by Paul Neuhaus
I gave her the stink-eye as I wondered what kind of reputation hit I’d take for letting the inmates of hell escape. I started to say something snotty, but the lawyer interrupted me with a shout and a point.
“Look!” she said.
I looked in the direction she was pointing and saw Eurydice moving in the opposite direction the crowd was moving. She was headed the way my friend and I had come in. “Come on!” I said and then I dashed off after the ghostly woman. As I got closer, I saw Eurydice was running toward someone.
That someone was Orpheus.
We crossed the bridge over the river and headed back toward the first chamber we’d come through. It was very difficult to track Eurydice and Orpheus as they moved through the waves of the dead. Fortunately, they were unusual in that they were going against the prevailing current. Most of the shades were headed toward the main gate. Our targets were headed toward the exit in Bronson Caves.
As we passed the grate covering the entrance to Tartarus, something slammed against the iron bars—something big and very, very angry. The dead didn’t react at all, but Amanda and I nearly shit our pants.
“I don’t like this. I don’t like this,” Venables said. She was near tears, and who could blame her? The only thing keeping me going at all was that I couldn’t yet process the enormity of what had happened. I couldn’t think through all the implications because they were too huge and too terrifying to consider. I grabbed her by the hand and pulled her into the adjacent chamber.
For a second I had to scan the crowds to find our targets again. There they were. I ran, and I pulled. Amanda resisted at first, but she allowed herself to be drug along. When we were about halfway to the tunnel we’d entered through (the one with Cerberus in it), I heard a loud screeching and felt a wind next to my head. I used my free hand to swat the air around me but that only made the screeching more persistent. I looked and there, floating next to my right ear, was Leon, Stephanie’s little bat friend. He must’ve been the only creature in all the Underworld immune to the sleeping gas. I slowed my pace but kept flipping my view back and forth between Eurydice and the bat. “Leon. What is it? I’m trying to keep up with Eurydice.”
Leon unleashed a new stream of noises. His cadence went up and down and some of the screeches got greater emphasis than others. There were definitely words in there, but I didn’t understand them at all.
“I don’t understand, Leon. Do you speak English? Parlez vous francais? Sprechen sie deutsch?”
In response, the bat flitted a short distance to my right and then back again.
I didn’t make anything of it. “You can help me track Eurydice. Will you fly a little higher and keep us going in the right direction?”
A short burst of screeches followed by another short flight to the right and back again.
“I think he wants us to follow him,” Amanda said.
“Okay. But what about Orpheus and Eurydice?”
“What if he’s found your jug?”
Well, shit. There was a real conundrum. I stopped for a second to consider. I decided to follow Leon. I turned toward him. “Alright, Leon. But this better be about my pithos. If you just wanna show us a potato chip that looks like Winston Churchill I’m gonna be pissed.”
The bat gave an affirmative screech and headed off toward the right again. This time he didn’t stop. The only problem was he flew over the river. The current looked strong and the water looked deep. “How’re we gonna get across?” Amanda said.
Our answer came quickly. To our immediate right, Charon’s boat came into view. There were a few dead folk aboard it, but the ferryman was no longer in charge. He was crumbled on the deck fast asleep—just like all the other caretakers of the Underworld. I dove into the water without a word, expecting Amanda to follow suit. She didn’t let me down. The two of us swam over to the little craft and climbed aboard. I pushed to the front toward Charon. As I went, I passed the confused shades. “‘Scuse us,” I said. “Pardon us.”
“How ya doin’?” Venables said to them.
When I got to Charon, I took the pole out of his hand and stepped back in a coughing fit. Word to the wise: Charon stinks. He stinks real bad. Pole in hand, it was a simple matter of steering the boat over to the opposite shore where Leon waited. As soon as we rejoined him, he took off again, leading us into a new tunnel. The passage was pitch-black, and the bat guided us with a series of rhythmic screeches. He was pretty smart for a bat.
