by Bryan Davis
Lauren stooped and ran her finger along a mat’s surface. How could two girls trapped in Hades for untold centuries possibly survive? Most girls on the volleyball team complained about waiting ten minutes for a sibling to get out of the bathroom.
She turned toward the museum. Her angle with the doorway now allowed a view of the inside. A tree at the center stood about five feet tall. With a single tiny flame burning at the end of a branch, it looked like a Christmas tree carrying only one lit bulb.
She listened for footsteps. All was quiet except for the song, clearly emanating from the museum. After adjusting the rope coil on her shoulder, she rose and walked slowly, reverently, gazing at the mammoth building. Inside, the tree seemed to grow brighter and taller as she drew closer, though it was really no taller than herself. The flame flickered vibrantly, as if consuming the greenery, but it made no sound, not even a hiss.
When she arrived at the doorway, she stepped through. As she passed, an electrostatic crackle filled the air, though no feeling of static affected her skin, hair, or clothes. The moment her body fully entered the museum room, the noise ceased.
She set Apollo down and dropped the rope near a tall ladder leaning against a wall. How strange. Dad didn’t mention a static sound, but, again, he might not have been able to hear it. She slid her arms out of the straps, let her backpack settle next to the coil, and pushed the phone into her pants pocket. Rotating her shoulders, she inhaled deeply. Much better. That load was getting heavy.
She took off the helmet and aimed the beam at the tree. Between the tree’s little flame and the beam, the museum room had plenty of illumination. A few rocks and pebbles along with some sand lay strewn across the floor, as if rocky debris had rained from above. A ring of low stones ran around the tree’s soil, framing a planter the same width as the tree’s five-foot girth.
Tiptoeing, she edged closer to the noiseless flame. Flickering orange surrounded a trio of star-shaped leaves like an undulating glove. How could it keep burning without consuming its fuel? She extended a hand and cupped her palm over the flame, careful not to touch it. Warmth coated her skin. A normal fire would have scorched her by now. Maybe it wasn’t real at all.
She touched the flame with a fingertip. “Ouch!” She jerked back and sucked the wounded digit. It was a real fire all right. She withdrew her finger and looked at the tip. Only a slight blister, no bigger than a pinhead. Fortunately, the flame didn’t have time to do much damage.
Careful now to stay away from the fire, she skirted the tree and scanned the encircling wall. Flickering light danced along a series of built-in shelves, one on top of another, mostly empty past head height, though shadows of indistinguishable objects stood within the recesses high above. The lower shelves held a scattering of old books and scrolls as well as a few piles of newspapers, magazines, and candles of various shapes and sizes.
She shuffled closer to one wall and reached for a stack of magazines. As her hand passed the shelf boundary, another crackle filled her ears. She grabbed the top two magazines and jerked her hand back. The noise stopped again. Might there be that much static electricity in the air?
She read the magazine covers—National Geographic from 1912 and Life from 1940, both finger-worn with several dog-eared corners. She slid them back in place, again raising the crackling noise as her hand passed into the cubbyhole.
Backing away, she listened. The melody from her mother’s song came through loud and clear, now without the accompanying laments. But from which direction? The entire room seemed like a big stereo system with speakers all around, as if the song bounced off the walls.
After donning the helmet again, she looked above and concentrated on the upper reaches of the room. As her vision climbed the shelves, the beam and the tree’s light faded—nothing but dimness and shadows after about five levels. According to Dad, the portal lay up there somewhere.
She picked up Apollo and stepped on the ladder’s lowest rung. There wasn’t much else to do but give it a try. She climbed, skipping a broken rung near the bottom. When she reached about the twentieth rung, her shoulder brushed a wooden truss. Above, the ladder ended after five more rungs. If a portal existed, it probably wasn’t any higher than this level.
