Designed by Death

by Melody Rose

  I snapped the latch shut, and the sound echoed throughout the cavern. Anticipation crawled up my skin like spiders as I waited for someone to arrive. My breathing had finally returned to normal, but now it quickened again. My heart skipped beat after beat as the wait continued.

  A twinkle at the end of the tunnel signaled to me. It blinked sporadically, as though it were typing out something in Morse code. I thought about the sequence for a moment, but when I couldn’t figure anything out, I abandoned the effort and chalked it up to being a faulty lightbulb.

  The light grew as it came closer. It hung from a lantern at the tip of a boat that traveled along the river, creating no ripples. It looked as though it skidded along black ice.

  The boat was long, like a gondola, but it wasn’t made of wood. Smooth metal wrapped around the whole boat, without any signs of slats or construction of any kind. It was a lighter black than the river, something resembling onyx, so I could tell the difference between the two as it moved closer and closer to me.

  While the way the boat floated spooked me, that was nothing compared to the captain of the ship. He stood tall and lean, with a large pole that he dipped in and out of the water, again with no ripples or droplets of water. He wore a dark cloak, complete with a Grim Reaper-like hood. The only part of him I could see was his hands, which were thin and boney, though, thankfully, they still had skin around them. It was swallowed, grayish, and dry, but it was there. I was grateful I wasn’t about to be greeted by a skeleton.

  The boat pulled up to the edge of the rocky inlet I stood on. I could feel the heat of Erich’s flame in the locket as the being approached. I wanted to put a hand over it, even just to give my half-brother a little reassurance, but I stood still. I didn’t want to draw any more attention to the locket by fiddling with it.

  The figure never left the boat, but instead, anchored his pole on the ground to steady the ship and latch it to the shore. The hood turned in my direction, and I couldn’t see anything beneath the hood. It felt like I was looking into a black hole, and I wanted to look anywhere else.

  However, I couldn’t.

  Despite my inability to look away, my brain raced as it pieced together the situation at hand and how it directly related to Greek mythology. Within seconds, I identified this being.

  “Uh, hi,” I said with a cheeky wave. “Are you Charon? The psychopomp who ferries souls from the mortal world to the Underworld?”

  “Get in the boat,” Charon said with a hollow, domineering voice. It boomed against my ears and ricocheted off the rocks around me.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” I concluded. Deciding it was better to obey, I stepped forward and made my way for the boat. As I got closer, Charon leaned over me and sniffed.

  Even though I couldn’t see his nose, the noise he made definitely sounded like a sniffle, as though he were smelling a delicious pie. I recoiled from the being and shot him a disgusted look.

  “What the hell?” I asked, forgetting any semblance of manners or decorum.

  “You are not dead,” Charon reported robotically. This time, the voice wasn’t as intimidating. It was as though someone turned off the surround sound. I could decipher that there was a face beneath that hood, or at least, that’s where his voice was coming from.

  “I never claimed to be dead,” I said cautiously.

  “Come here,” Charon said as he peeled a finger off his pole and beckoned me with one ratty finger.

  “I’d rather not get so close if that’s alright with you,” I said. I accompanied my words with a step backward from Charon and the boat.

  There was another sharp inhale from under the hood. “Mortal,” Charon sneered, but then another sniffle erupted. “No, demigod,” the ferryman corrected.

  I couldn’t tell which of these assessments was the better one.

  “A live demigod,” Charon sneered. Suddenly, the ferryman whipped the hood back from his head with the sweep of one arm.

  Beneath the cloak was a squat, square face that looked like a bridge troll. He had a hooked nose with two darts sticking out of the side of it. His ears were pointed and large, looking more like wings as they popped out from his head. He didn’t have any eyebrows above his wide, bulging grey eyes.

