Necrophiliac's Honeymoon

by Paul Neuhaus

  We fell back into quiet-time until I took the exit off the one thirty-four. The caves were on the other side of Forest Lawn Cemetery (how appropriate), so I headed in that direction.

  When we got there, I parked the car and got two big camp flashlights out of the trunk. I handed one to Venables and kept the other for myself. Fortunately, both had working batteries.

  As we trudged up the hill to the main cave mouth, Amanda said, “Huh. That is the Batcave, isn’t it?”

  The inside of the cave was dark. Real dark. The flashlights showed us just enough of the terrain for us not to fall down and hurt ourselves. The last thing I needed at that time was a sprained stem.

  Amanda whispered. I don’t think she needed to, but I understood the impulse. “If you’ve never been to the Underworld, what makes you think you’ll be able to find the door?”

  “That,” I said. “Is a fairer question than you know.”

  “So, you don’t know how to find the door?”

  “We’re gonna find out, aren’t we?” I guess I just assumed as a Mythnik I’d be able to find the door. After all, Orpheus did it back in the day, and Orpheus is dumber than a bag of hammers. What if I couldn’t find the door, though? We’d come up snake eyes, and I’d look like a clod. Also, I’d never get Hope back and Dee and Dwayne would get away with whatever it was they were planning. It was that last thing that chapped my ass the most. Having your jug stolen and getting a bad case of hemlock poisoning will do that to you. Also, there was the fact I wouldn’t be able to commit slow motion suicide. I hadn’t been able to think about that much with Amanda around. She maybe wasn’t as good as a bag of Sativa, but she was a distraction. There was that anyway.

  “Did it occur to you that maybe Dwayne’s waiting for us at the bottom of this cave?” Venables said. “Maybe this is a trap.”

  “Oh, gods. I hope it’s a trap.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah, but let’s get one thing straight. You’re gonna alibi me. Of course, I.D.ing Dwayne’s body after I’m done with it’s gonna be a bitch.”

  Venables sighed next to me in the black. “I’d prefer you not kill anyone if you don’t have to.”

  “Hm. Were you not there for the poisoning? I could’ve sworn you were there. These people aren’t fucking around, Amanda.”

  “Still, aren’t we supposed to be better than them or something?”

  “People who go out of their way to be examples for other people usually end up dead. ‘Hey, let’s all get along. Let’s not fight’. Bang! ‘Oh, shit, he’s dead!’” I stopped suddenly and put my arm up to halt the lawyer. “Wait. Do you hear that?”

  Amanda cocked her head and looked around. “I don’t hear anything. What does it sound like?”

  I thought for a minute. “It sounds like... breathing. No, snoring. It sounds like snoring.”

  Again, she tried to hear what I was hearing. “I don’t hear anything. Do you have a headache? I have a headache. Maybe what you’re hearing is the blood pumping through your own skull.”

  I looked around myself, trying to get a bead on where the noise was coming from. “I do have a headache, and I do hear the blood pumping through my own skull, but this isn’t that. The blood pumping is like ‘wom, wom, wom’ and this new noise if like ‘zzzerf, zzzerf, zzzerf’.”

  “‘Zzzerf’?”

  “That’s right. Like a snore but with a little exhale at the end. Like an exhale through big rubbery lips.”

  My friend took a step back. “There’s something with big rubbery lips down here?”

  “Yeah, but it’s sleeping.” I started walking again and lowered my arm, so Amanda could follow. “Come on. I’m gonna try and steer us in the direction of the zzzerfs.”

  “Swell.”

  As we wound through twisty passage after twisty passage, I noticed a new feature. Sinkholes. Some big, some small, all of them stinky. They had a sulfur-y smell. No doubt Dwayne dropped the pithos into one of them. They were a direct line to the Underworld. I was tempted to just pick one and jump into it, but then I remembered the fall would probably kill me. If, that is, I could even be killed. It was the shark conundrum all over again. Anyway, we needed a better way in.

