I looked around at the burning lake surrounding us. Every now and again, a face surged upward like koi kissing a pond’s surface. “And where am I?”
“If you'd be so kind as to come down from there, I'd be happy to tell you.”
Only then did I allow myself to consider my position. With my limbs wrapped firmly around the prow, I looked like an oversized koala in a devil costume. Carefully, I peeled myself loose and took the farthest seat from him in the craft.
The empty sockets of the skull leered at me. I could swear the shadows at the corners of his exposed teeth flickered into a grin.
“Now that’s better. Please keep hands, arms, and all other appendages inside the boat at all times,” he warned. The bony fingers gripped the handle of a long black pole dipping into the water. The boat surged forward again.
I tugged my black latex hot pants down my thighs and crossed my arms over my corset. Since there were no eyes in the black holes of that skull, it was almost impossible to tell where my skeletal chauffeur was looking.
“Nice outfit,” he said. “Taking this whole Hades thing kind of literally, aren't we?”
“Hades?” I gaped. “I'm in Hades?”
“Not yet, you're not.” He lifted the black pole and immersed it in the water on the opposite side of the boat. “Still in the suburbs.”
“I know who you are. You're Charon, the Ferryman.”
“Good for you,” the skeleton drawled. “Pity I’m fresh out of gold stars.”
“But that means I’m…Oh, God. Please tell me I'm not dead.”
“You're not dead.”
“Liar!” I shouted. “What would I be doing crossing the River Styx if I'm not dead?”
“You'll have to ask the Boss that question. But if he sent the Scarecrow after you, chances are, it's not good.”
“The Scarecrow? Is that what he's called?” The moniker seemed oddly appropriate for the dead-eyed, monosyllabic brute who had brought me here.
“Yes indeed. His job is to frighten people in the desired direction. As you’ve no doubt discovered, he does it rather well. But you're safe, for the moment.”
Without warning, a scalded body heaved itself up onto the side of the boat. Muscle hung from its exposed bones in steaming ribbons. The eyes were dull in their sockets. “Flesh,” the unearthly voice gasped, fingers clawing at me.
“Oh no you don't.” Charon swung the pole, knocking the interloper back into the fiery soup. “You'll have to wait your turn just like all the rest.”
I felt a sudden surge of gratitude that I had heaved the contents of my guts up earlier that evening, or surely now I would have yarked right onto Charons’s tarsals.
“What is this place?”
“Think of it as a waiting room of sorts.”
“A waiting room for what?”
“For what’s next. After you humans die, you have to be processed.”
“You make it sound like the DMV,” I snorted.
“Gods no. Nothing that horrible.” He cracked his pole across the knuckles of another hand grasping at the side of the boat.
“Who are they?” I asked.
“Remember how I told you to keep your hands and all other objects inside of the boat?”
“Yes.”<
br />
“They didn’t.”
I scooched toward the center of the bench. “How long will they have to stay there?”
We passed into a narrow tunnel of melted rock. Charon’s disjointed voice echoed in the darkness. “Forever.”
“But that’s horrible. Just for—”
“Oh, take it easy. I’m only kidding. They only have to stay there until they accept that they’re dead. That’s what drives them to bung themselves in in the first place.”
“You mean they actually choose to go in there?”
“You bet your fanny.”
A pinpoint of gray light became visible at the other end of the tunnel. “Why would anyone do that?”
“The ferry serves one purpose, and one purpose only,” Charon explained. “It’s a metaphor of passage. It helps the dead understand their change in states. Sometimes they refuse to accept it. Sometimes they would rather burn in torment than let go of the life they knew. Humans understand pain better than they understand ends.”
“But you said I’m still alive. How is it that I can see it?”
The gray light stretched before us. I willed it to come faster, to swallow the boat and drag us out onto the other side.
“Ahh,” Charon mused. “Now that’s the crux of the biscuit, isn’t it? I suspect the answer to that is precisely why the Scarecrow brought you here. You can see both. The living and the dead.”
Gooseflesh rose on my arms and chased over my scalp. “That only started happening recently.”
“But it did start happening. Which is what’s important. It works both ways, you know. Often the dead can’t accept they’re no longer living. And the living can’t accept their ability to see the dead.”
“Is it rare? The ability to see the dead?”
“It’s rare to have a gift as strong as yours, but it’s more a sliding scale than a yes or no proposition. Almost everyone can see and feel to a certain extent. Gods. I just said proposition and extent in a sentence. Do you know how nice it is to have a decent conversation for once?”
We crested the end of the tunnel and slid out onto a stretch of smooth, silvered water. I didn’t dare look over the side for fear of what I might see staring back at me from the surface.
“Your usual passengers not much for talking, I take it?”
“Doctor, imagine an eternity of hearing “it’s not my time” and “take me back” and “but I didn’t know it was flammable!”
“I can imagine that could get a little tedious.”
“Tedious doesn’t begin to cover it.” He picked an ash off his cloak and flicked it. The gesture struck me as both hilarious and endearing. “Of all the colors they could have me wear, why did it have to be black? Shows every bloody speck of brimstone.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“For what?”
“For answering my questions. For being so kind. If there’s ever anything I can do in return—”
I suspected there were no lungs hiding behind the ribcage of Charon’s chest, and yet he still managed to gasp. The tips of his bony fingers clicked as he twiddled them.
“What?” I asked. “What is it?”
“There is something I’ve always wanted to try. Would you mind if I…That is—”
“Go ahead,” I said. “Whatever it is.”
A blinding flash of light knocked me backward off my cushioned bench seat. Charon stood before me with an apron tied over his cloak and a silver bowl in his hand. He lifted a flaming scrap from the bowl with a set of delicate silver tongs. “Hot towel?” he offered.
The cloth fell at my feet in a smoldering heap.
