The Gatekeeper's Sons

by Eva Pohler

  Chapter Five: Figments and the Underworld

  “She’s waking up! Sheila! She’s waking up!”

  “Tell Dr. Burton her patient is waking up.”

  Therese grabbed the plastic tubing in her mouth and yanked. It scratched her throat, and tears welled in her eyes. Hands in latex gloves guided the tubing out and away. Therese gagged, heaved a dry heave. The latex-gloved hands held out a cup.

  “Take a sip of water.”

  Therese put her parched lips to the cup and sipped. Her neck hurt when she lifted her head, so she lay back again. She blinked and looked up, squinting against the bright lights. She cleared her throat. The crud was still there. She cleared again. Took another sip. Ow, my neck.

  “Therese, can you hear me?” It was her Aunt Carol, her mother’s sister from San Antonio. What had happened to the brothers? They were right here, so close to her. How could they vanish like that? Carol kissed Therese on the forehead. “Oh, sweetheart!” Therese felt a flutter of kisses sweep over her cheeks. “Oh, Therese! I’m so glad you’re finally awake!”

  Why would Carol be here without her parents? “Where’s Mom and Dad?”

  Carol took her hand and squeezed it. “First tell me how you feel. The nurse needs to know.”

  She looked around the room. Machines beeped beside her. An I.V. ran through a needle in her hand. A nurse stood beside her aunt.

  “My neck hurts.” Then she added. “I’m so cold.”

  Carol pulled the covers up around Therese. “Can we get her another blanket, Sheila?” Carol said to the nurse.

  Sheila left the bed and opened a nearby cabinet.

  “Anything else hurt?” Sheila asked.

  “I don’t think so.” Therese cleared her throat again. “Where’s Mom and Dad?”

  Another woman entered the room in a white coat.

  Carol said, “Oh, Doctor, I’m so glad you’re here.”

  She nodded hello and took a small flashlight from her front pocket. “Hi there, Therese. I’m Dr. Burton.”

  “Where are my parents?”

  Sheila unfolded a thin white cotton blanket and added it to the heap of covers already atop Therese. Although the three persons in the room, including her aunt, looked at her with the kindest eyes, she had a sudden feeling of dread dragging her down like a heavy weight into a sea of gloom.

  “Your parents didn’t make it, Therese,” Carol said, squeezing her hand. “They died in the crash. I’m so sorry.”

  Therese’s mouth dropped open. Despite the dread and the inkling memory she had suppressed, she was utterly surprised. “But I just saw them. They were right there with me, hugging me, kissing me. I saw them plain as day!” Then, against her will, she remembered the shooting, the car plunging into the lake, and her parents drowning in front of her. She saw her father writhing in the water and her mother’s yielding face. She felt panic gripping at her chest. She was all alone. Her mother and her father were gone. A silent scream of terror rose in her throat, but she pushed it down.

  She wanted to be a little girl again sitting in her father’s lap, curled in her mother’s arms. She wanted to be a tiny thing making sand castles with her parents at the Great Sand Dunes, canoeing and kayaking on the lake and down the river, making snow people and snow animals in front of their house. She wanted to feel the warmth of her father on a summer evening standing on their deck around their house with binoculars turned toward the mountains beyond the reservoir in front of their house. She wanted to bake brownies with her mother one more time. She didn’t need to lick the bowl; she didn’t need to eat a bite; she just wanted her mother there telling her what to do with the big wooden spoon and array of ingredients. She just wanted to hear her mother’s voice one more time. She wanted to be a baby again, safe and swaddled, and listening to her mother’s sweet lullabies:

  Sweet Therese, my precious girl; you’re my love, my life, my world.

  Then she remembered the boys, the brothers, and her parents on the raft with the old man. It had been a dream, hadn’t it? But at least she could be with them there. She wanted to be with them any way she could. She closed her eyes and tried to go back to the dream.

  “Therese, try to stay awake,” the doctor said, shining the flashlight in her eyes as she held open each lid, one at a time. “I need to check your reflexes.” The doctor tapped an instrument against Therese’s elbow, then her knee, her foot.

  No, she thought. I want to die. I want to go be with my parents. She closed her eyes again.

  Sheila strapped a band around Therese’s upper arm. The band expanded and squeezed Therese’s arm, hurting her, forcing her awake again.

  “Where are my mom and dad?”

  Carol gave the doctor a look of concern and then stroked the bangs from Therese’s eyes. “Oh, sweetheart. They didn’t make it. They’re in a better place.”

  Her aunt’s hair was red and straight like her mother’s, but shorter, in a stylish bob, the front ends slightly longer than the back. Her eyes were the same blue as her mother’s and her eyebrows had the same arch. Even their slender noses looked alike. Therese was grateful Carol was with her. She loved her aunt like a big sister and had relished every Christmas and spring break and summer vacation they had ever spent together either in San Antonio or here in Durango. She held her aunt’s hand and allowed the flood of tears to pour from her eyes. “But Carol, where are they? I mean their bodies. Are they in the lake?” The sobs shook her. She thought she might be sick.