  My ears have always been pretty good. As we moved deeper and deeper, the snoring got louder. Loud enough that I realized it wasn’t a single snore. It was multiple snores slightly out of sync with one another. It looked like there were multiple things with big rubbery lips somewhere below us. I hadn’t anticipated that. We really should’ve prepared better. Scored some weapons maybe. My pepper spray and my brass knuckles would only get us so far. Finally, we came to a dead end. It was a little, roundish chamber and our lights lit up the blank wall in front of us.

  “Well, this ain’t it,” Venables said.

  “I don’t understand. This is where the snoring is the loudest.”

  “I still don’t hear anything. Maybe you need a CAT scan. A complete neurological work-up.”

  “You’re a complete neurological work-up.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Come on. There’s something weird about that wall.” I took a few steps forward and Amanda did too. We both had our flashlights trained on the dead end. “See what I mean?” I said.

  “It looks like a vagina,” my friend replied.

  It did look like a vagina. There was a vertical seam running down the middle of the wall. It wasn’t just a gash, though. The edges were textured in a very labia-like way. I reached out and touched the seam and it was warm. Not just warm but throb-y. I pulled back my hand and said, “Whoa.”

  “What? Why whoa?”

  “Touch it.”

  Amanda reached out a tentative hand and touched the gash herself. She too withdrew her hand quickly. “Whoa,” she said. “It’s warm and throb-y.”

  “I know, right?” Then a thought occurred to me. A crazy experiment. I reached out my hand again and rubbed my fingertips down the rock-labia on both sides. The gash got warmer and throb-ier. “Oh, man, that’s odd.” After just a moment of rubbing, the gash parted slightly and a dimple at the top opened to expose what I can only describe as a rock-clit.

  “Oh, hell no,” Venables said, raising her voice slightly.

  I turned to her and grinned. “Looks like I’m getting to third base.” I brought my hand up and began rubbing the clit. The stone wall did everything but moan. The more I rubbed, the wider the gash got. If I could bring mother earth to orgasm, we’d have a fair shot of getting through the gap. “Okay, I’m gonna get this bitch off. Keep watching. As soon as you think the gap is wide enough, I want you to go through. I’ll follow.”

  “This is so fucking weird.”

  “Don’t look a gift vagina in the mouth.”

  “Ew.”

  We could see the space behind the gash now. It was still mostly dark, but there was also a swirling, luminescent mist. Also, the snoring was getting louder.

  “I can hear the zzzerfing now,” Amanda said.

  “Then we’re on the right track. Keep watching.” Rocky was getting close. I could feel the whole wall spasming. “Keep watching.”

  Without a word, Venables dashed through the gap in the wall and turned to look at me through the opening. The gap was almost wide enough for me, too, but I felt a weird sense of obligation. After all, it’s not cool to get someone hot and leave them hanging. I increased the speed of my rubbing.

  “Come on! It’s wide enough!”

  “One second.”

  Then, Pow! Gaia got off, I jumped through the crack Indiana Jones-style, and the crack slammed shut. I was not expecting to enter the Underworld by giving someone a handy, but there you go.

  Us gal pals took a minute to gather our wits. “Does what just happened mean we’re standing inside a massive pussy?”

  I sniffed the air. “You’re taking the metaphor too far, probably.” Amanda had been right a minute ago. You really could hear the zzzerfing good on the other side of the rock wall. Since the tunnel we
were in had no branches, whatever was making the noise had to be somewhere ahead of us. It was likely to be something mythological. I didn’t mention that to Venables, since we were both gonna find out at pretty much the same time.

  My friend was running her fingers through the glow-y mist. “This is neat. It looks like something out of the Haunted Mansion.”

  “I’m sure Stephanie will be pleased you think so.”

  “‘Stephanie’? There’s someone named Stephanie mixed up in all this? Is she the goddess of high school cheerleaders?”

  “No, but I wish we had that.” As we walked down the widening tunnel, I sketched out the story of Hades and Persephone (AKA Stephanie). About how Persephone was the daughter of Demeter the nature goddess, and how they worked out a deal where Persephone spent a certain amount of time above ground every year and, the rest of the time, she was below ground with Hades. Because of that arrangement, we had seasons.

  “If you don’t mind my saying, your stories don’t have many good parts for women.”

  I laughed. “Show me anybody’s stories where women get good parts...”