She aimed her light at Apollo’s digital meters. As in the entry tunnel, the readings indicated a portal, but where exactly? She shifted her light to the center of the room where the truss intersected another at a right angle. That had to be the most likely spot. Climbing out there with Apollo wouldn’t be too hard, but if the portal opened inside a volcano, might more debris fall into this room? She shifted the beam to the floor where the rope sat in a coil. Maybe there was a way to create a flash from a safe distance.
After setting Apollo’s programming to open a portal based on its readings, she hurried down the ladder. When she reached bottom, she set Apollo down, grabbed an end of the rope, and climbed back to the top. Using the helmet beam again, she searched for a counterweight on the shelves. A scroll came into view in one of the cubbyholes. When she picked it up, again raising the crackling sound, the wooden end clinked against a glass object.
She squinted. Glass in Hades? Strange, but checking on it could come later.
She tied the end of the rope around the scroll and tossed it over the intersection where the trusses met. As she held the other end, she let the rope slide through her hands until the scroll settled on the floor.
Still holding the rope, she shinnied down the ladder, detached the scroll, and tied that end to one of Apollo’s dowels. She set Apollo’s timer for one minute and, pulling the rope, lifted it toward the trusses. The rope slid easily. In less than a minute, she might have a way out of this place.
Finally, Apollo bumped against the trusses. Lauren tied the rope to the ladder frame and aimed her helmet light high. Apollo swayed under the intersection, slowing with each cycle. By the time the final thirty seconds elapsed it would probably be motionless enough.
As she waited, the scene at the prison yard came to mind. The dragons’ flames encircled a field of lava. Rocks floated in the superheated soup, bubbling and steaming. Again, her father’s words came to mind. I know of two portals within Hades. One is in a chamber that held part of a museum. At the top level of the museum, a portal led to a volcano in Second Eden.
Lauren gulped. An erupting volcano?
Apollo flashed. Lauren dove toward the doorway and rolled out of the museum. She flipped to her stomach and looked back. Light poured in from above, and ash drizzled at the center of the room, landing on the tree.
Lauren pressed her hands against the floor to get up, but her fingers slid into something sticky. She lifted a finger. Red liquid dripped from the tip.
Grimacing, she drew back and wiped her finger on the floor. Someone had bled here. And it had to be fresh, unless blood didn’t clot as quickly in Hades.
She climbed to her feet and dashed back inside, hearing once again a split-second crackle. From now on it would probably be better just to ignore the sound. It obviously wasn’t harmful.
Above, a hole to the sky replaced the entire circular ceiling. All around the hole, smoke rocketed skyward while ash fell like snow. Apollo hung from the trusses, still visible just below the opening.
After removing her helmet and goggles, she began scaling the ladder. As she drew closer to the portal, the air temperature rose, though still tolerable, and the song grew louder. Her waist now at Apollo’s level, she lifted her hand into the portal plane, then jerked it back and looked at her skin. A little red, but not too bad. This portal didn’t appear to be as electrified as the one she and her father had entered.
She untied the sweatshirt from her waist, pulled it on with the hood raised, then stepped up two more rungs and peeked over the opening. The portal barrier sizzled around her shoulders, but the protective coating kept the material from igniting. With her head the only part of her body out in the daylight, she felt like the red-eyed rat peering out of a sewer manh
ole. Smoke billowed all around, and ash flew everywhere in flashing swirls.
Her throat narrowed, and an acrid taste gnawed at her tongue. She stepped down a few rungs and sucked in clean air. Her throat soon opened again. While she breathed, the portal began shrinking at the outer edges, but not as quickly as the previous one had.
She looked at the place where she had contacted glass earlier. A dark bottle stood next to a clear lab beaker, both about six inches tall. A label on the bottle read “Keelvar Extract – Apply liberally to your mask.”
Lauren blinked. Mask? She searched the shelf and found a plastic bag filled with white dust masks, the kind builders used when sanding drywall. She pulled one out, opened the bottle, and poured a stream on the mask. The liquid gave off a pungent, perfume-like odor that hung in the air for a moment before fading.