Finally, Leon gave a particularly high-pitched squeal and made a sudden hard left. The turn was so sharp Amanda and I slammed into the wall before correcting our course. Keystone Cops in Hell. As soon as we righted ourselves, I could see that Stephanie’s little bat had steered us into a tunnel with an obvious end. Not too far in front of us, the passage opened up into a room. It was a huge chamber with a rough, uneven floor broken up by steaming, sulfurous pools. The stink was ungodly. Almost as bad as Charon’s.
As soon as we entered the room, my friend and I bent double with our hands on our knees. Leon was, of course, hovering in place. He looked at me expectantly. As soon as I caught my breath, I stepped toward him and he took off again. He took me to the biggest of the stinky pools. It was deep, and it had a little island in the middle. Half-buried in the island was my pithos. My heart leapt, but there was a problem. Between the shore and the island, something was swimming. Its back looked like a crocodile’s back. Long and bulky with triangular bumps. When it was directly in front of us, it stopped swimming and raised its head. The head was also crocodilian but shorter, smarter and meaner. Also, the eyes weren’t as far apart as they are on your typical crocodile. They were front-mounted, close together and they glowed with reddish light. I’d say the thing was fifteen feet long and probably weighed more than a ton.
“Okay,” I said to Leon. “I’ve got a plan. You’re gonna carry me over the water and drop me on the island so I can grab the jug. Then you’re gonna fly us back.”
Did I mention that Leon was the size of my head? He didn’t look amused.
Sighing, I sat down in the mud and took off my kicky boots. It took one item out of my purse and laid my purse next to my shoes. “Watch my stuff, would you?”
Leon chirped in the affirmative and I took a deep breath. I really didn’t wanna do this. Forget the crocodile for a second. I didn’t wanna smell like rotten eggs for a week. Finally, though, I got the kick in the pants I needed.
“Dora? Is that you?” It was the first time I’d heard Hope’s voice in a couple of days and, I gotta say, I was pretty relieved. As much as the old girl got on my nerves, it was weird not having her around.
“Yeah. I’m here.”
“I’m in hell. Did you realize that?”
“What do you think I been doing this whole time? I had no idea who took you or where you ended up. The Underworld wouldn’t have been my first guess.”
“It was Orpheus! He’s working with Medea. Orpheus wants Eurydice back.”
“I know, I know. Look, I don’t know if you know this, but you’re on a little island in the middle of like a sulfur-y pond and, swimming in the sulfur-y pond, is a huge alligator-looking thing-y.”
“Figures.”
“I’m going to do my best to get to you, but if I don’t make it...”
“If you don’t make it, you’ll have fulfilled your wish.”
“Huh?”
“Your death wish, remember?”
I sighed. “Okay, yeah. You shouldn’t be reminding me of that right now.”
“I know. You’re right.” Then her tone became very sincere. “For real, though... If anyone can do this, it’s you, Dora.”
She meant it. Which helped a little. I looked at Leon and said, “Here goes nothing.” I stuck one foot in the water, yanked it out again and yelled, “Cold! So cold!”
“Oh, come on!” Hope said, frustrated. Even Leon peeped at me.
“Alright, alright.” I took a deep breath and dove into the water, letting the shock hit me all at once. A sh
ock it was too. Bits of me I didn’t even realize I had tried to retreat from my surface to my interior. Anything to get away from the shocking cold (and the terrible smell).
Croc-y saw me right off and jetted through the water like a torpedo aimed in my direction. I dove and kicked, doing my best sea otter impersonation. It hurt to open my eyes in the water, but I needed to see him. As soon as he was above me, I shot upward, surfaced on his right side and threw my left leg over his bumpy body. For just a moment, I was riding and—I won’t lie—it felt cool. But I wasn’t trying to impress anyone or have a cheap thrill. Time was of the essence. I popped open the handcuffs, jammed one bracelet through both of his eyes and snapped it shut. I drove the other bracelet through both of his nostrils and snapped it shut too. The horrible creature was not only blind, he was handcuffed to his own face. He was also majorly panicked (as any of us would be in a situation like that). He threw me off, but he didn’t spin on me. Instead, he swam to the shore and ran onto dry land. He only stopped when the knock-out gas hit him. He went beddy-bye just like every other living creature in hell. I swam to the island. I slipped a couple of times in the mud before I got to the jug and I also had trouble yanking it free. The fall from the sinkhole somewhere far above had embedded it but good. When I stuck the pithos under my arm and headed back toward the water, Hope said. “Together again. Bonnie and Clyde. Butch and Sundance.”