  “Touché.”

  The zzzerfing had gotten pretty loud by that point. I was starting to have a suspicion about what the noise might be, and I almost said it out loud, but then we saw for ourselves. My suspicion was right.

  The tunnel opened out into a round chamber. Above us, the moon shone down through the open ceiling. On the other side of the room was another opening into another tunnel. Between us and that opening, a big dog was laying. And I mean a big dog. A dog roughly the size of my ex-trailer. It may not surprise you to learn it had three heads. Each one of the heads was snoring and exhaling through rubbery lips.

  Venables and I backed up far enough, so we could talk. “We need like a six-foot Milkbone,” she said.

  “Now do you think myths are real?”

  “I do, but I still wouldn’t mind getting this mist analyzed. Me and my sister used to huff paint fumes and we saw some pretty fucked-up shit.”

  “Ever the skeptic. Let’s agree on something...” I replied, turning the conversation back to the matter at hand. “There’s no way in hell we’re tiptoeing around that dog without waking it up.”

  Amanda looked over my shoulder back toward Cerberus. “What does he eat? How does he get out to go to the bathroom?”

  “Focus, girl. I’m not sure what to do here. I mean, if this was one of the old stories, this is the part where a maiden or a talking fish would appear with the solution. They’d distract the dog with a stick or a magic kitten.”

  My friend looked around. “Yeah, no maidens or fish in sight.”

  “I know, I know. Lemme think...”

  “Holy shit, that’s a big fucking dog. Or is it dogs?”

  “Again, let’s lock-in on the parts of this situation that’ll help us.”

  “Sorry. I’m terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought.”

  I opened up my purse. Obviously, the handcuffs weren’t going to do us any good. The brass knuckles were kinda useless too. I took out the can of pepper spray and held it up. “Does pepper spray work on dogs?”

  “Suddenly I’m a pepper spray expert?”

  “Yeah, it’s a shame we don’t have any way to look it up...”

  Amanda snorted. “My phone? Yeah, right. Like we’re getting a signal down here.”

  I pointed back into the round chamber. Cerberus was lit up blue by the full moon. “There’s a hole in the roof.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Venables took out her phone and shielded it so the light wouldn’t attract the dog. (We’d turned off our flashlights just as soon as we saw our way was blocked by the giant mythological monster.) “Ah ha,” she said. “They make pepper spray specifically to protect against dogs and it’s weaker than the human kind. Which makes sense I guess since a dog’s eyes are more acute. What you’ve got in your hand there should knock Fido on his ass.”

  “‘Bout time something went our way.” I smiled. “You know your phone just became our talking maiden fish.”

  “Do you think you can hit him in all six eyes?”

  “Does the bear pope shit in the woods?”

  “What’s the plan?”

  “I’ll get a little closer and then you’ll say, ‘Hey, doggie!’. As soon as his heads pop up, I’ll nail him with the stuff.”

  My friend took a big breath. “Okay, I can do that.”

  Let me just point out something for you so you know: I am not a superhero. I’m not Hercules or Perseus. Hell, I’m not even Batman. The Evils I’ve captured over time I’ve captured with my wits and a lot of mean-spirited muscle. If Cerberus woke up and I miscalculated, I (and probably Amanda) would be on the menu. I looked back at Venables and mimed a countdown. 3… 2…

  1!

  “Hey, doggie!”

  All three heads woke up at once, more alert than I would’ve expected. Cerberus was a guard dog, after all. I brought up the pepper spray directly in front of me. My intention was to hit the center head and then wave my hand back and forth to get the other two. In the moment before I pressed the button, I congratulated myself. I’d lined it up perfectly. This was gonna work.

  I pressed the button.

  I fell backward immediately, in intense physical pain. The can was pointed the wrong way. I’d just pepper sprayed myself good. I screamed and, in clawing at my own eyes, I dropped the spray. I took a few awkward steps backward toward Venables but then hit a bump in the floor and landed on my ass. I backwards-crawled on my butt toward my friend.

  Cerberus stood up to his full height and looked at the two of us. All three heads were growling.