  The band released its pressure on her arm.

  “Her vitals are normal,” Sheila informed the doctor.

  “Oh, thank God!” Carol cried. She squeezed Therese’s hand.

  “Tell Lieutenant Hobson he can come tomorrow,” the doctor told Sheila. “Let’s give her today to rest.”

  “Yes, Doctor,” the nurse left the room.

  Carol caressed Therese’s forehead. “You’ve been in a coma for a week. We’ve already buried your parents.”

  Therese tried to understand what her aunt had just said.

  “I’ll check on her again later.” The doctor excused herself.

  Therese turned to Carol. “A week?”

  Carol nodded. “I’ve been staying at your house. Puffy, Jewels, and Clifford are fine.”

  “It’s really been a whole week? I missed the championship meet?” As if that really mattered now.

  She briefly wondered if her swim team had won, but then indifference set in. It no longer mattered anyway. Her parents were dead. Nothing mattered anymore. She closed her eyes and tried again to find her parents in her dream.

  Therese quickly realized she was wearing nothing but a t-shirt. No shorts, no undies, no socks and shoes—as if socks and shoes mattered when she was wearing no shorts and undies. She pulled the t-shirt over her hips and sat, crisscross, in the middle of the gymnasium floor. The entire freshman class soon noticed her. They stopped playing basketball on the half court. They piled into the stands, all pointing, staring, and laughing at Therese sitting there in the center of the gym floor with her shirt pulled over her naked bottom. Soon the entire student body, all 1, 352 students, sat in the stands laughing.

  Even Vicki Stern, the new girl Therese had befriended because she felt sorry for her, pointed and laughed.

  To complicate matters, Puffy, Therese’s hamster, was loose and running across the floor.

  “Get Puffy!” Therese cried out. “Save him! He could get hurt!”

  No one, not even Jen, came to her aid.

  “Wait a minute,” Therese whispered. “I’m not a freshman anymore. It’s summer. And I would never forget to put on shorts and undies. This must be a dream.” She willed herself into a pair of jeans. To be sure it was a dream, she jumped into the air and swam the breaststroke toward the ceiling. She swooped down, picked up Puffy, and soared back into the air. She kissed her hamster on the head. “Where do you think you’re going, mister?”

  She dove down to the gym floor, made an announcement over the microphone that
everyone was to return to class, and looked across the room for Jen. “There you are. Ready to drive me home?”

  Jen drove her truck toward Therese’s house, toward the outskirts of Durango. They rode over the Animus River and into the San Juan Mountains.

  Therese tried to remember the important thing she was supposed to do. Didn’t it have something to do with finding her parents, or someone who could help her find her parents?

  Without transition, she found herself in the back seat of Jen’s pickup with the steering wheel in her hand. She was trying to see from the back, but was having trouble. She strained her neck as she approached an intersection flanked by tall pines. She turned to the left. The road looked as though it was winding in impossible dimensions. The steering wheel came loose and the pickup swerved out of control.

  “What are you doing?” Jen asked.

  Therese let go of the broken steering wheel, jumped out of the window with Puffy in her hands, and dolphin-kicked up to the clouds over Durango. “I’m taking control again. I call the shots in my dream. Which reminds me: I need to find Hip.” Therese kissed Puffy and told him to go home like a good little hamster. “Feed Jewels and Clifford,” she told him.

  Puffy gave her a thumb’s up and said, “No problemo.” Then poof: Puffy disappeared.

  Therese waved goodbye to Jen.

  Jen’s Toyota pickup sailed away, just like Chitty-chitty-bang-bang, the flying car from her favorite childhood movie.

  Now off to find Hip, Therese thought. She flew the breaststroke over the tall pines and cypresses of the mountains near her home. “Hip! Hip! Where are you?”

  “Over here!”

  She couldn’t see him, so she ran toward the sound of his voice. She was running down a long corridor with white floors and white walls and lots of closed doors. This must be a hospital, she thought. She ran faster, sure Hip was ahead, his golden hair just visible as he turned a corner. She turned the corner expecting to see him, but he wasn’t there.

  “Hip!”

  No answer.

  She kept running down the winding hallway. Now down a flight of steps. She could just see the golden hair as the figure rounded the landing to the next flight of stairs. Then she cried, “Hip! Enough of this!” and she stopped dead in her tracks.

  The hospital setting faded away, and she was floating over the foggy river between the massive granite rocks of the gorge.

  Hip floated in front of her. “You’re amazing.” He took her in his arms and kissed her lips. “I’m so impressed.” He kissed her again. “Most people just keep on running. They don’t even know why, and they never think to stop.”