“You realize all four of those people died in a hail of bullets, right?”
“You always gotta focus on the negative.”
“I’m a half-full kinda gal.”
I swam back across the horrible pond. As we walked back toward Amanda, Leon joined us. “Get up, Amanda. This is my friend Hope. Hope, this is my friend Amanda.” Amanda got up and exchanged pleasantries with my jug. “Come on, we’re getting out of here.”
“Good,” Venables said, still out of breath. “Lemme know when we get to the surface. I wanna throw up.”
When we left the chamber of the sulfur pools, Leon went left when I expected him to go right. He insisted upon going left, though, so I decided to trust him. He obviously had an alternate route. The last leg of the journey was a maze. So many twists and turns that Amanda and I started getting seasick. When the twisting and the turning finally stopped, the climbing began. A forty-five-degree incline that had us trudging and panting like we were about to die.
The slope dumped us right out into the open. It was morning and we were about thirty feet above where we first entered. There was another smaller cave mouth above the Batcave, we’d failed to see it in the dark the night before. Fortunately, a narrow set of switchbacks led down to ground level. Unfortunately, Leon flew in a wide arc away from the cave and then went right back in again. We’d lost an ally.
“Who was that guy?” Hope said.
“That was Leon. Friend of Stephanie’s.”
“Huh,” she replied.
As soon as we’d resigned ourselves to losing Leon, we focused on the ground beneath us. It was thick with the escaped dead—only now they were no longer dead, they were living again. The color had returned to their skin and hair and even their clothing. There were dozens and dozens of them. They were milling around, wondering what to do with their newly non-dead selves. “This is just the tip of the iceberg,” I said. “There are exits from the Underworld all over.” Like I mentioned earlier, the main gate lets out in Greece. The crowd in front of Bronson caves was, I’m sure, nothing compared to the one in the motherland.
“What happened down below?” Amanda said, “Why’d we turn into gas bombs?”
“Medea didn’t poison us. She knew we’d go to the Underworld, so she put something in our bodies. A substance, a chemical, that reacts with the rains down there. She turned us into living mustard gas grenades.”
Amanda’s eyes grew wide. “Wait. Wouldn’t that mean Basil was in on it somehow? He was the one that told us we had hemlock poisoning.”
I hadn’t considered that, but she was probably right. Even if it was true, it’d have to wait. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. I need to think.” Before I could even begin to think, though, a new variable came into play.
Venables pointed and said, “Look!” I looked where she was pointing and there were Eurydice and Orpheus again, running toward the Bullit car (which was parked on the street in front of the Firebird).
“Come on,” I said, driven to action. I wanted to go down there and put a hurt on Orpheus like I never wanted to put a hurt on anyone else before. It wouldn’t be easy, though. We had to get down the switchbacks and push through the crowd before Orpheus could get away.
We started down the incline but stopped when we heard a sharp crack. Part of the rock wall right next to my head exploded, sending dust and little pieces of stone out in a puff. “What the—?” I looked to my left and saw the ground in front of the Batcave and the Pontiac beyond it. Next to the Pontiac was the road. On the other side of the road was a stand of tall orange rocks. From out of the rocks came another sharp crack accompanied by smoke. Another impact on the rock wall, this one between Amanda and I. “Oh, shit!” I said. “Somebody’s shooting at us!”
You’ve never seen two women and a jug move faster in your life. We ran down the switchbacks, hunched over low with our arms over our heads (as if that would’ve done any good). All the while, little impacts hit around us, most of them dangerously close to home. “She’s got twenty shots so we’re not out of the woods. She’s not gonna need to reload.”