  I couldn’t help myself. I jerked away from the sheer ugliness of him. A weird sound, something between a gasp and snicker, emerged from my mouth and threw up a hand to cover it and prevent any more rude sounds from coming out. I was expecting some skeletal creature, all Grim Reaper like, but this disproportional troll was a shock, and a hell of a lot less intimidating. Now that I could see beyond the cloak, the mystery and the anticipation disappeared. A sense of confidence floated up in my chest, knowing that I could probably take on this pitiful goblin-looking man.

  Charon tilted his head and the space where his eyebrow should have been raised up, curious. “You are alive, demigod. You should not be down here.”

  “Yeah, well, I am,” I said with a shrug. “Guess you should take me inside.”

  “I cannot,” Charon declared as he stood up straight and wrapped both hands around his pole. He adopted the air of a palace guard, and instantly, I was offended by his outright rejection.

  “What do you mean, ‘You cannot’?” I mocked his growly voice. “You’ve done it before.”

  “Not in many millennia,” the ferryman reminisced as though he were a grandfather speaking fondly of his grandchildren.

  “Seriously?” I asked, surprised by this information. “No heroes have come down here since the original Greek myths?”

  “No one is stupid enough to do so,” Charon said pointedly.

  My mouth immediately dropped into a frown. “This is important.”

  “It is always important,” he said with an exasperated sigh. “What is it this time? A prophecy? A long lost love?”

  “Neither actually,” I said, feeling oddly proud that I didn’t fit into the mold of those other stories. “And as much as I enjoy talking to you about it, I would much rather get to the source so, chop-chop.” I clapped my hands and made a step forward to get into the boat. Out of nowhere, Charon slammed his pole out in front of me, a barrier blocking me from him.

  “No,” he shouted, his voice echoing around the cavern. “I am not permitted to take any live beings into Hades.”

  “Okay, fine, I don’t need to see Hades,” I said, trying to find a workaround. “I just need to find a soul. Can you help me do that?”

  My necklace burned in warning, and I had to do everything in my power not to slap a hand over it in response. Obviously, Erich didn’t think admitting so much to the ferryman was a good idea, but frankly, I was running out of options. There was no way I was getting in that black water without some mode of transportation.

  Charon rolled up the sleeves of his cloak to reveal lean but muscular arms, like an old man who was a bodybuilder. The fear and intimidation immediately return upon seeing his muscles. Over the years, the Academy had trained me well, but without any sort of weapon save for the knife in my boot, I knew I would struggle with beating this gatekeeper in a melee fight.

  “You think I am going to let you come in here and order me around?” Charon snapped as his knuckles went white from gripping his pole.

  “I didn’t order you,” I defended in a meek voice, “I just asked.”

  But the ferryman didn’t seem to hear me. He barrelled over me, his voice getting louder with every word. “You think I’m going to let you, a mere mortal, enter the realm of Hades and take back a soul that the great god of death has decided to claim? Who do you think you are to be able to come down here and defy Hades?”

  I stared at the psychopomp and found my eyebrows pulling together in frustration. “First off, I said nothing about taking the soul back to the mortal world. I only said I was looking for a soul.”

  Charon stamped his pole into the hard ground. “Same difference. Do not think you can trick me, demigod.”

  “Second off,” I said, taking a defiant step forward so
that I pushed my body against his pole as though I could press right through the blockade. “Stop calling me mortal and demigod. It’s annoying. My name is Cheyenne Paulos, and I am the daughter of Hephaestus, god of fire and blacksmiths and makers.”

  “I do not care enough about your name,” Charon sneered as he leaned down so that our faces were inches apart, staring into one another’s eyes like a game of chicken. “Not even when your own soul ventures back down here will I give a damn about who you are. You are only another soul to join the millions upon millions in the Underworld. You are nothing to me.”

  As a final act of defiance, the ferryman spat at my feet.

  I watched the ground turn a darker shade of grey at the saliva spread out against the rocks. Slowly, I looked back up at Charon, who had leaned back with a smug expression on his face. He pushed the end of his pole away from the shoreline and resumed his position to sail away.