  “You’ve got lipstick on your cheek,” Therese said, pushing him away. “Have you been kissing another girl?”

  Hip sighed. “Look, this may be your dream, but I’m the sleep guide.” The lipstick disappeared. “I usually get my way when I appear in people’s dreams, and I say we make out, no questions asked. Got it?”

  He went for her, but she slipped past him and dolphin-kicked several feet away. “Then you’re with the wrong girl.”

  Hip looked amused. “No. You’re different. I like that.”

  Therese wondered in what way she was different. She was probably the most flat-chested girl going into tenth grade, her thighs were losing the gap between them and curving out past her hips, her nose could use the hands of a good plastic surgeon, and she was prone to daydream, which drove her teachers crazy. Despite her popularity as a fun person, the only boys who ever liked her—aside from Paul who was downright strange—were the ones she conjured up in her dreams, but she hadn’t conjured up Hip, had she?

  “Tell you what,” Therese said. “I’ll let you kiss me again if you answer a few of my questions first.”

  “Deal. Shoot.”

  “Where did your brother take my parents?”

  “To the Underworld, where all the dead go. Your parents made it to the Elysian Fields—kind of a paradise. I’ve seen them. They’re happy. But they can never leave that place now.”

  “Then how come I’ve been able to will them here?” Therese made her parents appear.

  “Hey, sweetie pie,” her father kissed her head. He was wearing a t-shirt and his favorite jeans with holes in the knees.

  “How was band practice?” her mother asked, wearing a pair of sweats that did nothing to diminish her beauty.

  Why can’t I look like that? Therese thought. “I didn’t go,” Therese replied.

  “What? Why not?” her mom asked.

  “They’re just figments,” Hip interrupted.

  Therese and her parents looked at Hip.

  “What do you mean?” Therese asked.

  Hip crossed his arms and leaned back. “Your parents’ souls have passed on to the Underworld, and once Cerberus, my dad’s three-headed dog, lets them in, he won’t let them out. The images of your parents here are figments. Figments are nymph-like creatures that reflect the dreamer’s unconscious images. They have no reflection of their own in a mirror, so you can always test it out if you’re not sure. Watch this.” Hip pulled a hand-held mirror from out of the sky and held it up to Therese’s parents. The mirror was blank where the reflection of her parents should have been. “See? No reflection.” Then he shouted, “Figments, I command you to show yourselves!”

  Therese’s parents turned into eel-like creatures with scales and long, winding bodies. They curled around the air and then zipped away, giggling.

  Therese hung her head.

  Hip moved his arms around her waist. “Don’t I get my kiss now, or do you have other questions?”

  “How can I get my parents back?”

  “You can’t. Only two other people in history have ever tried to retrieve a loved one from the Underworld, and both attempts turned out badly. Besides, that’s my brother’s area of expertise, not mine.”

  “Can you take me to your brother?”

  He snickered and shook his head. “No one ever wants to find Death.”

  “Your brother is Death?”

  “Most call him Than.”

  “He was Death?”

  “Look, I can give you a bird’s eye tour of the Underworld. I can even show you your parents from above. But I can’t actually take you into the Underworld proper while you’re alive. The other day when you met my brother, you were very near to dying. That’s the only way a person can come into contact with him.”

  “That’s so sad,” Therese said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Doesn’t he have any friends?”

  Hip shrugged. “Our sisters, I guess.”

  Therese bit her lip. “Well, I guess we can start with the tour.”

  Hip moved in close to her again. “First I get my kiss.” He pressed his lips against hers. His breath was like mint. She closed her eyes and brushed her lips across his.

  “Nice,” he said. “Let’s do that again.”

  Therese pulled back. “First the tour.”

  Hip took her hand and led her down to the river. A few feet away she could see the old man on the raft, his long white mustache, slight and slumped shoulders, and red peasant robe visible through the fog. He used his stick to pull away from the bank with two other passengers, one whom she recognized.

  “That old man is Charon,” Hip said. “He ferries the souls across the Acheron River where it meets the Styx River at the gates to the Underworld. My brother retrieves the souls from the world of the living and accompanies them until they’re settled in.”

  “Than!” Therese called.

  He looked up at her, astonished.

  “She wants a tour,” Hip explained.

  Hip didn’t wait for his brother’s reply. He took Therese’s hand and pulled her past the raft, down the river to where it entered a dark cave. Sitting near the mouth of the cave was a creature about six feet tall, black as night, with a sweeping dragon tail, and three ferocious heads resembling those of a French bulldog: tall batlike ears, pug upturned noses, large frowning mouths
with slight under-bites exposing white sharp teeth, and plenty of loose skin and wrinkles around the three necks. The eyes on the heads looked red and unfriendly, but Therese had never met an animal she hadn’t tried to befriend.