After securing the bottle, she put the mask on and climbed up the ladder again, two steps higher than before. Her feet at the truss’s level, she stepped onto the thick board and slid several feet toward the center to avoid the encroaching portal edges. The barrier again sizzled across her sweatshirt at waist level, but it did no harm.
A breeze pushed the smoke away, clearing her view. Now breathing easily through the mask, she stood directly over a volcano, as if floating a hundred feet above its decapitated peak. Below, lava bubbled and spewed fountains of thick redness. Heat dried her skin, almost unbearable, but the song of the ovulum flowed more clearly. Maybe she could spot Mom from this high vantage point.
She pulled the phone from her pocket and searched for the map of Second Eden. When it popped up on the screen, she compared it to the haze-covered landscape. In the distance, a river spilled into a valley. That could be Twin Falls River. But the rest of the landscape didn’t match the map well at all. The forests were mostly gone, replaced by scorched logs, boulders, and lava slowly coursing in fiery paths, like flaming tentacles branching out to consume whatever they touched. Only a few collections of evergreens remained here and there, standing at a level the lava couldn’t reach.
In one area, a high wall of lava pressed against a blockade of fallen trees. Flames shot up from the logs, burning them away. It wouldn’t be long before the lava dam would burst and send a river of molten rock charging beyond the current boundary.
While scanning the landscape once more, she imagined what she must look like to anyone who might be watching. The top half of a body poked out of nothingness a hundred feet above a volcano. Yet, there was no sign of any life—no animals, no birds, and no Matt or Mom. No one could see her at all. Still, Mom’s song played on and on. She had to be out there somewhere.
Lauren turned slowly, recording the panorama with the phone’s video camera, though smoke blocked some views. She spoke into the microphone, hoping her voice wasn’t too muffled by the mask, and explained her position and observations, but when smoke returned on a shifting wind, she had to stop. Besides, the edges of the portal inched closer to her waist. If she were to keep searching, she would have to slide farther out onto the truss, and that could get treacherous.
She ducked under the portal plane, shuffled back to the ladder, and climbed down two rungs. With light still abundant from the portal opening, the shelves were easy to see all the way to the wall.
After removing her sweatshirt and tying it to her waist, she touched the beaker next to the bottle. Rows of other beakers sat behind it, maybe twenty in all. Long, deep scratches marred the shelf. Might someone have slipped from the ladder and held on until he could set his feet on a rung again? Obviously it was impossible to know.
She grabbed the first beaker and descended the ladder. When she reached the floor, the portal shrank more quickly. Smoke poured down, but the narrowing hole soon pinched off the channel.
She stripped off the mask, draped the goggles’ strap around her neck, and put the helmet on. With the tree’s flame and her beam the only sources of light, she looked again at the phone’s map of Second Eden. The devastation was terrible! How many people died? And there was no way to get down from the volcano to help them, at least not without a dragon. She sighed. What other options remained? Abaddon’s Lair? Dad certainly didn’t want to go there. It would have to be the last option.
Turning the beaker, she read the measuring lines on the side. This was like the kind she used in chemistry lab experiments. Scorched material lay at the bottom, strands of hair poking up from crusty grit that lined the inner glass. It smelled like burnt leather. Could something like this originate in Hades? Not likely.
After lowering Apollo with the rope, she sat cross-legged in front of it, opened its glass enclosure, and set the beaker inside. According to Dad, Apollo was preset for sending atomic-structure data directly to Larry the supercomputer. If so, Ashley would hear about it as soon as possible.
She set Apollo for analysis and pressed the activate button. A beam of greenish light emanated from the top, covering the beaker. Apollo buzzed for nearly a minute, then shut off. There. That was done. But what next?
She nodded. More data. Sending the video from Second Eden would let everyone know what happened, but adding even more information would be better. She took off the helmet and pointed the beam at herself, then aimed the phone’s lens at her face and began recording. For the next few minutes, she provided a summary of all that had happened, including the apparent kidnapping of her father and grandmother. Although she tried to stay calm and stick to the facts, fear kept breaking through. The process felt like scratching a note on tree bark and tossing it into the ocean from a deserted island. Would anyone find it? If so, could they get past the guards to mount a rescue?