  There was no way I was leaving here without the chance to talk to Hades, at the very least without finding Ruby. Charon was my only way off this rocky inlet and into the other parts of the Underworld. I had to find a way to convince him that I was someone, someone worth listening to.

  As Charon floated back out into the middle of the river, I threw out my hand and reached for the metal within the boat.

  Sharp tingles ran up my arm and down my spine as the magical substance initially resisted my advances. I closed my eyes and pictured the boat in my mind’s eye, combing over its smooth detailing. I beckoned it towards me, like I had with countless metal weapons in the past, or with the metal latch on the street lamp to release the Eternal Flame.

  It was an under-practiced skill of mine. I mostly focused on my abilities with fire and saved my skills with a hammer for the metal. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t do it. I’d seen this power work before, and I was determined to use it now to redirect the boat back towards me.

  “What the--?” the ferryman gasped, the words stopping halfway through as he screamed angrily. The guttural sound bounced off the rocks, but I tried to block it out as I strained to reel the boat back into the shore.

  I opened my eyes so I could watch Charon lose control of the boat as it slowly drifted towards me. As it did so, for the first time, the river showed ripples in the water. The psychopomp looked back at the inlet in horror.

  “What are you doing?” he screamed, his face burning red as he threw out the words.

  In defiance, Charon stuck his pole in the middle of the river and pressed down to anchor the boat in place. It had little to no effect as I continued to pull the boat in. Charon’s body stretched as he strained to keep his hold on the pole while holding his feet in the boat.

  I stretched out two hands and curled my fingers into my palms one at a time, the boat inching along with the movement of each of my fingers. Charon’s body was practically horizontal before he released the pole and collapsed into the boat. His coat flapped out wildly as he tumbled over, knobby legs sticking up in the air like roadkill.

  The boat skidded up to the shore, and for safety measures, I pulled the whole thing up on the rocks and completely out of the water. Suddenly, the river resumed its rushing, now that Charon’s boat was no longer floating on it.

  The ferryman lifted his disheveled self up and hung his arms over the side of the boat. His face was contorted into a mixture of anger, discombobulation, and awe. I responded by putting my hands on my hips while trying to even out my breathing.

  A wave of fatigue slammed into my chest, making my limbs grow heavy and weak. My concentration tried to pierce through a hazy cloud of exhaustion, but I blinked several times to focus on the ferryman. This side effect was new to me. I’d never experience any kind of weakness like this before, but then again, I’d never tried to move an entire boat carrying the escort for the dead on it.

  “I’m only going to tell you one more time,” I said as I sauntered up to Charon, despite my legs feeling like jelly. “My name is Cheyenne Paulos, and I’m the daughter of Hephaestus, and you will remember my name.”

  Before Charon had a chance to respond, another voice erupted in the air. It was sharp and regal, as though it was used to giving commands. It made the hairs on my arms rise, and instantly, I knew who it belonged to because, honestly, it couldn’t be anyone else.

  “Charon,” Hades commanded, “bring our guest to see me. I’m anxious to meet this daughter of Hephaestus.”

  9

  After Hades’s command, there wasn’t much argument from Charon about taking me deeper into the Underworld. In fact, the ferryman didn’t say a single word to me after the god of death issued his orders. Charon simply rolled up the sleeves of his cloak up again in order to push the boat back into the black river.

  The second the boat touched the water, the river went still again. This time, however, I noticed that when the sound of the rushing water ceased, it sounded as though a crowd quieted. It was the first time I thought the water sounded like voices.

  “Which of the seven rivers is this?” I asked the psychopomp. I wanted to know which tortures lived beneath that black sheen.

  But Charon didn’t answer me. He focused on pushing the boat back into the water. When he completed that, he hauled himself inside with limited grace. It was painful to watch him yank his legs up and over the sides. It seemed as though he never left the boat regularly, so he actually wasn’t sure how to get back into it.