  “That’s Cerberus,” Hip said. “He guards the gate.” A massive iron gate, maybe a hundred feet above the water, and who knew how many feet below, stood just past Cerberus tightly fastened. “Only the gods can go in and out, so I can’t take you through, but I can show you what’s down there by making the upper part of the caverns transparent.”

  “Gods? You and your brother are gods?”

  Hip gave her a smug grin. “That’s correct. Hades, the god of the Underworld, the gatekeeper, is our father, despite some misguided myths you people have about our origins.”

  “I’ve heard of Hades, but I’ve never heard of you and your brother,” Therese stated matter-of-factly, which seemed to offend Hip.

  He grabbed her arm in a tight grip. “Come on.”

  “Wait,” Therese insisted when Hip pulled her onward. “Can I say hello to Cerberus?”

  Hip’s mouth dropped open. “You actually want to?”

  “Yeah. Why not?” She let go of Hip’s hand and floated closer to the creature. “Hello there, Cerberus. Are you a friendly thing? May I pet you?”

  The three-headed dog leaned toward her and wagged its dragon tail.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Hip warned as he caught up to her. “He can be pretty vicious. And he’s always suspicious about being tricked, especially after what happened with Orpheus and Hercules.”

  Therese wanted to ask about Orpheus and Hercules, but Cerberus now bared his teeth and uttered a low growl from all three heads.

  “Why did you have to mention them? Look what you’ve done!”

  “Come on.” Hip pulled Therese past the creature, above the enormous gate, and over the mouth of the cave. “There’s a lot more to see.”

  They flew over rocky terrain with the night sky above them and the stars and crescent moon piercing through the fog now and then. Beneath them, the layers of rock vanished, and Therese could see several large chambers attached by tunnels through which five different rivers flowed. One of the rivers was alight with flames, illuminating the many chambers.

  Hip explained that the first chamber, just passed Cerberus, was the room of judgment, where three judges worked together to determine whether a soul was worthy of the Elysian Fields. If a soul was found to be unworthy, the judges would then determine which punishment in Tartarus would be most fitting. Some of these punishments were terrible, like that for Tantalus, who stood in water up to his neck but could never drink and saw fruit above his head but could never grasp it. Others were laborious, but not too unlike the world of the living, like Sisyphus, who was doomed to roll a huge rock uphill all day only to watch it roll to the bottom of the hill where he must start again. Some souls were doomed to remain in Tartarus for all eternity, Hip explained; but others, after their debts were paid, could travel over to the Elysian Fields. Tartarus was narrow and long like a great hall, just past the room of judgment. It seemed to stretch endlessly in two directions further than Therese could see.

  Hip then pointed out Erebus, a chamber just after Tartarus and much deeper, though also smaller in circumference, perhaps fifty feet wide at most. He explained that victims of terrible crimes were often sent there through the Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, to forget the heinous crimes that tortured them in life. Mostly abused children and women, suicides, and prisoners of war went there before they were eventually led up and out into the Elysian Fields. Therese could see people below in the dim light lying in their clothes in a shallow pool of water as though sunbathing.

  The fields were vast and amazing, covered in beautiful flowers of white, pink, and purple. There were trees and something like sunshine, but more of a purplish-pink veil of light that added beauty to all it touched. The Lethe River met its banks, and spread in small streams marbling through the fields, which meant that the souls who frolicked there had only the vaguest recollection of a previous life. Therese could see hundreds of souls all doing different things. Some read or slumbered under trees, others danced or swam or ate at huge tables covered with massive amounts of food. Others played sports like golf and tennis. A few children flew kites. Hip explained that the kites, the trees, the food, and the books and things were merely shared illusions, part of an ongoing dream for the dead. The Elysian Fields, like Tartarus, seemed to stretch infinitely in two directions, the boundaries invisible to her eyes.

  She squinted at a couple sitting on the bank with their feet dangling in the river. They were her parents.

  “Can I speak to them?” she asked Hip.

  “They won’t hear you from up here,” he answered. “And we can’t go down to them below. Besides, chances are they won’t remember you.”

  Therese couldn’t bear the thought of her own parents forgetting her. She burst into tears. “Take me to your brother, so he can tell me what I need to do to get my parents out of here.”

  “I haven’t even showed you my parents’ palace. It’s the most fascinating place of all.”

  She saw the old boatman docked at the gate just past Cerberus. She flew down to find Than.

  “Therese, wait!” Hip warned. “If you follow the raft in, you can’t come out. You’ll die, and then there’s certainly no way to save your parents.”

  She stopped and looked back at Hip.

  This is only a dream, isn’t it, she thought. There’s nothing real about any of this.

  “Therese! Wake up!”

  “Wait!” Hip called. “What about my kiss?”

  “Therese! Sweetheart, wake up!”