We dropped to the dusty ground. I took the lead. “Zig and zag,” I said. “Zig and zag between the undead!” I myself zigged and zagged as I moved toward Orpheus and his apparently willing companion. Amanda did too. Puffs of brown popped up near our feet as we moved. Every third shot or so, our would-be assassin hit one of the dead people and the dead person would drop to the ground, spouting blood. (It occurred to me that, until Stephanie recovered from the effects of the gas, these re-dead souls would return to the Underworld and, with no one minding the store, head again toward the nearest exit. The Underworld now had a revolving door.)
I could see Orpheus through the crowd. Fortunately for us, the shooter began dividing her attention between us and the newly reunited lovers. I reached into my purse and slid on the brass knuckles. I didn’t really think I was going to reach Orpheus in time, but I wanted to be prepared if I did.
It stopped mattering then.
One of the shots found its mark, passing through the pithos and into my right shoulder. I fell to the ground and shards of ancient crockery rained down on me. I heard Hope give part of a scream. At the same instant the jug shattered. In the space the pithos had occupied at the exact moment of its destruction, a cloud of black mist—in the shape of the jug—hung. Then the cloud burst apart into thousands of pieces. Each piece shot in a different direction and streaked away. Each piece emitted a different but equally sinister stream of laughter.
Venables deliberately slid to a stop next to me so she too was prone on the ground. Then she got up onto her haunches and drug me toward the Firebird. As she did, I watched Orpheus and Eurydice jump into his Mustang. The singer fired up the big engine. Some of the dust that sprang up in its wake drifted over us. A few bullets hit the ground the car had occupied. Amanda focused on my bleeding shoulder. “No exit wound. Looks like a twenty-two.”
“Yeah, it’s a twenty-two,” I said between gritted teeth.
“It’s still in there.”
“We’ve got more to worry about than that,” I said. “She shattered the jar. Did you see? She shattered the jar.”
“I saw. How do you know the shooter’s a she?”
“I know.” A bullet hit the hood of the Firebird to remind us we were still in danger. I said, “Fuck.”
Amanda was fishing in my purse for the car keys. She found them. “Alright, “I’m gonna open the door and you’re gonna pile in first. I’m not as good a driver as you, but we’re gonna have to make do.” She duck-walked away from me and stuck the key into the door.
She opened it and a shot ricocheted off the rearview mirror. The lawyer then reached out a hand and pulled me along the ground toward the cockpit.
“Okay, okay, okay. Gimme a second.” I caught my breath. I could feel the sweat pouring down my back. I gathered my energy as best I could and dove into the car. I didn’t quite clear the emergency brake, but I drew my legs up and over it once I was in. Right away, the passenger side window shattered, and little glass rocks rained down all over me. It was the same window Hermes had had replaced a day or two before.
Venables got in in a crouch, creating the smallest silhouette she could. In seconds, she had the Pontiac started and her door shut.
“Stay low until we’re out of range,” I said.
“Should I go after Orpheus?”
I thought long and hard. “No. I’ve gotta get this thing out of my shoulder. He won’t be able to consummate right away anyway.”
My friend put the car in gear and absolutely floored it. We peeled out like the Dukes of Hazzard in the General Lee. Two or three shots cut through the cloud and impacted on the blacktop behind us.
Once we were on the road circumnavigating Griffith Park, Amanda slowed down, but only a little. “Closest hospital should be Dignity Health,” she muttered.
I tried shifting my body, so I was comfortable. I couldn’t get comfortable. Not at all. My thinking started to get choppy. I had trouble fixing my own position in space. I was in my body and also outside my body. When I heard my own voice, it had a tinny echo. “Amanda,” I said. “It think Hope is dead.”
As Venables merged onto the five freeway, she reached over and took my hand.
6
Losses
I woke up standing on a cloud. Under me, dimmed by atmosphere, was the Greek countryside, rocky and intermittently green. Above me was a bank of haze I couldn’t see through.
Someone was coming toward me. He was hopping down a series of miniature altocumulus arranged like a spiral staircase. I couldn’t see the staircase’s origin point since it was somewhere in the bank of haze. The hopping gave away the person’s identity before I could even see him clearly.