“Uh…thanks,” I stammered.
“Oh bugger. I knew I’d overdone it. How about a beverage? I have complimentary tea, coffee, juices and Coke products…”
“No Pepsi?”
The tops of his eye sockets sloped downward dramatically. “This is Hades,” he said. “Not Hell.”
“Maybe just some water?” Opting for a cold beverage felt like the wiser choice considering the lump of ash at my feet.
Another blinding flash, and a plastic cup of water appeared in my hand.
“Would you care for any ice?” he asked.
“Sure.”
I blinked the swimming dots away from another flash. I opted out of a lemon wedge for fear of permanent damage to my retinas. The first sip felt like paradise after having crossed a lake of fire.
“Peanuts or pretzels?”
“Oh, no. You really don’t have to—”
“Or,” he said, dramatically sweeping back the arm of his cloak. “My homemade pomegranate muffins!”
From the cloak’s wide sleeve, he produced a muffin tin. The smell of cinnamon wafted up to me from the proffered tray, an oddly appropriate ode to fall.
“They have a streusel topping,” he sang, wiggling the pan.
I reached out and took a muffin, bringing it to my nose for another sniff. “Smells delicious,” I said.
“I do hope they’re not too dry. It’s hard to regulate temperature when you’re baking over a flaming lake of the tormented dead, and muffins are so temperamental.”
“You know, I really shouldn’t,” I said, rethinking the muffins of the damned. “I’ve uh, been trying to cut back.”
“Please try them. I love to bake, but there’s never anyone to bake for. I just end up throwing them out for the imps to eat and everyone knows they don’t even chew.”
“You mean you don’t like to eat them yourself?”
“Well that’s just bloody cruel,” he huffed. “I don’t have a tongue. Much less an esophagus, much less intestines to digest them.”
I made a mental note to ask him how he managed to talk when there was more time and less imminent collision with the afterlife.
Not wanting to be unkind, I peeled the wrapper from one side of the muffin and took a bite.
Charon hovered over me, skeletal hands twitching. “Well?”
I chewed for a moment. The spicy, buttery streusel dissolved on my tongue before the tangy pop of pomegranate lit up my palate. The texture was moist, fluffy, melt-in-your mouth perfection…of the damned.
“If you ever get tired of ferrying the souls of the dead to the afterlife, you really should consider opening a bakery in New York. You’d make a killing. Forgive the pun.”
“You really mean it?”
“Sincerely,” I said. “These are as good as anything I’ve had in any professional bakery.” I took a sip of water and another bite. The small bit of food had woken up my appetite, and I was suddenly ravenous.
“I can’t tell you how much that means to me, Doctor.” Charon set the tray down next to me on the bench seat and picked up his pole. “Have as many as you like. Calories don’t count in Hades.”
“Is that true?” I asked, taking a second muffin.
“No, that’s not true. But it should be. It’s a dreary enough place without the risk of packing on a stone. Am I right?”
“Sounds right to me.”
“We’re almost there now,” Charon announced.
I looked up from my muffin to discover a distant gray shoreline. Strange shapes shifted on its surface like a mass of migrating animals.
“What are those?” I asked.
Charon dipped his pole in the water and propelled us toward them. “Souls.”
*****
The Scarecrow was waiting for us.
He stood there on the shore as immovable as the buildings behind him. Flat, gray structures with lines stretching into and out of them for miles. Gray shades moved around him the way water accommodated rocks. Their collective voices buzzed in my head like radio static, too many to understand, too few to tune out.
“Why didn’t he just come with us?” I asked.
“Because he didn’t have to. His mind doesn’t require a metaphor of transition. He is transition.”
“I don’t want to go with him.”
“I’m afraid you haven’t a choice. In this realm, there is
no going back. Only forward.”
The Scarecrow crooked a finger at me.
“I guess this is it,” I said.
Charon offered me his dry, skeletal hand to hold as I stepped down from the boat. My heels sank into the mucky gravel. I certainly hadn’t been considering this as a possibility when I had selected my shoes earlier this evening.
“Doctor,” Charon whispered. His hood was close as he bent to help me down. “Don’t run. Don’t ever try to run.”
“Why not?”
A black-gloved hand grasped my upper bicep and marched me toward the tallest of the buildings within a vast compound. As we came closer, I recognized the architecture as Greek. Columns, pediments, raking cornices and entablatures. The precise sort of features borrowed from Greek temples by government edifices to suggest a kind of classical tradition and stability.
Only this wasn’t a temple.
It was an oversized mausoleum.
Heavy brass doors swung open at our approach. The silence inside was absolute and perfect. Were it not for the flaming red of my costume, I might have assumed I had strayed into a black and white movie, where the only thing separating one object from another was the shift in tonality from white, to gray, to black.
We passed under an atrium, or what would have been an atrium if there were any sunlight to shine down through it. Above us that same dusky atmosphere hung suspended like frozen smoke.
Water pooled below a stone fountain in which no moss grew. Our footfalls echoing off stone left an atmosphere of tense pauses. Of waiting.
The Scarecrow halted so suddenly that my feet nearly slid out from under me when my torso was forced to stop and the rest of me kept going.
“He will see you now.”
“Who?”
The only answer I received was a gesture toward ornately carved brass doors.
“I’m just supposed to walk right in?”
“In,” the Scarecrow repeated.
“Okey dokey. Going in. Got it.” I took a tentative step toward the door, but stopped, my hand hovering above the brass knocker.
“Come.” The voice beckoning was like none I had ever heard. Deeper than Crixus’s. Darker than Liam’s. More compelling than both combined.
I skipped the knocker and went straight for the giant door handle. It required surprisingly little force to open.
Undeadly: The Case Files of Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist (The Case Files of Dr. Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist Book 6) Page 6