  Once he was inside, however, he waited. We simply stared at one another. I waited for his permission or his command like he issued when he first saw me, but the ferryman only continued to look at me.

  “Should I…?” I started as I pointed from the boat to me and back again, indicating if I should get in or not. “Get in, or are we waiting for something, or…?”

  Once again, the psychopomp stayed silent. I licked my lips and looked around unassuredly. “Yeah, okay, I’ll just get in,” I conceded. Making up my mind, I stepped forward and vaulted over the side of the boat, swinging my legs over while my hands braced me.

  The inside of the boat was just as black, and I wasn’t sure whether to sit or stand. But the minute the ship started to move, it made the decision for me. I lost my footing immediately and tumbled back into the boat just as Charon had when I yanked the thing ashore.

  Unless I was mistaken, I thought I heard the ferryman chuckle when I fell even though his back was to me. Grumbling, I scrambled to my feet and took a seat on one of the wooden planks at the back of the boat, as far as possible as I could be from Charon.

  We traveled through the far opening and began our journey to Hades.

  The cavern narrowed, and the minimal light dimmed. Charon rowed us steadily along in an eerie silence. I wasn’t sure where the source of the light came from but was grateful that there was at least some there, so I wasn’t completely in the dark.

  The walls were just as blank and black as we ventured on. I lost track of time and direction, save for anything but forward. I chanced a glance behind us and couldn’t see anything but the same tunnel of darkness. For a panicked second, I thought we weren’t even moving. The only reassurance I had that we were was the movement of Charon’s pole, up and down.

  Suddenly, though, Charon stopped steering and paused a moment. He looked over his shoulder at me, the hood back over his face, obscuring his twisted features. Given the choice, I definitely preferred this faceless look now that I knew what was underneath.

  “You’re not screaming,” he commented.

  “Am I supposed to be?” I wondered, taken aback by the question.

  Charon grumbled and shook his head disappointedly. “This is one of the Tunnels of Fears.”

  “I don’t recognize that from mythology…” I hesitated. It was rather unusual for me not to remember a fact like that from Grecian history. Even if I couldn’t pinpoint the information right away, I almost always got it within a minute of hearing the term. This time, however, no answers appeared in my brain.

  “That is because no mortal has experie
nced it,” Charon said with a sigh. “And now I guess I see why. It does not affect you.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “Because I’m not dead?”

  “I suppose,” Charon said. He shrugged beneath his robe. “All the other heroes did not take this way, so I wanted to see what would have happened. If you, like the dead, would witness your deepest and darkest fears. I have to say I am rather disappointed.” The ferryman looked over his shoulder at me. His hood pushed back just enough so I could see his creepy smile peek out, a mouth full of pointed gremlin teeth. “I would have loved to hear you scream.”

  Shivered zipped down my back, and I did my back to stay still and not react to them. However, Charon caught on to my discomfort, and his smirk widened. He turned back to the front and resumed his steering. I felt the boat lurch as it continued on the path, and I was relieved. All I wanted was to get out of the Tunnel of Fear, so we could get to Hades as soon as possible and then get out of the Underworld. Hopefully, still alive.

  After an indeterminable amount of time, there was a light at the end of the tunnel. It was orange and inviting. Instantly, my mind related it to fire, and I got very excited. It was something familiar and recognizable in this horrid place.

  I pushed myself to the edge of the seat and gripped either side of the boat, looking around Charon so I could see whatever lay ahead.

  Sure enough, the tunnel opened up to reveal another cavern. Unlike the last one where I had first arrived, this one contained different pillars with bowls of fire on them. Some bowls of orange flame floated in the black river. There was another rocky inlet. However, instead of having a blank wall, there was a doorway flanked by two more black pillars topped with fire.

  It was the first time I felt warm since venturing down to the Underworld. If anything, it was rather toasty. The feeling eased my churning stomach. It was nice to be surrounded by heat and my familiar element.