After recording the tree of life and the surrounding shelves, she set the phone on top of Apollo, turned on Apollo’s infrared receiver, and downloaded the camera’s video. When the process finished, she set the instruments for a cross-dimensional data transfer and pressed the activate button. Again Apollo buzzed, this time for longer than a minute. The data file was probably huge, and transmission bandwidth through the portal had to be pretty narrow.
Lauren sat again with Apollo in her lap. Light from the tree’s single flame danced across its glass enclosure and painted a vibrating rainbow on her shirt. At least maybe someone would send a dragon to the volcano in Second Eden and give her a ride out of Hades. But did the dragons make it back to Second Eden? If so, had they become victims of the volcano? If they had to stay on Earth, Sapphira could help Ashley open the portal, so one way or another, the rescue should come soon.
She unzipped her backpack, grabbed two cereal bars and a bottle of water, and leaned against a shelf. As she ate and drank, she scanned the room. What should she do now? Try to find another portal? Her gaze stopped at the doorway. Oh, yes! The blood!
After wolfing down the second bar and draining the bottle, she hustled to the spot and knelt close to the small pool. It seemed too big to have been spilled by a rat. She looked back at the ladder. If the portal in the prison yard opened over the same volcano, could Matt have fallen in here?
Lauren aimed her helmet light at the floor. A few drops created a trail toward the archway entrance outside. She clenched a fist. Yes! Whoever bled in here was healthy enough to move. Maybe Matt was alive after all!
She skulked along the trail. Matt’s image came to mind, Semiramis pressing a knife against his throat. That had to be where the blood came from. She stopped at a second pool under the arch. It appeared to be fresher, but no trail continued on the other side. Maybe he wrapped his wound with a piece of his shirt. Since he had Semiramis’s knife, he could have cut a sleeve and made a bandage.
As her scales tingled, moans drifted past. The sad chorus felt like a heavy weight on her shoulders. She shook her head. The blood couldn’t be Matt’s. That was just wishful thinking. If he were here, he would have shown his face, or at least called out. The running footsteps proved that whoever was here a few minutes ago didn’t want to be seen. Matt would know there was no danger to hide from, wouldn’t he?
She shone her light at the museum room. Her backpack lay in view just inside the doorway. Maybe it would act as bait. If she kept quiet, whoever was out there might come to see what was in it.
She entered the tunnel leading out of the chamber, turned off her helmet light, and slid the goggles over her eyes. Crouching behind a rock protruding from the side wall, she watched the museum room through the infrared viewer. New sweat trickled down her back, accentuating the tingles. Someone had to be out there. Maybe a thought would come through and give the person away. He was hurt, bleeding. Might offering help spark a friendship with someone who knew how to get around this place?
As the tree’s tiny fire burned on, so did Mom’s song. They seemed attached somehow, as if note changes coincided with flickers in the light. It was just imagination, of course, but it was eerie all the same.
The scene conjured images of a solitary lighthouse standing on a promontory in the midst of a gloomy night. Except for the lighthouse itself and its surrounding rocks, everything lay blanketed in blackness.
More thoughts of Matt came to mind, the way he always stepped up to protect her, especially when he cut the rope. He wasn’t like any guy at school or even at Micaela’s church. He actually seemed to care about her as a person—someone who really mattered. In a way, it would be amazing if he weren’t her brother, then …
She shook away the thought. Matt was a perfect brother, exactly what she needed, a real friend who wouldn’t care about her glow or her radar ears. Friendship would be enough.
As her emotions spiked, so did the tingles. Sounds poured in. The laments grew louder. Words formed, stretched out and forlorn.
I daily die,
Alone and lost;
I lived a lie;
I pay the cost.
Inhale the fires;