  I gotta hand it to Amanda. She kept her head and used the tools at her disposal. She held out her phone at arm’s length for the dog to see. On the screen, a cat in a top hat played classical music. She’d fired up a playlist of funny cat videos. Cerberus came in for a closer look, cocking his center and right heads. “See?” the lawyer said in a soothing voice. “See the funny kitties? Look, this one’s playing Bolero on the harpsichord.”

  For a second, I thought it was going to work, but the stubborn left head reached out and ate Amanda’s iPhone. Stupid left head.

  Cerberus was walking forward. His hackles were up. He was growling. His breath was putrid. We were gonna die. “I’m sorry I got you killed,” I said to her.

  “I’m sorry you got me killed, too,” she replied.

  The dog was on us. He just needed to decide who he was gonna eat first, and then there was an ear-splitting whistle. Amanda and I clapped our hands over our ears. Cerberus whined and looked over his shoulder.

  There was a new arrival in the cave. My vision was way fucked up, though, so I couldn’t see who it was. It looked like a pink dot on top of a longer blue dash. “Oh, calm the hell down,” it said. The voice was female. Cerberus turned and went to her and she patted him lightly on each head. “I’m gonna give you a little tip,” the woman said to us. “Don’t wake him up. Go up to him while he’s still asleep and scratch his belly. He’ll be putty in your hands. But don’t scratch those little teat things or you’ll lose a hand.” Cerberus had lain down on his side and the woman was scratching him in just the way she’d described. His top rear leg kicked in the air several times until the woman stopped scratching. She came over to us and the dog stayed where he was. “Here,” the lady said. “You could probably use this.” She put something into my hands and I could feel it was the ancient Greek equivalent of a canteen. Water in a sheep’s bladder. I uncorked it and poured the coolest, most perfect water directly into my eyes. It took the whole bladder, but finally, my vision cleared. I could now see a woman with black hair and a simple blue shift dress. She wore a crown made of iron. “You guys’re really terrible at this whole infiltrating the Underworld thing,” she said.

  “It’s our first time,” I replied. “We’ll get better. Persephone, I presume?”

  She scrunched up her face. “I go by Stephanie now. Ever since my old man ran ou
t and left me with this dump.”

  Amanda helped me stand up. “Your dog ate my phone,” she said to the goddess of the Underworld.

  Stephanie smiled. “If you wanna hang around for a day or two, I can probably get it back for you.”

  Venables considered. “I’m good,” she said.

  “Come on,” Stephanie said. “You got in; you might as well see the place. But I just gotta know: Why’re you here?”

  “Funny story...” I said, stooping to pick up my pepper spray.

  Something you should know about gods and goddesses. They have an aura. I don’t mean that in a New Age-y touchy-feely kind of way. I mean they literally glow. In their native form, they can’t mix with mortals and stay incognito. That’s why there’re so many stories of the Olympians disguising themselves as something or someone else to mix with everyday folk. Hell, Zeus practically invented the shtick. He disguised himself as people, as animals, and, once, as a stream of piss. Sometimes they got cute with it. When you meet Hermes in the wild, he’s usually disguised as himself, only not glow-y. If there’s a loophole, an Olympian will find it. Anyway, we didn’t need our flashlights.

  With the pleasantries and the friendly advice about the care and feeding of Cerberus out of the way, our hostess’ mood darkened. I had a feeling I knew what the problem was. I approached it delicately. “I heard about Hades. Is it true your mom fucked off, too?” (Like I told Amanda: Stephanie’s mother was Demeter. The goddess of nature.)

  Stephanie sighed. “‘Fraid so. I’m part of dying breed.”

  “Ah, don’t put it like that. I’ve run into more Mythniks in L.A. County in the last two days than I thought there were left in the whole world.”

  “The Great Westward Migration,” the goddess replied. “When things fell apart in Greece, we went into Europe. When they discovered the New World, we went to America. As America spread out, so did we. From the East coast to the West. Funny thing about the West coast: it’s an edge. There’s nowhere else to go without falling off.”

  I had to hand it to Amanda: she was bold. Maybe even mouthy. “Hmm. Don’t take this the wrong way, Steph, but you’re kind of a Debbie Downer.”